Women and Childbirth

Childbirth was essentially, especially in the medieval ages very much an all female affair. Midwives usually oversaw the birth of children with male doctors and surgeons only being called if there was an immediate danger of death for the mother or child. It was not until the seventeenth century, mostly in France, that men began to be involved in midwifery.(Wiesner-Hanks, 85). Though they did not have the same knowledge that female midwives could gain from experience and other midwives, they did have access to classes and could participate in dissections to gain more knowledge, something that women could not do. Although it was  considered by many to be very improper for men to be involved in the childbirth experience, the male midwives became more common in England and France, especially among the middle-to-upper class women who could afford them.  

Midwives were responsible for not only the physical welfare of the mother and child, but were considered largely responsible for the spiritual as well,  in many areas of Europe they were allowed to preform emergency baptisms, a rite generally only allowed to be done by priests (Wiesner-Hanks, 90).  Childbirth, in general, involved a lot of spiritual ideas. One of the most interesting ones was the idea of "churching", the idea that a woman must be purified after giving birth, an idea rejected by Protestants but in some churches continues to this day. It is said that the idea is originally connected to Jewish rituals of purification after childbirth, and also to when Mary took Jesus to be presented at the temple. The painting below is The Presentation in the Temple by Hans Memling, circa 1470/80, a depiction of where the idea is supposedly from. 

http://www.hansmemling.org/The-Presentation-in-the-Temple-1463.html

The Seven Ages of Woman

        Am I the only one who was appalled by the image we saw Wednesday about the seven ages of woman from the nineteenth century? Upon reflection it showed that the only "good" time in a woman's life is when she has a baby. After that, she really has no contribution to society and becomes a pitiable human being by the end of her life. I am not unfamiliar with this type of artwork. In my great-grandmother's house hangs a picture on the wall that I remember looking at from a young age. It dates to the early 1900's and depicts the "best moments in a woman's life." This includes the first date, the proposal, the wedding, the honeymoon, a new love (baby), and that is all. I used to be fond of it until the last few years when I realized how sexist it is. Between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century, it seems that little changed regarding the role and expectation of women.
Wiesner-Hanks writes that "A woman was a virgin, wife, or widow, or, alternately, a daughter, wife, or mother" (WH 56).
       Below is a modern cartoon version similar to the artwork we have seen in class. It is from an online woman's magazine called "stylish eve" that I found by searching Google for "ages of woman." The picture is titled "The Life Cycle of Woman." I wanted to bring this picture to your attention to bring up the topic of how the life cycle of women has changed. By looking at this picture it would seem that (some people) in modern society still have traditional beliefs that relate back to the Middle Ages about the role(s) of women. I don't want to put a shadow over the progress women have seen in the last fifty years, but just a little reminder that these ideas aren't to far in the past and many people still believe that way today. One major difference we do see today is that more women than any other time in history are going to college which is delaying childbirth, often into the 30's. Women can have the best of both worlds, career and motherhood, if they choose.

Women and Wages

It’s no surprise that women were limited on the type of work they could do in Early Modern Europe. As Wiesner-Hanks states, “Women rarely received formal training in a trade,” they were given an informal type of education if any, and “religious opinion and the language of laws and records made it difficult for women to even see themselves as members of a certain occupation” (103). But despite this, women still had a strong presence in the workforce. Though they couldn’t call themselves physicians or label their shops as apothecaries, this doesn’t mean that they weren’t used by their communities. In fact, from the study on the London labor market in 1700, statistics show that expanding economies largely depended on women, which is how the Industrious Revolution came to be (Wiesner-Hanks 134). It would be a disservice to our review of history to say that women mainly stayed at home during this time period.

However, the treatment of working women is not an entirely positive one. Wages, especially show themselves to be an area where women were (and are) discriminated against. For example, professionalization, a term that women were not allowed to use, allowed men to charge at least ten times what women could charge for essentially the same service (Wiesner-Hanks 103). Another reason often used to justify paying women less for the same task as man performed was “because they were either single and had only themselves to support or married and so were simply helping their husbands out” (Wiesner-Hanks 105). Despite this, however, many widowed women worked on these bad wages, to support their families. And in seasons when the husband didn’t gain wages, the family’s financial burdens were dependent on the year-round kind of products/services the wife provided (Wiesner-Hanks 107).

I think there is a bigger lesson that people today can learn from this: the lesson that women HAVE had a big impact in the workforce. They have accomplished great works under the pain of bad wages, supporting families at times when the man could not. They still do. So to think that women still get paid $0.77 to every man’s dollar is perplexing to me. Should we not learn from the past and realize that this is something to be fixed? Women have already proved that they can live on lower wages than men, but should they continue to still? 

