Lisa Forman Cody

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Associate Professor, Department of History, and Associate Dean of the Faculty (as of July 1), Claremont McKenna College 
Area of Research: Britain, 1500-1945; France, 1700-1945; Visual Culture; Women, Gender, and Sex Roles; Medicine and Science 
Education: Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, History, 1993. 
Major Publications: Cody is the author of Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; paperback, summer 2008). Winner of the Berkshire Conference Best First Book Prize, 2006; the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize, 2006; the Phi Alpha Theta Best First Book Prize, 2005, shortlist for the Whitfield Prize, the Royal Historical Society, 2006. She is also currently working on The Castrato's Son and other Tales of Intimacy and Intrigue, and Imaginary Values: Health, Wealth, and Human Labor in the British Imperial Imagination 
Cody is the editor of Writings on Medicine, 1660-1700, in the series The Early Modern Englishwoman, A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, 1500-1750 (London: Ashgate Press, 2001).
Cody is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: "The Secret History of Imagination," as part of a forum with Rachel Weil, John Smail, Richard Conners, and Michael McKeon on Michael McKeon's Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (2008), "Public and Private England, 1600-1800," Histoire sociale/Social History 40.80 (Nov. 2007); "Living and Dying in Georgian London's Lying-in Hospitals," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 78.2 (Summer 2004): pp. 309-48. Winner of the Walter D. Love Prize, North American Conference on British Studies, 2005 and the Judith Lee Ridge Article Prize, Western Association of Women Historians, 2005; "'Every Lane Teems with Instruction, Every Alley is Big with Erudition': Graffiti in Eighteenth-Century London," in The Streets of London, 1660-1870, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2003), pp. 92-111; "Sex, Civility, and the Self: Eighteenth-Century Conceptions of Gendered, National, and Psychological Identity," in a Forum on Nina Gelbart's The King's Midwife and Gary Kates's Monsieur d'Eon is a Woman, French Historical Studies, 24:3 (Summer 2001), pp. 379-409; "The Politics of Illegitimacy in an Age of Reform: Gender, Reproduction and Political Economy in England's New Poor Law of 1834," Journal of Women's History 11.4 (Winter 2000), pp. 131-156. Winner of the Judith Lee Ridge Article Prize, Western Association of Women Historians, 2002. 
Awards: Cody is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Millicent C. McIntosh Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (2003-05);
Arnold L. and Lois S. Graves Fellowship, top teacher in a west-coast liberal arts college (2000);
Bernadote E. Schmitt Grant, American Historical Association (1999-2000);
Ahmanson-Getty Fellowship, Clark Library and Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies, UCLA (2000), declined;
Clark Library and Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies, UCLA, Short Fellowship (2000);
Benjamin Gould Humanities Center, Claremont McKenna College, Summer Fellowship (2000, 2001, 2003);
Helen L. Bing Fellowship; Mayers Fellowship, Henry E. Huntington Library (1999);
Claremont McKenna College, Dean's Summer Research Grant (1997-2003);
Whitney Humanities Center Junior Faculty Fellowship, Yale University (1995-96), declined;
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, Stanford University (1993-95);
Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship, Henry E. Huntington Library (1994);
UC Regents Traveling Fellowship (1990-91);
UC Humanities Graduate Research Grant (1989, 1991);
Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor, UC Berkeley (1990);
George H. Guttridge Prize in British History, UC Berkeley History Department (1989-90);
Beatrice M. Bain Prize for Outstanding Graduate Essay in Gender Studies, UC Berkeley (1989);
UC Berkeley History Department Fellowship (1987-88);
Isobelle Briggs Alumna Fellowship for Graduate Studies, Radcliffe College (1987-88);
John Harvard (1986-87); Harvard College (1984-87); Agassiz Awards (1984-87); Oliver Dabney Fellowship in History (1986-87); Josephine Murray, Radcliffe College Summer Fellowship (1986); Center for European Studies, Harvard, Summer Fellowships (1986). 
Additional Info: 
Cody formerly was Assistant Professor, Department of History, Denison University, (1995-96), Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, and Visiting Assistant Professor in History, Stanford University, (1993-95). and Instructor in History, Women's and Interdisciplinary Studies, U.C. Berkeley, (1989-93). 

