Journal of Family History最新文献

{"title":"Book Review: Birthing the West: Mothers and Midwives in the Rockies and Plains by Jennifer Hill","authors":"Cassandra Crisman","doi":"10.1177/03631990221097844","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03631990221097844","url":null,"abstract":"While all historians came to be through the process of birth, little attention has been paid to the historical significance of childbirth. Perhaps this is because birth is a natural process, something that is part of human life, rather than a medical condition that needs to be met, that we have neglected to study it. Building upon archaeologist Laurie Wilkie’s assertion that there is a tendency to ignore motherhood in her field, Jennifer Hill points out there is a lack of focus on reproduction and childbirth in the field of history also. Hill’s historical analysis of reproduction and childbirth at the turn of the nineteenth century fills this gap in scholarship, while challenging previous ideas about mothers and midwives as well as the overall capitalist-individualist narrative of the American West. Framing her work with the human life cycle: conception, birth, life, and death, Hill seeks to normalize childbirth while also emphasizing the historical importance it played in the colonization of the region. The high death rates of mothers who settled in states like Montana and Wyoming have been dismissed as a consequence of relying on midwives to guide the birthing process. Hill argues that it was not the incompetence of midwives that caused a high death rate, although this was the narrative that public health officials at the time pushed. Instead, the harsh material conditions and poverty that settler women faced contributed to high death rates during and after childbirth. While these conditions made childbirth risky, Hill praises the informal network of support that women created for its ability to manage healthcare. Birthing the West is an excellent addition to the historical field, as it elevates previously silenced voices while challenging major arguments about the American West. Often isolated in their rural settlements, women who settled in the Rockies and plains did not have the same access to healthcare that their urban counterparts had. Despite this challenge, solo birthing experiences were rare, as women formed a community to assist each other. Using personal letters, oral interviews, and journals, Hill maps a unique reciprocal economy that existed among settler women in this region. Still expected to maintain the home and farm, “chronically fatigued mothers living in isolation faced greater physical and emotional burdens than urban women” (58). Hill’s research shows that despite their stressful lives, plains and Rockies rural mothers were able to rely on each other in order to safely give birth and recover. Hill’s statistical data is from the Children’s Bureau, which under Julia Lathrop, interviewed just under five hundred new mothers in rural Montana during the Summer of 1917. According to their findings, the majority of maternity health care during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was provided by midwives. While some of these midwives had formal training, many gained their knowledge from personal experience and through","PeriodicalId":45991,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Family History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48992367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: The Birth Certificate: An American History by Susan J. Pearson","authors":"Shannon K. Withycombe","doi":"10.1177/03631990221098625","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03631990221098625","url":null,"abstract":"For many Americans, the birth certificate is a valuable document, but only for the purposes of obtaining other “official” documents (driver’s license, passport, marriage license, etc.). Most of us rarely look at our birth certificates, but keep it protected as it is “proof” that we exist and deserve consideration by our government. Citizenship rests upon the birth certificate, and yet citizenship is also constructed within the birth certificate, with each box and space filled with purportedly objective information. Susan J. Pearson’s newest book, The Birth Certificate: An American History reveals the fraught history of this simple document. She examines how the birth certificate has always been about who qualifies as “American” and who does not. What many social groups and political agencies portray as a simple representation of the truth of one’s existence and identity is instead, in Pearson’s work, a complex, layered, and contentious system of categorizing individuals into a country of valuable and valueless groups. Pearson illustrates that over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “The more birth certificates came to serve as proof of identity, the less stable their ‘facts’ became.” (124) Pearson set out to trace the creation, development, and challenges to the American birth certificate and did so with admirable depth, creating a book very rich in sources. She opens on mid-nineteenth-century Boston where statistician and public health reformer Lemuel Shattuck presented his plan for systematized and universal vital registration in his state in the 1850s. Like many other white men of influence at this time, Shattuck believed that with enough data and the right numbers, populational health, strength, and value could be determined. Linking vital registration to the changes in childbirth, racial anxieties, and colonialism, Pearson investigates the myriad individuals and organizations in the last half of the nineteenth century who advocated for “accurate” birth recording of some kind. Pearson is able to add another important consideration to the commonly known narrative about the shift in birthing attendants in the United States from midwives to male physicians over the course of the nineteenth century, as birth certificates favored educated males over women who had less access to literacy and official avenues of paper bureaucracy. As states moved to pass birth registration laws, supporters found that convincing doctors, midwives, families, and others who might be involved in a birth to shift their practices accordingly was more