Women Behaving Badly, part 5: Mary Toft Pulled (Several) Rabbits (Out Of Her Vagina)

Mary Toft (1701 - 1763) was an English peasant who became notorious for her involvement in her family's scheme to pretend she'd given birth to seventeen rabbits. The story is profoundly, continuingly, and rage-inducingly bananas.

Content warnings: animal cruelty/killing, nonconsensual gynecological procedures, Nathanael St. Andre

References:

The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England by Karen Harvey

What Mary Toft Felt: Women’s Voices, Pain, Power and the Body by Karen Harvey (History Workshop Journal)

Why Historians Are Reexamining the Case of the Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits by Sabrina Imbler (Atlas Obscura)

Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England By Dennis Todd

Lore, episode 45: First Impressions (Lore Podcast)

Mary Toft and Her Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits by Niki Russell (The Public Domain Review)

An Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits by Edward White (The Paris Review)

The Curious Case of Mary Toft (University of Glasgow Special Collections)

The confessions of a rabbit woman and other recently digitized tales from the Osler Library by Mary Yearl (McGill University Library News)

Mary Toft or Tofts (Godalming Musem)

The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits by Lucas Reilly (Mental Floss)

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