Reproductive Rituals

The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century

Angus McLaren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367434519
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000026887
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1984 Reproductive Ritual examines fertility and re-production in pre-industrial England. The book discusses both through anthropological research and reviews of contemporary literature that conscious family limitation was practised before the nineteenth century. The volume describes a surprising number of rules, regulations, taboos, injunctions, charms and herbal remedies used to affect pregnancy, and shows the extent to which individual women and men were concerned with controlling the size of their families. The fertility levels in England – as in Western Europe as a whole – were a very long way from the biological maximum in these centuries, and the book discusses the various reasons why this was so. The book reviews traditional ideas concerning the relationship between procreation and pleasure, drawn from a range of contemporary sources and discusses ways in which earlier generations sought both to promote and limit fertility. The book also examines abortion and shows how much evidence there is for its actual practice during the period and of traditional views towards it. This book provides a detailed understanding of historical attitudes towards conception family planning in pre-industrial England.

1

The pleasures of procreation: traditional and biomedical theories of conception

The popular conceptions of female physiology are generally held by women of all social groups in Maragheh, regardless of their educational background. Some educated women (and men) may hold both a modified version of the popular model and a simplified version of the biomedical model. But only the town’s physicians appear to dismiss the popular myth in toto, in favor of the biomedical model of female physiology.

Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good, ‘Of blood and babies: the relationship of popular Islamic physiology to fertility,’ Social Science and Medicine, 14B (1980), 151.

A recent chronicler of eighteenth-century childbearing has argued that the dangers and diseases which inevitably accompanied parturition were so great that women in past times must have loathed and feared sex.¹ But cultural anthropology’s most important insight is that every aspect of social life is culturally conditioned: the ways in which people perceive their experiences are as important as the experiences themselves.² To begin our investigations of the patterning of human fertility we will in this chapter seek to understand how English people in the past viewed the process of procreation and how such views began to change in the course of the eighteenth century.

In 1776 the Scottish surgeon John Hunter supervised the first successful attempt at human artificial insemination. Hunter instructed a linen-draper who suffered from hypospadias how to use a warm syringe to impregnate his wife. The operation worked and pregnancy ensued, but because of Hunter’s fear of the criticisms of moralists it was only reported posthumously twenty-three years later in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.³ Hunter’s success deserves, perhaps, more attention from historians because no other act so dramatically demonstrated the separation of the principles of sexual pleasure and procreation which is said to have occurred as the ‘modern mind’ emerged.

How did early modern English men and women perceive sexuality? Was it pleasurable? Was it a similar experience for both sexes? According to the historians who in the 1970s plotted the rise of the modern family, it was only in the eighteenth century that the enjoyment of sexuality became, for women, at least a possibility. Lawrence Stone, Edward Shorter and Randolph Trumbach all advance what is largely a Whig interpretation of the history of the family according to which only relatively recently did love, affection and a concurrent concern for the sexual gratification of one’s mate emerge.⁴ They attribute the possibility of women’s enjoyment of sexuality to the growth of a new individualism linked to market capitalism and to the freedom from pregnancies offered by the expansion of contraceptive knowledge. There is much of value in such arguments concerning the eighteenth century, but they fail to explain why in the nineteenth the double standard continued to hold sway: far from enjoining women to anticipate sexual pleasure, the majority of early Victorian writers who broached the subject counselled stoicism and passivity. Such an interpretation also fails to explain why – if the ‘pleasure principle’ were only to appear in the eighteenth century – the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were marked by an earthy attitude towards sexuality strikingly absent in the sentimental late 1700s and the prudish early 1800s.

Hunter’s work does provide a useful benchmark against which such shifts in both popular and scientific attitudes towards procreation can be plotted. In this study the literature devoted to the issues of sexual pleasure and procreation prior to Hunter’s activities will be reviewed with the intent of casting a fresh light on the history of English attitudes towards sexuality. It will be argued that from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries it was commonly assumed that women not only found pleasure in sexual intercourse but that they positively had to if the union were to be a fruitful one. It was only in the 1700s that a new scientific appreciation of the process of procreation began to spread, which held that pleasure and procreation were not necessarily linked. As a consequence, by the beginning of the nineteenth century one could speak of two sexual cultures: a ‘low’ culture of traditional beliefs in which women’s sexuality was accepted, and a ‘high’ culture of scientific understanding in which women’s sexuality had little place.⁵ We will be asking the sorts of questions that anthropologists, sensitive to the issue of sexual tensions, have posed – who takes the initiative in sexual encounters? who is supposed to gain more pleasure? who controls fertility? – in an effort to understand why the answers made to such questions in the seventeenth century differed from those of the nineteenth century.

The evidence most often advanced to support the argument that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attitudes towards sexuality were not ‘puritanical’ is, ironically enough, drawn primarily from Puritan sources. From Edmund Morgan to Edmund Leites the assertion has been made that Puritans in both England and New England recognized the importance of love, friendship and sexuality in marriage.⁶ Traditional Christianity portrayed women as the daughters of Eve and accordingly as lacking in rational control and sexually voracious. A woman’s innate interest in sex was considered not so much a matter of her sensibly seeking pleasure as giving in to self-destructive urges. With the rise of the ideal of the ‘spiritualized household’ in both humanist and Puritan thought in the sixteenth century, however, there came a new legitimation of marital sexuality, a stress on the virtues of family life, and an acceptance of female sexual needs as natural. Women’s libidinal drives were taken by Protestants as a good thing inasmuch as they helped hold together the family, whereas conservative Catholics, so the argument runs, continued to prize celibacy and view female sexuality with distaste. The Protestant ethic was echoed by William Gouge in Of Domesticall Duties (1622) who claimed spouses owed each other ‘due benevolence’, and declared ‘To deny this duty being justly required, is to deny a due debt, and to give Satan a great advantage’. This Puritan pamphleteer went on to assert that even after a woman was pregnant, sexual relations should continue: ‘Conception is not the only end of this duty: for it is to be rendered to such as are barren’.⁷ Similarly, Thomas Gataker in A Good Wife, God’s Gift (1623) claimed, ‘In the first place cometh the Wife, as the first and principall blessing, and the Children in the next…. If Children bee a Blessing, then the root whence they spring ought much more to bee so esteemed’.⁸ In short, such writers shifted the focus on the purpose of marriage from procreation to companionship.

