Lisa Forman Cody
Published: 2005-02-03
Total Pages: 376
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Birthing the Nation analyses two intertwined narratives that shaped eighteenth-century British life: the development of the modern British state, and the emergence of the man-midwife as the pre-eminent authority over sex and childbirth. By exploring peculiar episodes in the history of the reproductive body and the body politic, from stories of pregnant men to rumours that a midwife had foisted a 'suppositious' child on the nation as the Prince of Wales, this original andprovocative work proposes how national, religious, ethnic, and gendered identities were experienced through and symbolized by birth and midwifery.