Wollstonecraft's death, following the birth of her daughter, the future Mary Shelley, was typical of the times in which she lived: "A part of her placenta needed to be pulled out by a doctor's hand. She developed puerperal sepsis, an infection of the genital tract, which very painfully, and over the period of about a week, killed her." These were the days of rampant puerperal, or childbed, fever, spread by doctors and midwives and a mystery to everyone.

"In the first half of the nineteenth century about five European women in a thousand died from childbirth. Death rates in maternity hospitals were often ten times that; the hospitals stayed open because doctors had an incurable faith in good intentions, and patients a poor grasp of mortality statistics. The physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes led the American campaign to stop the spread of the disease by getting doctors to wash their hands. Obstetricians felt slighted. 'Doctors are gentlemen,' said Charles Meigs of the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, arguing that no such care was needed, 'and gentlemen's hands are clean.'

It's now generally accepted that, while still somewhat mysterious, childbed fever was caused by the streptococcus pyogenes organism, the same bacteria that cause strep throat and a host of other virulent ailments. Although it still exists, it can be treated with antibiotics and there has not been an outbreak in over forty years. And yet, the author asserts, childbirth hygiene standards are slipping. While we appreciate the end of sterility, anyone who reads the account of Mary Wollstonecraft's death can only thank God for gloves, soap and faucets.

When Childbirth Was Natural, and Deadly [Livescience]

Until fairly recently, just about all the big names in horror, the writers whose stories dominate the anthologies and whose novels stay in print forever, have been of the masculine persuasion: Poe, Le Fanu, Stoker, Lovecraft, M. R. James, King, Straub. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s remarkable 1892 tale of madness, "The Yellow Wallpaper", manages to creep into the odd collection, as does Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery,” which is so disturbing that it induced a significant number of New Yorker readers to cancel their subscriptions when it appeared in the magazine’s pages in 1948. But for the most part, a woman’s place in horror has been pretty well defined: she’s the victim, seen occasionally and heard only when she screams.

Even the few notable exceptions (Gilman, Jackson and Shelley) are set apart from the true purveyors of the occult in that they only “dabble” in the unspeakable, never devoting as much of their time and ink to the supernatural as their male counterparts. Many of the women writing in horror often fall into the “paranormal romance” genre, including the insanely popular Twilight series, where the real aim is not to evoke terror, but to present an impossibly romantic alternative to reality. For many years, horror fiction, like video games and action movies, seemed to be an exclusively masculine sphere, only occasionally broken into by the female voice.

Now, the Times argues, the tide is turning. Women writers are producing some of the most interesting and provocative horror fiction. Authors Sara Gran (Come Closer), Alexandra Sokoloff (The Price), Sarah Langan (The Missing, and The Keeper) and Elizabeth Hand (Generation Loss, and The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora’s Bride) have received both critical acclaim and awards for their contributions to the genre. With works featuring female protagonists and narrators, these writers are following in the footsteps of Shelley and Shirley Jackson, creating psychologically rich dramas and returning horror fiction to its subtly-creepy roots.

Horror can be powerful medium for feminist works. Monsters, zombies, ghosts, and vampires have been used before in both fiction and film to address social injustice. The end-of-the-world feeling that Elizabeth Hand and Sarah Langan capture seems similar to the terrifying and repressive future depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale. Although some of the novels described by the Times are not overtly feminist, there's a sense that these authors are willing to take risks with subject matter that many male authors shy away from, including sex and sexual violence (Hand’s novel, Generation Loss, is narrated by a former rape victim). In a way, the supernatural seems a fitting setting for a discussion about the real horrors of madness, violence, and death. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman draws upon her own experience with post-partum depression to create a chilling tale of madness and haunting, taking the hysterical-women stereotype and making it into something far more threatening, and thus far more subversive. Through playing with the boundaries of sanity and insanity, real and unreal, Gran, Sokoloft, Hand and Langan have created a new space for women in horror.

Shelley's Daughters [NY Times]