8 Examples of Poor Pregnancy Advice In History
1. Always Wear a Corset
During the 19th century it was not uncommon for women to wear restrictive garments while pregnant as a means to disguise their pregnancy. Within the costume collection we have rehoused one of such undergarment: an 1850’s maternity corset. This peculiar item differs from other corsets. Rather than being laced in the back, this corset’s lacing is located on either side of the abdomen, which allowed a woman to loosen the garment as her stomach grew. Along with the differing lacing location, the back of corset has no boning except for one bone that runs across the waistline, creating an unusual bowed out silhouette. Women wore these maternity corsets as corsetry restricted abdomen growth temporarily due to its constriction, allowing women to hide their pregnancy for an extra few weeks or even months, if they were lucky. Pregnancy during the Victorian era was not a happy occasion for many women, causing this desire for a woman to hide her condition.
Pregnancy for many women, regardless of social class, meant a loss in freedom. Working-class women frequently lost employment with the discovery of pregnancy, resulting in a loss of economic independence. With the Industrial Revolution emphasizing speed and constant productivity for mass production, pregnancy did not mesh well with the factory environment. Because pregnancy caused women to carry extra weight and tire more easily, employers feared women would not be able to keep up with the rapid pace and, therefore, slow down production and profit. It was highly common for factory owners to fire pregnant women. Without work, these working-class women who previously helped provide financial stability to their families now became a financial burden. In order to avoid this situation, these women masked their condition from their employers and their families for as long as possible. Middle and Upper-Class women experienced this loss of freedom as well within their own homes. Many higher-status women attended lavish balls and parties, dressed extravagantly for late-night concerts, and participated in other public events, but pregnancy called for women to retire from these enjoyments. Doctors and physicians recommended intensive bed rest for pregnancy, so women accustomed to constant entertainment had to remain in their home for the majority of the day. Refusing to give up their eventful lives, middle-class and upper-class women hid their pregnancy and avoided any recommendation of bedrest.
In addition to independence, Victorian society’s expectations pressured women to continue wearing corsets during pregnancy. Victorian society depicted a perfect woman as meek and virtuous, even when married. Pregnancy contradicted this ideal image by providing physical evidence that women participated in sexual intercourse. Because pregnancy proved women were not these demure creatures, women were expected to hide their pregnancy from public eye to avoid any discomfort for others. Along with virginity and innocence, women were valued for femininity. During this era, femininity was based on a woman’s tiny waist. Because a woman’s abdomen grew with pregnancy, many women felt they lost their youth and beauty in the eyes of society. In a desperate attempt to hold onto her femininity she simply continued donning her corsets to create the illusion of a small waist, and therefore beauty. The lacings on the sides of the maternity corset were meant to be loosened as the baby grew, yet women tight-laced these instead in order to maintain the preferred hourglass shape.
2. Watch What You Eat
Soranus, a Greek physician, believed flatulence could harm the fetus (no beans for you, expectant moms!) and also warned that constipation could suffocate a child, while diarrhea could wash it away.
According to The Distaff Gospels, a 15th-century book of old wives' tales, a woman should not eat fish heads, as her child would be born with a "mouth more pointed than normal." Eating soft cheese was also considered taboo, as it would cause a boy to have an abnormally small penis and a girl to have a large vagina.
3. Don't Take Baths
Soranus also believed that women shouldn't bathe during their first seven days of pregnancy because a bath will "loosen the texture of the whole body" and weaken the fetus. That's obviously not true (most women don't even know they're pregnant in the first week), but don't let the water get too hot! Avoid baths that can raise your body temperature higher than 102.2° F for more than 10 minutes. A temperature that high can create problems for you and your baby, including, a drop in blood pressure, depriving the baby of oxygen and nutrients and making miscarriage more likely, dizziness and weakness, and birth defects, especially in the first trimester.
