MIDWIFERY AND WOMEN'S WORK IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC: A RECONSIDERATION OF LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH'S A MIDWIFE'S TALE

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
TANFER EMIN TUNC
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early American ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Wage Earning

ABSTRACTTwenty years after its initial publication, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Pulitzer Prize winning monograph A midwife's tale: the life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812 (1990) still serves as a major benchmark in women's labour/economic history mainly because it provides scholars with a window into the life of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century lay American rural healer not through the comments of an outsider, but through the words of the healer herself. While, on the surface, Ballard's encoded, repetitive, and quotidian diary may seem trivial and irrelevant to historians, as Ulrich notes, ‘it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard's book lies … For her, living was to be measured in doing’ (p. 9). By piecing together ‘ordinary’ primary source material to form a meaningful, extraordinary socio-cultural narrative, Ulrich elucidates how American midwives, such as Martha Ballard, functioned within the interstices of the private and public spheres. A midwife's tale is thus not only methodologically significant, but also theoretically important: by illustrating the economic contributions that midwives made to their households and local communities, and positioning the organizational skill of multitasking as a source of female empowerment, it revises our understanding of prescribed gender roles during the early American Republic (1783–1848). Even though A midwife's tale is clearly limited in terms of time (turn-of-the-nineteenth century) and place (rural Maine), it deserves the renewed attention of historians – especially those interested in gender relations and wage-earning, the economic value of domestic labour, and women's work before industrialization.

scholarly journals Gender, the Service Sector, and U.S. Business History

2007 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angel Kwolek-Folland
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Service Sector ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Business History ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Integral Relations ◽  
The U.S

Despite the importance of service-sector activities, both to women and to the U.S. economy, services have not figured prominently in business history. A consideration of the usefulness of this subject to business history is followed by a case study of household services in the nineteenth century, showing their social and economic value and the ways in which they exemplified the integral relations between women's work and business.

Religion and American Politics

2020 ◽  
pp. 277-294
Author(s):  
Daniel K. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Moral Regulation ◽  
Early American ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

This article surveys the intersection of religion and politics in America from the colonial era to the present, with a particular focus on the controversies surrounding religiously inspired political causes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The article argues that religion (and, in particular, Protestantism and Catholic Christianity) has always played a central role in American politics, and that religious ideologies have inspired both liberal and conservative political movements. In the colonial era and the early American republic, controversies over religion focused primarily on disputes about church establishment and religious liberty, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, controversies over religion and politics increasingly centered on debates over religiously inspired moral regulation. Whether the issue was the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century or regulation of abortion in recent decades, America’s culture wars were usually political contests between competing sets of religiously inspired arguments.

Anglican Women and Social Service in Hong Kong

2018 ◽  
pp. 239-252
Author(s):  
Jane Lee
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Women Leaders ◽  
Social Services ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
First Century ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Women And Children

This chapter explores the contribution of Anglican women, Chinese and British, in the promotion of welfare for women and children in Hong Kong from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The narrative covers four areas of progress in chronological order, which include: Elevating Social Status through Education, Advocating Women’s Rights through Social Movements, the establishment of the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui Women’s League, and women leaders in social services. It presents an account of change and continuity in the development of women’s work for women: from British women’s work of charity and evangelism to Chinese women’s assumption of leadership roles; from protection of girls and women in the nineteenth century, to pioneering nursery and child care in postwar rehabilitation, and providing holistic care to the elderly and marginalised in twenty-first century.

Mill, Political Economy, and Women's Work

2008 ◽  
Vol 102 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
NANCY J. HIRSCHMANN
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Sexual Division Of Labor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Productive Labor ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Relationship Of

The sexual division of labor and the social and economic value of women's work in the home has been a problem that scholars have struggled with at least since the advent of the “second wave” women's movement, but it has never entered into the primary discourses of political science. This paper argues that John Stuart Mill'sPolitical Economyprovides innovative and useful arguments that address this thorny problem. Productive labor is essential to Mill's conception of property, and property was vital to women's independence in Mill's view. Yet since Mill thought most women would choose the “career” of wife and mother rather than working for wages, then granting that work productive status would provide a radical and inventive foundation for women's equality. Mill, however, is ambiguous about the productive status of domestic labor, and is thereby representative of a crucial failure in political economic thought, as well as in egalitarian liberal thought on gender. But because Mill at the same time develops a conception of production that goes well beyond the narrow limits offered by other prominent political economists, he offers contemporary political scientists and theorists a way to rethink the relationship of reproductive to productive labor, the requirements for gender equality, and the accepted categories of political economy.

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