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

Published Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2000

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Description 1 online resource (ix, 326 pages) Contents "Hot flannels, hot teas, and a great deal of care": Emily Hawley Gillespie and Sarah Gillespie, 1858-1888 -- An overview of nineteenth-century caregiving -- "Tried at the quilting bees": conflicts between "old ladies" and aspiring professionals -- A "terrible and exhausting" struggle: Martha Shaw Farnsworth, 1890-1924 -- "Just as you direct": caregiver translations of medical authority -- Negotiating public health directives: poor New Yorkers at the turn of the century -- Caregiving during the Great Depression: mothers seeking children's health care and American Indians encountering public health nurses -- "Very dear to my heart": confronting labels of feeblemindedness and epilepsy -- "Like ordinary hearing children": raising offspring according to oralist dictates -- Conclusion: The uses of the past 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 Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL English digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL Print version record Subject Caregivers -- United States -- History -- 19th century Caregivers -- United States -- History -- 20th century Medical personnel-caregiver relationships -- United States -- History -- 19th century Medical personnel-caregiver relationships -- United States -- History -- 20th century Women -- United States -- Social conditions -- 19th century Women -- United States -- Social conditions -- 20th century Home nursing -- United States -- History -- 19th century Home nursing -- United States -- History -- 20th century Women. Caregivers -- history Caregivers -- psychology Home Nursing -- history Family Relations Professional-Family Relations Women women (female humans) HEALTH & FITNESS -- Health Care Issues. MEDICAL -- Public Health. MEDICAL -- Health Policy. HEALTH & FITNESS -- Diseases -- General. MEDICAL -- Diseases. MEDICAL -- Health Care Delivery. MEDICAL -- History. Women Caregivers Home nursing Medical personnel-caregiver relationships Women -- Social conditions Hauspflege Pflegeperson Frau SUBJECT United States Subject United States USA Genre/Form History Form Electronic book ISBN 9780674020023 0674020022

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