Pregnant Women’s Sexuality in Early Modern England

"Pregnant Women’s Sexuality in Early Modern England fills a significant gap in the history of sexuality. This highly compelling short study pays attention to female sexual desire and its expression at a time when perceptions of impending motherhood eclipse considerations of such desire. Donaghy persuasively argues that shifts in thinking about female sexuality in the eighteenth century, influenced by a range of broader social changes, also led to changes in the way female sexual desires during pregnancy were conceptualised. Pregnant Women’s Sexuality in Early Modern England makes an important contribution to not only the study of sexuality but also our understanding of ideas about and attitudes towards the pregnant body more generally in the early modern period and eighteenth century". — Sarah Toulalan, Professor of Early Modern History, University of Exeter, UK.

This book provides the first history of pregnant women’s sexuality in England from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, with some discussion of broader Northern European perspectives on pregnancy and sex. Pregnant women in the past had sex, yet, we know nearly nothing about their sexual desires or what people generally thought about sex during pregnancy. There is currently a dearth of research into ideas about pregnant women’s sexual desires, or how pregnant women were perceived as erotic or desirable in this period. While we know much about the maternal body, research into sex and pregnancy is lacking. It explores a range of medical literature for descriptions of pregnancy and sexuality, particularly popular medical treatises and midwifery guides, as well as elite, Latin medical and scientific treatises. Alongside these medical texts, it considers a range of popular culture materials including novels, ballads, pornography, marital guides, and it examines diaries and correspondence. Drawing on methodologies from gender, sex, and queer histories, the book tries to locate examples of pregnant women’s articulations of desire.

Revisiting pregnant women’s sexuality across this period reveals the often paradoxical early-modern attitudes to sex and pregnancy; women’s gravid sexuality was portrayed as natural and desirable, but also in terms of excess, as potentially dangerous and disruptive to the developing fetus. The book argues that this latter idea of pregnant women’s sex, as harmful or risky, gradually became a dominant model over the eighteenth century, when sex during pregnancy was recast as immoral and reckless. 

Paige Donaghy is McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at The University of Melbourne, Australia. She is Historian of reproduction, medicine, and gender/sexuality in early modern Europe and has published on these areas in Social History of Medicine, Isis, and Journal of the History of Sexuality. Donaghy’s postdoctoral project is exploring what we now understand to be obstetric violence (harm, mistreatment, and violence experienced during pregnancy and birth care) in Britain from 1690 to 1890.