A History of Women in 100 Objects E-Book

Professor Maggie Andrews

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 521

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The history of the world has been told in objects. But what about the objects that tell the history of women? What are the items that symbolise the journey of women from second-class citizens with no legal rights, no vote and no official status to the powerful people they are today? And what are the objects that still oppress women, even now? From the corset to the contraceptive pill, the bones of the first woman to Rosa Parks's mugshot and the iconic Mary Quant cape, A History of Women in 100 Objects documents the developing role of women in society through the lens of the inanimate objects that touched women's lives, were created by women or that at some time – perhaps even still – oppressed them. Woven by two leading historians, this complex, fascinating and vital tale of women and womanhood is told with a lightness of touch and depth of experience that will appeal to all those interested in women's history.

Leseprobe

First published 2018

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Maggie Andrews & Janis Lomas, 2018

The right of Maggie Andrews & Janis Lomas to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 8719 6

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed in Turkey

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Introduction

Part I: The Body, Motherhood and Sexuality

1 The Bones of Lucy

2 Venus of Willendorf

3 London Foundling Hospital Token

4 Terracotta Baby Feeder

5 Postcards of Hottentot Venus

6 Early Twentieth-Century Medical Vibrator

7 Sanitary Towels

8 Powick Asylum Patients’ Notes, Volume 19

9 Chinese Baby Sling

10 Lucy Baldwin Apparatus for Obstetric Analgesia

11 The Shoreditch Sisters’ Vulva Quilt

12 Date Rape Warning Poster

Part II: Wives and Homemakers

13 Terracotta Figures

14 Scold’s Bridle

15 Taj Mahal

16 Hogarth’s Gin Lane

17 Meissen Box with Portrait of Lady Caroline Fox

18 Newspaper Report of a Wife Sale

19 Mrs Fawcett’s Bag

20Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management

21 The War Widows’ Pension Form

22 First World War Canadian Canning Machine

23 Women’s Aid Slogan

24 Porthleven Website Advert for a Food Bank

25 The Barclaycard

26 Suffragette Teacups and Saucers

Part III: Science, Technology and Medicine

27 Grecian Vase Showing Women Spinning

28 Roman Tap from Pompeii

29 Eighteenth-Century Obstetric Forceps

30 The Sewing Machine

31 Marie Curie’s Desk

32 Mary Anning’s Fossil of Plesiosaurus

33 The Washing Dolly

34 Quarter-Plate Cameo Camera

35 The Electric Fridge

36 The Ekco SH25 Wireless

37 The Contraceptive Pill

Part IV: Fashions and Costumes

38 Bronze Age Cosmetic Box

39 The White Veil in Iran

40 Joanne Stoker Red Shoes

41 The Corset

42 Queen Victoria’s White Wedding Dress

43 Tsarina Alexandra Romanov’s Emerald and Diamond Tiara

44 Lady Curzon’s Peacock Dress

45 Second World War Garden String Hat

46 Mary Quant Cape

47 Marilyn Monroe’s Subway Dress

48 Lesbian Liberation Badge

49 The Silicone Breast Implant

Part V: Communication, Transportation and Travel

50Woman Magazine

51 Ladies’ Carriages in Trains

52 The Mask of Warka

53 The Covered Wagon

54 The Rajah Quilt

55 Emily Wilding Davison’s Purse and Return Ticket

56 The Phone Box

57 A First World War Love Letter

58 Frances Willard’s Bicycle

59 Amelia Earhart’s Little Red Bus

60 The Mini Car

Part VI: Women’s Work and Employment

61 The Bayeux Tapestry

62 Bill of Sale for a Slave Girl

63 Harris’s List

64 Portrait of Dr James Barry

65 Three-Legged Milking Stool and Yoke

66 Servant’s Bells

67 The Typewriter

68 The First World War Policewomen’s Armlet

69 Nursing Qualification Certificate

70 The Royal Shakespeare Theatre

71 ‘Women of Britain – Come into the Factories’ Poster

72 Maria Montessori 1,000 Lira Note

73 The Equal Pay Plate

Part VII: Creativity and Culture

74Medea (Ancient Greek play)

75Judith and Holofernes

76 Watercolour of the Ladies of Llangollen

77 Postage Stamp of Mary Wollstonecraft

78 Joanna Southcott’s Box

79 Statues of the Brontë sisters at Haworth Parsonage

80 Am I Not a Woman and a Sister? Anti-Slavery Medallion

81 Brownies’ Badge for Agility

82Strange Fruit Album and Song

83 Anne Frank’s Diary

84 Statue of Alison Lapper

85I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

86A Week from Hell, 1995 by Tracey Emin

Part VIII: Women’s Place in the Public World

87 Hatshepsut’s Temple, Djeser-djeseru

88 Boudicca

89 Joan of Arc’s Ring

90 The Death Warrant of Mary, Queen of Scots

91 The Malleus Maleficarum

92 New Zealand Women’s Suffrage Petition 1893

93 Force-Feeding Equipment

94 Fianna Éireann Gal Gréine (Sunburst) Flag Belonging to Constance Markievicz

95 Irena Sendlerowa’s Jars

96 Rosa Parks’s Mugshot

97 Barbara Castle’s Diaries

98 Greenham Common Fence

99 Women Against Pit Closures Banner

100 Margaret Thatcher’s Statue in the House of Commons

Select Bibliography

Image Credits

Introduction

Women’s history is multifarious, women’s experiences infinitely varied, too wide-ranging to be summarised by 100 objects in 100,000 words. The objects we have included provide a starting point for exploring and discussing women’s past. They provide a sense of the rich heritage of women, stories of how women were encouraged to conform to ideas of femininity and how feminist forebears challenged any such pressures; the objects are indications of women’s oppression, women’s heroism, women’s ingenuity, and their skill and expertise.

The journey to select the 100 objects for this volume is littered with objects that were going to be included and were then sidelined in favour of others. The choices we have made will not, and should not, be those that others would have made. Historians are not neutral or impartial; they start from where they are at, their own experiences and knowledge, values and interests, their concerns and politics. This is a history written by and with the priorities of social and cultural historians of England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but we have attempted to look beyond this to explore some of the communalities in women’s experience across time and space. Written for publication in the year that Britain celebrates the centenary of suffrage being granted to some women, maybe suffrage and the steps along the way from women’s domestic focus to their increasing engagement in the public sphere loom larger than they otherwise might. This book is however a history of women not the history of women; our choices are intended to provide a starting point for discussions, debate and some discord about women’s history, about what, how and why women’s lives have been changed, shaped and redefined.

