ABSTRACT
This chapter explores two themes: the complex eighteenth-century engagement with nature and the intricate interplay between femininity and nature, which was possible because the use of the female body to express a wide range of abstract ideas had been thoroughly conventionalised. In linking nature with feminine figures, attention could also be drawn to the fragility of gender roles, to the troubling implications of moving between identifiable persons, Woman and women, and to the need for clear boundaries, which appeared so elusive. The cult of nature had an erotic dimension, and the intense emotions elicited by man-midwifery suggest how important sexual anxieties about inappropriate touching were. There were fireworks about midwifery because associations between the feminine and nature in the second half of the eighteenth century became more varied, more blurred, more unstable, more integral to larger political, social, and cultural shifts.
