U.K.-based Elinor Cleghorn is a ground-breaking cultural historian, specialising in women’s lives, bodies, and health. She’s the author of 2021 book Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World, and recently released book A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming The Radical History of Mothering.
A Woman’s Work begins in the ninth century BCE, and takes us through periods in history including ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, and ensuing centuries, up to the present day. Because history has largely told men’s stories, Elinor tells a unique story, which includes introducing change-making women across history, many of whom are little-known.
Elinor talks to Sarah Lang about the importance of rituals when birth was incredibly dangerous; the ingrained notion that a pain-filled ‘natural birth’ makes us good mothers; the narrative that women’s bodies were corrupted yet childbirth was compulsory; how Christianity demonised women (blaming Eve) and held women to an impossible standard (the virgin Mary); the ancient Greeks’ belief that women had to orgasm to conceive; and why it’s vital to tell mothers’ stories right now.
Hi Elinor! How did you approach the book?
To tell a story of the past, I’m drawn to think: what do I care about? What are my stakes? What do I stand for? What stories am I choosing to tell, and how? Because motherhood is an absolutely mammoth topic. Everyone’s got an emotional, specific relationship to the idea of mothering – they’ve been mothered, or are a mother, or both.
You felt that the story of mothering was neglected by history, and it was vital to document it now?
It felt vital, in this political moment, to bring women’s stories to light. It’s particularly important to understand how certain constructs have served certain people and certain agendas at different points in history. Currently, there’s this discussion about so-called fertility and birth-rate crises, and ‘under-babied’ women. And, at the end of the 18th century, there was much discussion around it being a woman’s duty to her nation state to have babies, stay in her ‘feminine sphere’. That wasn’t linked to her submission so much as it was about promoting a noble, sacred duty. We can see echoes of that today, especially with rhetoric around what women should do with their bodies and how they should live their lives. There’s this resurgent idea that the correct organisation of society has women in the home and men in the public sphere. We’re also in a terrifying moment when it comes to reproductive health especially in the U.S., wider maternal health, and the economic sustainability of mothering. But knowing these things have happened before can give us perspective on how history moves like waves. It’s not just linear.
You do a lot of original research, given history has largely told men’s stories?
It’s not that women haven’t talked about, written about and recorded their experiences of having and raising children. It’s that history hasn’t been very interested in the everyday details of women’s lives. I came up against the limits of the archive with women’s history. Maybe there were records, diaries and letters, but these weren’t considered things that constituted knowledge, so they weren’t preserved. Also, women didn’t have many opportunities throughout history to write about their everyday lives. So I searched for little traces of what it felt like to mother at different points in history. To me, it’s worth paying a lot of attention to these traces and showing you can read a history of women’s experiences over thousands of years. In particular, the resilience, strength and determination of women to keep babies alive, to keep going through pregnancies and the grief of baby loss – that protection and survival is, to me, the extraordinary stuff of human history.
You’ve found and told the stories of many impressive women – writers, thinkers, activists, midwives, early feminists, and campaigners for black women’s rights – who are very little-known.
We need to honour the women who courageously challenged the oppressive and repressive attitudes that threaten women’s sexual freedom, reproductive rights, maternal bodies and mothering experiences. They faced unimaginable obstacles.
It was interesting that you combed through criminal-trial records to find out about mothers of illegitimate children who were tried for murder, even though stillbirths may have occurred.
Yes. In 17th-century London and major English cities, single mothers who had illegitimate babies were seen as the undeserving poor who should take responsibility for their immorality. The illegitimacy was considered a stain on the moral landscape. Reading these trial records, I got a little scrap of who a woman was: her name, where she worked, maybe a few little character testimonies. But she was a whole person, who either had a consensual or non-consensual encounter. She comes into history because of prejudice and laws that punished and demonised unmarried women who weren’t in nuclear families dependent on men. To me, these women must be honoured.
Your book shows that, across many time periods, women’s bodies were considered corrupting and unclean, with the vagina ‘the wellspring of sin’, and the womb as an ‘untamed animal’. But that didn’t stop men having sex with their wives whenever they wanted!
These narratives around women’s bodies being degraded, disgusting, corrupting, poisonous – especially related to childbirth and menstruation – what were they about? Much of it was a projection of men’s guilt and shame about their own sexual desires. It was also about the hold religion had over people. The Bible tells men that women, represented by Eve, are responsible for all the sin in the world, and that women’s desire to learn and know is the root of evil. Then men construct certain fantasies and fictions to degrade women. History is full of these crazy contradictions: that women are degraded and disgusting, yet childbirth is this sacred purpose. Like, ‘you must do this, yet it’s gross’.
Then there’s the mother of Jesus, who became a ‘purification poster girl’ because she supposedly gave birth as a virgin, right?
