All the Frills: Pregnancy Portraits (It's Not What You Think)

So one of the sections of my forthcoming book on honor among the early modern English elite deals with so-called pregnancy portraits – this relatively new development in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century portraiture in which elite women commissioned portraits of themselves while visibly, heavily pregnant. Basically I argue that they see these visual displays of their fecundity as connected to their honor - although it's a bit more nuanced than that, of course.

I still think there’s a lot of truth in that, but now that I’m pregnant myself I also have an appreciation for how, just on a purely corporeal level, pregnancy and all the wacky things it does to your body sort of makes you want to weirdly commemorate it. It truly is an odd experience. I feel both more connected to my body than ever before but also, paradoxically, very separated from it. It is something almost unrecognizable to myself now - something new and different and generative. It's also a very public thing now. I think as women we all accept from a very young age (unfortunately) that our bodies are always, to a degree, public things (certainly more so than men). People will observe our bodies, they will comment on them, they will judge them, they will sometimes think they are entitled to have uninvited physical proximity and/or access to them. But pregnancy adds a new element to this for me because the very inner, very private workings of my femaleness are now on display in a palpable way (not to mention the few times people have tried to touch my stomach and damn near lost a hand). What my biologically female body is capable of is unambiguously on display for all the world to glimpse. It's a very unnerving realization, to be honest.

Anyways, tangent over (sorry!) but here are two of the early modern pregnancy portraits that I consider in the book.

Weekend Reading:

• Oft touted stats about how long you could reasonably wait to try to have a family always used to terrify me…until about two years ago when I read about how they were mostly based on French demographic information from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
  
• Jesus Christ, what is happening at this school? This is horrific.
  
• The various “prohibitions” placed on what pregnant women can eat, drink, etc when pregnant are just a minefield. I’ve spent an insane amount of my pregnancy navigating them and doing my own research (rather than just trusting in the tyrannical “wisdom” of books like What to Expect When You’re Expecting)…thankfully the silly stance on limiting fish was not something I listened to.
  
• This article about the archaeology of the dead (well, really about different historical burial practices related to stopping the “restless” dead) is pretty fascinating.
  
• Aliens is seriously my favourite series of movies of all time. And it totally is a feminist franchise.