Veronica Franco's poetry

After our discussion on Monday over the poems of Veronica Franco, I decided to look into some more of her work and how it related to other women during her time.  The image above is a compilation of both Veronica's poems and others written by men.  the poetic style of this work is known as the capitoli in tereza rima.  According to the online source, this is comparable to the style that Dante presents in his writings.  In this collection, a variety of poems are separated into "chapters" and are composed by various poets including Franco.  In certain excerpts of this text, according to the source, Veronica expresses her distaste for her male counterparts degrading and insulting comments towards women.  Franco uses her poetic background to argue against men who put down women in their compositions, and is published alongside with the male poetry in this collection.

This image represents the title of Veronica Franco's Lettere Familiari,  which we have discussed in class.  According to the online source, Franco uses various styles of poetry throughout this text, including a laconic style of writing in order to speak plainly rather than providing an intricate text that is challenging for viewers to read.  This is probably because of Franco's concern with reaching more views and being able to communicate with a wider audience.  As for her writings, from this source, it is evident that her work has remained very successful throughout the years, and has undoubtedly influenced the work of others.

Sources:

http://dornsife.usc.edu/veronica-franco/poems-and-letters/

Menstruation

As we know living in the 21^st century, menstruation is the cycle of changes that occurs in the uterus and ovary for the purpose of sexual reproduction (Wikipedia). According to Wiesner-Hanks since menstruation had not yet been discovered, menstruation was viewed medically as either a process that purified women’s blood or that removed excess blood from their bodies (WH 58). At that time, doctors typically recommended hot baths, medicines, peccaries placed in the vagina (bizarre), and, for married women, frequent intercourse, to bring on a late menstrual period (WH 58). It’s our human nature to create explanations with our religious view. For the Hebrew Scripture held that menstruation made a woman ritually impure so that everything she touched was unclean, and her presence was to be avoided by all (WH 59). These taboos went as far as not allowing menstruating women to enter churches or take communion, such as the Orthodox Slavs (WH 59).

 

According to Wiesner Hanks most women seemed to viewed menstruation not as an illness or a sign of divine displeasure but as a normal part of life. So why did the church think that women were so unclean during their period? I don’t understand why even with a woman’s menstruation they had to make it negative? During the sixteen century, the idea spread that this was medically unwise because it would result in deformed or leprous children (WH 59).  Two questions to think about, why did the church have such a negative view on a woman’s menstruation? Second, does the concept of humoral theory affect their opinions?

 

sources:

Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 and image is from the 2007 Shannon L. Meyer, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Dowry Inflation in Renaissance Italy

Dowries were significant to the social and patriarchal constructs of both the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Particularly in Italy, the inflation in dowry during the sixteenth century had an impact on varied aspects of society, not just marriage, and thus, was responded to by prominent institutions, like government and the Catholic Church. As Wiesner-Hanks alludes to, both provided an avenue through which women, albeit specifically women who were judged to have “potential” for marriage, could amass a dowry when they would not otherwise have been able to (Women and Gender 81). In this way, it was almost as if “work programs” were set up to guarantee the “employment” of such women in the future, their job being one of a wife and a mother. However, the dowry inflation ensured that women, in most cases, would fulfill certain roles. In a hierarchal manner, dependent on their level of resources, women were shuffled into an identity of that of a wife, a nun, a seamstress, or a domestic servant (Women and Gender 81). Therefore, the dowry inflation, as it reflected a more stratified society on the whole, perhaps intensified the status quo of patriarchy, as it more precisely relegated women to a specific position with fewer, if any, possibilities of escaping it. On the other hand, it may have permitted more women to circumvent an expectation of marriage and thus, explore more untraditional roles for themselves. Overall, the responses to the dowry inflation demonstrate just how prevalent gender was in the political, economic, and social environment, as women’s supposedly “private” sphere was continually a major player in the public context.

 

Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.




This painting (1480) represents the transportation of a woman's possessions, some of which were household items considered part of a dowry, into her husband's household at marriage(http://www.turismo.intoscana.it/allthingstuscany/tuscanyarts/cassone/).

The Imaginary Mothers - Wet Nurses

(This image is a 16th century painting of a wet nurse, and two more elite ladies in the foreground.)

One concept that not too many sources mention when recounting pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood is the aspect of using a wet-nurse and how this affected women of the period. Wiesner-Hanks offers a few pages of information concerning the topic of wet-nursing. She relates that many women of the period nursed their own children and did not use wet nurses. One important thing is the amount of time each child would be nursed. Typically, this lasted two years (WH 91). Women who could not produce milk or could afford it typically had a wet nurse. These women did not get to choose their nurse, rather their husbands chose for them (WH 92). Choosing a wet nurse was a serious process, to find a healthy woman, and one who would impart good moral and psychological qualities on a child through her milk.

Yet on the other end of the class spectrum, communities would hire wet nurses for children of the poor, foundlings and orphans. This meant that even those children left to destitute situations still had a chance at life. It is important to note many of these children died, as did some of the wealthy children left in the care of the wet nurse, due to either neglect or just sheer inattention paid by these women (WH 92). Mostly it was because these women typically came from the lower social classes and offered to care for other children in hopes of earning more money. Women who worked as wet nurses usually formed an attachment to the children they cared for and sometimes went to the home to become domestic servants after the child grew up. This is interesting because for these women the attachments to other people’s children could even be stronger than their attachment to their own children.

Citation:

Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008

Wiesner-Hanks - Childhood and Adolescence

Based on all of the readings we have done so far in class I wasn't at all surprised by the harshness that was talked of in regards to young girls and, in some cases, infants in Europe. Seeing some things such as Jewish mothers praying that they would have sons; German midwives being more heavily rewarded for assisting in the births of sons. (pg 57) And then some families just abandoning their infant girls causing the orphanages to be overflowing with girls. But the thing that struck me was when it mentioned that in London there were higher number of boys that were abandoned than girls. Every Country can do different things, but this caught my eye as they seemed to be the odd one out in Europe considering the higher regard for boys in the rest of Europe. I was hoping for more information on this matter, but so far haven't seen any. Could it be that for some reason women were actually on more equal ground in London than in the rest of Europe or were there other circumstances for this? Most of the European nations simply thought that their boys were the only ones that had a chance for success; so I am inclined to believe that maybe the people of London believed more in the equal chances of boys and girls to have success as adults.

There's A Manual For Everything

     Today the series of books called "....For Dummies" is a self-help manual series that explains from point A to point B how to accomplish something. While these books are a recent invention, the idea of a self-help manual is not. In the sixteenth century there were manuals from birthing to biological changes in men and women. It is of no surprise that the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century paved the way for manuals to become common and referenced daily. One type of manual that I found particularly interesting was that of the midwives manual. According to Mary Wiesner-Hanks, "these manuals contained advice for prenatal care for the mother as well as the handling of the deliveries" (84).              
   The following image is by Eucharius Rosslin and it depicts a woman in labor with two midwives in attendance. This image, along with many others, were used in the manuals to illustrate the points. 

http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/301195/enlarge

    Midwife manuals were not the only types of manuals produced in the sixteenth century. Marriage manuals, menstruation manuals, among others, became widely popular among all social classes within society. I question, who wrote these manuals? Were both men and women writers of these manuals and both were accepted by the public? Were manuals that dealt directly with issues of the female sex written by women? Was this genre of literature one of the only ways women writers could be published without critique during the sixteenth century?  

                                                                Works Cited

Wiesner-Hanks. Women and Gender In Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University   Press, 2008. 

"Science Photo Library." Accessed February 4, 2014.http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/301195/enlarge. 

If not chastely, at least Cautiously

No one gives any credit to the distant past. Many older scholars have painted the period as one filled with "cheerless children" and "woeful women." It's no wonder that everyone believed that contraception strictures were followed to a T (if you're Catholic, you might be seeing some similarities here!). So, how have scholars proved that contraception was used?  Medical books or pharmacy books might provide some clues. So does the rise in population exponentially in the course of the 10th through 13th century! But how does one prove coitus interruptus, perhaps the most successful birth control method of the past. Keep in mind that some very common things, like bread recipes, just don't exist--not for a lack of existence, just because it was so common.

In his article on "Birth Control in the Medieval West," Pete Biller, a professor at the University of York, proves that the Church and society was aware of sexuality being practiced for non-procreative purposes. Sorry, Augustine, you are going to lose that battle! Biller includes a quote from a fourteenth-century Dominican, where he relays the usual response about the Sacrament of Marriage being for the procreation of children. Then he cautions: "And some married couples intend an end for marriage which is other than that intended by God . . . lust. . . and if one pays attention to their abuse of the sexual act, it is no wonder that they lack marriage's due end and reward, off-spring" (15). What! Just when we thought it was unprovable, an invisible act, it becomes a bit more clear that this church father had probably noticed that some couples were not conceiving.

Are there other areas of evidence? Biller uses penitential manuals to suggest that women should be punished for trying to avoid the pains of childbirth, to preserve or beauty, or to protect from the economic expenses of not having children. And then there are the marriages declared null and void by Pope Gregory IX, between 1226 and 1234, when there was an intent by married parties to avoid having offspring.  There is a modern phrase, "if you can't be good, be careful" and medieval satire, poems, and perhaps even one priest's manual from Passau recommended this as well, thus the title above. It's odd that one chronicle records that among prostitutes "they seem to be more sterile" (18). Biller concludes by recounting the direct words of Peter de Palude, writing around 1310. He practices coitus interruptus, he says, to avoid having children "whom he cannot feed" (25). To add to the complexity, Biller suggests that Parish priests may have counseled family planning (he does not, however, suggest that women may have passed on this knowledge, which seems likely). By examining some of the words of actual texts from the Middle Ages, it allows us to see a disparity between prescriptive texts that demand certain actions and those participants in history who frequently ignored the call for sex plus babies. In this way, we are including the participants in the past to see how they acted with agency to shape their future, rather than dwelling simply on what they were being told.