On 3 December 1734, Lady Anne Conolly was at home in Leixlip Castle, County Kildare, entertaining her husband's widowed aunt, Katherine Conolly, when she suddenly fell into an unexpected and abnormally fast labour with her second child. Katherine had just time to send for an elderly woman who lived nearby to attend on Anne, before the baby, a boy, arrived. He was premature and small, wrote Katherine, and it was ‘a great providence I was here or in all human probability both mother and child had been lost’. It was a month later before Anne could write to her father, Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, offering her thoughts on her ordeal and her first son. When she did, she explained that she was:

Anne's experiences exemplify many of the joys, risks and harsh realities of becoming a mother in eighteenth-century Ireland. Her own letter and that written by Katherine are evidence of the dangers of pregnancy and labour, the threat of infant mortality, the pressure on women to produce a male heir and the rate at which ladies of the elite might have their children (Anne had married in April 1733, had her ‘pretty girl’, Kitty, on 30 January 1734 and would go on to have nine children in total). It is these issues (and others) surrounding pregnancy and childbirth which this chapter will consider, along with how children were raised, cared for and educated, and the part their mothers played therein.