4. Don't Have Sex Once Pregnant
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg developed Corn Flakes because he believed bland foods would decrease sexual appetites, which he blamed for all sorts of physical and mental conditions. Unsurprisingly, he didn't support of sex for pleasure, particularly when a woman was already pregnant. He warned that having sex while expecting would leave "injurious influences upon the child of the gratification of the passions during the period when its character is being formed, is undoubtedly much greater than is usually supposed. We have no doubt that this is a common cause of the transmission of libidinous tendencies to the child." In other words, getting it on while pregnant will make your child grow up to be a lustful, horny creep.
5. Take Your "Medicine"
In the early 1900s, cocaine and champagne were believed to help morning sickness, and opium was used to treat additional pregnancy-related issues. Pabst Brewing Company even marketed their Pabst Extract to pregnant women, promising their malt extract would provide expectant mothers with "nourishment not supplied by ordinary foods."
6. Always Give Into Those Food Cravings
The Distaff Gospels warn that if a woman does not submit to her food cravings, her baby may be born without a vital organ (which one, we're not sure). A 19th-century doctor, John D. West, concurred, warning that failure to give into cravings could result in a baby born with birthmarks.
7. Have a Hyena Present During Delivery
Like Soranus, Pliny the Elder was a Greek scientist who gave advice on childbirth. He believed the smell of the fat from a hyena's loins would stimulate delivery and placing the right foot of the animal on the mother would result in an easy birth, but doing the same with the left foot would cause death.
8. Why Are We Still So Paranoid About What Pregnant Women See?
There’s a scene on the CBS show Criminal Minds in which JJ, a pregnant FBI profiler, halts a conversation about a killer to put headphones over her pregnant belly. She tells the others she doesn’t want her child to hear the gory details of the conversation, as if talk of dismembered women will permanently scar the developing fetus still inside of her. The rest of the team of analytical thinkers readily assent to JJ; no questions are asked.
When I watched this scene, I was folding onesies for my own child, who right then, was wiggling inside my womb, making me constipated and nauseous. When my mom called a few minutes later, she balked when I told her which show I was watching. “What about the baby?” she said.
The barrier between mother and child is literally permeable and philosophically up for debate. A defining factor of pregnancy is the list of things you’re forbidden from putting in your body, as not to harm your fetus: alcohol, drugs, medication, lunch meat, anything otherwise impure. You are asked, even, to refrain from allowing certain things to enter your mind: studies on pregnant woman show links between increases in maternal stress and fetal stress, and maternal stress has even been linked to preterm birth and schizophrenia.
Those cause-and-effect links are proven and tangible—while other links between mother and baby slip into a nearly spiritual realm. Long after a child has left its mother, its fetal cells remain lodged inside the mother, crossing the placenta and becoming part of the bloodstream. Mothers, too, leave their cells in their children: these cells cross the placenta in the opposite direction, strengthening the immune system and, well—no one is quite sure what else.
The science leads easily to superstition. Today, a thriving contemporary market of goods exists to promote fetal positivity and protect your baby from the wicked influences of the world. Bellybuds, the $49.99 sound system for your baby, advertises its ability to make a positive maternal impression: to transmit sound into the womb, so parents can “deliver audio stimulation to their developing child to start creating those memories now.” Bellypod, a tampon-like speaker that can be inserted in the vagina, takes that idea even further.
The logic is ancient. Upset the mother and ruin the baby; if the mother is sweet, the child will be sweet too. Expectant mothers are responsible for a double version of the traditional idea of the woman’s body, generally thought to be either pure or defiled. It’s a logic rooted in biological fact—the state of a pregnant woman’s body does affect her fetus—that has been twisted into an equally powerful psychological fiction, which extends to a woman’s mind. The idea that what a pregnant woman sees and thinks about will manifest in her unborn child dates back centuries, and still persists today.
In 1897, CJ Bayer wrote a pleading appeal to pregnant women in his book Maternal Impressions:
“The basic principle which we wish to impress upon the reader is: That a mother who is in the condition to which attention is called, who has an imperfectly formed object, such as a monstrosity of any kind in her mind, and who dwells upon it, or who has impure or vulgar thoughts and mean or unholy ideas, or who has murder in mind—that is, would like to kill her unborn babe—will impress such a formation of the brain structure of her offspring, as will form its desires in the direction which her thoughts have taken.”
