Eighteenth-century chemistry as an investigative enterprise

14 articles, the most reflective is that of an outsider, Jane Lewis of the London School of Economics, who in an overview of the literature suggests, somewhat at odds with the other contributors, that "it is a mistake to see women as passive recipients [of obstetrical care] or as victims of these changes". Essays in the volume edited by Valerie Fildes continue this celebratory note of women's experience, yet utilize a range of evidence-much of it archival-that permits virtually all the contributions to enhance the debate about whether men's and women's attitudes to such intimate matters as childbearing have changed at all over the years, or whether only the parameters of repression have changed. In a fluent contribution on "the construction and experience of maternity" in seventeenth-century England, Patricia Crawford concludes that "a powerful ideology ofthe good mother as caring for children under patriarchal direction existed". After accumulating a large number of anecdotes-many ofthem from manuscript sources-she finds that women valued their maternity quite highly. Linda Pollock takes this triumphalist celebration ofwomen's physical experience to absurd lengths-again, after piling anecdote upon anecdote-in such undifferentiated declarations as, "Pregnancy when it did ensue was a matter for rejoicing". The author's enthusiasm permits her simply to kick aside some inconvenient statistical obstacles, dismissing maternal mortality, for example, as "low". In an essay on the psychodrama of childbirth, particularly on the lying-in month and the practice of churching, Adrian Wilson, taking his lead from Natalie Davis, interprets "the politics of ritual as a matter of contest between the sexes [his italics], stressing the active agency of women". It would not have been possible to come to any other conclusion and still be included in the volume, or for that matter in the first one either. Three quantitative analyses deserve special mention. In Robert Schnucker's short but innovative study of literary references to childhood discipline among the Puritans in the period 1560 to 1634, he finds no changes. Many researchers will want to read Fiona Newall's analysis of a parish in Hertfordshire that received many nurslings and poor children from London. She finds that the practice of sending children en nourrice was quite common until the 1720s. Nor does any "massacre of the innocents" seem to have occurred, as often happened in France. To my mind, the most important article in the book is Valerie Fildes's, on child abandonment from the late sixteenth until the mid-eighteenth century in London, looking at the mothers and families who did the abandoning as well as at care arrangements for the children. Abandonment rose steadily until the early eighteenth century, then declined: the author is at pains to establish that it is not a sign of maternal indifference to children. Finally, Mary Prior has written an intriguing, brief article on romantic love within marriage as seen from the perspective of poetry. She finds a silence, poems by women in particular in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries sooner critical of marriage than embracing it. From this the author concludes-as do several other contributors-that Lawrence Stone's well-known hypotheses are incorrect. (The present reviewer comes in for hostile comment as well in both of these volumes.) The book ends with a useful bibliography of the secondary literature, ordered by such themes as "infant care", "infanticide and child abuse", "marriage and family life", and "working mothers." In addition to being a literate up-date on what is happening at the intersection of women's history, family history, and the social history of medicine, it may also be assigned with profit to interested undergraduates. Edward Shorter, University of Toronto