Women’s history has perhaps inevitably charted many of the constraints, controls and restrictions placed on women in the past and the present. But women are not passive nor merely victims; they have agency, they find ways of taking control even if the conditions of their lives are far from ideal. In 1852 Marx argued that ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’. His analysis could perhaps very usefully have discussed women, who also make their own history, and as rulers, scientists and creative talents they have also made everyone’s history although this has all too frequently been forgotten. The objects in this volume celebrate women’s skills and resourcefulness, their tenacity and creativity, their sense of fun and freedom in the face of constraints and criticism.

The significance of individual objects discussed sprawls across borders and boundaries although we have arranged them thematically, in sections, to make it easier for readers to navigate their way around the topics. Some of the objects could have been placed in a different sections; the electric refrigerator, which was invented by New Jersey housewife Florence Parpart in 1914, could have come under ‘Wives and Homemakers’, but is included in the section on ‘Science, Technology and Medicine’, because it serves as a reminder that domestic technology is not something that is invented for women but something that women have taken a role in inventing themselves.

This is not a book we have written on our own: so many people have been involved in discussion about it and made suggestions for inclusions. We have had the benefit of a considerable number of professionals with relevant expertise. Our special thanks therefore go to Paula Bartley, Dickie James, Sallie McNamara, Lesley Spiers and Gill Thorn. Research and specific chapters have been written by past and present postgraduate and undergraduate history students at the University of Worcester: thanks are due to Hayley Carter, Nicola Connelly, Amy Dale, Lisa Davies, Richard Dhillon, Scott Eeles, Jade Gilks, Elspeth King, Rose Miller, Anna Muggeridge, Linda Pike, Charlotte Sendall and Leah Susans, who have all contributed to making this a more richer and more varied text. The research in this book relies upon the explosion of women’s history that has occurred in the last fifty years; it draws upon the academic research of countless historians, who are too numerous to mention or reference. It is not a book intended to sit on the shelves of university libraries but rather to enter the homes of those who had not realised how fascinating women’s history can be. We hope you will get excited by women’s history and explore it further in the hundreds of books, films, blogs, events and websites dedicated to women’s history, perhaps beginning with the Women’s History Network, which since its formation in 1991 has been promoting and encouraging women’s history in Britain. This book is therefore dedicated to historians of women, past, present and future, with grateful thanks.

Part I

The Body, Motherhood and Sexuality

For some it is the body that defines what it is to be a woman – the experience of menstruation, pregnancy and giving birth – but although these may seem to be unifying biological experiences, they are given many varied meanings in different cultures at different historical moments. There have been, for example, shifting attitudes to the pain women experience in childbirth; thankfully the idea that it was something that women needed to experience in order to love their babies has now been abandoned, thanks to objects such as the Lucy Baldwin apparatus for obstetric analgesia.

Recent debates about gender have shifted away from the idea of a binary opposition between men and women, emphasising the fluidity between the genders, and the degree to which people exert agency in shaping their own gender identity. Objects such as baby feeders have separated the degree to which biology predetermines women’s experience.

Nevertheless, many religions have placed taboos on the natural functions of women’s bodies, forbidding women to undertake various tasks or enter holy places during menstruation and insisting on the ritual purification of women after giving birth. Similarly, the pleasure that women can enjoy from their own bodies and masturbation remains a topic that may elicit social disapproval. While medieval historians have debunked the myth of metal chastity belts as humorous fantasy objects, there are a range of social and physical ways in which power has been exerted over women’s sexuality. Female genital mutilation (FGM) is still practised and is the subject of contemporary feminist campaigns across the world.

For some women who transgress social expectations in relation to sexuality, there has often been a heavy price to pay: they may be considered mad or bad. The tokens left by mothers who had to part with their illegitimate children at the London Foundling Hospital provide an insight into the ways in which women have suffered because they are, so to speak, ‘left holding the baby’.

The objects explored in this section also have some upbeat stories to tell: the fun to be had from the introduction of the dual-action vibrator, the Rabbit, in 1984; the freedom women obtained when the Maclaren baby buggy was introduced in the 1960s; and the role grandmothers take in passing on women’s history to the next generation.

1 | The Bones of Lucy

The Grandmother of Humanity

MAGGIE ANDREWS

In July 2015, President Obama visited the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa to see several hundred pieces of bone fossils representing 40 per cent of the skeleton of a female of the hominin species from some 3.2 million years ago, known as Lucy.

She was discovered by a team of palaeontologists, led by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray, digging in the Afar region of Ethiopia in November 1974; as the team celebrated their discovery over supper, the Beatles album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band played on the stereo. Someone hearing the song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ suggested calling this collection of bones, which had most of its skull missing but contained portions of the jaw, vertebral column, pelvis and limbs, Lucy. President Obama referred to his visit to the museum at a state dinner with the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, saying:

We honour Ethiopia as the birthplace of humankind. In fact, I just met Lucy, our oldest ancestor. As your great poet laureate wrote: ‘Here is the land where the first harmony in the rainbow was born … Here is the root of the Genesis of Life; the human family was first planted here’.

He pointed out that Lucy is ‘a reminder that the world’s people are part of the same human family’ and referred to Lucy as the ‘grandmother of humanity’.

Scientific evidence suggests that the physical traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors slowly evolving over 6 million years. A range of archaeological finds provides indications of significant steps along this evolutionary path. Lucy has attributes of both man and ape; in a sense she is a halfway house between the two species. Most importantly, scientists studying the structure of Lucy’s knee and spine curvature have ascertained that she spent most of her time walking on two legs – a distinctly human trait. Furthermore, evidence of tool making has been identified in the East Turkana district of Kenya, believed to be from over 2.5 million years ago. Evidence of this has also been located in East Africa and estimated to date from 2 million years ago. All the fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago have been found in Africa. The first migration from Africa into Asia is considered to have occurred between 2 million and 1.8 million years ago, and migration to Europe between 1.5 million and 1 million years ago.

