A risky and dangerous business: pregnancy and childbirth in nineteenth century Western Australia

 

For those of us who have borne children in the age of antental care, antibiotics and ultrasounds, it can be difficult to imagine the perils facing a pregnant woman in the early days of Western Australia. In general, childbirth was considered 'women's business', and labouring women the world over were usually attended to by other women, whose skills could vary wildly. For women in colonial times, this experience was further complicated by isolation; for such women, childbirth was often a 'lonely, painful, dangerous and frightening experience' (Carter and Carter). 

It is difficult to ascertain maternal and infant mortality rates before the late 1800s, but it is likely that few families in the fledgling Colony were unaffected by miscarriage, stillbirth and infant death. Like their counterparts across the country, many women would have been affected by some form of pregnancy loss or the death of an infant or older child. The personal narratives of women living in Australia in the mid 1800s, as recorded in private letters and diaries, are testament to the frequency of pregnancy loss and perinatal death, with some women experiencing more than one death of a baby or older child. Georgiana Molloy, whose first baby died after nine days in 1830, considered the death of her baby as a tragedy, albeit one governed by God. Molloy wrote to a friend who had recently lost a baby that ‘I could truly sympathise with you, for language refuses to utter what I experienced when mine died in my arms in this dreary land … Oh! I have gone through so much … It was so hard.'

In a time before reliable contraception and family planning, women certainly would have had different responses to the ending of a pregnancy. Mary Taylor, a farmer’s wife in Albany, Western Australia, noted in her diary that she had received a letter from her niece Josephine, informing Mary of her recent miscarriage. Although Josephine’s own response to her miscarriage is not known,
her aunt was filled with relief and wrote that ‘I am so thankful that the dear girl has lost her
baby’ - possibly because Mrs Taylor herself knew the burden of multiple pregnancies and the associated risks.

By the time of official record-keeping, it is apparent that the ending of a pregnancy through miscarriage or perinatal death was an event of great regularity, and the risks to both mother and child posed by childbirth were ever-present concerns. A lack of knowledge of infection during childbirth proved fatal for many Australian women and their babies, whilst poor
living conditions in cities led to large outbreaks of infectious diseases such as gastro-
enteritis, pneumonia, diphtheria and tuberculosis as well as a high incidence of weanling
diarrhoea, making infancy a particularly dangerous period of life.2 In the period between
1870 and 1914, 1495 stillbirths (often confused in the record with premature birth) and
5693 infant deaths were recorded in Perth alone.

 As the colonial population grew, including the numbers of single young women, so did the number of births to unmarried women. For these women, pregnancy was not only dangerous, but could prove to be socially damning. Responding to the plight of servant women dismissed because of incapacity or illness - including pregnancy - the first women's hospital was founded in a rented cottage on St Georges Terrace by the benevolent Ladies Friendly Society. Despite being established with charity in mind, it soon became a site of punishment and moral outrage. The Colonial Administration took over the running of the home from the Ladies Friendly Society; under its governance a maternity wing was added for 'women of immoral character' with the 'strictest prison discipline' its rule (Carter and Carter).

Thankfully, in later years of the nineteenth century, charitable and religious societies established 'houses of mercy' for unmarried or abandoned women during their pregnancies, including the House of Mercy (1891), a maternity wing in the Salvation Army's Perth Refuge for Women (1896) and 'The Open Door' in the Salvation Army in North Fremantle (1903). However despite these institutions single motherhood was a burden that was often difficult to bear; the plight of young unmarried mothers forced to board their babies out in order to continue working, often as domestic help, was thrust into the spotlight in 1907. The shocking death of a five month old baby left in the care of Mrs Alice Mitchell