Abstract

Childbearing was a frequent and meaningful part of many women’s lives in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Anglophone world. Equally, fashion and textiles were matters of great consequence to women’s bodies and everyday lives. Yet scant scholarly work exists on the intersection between these two, or the question of dressing maternal bodies in a period of great change for both fashion and reproduction. This is particularly true of object-based analyses, an omission often attributed to a lack of survivals and the perceived militant modesty of many sources on the intimate management of women’s bodies. Consequently, there exists a significant silence, something of a pregnant pause, in histories of dress, women, and childbearing in the period.

This thesis tackles that omission through a wide-ranging study of the material culture of maternity and dress contained in museum collections in the United Kingdom, U.S.A, Canada and Australia, focusing on 1750-1900. Using a methodological combination of detailed object-based analysis and perspectives on embodiment in dress, this research identified and examined over 300 garments in 51 collections. In so doing this work builds on existing studies of individual maternity garments, specific styles or maternal dress in smaller regions. The challenge of studying maternity wear in a time before the term existed is addressed by instead documenting maternal traces, echoes of the pregnant or breastfeeding body contained in the shape, stains, and stitch marks of surviving garments. These traces are then contextualised and contrasted with archival sources, health and advice literature, advertising, and visual sources to create an object-led account of the variety and richness of the dressed maternal body in the material record. Such an account confounds lingering perceptions of unilaterally limiting domesticity and universal antenatal confinement by placing dressed maternal bodies firmly within the everyday, sociable and fashioned worlds of the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

Centered on notions of visibility, domesticity and fashionability, the discussion employs surviving garments to illustrate the negotiated relationship between dress and reproductive experience in the period. From maternity corsets to altered evening gowns, royal celebrations to colonial passenger ships, the variety of that relationship is also traced through decades of changing silhouettes and across social and geographic boundaries. It concludes with the development of expressly designed and marketed maternity wear at the close of the nineteenth century amidst falling fertility rates and the birth of ready-to-wear clothing. Encounters with the dressed maternal body in the material record argue for the contribution of surviving dress to understandings of both fashion and childbearing, and provide historical context to ongoing contestations of the simultaneously visible, pregnant, and fashionable body.