The final chapter explores how ideas about pregnant sexuality changed over the eighteenth century. While early in the century, medical and cultural texts still deliberated over pregnant women’s sexuality, debates and discussions about women’s desires and pleasure slowly disappeared from these works. To demonstrate this, I present quantitative and qualitative analysis of these texts from 1700 to 1800, compared with texts from 1600 to 1700. Building on historians’ previous research, the chapter argues that pregnant women’s sexuality, which was once concomitant with ideas of maternality, eventually gave way to new eighteenth-century conceptions of motherhood in which sexuality was largely absent. While the evidence of this chapter tends to demonstrate this shift away from sexuality in ideas about pregnancy and motherhood, I argue that medical and cultural fascinations with pregnant women’s pica, longings or imagination represents a discursive transplantation of the erotic to the sphere of appetite.

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“A Woman Ought to Abstain”: Pregnant Women’s Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century

  • Paige Donaghy

摘要

The final chapter explores how ideas about pregnant sexuality changed over the eighteenth century. While early in the century, medical and cultural texts still deliberated over pregnant women’s sexuality, debates and discussions about women’s desires and pleasure slowly disappeared from these works. To demonstrate this, I present quantitative and qualitative analysis of these texts from 1700 to 1800, compared with texts from 1600 to 1700. Building on historians’ previous research, the chapter argues that pregnant women’s sexuality, which was once concomitant with ideas of maternality, eventually gave way to new eighteenth-century conceptions of motherhood in which sexuality was largely absent. While the evidence of this chapter tends to demonstrate this shift away from sexuality in ideas about pregnancy and motherhood, I argue that medical and cultural fascinations with pregnant women’s pica, longings or imagination represents a discursive transplantation of the erotic to the sphere of appetite.