Research Catalog

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

Title: Hearts of wisdom : American women caring for kin, 1850-1940 / Emily K. Abel.
Author: Abel, Emily K.
Publication: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2000.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	R727.47 .A24 2000	Off-site

Details

Description

ix, 326 pages; 25 cm

Summary

"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.
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."--BOOK JACKET.
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 public health records, white farm women's diaries, and antebellum slave narratives. Abel assembles 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.

Subjects

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Pt. 1. 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": Conflicts between "Old Ladies" and Aspiring Professionals -- Pt. 2. 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. 7. Caregiving during the Great Depression: Mothers Seeking Children's Health Care and American Indians Encountering Public Health Nurses. 8. "Very Dear to My Heart": Confronting Labels of Feeblemindedness and Epilepsy. 9. "Like Ordinary Hearing Children": Raising Offspring according to Oralist Dictates. Conclusion: The Uses of the Past.

ISBN

0674003144

LCCN

00033596

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries