Historically were women petrified of being pregnant due to childbirth?

[Buttercupsandpoppys]

As the title says. Mortality rates weren’t great with so many women dying during labour.

I know there was so much pressure to have children as a women. In period dramas and books/films you see women desperate to ‘provide sons’. But if they knew death was so likely, wouldn’t they be petrified at the very thought of pregnancy?

im suprised history isn’t full of women just point blank refusing sex/marriage and all having to be publicly dragged kicking and screaming knowing pregnancy was practically a flipping of the coin between life and death.

I honestly think I’d have tried any and every trick in the book to avoid it. Even making myself as unattractive as possible so no kind would wish to marry me!

Anyone have any knowledge of this?

Fascinating thread. It should be saved to the classics thread so we can find it easily every time someone says a woman is selfish for not having kids, or only having one.

Yes, it's beautiful and a really good reminder that people are people are people. Grief for the loss of a child or wife is not a modern thing.

Life expectancy of both men and women was low during the years of the industrial revolution. Men in industry had hard manual jobs. Women had tough lives too but seemed to survive longer.
Wealthier families if you look on gravestones the men lived longer and had several wives and some died in childbirth.

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/howhaslifeexpectancychangedovertime/2015-09-09

With the purgatory thing I was more thinking of the people in medieval times. Although, I have to say my mother was a Catholic, and she did become more religious when she was dying, so maybe it did provide her with some comfort. Methodism sounds like a sensible type of religion, the good stuff without the terrifying stuff!

But I was in Madrid last year and saw some of Hieronymus Bosch's paintings about hell. and it didn't look like it would be a lot of fun, and I don't think believing that could happen to you would have been a comforting thought.

I'd never seen this clip before. Thanks for sharing it I found it so interesting!

From what I've read, I think people did a lot of insuring against hell with last rites, and speedy processing through purgatory by paying for masses for the deceased and so on. But I don't know how much reassurance that would have given. Especially if you were too poor to afford to pay the priest to pray for your early release. Its interesting because any historical documents from people facing death don't mention fear as much as faith. But these would typically be wealthy people who could pray for the necessary intercessions.

I have often wondered why woman have so much more complicated births, compared to animals. Given we are descended from types of animals, it must be that we have evolved standing up and it has hindered birth.

We also have very big-brained babies. they have large heads as a consequence and that is what causes a lot of the problems.

Ohhh of course, makes sense.

Yes @coldcallerbaiter , women exist on the knifes edge of infant head size/pelvic girdle circumference.

If babies were born earlier, with smaller heads, they would be helpless for even longer, and more susceptible to dying.

If women had a pelvic girdle any bigger, we could not be able to walk upright, and would have to still crawl.

It is why the Q angles of the leg bones are so, so different between women and men.

It is why it is so easy to tell a woman and man apart, when you just look at them walking.

There was a brilliant piece of research done, where men and women were dressed in data collection suits (the ones that show up as moving dots). From just the walking movement, everyone could correctly identify which was the man, and which the woman.

I can't understand why they did not tie their knees together!

I caught a bit of a program on Radio 4 yesterday when they were actually debunking some myths from the past and saying that the mortality rate for mothers in the middle ages was not actually as high as we might expect. And that although we think of life expectancy as being low, because so many people died as children, once you got through, you had a pretty good shot at making it into your 70s. Not sure what program it was, and have not had a chance to look into it, but totally want to see if I can listen to the whole thing.

This is absolutely right. People misunderstand how life expectancy is calculated. Its an average so the figure is pulled down by high infant/childhood mortality. Once you passed that period your chances of reaching old age were quite good. For women there was an additional risk period in your child bearing years. If you survived childbirth you had a good chance of living to old age.

This is a chart of life expectancy for girls at 15. Many women died in childbirth (the figure will change over time) so if this is an average then if you survived childbirth you had a good chance of living to be older than these figures.

I find your post the one I most agree with on this thread, but is there a typo:
1 - (0.99)^10 rather than 1 - ((0.99) x 10)? That is about 9.6%.

“the actual figure is the .99 chance of not dying x 10 subtracted from 1 which I think comes to a 9.6% chance of dying after ten births.”

True about Cambridge, there was a vote about it in 1897 (see article with interesting photos here) but it didn’t stop women studying the same courses and taking the same exams.

In 1890 Philippa Fawcett scored a higher mark than all the men in her final Maths exams, 13% higher than the top-scoring man according to that article.

I agree that it wasn’t easy for women to study at university. One of my favourite autobiographies and films is Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain. The film starts with her brother preparing to go to Oxford. Initially her father won’t let her apply, and buys her a piano instead.

Absolutely. Ignaz Semmelweis knew it too but nobody would listen.

Men just can't stand powerful women. They can't accept Queen Elizabeth the first was an actual woman

I think we forget that women where treated as second class citizens. Until quite recently we couldn't vote, couldn't own property, weren't seen as individual in our own rights if we weren't married. Even women from higher classes were not as well educated as their male brothers. Being married gave you status and respectability. It made it an attractive proposition and something to aspire to.

There were few other options for women and they were often only available to the rich not the poor. Unless you wanted to be a fallen woman.

This is a super haunting picture....

I've posted evidence that life expectancy for a woman who passed the danger years of childhood hasn't been 'around40' since the Middle Ages. Its misunderstanding of how 'life expectancy' is calculated and therefore what it means . Views about the afterlife varied quite a lot depending in what religious denomination you were so I dont think you can assume that people weren't so scared of death and were more accepting of it because it was a 'daily occurrence'. After all those women later on with the big families had clearly escaped death several times over. Also attitudes to death would almost certainly be different when you were young or healthy, compared to when you were on your death bed.

If you look at a few pages of a Victorian (sometimes earlier) parish register, you can quickly see the patterns that built the stats for average life expectancy. A lot of babies die, and quite a few young children. Then it thins out massively. People did die in their teens, 20s, 30s and 40s, of accidents, illnesses that could not be treated (TB was quite a significant killer of young adults) and infections, but not in huge numbers. Then, in their late 50s and early 60s, it starts to crank up. A few people made it to their mid-70s. One of my forebears lived into his 80s well before the advent of modern medicine, so goodness knows what sort of physical condition he was in (cataracts, arthritis, all those things that don't kill you but wreck your quality of life).

But average life expectancy is widely misunderstood, with people who should know better claiming that a Medieval person of 45 was very old, as almost no one lived that long, they all died in their 30s.

Yes I understand how average life expectancy works and that infant mortality rates were a key reason it was low. However those infant deaths were still deaths and a reminder of the precarious nature of life. It also stands to reason that in the absence of contemporary medical interventions and health and safety measures death would be more commonplace. We only need to consider the people in our own circles who required interventions to imagine how much more frequently we'd have encountered death before they existed. Most of us could list multiple people we know who would almost certainly have died if they had lived in those times.
As for religion, the majority of people were Christians, either Catholic or protestant, both having a belief in the afterlife. Both believing there were means to move to a 'better place' provided you were a believer/virtuous/died in a state of grace/were purged of sin by prayers of the living. I'm sure there were people who didn't believe this, but given the ongoing support of churches, I'd imagine many did.

You're so right. I've always felt a little ashamed or embarrassed about being more interested in social history as if it's the more frivolous option compared to the serious business of men and war, and I'm only now realising that is internalised misogyny. Ordinary people's lives are so much more interesting, and women's lives in particular because it's such an unexplored part of history apart from the odd throwaway line like "women made the clothes and cared for the children" and "women worked in factories while the men went to war"