Yes, Mary symbolised a patriarchal reproductive fantasy that a woman is purely an environment for a child. Add onto that Mary’s perfection as a mother: devoted, serene, completely submissive. She accepts her divine duty. She doesn’t have a midwife. She doesn’t have blood, pain and effort honoured in her story, just the divine overshadowing of her body by God. Then she breastfed the infant Jesus, and breastfeeding is seen as this sacred expression of maternal devotion. That’s another way of adding guilt onto mothers, because breastfeeding is so associated with the ‘perfect mother’. Look, I respect religious practice where Mary is considered a saint. But I often think about how the construction of this myth of Mary is maddening, and what it’s meant for women since. There was an opportunity to have a birth story that honoured women’s power, but that was taken away from us.
Do you think Christianity demonised women more than Roman and Greek societies did?
Classical Greek society was horribly, deeply patriarchal, and Greek and Roman societies had very specific ideas about what men and women did, constructing an organisation to society that made sense to them. They didn’t have the demonising of women that Christianity brought with it: its justifications for women being submissive and subordinate to men – and bringing women guilt, shame, and the need to constantly ‘redeem themselves’.
I was shocked that 16th-century priest and theologian Martin Luther proclaimed “bring that child forth and do it with all your might! If you die in the process… good for you! For you actually die in a noble work and obedience to God”.
I found that really chilling, partly because Lutheranism, a major branch of Protestantism, didn’t want women to have recourse to any of the comforting, hopeful, intentional rituals they’d had around birth. He didn’t want what he called foolish women’s deeds.
You write that, given the dangers of childbirth, comforting rituals – and objects like amulets – were what many women needed to hold onto?
Yes. Today that might look like setting a birth plan. For women in medieval Europe, their rituals were a bit like that, with safe, comforting objects, ideas or thoughts. That was all they had. They couldn’t get an ultrasound, or see a gynaecologist. Sometimes I feel we dismiss ritual and practices rooted in belief. But if we think of them as a companion to medicine, we can better understand the significance of childbirth rituals.
Luther also said reproductive suffering is sacred, and inflicted as punishment for Eve’s fall. In the 21st century, British midwifery professor Denis Walsh said “more women should be prepared to withstand pain” in childbirth which prepares mothers “for the responsibility of nurturing a newborn baby”. Does it surprise you that fixation on a ‘natural birth’ is still around today?
Very much. Now that a medicated birth is possible – and no matter how much we think we’ve evolved past this elevation of ‘natural birth’ – this idea that the pain of childbirth is a rite of passage for women is so culturally and historically ingrained. So, some of us still believe that to suffer through that pain is somehow linked to our goodness as mothers. Biblically, God told Eve that all women will suffer in childbirth to learn something. We’ve inherited the residue of this myth and often internalise it, like I did. I had my first baby with a bit of gas, and my second with nothing because there wasn’t any time. But I remember feeling – and I’m a little ashamed of this – pride for having no pain relief. I definitely don’t have judgmental feelings towards anybody who has pain relief in labour, my God.
You write that the rise of medicine saw male physicians staking their claims as authorities on birth, even though midwives had so much knowledge, training and expertise.
Yes, in early modern Europe, theologians, churchmen and lawmakers began to pry into the women-dominated culture of childbirth, and midwives and maternity caregivers were increasingly judged and scrutinised. There had also long been this myth of the malevolent midwife.
It was long thought to be women’s fault if anything went wrong with their pregnancy. Talk about victim-blaming!
Nobody knew what was going on in that uterus, so mysterious ideas about the link between the woman and the baby were invented. For much of early history, narratives around the influence of women’s minds, thoughts, appetites and emotions on the foetus happened because of the belief that the foetus was male-created and the woman was essentially a greenhouse.
Yet, the Hippocratics of ancient Greece, who established medicine as a profession, believed women needed to orgasm to conceive?
Yes, they believed women had to release female seed analogous to sperm, through orgasm, because it opened up her womb in order to curdle a baby, a bit like cheese-making. This idea that mutual sexual fulfilment was necessary for pregnancy was really important for centuries. It sounds sex-positive, but the men who wrote about this weren’t interested in what women thought and felt about who they were having sex with. These men understood orgasm as a physiological response, not as something about heart and mind. By no means does this mean that every woman was having pleasurable intercourse with her husband in ancient Greece and Rome. Soranus, a Roman OB-GYN by today’s standards, said basically if she’s not in the mood, she’ll get into it, which is horrifying. It set up this dangerous precedent. Many centuries later, Republican candidate Todd Akin said that, if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut things down – basically, that women can’t get pregnant unless they consent, thus implying that ‘genuine rape’ doesn’t exist. These are, again, tales men tell themselves about their right to women’s sexual bodies, to justify men’s behaviours and actions. Men tell themselves stories, but I’m telling women’s stories.
*A Woman’s Work is out now. Part 2 of this conversation is coming soon
Photo: © Lara Downie
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