Personal Anecdote

When asked as a girl what I would someday be, I never said a historian. Instead, I first said Frank Lloyd Wright, then around third grade, a suffragette, and then as a teenager, either Mary Cassatt or Elizabeth Blackwell. Given my particular talents, I knew I should want to be a doctor or an illustrator, but I did not yet realize that I could only envision myself in those occupations in the context of another age-the world of Beatrice Potter or Florence Nightingale. 

I grew up in Fort Collins, Colorado in the 1970s, but refused to admit that basic fact. My absence was reaffirmed each Sunday at 9 p.m., Mountain Standard Time. My parents were huge Masterpiece Theatre buffs, and so I, the dutiful oldest daughter, watched alongside them imagining myself into the past. In second grade, my friend Margaret and I had feuding crushes on Tom Brown and his nemesis Flashman. After school, we pretended that even though we were girls, we went to Rugby too and rescued poor Tom Brown and Cuthbertson from their miserable School Days. 

It should have been obvious where things here were inevitably headed, as I lived through Upstairs, Downstairs, Shoulder to Shoulder, and countless other BBC dramas. But when I went off to Harvard, I made a list of what I would absolutely not major in: physics, engineering, and of course history. I thus decided to kill my core requirement in history immediately with "London and Paris in the Nineteenth Century." That I sat in the front row eagerly (a.k.a. nerdily) laughing and clapping at the divine Patrice Higgonet and (the late) divine John Clive should have tipped me off right from the first seven minutes. Instead it took two weeks. When Professor Clive read Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard, I responded as many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers had: I wept. (Melodramatic? Yes. Surprising? No. Consider this: in first grade, my best friend Margaret and I had an ongoing debate about what would make either one of us the luckiest girl in the world. Having recently watched The Six Wives of Henry VIII, the answer was obvious: to have Henry VIII's casketed, dead body in my living room. Sure, this was macabre, but at the time, it seemed hard to imagine that a trip to Disneyland or a pony could top this as the best birthday present ever. I never got the pony either-stuffed or otherwise.) 

Gray's Elegy transported me to mid-eighteenth-century England, which ultimately is where I have lived imaginarily for two decades as I dig through archives at the nearby Huntington Library and when in Britain, and as I now think about the next research project while shuttling my children to school and the dinosaur museum and the grocery store. Yet Gray's poem also made me appreciate how being a historian can verge on the uncanny act of channeling the dead-which perhaps is what I had been trying to do all along. Clearly, with my childhood desire to keep Tudor corpses in the living room and my adolescent penchant (I confess) for obsessive Ouija board sessions, I had been trying to do so mostly in the dubious spirit of Madame Blavatsky. Thankfully, though, I soon tripped upon the archives instead, which has allowed me to raise the dead in ways that are considered slightly more acceptable, if not as remunerative as reading palms or transfiguring the departed. 

I trained at Berkeley with Tom Laqueur and other marvelous scholars at an exciting time in the late 1980s and 1990s when theory was big and invariably had an impact on the nature of my scholarship. Yet despite that training, a perhaps slightly old-fashioned search for spirits haunts much of my research. And no spirit more so than an eighteenth-century midwife, Elizabeth Nihell, who has enjoyed an iconic status among feminists for her exuberant attack on male obstetricians in the 1760s. 

