Джудит Фландерс – The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed (страница 12)
Despite this divergence on medical treatment, both women and doctors agreed in regarding childbirth as an illness. Mrs Panton called it a ‘plight’, and warned that ‘Naturally these times are looked forward to with dread by all young wives.’53 The lower middle classes, and a substantial swath of the more prosperous, did not have the servants to permit them to lie in bed for weeks (or even days). And it was they – overburdened with heavy housework which they performed themselves, and with the care, feeding, clothing and education of children – who would probably have benefited from time in bed. Some were forced to remain in bed, whether or not they had servants: Emily Gosse was unable to leave her room for six weeks.54
Prosperous middle-class women, on the other hand, were expected to stay in bed after the birth for at least nine days; those who got up earlier did so, it was supposed, not because they felt well enough, but out of ‘bravado’, and they were considered to be acting foolishly, because ‘the strength and health of the mother’s whole life depend upon judicious treatment at such a critical time’.55 Louise Creighton, an upper-middle-class woman married to an Oxford fellow,* accepted this fully. She gave birth to her second child in 1874, and a month later a close friend who had also just had a child came to visit. ‘We spent the afternoon happily together wondering which was the most fit to get up & ring the bell when we needed anything.’56 Ursula Bloom noted that, in her upper-middle-class family, after giving birth the women were kept flat on their backs and fed with a feeding cup, a china cup with a partial covering and a spout, through which the recumbent patient could drink. The windows remained closed, and small sandbags were laid along the edges of the frames to keep out any draughts. A lamp was left burning all night, and the monthly nurse slept on a sofa in the room. This lying-in lasted a month, and was then followed by churching, which no men attended (and seems to have been relatively uncommon – Bloom came from a clergy family).57 The woman was usually faint and weak at the end of the month: without any fresh air or exercise, and with only an invalid diet, all the while breastfeeding, it was to be expected.
Serious illness always lurked. Although women had a slightly longer life expectancy than men throughout the period, all joined in regarding them as the frailer vessel. The most dangerous time was childbirth: childbed fever (or puerperal fever, now simply septicaemia) was the most common cause of death in childbirth. From 1847 to 1876, 5 women per 1000 live births died, with puerperal fever causing between a third and a half of these deaths. There was no cure available: doctors merely prescribed opium, champagne, and brandy-and-soda, trying to ease the passing, rather than making a vain attempt to cure a mortal illness.58
In Vienna in 1795 Ignaz Semmelweis had radically cut the number of deaths from septic poisoning among his patients by insisting that anyone who entered his wards first scrubbed with chloride of lime. A paper on the subject, noting his results, was read before the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in 1848,59 but general acceptance was extremely slow: after the Female Medical Society in 1865 warned doctors against coming from dissecting rooms straight to childbed.
With childbirth being regularly repeated, one can see the women’s insistence on their weakness as making a certain amount of sense, even if it was not always phrased in ways that today we feel an immediate bond with. Mrs Panton was vehement that the mother ‘should be the first object of every one’s care until she has been for at least a fortnight over her trouble, and I trace a good deal of my own nervous irritability and ill-health to the fact that after my last baby arrived I had an enormous quantity of small worries that the presence in the house of a careful guard would have obviated’. The monthly nurse, she went on, should be ‘a dragon of watchfulness’ who keeps ‘away all those small bothers which men can never refrain from bringing to their wives, regardless that at such times the smallest worry becomes gigantic’. It was essential that, ‘if at no other time can we obtain consideration and thought, it is imperative that for at least three weeks after the arrival of a baby the wife should have mental as well as bodily rest, and that she should be absolutely shielded from all domestic cares and worries’. The querulous tone was unattractive, but when she pointed out that, by the time a woman had had her fifth or sixth child, her husband might have become so used to the event that he would ‘so depress and harass his wife by his depression that she may slip out of his fingers altogether’, one does feel for the overburdened woman.63
There was not much escape, either. Mrs Beeton was firm that babies should not sleep with either their nurse or their mother: ‘The amount of oxygen required by an infant is so large, and the quantity consumed by mid-life and age, and the proportion of carbonic acid thrown off from both, so considerable, that an infant breathing the same air cannot possibly carry on its healthy existence while deriving its vitality from so corrupted a medium.’ This was always the case, but it was exacerbated at night, when doors and windows were closed, ‘and amounts to a condition of poison, when [the baby is] placed between two adults in sleep, and shut in by bed-curtains’.64 However, the separation of the child from the mother in its own space was nothing but a hoped-for ideal: the space was rarely available. Without a nurse, to get any sleep at all, mothers had to share their bedroom with the child they were feeding. Mrs Beeton was not keen on this: she thought there was a risk that, while the mother was asleep, the child would continue to feed, ‘without control, to imbibe to distension a fluid sluggishly secreted and deficient in those vital principles which the want of mental energy, and of the sympathetic appeals of the child on the mother, so powerfully produce’. The mother, on waking, was then ‘in a state of clammy exhaustion, with giddiness, dimness of sight, nausea, loss of appetite, and a dull aching pain through the back and between the shoulders. In fact, she wakes languid and unrefreshed … caused by her baby vampire.’65
Breastfeeding, indeed, she thought ‘a period of privation and penance’,66 which continued for between nine and fifteen months. Many other advice books echoed this idea of the suffering of the mother in various ways, or considered pre-empting the penitential period altogether, suggesting not only that bottle-feeding brought improved health to the child and mother, but that ‘In these days of ours few women … have sufficient leisure to give themselves up entirely to the infant’s convenience; and here I maintain that a woman has as much right to consider herself and her health, and her duties to her husband, society at large, and her own house, as to give herself up body and soul to a baby, who thrives as well on the bottle.’67
There are no statistics for the number of women breastfeeding their children instead of bottle-feeding, or, as it was known, bringing them up ‘by hand’.68 However, with the advent of prepared foods and cheaper glass bottles, the shift to bottle-feeding began. Mrs Beeton, by 1860, was already a little squeamish: a child protractedly nursing was ‘out of place’ and ‘unseemly’.*69 (Dr Chavasse also disapproved of postponed weaning, but his concern was that women who fed their child for more than a year exposed themselves to consumption.)70 Mrs Beeton thought bottle-feeding ‘more nutritious’, and that the babies ‘will be thus less liable to infectious diseases, and more capable of resisting the virulence of any danger’. Breastfed children might develop ‘infantine debility which might eventuate in rickets, curvature of the spine, or mesenteric [intestinal] diseases, where the addition to, or total substitution of, an artificial … aliment’ would help.71 This might have been true, in particular among lower-income families where the women were not able to get sufficient food themselves, although these were the ones who could least afford patent food.