Maternity Tales – Exploring the History of Maternity Spaces

Maternity Tales is a three-year research project lead by Dr Emma Cheatle at Newcastle University. It looks at the buildings and interior spaces used for childbirth in England from the seventeenth century onwards, and evaluates their impact on the development of maternity practices.

In this post, Dr Cheatle gives a short history of maternity spaces and talks about her contribution to this years Being Human Festival.

Until the 1750s all births took place at home – except of course where birth occurred unexpectedly! A labour and the recovery afterwards were known as ‘lying-in’. The lying-in period was typically a month, during which the new mother at first recuperated bed-bound, then remained in the house, gradually returning to her household duties. Lying-in ended with the public cleansing and thanksgiving ritual of ‘churching’ performed in the local Church of England.

Lying-in did not take place just anywhere in the home but involved carefully remaking the master bedroom into a dark and airless lying-in chamber. At the first signs of labour, extra linen was draped onto and around the bed and over the windows and doors. The fire was stoked up, and all openings in the room closed – sometimes even gaps and the keyhole were stuffed with fabric. It was thought air and light were harmful, and may lead to the dreaded puerperal fever, a tremendously dangerous illness (essentially an infection) experienced after childbirth. Men were removed from the room, and replaced by a gathering including the midwife and at least five women to aid the birth, called the ‘gossip’. The room was darkened further after birth, as it was thought light could damage the new mother’s eyesight, already weakened by the effort of childbirth.

Jane Sharp, The Midwife Book, 1671, detail of frontispiece

Jane Sharp, The Midwife Book, 1671, detail of frontispiece

From the 1750s the domestic spaces of home birth were made complex by the emergence of lying-in hospitals. These were the first specialist hospitals, and began an era of institutions in general – from spaces of welfare such as asylums and hospitals to those of intellectual gathering like the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle and the Royal Society in London. The lying-in hospitals were philanthropic charities aimed at poor (albeit married) women who lacked the funds to afford decent homes let alone good midwifery care. Although they undoubtedly helped many women, the lying-in hospitals were devised and controlled by the new men-midwives to develop their skills and establish their status. At first occupying large houses, as the century progressed they acquired purpose made buildings. In contrast to the dark and airless domestic lying-in chamber, these were lofty and neo-classical designs, with roomy wards of 6-8 beds and large windows. Their advantages – including light and airy spaces, access to new forms of care and spaces of rest – contrasted with their disadvantages – lack of privacy, a shift in control over one’s own body as it was passed to the institution, the medicalisation of birth and an increased death rate from puerperal fever.

Newcastle Lying-in Hospital, 1825 From Tom Faulkner and Andrew Greg, John Dobson, Newcastle architect 1787-1865 (Tyne and Wear Museums Service, 1987)

Newcastle Lying-in Hospital, 1825
From Tom Faulkner and Andrew Greg, John Dobson, Newcastle architect 1787-1865 (Tyne and Wear Museums Service, 1987)

Across the nineteenth-century, birth witnessed various experimental practices in these purpose made spaces. Men-midwives were gradually renamed accoucheurs and then obstetricians. Although the vast majority of women continued to give birth at home – indeed it was not until the 1940s that more than 50% women gave birth in hospital – midwifery care had shifted, and the practices and ideas tested in the hospitals affected home delivery. Light and fresh air were seen as important. Instruments such as midwifery forceps became more common, and men began to be called into the birth chamber in favour of the traditional female midwives, particularly by the middle- and upper-classes.

The Maternity Tales Listening Booth at the 2016 Being Human Festival

Parts of the Maternity Tales project are being presented in an installation which can be seen at this November’s 2016 Being Human Festival. The installation, taking place at the Laing Art Gallery and Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne, presents a ‘listening booth’ to explore the history of maternity. Aimed at parents to be, parents, grandparents, midwifery/obstetric professionals, plus anyone interested in architectural and maternity history, the booth comprises two parts:

[1] Histories: Visitors are able to explore a tall wooden filing drawer unit containing different visual displays and sound pieces on the history of spaces used for birth from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.

[2] Collections: Visitors are encouraged to fill in record cards found in one of the drawers, in order to explore and share their own labour experiences as ‘spatial maternity stories’. Willing participants are also invited to make sound recordings in a separate screened private interview space. Both these collections will inform Emma’s further research and a radio play.

References:

Doreen Evenden, The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London (Cambridge, 2000)

Ralph A Houlbrooke, English family life,1576-1716 An Anthology from Diaries (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)

Pam Lieske, Eighteenth-century British midwifery (Pickering and Chatto, 2007)

Adrian Wilson, The making of man-midwifery,1660-1770 (Harvard University Press, 1995)

Margaret Connor Versluysen, ‘Midwives, medical men and “poor women labouring of child”: lying in hospitals in eighteenth century London’, in Helen Roberts (ed.), Women, health and reproduction (Routledge, 1981), pp 18–24.

Helen King, Midwifery, obstetrics and the rise of gynaecology: the Uses of a Sixteenth-Century Compendium (Ashgate, 2007)

 

Dr Emma Cheatle is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute. She is an architectural historian and writer, and author of Part-Architecture: The Maison de Verre, Duchamp, Domesticity and Desire in 1930s Paris (Routledge, 2017). Her current project presents a critical history of maternity spaces and examines how the past changes our understanding of contemporary experience.

Emma.Cheatle@newcastle.ac.uk 

Living Bricks of Venice: A vision, experiment and exhibition by Living Architecture

Rachel Armstrong, Professor of Experimental Architecture and project coordinator of the Living Architecture (LIAR) research project, gives an update on the project and an exciting event showcasing the project’s development taking place in Venice.

