Lecture: “Lying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity”
Emma Cheatle: “This research, and my book of the same name, studies the spatial, architectural experience of childbirth, through both a critical history of maternity (lying in) spaces and buildings and a creative exploration of those that we use today.
Where conventional architectural histories objectify buildings (in parallel with the objectification of the maternal body), the book presents a creative-critical autotheory of the architecture of lying-in. It uses feminist, subjective modes of thinking, which travel across disciplines, registers and arguments. The research assesses the transformation of maternity spaces—from the female bedchamber of the eighteenth-century marital home, to the lying-in hospitals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries purpose built by man-midwives, to the late-twentieth-century spaces of home and the modern hospital maternity wing—and the parallel shifts in maternal practices. The spaces are not treated as mute or neutral backdrops to maternal history, but as a series of vital, entangled atmospheres, materials, practices and objects that are produced by, and, in turn, produce particular social and political conditions, gendered structures and experiences.
Moving across spaces, systems, protagonists and their subjectivities, I show how historic hospital design and protocol altered ordinary birth at home and continues to shape maternal spatial experience today.”
Emma Cheatle is an architect and architecture researcher, senior lecturer as well as Director of Research and Innovation at the School of Architecture and Landscape, University of Sheffield. Her interdisciplinary research aims to examine the political, cultural and social implications of architecture and urban space, particularly through questions of domesticity, care, gender, health (maternity, disability and early childhood), decoloniality, and common rights. Her PhD thesis resulted in a monograph Part-Architecture: The Maison de Verre, Duchamp, Domesticity and Desire in 1930s Paris (Routledge) in 2017; her second monograph Lying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity (Routledge, 2023) examines the role of architecture and space in historic and contemporary constructions of the maternal body and maternity practices. She has also analysed feminist spaces in the writing of Simone de Beauvoir and bell hooks. In collaboration with Hélène Frichot (University of Melbourne) she assembled a major retrospective on the feminist theorist Jennifer Bloomer for the Journal of Architecture (2024); and serves as the UK Editor for the Bloomsbury Global Encyclopaedia of Women in Architecture 1960–2015 (2025, forthcoming).
