A WOMB OF ONE'S OWN

Birth stories from antiquity.

Making an enlightening and engaging book debut, Mulder, a scholar of classical and Near Eastern studies—and a midwife’s daughter—offers a feminist history of birth in the Roman Empire during the centuries that straddle the year 0. Drawing on letters, medical case histories, legal documents, poems, myths, funerary inscriptions, and archaeological findings, Mulder has pieced together the lives of particular women, whose experiences with conception, pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, delivery, and postpartum care anchor her chapters. Their stories reveal a patriarchal and misogynist society, in which male doctors increasingly encroached on an area in which midwives had dominated, melding practical, anatomical, and botanical expertise with superstition and magic. A woman who wanted to get pregnant might carry a uterine amulet, a small gemstone inscribed with religious formulas and figures. Spells or potions were believed to work as aphrodisiacs and to promote conception; one fertility remedy prescribed eating a hyena’s eye with licorice root and anise. At a time when women were pressured to marry young and bear children immediately and often, doctors contributed wildly inventive theories about women’s bodies (wandering, suffocating uteruses, for example) and the process of reproduction. The 2nd-century physician Soranus was especially influential in changing attitudes from seeing pregnancy as “healthful” to seeing it as “pathological.” Privileging men’s needs, he advised husbands to monitor and control their wives to make them ideal vessels to grow a fetus. Not surprisingly, since abortion deprived men of the heirs they desired, by the 3rd century it was prohibited by law. Mulder argues convincingly that when male medical practitioners engaged in “writing down and systematizing” gynecological knowledge, “the status of the fetus was raised, while that of the pregnant woman was lowered.” Illustrated with drawings by Hayley Monroe.

A fresh, edifying contribution to women’s history.