The €3.2m LIAR project explores an extended conception of design by bringing together the sciences, design disciplines and the arts to explore the possibilities of “living” in the broadest sense of the term in the 3rd millennium.

LIAR will develop blocks able to extract resources from sunlight, waste water and air. The bricks are able to fit together and create ‘bioreactor walls’ which could then be incorporated in housing, public buildings and office spaces.

Each block will contain a microbial fuel cell, filled with programmable synthetic microorganisms developed by experts at UWE Bristol. Robotically activated, each chamber will contain a variety of microorganisms specifically chosen to clean water, reclaim phosphate, generate electricity and create new detergents. The living cells that will make up the wall will be able to sense their surroundings and respond to them through a series of digitally coordinated mechanisms.

LIAR is a collaboration of experts from the universities of the West of England (UWE Bristol), Trento, Italy, the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid; LIQUIFER Systems Group, Vienna, Austria and EXPLORA, Venice, Italy.

On Friday 14 October the LIAR consortium will host an event in Venice which will demonstrate a working brick and exhibit a ceramic model, which has been developed by LIQUIFER Systems Group, as a discussion point for the potential impact that future living bricks may have for architecture, design, ceramics and the arts.

This will be followed by a short round table of experts including Ioannis Ieropoulos from the University of West England and Juan Nogales from the Spanish National Research Council who will introduce the key technological advances.

Living bricks are part of the story of an alternative future for Venice, which owing to devastating changes in its relationship to rising water levels, is likely to be claimed by the sea. In 2008 we began to ask whether it was possible to turn the city’s fate around by equipping it with some of the properties of living things so that it may actively fight back against the elements in a struggle for survival like creatures do, and so, adapt to its changing conditions on ways that we’d normally associate with living systems.

Back in 2008 a model technology was explored as a possible platform for this transformation based on the chemistry and physical properties of dynamic droplets, with simple metabolisms. Potentially, such a system could initiate the construction of a protective limestone reef around the foundations of the city by biomineralizing Venice’s wooden foundations, which are under threat by the traffic from large cruise ships whose wakes suck the preserving salt water out from under the foundations, leaving the foundations exposed to the air, where they rot. With time, the bio concrete-stimulating droplets then would form a kind of protective kettle-limescale during these times and even build up a residue that could repair erosion of materials at the tidal zone in some specific locations.

Field studies to identify possible sites for testing the technology revealed that the natural marine wildlife was already carrying out a metabolically vigorous version of this process. This suggested that it might be possible to find ways of orchestrating a whole range of events between the biological systems in the lagoon, the chemical technology and the concrete-forming processes in the waterways to produce a synthetic platform, which was potentially programmable.

LIAR

Living bricks are an exploration of that choreography, looking at how we might shape relationships between human habitation, technology and nature through a mutually beneficial relationship. While specific outcomes are not specifically directed towards the mineralization process at this stage, we are creating these prototypes so they can be directly interrogated by the Venice community, in the hope they will explore their functions and help us understand how such apparatuses may be useful in addressing real challenges within a city that is being, quite literally, digested by its circumstances.

So, living bricks are not a solution to a particular grand challenge, but a prototype that helps us all think differently about technology and architecture in challenging places. These prototypes address different approaches to optimizing the choreography between agents with complex relationships and may help us discover how we may differently address some of the pervasive problems of human habitation. For example, living bricks may help us understand how we may deal with our waste differently, provide clean water for everyone, or retrofit our buildings to increase their environmental value.

The Venice event takes place at Hotel Carlton on the Grand Canal, Santa Croce 578, 30135 – Venezia.

For details of the event on Friday 14 October please contact info@explora-biotech.com.

LIAR is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement no 686585.

Creating a shared vision for the Northumberland National Park Local Plan

In this post, Dr Paul Cowie explains how an innovative piece of theatre is helping shape Northumberland National Park.

The next phase of the Town Meeting project starts with a dress rehearsal of the new version of the Town Meeting play. Over the past year, Cap-a-Pie and I have been working with Northumberland National Park to create a version of the play that will help the National Park start the consultation process on the new Local Plan. The new version of the play aims to link the Local Plan being developed now with the actual planning decisions it will affect over the next five years. Often communities do not see the need to get involved in the process of framing the Local Plan as they see little direct relevance to their lives. Only when, a few years later perhaps, an actual planning decision has to be made using the plan do they get involved.

Clennel Street

Clennel Street

We hope to change this by creating a fictitious planning application set within the National Park which takes place in the near future. The scenario aims to test the community’s views on certain planning principles and their vision for the National Park. The new play also has a secondary aim, which is to highlight the limits of planning. Many issues that concern communities do not fall within the domain of the Local Plan. For example issues such as better public transport links or more community activities. In the statutory planning process these are often seen as a distraction. However these ideas need to be developed and encouraged. It’s hoped our new co-production process can also capture these non-planning planning issues and connect them to resources and people that can help.

As far as we know, this is the first time this method of theatre as a tool for planning has been tried so there will be a more traditional consultation process running in parallel to the theatrical events. However we hope this will be a fun and engaging way to get involved in what can be a quite off-putting process.

If you’re in Northumberland and are interested in framing the new Local Plan for the National Park in a new and innovative way we will be holding events in Elsdon Village Hall on the evening of the 18th October and in Harbottle Village Hall on the evening of the 28th October. See the Northumberland National Park website for more info.

Dr Paul Cowie is a Research Assistant in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape
Email: paul.cowie@ncl.ac.uk