Stories Without Pattern, Lives at the Edge: The Mass Observation Project and Emotional Histories of In/Fertility Before IVF

Very little is known about the experience of infertility before the successful deployment of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) in the late 1970s. It is sometimes assumed that in the more constrained emotional climate of early and mid-century Britain, infertile couples adopted or adapted, and that prolonged grief at childlessness is a post-IVF artefact. This article employs a longitudinal study of responses to Mass Observation Project directives, tracing five women who experienced fertility problems through the archive to reconstruct their fertility biographies. These women’s life-writings challenge the myth of stoic adaptation to infertility, while the diversity of experiences thrown up by the archive suggests the expansive possibilities of more fluid historical framings of ‘infertility’ as ‘in/fertility’.