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?

Worth pointing out that women still die in pregnancy and childbirth in vast numbers worldwide, mostly in the developing world.

I think it's in her book she mentions a Belgian? Dutch? midwife in the 1600s who kept very good records and had very similar stats. Can't remember more (did a PP mention this up thread?)

Catharina Schrader, 300 years ago. Louise Bourgeois also wrote a fascinating book on midwifery in around 1600.

This. Sometimes I think my undergraduates think of The Past as one long, undifferentiated swamp where women wore long dresses and Were Oppressed.

In relation to the OP’s question, even a lifelong spinster like Jane Austen, whose work is eloquent on the joys of romantic love in its social contexts, was well aware of the risks of repeated childbearing, even when non-lethal (and she lost two SILs in childbirth, one having her 11th child in 17 years of marriage, the other aged 25, having married at 17, after giving birth to her fourth child).

She says of one of her nieces, who was expecting her third child in under three years of marriage ‘Poor Animal — she will be worn out before she is 30.’

Her letters are full of jokes, impatience at the huge families she saw multiplying around her, some black humour about a miscarriage having being caused by the sight of the male body, and evidence she knew exactly how babies were made, and how they might be prevented.

I think there’s an element of thankfulness at her own escape when she says that getting older (and no longer considered marriageable) has its compensations because at balls she’s put on the sopha near the fire ‘and can drink as much wine as I like’.

In the first seminar of my history degree, we were asked about our favourite historian.

Everyone else said Pliny or Kershaw or something.

I said Terry Deary, because I probably wouldn't have been on the course if it weren't for him. And because his books covered such a lovely intersection of society - women, children, work, culture, food. And they always finished with a poignant reminder of the ordinary humanity of people who seemed very different to us.

My favourite was the one about the wounded Neanderthal caveman who lived a long life, clearly being treated and valued by his tribe.

I'd rather have been a woman in the past than a man.

Childbirth is easy compared to the butchery of war.

It depended...
Most men never went to war.
The vast majority of women experienced childbirth.

Wars were horrendous for civilians caught up in them: flight and hunger were reasonable options compared to being a young woman caught up in the sack of a city, which quite probably happened after a siege with all the attendant privations.

Euripedes disagreed.

Besides, as the other poster pointed out - while the actual fighting bit was mostly men, more civilians (male and female) die in wars compared to soldiers. That's true of pretty much every war through history. And until very recently almost all of the "rules of war" concerned treatment of soldiers not civilians. A captured soldier or a wounded soldier could expect better treatment than a captured civilian (man or woman, adult or child). Why do you think they always give their "name and number" in war films? When a military unit based in a besieged city surrendered, they could expect to negotiate safe passage or at least decent treatment and that was usually followed through on. The civilian population had no such guarantee and no bargaining chips.

This doesn't stop your husband from entering you, just means he does it from behind.

Do you want to tell that to the Ukrainian, Eritrean, South Sudanese, and Congolese women raped by soldiers?

Yea of course this was a huge fear

also for the majority the pressure of feeding another member of the family

my great granny has her last baby at 49 my Nanny told me she tried a number of times to bring on a miscarriage she was utterly distraught at being pregnant again

what miserable lives so many woman had

Mary Carey wrote in her diary in 1649 ' I am now near the time of my travail and am very weak, faint, sickly, fearful, pained, apprehending much suffering before me, if not death itself, the King of Terrors'.
This is just one quote, but no reason to think its atypical & s sums up some of the issues in this thread - yes she was scared, yes she knew what might be coming in terms of labour, yes she knew she might die, and was afraid of death.
But, most women still desperately wanted children, saw it as the purpose of marriage and central to their role.

Equally, many men loved and cared for their wives, and many still do. No one bothers starting a thread to say how good their relationship is.

I'm not sure I agree. At all tbh. And apart from the subjective pain and fear people would suffer, I would be interested to know a. What percentage of men actually fought in wars and b. What percentage of soldiers were badly injured or killed.

And as well as spinsters (only a deliberate option if you had money), there were of course lesbians, many of whom would have been forced into marriage simply to survive.

Yes, there's lots of evidence of happy marriages and of marriages which were strong partnerships, even if there was no love. The level of generalisation on this thread is off the scale! I find it really weird how people think people in the past were basically robots rather than as diverse & nuanced as people today.

