Women in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Intimate, Intellectual and Public Lives

Deborah Simonton, Katie Barclay, Katie Barclay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134774920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

The eighteenth century looms large in the Scottish imagination. It is a century that saw the doubling of the population, rapid urbanisation, industrial growth, the political Union of 1707, the Jacobite Rebellions and the Enlightenment - events that were intrinsic to the creation of the modern nation and to putting Scotland on the international map. The impact of the era on modern Scotland can be seen in the numerous buildings named after the luminaries of the period - Adam Smith, David Hume, William Robertson - the endorsement of Robert Burns as the national poet/hero, the preservation of the Culloden battlefield as a tourist attraction, and the physical geographies of its major towns. Yet, while it is a century that remains central to modern constructions of national identity, it is a period associated with men. Until recently, the history of women in eighteenth-century Scotland, with perhaps the honourable exception of Flora McDonald, remained unwritten. Over the last decade however, research on women and gender in Scotland has flourished and we have an increasingly full picture of women's lives at all social levels across the century. As a result, this is an appropriate moment to reflect on what we know about Scottish women during the eighteenth century, to ask how their history affects the traditional narratives of the period, and to reflect on the implications for a national history of Scotland and Scottish identity. Divided into three sections, covering women's intimate, intellectual and public lives, this interdisciplinary volume offers articles on women's work, criminal activity, clothing, family, education, writing, travel and more. Applying tools from history, art anthropology, cultural studies, and English literature, it draws on a wide-range of sources, from the written to the visual, to highlight the diversity of women's experiences and to challenge current male-centric historiographies.

Part 1
Intimate Lives

Chapter 1
Female Birthing Customs and Beliefs

Anne Cameron

In the eighteenth century, every aspect of conception, pregnancy and childbirth was suffused with social rituals. Scholarly research has illuminated these practices in early modern England and continental Europe, but comparatively little has been written on the folklore of birth and pregnancy in Scotland, first-hand evidence of which is extremely difficult to uncover.¹ Childbirth was a female province to which men were only admitted in exceptional circumstances; consequently, birthing practices are scarcely mentioned in men’s journals and correspondence, and, at least until the mid eighteenth century, Scottish women rarely had the leisure or ability to record their own experiences. Drawing upon scattered references in contemporary diaries and letters, proscriptive allusions to ‘idle superstitions’ in eighteenth and nineteenth-century medical treatises, and nineteenth and early twentieth-century compendia of folklore, this chapter aims to explore some of the primary rituals associated with childbirth and post-birth celebrations involving mothers and their midwives, and to suggest how they may have changed over the eighteenth century and beyond. While many of these practices were observed across Scotland, and indeed throughout Europe, others remained peculiar to certain localities until large-scale migration from the Highlands to the Lowlands began to blur regional distinctions in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similarities and differences in the observance of customs across the social spectrum are much harder to identify, however, as these tend to be obscured by the nature of the sources – whereas personal references to birthing customs stem mainly from the pens of the elite, references gathered from other sources probably refer implicitly to the lower classes.

The prayers, protective amulets and ritual practices described may or may not have afforded tangible practical benefits, but they held tremendous psychological significance for midwives and their clients.² As Jacqueline Musacchio has observed, ‘the contemporary belief in sympathetic magic and the mediating force of specific objects and rituals promised a greater personal control over pregnancy and birth than was medically possible at that time’.³ While labour might be protracted, and excruciatingly so, most deliveries were uncomplicated, with a favourable outcome. Accordingly, the comfort and reassurance of familiar and trusted rituals helped sustain expectant women during their ordeal, whilst a safe deliverance reinforced the purported efficacy of such practices. If the baby was disfigured or stillborn, or the mother died in childbirth, the blame could readily be placed on supernatural agents, such as fairies.

Preparations for Labour, Expediting Delivery, and Tending to Mother and Child

Until well into the nineteenth century, pregnant women throughout Britain were almost always delivered in their own homes.⁴ Vagrants and those taken in labour whilst travelling had little choice but to give birth wherever they happened to be, but, as the Glasgow Mercury reported in 1791, their plight sometimes moved strangers to offer shelter:

During the great fall of snow on Monday se’ennight, a poor woman was taken in labour on the Greenock road, near Crosshill, and delivered of a child. The people at Crosshill took her in, and humanely accommodated her with a bed, and a contribution was immediately made by the travellers in the house.⁵

