Hearts of wisdom : American women caring for kin, 1850-1940 /
"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...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge, MA :
Harvard University Press
2000
Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2000 Cambridge, Mass. : 2000 Cambridge, Mass. : c2000 Cambridge, Mass. ; London : 2000 Cambridge, Mass. : 2000 |
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| 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 "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."--Jacket 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 |
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| Item Description: | This WorldCat-derived record is shareable under Open Data Commons ODC-BY, with attribution to OCLC |
| Physical Description: | ix, 326 p. ; 25 cm ix, 326 pages ; 25 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (p. 277-320) and index Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-320) and index Includes bibliographical references and index |
| ISBN: | 0674003144 0674010159 9780674003149 9780674010154 |