Its driving me mad that I can't find the reference I found yesterday relating to this The number of men killed in wars in europe dropped to around 5%, from quite a high percentage but I can't remember when. Maybe 18th c? Its worth remembering though that life was quite violent in the past even if men weren't off at war all the time. Despite the 'what is this country coming to' comments after violent events the general trajectory is that we have generally become a less violent sciety.

Thank you @Carebearsonmybed this is what I wanted to say. Historically women had much to fear, with no rights or independence, and being physically smaller and weaker than men, so they've always been at risk of lots of things. Death in childbirth was definitely a risk, but not as high as most people think, birthing practices didn't put all women on their backs, and there were midwives, in various guises.

"Maternal mortality peaked when men got involved in births and didn't wash their hands between patients."

Also most people are surprised to learn that infant and maternal mortality/injury rates have not reduced since birth began to take place in hospitals. Most births are just physiological events, not a medical emergency.

My great grandmother, who was born in the 1880s, died in childbirth. She had already had about 8 children and was told after the one before that if she had another child she would die. Her husband didn’t want to be deprived of anything so she died. My grandmother, who was her oldest child, was terrified by it and stopped at 1.

Given how unreliable contraception was and how dangerous childbirth was, what kind of loving husband would put his dick in his wife? That's what we are talking about: that the consequence of fucking your wife was possible death and men still did it.

Some time periods were really brutal. The religious wars in Europe killed about 30% of the population in many places (HRE), up to 50% in some areas. Some towns in what is now Germany saw 90% of the inhabitants die. You can back that up quite easily comparing mass graves etc to contemporaneous accounts.

But its quite hard to separate out which percentage of men died as a result of being soldiers, rather than as a result of being in a war zone (like everyone else that was killed). Even active, fighting soldiers were more likely to die from e.g. dysentery and other diseases. Then you have the fact that most men involved in war aren't necessarily on the front line. (You need support staff). As soon as you factor those in you have to include all the female support as well (and even in Ancient Greece women stayed behind in besieged cities to provide non-combat support), then the fact that (in the chaos of some wars) Johanne the onetime mercenary could easily survive the battles he was in, return to his home town only to be brutally massacred along with the rest of the civilians there. And some males never fought at all and were killed. And some were little babies. And all of the women in those scenarios were killed alongside them but some were gangraped first.

Plus - how where do you draw the line - do you include just deaths from direct violence, or deaths from the resulting famine and disease, or deaths from (to bring it back to the topic) women going into premature labour because the enemy is at the gates and they are scared. Or even, as in Europe, deaths from wolf attacks because the previously timid animals became so used to feasting on those killed in battles/massacres they started roaming the streets of Paris freely.

Its not that war isn't terrible for soldiers. Or terrible for men generally. Its just that its terrible for civilians and women and children too. And particularly bad, actually, for pregnant women.

You could also argue that the number of men killed in war dropped in the 18th century because Western European countries mostly stopped fighting each other as viciously (Napoleon aside) on European soil and many of the wars moved elsewhere. Which means only those who actively went of to fight were being killed. Other countries still got the fun of a front row seat however.

You obviously have no understanding of evolution, biology, or human nature! Childbirth actually wasn't as dangerous as popularly assumed. Women are designed to give birth & most women had their first child in their 20s which is a safer than our move to having first babies in our later 30s/40s. The table show maternal mortality rates

I think you have to separate out the situation for some couples of times past - they are married, having children is expected besides they both want children and also both like having sex. And the individual anecdotes on here and in history - about women who were physically weak after giving birth multiples times, or had been warned that having more children could kill them (or they couldn't afford more mouths etc) and their husbands still got them pregnant. Or Mary Woolstencroft's sister who was basically being raped by her husband despite having mental health issues caused by being raped. Its easy to look at that second group of men and think "how could anyone be so callous". That doesn't mean all men having sex with their wives were callously playing Russian roulette with their lives. Some were though and you didn't have many options if your husband was like that.

Women aren't "designed" to do anything, we've evolved and exist, as a PP explained, on a knife-edge balance between our hips being too wide to walk and our babies being too young to survive.

If I was male and knew that each birth had a one in 100 chance of killing my wife, I wouldn't fuck her. Hell, I wouldn't fuck a stranger and subject her to those odds.

Women also wanted children, probably more then than now: there were fewer other things to do with your life, and many would never have seriously questioned the expectations placed on them: it was just what you did, like going to church on Sunday and getting the water from the well. And some women are very broody: I was from the age of about 18 until I finally had my own DC. And at that age you're convinced that the bad stuff won't happen to you...