The history of women in the millions of years since Lucy lived rests upon snippets of the past, incomplete traces and fragments of women’s lives that historians struggle to understand and interpret. As the 1970s feminist Sheila Rowbotham astutely pointed out, women have been ‘hidden from history’. Their history is often about the private and domestic spheres, intimate relationships, heroic struggles to survive; women’s stories are rarely considered important enough to be written down and recorded. Instead women’s history is often passed down by stories told by mothers to daughters, and perhaps even more importantly, told and retold by grandmothers. As Angela Cavender Wilson explained in the American Indian Quarterly in 1996:

In 2012, women comprised 64.2 percent of grandparents who lived with their grandchildren in the USA.

As I listened to my grandmother telling the last words spoken by her great-great-grandmother, and my grandmother’s interpretation, I understood that our most important role as women is making sure our young ones are taken care of so that our future as Dakota people is assured … It also was clear, through this story and others, that although these were and continue to be hard memories to deal with, always there is pride and dignity in the actions of our women.

Histories and traditions are often handed down in the many hours grandmothers spend caring for their grandchildren. In Britain, women working in the Lancashire factories in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often relied on grandmothers for childcare, as did women who worked in the Portsmouth dockyards in the Second World War. In many contemporary societies marital breakdown and the need to combine paid work and motherhood ensures grandmothers continue to play a role in providing physical, practical and emotional support to their daughters and daughters-in-law. Furthermore, the Helping Hands study of 3,000 over-55s carried out in Britain in 2010 discovered that 65 per cent of what is now being referred to as the ‘sandwich generation’ in Britain struggle to care for both the elderly parents and grandchildren of their family. One in four working families depends on grandparents for childcare in the UK; in Holland the figure is nearer to one in two. In many African communities grandmothers are caring for children orphaned by AIDS. In 2006 the Grandmothers to Grandmothers campaign was launched in Toronto to ‘raise awareness, build solidarity and mobilize funds for community-based organisations that support African grandmothers and the children in their care’.

Has the important role played by grandmothers in conveying women’s history to their grandchildren been overlooked?

Many women it seems are now continuing Lucy’s role as grandmothers of humanity, and indeed proponents of the Grandmother Theory suggest humans’ longevity evolved because grandmothers played a crucial role in taking care of children: ‘Grandmothers’, according to Kristen Hawkes in an interview with the Daily Mail in 2015, ‘are what make us human’.

2 | Venus of Willendorf

Women and Fertility

MAGGIE ANDREWS

The ‘Venus of Willendorf’ is a small female figurine thought to date from the old Stone Age, between 28,000 and 22,000 BCE. Johann Veran found the figurine during excavations led by the archaeologist Joseph Szombathy, near the town of Willendorf in Austria in 1908. It is made from oolitic limestone, measures 110mm in height and is tinted with red ochre; it is now kept in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna.

This is perhaps the most well known of several hundred stone figurines of somewhat curvaceous women found in the area between the Russian Steppes and the Pyrenees, which are collectively known as Venus figurines. This name, which links the figurines to Venus, is perhaps a little confusing as they pre-date by millennia the Roman period, to which the mythical figure of Venus belongs. Venus was the goddess of love, beauty and fertility; and such a name has led to an assumption that these earlier figurines were also fertility goddesses, which were perhaps appealed to by women in order to bring about conception. Certainly the statue is female, and the parts of body associated with childbearing are emphasised: the enlarged stomach, breasts and pubic area, and absence of facial features seem to define this woman by her role in procreation. Furthermore it has been suggested that the red ochre pigment symbolises menstrual blood.

Certainly time and effort were invested in constructing these figurines, but by whom, or how they were used, is hard to gauge. The figures themselves and their feet were particularly small; they seem constructed to be carried or placed on display lying down. They may have been good luck charms, which accompanied nomadic tribes in their search for food – such ample, even obese, proportions are sometimes venerated by groups facing food shortages. While some have suggested they could be cave porn with exaggerated features to appeal to men, others see them as fertility charms given by women to other women as examples of the great fecund mother goddess, perhaps even indicating a matriarchal culture. Emblems of fertility, goddesses, fruits and even animals that appear to reproduce prolifically have a place in many cultures; for example, mistletoe, hazelnuts, pomegranates, and lotus flowers. Indeed in Hindu culture the lotus flower is perceived to grow untouched by the impurity of the muddy waters in which it grows, whereas the abundant reproduction of frogs and rabbits have carried sexual symbolism, and the Easter bunny is an emblem of both rebirth and fertility. Nature and particularly women’s ability to reproduce is a potent and powerful symbol, something to be both revered and feared. When the magazine Vanity Fair displayed in 1991 the heavily pregnant actress Demi Moore on its cover a media controversy ensued. Some news-stands refused to sell the magazine; others enfolded it in brown paper, suggesting such an image was pornographic.

The Venus of Willendorf may be a fertility charm or a great fecund mother goddess.

Arguably for women the ‘sacred call of motherhood’ can be a double-edged sword. Women who do not, or cannot, bear children, historically, have been more likely to be abandoned or divorced – whether infertility was their ‘fault’ or not. In contemporary society, women unable to conceive naturally continue to feel inadequate, isolated by the numerous images of ‘perfect motherhood’ that circulate on various media platforms. In wealthier Western countries, a range of treatments for infertility has become more readily available. In 1978 the birth of the world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was considered a landmark. In vitro fertilisation (IVF) gave hope to many women struggling to conceive, and is now used alongside surrogate motherhood, ova donation and adoption to enable women to become mothers. But in developing countries such as sub-Saharan Africa infertility is also common but medical assistance is hard to obtain, as health programmes are geared towards controlling the population and containing high fertility.

Are women, even in the twenty-first century, defined by their fertility?

Women encounter social and health challenges when going through IVF treatment which involves being injected with powerful drugs that can lead to excruciating headaches, mood swings and spots in front of the eyes. But perhaps it is the emotional rollercoaster of IVF that is most challenging. One woman recalled her experience:

Those years of trying for a baby were hands-down the most difficult in my life. They really changed me. Gradually I became someone I didn’t recognize or even like any more: a baby-obsessed, crazy, tearful nightmare. Never mind crying over newborn photos on Facebook, I once lost it while watching Shrek when it turned out Fiona was pregnant!

Medical and social interventions to enable women to become mothers are not problem free, or value free. Controversy now rages over the practice of women from wealthy Western countries adopting children from Africa or using surrogate mothers in India. As Carole Joffe has pointed out, ‘Adoption, by its very nature, typically brings some combination of pain and loss as well as joy and peace to all involved in the “adoption triangle” of birthmother, child and adoptive parents’. Little wonder, then, that some have begun to question why so many women define themselves by their reproductive capabilities, and have sought to challenge the social pressures on women to have children, arguing there is a need to monitor medical intervention in women’s fertility carefully. It is thousands of years since the Venus of Willendorf was carved but many women still define themselves by their fertility.

3 | London Foundling Hospital Token

Having Illegitimate Children

JANIS LOMAS

The collection of tokens left at the London Foundling Hospital by mothers, mostly unmarried or abandoned, who were unable to keep their babies is a poignant reminder of the difficulties single mothers faced in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

Every child admitted to the hospital was baptised with a new name, so mothers left tokens in the hope of being able to identify their child if they were reunited at some point in the future. 18,000 of these tokens can be seen at the Foundling Museum in London. Sadly, records show that only two children were ever reclaimed by their mothers.

Prior to the hospital being established, children were left at the doors of Poor Law institutions, hospitals or in public places. By the early 1700s the growing population in the cities meant the situation was acute. Thomas Coram, a sea captain arriving in London in 1720, was shocked to see babies and children dying abandoned in the streets. It took Coram nineteen years to overcome prejudice against unmarried mothers and secure a Royal Charter from George II, enabling the London Foundling Hospital to be opened in 1741. Mothers sought to hand over their babies themselves; but this hospital’s acceptance of the baby was not automatic. Women had to appear before a panel of men who questioned them about their respectability; only mothers who ‘proved’ to the panel that they were truly penitent, and were victims rather than deliberate sinners, were allowed to leave their infant.

The care of abandoned children and their unmarried mothers has vexed societies for centuries. In Italy from 1198, to stop desperate women throwing their infants into the River Tiber, the pope decreed babies could be left at the entrance to a foundling hospital – a practice gradually adopted all over Italy, Sicily and many other Catholic countries. In Paris, foundling wheels were introduced in 1638 for mothers to leave their babies anonymously. A revolving door was installed and the baby could be placed on the platform, which rotated. When the infant was inside the building, the mother rang a bell and left. There were 251 wheels in France when the system closed in 1863. Ireland operated a similar scheme from 1730 until 1825, when the Dublin Foundling Hospital was closed due to the high infant mortality rates. Foundling wheels have reappeared since the 1950s in countries seeking to avoid infanticide or child abandonment.

In the United States informal arrangements were virtually the only help for abandoned babies and children prior to the founding of the Children’s Aid Society in the 1850s. From 1854 until 1929, an estimated 200,000 babies and children found on the streets of New York and other large eastern cities were shipped westwards, on so-called ‘orphan trains’ which took them out of the cities to be brought up on farms for a healthier, more wholesome life. Britain operated similar schemes whereby orphans, or those from children’s homes or workhouses, were transported to Australia and Canada up until the 1970s. Those who organised these schemes may have had good intentions, but many children found themselves working without wages and stigmatised within communities as ruffians and potential thieves. The suffering of the mothers who were temporarily unable to care for their children and discovered they had been sent abroad is unimaginable. Aswini Weereratne QC, for the Child Migrant Trust, explained:

There are approximately 2 million single parents in Britain, 90 per cent of whom are mothers.

From their evidence, a number of common themes emerge. They and their families were lied to, many parents were told that their children had been adopted by loving families, some children were told their parents were dead. Some have learnt after years of searching for their records that their parents tried to get them back. One foster mother campaigned to have her foster daughter returned to her from Australia.

With a quarter of children brought up in single-parent families in the UK, has disapproval and judgement of non-traditional families finally ended?

The Catholic and Protestant Churches, who were active in setting up schemes to deal with the children’s homes, ‘wayward’ girls and unmarried mothers, tended to see illegitimacy as a problem that needed to be punished to deter others. The best-known and longest lasting of such institutions were the Magdalene Laundries, which existed in many countries but are mostly commonly associated with Ireland where the regime was widespread. Their name derived from the biblical Mary Magdalene, thought to be a reformed prostitute. Parish priests or families who sought to avoid the shame and expense of a girl having an illegitimate child precipitated this by sending women to the laundries. Mentally unwell girls, those who had committed petty crimes or who had sexually transgressed were also sent there as a punishment. Over 2,000 babies born in Magdalene Laundries were illegally adopted by wealthy American families in return for a donation, while their mothers were forced to work, unpaid, in silence, for gruelling twelve-hour shifts, with little medical care, poor food and no way of leaving. Many women lived and died in the laundries and the child mortality rate was high, as the graves of as many as 800 children at Tuam near Galway testify. The laundries existed for over 200 years with the last only closing in 1996 as home washing machines meant that they had become uneconomic.

From the 1950s onwards, mother and baby homes were seen as a solution to unwanted pregnancies in the UK; there were 172 in 1968, mostly run by church organisations. The only option available to the majority of mothers who gave birth in these homes was to have their child adopted after breastfeeding and caring for it for only six weeks; 16,164 babies were adopted in 1968 alone. Girls or women were then expected to resume their previous life as if nothing had happened. Families often made up a cover story to explain the absence of the young mother from home and the subject was never mentioned again. Girls and young mothers subsequently had no one to talk to about the loss of their child and often suffered a lifetime of regret and suffering. A common theme in the attitudes towards illegitimate children and their mothers over the centuries is the lack of sympathy or counselling for mothers dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, the trauma of birth and the loss of their child.

4 | Terracotta Baby Feeder

Infant Feeding and Formula Baby Milk

MAGGIE ANDREWS

The 4,000-year-old terracotta baby feeder provided archaeologists with evidence that, although breast milk is ideal for babies, for thousands of years women have needed or wanted to find substitutes.

