Under the direction of Lisa Surridge and with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a group of scholars have created the peer-reviewed “Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Age of Victoria,” which can be found at
- “Pregnancy Testing,” by Isabel Davis
- “Pregnancy and Venereal Disease,” by Anne Hanley
- “Birth Control,” by Lesley Hall
- “Abortion,” by Lesley Hall
- “Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing, and Feeding ‘by Hand,'” by Jessica Cox
- “Sexual Knowledge in Print Culture,” by Sarah Bull
- “‘Advice to a Young Wife’: Medical Advice Manuals in the Nineteenth Century,” by Anna Niiranen
- “Victorian Childbirth,” by Hilary Marland
- “Anatomical Models of Pregnancy,” by Corinna Wagner
The launch event will feature discussion from scholars around the world on their research and articles covering topics such as birth control, sexual knowledge, advice manuals, and pregnancy tests in the nineteenth century. The events will take place on Zoom on 3 November at 10:00 AM PDT and 17 November 2022 at 10:00 AM PST and run for approximately one hour. We hope to see you all there! To register, please email victorianpregnancyproject@gmail.com.
For more on Victorian pregnancy and childbirth, see Lisa Surridge and Mary Elizabeth Leighton’s latest article in the Journal of Victorian Culture: “From ‘a piece of grossness’ to ‘minute particularity’: Queen Victoria’s First Pregnancy in the British Press”.
Image credit: A woman in bed after giving birth. Engraving by J. Wood, 1830. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.