Hearts of Wisdom
Subtitle: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850-1940
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: November 20, 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780674003149
Subjects: American history: c 1800 to c 1900; American history: from c 1900 -; Health systems & services; History of medicine; Social history; Women's studies; 20th century; c 1800 to c 1900; Medical Personnel; Sociology Of Women; History - General History; Medical; USA; United States - General; Women's Studies - History; Medical / History; General; Women's Studies - General; 19th century; Caregivers; History; Medical personnel-caregiver relationships; United States
Description: "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.