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Updated: May 31, 2025
Returning from the hospital I was accosted by poor old Teresa, the wretched negress who had complained to me so grievously of her back being broken by hard work and child-bearing. She was in a dreadful state of excitement, which she partly presently communicated to me, because she said Mr. O had ordered her to be flogged for having complained to me as she did.
I do beleeve that it is very pleasurable to ly with a Gentleman, but the Child-bearing hath no delight at all in it. Oh I am affraid, if there come not a sudden change, that my good Mistris will not be able to undergo it. Oh sweet pretty blossom as she is.
The time is more than usually long with me, as the doctors consider some special precautions necessary. Alas! my child, habit does not inure one to child-bearing. There are the same old discomforts and misgivings. My father thought Felipe looking very thin, and my dear pet also not quite so blooming. Yet the Duc and Duchesse de Soria have gone; not a loophole for jealousy is left!
Some, though by no means all, of them are functionally castrated; some actively deplore the necessity of child-bearing, and perhaps are parturition phobiacs, and abhor the limitations of married life; they are incensed whenever attention is called to the functions peculiar to their sex, and the careful consideration of problems of the monthly rest are thought "not fit for cultivated women."
His chief work was that of carrying water, wood and working around the house when a youngster; often, he states he would hide in the woods to keep from working. Because his mother was a child-bearing woman, she did not know the hard labors of slavery, but had a small patch of cotton and a garden near the house to care for.
Compare M. Martin, "Description of the Western Islands of Scotland," in J. Pinkerton's Voyages and Travels, iii. 612 sq.: "There was an ancient custom in the island of Lewis, to make a fiery circle about the houses, corn, cattle, etc., belonging to each particular family: a man carried fire in his right hand, and went round, and it was called dessil, from the right hand, which in the ancient language is called dess.... There is another way of the dessil, or carrying fire round about women before they are churched, after child-bearing; and it is used likewise about children until they are christened; both which are performed in the morning and at night.
Is child-bearing to become the labour of but a portion of our sex? then we demand for those among us who are allowed to take no share in it, compensatory and equally honourable and important fields of social toil.
And if He should so dispose that the worst should befall, well, such temporal clangers and sufferings as attend child-bearing are the lot of woman-kind, just as the dangers and hardships of the battlefield, the mine, the factory, the forest, and the prairie are the lot of the men.
Marie said slowly, twisting her hands: "I felt, when I came home, after a joy-year which he didn't want to give me the remotest chance of sharing, that that I could never forgive him for all those years of losing my health and looks, those years of work and worry and child-bearing; those years of quarrelling and grudging; those dead, drab, ugly, ordinary married years. And so...."
He especially chides himself for not having more seriously thought of the peril of child-bearing, so as to pray more earnestly for his wife; and he saw clearly that the prospect of parenthood had not been rejoiced in as a blessing, but rather as implying a new burden and hindrance in the Lord's work.
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