ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by quoting two highly conventional claims. The first, from The Womans Doctour, describes a natural relationship between female bodies and domestic space. The second, from Samuel Purchas’s Purchas his Pilgrimage, comments on accounts of Amazons. “The Amazons are one nation further then the relaters or their authors have traveled. The chapter considers implications of that intersection for conventions of maternity. Stories about Amazons provide a vocabulary for this tension, and give narrative shape to anxieties concerning maternity more generally. In a culture that often seems perfectly willing to accept Amazons themselves as real, descriptions of unnatural women and the rhetoric of domesticity intersect, even as the conventionally male prerogative of definition relies on a gap between them. As a number of scholars have demonstrated, the processes of conception, pregnancy, birth, and child-rearing are highly contested in early modern England, bringing together the conviction that women lack power and the fear that mothers might have too much control.
