The Gentleman's Daughter (19 page)

In addition to mental misgivings, the Parker and Whitaker correspondents
catalogued the attendant physical discomforts. Surprisingly, however, there is but one surviving reference to nausea – a dramatic sign which now looms so large in the popular impression of early pregnancy. Perhaps vomiting was seen as both normal and healthy given the universal reliance on purging as a prophylactic and general cure-all. In any case, more striking to eighteenth-century letter-writers were the accompanying melancholy, aches and immobility of pregnancy. Elizabeth Parker, Jane Scrimshire and Eliza Whitaker all complained particularly of lameness. In fact, the gamut of side effects endured by Eliza Whitaker in 1816 ran to headaches, abdominal pain, dizziness, fainting fits and palpitations.
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Emotional confusion, blunted concentration and depressed spirits were routinely associated with pregnancy. ‘Do all in yr power to keep up your spirrits’, Ann Pellet urged her niece, ‘for the want of spirits is the greatest misery that can be felt this side of the grave.’ In fact, she claimed her own ‘
labour
was but a triffle when compared to weak nerves’. Similarly, John Parker bolstered his pregnant daughter: ‘I am glad my Dr you keep up yr Spirits, which is [the] only thing to support us in this life …’
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In the 1750s Jane Scrimshire was plunged into despondency and felt her powers of concentration slip away: ‘My abilities decrease & I have no more notion of Penning a smart letter than I now have of making a smart cap … both body and mind disorder'd but have never been well since I came from Harrogate & what is worse my complaint is of the
Encreasing
kind & nothing but time can cure …’
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In the 1810s an unusually torpid Elizabeth Addison felt unequal to polite conversation and even her lifeline – letter-writing: ‘I cannot bear the thought of being among strangers … you know my awkward bashfulness at all times. But when I am in my present way it is doubly perceptible … I shall write no more for I am in a sad, stupid humour, this hot weather stultifies me.’
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By the third trimester of pregnancy, several women within the Parker, Barcroft and Whitaker networks were practically immobilized and thereby socially isolated. The pregnant Elizabeth Parker felt she could not stir from Colne; a Leeds merchant's wife, Mrs Ridsdale, had to catch up with her friends after a winter's ‘long Confinement’; while Mrs Addison of Liverpool admitted, ‘I was so entirely confined to the house for the two months before that I could not even walk around the garden & I have always been active to the last before’.
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Of course, the experience of pregnancy differed from woman to woman, and as the last comment suggests, from pregnancy to pregnancy. A useful leavening is provided by the robust commentary of school-master's wife Bessy Ramsden. In the 1760s and 1770s she suffered little or no discomfort, was resolutely humorous throughout her four pregnancies,
and even contemplated ‘the fatal moment’ with apparent equanimity. Although incommoded by her sheer size, she refused to forgo the pleasure of visiting, shopping and card-playing in the metropolis.

While Bessy Ramsden was supported throughout life by her good humour and high spirits, she was also lucky, for, beyond a certain point, ease or discomfort in pregnancy were outside a woman's control. Only Eliza Whitaker recorded the receipt of treatment for her side-effects and this attention was essentially a by-product of her doctor's efforts to avoid the miscarriages to which she was believed prone.
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Most other women were simply prescribed a good dose of resignation, since ante-natal indisposition was seen as a relatively unimportant symptom of ‘carrying on the Great Cause of Nature’. The inevitability of female suffering was ancestral. It was simply ‘the penalty entail'd on our sex by our G.mother’. In fact, ill health in the pregnant mother was long seen as a good omen, proof of a thriving foetus within. Thus, Elizabeth Shackleton smugly reported of her pregnant daughter-in-law: ‘Mrs P. was sick a good sign.’
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That women's letters are so rich in references to pregnancy is testimony to a shared female concern with the business of motherhood. Female well-wishers reassured and advised, expected to be told exactly when the ‘little stranger’ would arrive (women estimated the date of their confinement with varying degrees of success), were interested in the details of pregnancy and eagerly awaited news of the birth. Practical preparations for the confinement fell to the expectant mother. Women decided where to be confined; some returned to their maternal home or a well-serviced centre like Preston; others requested the company of their close female kin in the marital home. However, the evidence is too sparse to establish one standard practice. By contrast, the wives of peers usually arranged to be confined in London, where midwives and recovery nurses had the best reputations.
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Once installed, the mother-to-be attempted to prepare the household and procure a nurse and/or nursery maid. While inured to worry about matters medical, Bessy Ramsden admitted ‘I sleep in fear of Consequences’, having fallen behind on domestic preparations, with ‘yet a new bed to make up for the ocasion, which is to be made at home, beside a Thousand odd matters’.
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Of all practical arrangements, procuring a practitioner to assist at the birth and a nurse to attend in the aftermath were considered the most pressing. Medical historians have dwelt on the rivalry between midwives and surgeons or men-midwives, while the northern manuscripts reveal that local physicians were also common assistants at the birth. Elizabeth Parker in the 1750s, Bessy Ramsden in the 1760s, Beatrix Parker in the 1770s, Betty Parker in the 1780s, Eliza Whitaker in the 1810s and Ellen Parker in the 1820s were all attended by local physicians – many of whom came from genteel families and who knew their patients socially. From the fragmentary evidence that exists most of these appear to have been booked appointments for the doctor to call at the onset of labour, without a midwife in support.
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Only Eliza Whitaker's letters evidence the antenatal care of an advance call. Meanwhile, Jane Scrimshire in fashionable Pontefract made a seemingly controversial decision and opted for a man-midwife, as she confirmed in a letter of 1756:

