Common bodies : women, touch and power in seventeenth-century England / Laura Gowing.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gowing, Laura, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women--England--Social conditions--17th century.

Women.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (271 pages)

Place of Publication:

New Haven ; London : Yale University Press, [2003]

Summary:

This pioneering book explores for the first time how ordinary women of the early modern period in England understood and experienced their bodies. Using letters, popular literature, and detailed legal records from courts that were obsessively concerned with regulating morals, the book recaptures seventeenth-century popular understandings of sex and reproduction. This history of the female body is at once intimate and wide-ranging, with sometimes startling insights about the extent to which early modern women maintained, or forfeited, control over their own bodies.Laura Gowing explores the ways social and economic pressures of daily life shaped the lived experiences of bodies: the cost of having a child, the vulnerability of being a servant, the difficulty of prosecuting rape, the social ambiguities of widowhood. She explains how the female body was governed most of all by other women—wives and midwives. Gowing casts new light on beliefs and practices of the time concerning women’s bodies and provides an original perspective on the history of women and gender.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Introduction

1 Uncertain knowledge

2 The politics of touch

3 Consent and desire

4 'The child in me': perceiving pregnancy

5 Childbed conflicts

6 Precarious parenthood

Conclusion

Notes

Select bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780300142884

0300142889

OCLC:

1255893736