But the underlying theory can be found as far back as the Bible, when Jacob makes a deal with his father-in-law Laban to only take the spotted or striped goats in the flock as his dowry payment for Rachel and Leah. Jacob vows to Laban that if an all-white goat is found among his flock, it will be considered stolen.
So, in order to ensure his flock remained spotted, Jacob has branches cut and the bark peeled from them in strips so that the inner wood showed. He makes his flocks cross over these striped branches on their way to eat and drink. He makes the strong ones mate in front of the branches, so they would be dark and spotted. The weak ones he sets apart from the branches, so they would be born white and sent back to Laban.
The author of Genesis wrote: “In this way the man grew exceedingly prosperous and came to own large flocks, and maidservants and menservants, and camels and donkeys.” In other words, early Biblical commentators believed that just the vivid sight of the striped branches was enough to imprint on the goats in the womb.
Hippocrates explained a similar theory in the 4th century BC: “If a pregnant woman feels the desire to eat earth or charcoal and then eats them, the child will show signs of these things.” Pliny the Elder argued years later—between 77 and 79 AD—that the reason for greater variability among human appearance over animals is because humans possess a greater capacity for imagination. Aristotle, in his humbly titled Masterpiece, wrote that an adulteress having sex with her lover can conceive of a child who looks like her husband, by simply imagining his face during conception. He added, “And through this power of imaginative faculty it was that a woman, at the time of conception, beholding the picture of a black-a-moor, conceived and brought forth a child, resembling an Ethiopian.”
Many early stories about maternal impressions concerns taboos around race. There is a recurring legend of dubious historical documentation that tells of Hippocrates saving a princess accused of adultery because she had given birth to a black child. His defense was recounted by sixteenth-century surgeon Ambroise Pare in his own book On Monsters and Marvels:
“Her husband and she both having white skin...the woman was absolved upon Hippocrates persuasion that [her child] was [caused by] the portrait of a Moor, similar to the child, which was customarily attached to her bed.”
Other suggestions of perceived sexual deviance creep into these stories, too. In A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities Jon Bondeson tells the story of a noblewoman in Ursini who was born with the fur and paws of a bear. It was the thirteenth century, and the defect was blamed on a picture of a bear that hung in the woman’s bedchamber. “The things desired by the mother are often found impressed on the child that the which the mother carries at the time of the desire,” Leonardo Da Vinci once famously wrote in his Quaderni d’Anatomia, which he compiled between 1485 and 1515.
The same theory was also put forth in the Vedas, a collection of texts that originated in ancient India. Naomi Wolf recounts in Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected Journey to Motherhood that many Southeast Asian communities practice “sympathetic magic.” She explains: “If a pregnant woman mocks someone with a deformity, her child will be born with the same condition; if she eats dark fruit, her baby will have a mottled complexion; if she sees quarrels, her child will have a difficult temperament.” And so on.
Centuries later, at the dawn of the scientific age, C.J. Bayer’s book told the same horror stories. There is a pregnant woman who watches a firework explode into a child’s head; she then gives birth to her own baby with a large indent in its head. If only she would have wished and prayed that her child would have no deformities because of witnessing that event, Bayer laments. He tells stories of mothers craving beef during pregnancy, whose infants could only being soothed by suckling on sticks of beef, and of a Jewish mother who craves pork, and whose child cries inconsolably until he is offered some bacon.
A 1919 public health education poster scoffs at the idea of maternal impression, but then advises women that they should still be emotionally on guard for their baby’s safety: “Worry, fear and anger may affect his mothers’ blood, which supplies his food. Therefore, she should be calm, happy and sweet-tempered.”
“Be sweet!” is still the dominant advice for pregnant women today. Take a rest. Sit down. Don’t worry your pregnant mind. Think of the baby. And pregnant women who expose themselves to that which is not sweet—who have a sip of wine, take some cold medicine or regularly watch gory crime procedurals before bed—they are selfish. They are unable to take heed of maternal impressions and put their child’s needs before their own.
