ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how common some serious infection was in the lives of traditional women. It emphasizes the nefariousness of their infections, a hazard to which men were not at all exposed. The chapter shows that it was around 1900 that the rate of infection became dramatically reduced, rather than in the late 1930s as heretofore thought. It discusses the timing because precisely at the turn of the century other terrible risks associated with womanhood also began to vanish, setting the stage for a new epoch in relations between men and women. Post-delivery infections would set in around the third day after birth, when the mother had relaxed, thinking she had passed through delivery without incident. To avoid a dramatic undercount of infection cases, the historian should assume that virtually all infections occurring within a month after delivery were obstetric in nature. One eighteenth-century authority advocated facilitating delivery by reaching into the rectum and pushing against the child's chin.