Babies require nurturing even when their mothers are unavailable due to any number of reasons, such as illness, death, domestic and paid labour, social expectations, looking after farms or other members of their families. Besides wet nurses, animal milk and other substances have been used to feed babies. Cow’s milk and boiled wheat kernels were suggested to sustain babies in Egypt in the fifteenth century BCE. In later times advice books provided recipes for pap, made of flour or breadcrumbs cooked in water sometimes with milk added, gruel and thin porridge as sustenance for the very young. In 1867, the first factory-made formula milk for babies made its appearance and soon became popular in Europe and the USA.

Evidence of the use of wet nurses has been identified as early as eighteenth-century BCE Babylon and also in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, where it was most common among royalty or the wealthy. Predictably, the process of selecting an ideal wet nurse provoked much debate, with the quality and supply of milk not being the only concern. In ancient Greece, it was thought that, ideally, wet nurses should have brown hair, a calm temperament and not be pregnant or menstruating. In the medieval and early modern periods, when wet nurses were usually selected by fathers, there was a preference for those who had previously had a male child, although temperament was still important. Wet nurses were required to be of good character, neither vicious nor ‘sluttish’, and according to Thomas Phaire, writing in 1545: ‘sober, honest and chaste, well formed, amiable and cheerful, so that she may accustom the infant to mirth. No drunkard, vicious or sluttish [women], for they corrupt the nature of the child.’

Should formula baby milk, like cigarettes, carry a health warning?

Puritan theology during the Reformation suggested that non-breastfeeding mothers who employed wet nurses were selfish and lacking in love for both their child and God. Breastfeeding became almost a religious duty. Nevertheless the practice of using black women slaves as wet nurses became common throughout all American slave-owning societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To take on the role of wet nurse, a woman had usually either lost her child or was compelled to neglect or abandon them. The image of the black ‘mammy’ holding a thriving white child, which has become a sentimental, softer image of slavery, often masks a more complex history. The use of black women’s bodies allowed white women to recover after childbirth and return to what some saw as a frivolous lifestyle.

Many countries, such as Brazil, abandoned using slaves as wet nurses when ideas of scientific motherhood became popular at the end of the nineteenth century. At this time other alternatives to breastfeeding also came under criticism. In early twentieth-century Britain, with one in five children not living to reach their fifth birthday, attention turned to maternal care and the welfare of babies. The discovery that there was lower infant mortality among breastfed babies led not only to disapproval of mothers who went out to work, but assertions of neglect by them from middle-class observers with little understanding of the pressures and the poverty that working-class women endured. Few working-class women could afford formula; struggling with domestic or paid labour, many instead used the cheapest available condensed milk diluted with hot water to feed their infants, which unfortunately had little nutritional value. Unscrupulous manufacturers marketed a brand of skimmed cow’s milk as ‘Goat’, exploiting the belief that goat’s milk was the best substitute for breast milk, even though the product had little to recommend it. The lack of knowledge and means to sterilise feeding bottles was a particular problem for poor families, especially as feeding bottles could be made from pewter, tin plate, earthenware or porcelain; some were even attached to long tubes with a form of teat on the end, enabling babies to suckle on demand, almost feeding themselves. The tubes were difficult to clean and became a breeding ground for bacteria. Little wonder such baby feeders became nicknamed the ‘Murderer’ or the ‘Killer’.

Medieval wet nurses were required to be of good character, not vicious or ‘sluttish’.

In 1974, the charity War on Want published a report entitled ‘The Baby Killer’, written by Mike Muller; he argued that what was becoming a worldwide trend away from breastfeeding was significantly influenced by the marketing of the baby food industry. For those living in poverty, with poor housing and sanitation and impure water, bottle-feeding led to infection and diarrhoea which can kill babies, especially if they have not had the initial dose of antibodies in the colostrum (the milk-like substance produced in the first few days after birth). Furthermore ‘stretching’ or over-dilution of milk powder can cause malnutrition. Consequently, in developing countries:

Babies are dying because their mothers bottle-feed them with western-style infant milk. Many that do not die are drawn into a vicious cycle of malnutrition and disease that will leave them physically and intellectually stunted for life.

When Muller’s pamphlet was translated into Swedish with the title ‘Nestlé Kill Babies’, the company successfully sued, but the bad publicity led to a widespread boycott of the company’s products. Across the world, 7 million children under 5 years of age die each year, many from preventable causes, and nearly half are newborns whose chances of survival would be drastically improved by breastfeeding. Consequently the charity Save the Children has recently suggested formula baby milk should carry health warning messages, as cigarettes do. Other campaigners point out this will only add to the guilt experienced by women who want to breastfeed but find they cannot. The World Health Organisation now recommends exclusive breastfeeding of infants for the first six months of life, but many women cannot afford to give up work for this long, especially if, as in the USA, there is no statutory right to paid maternity leave. Many mothers, seeking to maintain their families’ financial survival, their health or sanity, continue to choose the age-old tradition of using bottles and baby feeders, modern equivalents of 4,000-year-old terracotta feeders.

5 | Postcard of Hottentot Venus

Pornography and Objectifying Women

MAGGIE ANDREWS

Saartje Baartman, a South African woman referred to as the Hottentot Venus, was brought to England in 1810. Baartman, born among the Khoikhoi (Hottentot) or Khoisan (Bushmen) people, was displayed semi-naked with African beads and ostrich feathers as a sideshow attraction, first in Piccadilly, Bartholomew Fair and Haymarket, and then throughout London, the provinces and Ireland. She was then sold to an animal trainer in France, where she died in 1815.

One sympathetic onlooker noted how this spectacle of otherness was ‘ordered to move backwards and forwards and come out and go into her cage, more like a bear on a chain than a human being’.

Her subjugation and objectification served to legitimise racist and imperialist oppression, and her degradation is symbolic of the treatment of black women, both at that time and often since. Press coverage and public responses to Baartman, whether on display in carnivals or the private homes of the wealthy, obsessed on the size of her buttocks. Her body was referred to, reproduced, commented on and observed in cartoons, ballads, vaudeville plays and numerous illustrations. In these Baartman was sexualised, reproducing and reinforcing nineteenth-century attitudes to black women in medical and scientific literature, and in paintings and cartoons; postcards of Baartman’s body were produced for men to leer at.

