@article{1478184,
      recid = {1478184},
      author = {Abel, Emily K., },
      title = {Hearts of Wisdom : American Women Caring for Kin,  1850-1940 /},
      pages = {1 online resource (336 p.)},
      abstract = {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.Table of Contents: Acknowledgments  Introduction Part One: 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": Con'icts between "Old Ladies" and Aspiring  Professionals Part Two: 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 Reviews of this book:  This excellent historical review of female caregiving  within families as a transformative experience identifies  conditions that make this form of human connectedness  rewarding and meaningful.--J.E. Thompson, ChoiceThis is a  breathtaking work in terms of its depth and its breadth.  Emily Abel's research is impressive in its time frame, wide  range of topics, and wonderful source material. What she  has given us, for the first time, is a full-length study of  the female support network, not only for childbirth but for  a whole range of health issues. With her pleasing writing  style and clear, readable prose, she gives us much more  than mere glimpses of anonymous people--she provides the  reader with a sense of the texture of human lives.--Susan  L. Smith, University of AlbertaThe reader of Hearts of  Wisdom is surprised by the topic and content, but is left  with the sense that the most central story of human  possibility has been left out of all other history books.  The work offers a substantive contribution to history,  feminist scholarship, caregiving professions, and informal  caregivers.--Patricia Benner, R.N., Ph.D, University of  California, San Francisco},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1478184},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674020023},
}