Perceptions of Pregnancy from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century

1. Introduction
Jennifer Evans, Ciara Meehan

Part I. Narratives of Pregnancy, Birth, and Parenthood

2. “Breeding” a “Little Stranger”: Managing Uncertainty in Pregnancy in Later Georgian England
Joanne Begiato

3. “Bound to Be a Troublesome Time”: Canadian Perceptions of Pregnancy, Parturition, and Pain, c. 1867–1930
Whitney Wood

4. Families, Vulnerability and Sexual Violence During the Irish Revolution
Justin Dolan Stover

5. Audible Birth, Listening Women: Storytelling the Labouring Body on Mumsnet
Anija Dokter

Part II. Literary Pregnancies

6. Feminine Value and Reproduction in Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin

Daisy Murray

7. “Pregnant Women Gaze at the Precious Thing Their Souls Are Set On”: Perceptions of the Pregnant Body in Early Modern Literature
Sara Read

8. Babies Without Husbands: Unmarried Pregnancy in 1960s British Fiction
Fran Bigman

Part III. Consumers, Participants and Patients

9. The Birth of the Pregnant Patient-Consumer? Payment, Paternalism, and Maternity Hospitals in Early-Twentieth-Century England
George Campbell Gosling

10. “Closer Together”: Durex Condoms and Contraceptive Consumerism in 1970s Britain
Ben Mechen

Keywords: History, World History, Global and Transnational History, Social History, Gender Studies, Modern History, History of Early Modern Europe