The purity of the Israelite tent had a direct relationship to the purity of God’s tent, or the tabernacle. Understanding purity is critical to understanding Leviticus’ theology of holiness and holy space. This chapter discusses the difference between moral and ethical purity as well as the dietary laws and other commands for Israel around maintaining their holiness.

This chapter examines rituals which took place after childbirth, uncovering evidence of baptisms, circumcisions, and even churching ceremonies that were held in domestic spaces. It suggests that a range of ceremonies we would now associate with public places of worship were frequently located in domestic spaces. It moves beyond studies which have argued that domestic baptism primarily took place in the home out of necessity, demonstrating that elective domestic baptism was more commonplace than has previously been acknowledged. Domestic ceremonies could also take place in networks of homes, being accommodated not in the family home, but in the home of a midwife, rabbi, or lay co-religionist. These ceremonies, and associated processions from the home to the place of public worship, marked the symbolic ending of the lying-in period, the departure of the mother from the home, and the welcoming of the child into the religious community. They emphasise the significance of the home as a setting of communal sociability and religious practice, and provide an important opportunity to consider the central place of the individual household within its congregation.

This chapter analyses domestic practices associated with childbirth. It considers how urban households approached and framed childbirth as an event of religious significance, by examining prayers that were said before, during, and after the event of childbirth, as well as ritual attempts to demarcate the setting of birth or the lying-in chamber from the rest of the home. Through an examination of the ecclesiastical licensing of London midwives, it explores post-Reformation attempts to regulate the female domestic event of childbirth, amid fears that it could be associated with ‘Popish’ or superstitious practices, and concerns that Catholic midwives, if operating undetected, would attempt to perform clandestine Catholic baptism. By considering personal writing and Quaker and Jewish congregational birth records, it examines the faith of midwives and invited gossips, situating the lying-in room within the broader parish or religious community, and showing how those invited into the home could be representatives of the congregation beyond its walls. It shows that such occasions emphasisied women’s relative authority both within and outside their own households.

Abstract: Anne and Jack moved to San Francisco. Anne struggled in the first months of her internship at Mount Zion because she didn’t know medicine. She was eventually accepted into a neurology residency at UCSF. Anne learned how to assess what was ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ in patients she saw, such as their gait, strength, coordination, sensation and cognitive function. She spent her first night on call in the Mission District at the San Francisco General Hospital emergency room. As an intern, Anne became familiar with death and losing patients. Anne rotated at Moffitt (the University) Hospital, the Veterans Health Administration Hospital (VA) and the San Francisco General Hospital. Anne sometimes sought Jack or other residents such as Roger Simon for advice while on call. Jack proposed that he and Anne try to have kids. Within a short time of trying, Jessie was born, a C-section baby. Anne took two weeks off from work. In her third year, she was chosen as chief resident. She and Jack applied for new jobs. They moved to Ann Arbor. Anne was hired by the head of neurology as an assistant professor and Jack for another year of fellowship in neuroanatomy followed by an assistant professorship the next year.

Birth of daughter. Briefly well afterwards but relapsed and was admitted to hospital again with my baby.

Fertility brings an increased risk of receiving a mental health diagnosis, from pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) to depression following miscarriage, post-natal psychosis and ante- and post-natal depression. Suicide is a leading cause of death in new mothers. Across the world, women’s reproductive systems remain a political battleground and subject to external controls from access to contraception and abortion in the USA to getting better mental health care for perinatal mental illness. Women can feel disempowered and unheard by the professions as recent maternity scandals in the UK have revealed. There is also pressure for women to have ‘natural’ births without intervention. What part do misogyny, patriarchal attitudes and aspects of feminism itself play here? We can all advocate and support fellow women who are struggling with any of the complications of fertility and not getting the care they need. There are ‘red flags’ we can all remember for getting mental health care involved in the perinatal period: Providing pregnant women with the information to make truly informed decisions about their health care is crucial. Perinatal mental illness is real and can kill.

Fertility brings an increased risk of receiving a mental health diagnosis, from pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) to depression following miscarriage, post-natal psychosis and ante- and post-natal depression. Suicide is a leading cause of death in new mothers. Across the world, women’s reproductive systems remain a political battleground and subject to external controls from access to contraception and abortion in the USA to getting better mental health care for perinatal mental illness. Women can feel disempowered and unheard by the professions as recent maternity scandals in the UK have revealed. There is also pressure for women to have ‘natural’ births without intervention. What part do misogyny, patriarchal attitudes and aspects of feminism itself play here? We can all advocate and support fellow women who are struggling with any of the complications of fertility and not getting the care they need. There are ‘red flags’ we can all remember for getting mental health care involved in the perinatal period: Providing pregnant women with the information to make truly informed decisions about their health care is crucial. Perinatal mental illness is real and can kill.

Genealogical narratives often include a strand of violence and physical effort for women, particularly through childbirth but also through exile, migration for marriage, and establishing an independent life, as the previous chapters show. This chapter explores genealogical transmission and its relationship to violence and women’s action in the context of administrative communication networks in the Middle English Athelston, in which the king kicks his wife, killing his heir, and sentences his pregnant sister to a trial by fire. Drawing on network theory, which emphasizes the “doers” and “doing” of a network, the chapter explores the alignment of the two royal heir-bearers with messengers, which positions the women as key transmitters, not unlike the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation, rather than as wives who simply carry their husbands’ children. In this model of transmission, the women influence succession not only through childbearing but also through royal petitioning, letter writing, and prayer.

Genealogy, as depicted in medieval texts and images, is an expansive concept that extends beyond the male-oriented model of patrilineage and includes various approaches to matrilineage and women’s legacies. Because genealogy is always constructed, regardless of how much writers insist on its naturalness, literary sources are key to revealing the imaginative ways medieval writers and their patrons conveyed women-oriented narratives. Through an overview of medieval sources and recent scholarship, this chapter opens up the medieval notion of genealogy to show how it both included female characters and drew upon characteristics typical of elite women’s lives. The Introduction presents three features frequently associated with and useful for understanding women’s genealogies: a close relationship between lineage and material textuality, the importance of manuscript context, and mobile notions of time and geography. Analyses of an aristocratic matrilineal diagram and an excerpt of the Anglo-Norman family romance Fouke le Fitz Waryn illustrate these features.

Perinatal mental illnesses are common and carry significant morbidity for the mother and infant, the family and wider society. Suicide remains a leading cause of maternal death. Pregnancy, childbirth and the transition into parenthood presents a unique life stage where a combination of physical, biological and psychological stressors can leave many women vulnerable to developing perinatal mental illness. This is a time where individuals often reflect on their own experiences of parenting and early life trauma can be reactivated. In addition, there is now consistent evidence that perinatal mental illness is not confined to maternal mental health problems. Approximately 10% of fathers experience postnatal depression and a recent study by the National Childbirth Trust has shown that 38% of all first-time fathers are concerned about their mental health.

The perinatal period is a time in a family’s life when they are in contact with many health professionals.

This chapter takes a bio-psycho-social perspective on the experience of childbirth and first contact with the infant. Historical and contemporary debates about medical interventions in childbirth are discussed as well as evidence for the effectiveness of different approaches to preparation for childbirth and strategies for coping with pain. The setting for birth and contribution of the partner are discussed, as well as theory and research on early contact with the baby, and the experience of premature birth.

This chapter studies medical midwifery in Japan, which developed in the 1860s–1890s in parallel with the management of vital statistics within the Meiji government. The chapter describes that the profile of midwives was significantly transformed in the Meiji period, from regionally diverse birth attendants, often implicated in abortion and infanticide, to medically informed and licensed healthcare practitioners, defined by their role in enhancing – yet simultaneously monitoring – people’s everyday reproductive experiences. At the same time, it also shows how this transformation of midwives was intimately tied to the public health officers’ desire to collect and manage more “accurate” data about infant births and deaths, which they judged would be essential to construct a genuinely “modern” public health system. In this context, the medical midwife was an invaluable local point from which statistical data on infant health entered into the state administrative system. By juxtaposing the history of the professionalization of midwives with that of the establishment of vital statistics in public health, this chapter shows how the burgeoning statistical rationale acted as a pivotal background for the making of medical midwifery in modern Japan.

One feature of neoliberal market imperialism is the idea that no corner of life should be off limits from market-based competition and profit. Rather predictably, this sort of economic thinking has found its way into the provision of healthcare, even in the context of countries with socialized, nationalized healthcare such as the United Kingdom. Here, Shapiro examines what happens to care for mothers and children in the United Kingdom after the introduction of neoliberal reforms and compares it to Sweden, both ostensibly national systems, but differing in their degree of market creep. Shapiro makes use of a legal, human-rights-based frame of analysis to show that birth in Sweden is far better for human well-being than it is in the UK. In terms of the overarching theme of the book, the chapter is an example of the advantages of increased government planning against neoliberal orthodoxy. Her analysis also points to the alliance between neoliberal austerity policies and the defense of traditional conservative “family values.”

The Black press was produced almost exclusively by male writers and editors. Those writers, joined by a small number of women authors, frequently addressed themselves to women readers or took up women’s issues. While the papers often invoked the ideal of Black women leading fulfilled lives in the home, caring for their husbands and children, they also acknowledged that for most Afrodescendants, that ideal was simply unattainable. Writers supported the efforts of Black (and White) domestic workers to organize and achieve the workplace protections enjoyed by industrial and commercial workers.Motherhood was a fraught and frequent topic in the Black press. The papers worried about high rates of illegitimacy and single motherhood in their communities, and enjoined mothers to prepare their children to lead honorable and productive lives.Women’s contributions to the papers offer evidence of Black women's political participation, before and after the advent of female suffrage, and the limits of that participation. Finally, female beauty was a regular topic in the Black press, which offered advice on how to achieve it, public contests to determine who best embodied it, and debate over fashion from the perspective of both morality and women’s equality.