SEX AND SENSIBILITY

The rise and fall of the Bluestockings.

- MARGARET TALBOT

It's easy to imagine why a clever Englishwoman of the eighteenth century might have wished to move about the world as a disembodied mind. Virginity was a corporeal asset that could lose all its value in an instant. Your bed partner might well be suffering from a raging S.T.D., for which a common treatment was a mercury douche (just as ineffective and as toxic as it sounds). Childbirth, before the advent of obstetric anesthesia, in the mid-nineteenth century, was a harrowing and not infrequently deadly trial. In 1764, when the talented writer and salonnière Hester Thrale gave birth, after three days of agonizing labor, to the first of her children, her attending physician pronounced, “It is a Lady, Madam; destined to bear what you are this Moment freed from." Thrale would go on to fourteen more pregnancies in sixteen years "holding my Head over a Bason 6 months in the Year," as she wrote.