Such interpretations are useful, but a reliance on religious tracts should not overshadow far more obvious sources relating to sexuality: the traditional medical texts.⁹ In the large corpus of works devoted to the questions of conception and gestation, sexuality necessarily figured centrally. How one moved from ‘non-being’ to ‘being’ was from the time of the Greeks a key philosophical and scientific conundrum. It gave rise to an extended discussion over the centuries of embryological development. It was a discussion which, until the new medical experimentation of the sixteenth century, was highly speculative, one in which laymen, doctors and priests all participated and accepted as given the linking of pleasure and procreation.

Early modern Europeans looked back to Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen for explanations of how life was created. Aristotle, ignorant of the functions of the ovaries and testicles, believed both male and female produced ‘sperma’ from their blood – seed from the male and menstrual fluid from the female. The woman because of her natural coldness could not manufacture real seed and as proof Aristotle noted: ‘A sign that the female does not emit the kind of seed that the male emits, and that generation is not due to the mixing of both as some hold, is that often the female conceives without experiencing the pleasure that occurs in intercourse’.¹⁰ Given Aristotle’s preconceptions regarding male dominance, the male fluid was qualitatively superior; he asserted that it provided the elements of form and movement for the new being, while the female fluid was the source of its matter and passivity. Aristotle suggested that, as in the making of cheese the inert milk was activated by rennet, so too in procreation the active semen produced life from the passive menstrual fluid. He went so far, some have argued, as to deprive women not only of pleasure, but even of maternity and presented them as being little more than incubators. Beyond this, he claimed that semen tried to produce the highest form of life, that is the male; should it fail, the result was an imperfect product, the female.¹¹

More popular in the long run than Aristotle’s views were those of Hippocrates who on the whole tended towards an egalitarian model of procreation. He argued that because of the ‘intensity of the pleasure involved’, the seminal fluids were distillations drawn from all parts of both spouses’ bodies and accordingly hereditary traits of either could appear.¹² The two fluids or ‘semence’ were similar in nature and their mixing produced life. This Hippocratic line was taken up by Galen in the second century AD who attempted to synthesize it with Aristotelian medicine.¹³ This compilation of medical theories was to dominate western thought for the next fifteen hundred years. For the purposes of this study, what is of interest is that in contrast to Aristotle’s male-oriented explanation of procreation the Galenic thesis was ‘feminist’ inasmuch as both sexes were presented as contributing equally in conception and accordingly both had to experience pleasure. The female seed was said to move like the male and the fact that a woman could not bear children if her ovaries were removed was advanced as proof that she was more than the mere ‘nest’ Aristotle suggested. Anatomically, the two sexes were presented in Galenic accounts as complementary, the difference being that the man’s genitalia were external and the woman’s internal. The clitoris was likened to the penis and the ovaries considered ‘testicles’ or ‘stones’ that produced seed. The male seed was, it must be said, depicted by Galenists as superior in having ‘spiritual’ qualities lacking in the female, but Galen’s reproductive schema was nevertheless far more egalitarian than Aristotle’s.

The semence or two-seed theory was to have a long life in western culture.¹⁴ Thomas Raynald asserted that the woman’s seed differed from the man’s but was no less perfect and her sensual appetites no less demanding:

For if that the God of nature had not instincted and inset in the body of man and woman such a vehement and ardent appetite and lust, the one lawfully to company with the other, neyther man nor woman would ever have been so attentive to the works of generation and increasement of posterity.¹⁵

Why, asked Nathaniel Highmore, would women have ‘testicles’ if not for the purpose of producing seed? ‘When also in coition ye shall observe the same delight and concussion as in Males; why should we suppose Nature, beyond her custome, should abound in superfluities and uselesse partes?’¹⁶ Sir Thomas Browne advanced the same views when rebutting the report that a woman could be passively impregnated by bathing in a tub in which a man had left semen. “Tis a new and unseconded way in history to fornicate at a distance, and much offendeth the rules of physic, which say, there is no generation without joint emission, nor only a virtual, but corporal and carnal contraction’.¹⁷ William Harvey provided a useful summing up of early seventeenth-century views:

Conception, according to the opinion of medical men, takes place in the following way: during intercourse the male and the female dissolve in one voluptuous sensation, and inject their seminal fluids (geniturae) into the cavity of the uterus, where that which each contributes is mingled with that which the other supplies, the mixture having from both equally the faculty of action and the force of matter; and according to the predominance of this or that geniture does the progeny turn out male or female.¹⁸

Although the microscope was to permit in the late seventeenth century the beginnings of a more precise definition of the different contributions of the two sexes in procreation, one still found in the popular literature of the la...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: History and cultural anthropology
• 1 The pleasures of procreation: traditional and biomedical theories of conception
• 2 ‘To remedy barrenness and to promote the faculty of generation’: promoting fertility, 1500–1800
• 3 ‘Excellent recipes to keep from bearing children’: restricting fertility, 1500–1800
• 4 ‘All manner of art, to the help of drugs and physicians’: abortion as birth control
• 5 ‘Converting this measure of security into a crime’: the early nineteenth-century abortion laws
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index