Capturing ghosts is notoriously elusive. A summer research trip to Paris, for instance, revealed nothing of Nihell's life at all, even after plowing through thousands of pages at the Archives de l'Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris in hope of finding her at the Hôtel Dieu where she had had trained as a midwife. I could not find her that summer, but she led me through a rich summer of French research that illuminated unexpected connections between nationalism, religion, and reproduction-insights that fundamentally transformed my book manuscript, Birthing the Nation. A huge analytical payoff, certainly, but I still felt crushed that Nihell herself had no surviving records-and, worst of all, there had been records until the cataclysms of the nineteenth century. I discovered that in 1869, Monsieur Brièle, head of the Hôtel Dieu archives, fastidiously recorded each scrap in his collection, including liasse 1395, a massive file containing every midwife-pupil's testimonials and birth and marriage certificates for the previous two centuries. Earlier nineteenth-century sources indicated that Nihell was included in this file. In 1870, however, Brièle was forced to choose the saved versus sacrificed as the city fell. He rescued many documents about topics which have since made other historians' careers-say, on the subject of sewage-but he let liasse 1395 and scores of midwives burn. 

In spite of the nineteenth-century flames which licked up her maiden name and much more, I did find a small piece of Mrs. Nihell in the London archives. Another summer, on a hunch, I refused to believe the eighteenth-century parish indices and decided to read through hundreds of files myself, just to double check, just in case. Every weeknight, after the British Library and other archives closed, I crossed Trafalgar Square and walked down Whitehall towards the Westminster City Archives, which stayed open late. It took a summer, pregnant with my first son (i.e. one of my last "real" research trip now that I have three of them), to find my midwife-ghost who had been, it turns out, misfiled for over two centuries. I found her in, of all places, the (poorly alphabetized) affidavits for the St. Martin's workhouse as a ward of the parish. Her detailed pauper affidavit revealed that she was a Catholic married in Paris in 1740 to an Irish Catholic surgeon around age eighteen who abandoned her in 1775. She never left the workhouse. In May of 1776, she died there and was buried for 2 shillings, 6 pence. 

Elizabeth Nihell, a learned, published, proud author, and inspiration to Mary Daly and other modern feminists, was buried in a parish pauper pit. This grave would have been roughly under what is now a Trafalgar Square traffic island with a statue dedicated to a feminist nurse and national martyr of World War One: Edith Cavell. A fittingly ironic monument, to be sure, but a tragic plot for another feminist health practitioner whose 1760 treatise sold for twice the price of her burial. I felt disconcerted as the documents fell together and realized that my historical muse had once been placed six feet under an intersection that I have crossed hundreds of times since the age of eleven when my Masterpiece Theatre obsessed family took a sabbatical to London. I was already fully immersed in the past as I pretended to be a Pankhurst toppling the staid Edwardian world in sixth grade, but I of course had no idea that such an ordinary spot on Charing Cross Road would someday become my imaginary touchstone. 

As jubilant as I was to find Nihell, I was also saddened by this enterprise, where so much of what we find hinges on little more than "the short and simple annals of the Poor." As a historian attracted to theory, analysis, and arguments, Nihell's ghost reminds me that I nevertheless became a historian thanks to Thomas Gray's sentimental words and a recognition that I had long felt compelled to channel the dead so as to convey "Their homely joys, and destiny obscure." Corny, melodramatic, perhaps unsophisticated, but listening to the dead is a precious aspect of our profession, and one that exists in few others. 

Quotes

By Lisa Forman Cody

"Birthing the Nation explores what relationships existed between corporate and individual identities in the British Isles from the 1660s to the 1830s by examining the emergence of men, rather than midwives, as pre-eminent authorities over sex and birth... 

Male experts transformed what had once been the private, feminine domain of birth and midwifery into topics of public importance and universal interest.... This is the first book to place the eighteenth-century shift... in a larger cultural and political context. It illuminates how eighteenth-century Britons understood and symbolized political, national, and religious affiliation through the experiences of the body, sex, and birth.... Political arguments of the age were not always made on disembodied, rational terms, but instead referenced deep cultural beliefs about gender, reproduction, and the family.... 

Through reproductive signs and stories, Britons could describe themselves and others, as individuals, as types, as members of different corporate bodies, including nations, and these comparisons helped to establish the seemingly natural facts of community and otherness." -- Lisa Forman Cody in "Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of the Eighteenth-Century Britons"

About Lisa Forman Cody