A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration

secrets of life’s beginning and the social potential of the female body. Later in the century, practitioners compared pelvises, breasts, and menstrual flows to classify racial and national differences. They determined, for instance, that African women were masculine and thus inferior, for they seemed to have remarkably short labor after which they immediately returned to work. Other taxonomies targeted cultural and medical practices to deem continentals barbaric for using the Cesarean section and native peoples primitive for the rituals of the couvade (the mimicking of childbirth by the father). In the nineteenth century, men-midwives solidified their authority over the anatomy and subjectivity of women, offering expert opinion in cases of infanticide, molestation, and rape. By then the state interjected itself into the sphere of reproduction, measuring demography through the census and devising intrusive policy on illegitimacy, abortion, and parenthood, especially among the poor. Birthing the Nation breaks ground in its interdisciplinary reach. Jettisoning sweeping notions of gender and power in favor of fresh insight, Cody’s study is the first to account fully for the political and social circumstances that produced male-midwifery as well as for its manifold historical ramifications; the “birth” it gave to defining aspects of British science, nationalism, and a unique sense of the social. The book also excels in its employment of images. Cody highlights the corporality of reproductive knowledge embedded in prints and caricatures and the capacity of visual representations to generate distinct sets of meanings. In a segment that is particularly timely, she shows how men-midwives contributed to the creation of the modern subject position of the fetus by, among other means, commissioning highly sentimental detailed illustrations of the fetus-as-child resting in utero. Thus, “the unborn was endowed with a sense of personhood and even a notion of rights that had not been seen in previous centuries” (278).