Stephen Bartlett
Tara Mulder.
I was hooked at the introduction: “This book is a birth story…. This book is also a feminist history of the cultural forces that shaped the experience of giving birth in the ancient Roman world.”
In A Womb of One’s Own: Lost Histories of Childbirth in Ancient Rome (University of California Press), Tara Mulder, associate professor of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at UW-Madison, does more than play on the title of the famous essay by Virginia Woolf. Like Woolf, Mulder centers fundamental human experiences that, in Woolf’s words, remain “all but absent from history.”
Take Cyrilla, whose story opens the book. It’s a summer in Rome between 162 and 166 CE. She’s been experiencing “flux,” or heavy vaginal discharge. Attempted remedies have failed. (Based on her reproductive age, the hot summer season, and her physician’s self-proclaimed success through stress reduction, herbal anti-infectives, a protein-dense diet, and time, my guess is that Cyrilla suffered from bacterial vaginosis and yeast overgrowth, common conditions today.)
The only reason we learn about Cyrilla is because her wealthy husband hired the physician Galen, a “prolific and self-aggrandizing practitioner,” according to Mulder, who left the single largest surviving body of medical texts in Ancient Greek. And the only reason Cyrilla has a name is because Mulder gives her one. As with all his female patients, Galen refers to her only in relation to a man, in this case, “Boethus’s wife.”
History as it’s told has resulted in “a kind of pornification of ancient Rome,” Mulder tells Isthmus. Hundreds of explicit sexual images from ancient Rome, “many of them depicting sexual violence,” have come down in the record, yet fewer than ten descriptions of childbirth survive.
“We get the impression that Rome was this hypersexed, hyperviolent culture,” says Mulder, rather than “a place where women were having periods, managing their fertility through birth control and abortion, helping each other through pregnancy and childbirth, and spending years of their lives breastfeeding. Anyone who has gone through these processes knows how earthshaking and transformative they are.”
Mulder suggests that the prioritization of manly exploits over childbearing is “the kind of imbalance that emerges when you have a lot of men telling stories about war and almost no women telling stories about birth.”
The majority of passages from ancient texts used in the book are translated from the original Greek or Latin by Mulder herself. She used literary, bioarcheological, and funerary sources to recover unsung stories of the lives of girls and women in ancient Rome.
As a daughter of a homebirth midwife and herself an assistant at more than two dozen births, Mulder also drew from her own experiences. The approach, she says, lent itself to the book’s “series of short, evocative vignettes, capturing the fragmentary, but often still vivid bits of evidence that survive.”
One woman, empress Julia Agrippina (15-59 CE), did write about her birth experience, and Mulder describes the breech birth in detail. As the elite and literate younger sister of the emperor Caligula, Agrippina was able and motivated to document the birth of her only child, the infamous emperor Nero. “The fact that it was a breech birth — and that both she and her son survived — shows that birth in antiquity wasn’t always as dangerous as it is made out to be.”
Although Agrippina’s own account of her birthing experience doesn’t survive, it’s referred to in other accounts, including from Pliny the Elder. Mulder notes, “The fact that she wrote about it, suggests that at least some women in ancient Rome were interested in telling their birth stories.” Like all birth stories, those related in A Womb of One’s Own promise readers an odyssey that’s both unique and universal.
Tara Mulder will appear on Oct. 17 in conversation with Kate Phelps of UW-Madison Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.
