gentle birth

“She really wanted to breastfeed after having many of her birth choices and preferences taken from her, if only for a short time because cancer treatments resume when she is discharged from the hospital,” the Florida-based Gentle Birth Options midwife center posted on Facebook along with photos of the woman.

The reason for it—paradoxical as this may sound—lies in the very narrowness of the sphere to which women of gentle birth were confined.

Surely to represent a majority of girls, or even a majority of girls of gentle birth, as having received their nurture in convents, would be on the evidence absurd.

The second limitation of convent education in medieval England is contained in the words “girls of gentle birth.”

Every scrap of evidence which has come down to us goes to prove that the girls educated in nunneries were of gentle birth, daughters of great lords, or more often daughters of country gentlemen, or of those comfortable and substantial merchants and burgesses, who were usually themselves sprung from younger sons of the gentry.