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Presence

A Hidden History of the Female Body
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Presence

By: Erin Maglaque
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

A bold new history of the female body, combining memoir with archival research to reveal a hidden history of birthing, caring and desiring - with radical implications for how we understand our bodies today

Sex and abortion, pregnancy and birth, feeding and rocking and washing: these are embodied practices with a deep past. Yet the history of the female body remains largely unknown – even unimagined.

In this exhilarating book, Erin Maglaque uncovers the hidden history of the desiring, labouring, caring women of the pre-modern past. From fragments in medical manuals, trial transcripts, letters, diaries, legal treatises, prayerbooks and case books, she assembles a chorus of women’s voices. Through them, we encounter a vanished past both strikingly recognisable and strange, when ideas of the female body, sexuality, work and pleasure were more varied, more unruly, and sometimes freer.

This is the invisible history of the female body – working, desiring, bleeding, rocking, spinning, dying. Restless, exuberant and beautifully written, Maglaque uncovers a hidden female history and points towards a radical new way of understanding our bodies today.

© Erin Maglaque 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 Gender Studies Social Sciences Women

Critic reviews

A work of remarkable archival scholarship, and a radical recovery of the history of female embodiment. As I read, the closeness of these pre-modern women was uncanny and revelatory: their voices rang in my ears, and in their words I encountered things I had felt and experienced. Extraordinary! (Harriet Baker, author of Rural Hours)
Impassioned and deeply thoughtful, Presence taps into the feelings, desires and fears of women in the past. It left me pondering my own physical experiences. Illuminating and brave. (Alison Light, author of Common People)
For too long, history has trivialised and even deleted women’s physical experiences. In Presence, Erin Maglaque does something radical, not only dissolving the obsolete Cartesian divide – which insists on separating thoughts and feelings – but daring to honour her own bodily truths as worthy of record. An important, original contribution to modern feminist writing about the body. (Gabriel Weston, author of Alive)
An immersive, revelatory, and astonishing book about women, told through the distinct bodily experiences that punctuate our lives, and the history we’ve rarely been taught. Beautifully written and acutely insightful, Presence connects us to ourselves, our foremothers, and each other. (Sophie Gilbert, author of Girl on Girl)
Engrossing and vital, Presence rediscovers the female body as a vessel of history. Interweaving past and present, the personal with incisive scholarship, these stories reveal the rich, unexpected, and sometimes brutal ways in which the complexities of female embodiment connect all women across all time. (Michelle Orange, author of Pure Flame)
In Presence, Erin Magalaque expands and explodes the genre of personal history. In a voice at once deeply learned and often disarmingly intimate, these explorations unravel much of what women have been told about our bodies, desires, and capacities. They embody a mode of thought that does not only describe freedom but enacts it. (Moira Weigel, author of Labor of Love)

An impressive book debut . . . As Maglaque examines pregnancy and miscarriage, abortion, labor and birth, caregiving, housework, and care of the dying, the voices of myriad women (herself included) amply fulfill her aim of making the past ‘present and immediate.’ A richly textured, revelatory history.”
“An impressive book debut . . . As Maglaque examines pregnancy and miscarriage, abortion, labor and birth, caregiving, housework, and care of the dying, the voices of myriad women (herself included) amply fulfill her aim of making the past ‘present and immediate.’ A richly textured, revelatory history.
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