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.
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