Indeed, she cannot have been alone in her choice, at least in Pontefract, for judging by Jane Scrimshire's tart remarks Lucas's stock was clearly rising: ‘Lucas is in high degree as Man Midwife, he don't so much as smile [now].’
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The fact that there was enough custom in Pontefract to support three men-midwives as early as the 1750s is interesting in itself. It has been customary to look on the mid-eighteenth century as the period when male midwifery was established in metropolitan anatomy schools and teaching hospitals, while the expansion of provincial practitioners has been dated much later. The evidence also does not marry with the received chronology regarding the character of professional involvement at the birth. Guided by the historiography, we would expect mothers in the 1750s and 1760s to be delivered as a matter of course by midwives, only calling in a man and his forceps in emergency. However, male professionals were already the practitioners of first resort for the majority of the genteel women who recorded their arrangements. Clearly, the polite already preferred the ministrations of a presentable professional over the traditional collective participation of midwife and old women. However, this is not to say that polite matrons were lured away from a rich neighbourly collectivity by suspicious husbands. An important negative finding is the
absence of a single instance of reported tension between mother and father-to-be over the choice of birth assistant. Dispute, discussion and persuasion is confined to the letters women exchanged amongst themselves. Correspondingly, when William Hunter advised aspiring accoucheurs on how to make a good impression at a lying-in, he strongly advised the assiduous cultivation of the mother's friends, but made no reference at all to consultation with the father.
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Of course, genteel mothers were surrounded by servants, so they did not need a bevy of neighbours to cook, clean and look after the family during the lying-in. Nevertheless, they still relied on the support of female kin and close friends. Pregnancy and birth still engendered female collectivity, albeit one gathered on narrower social terms.

Women in the Parker network, in particular, encouraged their pregnant kin to make full use of available medical expertise, their own advice was seen as a supplement not an alternative to academic authority. Ann Pellet (herself the widow of a president of the Royal College of Physicians) showed no loyalty to practitioners of her own sex; pronouncing herself ‘much pleased that [Mrs Scrimshire] designes to follow your prudence in choosing to be assisted by a Docr, rather than an ignorant old woman’. She was a firm supporter of the doctor who attended her niece, and encouraged Elizabeth Parker to follow his ‘directions in every
point
’, implying that her previous miscarriage could have been avoided. She hoped ‘you'll manage better than you did last; by giving Dr Clayton more timely notice that he might be of greater service to you’. On her own homely authority, Aunt Pellet entreated her niece to air her linen properly, not to drink too many cooling drinks, not to go riding and to have ‘a friend with you during yr approaching confinement’.
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In sum, there is no evidence of female hostility to professional medicine. Overall, whether genteel women plumped for physician, surgeon or midwife they enjoyed a considerable degree of personal choice.

Women rarely appear to have committed the details of their labour to paper. At any rate, no detailed accounts of childbirth have survived in the northern records. Only laconic references to delivery can be found in the Parker correspondence: Jane Scrimshire had ‘a very severe time’, Bessy Ramsden mentioned the ‘History of my Groaning &c’, while Elizabeth Shackleton commiserated with her daughter-in-law: ‘My sister Parker tells me she never saw so large a child … You wo'd feel for that. I often think how you went on – Thank God it is over. I Hope this child will be a comfort & make amends by grace & every Virtue what you suffer'd for him …’
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Given such glancing mentions of labour and birth, the practical
business of the lying-in chamber remains obscure for most. However, one disturbing and graphic account remains, which bears repetition in full here because of its rarity and because of its horror – an account of birth that stunningly demonstrates the physical and emotional trauma that a woman, whatever her rank, might have to undergo. In June 1739 Anne Gossip laboured in agony for forty-nine and a half hours, and with a stoicism barely imaginable suffered her dead baby to be torn apart within her and removed in pieces. A nightmare in the fullest sense, this episode was recorded with almost dispassionate clarity by William Gossip her devoted spouse:

Of course, a grotesque ordeal was not the universal experience, yet the potential for it haunted most. A crescendo of anxiety and hope was almost invariably experienced by the family of the labouring mother. Let the following account of an uneventful London labour penned by an exhausted mother-in-law in 1821 stand for the many apprehensive households: