Abstract

How did Victorian print forms shape experiences of pregnancy? This article focuses on pregnancy calendars, a form that rose to prominence in nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. Such calendars appeared in tabular as well as circular formats and were printed in books, periodicals and pocketbooks designed for both medical practitioners and fertile women. These calendars shaped the nebulous period of human gestation, giving pregnancy narrative form by dividing it temporally into stages and highlighting key events and medical interventions. In the nineteenth century, these printed pregnancy calendars mediated between women’s personal experiences and gestational body time as well as medical management of that time. During this period, such calendars—which included the columnar reckoning table as well as the circular periodoscope—functioned as instruments of both medical control and female agency. Although they did not enable pregnant women to critique the medicalisation of pregnancy, they nevertheless accorded to such women some power in managing their reproductive bodies.