It's Always More Complicated

I suppose it's remotely possible that there's someone with a similar name to mine for whom this would be a relevant conference:

The ITISE 2026 (12th International conference on Time Series and Forecasting) seeks to provide a discussion forum for scientists, engineers, educators and students about the latest ideas and realizations in the foundations, theory, models and applications for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research encompassing disciplines of mathematics, econometric, statistics, forecaster, computer science, etc in the field of time series analysis and forecasting.

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I have discovered a new 'offputting phrase that, found in blurb, causes you to put the book down as if radioactive': 'this gargantuan work of supernatural existentialism' - even without the name of the author - Karl Ove Knausgård - who has apparently moved on from interminable autofiction to interminable this.

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A certain Mr JJ, that purports to be an Art Critick, on long history of artistic rivalries (between Bloke Artists, natch):

Shunning competition makes the Turner Prize feel pointless. It may be why there are no more art heroes any more.
Artistic competition goes to the essence of critical discrimination. TS Eliot said someone who liked all poetry would be very dull to talk to about poetry. Double header exhibitions that rake up old rivalries are not shallow, but help us all be critics and understand that loving means choosing. If you come out of Turner and Constable admiring both artists equally, you probably haven’t truly felt either. And if you prefer Constable, it’s pistols at dawn.

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I rather loved this by Lucy Mangan, and will be adopting the term 'frothers' forthwith:

I like to grab a cup of warm cider and settle down with as many gift guides as I can and enjoy the rage they fuel among people who have misunderstood what many might feel was the fairly simple concept of gift guides entirely. I am particularly fond of people who look at a list headed, say, “Stocking stuffers for under £50” and respond by commenting on how £50 is a ridiculous amount of money to be spending on a stocking stuffer. They are closely followed in my pantheon of greats by those who see something like “25 affordable luxuries for loved ones” and can only type “Affordable BY WHOM?!?!” before falling to the ground in a paroxysm of ill-founded self-righteousness. On and on it goes. I love it. Never change, frothers. You are the gift that keeps on giving.

Further to that expose of freebirthers, A concerned NHS midwife responds to an article about the Free Birth Society

Not sure these links are particularly appropriate, but maybe so.

Well, I do remember her saying she scarcely noticed The Change, though she did nuance that statement by adding that she had so much else going on at the time (eldercare and other stuff) she didn't have time to notice:

Yet more on monetising the menopause: Menopause getting you down? Don’t worry, the wellness industry has a very pricey solution for you.

I am probably being horribly cynical, but when somebody goes for a home birth after a first high risk experience of parturition, one does wonder if some kind of wellness woowoo was in the mix (“She had read or heard somewhere that there was less chance of bleeding at home and that is why she wanted a home birth.”)? but this is a dreadful story: 'Gross failure’ led to deaths of mother and baby in Prestwich home birth.

This is also a really grim story about reproductive politics in Brazil: Two More Weeks: The Brutality Behind Brazil’s Reproductive Politics:

In complicated childbirth scenarios, when the life of the pregnant person and the fetus are in conflict, therapeutic abortion has historically been considered the last resort. But in Brazil, since the nineteenth century, this solution has been replaced by the cesarean operation. This was not based on medical reasons. Cesarean sections, up until the early twentieth century, were rudimentary procedures, almost always fatal to the birthing person. What motivated its adoption in Brazil was based on different logics: religious, legal, and moral. The cesarean became an acceptable alternative to abortion because it allowed the fetus to be born, even if the birthing parent died. The nineteenth-century theological and medical debates that gave rise to this sacrificial logic still shape birth in Brazil.

One in 32 births in 2023 [in the UK] were the result of in vitro fertilisation, up 34% from one in 43 in 2013, according to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA)

I admit this sounds rather startling, but then, being a historian of reproductive health among other things, I think of the fact that though we sometimes think our poor ancestresses were popping out progeny pretty much nonstop until death or menopause arrived, in actuality, fertility and subfertility were A Thing, historically. (Let us consider certain famed historical examples and a plethora of folktales on this theme.)

I have remarked heretofore about the assumption that Wo Unto The Sperms of the Modern Man, They Are Weak and In Decline, when I cannot see that there is any sound baseline of what the average male's average sperm count was and whether the little swimmers were even in prime condition at that even a very few decades ago. One assumes that any samples preserved in sperm banks (if they are and supposing they have not themselves deteriorated over time) would have been prime stuff from healthy young specimens. (Though given some of the stories that have come out about dodgy fertility docs, perhaps not.)

So this is not necessarily a story of Wo Wo Fertility B Declining, with side-order of Wymmynz B selfishly waiting Too Long to progenate, but of a problem which used to exist and was at the very least Not At All Easy To Fix (hopes and prayers, mostly, and try to relax....) has some chance of being resolved.

Okay, some percentage is presumably LGBTQ+ couples/constellations forming families.

And some of it is Older Mothers though again, historically, women have gone on Havin Babbyz well into their 40s and (Journal of Anecdotes Told to Me By Committee Members of Reproductive Health Charities) these days a significant % of abortions in the UK involve women who have misleadingly supposed from media myth that At Their Advanced Age their ovaries have shrivelled up and their fertility fallen off a cliff.

Though this is interesting:

The number of women freezing their eggs also increased sharply, with cycles up from 4,700 in 2022 to 6,900 in 2023. Egg freezing increased most among women in their 30s, but the number using their stored frozen eggs remained low, the report said.

The Egg: A story of extraction, exploitation and opportunity: this is grim, though I seem to recall another piece of rather similar tenor about commercial surrogacy. Can't see that I posted it however.

This seems related, in its argument that the reproductive process is not this wonderful simple natural thing:

There is an inherent tension between two basic facts about childbirth. On the one hand, it has happened billions and billions of times in the course of human history and it has been successful in a wide range of settings, from neolithic caves to state-of-the-art hospitals. On the other, it is objectively dangerous in many cases.
This tension can be felt in much of the modern popular discourse on birth. On my Instagram feed, there are depictions of unmedicated home births in a bathtub surrounded by flowers and a caption about how birth has got too medicalised. Some commenters are quick to note that, in their case, having that medical help was life-saving. To put it most starkly: yes, people have been giving birth at home for millions of years, but a lot of them died.

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And, not unrelated.... The male breadwinner nuclear family is not the ‘traditional’ human family, and promotion of this myth may have adverse health consequences:

The importance of social support for parental and child health and wellbeing is not yet sufficiently widely recognized. The widespread myth in Western contexts that the male breadwinner–female homemaker nuclear family is the ‘traditional’ family structure leads to a focus on mothers alone as the individuals with responsibility for child wellbeing. Inaccurate perceptions about the family have the potential to distort academic research and public perceptions, and hamper attempts to improve parental and child health. These perceptions may have arisen partly from academic research in disciplines that focus on the Western middle classes, where this particular family form was idealized in the mid-twentieth century, when many of these disciplines were developing their foundational research. By contrast, evidence from disciplines that take a cross-cultural or historical perspective shows that in most human societies, multiple individuals beyond the mother are typically involved in raising children[.]

The life and adventures of Toby, the Sapient Pig:

There had been a previous wave of performing pigs in the late 18th century, but something about Toby appears to have particularly gripped the public imagination. Verses were written comparing him favourably to the greatest actors of the day, like Edmund Kean, and ‘Toby’ quickly became the generic name for all of his porcine competitors. His fame was such that, boasting he was ‘the first of my race that ever wielded the pen’ (an earlier literary pig had merely dictated its memoirs), Toby even wrote his own autobiography, The life and adventures of Toby, the sapient pig: with his opinions on men and manners. Written by himself (London, c. 1817).

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More critical demography from the Cambridge Population people: Changing fertility and timing of motherhood in England and Wales – a long view:

In fact, before the fertility transition, high levels of fertility were accompanied by high average ages at childbirth, and demographers in the 1960s thought that previous fertility decline would have been closely accompanied by a decline in the average age of childbirth. The reality was rather more complex, as shown in the graph below.

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Another fascinating case uncovered by the Divorce Court Project: Deafness in the Divorce Court:

It is no exaggeration to say that the education that Mary Ann received at YIDD [Yorkshire Institute for the Deaf and Dumb], together with her training as a dressmaker saved her life. Being literate enabled Mary Ann to communicate the appalling details of her marriage to William [also Deaf] with her solicitor in Sheffield, and her ability to pick up a needle and earn her own living enabled her to meet the criteria for an Order of Protection.

Through a Herne’s Eye: On Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Five Novels”: the editor on editing this volume of the Library of America edition of her works.

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Colouring flowers: books, art, and experiment in the household of Margery and Henry Power:

From the 1650s, this couple worked in tandem to enhance their understanding of the vegetable world through various paper technologies, from books, paper slips and recipe notebooks to Margery's drawing album and Henry's published Experimental Philosophy. Focusing on Margery's practice of hand-colouring flower books, her copied and original drawings of flowers and her experimental production of ink, we argue that Margery's sensibility towards colour was crucial to Henry's microscopic observations of plants. Even if Margery's sophisticated knowledge of plants never left the household, we argue that her contribution was nevertheless crucial to the observation and representation of plants within the community of experimental philosophy. In this way, our article highlights the importance of female artists within the history of scientific observation, the use of books and paperwork in the botanical disciplines, and the relationship between household science and experimental philosophy.

More great stuff from the Cambridge Population people: How dangerous was childbirth in the past? Interesting that it seems rather more dangerous to have been an elite woman - I'd possibly factor in there that upper-class babies were wet-nursed, so maybe elite ladies were also having closer together pregnancies? (or at least women who nursed their own were maybe getting some protection from immediate conception.)

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I was interested to see this - British children the least happy in Europe – and Dutch kids the happiest? Don’t believe the hype - at least in part because I remember my Dutch hist-of-sex pals being fairly cynical about the Netherlands rep for being o-so-sexually-cool-and enlightened.

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Memorialising poets:

Campaign aims to renovate Sussex home where artist and poet wrote Jerusalem in time for 200th anniversary of his death:

The couple are said to have been enamoured of their flintstone-walled garden, where they grew vegetables and flowers and allowed their kitten to prowl. According to legend, they were once discovered sunbathing naked in the garden, allegedly prompting Blake to say to the visitor: “Come in! It’s only Adam and Eve, you know.”

Volunteers work to reopen land that inspired poet

The nature 19th Century poet John Clare grew up in Helpston, Cambridgeshire, which at the time was part of Northamptonshire, and wrote about the loss of the scenery he loved as a child. The John Clare Countryside Project, led by the Langdyke Countryside Trust, will connect Peterborough to Stamford in Lincolnshire, through green corridors of farmland.

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Large fauna is At Large:

You would think a capybara was large enough that it would be easy to find.... Cinnamon, a one-year-old female, escaped on Friday and has eluded inventive efforts to recapture her.

UK’s first ever bison bridges under construction in Kent woodland:

When Europe’s heaviest land mammals were introduced into a woodland on the edge of Canterbury, it was hoped they would flourish and make space for other wildlife. But the European bison have been so successful in West Blean and Thornden Woods that more space must be made for them – in the form of Britain’s first ever bison bridges. Four bridges costing a total of £1m are being built in to allow introduced bison, which are classified as dangerous wild animals in UK law, to cross the maze of public footpaths in the ancient woods without interacting with people.