Nineteenth-century culture, in many ways, suppressed and was anxious about sexuality. Black women like Baartman were portrayed as eroticised, animalistic, lustful and depraved, regarded as less than human, a source of fear and fascination. The scientific community of naturalists and ethnologists wrote learned treatises on Baartman, measuring, drawing and scrutinising her body when she was alive and dead. Three scientists inspected her in Paris in 1815 and considered Baartman to be more similar to an orang-utan than ‘a Negro’, and concluded Hottentots ‘were barely human’. Hottentot women were reputed to have elongated labia; during her lifetime Baartman did not permit inspection of her genitals, but after her death her body was investigated by Napoleon’s surgeon general, Georges Cuvier, the chair of anatomy of animals at the Museum of Natural History in France. Following Cuvier’s scientific exploration and writing on Baartman, images of her genitalia and buttocks appeared in anatomy textbooks; a jar containing her genitals, a skeleton and cast of her were on display in the Musée de l’Homme until 1976. When Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa in 1994 he urged François Mitterand to return the remains; this did not happen until 2002, when Baartman was finally buried in South Africa. As journalist Chris McGreal asked at this time: ‘This young woman was treated as if she was something monstrous. But where in this affair is the true monstrosity?’

The models and images of Baartman conserved in museums and reproduced in textbooks symbolically dismantled her, dissecting her into parts, turning her body into objects and licensing unregulated voyeurism, as pornography has arguably done since. While there are examples of images and materials created for sexual stimulation in the seventeenth century, well before Baartman’s arrival in Britain, even in the middle of the nineteenth century they were too expensive for mass consumption. Pornographic postcards became more affordable towards the end of the nineteenth century, and in the second half of the twentieth century glossy porn magazines appeared. Shifting attitudes to sexuality, censorship and new publishing techniques enabled Playboy to be launched in the USA in 1953, and the British magazine Mayfair was first published in 1965. New media technologies have continued to increase the platforms through which pornography has spread problematic images of women for the male gaze.

Saartje Baartman was displayed semi-naked as a sideshow attraction in the early nineteenth century.

There were objections to Baartman being exhibited for others’ interest and amusement in the early nineteenth century; similarly more recent pornography has its critics. Some of the most vociferous of these critics were the radical feminists of the 1970s and ’80s, when the American feminist and activist Robin Morgan proclaimed that ‘pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice’, suggesting that pornography not only degraded women but encouraged violence against them.

A number of women campaigned against pornography, for example in Minneapolis, where they demonstrated and visited porn stores once a week in the 1980s. Protestors stood behind customers and one, Jacqui Thompson, explained: ‘It makes the people in the stores uncomfortable, and that’s the point.’ On 30 December 1983 the city council voted to ban pornography – a decision later vetoed by Mayor Don Fraser, causing women to protest against him. Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon’s attempt to introduce civil rights anti-pornography legislation in 1988 in the USA was also unsuccessful.

Does the sexualisation and objectification of women in pornography have an impact on attitudes and behaviour towards women in general?

A number of feminists have, however, argued against censorship, and pointed out it contains a complex and contradictory range of representations of women while evidence that pornography is linked to violence against women is inconclusive. Others have sought to celebrate and explore ‘fantasies’ and their ability to dislodge traditional notions of women as sexually passive. The American singer Madonna’s popularity has at times rested on her ability to re-appropriate the iconography of pornography in pop videos such as ‘Justify my Love’ (1990) and her coffee-table book Sex (1992). More recently the novel Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) topped bestseller lists around the world and led to the genre of ‘mummy porn’. Like Baartman, Fifty Shades of Grey embodies many of the anxieties and preoccupations of its era. The exploration of bondage, dominance and submission exaggerates and explores some of the uncertainties around sexuality and relationships in an age of self-governance, individualism and self-gratification. Unlike those who made money out of selling postcards of the Hottentot Venus, the process of producing mummy porn does not degrade actual women, as happened to Saartje Baartman in the nineteenth century.

6 | Early Twentieth-Century Medical Vibrator

Masturbation

MAGGIE ANDREWS

Vibrators produced at the beginning of the twentieth century were initially intended for medical purposes; their ability to massage muscles and relieve tension apparently had health benefits for men and women. The medical profession’s enthusiasm for vibrators was, however, limited and the product was quickly rebranded for the consumer market.

More than sixty vibrator patents were issued in the years 1905–20 in the USA, and by 1909 there were more than twenty companies producing vibrators there, including the Eureka Vibrator Co.; all advertised the health and beauty benefits of their devices in newspapers. These included removing wrinkles and curing nervous headaches, but people found other uses for the little devices, which the advertising ‘acknowledged’. Although any newspaper being too open about the use of vibrators for masturbation would have risked prosecution, in 1902 one advert suggested that the vibrator would ensure that ‘All the pleasure of youth will throb within you’.

There were forerunners to these electric vibrators: the steam-fired manipulator invented by the American physician George Taylor in 1869 has been seen as the prototype of the modern vibrator. His patented designs, which, according to historian Rachael Maines, ‘included a table with a cutout for the lower abdomen, in which a vibrating sphere, driven by a steam engine, massaged the pelvic area’, were for products intended to be purchased by doctors and spas.

The first electromechanical vibrator did not appear until 1882 – an invention credited to the British physician J. Mortimer Granville. He used it to treat nervous problems in men and women, believing that disease could result from what were supposed to be healthy vibrations in the body’s nerves being out of balance. The credibility of his theories was called into question in a letter from a physician to the editor of Medical News in 1898, pointing out:

Is women’s sexuality too often seen in terms of what pleases men?

After many years of vibratory therapy I am now convinced that its value is greatly exaggerated, and depends more on the creation of suggestion than anything else … This form of therapy has become so popular with hypochondriacs that a few years ago a company with a large capital was formed here to exploit the ‘household’ vibrator.

It has been suggested that the vibrator was invented to administer vulva massage to women with hysteria. A common myth in the Victorian era was that women with symptoms ranging from loss of sexual appetite, fatigue and anxiety to mild depression were suffering from female hysteria, which could apparently be cured by pelvic massage leading to hysterical paroxysm (orgasm). Despite the absence of any evidence to support this myth about the practices of Victorian doctors, it remains tenacious. In 2012 the film Hysteria suggested that a doctor dealing with numerous women suffering from hysteria invented the vibrator to alleviate carpal tunnel syndrome.

