Gendering Enlightenment: Sarah Stone, William Cadogan, and the Politics of Maternity

Sarah Stone (fl. 1701-1737) and William Cadogan (1711-1797) make an unlikely pair. She was an English midwife, trained by her mother, who practiced in rural Somerset, Bristol, and then London. Cadogan was a very successful physician, educated at Oxford and Leiden, who also practiced in Bristol and London. Each published a book about maternity that criticized contemporary practices by setting up the author as a person of enlightenment. As Margaret Pelling has argued, the gendered connotations of health care often compromised male physicians’ claims to authority. Both Cadogan and Stone, therefore, had to work around their culture’s assumptions about women’s roles in medicine, although in different ways. In this paper I explore how each practitioner used categories such as reason, ignorance, and superstition, and how each negotiated a critique of ordinary and accepted practices. By writing a short book about child care, Cadogan in effect removed the traditional last chapter from a standard popular book about midwifery and re-made it into a male-centered book that endorsed practices that were the exact opposite of those usually recommended by and for midwives. Stone constructed her case histories as narratives of woeful ignorance and miraculous deliverance that cried out for better-educated female midwives.  In fact, the practices that Stone and Cadogan so disliked had logics and reasons of their own. Through this comparison, I show how each author created authority for her or himself, and suggest ways in which health-care and appeals to enlightenment were shaped by gender.