Science has always believed that women’s bodies are permeable vessels: weak clay to the man’s molded steel. For pregnant women, this is even more so. There is a bias at play even when the facts are unknown or neutral: in a recent interview with NPR, Janet Williams, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, advised women that there are too many unknowns with drinking while pregnant, so women should just avoid it all together, which is both an understandable suggestion and yet completely regressive. If a pregnant women were to avoid all unknowns, they would be locked in quiet closets listening only to Mozart—and mom blogs would still debate how harmful the light is coming in from under the door.
For science, mystery is a thing to be conquered. And if there’s any mystery greater than a women’s body, it’s that woman’s body when she’s carrying a child. The history of medicine is one of isolating women—strapping them down, tying them up, locking them away. But to immediately cloister a woman from the world around her, not only to protect her but to protect her children, is to assume that her body contains mostly weaknesses. The mother-child connection in pregnancy is fundamentally opaque; the nature of creation is fluid and flexible, and in talking about what’s passed on from mother to fetus, we rarely talk outside terms of purity. We rarely talk about strength.
There is undeniably an almost mystic connection between mother and child, one that holds fast even into adulthood. The subcortical regions of our brains are deeply influenced by this first love, this longest lasting connection. But the extent of this connection remains unknown. No one can say if the fact that I watched crime shows will give my children some unknown deviance, or if that allergy medicine taken out of desperation in the second trimester will be the reason my daughter doesn’t make it into Yale. We only know there’s such a thing as a maternal impression. I hope for a future in which that idea makes us something other than afraid.
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Pregnancy for many women, regardless of social class, meant a loss in freedom. Working-class women frequently lost employment with the discovery of pregnancy, resulting in a loss of economic independence. With the Industrial Revolution emphasizing speed and constant productivity for mass production, pregnancy did not mesh well with the factory environment. Because pregnancy caused women to carry extra weight and tire more easily, employers feared women would not be able to keep up with the rapid pace and, therefore, slow down production and profit. It was highly common for factory owners to fire pregnant women. Without work, these working-class women who previously helped provide financial stability to their families now became a financial burden. In order to avoid this situation, these women masked their condition from their employers and their families for as long as possible. Middle and Upper-Class women experienced this loss of freedom as well within their own homes. Many higher-status women attended lavish balls and parties, dressed extravagantly for late-night concerts, and participated in other public events, but pregnancy called for women to retire from these enjoyments. Doctors and physicians recommended intensive bed rest for pregnancy, so women accustomed to constant entertainment had to remain in their home for the majority of the day. Refusing to give up their eventful lives, middle-class and upper-class women hid their pregnancy and avoided any recommendation of bedrest.
In addition to independence, Victorian society’s expectations pressured women to continue wearing corsets during pregnancy. Victorian society depicted a perfect woman as meek and virtuous, even when married. Pregnancy contradicted this ideal image by providing physical evidence that women participated in sexual intercourse. Because pregnancy proved women were not these demure creatures, women were expected to hide their pregnancy from public eye to avoid any discomfort for others. Along with virginity and innocence, women were valued for femininity. During this era, femininity was based on a woman’s tiny waist. Because a woman’s abdomen grew with pregnancy, many women felt they lost their youth and beauty in the eyes of society. In a desperate attempt to hold onto her femininity she simply continued donning her corsets to create the illusion of a small waist, and therefore beauty. The lacings on the sides of the maternity corset were meant to be loosened as the baby grew, yet women tight-laced these instead in order to maintain the preferred hourglass shape.
2. Watch What You Eat
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| Getty Images |
According to The Distaff Gospels, a 15th-century book of old wives' tales, a woman should not eat fish heads, as her child would be born with a "mouth more pointed than normal." Eating soft cheese was also considered taboo, as it would cause a boy to have an abnormally small penis and a girl to have a large vagina.
