Many women today can choose when to become pregnant, thanks to the availability of safe and reliable contraceptives.1 It wasn’t always so. During the Regency period women were often pregnant every few years, beginning within the first or second year of marriage and continuing until they were in their 30s or 40s.

Portrait of Sir Wolstan Dixie, 4th Baronet, and Family

Portrait of Sir Wolstan Dixie, 4th Baronet (1700-1767) of Bosworth Hall, by Henry Pickering (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

An Average of Eight Children

The median childbearing period between a woman’s marriage and her last birth was eighteen years for the 50 aristocratic women described by Judith Schneid Lewis in her book In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy, 1760-1860.2 These 50 women typically gave birth to eight children each. An aristocratic women usually married at the age of 21 and gave birth to her last child at age 39, delivering a child about every 2.25 years or 27 months. The above portrait of Sir Wolstan Dixie, 4th Baronet, and his family thus seems typical of the 18th century: there were eight children, two sons and six daughters.

Roughly 50% of the 50 aristocratic women described by Dr. Lewis gave birth to their first child within one year of their marriage; 80% gave birth within two years of marriage. One aristocrat—Charlotte, Duchess of Beaufort (1771-1854)—gave birth to three children within two-and-a-half years of marriage, although the third child was born premature and died six weeks later.

The Radcliffe Family, ca. 1742

The Radcliffe Family, painted by Thomas Hudson, ca. 1742. (Source: Wikimedia Commons and the Berger Collection at the Denver Art Museum)

A Startling Record: 33 Children Born to a 17th-Century Buckinghamshire Woman

Dr. Lewis mentions that one aristocratic woman in her study, the Duchess of Leinster, was particularly fertile: she birthed 21 children over 30 years, the last born when she was 46 years of age.2

Another fertile woman was Catherine Tothill, wife of William Tothill, Esq., who resided at Shardeloes in Buckinghamshire during the 17th-century. She birthed 33 children! I found this tidbit quite by accident when I was reading about Buckinghamshire, the county where Lord Metcalfe’s ancestral home was situated in my novel, Rosings Park.

Although there is no indication of how many of the Tothill children survived to adulthood, giving birth to 33 children is an astonishing feat.Just think about it. If Catherine Tothill married when she was a slip of a girl at 15 and birthed her last child at the age of 48—a span of 33 years— then she birthed a child every year of her adult life! She might have had a year off if she birthed twins. Otherwise, she was pregnant nine months out of every year. I have no information about her age at marriage or whether she ever birthed twins or triplets, but the thought of her being pregnant every year for three decades boggles the mind.

Family portrait of Gabriel Joseph de Froment, Baron de Castille

Gabriel Joseph de Froment, Baron de Castille, with his family, 1825 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The Families in Pride and Prejudice

The main families in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice had fewer children than the average number of eight in Dr. Lewis’s study. Lady Catherine de Bourgh had only a single child—her daughter, Anne. Mr. Darcy was the sole son in his family and had only one younger sister, Georgiana. The Bennets, by comparison, were fortunate in having five living daughters.

There are three interesting sides to this story. First, what was it like to be a Regency woman and have almost no control over your reproductive life? To birth a child every year or two or three? To be a virtual slave to the ceaseless demands of pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation? Regency women must sometimes have longed to be released from the constraints of perpetual pregnancy, particularly if they had come to believe their childbearing days were behind them. But when they were in the family way, aristocratic women did not hesitate to appear in public, even if they were nine months pregnant. They attended the opera and theatre, hosted dinner and music parties, and continued with their normal lives right up until the child’s delivery.2

Second, what was it like to grow up in a family where your mother was regularly pregnant? It must have seemed perfectly natural for your mother to be pregnant with a prospective brother or sister when you were aged 10 (at which point you might already have three or four older siblings), but then she might have also birthed a child when you were aged 12 and aged 15 and then again when you turned 18. In fact, when you married and started your own family at the age of 20 or 21, your mother might be pregnant yet again.

Third, isn’t it interesting that in the three family portraits shown above the daughters outnumber the sons in every instance? Hmm. Might there be something to the research suggesting that women really are the stronger sex?


Sources:
1Sitruk-Ware R, Nath A, Mishell Jr DR. Contraception technology: past, present and future. Contraception. 2013;87(3):319-330.
2Lewis, Judith Schneid. In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy, 1760-1860. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986, pp. 122-124.
3Sheahan, James Joseph. History and Topography of Buckinghamshire (London, 1862), pp. 798-799 (PDF pp. 819-820).