Well-to-do families might engage a midwife to live-in as the pregnancy progressed, thus in 1756, George Ridpath noted that the Minister of Morebattle’s wife, who was nearing full term, ‘still keeps afoot, but has the midwife with her’.⁶ More usually, however, an expectant father would hurry to fetch the local midwife when labour commenced, coining the Scots expression ‘to go at midwife-gallop’, or at full speed.⁷ Along the way, he apprized his wife’s female friends and neighbours, collectively known as ‘gossips’, that their presence was also required. Diaries and correspondence rarely reveal how many women assembled on these occasions, but the number probably varied with the size of the community and the personal circumstances of the mother-to-be. In England, six women might attend; in Orkney, too, there were ‘sometimes as many as half a dozen’.⁸ On one occasion, John Galt’s fictional parish midwife found that ‘young and old were there … widows and grannies giving advice, and new-married wives sitting in the expectation of getting insight’.⁹ Yet when the wife of Glasgow businessman and manufacturer, Robert Govane, gave birth in 1807, ‘we had no person with us but the Mid-wife, and Mrs Kemp, who in some degree forced herself upon us, but she is a fine Body, and was really very useful’.¹⁰

While also assisting the midwife and acting as witnesses to the birth, the gossips’ role was to comfort and encourage the labouring woman. Understandably fearful of labour, many women craved the reassuring presence of their mothers and sisters at this time.¹¹ Mary Stewart Mackenzie’s two sisters travelled to Brahan Castle to be with her, and her mother, Lady Seaforth, promised that ‘if you have any wish for me … I will go to you at any time’. Mary Carlyle was considered ‘absolutely necessary to her sister when she lay in’, and Mrs Dawson travelled from Stitchell to Glasgow to attend a niece ‘who, in the midst of strangers, has lost her husband lately, and is at the point of lying-in’.¹²

In Scotland, as elsewhere in Europe, husbands were barred from the lying-in chamber, yet there were occasional exceptions.¹³ Expecting her first child, Mary Walker, wife of the Minister of Dundonald, went into labour on 8 September 1740. Her husband, Thomas, recorded that she ‘being very uneasie all night, [I] slept lit[t]le, read throw the Day & visited my Wife now & then’.¹⁴ Thomas’s sister had previously endured a perilous labour and a stillbirth, which had affected him greatly, and may have made him particularly anxious for access to his wife. Happily, at 3.30 a.m. on 9 September ‘it pleased G[od] to give my Wife a safe Delivery of a Daughter’.¹⁵ Though generally excluded from the intimate proceedings, husbands might remain in or near the house and receive moral support from male companions, just as their wives drew encouragement from the gossips in the birthing chamber.¹⁶ Two friends kept company with Thomas Walker during his wife’s labour, and Walker offered similar support to Richard Cunningham, Minister of Symington ‘while his Spouse was crying’.¹⁷

It was important to secure a warm, private space for the delivery, and poorer women who lacked a separate bedroom might achieve this by isolating the bed (basic box beds, which were enclosed by curtains, would be amenable to this).¹⁸ In early modern France, a stable was used to avoid having to clean the house afterwards, while Russian women gave birth in the village bathhouse.¹⁹ Mary Mackie, the wife of an Aberdeenshire innkeeper, usually appropriated a spare room, but once had to be delivered ‘in our own bed closet, the room that we generally use for that purpose being occupied by Mr Taylor, hose merchant’.²⁰ Whereas Mr Taylor was a paying guest, one’s sleeping husband could more readily be turned out, as was Thomas Walker’s experience in 1747.²¹

It was common throughout Europe for the midwife to close all doors and windows in the room to retain warmth and repel evil influences. In some parts of Scotland, the curtains were also drawn to block out sun and moonlight, it being considered unlucky for either to shine upon the baby.²² The fire – a crucial element in the rituals performed to safeguard mother and child after delivery – was stoked to keep the room warm and to brew the caudle, a mixture of alcohol, sugar and spices to fortify the labouring woman for the hours ahead. Upper-class families purchased wine specially for this purpose, while at the opposite end of the social scale, the manservant of George Home of Kimmerghame got from Home ‘some seck [,] his wife being in travell’.²³

There is some evidence to suggest that midwives prepared and administered herbal remedies to their clients. After suffering a series of miscarriages in the 1690s, for example, the Countess of Panmure consulted various midwives for advice. One, Sarah Inglis, supplied both the Countess and other Scottish noblewomen with ointments and preparations.²⁴ Remedies purporting to ease or hasten childbirth were passed amongst female friends and copied into their recipe books for future reference. It is difficult to determine their efficacy, but personal endorsements suggest that women set great store by them. One recipe to prevent miscarriage in a notebook owned by Mary Harrison carries the assurance that Mrs Greenhill took it ‘with Such Sucksess, that she had many Children, & was with child 39 times; which I have heard her say my self’.²⁵ Women similarly passed on...