If Monte Punshon is remembered today, it is for two things: she lived to 106 and in her last years she was feted as “the world’s oldest lesbian.”:@

This woman — born a century earlier but happy to declare in the 1980s that she had always loved women — had always resisted the label. For her, unlike the lesbian feminists of a new era, the personal was not political: “I’m not labelled anything. I’m just me myself. I hate that name.” Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s biography of this intriguing figure, A Secretive Century: Monte Punshon’s Australia, takes as its inspiration “a new wave of biography and microhistory writing that sees the exploration of individual lives as a vantage point” for scrutinising and challenging established versions of history and thus making “forgotten histories visible.” The key to her approach lies in the book’s title, and her subject’s long and varied life provides the opportunity to examine the byways of Australian history from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Punshon’s life as a devotee of Japanese culture also gives Morris-Suzuki, a distinguished scholar of East Asian and Pacific History, scope to use her expertise.

I'm posting this with the content warning that the article includes: 'This piece contains graphic descriptions of child sex abuse': Belief and Doubt in Histories of Abuse:

The Army, the War Office, and the Colonial Office believed the allegations were substantial enough to court martial Macdonald. But before the trial could begin, he ended his life. Specifics, beyond that there were “grave, very grave charges,” were not publicly released. Macdonald’s supporters could therefore go on believing that he was the innocent victim of an amorphous classist and/or anti-Scottish conspiracy, revised in the mid-20th century to include a more plausible element of homophobia. Macdonald is remembered today in memorial towers and bagpipe tunes, popularly believed to be an unfortunate victim of snobby colonial gossip.

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Fluid modernities: the birthing pool in late twentieth-century Britain:

This article attends to the emergence, design and meaning of such birthing pools, with a focus on the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. Across spheres of media, political and everyday debate, the pools characterise the paradoxes of ‘modern maternity’: they are ‘fluidly’ timeless and new, natural and medical, homely and unusual, safe and risky.

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Chartist Ancestors: Emma Miles, 1819 – 1877: A member of the City of London Female Chartists Association:

She was scathing of the idea that women should be ‘an ornament to the domestic hearth’, and should confine themselves to the duties of the home. ‘Where, she would ask, were the comforts of the “domestic hearth?” and how could that be regarded as “home” from which every comfort had been banished, by that bad system and state of society which compelled man to a hard and unremitting toil of fourteen or fifteen hours a day for a scanty subsistence’.

I am not sure what I think about this - Inside the British Museum reading room — the UK’s grandest library reopens - it's not actually opening as a functioning library, is it? huh? Also, those of us who actually used the British Library in the days when it was ensconced in the British Museum are perhaps less beglamoured, or at least those of us who remember the sheer inconvenience of the Dept of Manuscripts being Somewhere Else, and consulting materials in the North Library and its gallery do not necessary go 'Whooooooo Round Room!!!'

I'm sure if I did a bit of digging I could find a passage from e.g. Gloomy Ol' George Gissing about miserably slogging away there.

Because this is a theme I keep banging on about myself: Radical Books: Dale Spender, There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement This Century (1983), and it doesn't keep needing to be discovered again from scratch, really.

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Though, even so, maybe we have to think of the different ways in which things were expressed in the past: this is a swingeing riposte to the guy who decided to expose his ignorance on social media by claiming that the clitoris and the female orgasm were inventions of evil modern feminism: On women’s anatomy and the power of paying attention. I did myself wonder about mentioning Isaac Baker Brown, but apart from feeling that possibly the guy was not deserving of the tribute of rational refutation, would one want to draw his attention to the practices of the London Surgical Home in the 1860s?

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How soon they forget - what they forget is how dangerous childbirth used to be (and still can be): Call the midwife! No matter how bad you’ve heard care can be, ‘freebirthing’ is not the answer. The whole thing about making childbirth a beautiful mystical experience only really took off after the advent of antibiotics and blood transfusion and the increase in the statistical likelihood of survival. Indeed, lately noted that while the birth control movement doubtless felt that the Labour Government lately returned to power in 1924 was likely to be a little more sympathetic to its pleas for permitting advice to be given in maternal welfare clinics than the Conservatives, the Ministry of Health report that year on Maternal Mortality was also a factor.

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Women entrepreneurs - Georgian women entrepreneurs - Even if you’ve never heard of Eleanor Coade, you will have almost certainly walked past some of her work in London:

This might sound unusual for an 18th century mother and daughter to embark on a business together but there was a history of entrepreneurial women in the family. Eleanor Senior’s mother was Sarah Enchmarch who ran a successful textile business in Tiverton, Devon.

Politickal ladies (yes, they existed): Harriet Grote (1792-1878):

Grote developed many of her strategies for activism during the 1830s, when she was central to organising radical politics at Parliament. George was MP for London between 1832 and 1841, and in public emerged as a leader of the disparate, but initially sizeable, band of radicals and reformers in the Commons. Behind the scenes, however, Grote was the chief organising force of what she called the ‘popular party’. While she failed in her ultimate ambition of ‘bring[ing] destruction upon Whigs and Tories’, her innovative methods for influencing national politics were a clear example of unsung nineteenth-century female political leadership and a major challenge to convention at Westminster.

Queer Fascism and the End of Gay History, Interesting, though it doesn't seem to name-check the macho-macho strand within the German homophile movement, very much opposed to Hirschfeld, post WW1, trying to dredge up details from memory: anyway, already looking proto-fascist in the 20s.

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Old face from the early 90s floating crap-game of sex historians who always all turned up at the same conferences and now we hardly ever see one another (even before More Recent Events): Harry Oosterhuis, 'Sodomy, Possessive Individualism, and Godless Nature: Eighteenth-Century Traces of Homosexual Assertiveness' (wonder if he cited van der Meer on the situation in the C18th Netherlands, where persecution actually created sense of identity? - and has Theo's work yet been translated into English?)

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Medicine, morals, and masturbating women: John Marten and the changing face of female self-pleasure – Elizabeth Schlappa - interesting on the changing moral/medical perception - how far did the wider context of the increasing pathologisation of male masturbation inflect it?

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What Made a 17th-Century Midwife Good at Her Job? Swingeing smack at male 'historians' - i.e. male professionals dabbling in the history of their field and erasing/dissing on women precursors. Though on the licensing system for midwives I remember looking out some ecclesiastical licences for midwives for a talk/demonstration I was giving and boy, they sounded terrifying 'a God-fearing woman and she bringeth up her children in the fear of the Lord' - yes, that is totally the person I want when I'm having babby....

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This sounds terrible and I am so glad nobody came near me with invites to be involved: Sex: A Bonkers History review – the relief when it ends is indescribable.

Ministers urged to relax abortion laws in Great Britain after woman jailed: Labour MP criticises ‘chilling’ effect of legislation amid anger at sentence for termination outside time limit.

Women were very, very seldom if ever prosecuted under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act for procuring their own abortion - as opposed to actual abortionists, when the woman died - probably because it was something that took place in secret, and even if the woman sought medical help, as textbooks of forensic medicine pointed out, it was hard to tell. Miscarriage was common (probably even more so than in these days because of poor nutrition, hard work, environmental toxins, etc). If a doctor did suspect an abortion had taken place, his first thought was to ensure that it could not be attributed to any action of his. His second was to care for the patient. Interrogating the patient as to who had done it was a low priority, to the annoyance of officers of the law (according to Leslie Reagan, the situation in the USA was different).

But anyway, we might also suspect that there was an acceptance that desperate women would undertake this in desperate circumstances.

Because there was also a certain mitigation in practice of the strictness of the law around infanticide, at least in those cases when the infant died very close to the presumed time of birth, when the mother had given birth alone because she was unmarried and unsupported. How could it be definitely ascertained that the child had even been born alive? What might the mother in her distraught and confused state have unwittingly and unintentionally done?

Lesser sentence for concealment of pregnancy.

(There is significant historiography on this.)