The Seed. Alexandra Kimball
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Dow as ‘ill-natured and ugly, artful and aggravating, malicious and revengeful,’ Cole was imprisoned and tortured several times over a period of ten years, earning the title of ‘the Witch of Hampton’ (she still figures prominently in local legends; Hampton, Massachusetts, has a diner named after her). The spectre of infertility even condemned women who were in fact fertile, as happened in the seventeenth-century trial of German wife Merga Bien. An argumentative woman who had been in a childless marriage for fourteen years, Bien was first arrested on suspicion of attending Satanic rites, but convicted when it was discovered that she was pregnant. Inquisitors believed such fertility after prolonged barrenness could only be the result of demonic intervention, and Bien was executed in 1603.
The Old and New Testaments had, on their surface, a good deal of sympathy for infertile women (the invocation ‘Sing, O barren woman!’ compares the plight of the chosen people of Israel to the sorrow of an infertile wife). But her potential for danger is always present, troubling that male sympathy. The barren monsters of pagan myth and folklore were threatening not only because they defied the edict for women to procreate, but because each of these feminine demons demonstrated her anger and bitterness over her situation, which fuelled her acts of supernatural revenge. As in these tales, the Bible defined women as passive instruments of their reproductive fate; the standard woman was ‘self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands’ (Titus 2:4-5). Thus emerged the only acceptable image of the infertile woman: the pining religious supplicant, symbolized most strikingly in the Biblical story of Hannah. Infertile but virtuous, she is first encountered in a moment of submission, having skipped food and drink at a family gathering to pray to God for a (specifically, male) child:
‘O Lord of Hosts, if You will look upon the suffering of Your maidservant and will remember me and not forget Your maidservant, and if You will grant Your maidservant a male child, I will dedicate him to the Lord for all the days of his life, and there shall no razor come upon his head.’ (1 Samuel 1:11)
Hannah is praying silently, unwilling to disturb others with her distress, which causes the priest Eli to interrupt and accuse her of drunkenness. Hannah rehearses her predicament in terms that also underscore her feminine piety:
‘Oh no, my lord! I am a very unhappy woman. I have drunk no wine or other strong drink, but I have been pouring out my heart to the Lord. Do not take your maidservant for a worthless woman; I have only been speaking all this time out of my great anguish and distress.’ (1 Samuel 1:14–15)
Hannah’s story circumscribes acceptable attitude for the infertile woman – prayer, silence, submission, and acceptance of God’s will. Rabbis of the period believed that barrenness existed ‘because the Holy One, blessed be He, longs to hear the prayer of the righteous’; at the same time, barren women had little to no social status and female infertility was grounds for divorce. Unsurprisingly, Hannah’s is the only prayer by a woman recorded in the Bible, illustrating the proper response to female infertility as it underscores the importance of prayer and the centrality of God to the mysteries of reproduction. (In Psalm 13: ‘He makes the barren woman abide in the house As a joyful mother of children. Praise the Lord!’) And it also invokes her propriety: after Eli tells her to ‘go in peace’ and resume eating and drinking, ‘she is happy.’ Spoiler alert: God eventually gives Hannah a (male) baby. She is one of the earliest examples of the enduring cliché that if a woman has enough faith (or, in our secular cult of ‘wellness,’ is ‘positive’ enough), a miracle pregnancy is all but inevitable. In my digital infertility groups, a meme is often posted beneath stories of the poorest prognoses: an image of a dandelion or a rainbow, below which is written, in cursive font: ‘Always Hope.’ (‘I fucking hate hope,’ my friend, who struggled with infertility before having her daughter, told me recently. ‘Hope is how you tell women to shut up. Hope is weaponized.’)
In these spaces where politics are absent, the imperative to be positive and maintain hope is particularly telling of how infertility itself is understood as ultimately mysterious and ephemeral, uprooted from even the medical science on which our outcomes depend. It is standard in many groups, for example, to refer to IVF babies as ‘miracles,’ or to symbolize babies conceived after miscarriages with rainbows, which invoke the intangible power of hope. Feeling that this imagery erases the difficult, expensive, and very concrete work of infertility, some infertile women on the Infertility subreddit have banned the terms and refer to their children not as ‘miracles,’ but ‘money and science babies.’ The shift pokes at the misogyny that shapes women’s experiences of infertility from Hannah to the present – how, unlike issues of abortion, consent, employment equality, and so forth, resolving infertility is seen as an issue not of policy or material action, but of passive faith. And it doubles the infertile woman’s isolation: in the language of hope, infertility is not a matter between women and the world, but one woman and fate.
Hannah’s prayer is recited frequently at Christian infertility groups, where her submission to God’s will is held up as a model of faith. ‘Some couples see infertility as a malady and become consumed with it,’ advises one Christian infertility site:
They may have uncomfortable feelings toward those who are blessed with children. They may find fault with each other or become angry with themselves. They may doubt God’s wisdom as it applies to their lives … So what do infertile couples do in the meantime – be happy while everyone else takes their children for picnics in the park? Absolutely! Yes! And may God grant such couples the patience to make their smiles genuine and sincere … And they can be happy, knowing that God also has a plan for their lives as well. Satisfaction and contentment with one’s station in life is always God-pleasing.
If the barren she-monsters of pagan mythology and world folklore are actors, avenging their infertility through acts of evil and destruction, Hannah is redeemed by her passivity and acceptance of a divine plan. In her, we see the origin of the contemporary myth identified by feminist historian Naomi Pfeffer: prior to the development of high-tech reproductive medicine, ‘involuntary childless women either suffered their fate in stoic silence, or resolved their childlessness by adoption.’ Hannah’s response is almost a parody of appropriate feminine submission: she prays silently, denies herself food and drink, and submits immediately to the orders of the male priest who is her only human counsel. It’s as she is trying to redeem her deviance, her failure as a woman, by doubling down on femininity, emphasizing her submissiveness and obedience to male authority. When God eventually ‘opens her womb,’ it’s partly in response to her prayer, but also to reward her for her feminine virtue. Because she is pitied, not feared, we know Hannah is not a monster.
Many anthropologists have explained the common fear of infertile women, and history’s tendency to demonize, pathologize, and criminalize barren women as more or less evolutionary: barrenness threatens the continuation of the species. But human extinction is a universal dilemma, and the fact is, the monstrosity of barrenness is still depicted as female. Our ideas about infertility germinated in patriarchy, which is organized around the gender-essentialist idea that women can be reduced to our wombs, and our virtue measured by their function. In cultures that define women as primarily child-bearers and mothers, barren women are scary because we undermine the basis of gendered life.
Woman-as-womb: it sounds comically reductive, a conceptual synecdoche too narrow for anyone living in 2019 to possibly buy into, but I’ve never met an infertile woman who hasn’t expressed some anxiety around feeling less than female because of her condition. Feeling like ‘less than a woman’ is also a common theme in online support groups; after IVF and isolation, it’s one of the most popular topics. (‘I feel like a freak and a waste of womanhood,’ one writes. Another: ‘I am a baby-less monster.’) Many women, raised to reject the essentialist idea of women-as-wombs, are as distressed by the antifeminism these feelings imply as they are by the feelings themselves. ‘Let me just say that I’m not implying anyone who is child free by choice or cannot get pregnant for one reason or another is any less than a woman,’ writes one poster on Reddit:
I guess what I’m feeling is the counterpart to a man feeling emasculated? And I know that sounds so ridiculous, so please don’t judge me. I’m here because I’m ashamed of these feelings. I just … don’t feel like a proper woman. I don’t feel like a good wife. I don’t feel like a good partner