3. Don't Take Baths
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| Getty Images |
4. Don't Have Sex Once Pregnant
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| Getty Images |
5. Take Your "Medicine"
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| Getty Images |
6. Always Give Into Those Food Cravings
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| Getty Images |
7. Have a Hyena Present During Delivery
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| Getty Images |
8. Why Are We Still So Paranoid About What Pregnant Women See?
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| Getty Images |
When I watched this scene, I was folding onesies for my own child, who right then, was wiggling inside my womb, making me constipated and nauseous. When my mom called a few minutes later, she balked when I told her which show I was watching. “What about the baby?” she said.
The barrier between mother and child is literally permeable and philosophically up for debate. A defining factor of pregnancy is the list of things you’re forbidden from putting in your body, as not to harm your fetus: alcohol, drugs, medication, lunch meat, anything otherwise impure. You are asked, even, to refrain from allowing certain things to enter your mind: studies on pregnant woman show links between increases in maternal stress and fetal stress, and maternal stress has even been linked to preterm birth and schizophrenia.
Those cause-and-effect links are proven and tangible—while other links between mother and baby slip into a nearly spiritual realm. Long after a child has left its mother, its fetal cells remain lodged inside the mother, crossing the placenta and becoming part of the bloodstream. Mothers, too, leave their cells in their children: these cells cross the placenta in the opposite direction, strengthening the immune system and, well—no one is quite sure what else.
The science leads easily to superstition. Today, a thriving contemporary market of goods exists to promote fetal positivity and protect your baby from the wicked influences of the world. Bellybuds, the $49.99 sound system for your baby, advertises its ability to make a positive maternal impression: to transmit sound into the womb, so parents can “deliver audio stimulation to their developing child to start creating those memories now.” Bellypod, a tampon-like speaker that can be inserted in the vagina, takes that idea even further.
The logic is ancient. Upset the mother and ruin the baby; if the mother is sweet, the child will be sweet too. Expectant mothers are responsible for a double version of the traditional idea of the woman’s body, generally thought to be either pure or defiled. It’s a logic rooted in biological fact—the state of a pregnant woman’s body does affect her fetus—that has been twisted into an equally powerful psychological fiction, which extends to a woman’s mind. The idea that what a pregnant woman sees and thinks about will manifest in her unborn child dates back centuries, and still persists today.
In 1897, CJ Bayer wrote a pleading appeal to pregnant women in his book Maternal Impressions:
“The basic principle which we wish to impress upon the reader is: That a mother who is in the condition to which attention is called, who has an imperfectly formed object, such as a monstrosity of any kind in her mind, and who dwells upon it, or who has impure or vulgar thoughts and mean or unholy ideas, or who has murder in mind—that is, would like to kill her unborn babe—will impress such a formation of the brain structure of her offspring, as will form its desires in the direction which her thoughts have taken.”
But the underlying theory can be found as far back as the Bible, when Jacob makes a deal with his father-in-law Laban to only take the spotted or striped goats in the flock as his dowry payment for Rachel and Leah. Jacob vows to Laban that if an all-white goat is found among his flock, it will be considered stolen.
So, in order to ensure his flock remained spotted, Jacob has branches cut and the bark peeled from them in strips so that the inner wood showed. He makes his flocks cross over these striped branches on their way to eat and drink. He makes the strong ones mate in front of the branches, so they would be dark and spotted. The weak ones he sets apart from the branches, so they would be born white and sent back to Laban.
The author of Genesis wrote: “In this way the man grew exceedingly prosperous and came to own large flocks, and maidservants and menservants, and camels and donkeys.” In other words, early Biblical commentators believed that just the vivid sight of the striped branches was enough to imprint on the goats in the womb.
Hippocrates explained a similar theory in the 4th century BC: “If a pregnant woman feels the desire to eat earth or charcoal and then eats them, the child will show signs of these things.” Pliny the Elder argued years later—between 77 and 79 AD—that the reason for greater variability among human appearance over animals is because humans possess a greater capacity for imagination. Aristotle, in his humbly titled Masterpiece, wrote that an adulteress having sex with her lover can conceive of a child who looks like her husband, by simply imagining his face during conception. He added, “And through this power of imaginative faculty it was that a woman, at the time of conception, beholding the picture of a black-a-moor, conceived and brought forth a child, resembling an Ethiopian.”
