Hearts of wisdom : American women caring for kin, 1850-1940 / Emily K. Abel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Abel, Emily K.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Caregivers--United States--History--19th century.

Caregivers.

Caregivers--United States--History--20th century.

Medical personnel-caregiver relationships--United States--History--19th century.

Medical personnel-caregiver relationships.

Medical personnel-caregiver relationships--United States--History--20th century.

Women--United States--Social conditions.

Women.

Home nursing--United States--History--19th century.

Home nursing.

Home nursing--United States--History--20th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (336 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2000.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

A study of caregiving in America across ethnic and class divides during the 19th and early 20th century. This book reveals how a complex series of historical changes altered the cultural meaning of care.

The image of the female caregiver holding a midnight vigil at the bedside of a sick relative is so firmly rooted in our collective imagination we might assume that such caregiving would have attracted the scrutiny of numerous historians. As Emily Abel demonstrates in this groundbreaking study of caregiving in America across class and ethnic divides and over the course of ninety years, this has hardly been the case. While caring for sick and disabled family members was commonplace for women in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America, that caregiving, the caregivers' experience of it, and the medical profession's reaction to it took diverse and sometimes unexpected forms. A complex series of historical changes, Abel shows, has profoundly altered the content and cultural meaning of care. Hearts of Wisdom is an immersion into that "world of care." Drawing on antebellum slave narratives, white farm women's diaries, and public health records, Abel puts together a multifaceted picture of what caregiving meant to American women--and what it cost them--from the pre-Civil War years to the brink of America's entry into the Second World War. She shows that caregiving offered women an arena in which experience could be parlayed into expertise, while at the same time the revolution in bacteriology and the transformation of the formal health care system were weakening women's claim to that expertise.

Contents:

Acknowledgments Introduction Part One: 1850-1890 1. "Hot Flannels, Hot Teas, and a Great Deal of Care": Emily Hawley Gillespie and Sarah Gillespie, 1858-1888 2. An Overview of Nineteenth-Century Caregiving 3. "Tried at the Quilting Bees": Con icts between "Old Ladies" and Aspiring Professionals Part Two: 1890-1940 4. A "Terrible and Exhausting" Struggle: Martha Shaw Farnsworth, 1890-1924 5. "Just as You Direct": Caregiver Translations of Medical Authority 6. Negotiating Public Health Directives: Poor New Yorkers at the Turn of the Century

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 277-320) and index.

ISBN:

9780674020023

0674020022

OCLC:

923110714