Vibrators and female masturbation remained shrouded in euphemism and shame for much of the twentieth century but the work of sexologists in the period following the Second World War began to change this. The Hite Report (1976) drew upon over 3,000 questionnaires completed by women to argue that for many women heterosexual penetrative sex was less than satisfactory. The survey suggested that 8 per cent of women preferred sexual activity with other women, 53 per cent preferred sexual activity with themselves and 17 per cent preferred no sexual activity at all. Simultaneously the slogan of the feminist movement – ‘the personal is political’ – made sexuality, orgasm and masturbation deeply political issues. There was discussion within women’s groups, magazines and feminist novels about the pressure many women felt to fake orgasm. In her seminal article ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’ (1970), Anne Koedt argued that ‘women have been defined sexually in terms of what pleases men; our own biology has not been properly analysed’.

The Hite Report in the 1970s suggested that 53 per cent of women preferred sexual activity with themselves.

Some feminists, such as Betty Dodson, encouraged women’s exploration of their own bodies; her bestseller Sex for One (1973) and women-only masturbation classes called ‘Bodysex’ made her one of the leaders of pro-sex feminism. She argued many women were ‘afraid of sex because they say it’s too controversial. But I feel it’s because they’re personally too conflicted. They don’t want to masturbate, they want Prince Charming. It’s Walt Disney. Puke.’

Notwithstanding Betty Dodson’s comments, popular culture, particularly in the USA, embraced female masturbation by the end of the twentieth century. The Eurythmics’ popular feminist anthem in 1985 included the chorus:

Sisters are doing it for themselves,

Standing on their own two feet,

And ringing on their own bells.

Sisters are doing it for themselves.

It was the introduction of the dual-action vibrator, the Rabbit, in 1984, which made vibrators and female masturbation mainstream. It has been described as ‘one of the most visible contemporary signs of active female sexuality’ and featured in the HBO hit series Sex and the City (1998), in which heroine Charlotte becomes addicted to the pleasures of her Rabbit. A further indication of shifting attitudes can be seen in Desperate Housewives (2004) star Eva Longoria’s statement: ‘I give Rabbit vibrators to all my girlfriends … They scream when they unwrap it. The best gift I can give them is an orgasm.’ However, women’s enjoyment and expression of their sexuality still remains framed by both experiences and legal and cultural restraints.

Many religious groups still oppose masturbation, and selling sex toys was illegal in Texas until 2008. Mandy Van Deven pointed out in Bitch magazine (2010):

I think there’s an expectation for feminists to be all sexually liberated and uninhibited, but sex is complicated, even when it’s solo. And masturbation isn’t intuitive for everyone, particularly those of us who have been victims of sexual abuse. I wish the conversation about feminism and masturbation was broader and made more room for complex and uncomfortable truths about sexuality.

7 | Sanitary Towels

Female Hygiene Products

JANIS LOMAS

The invention of the sanitary towel transformed the difficulties and potential embarrassment of menstruation for millions of women. The first towels were produced in the UK by Southall’s in 1888. In the USA, Lister’s produced the first commercial disposable sanitary towel in 1896. However, the cost of these products meant that in both countries they were beyond the means of the majority of women; it was to be decades before they were in common use for most women in Europe and the USA. In many parts of the developing world they are still not available and women are still subjected to real difficulties and worry every month of their reproductive lives.

Before sanitary towels, women had no option but to use initially leaves and grass, or whatever scraps of material or rags were available, which were boil washed and reused after use. Women also fashioned their own reusable towels from wadding used for quilting with an outer layer of cheesecloth or cotton rags. At times in rural areas, rabbit’s fur or sheep’s fleece was cut into strips with the skin side of the fleece serving as the outer layer, which was sometimes rubbed with tallow to make it more leak proof. When away from home women had to produce a quantity of homemade sanitary towels or cotton strips to take with them and it was one of the selling points of the commercially made towels that they were convenient for travelling. By the end of the nineteenth century, American women could also buy rubber bloomers to ensure there was no leakage. Sold for $13.50 per dozen, they were advertised as reversible and with side openings for ventilation.

When factory-made sanitary towels were finally introduced, they created an advertising problem for manufacturers, as it was not acceptable for such intimate products to be mentioned openly. This British advertisement from 1894 shows the discretion that had to be used in advertising and selling these items:

For private parcels of Southall’s Sanitary Towels by post securely packed – with private address labels, quite free from anything to attract observation; write to – The Lady Manager, 17, Bull Street, Birmingham – this department being entirely managed by Ladies.

Some stores even had a moneybox where women could place the correct money and take a packet of sanitary towels without having to ask the shopkeeper for the item. Similar discretion can be seen in this letter sent to Herbert Gladstone, the British Home Secretary, in August 1908. R.C. Wyatt, the husband of a suffragette, wrote to him about the failure of the prison authorities to provide suffragette prisoners with sanitary towels. With typical Edwardian reticence, he attempted to make his complaint clear without being explicit. He asked why ‘at certain times, certain indispensable clothing is not provided … an outrage on decency and health’. He requested the Home Secretary to stop this ‘filthy punishment’; however, it is not known if he received a reply, or even if Gladstone understood what his complaint was about.

A survey commissioned by the Indian government in 2011 found that only 12 per cent of women used sanitary towels, and in much of the Indian sub-continent women are still not allowed to prepare food or attend religious festivals when menstruating. In Nepal, despite the practice having been officially banned since 2005, some women in rural areas are still exiled from their home and forced to live in the forest, caves or in crude huts while menstruating, as they are thought to be unclean and that if allowed to remain in the home others will get sick or the house will catch fire. Similarly in the Hollywood horror movie Carrie (1976) the title character has a complete freak-out in the showers when she starts menstruating, fearing she is bleeding to death. Instead she is given supernatural powers to enact evil deeds and revenge her enemies. Such superstition and the continuing taboo and embarrassment continue to cause shame and untold misery around a natural bodily function for hundreds of thousands of women and girls.

A survey suggests that women in Britain spend approximately £20,000 on sanitary products in their lifetime.

The earliest historical record of tampon use is in ancient Egypt, where medical records describe tampons fashioned from papyrus. The physician Hippocrates, in ancient Greece, described women using tampons of lint wrapped around a small piece of wood, while the Romans used wool. At a later point, sheep’s wool, cotton wool balls and sponges also had a role to play as homemade tampons. It wasn’t until 1929 that tampons with a cardboard applicator were invented, while Tampax came on to the market in the mid-1930s.