Many early stories about maternal impressions concerns taboos around race. There is a recurring legend of dubious historical documentation that tells of Hippocrates saving a princess accused of adultery because she had given birth to a black child. His defense was recounted by sixteenth-century surgeon Ambroise Pare in his own book On Monsters and Marvels:
“Her husband and she both having white skin...the woman was absolved upon Hippocrates persuasion that [her child] was [caused by] the portrait of a Moor, similar to the child, which was customarily attached to her bed.”
Other suggestions of perceived sexual deviance creep into these stories, too. In A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities Jon Bondeson tells the story of a noblewoman in Ursini who was born with the fur and paws of a bear. It was the thirteenth century, and the defect was blamed on a picture of a bear that hung in the woman’s bedchamber. “The things desired by the mother are often found impressed on the child that the which the mother carries at the time of the desire,” Leonardo Da Vinci once famously wrote in his Quaderni d’Anatomia, which he compiled between 1485 and 1515.
The same theory was also put forth in the Vedas, a collection of texts that originated in ancient India. Naomi Wolf recounts in Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected Journey to Motherhood that many Southeast Asian communities practice “sympathetic magic.” She explains: “If a pregnant woman mocks someone with a deformity, her child will be born with the same condition; if she eats dark fruit, her baby will have a mottled complexion; if she sees quarrels, her child will have a difficult temperament.” And so on.
Centuries later, at the dawn of the scientific age, C.J. Bayer’s book told the same horror stories. There is a pregnant woman who watches a firework explode into a child’s head; she then gives birth to her own baby with a large indent in its head. If only she would have wished and prayed that her child would have no deformities because of witnessing that event, Bayer laments. He tells stories of mothers craving beef during pregnancy, whose infants could only being soothed by suckling on sticks of beef, and of a Jewish mother who craves pork, and whose child cries inconsolably until he is offered some bacon.
A 1919 public health education poster scoffs at the idea of maternal impression, but then advises women that they should still be emotionally on guard for their baby’s safety: “Worry, fear and anger may affect his mothers’ blood, which supplies his food. Therefore, she should be calm, happy and sweet-tempered.”
“Be sweet!” is still the dominant advice for pregnant women today. Take a rest. Sit down. Don’t worry your pregnant mind. Think of the baby. And pregnant women who expose themselves to that which is not sweet—who have a sip of wine, take some cold medicine or regularly watch gory crime procedurals before bed—they are selfish. They are unable to take heed of maternal impressions and put their child’s needs before their own.
Science has always believed that women’s bodies are permeable vessels: weak clay to the man’s molded steel. For pregnant women, this is even more so. There is a bias at play even when the facts are unknown or neutral: in a recent interview with NPR, Janet Williams, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, advised women that there are too many unknowns with drinking while pregnant, so women should just avoid it all together, which is both an understandable suggestion and yet completely regressive. If a pregnant women were to avoid all unknowns, they would be locked in quiet closets listening only to Mozart—and mom blogs would still debate how harmful the light is coming in from under the door.
For science, mystery is a thing to be conquered. And if there’s any mystery greater than a women’s body, it’s that woman’s body when she’s carrying a child. The history of medicine is one of isolating women—strapping them down, tying them up, locking them away. But to immediately cloister a woman from the world around her, not only to protect her but to protect her children, is to assume that her body contains mostly weaknesses. The mother-child connection in pregnancy is fundamentally opaque; the nature of creation is fluid and flexible, and in talking about what’s passed on from mother to fetus, we rarely talk outside terms of purity. We rarely talk about strength.
There is undeniably an almost mystic connection between mother and child, one that holds fast even into adulthood. The subcortical regions of our brains are deeply influenced by this first love, this longest lasting connection. But the extent of this connection remains unknown. No one can say if the fact that I watched crime shows will give my children some unknown deviance, or if that allergy medicine taken out of desperation in the second trimester will be the reason my daughter doesn’t make it into Yale. We only know there’s such a thing as a maternal impression. I hope for a future in which that idea makes us something other than afraid.
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