nd yet the next Night, the Man got her with Child.
S. M. 1708.
(Pt. 2, pp. 10-11)

S. M. is clearly unsympathetic to the plight of married women in an age
with only the most primitive forms of birth control.[4] The picture of
her as a long-suffering person is undercut by the casual male assumption
that giving birth was not really dangerous and that women make too much
of the pain and difficulty. That women were often forced to go through
thirteen or fourteen deliveries when little thought had yet been given
to creating an antiseptic environment for childbirth is apparently of
little concern to S. M., who finds in the apparent willingness of the
woman to have sexual intercourse one more time sufficient reason for
contempt.

[Footnote 4: For an account of the horrors associated with
childbirth, see Lawrence Stone, _The Family, Sex, and Marriage in
England, 1500-1800_ (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 79-80.]

In addition to giving glimpses into social attitudes, _The
Merry-Thought_ has a variety of inscriptions that show the way these
writings functioned. Professor George Guffey, in his introduction to
the first part of this work (ARS 216 [1982], iii-iv), remarks upon the
proposal scene carried on in _Moll Flanders_ between Moll and the
admirer who will prove her third husband and her brother. Such scenes
involving witty proposals and responses cut into the windows of taverns
were real enough at the time. The exchange in part two of _The
Merry-Thought_ is not, however, half so satisfactory. The woman takes
umbrage at her admirer's suggestions that the glass on which he writes
is "the Emblem" of her mind in being "brittle, slipp'ry, [and]
pois'nous," and writes in retort:

I must confess, kind Sir, that though this Glass,
Can't prove me brittle, it proves you an Ass.
(Pt. 2, p. 27)

Though an easy cynicism about women's availability and about the
body's insistently animal functions predominates, there is enough
variety in _The Merry-Thought_ to provide something of a picture of
eighteenth-century society were any future anthropologist to come
upon this volume as the sole remnant of that period. He would see a
society engaged rather more in animal functions than in intellectual
pursuits--a society rather more concerned with drinking, love, and
defecation than the picture presented by the polite and i