Metropolis and province. Science in British culture 1780–1850

Such topics readily lend themselves to sterile presentist polemics (witness the controversy stirred up recently by Edward Shorter's A history of women's bodies). Hence it is specially pleasing that Mireille Laget, in her survey of birthing practices in Enlightenment France, eschews indignation and poses a key historical question. Noting the degree of pluralism then prevailing in approaches to childbirth, she begins to examine how women themselves made choices as to method and type of practitioner when coming to plan their lyings-in. The rise of the man-midwife, she suggests, may not have been the death-blow to client choice, but may instead have extended the range of options. It may be worth noting here that several of the Oriental scholars confirm the suggestion recently made by Shorter and Adrian Wilson, that traditional all-women birthing practices, centring on the midwife, were commony experienced by the mother as more interventionist and brutal than the practices of the newer male obstetricians. Ann Oakley's book encounters a similar paradox. Through an admirably researched empirical study of the rise of antenatal care in Britain from the late nineteenth century (her subtitle is grossly over-inflated), she shows how traditional, community-centred, women-oriented pregnancy care steadily gave way to a more medicalized, more bureaucratic approach-sometimes degenerating into the "assembly-line"-dominated by male obstetricians, and focused upon the hospital and the clinic. Oakley notes that this shift did indeed produce improvements in health (though she queries exactly how far medical science has been responsible for the more general improvement of the health of pregnant women this century). But her case is that the motor for changing practices came less from a concern with women's health than from a desire to control their bodies and lifestyles (hence the provocative title, with its "captured womb"). But this interpretation of the rise of antenatal services as a tactic in the social control of women is fraught with difficulty. This is in part because the impetus for the movement came more from articulate women's pressure groups than from the medical profession (largely sluggish and indifferent)-it was women themselves who wanted the medicalization of pregnancy; and in part because the kind of women (i.e., "feckless" working-class women) whom patriarchy, one supposes, would most seek to control, are precisely those who, by choice, have always remained least affected by antenatal services. Two important conclusions are suggested by these stimulating and original books. First, it is clear that medicine …