Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Female Networks in Ireland, 1850–1950

Despite the centrality of motherhood to modern Irish religious and national discourses, little is written about women’s experiences of pregnancy or about the meanings of the beliefs and rituals surrounding childbirth.  This paper examines pregnancy and childbirth in Ireland from the 1850s through the 1930s.  Through an analysis of oral histories, diaries, memoirs and autobiographies, and folklore narratives, it illuminates women’s experiences, with a particular focus on poor rural and working-class urban women.

I argue that tensions between local communities’ supervision of reproduction, the Catholic Church’s views of childbirth and its surrounding rituals, and the ways in which women themselves viewed pregnancy and birth provide a window into changing authority structures in modern Irish history.  While Irish women’s reproductive bodies were regulated both by community traditions and Church dictates, women themselves were hardly powerless.  As they gave birth and created their own birth customs and rituals, women struggled with, negotiated or reworked, and in some cases rejected local norms and Church directives.  They came into conflict with family members, neighbors, and priests as they attempted to secure a comfortable place for themselves and retain some autonomy within their communities and within the newly centralizing Catholic Church.