The history of the sanitary towel and tampon represents a turning point in women’s lives. Before sanitary towels women were often afraid to travel or play sports during their period, and menstruation was seen as something to be embarrassed about and never mentioned. It was often referred to as ‘the curse’. This has gradually changed and now sanitary towels and tampons are advertised openly in many countries, and shame and embarrassment are becoming much less commonplace. The introduction of the sanitary towel provided a hygienic, convenient and disposable way of dealing with menstruation, and it relegated what was a major obstacle to women taking a full active role in all aspects of life to a mere inconvenience. Its introduction gave women more freedom; not simply physical freedom, but also freedom from awkwardness, embarrassment and prejudice.

Why is period pain often dismissed as normal?

8 | Powick Asylum Patients’ Notes, Volume 19

The Treatment and Attitudes Towards Women and Madness

MAGGIE ANDREWS

Powick Asylum patients’ notes, volume 19, records that 26-year-old farmer’s wife Ellen Bullock was admitted to the asylum as a private patient on 8 August 1877. Married without children, she was not considered suicidal but she used obscene language, threw her supper and plate through a window, and apparently suffered with many delusions, which seemed to centre on a rejection of her marital status.

She removed her wedding ring and claimed she wanted to marry again into another family. Her ‘irrationality’ and eccentric behaviour improved dramatically when she was in the asylum; she was discharged in May 1879, only to be readmitted in September 1882 when she stated her husband ought to have been sent to the asylum instead of her, had cut up her clothes and threatened her husband with a pair of scissors. He ceased to pay her asylum fees in December 1882, declaring the marriage was over and from that moment on her health improved; when she left the asylum this time she never returned. It seems Ellen Bullock’s mental health problems were a response to her tempestuous marriage and the circumstances of her life.

Women historically have been linked to insanity, seen as hysterical, irrational and over-emotional in comparison with men’s apparently innate rationality. The records, which indicate that more men were admitted to mental institutions in Britain in the eighteenth century than women, do not, however, support this. Ellen Bullock fell foul of the assumptions about femininity when some husbands and medical practitioners conspired to use insanity and private medical institutions to sideline inconvenient women and curtail their actions and voices. Hannah Mackenzie, for example, was incarcerated in Peter Day’s Paddington ‘madhouse’ at her husband’s instigation as he sought to continue an adulterous affair with her niece in 1766.

Elizabeth Ware Packard was similarly detained in a mental institution, in Illinois, USA, for contravening the social conventions of appropriate female behaviour in 1860. She had expressed radical religious views, which her husband considered detrimental to his career as a minister. She was released three years later only to be imprisoned, in her home, by her husband. In the ensuing court battle leading to a divorce, she was financially ruined and lost custody of her six children. She wrote a memoir of her experiences, which played a role in campaigns to alter the process of committing women – and men – to asylums. Such campaigns were given a boost on both sides of the Atlantic by the publication of Wilkie Collins’s sensational novel The Woman in White, about two women incarcerated in a private medical asylum by an unscrupulous husband seeking to appropriate his wife’s fortune. Initially serialised in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round, beginning in November 1859, the book was turned into a play and translated into other languages. The Woman in White perfume, bonnets and clothes were sold in shops as the book became a publishing phenomenon.

In Britain, more men were committed to mental asylums in the eighteenth century than women.

It was not only the committal of women to asylums which was controversial in the nineteenth century, but, then as now, the efficacy of the treatments which were administered by the medical profession. In the 1860s, Dr Baker Brown gained some notoriety by undertaking operations to surgically remove the clitoris of women he considered to be suffering from insanity. He had been president of the Medical Society in London and helped found St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, but his actions are indicative of the era’s fear and anxiety about the female body and sexuality. His rather troubling definition of symptoms of insanity in women included: epilepsy, masturbation, undertaking too much reading or expressing a desire to be a nurse. He asserted that the first signs of women’s degeneration from masturbation, through to epilepsy and insanity to eventual death could be identified when a woman ‘becomes restless and excited, or melancholy and retiring, listless and indifferent to the social influences and domestic life’ (emphasis in original).

Is there still a tendency to see women as hysterical, irrational, mad and over-emotional compared with men and their apparently innate rationality?

Baker Brown was expelled from the Obstetrical Society in 1867, but women continued to be confined in mental institutions for what society considered aberrant sexuality, having an illegitimate child or sex before marriage well into the twentieth century.

While the practice of the medical profession and definitions of madness have been strongly gendered through the supposition that women are psychologically weaker, or assumptions of what constitutes ‘normal’ female behaviour, treatment of women who are suffering the genuine distress of mental illness has changed dramatically. Had Ellen Bullock entered Powick Asylum in the middle of the twentieth century, she might have been given electric shock treatment (ECT), while in the 1960s and ’70s she would probably have taken tranquilisers such as Valium, promoted by drug companies for its capacity to enable women to embrace their duties as wives and mothers. Since 1987, selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac have often been used to help women adjust to their lives. In the twenty-first century, Ellen would also have had a range of alternative ways to escape a difficult marriage, but many women continue to suffer from depression and mental illness as a result of the circumstances of their lives and their inability to bring about a change in their personal situation.

9 | Chinese Baby Sling

Methods for Transporting Small Children

MAGGIE ANDREWS

The beautifully embroidered baby sling from the Bai region of south-west China is both a celebration of a young baby and a traditional, convenient method for mothers to carry their children while working.

Egyptian artwork from the era of the pharaohs depicts children being carried in slings, and since then women have continued to find ingenious ways of carrying their infants. A 4–5ft length of fabric is often used to secure babies on to their mothers’ backs, front or side. Inuit mothers use a special Amauti coat wrapped around mother and baby to keep their infants warm, while in Peru brightly coloured woven shawls secure little ones to their mothers’ backs. Carrying children in these ways has been particularly important for women undertaking domestic and agricultural work while also caring for a small baby. Traditionally many Bai women lived on farms, taking a role in harvesting and weeding crops such as tea, sugarcane, tobacco and wheat and working in rice fields. In recent years Chinese Bai women have also made and sold their embroidered handicraft items, like this sling, to tourists.