A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering, Elinor Cleghorn, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £22

In the 2nd century AD, a famous (male) gynaecologist from Ephesus, in modern Turkey, wrote a treatise outlining the best care for pregnant women. In the tradition of the Hippocratic doctors who had long been advocates of rest, a calm hystera (womb) and the avoidance of ‘bitter’ foods, Soranus, in his widely read Gynaecology, advised expectant mothers to avoid emotional shocks that might trigger a miscarriage. More unusually, he expressed a professional opinion that girls under the age of 15 should not become mothers.

To a modern reader’s eye, some of Soranus’ opinions seem a little more humane, more patient-centric than those of his predecessors. But – as Elinor Cleghorn points out with decidedly un-hysterical clarity at the outset of this sweeping indictment of efforts to control motherhood – he was still governed by the prevailing belief that it was primarily the survival and health of the baby that mattered, rather than of the gravida, or pregnant woman. Caring for the latter was like building a strong foundation for the housing of a future citizen.

The conviction that children belong primarily to their fathers, male elders and, more broadly, to society, is as longstanding as any crime of the patriarchy. For the ancient Greeks, a woman and her womb were means to a sociological end – an opinion that does not seem wildly dissimilar, 2,000 years later, to the attitudes of anti-abortion states in the US after the overturning of Roe v Wade. Then, as now, a woman was blamed for any miscarriage she might suffer, even if (as is usually the case) the reason was unknown. The legal consequences of miscarrying could potentially be lethal, as in the case of the Englishwoman Joan Blackwell, who was sentenced to death in 1679 because her illegitimate baby died after she ‘delivered alone without calling help’. The fact that women in some US states today still face prison sentences for miscarrying makes Cleghorn’s point all too neatly.

Cleghorn’s recounting of Soranus and his antenatal lifestyle guide made me think of the commercial norms of modern surrogacy as a parallel. In particular, I thought of the clauses included in surrogacy contracts which outline the legal obligations of a woman paid to carry a child – even down to the type and quantity of vitamins she must consume on a daily basis. The specification of the number of hours she must rest after IVF treatment mirrors the ancient advice of Soranus to a post-coital woman: she must stay in bed and rest for two days, avoiding ‘every excess and change both bodily and psychic’ in order to ensure successful conception.

There is much to be said about men’s erasure of the labour of motherhood, and Cleghorn, as one might expect from the author of Unwell Women, addresses the subject with a quiet anger underpinning her scholarship, and a thoroughness that sometimes threatens to overwhelm. But the scope and detail of her examples only serve to prove her point that the obliteration of maternal sacrifice from the historical record is as old as time. Even, as Cleghorn informs us, in the apparently ‘gynocentric’ cultures of the Bronze Age that worshipped female fertility in the form of goddesses, the idea that a real ‘matriarchy’ existed is an academically disputed one, despite the excitement prompted by the discovery of clay figurines of birthing and breastfeeding mothers. The awe-inspiring power of female fertility has – as far as we know – never resulted in a corresponding level of political power.

If that sounds depressing, there are many uplifting counterpoints in this epic history of motherhood: Cleghorn is particularly compelling when she recounts the personal efforts of individual women to achieve political power in relation to their motherhood – those who have fought to lay claim to their own children, in particular, and win legal custody in defiance of longstanding cultural norms. She is fiercely meticulous in outlining efforts to overcome their default position as birthing machines producing heirs for their fathers, and future workers – or future birthing machines.

The figures and stories she brings to life are genuinely moving: Sojourner Truth, for instance, a black slave woman who escaped her owner in New York in 1826 with her baby daughter, and later won a court case against a different white man who had bought her son years earlier, reclaiming the boy who had been forcibly removed from her by ‘fighting against the cultural and legal designation of children as “property” borne by women to be owned by men’.

Other inspiring but more tragic stories involve women who turn to writing in the absence of political power: the Englishwoman Sarah Pennington, for instance, who in 1761 wrote a book called An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to Her Absent Daughters in the form of a letter to the children who had been taken from her after she asked for a separation from her husband. The book defied her husband, who had denied her any contact with them; she advised her daughters not to bow to his ‘command’ when the time came to marry. Other writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, used their experiences to expose the plight of unwed mothers to a wide audience by publishing works of fiction. Still others, like Elizabeth Jocelin in 1622, wrote private love letters to their unborn children while pregnant, rightly convinced that they would die in childbirth.

This is where Cleghorn’s writing shines – in the personal, which is, of course, deeply universal. Certainly, as a mother myself on the cusp of giving birth to my third child, it was horribly easy to imagine the anguish experienced by some of the women she writes about. At the conclusion of the book, Cleghorn pays tribute to her own mother, who raised her alone in the 1980s, suffering unannounced visits to her home by social workers checking there was no man on the scene who would disqualify her for state help.

The indignity, violence and injustice of mothers’ treatment throughout the ages does not always make for cheerful reading. But the author’s experience of being mothered solo, with excellent results, inspired a book which is necessary, moving and, ultimately, a deeply rewarding read.