Research Catalog

Hearts of wisdom : American women caring for kin, 1850-1940

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.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Filter by

1 Item

StatusFormatAccessCall NumberItem Location
Request for On-site UseRequest Scan
How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?
TextRequest in advance R727.47 .A24 2000Off-site

Holdings

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
Subjects
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references (p. 277-320) 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
OCLC
  • ocm44046827
  • SCSB-4011213
Owning Institutions
Columbia University Libraries