difficult than they supposed. The United States Children’s Bureau, formed in 1912, stepped in to fill this role and worked tirelessly to spread the gospel of birth registration across the nation. As popular concerns of Progressive-Era club women, public health officials, and physicians striving to gain a professional monopoly, infant survival and child welfare emerged as problems to be solved by the state. The Child","PeriodicalId":45991,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Family History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42354849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book review: The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria by Robin P. Chapdelaine","authors":"S. Duff","doi":"10.1177/03631990221092992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03631990221092992","url":null,"abstract":"and as a problem to solve. African Americans and Native Americans had less access to obtaining birth certificates. When they did possess them, the “fact” of their race created obstacles to employment, marriage, and voting rights. Due to pressure brought by multiple groups, including the NAACP, in 1968 the Census Bureau agreed to move “race/color” to a section of the birth certificate that remains, to this day, confidential state information. Pearson reveals the simultaneous meanings of race as a “fact” of the population and a construction that can bring harm to individuals. With these challenges to the birth certificate’s claim to truth by individuals and groups harmed by its growing authority over individual identity and populational policies, Pearson is easily able to bring this long history up to the current wave of “bathroom bills” and other legislation used to empower the facts of the birth control over the autonomy of trans-Americans to live their lives as their authentic selves. Both the state and private citizens have used birth certificates to discriminate against multiple groups in US history, but Pearson shows us that those discriminated against also have a history of action and agency in reshaping the birth certificate. In the closing of the book, Pearson lauds the flexibility of the fixed document that is the birth certificate: “If our documents are meant to say who we are, then we ought to have a say in our documents.” (292) Pearson is only able to craft this sweeping narrative of a complex, powerful document over 150 years with exhausting research. Or at least, research that appears in her notes as exhaustion-inducing (I cannot speak for her frame of mind or level of energy at the end of the project). By my count, Pearson visited eleven different archives in nine different states to dig through papers of both government agencies (such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the Children’s Bureau) and individuals at the center of birth registration debates (such as Lemuel Shattuck and Grace Abbott). Juggling personal correspondence, government reports, and newspaper articles (to name just a few source types) Pearson exhibits her dexterity and care as a researcher. Historians interested in any number of topics in twentieth-century America could find new research paths just with a close reading of her footnotes. In the end, Pearson crafts one of those fascinating histories of an entity of all our lives that has always seemed inevitable in the progress of American culture. When I teach graduate students about how to come up with a research question, I ask them to practice by just looking around them and asking: “why is that?” Pearson asked, “why is that?” about one of the most meaningful documents in the country and answered with an original and captivating story that forces us all, historian and American alike, to reconsider our understandings of the facts of our own births. The birth certificate marks all of us, from the very moment we ar","PeriodicalId":45991,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Family History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48090689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Professors Down the Aisle: Academic Marriage Patterns in the Seventeenth Century Dutch Republic","authors":"Leonie Price, Manuel Llano","doi":"10.1177/03631990221088298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03631990221088298","url":null,"abstract":"Misogamist discourse prevailed among western European early modern scholars. This article examines whether misogamist discourse translated into behaviour in the Dutch Republic. We identify marriage trends of professors employed by the universities of Leiden and Utrecht in the seventeenth century, using quantitative and qualitative approaches. We analysed a prosopographical dataset of professors and their wives, explored here through several case studies. Against views of exceptionality, seclusion and celibacy in scholarly culture, based on self-fashioning and a handful of memorable examples, we argue that scholars overall replicated and intensified the European Marriage Pattern, and marriage strategies of the Dutch civic elite.","PeriodicalId":45991,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Family History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45960593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Stalin’s Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937–1951 by Karl D. Qualls","authors":"D. Kowalsky","doi":"10.1177/03631990221080066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03631990221080066","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45991,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Family History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41671144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother by Marga Vicedo","authors":"K. E. Nielsen","doi":"10.1177/03631990221084934","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03631990221084934","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45991,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Family History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49206917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: An Elite Family in Early Modern England: The Temples of Stowe and Burton Bassett 1570–1656 by O’Day, Rosemary","authors":"Linda A. Pollock","doi":"10.1177/03631990221081448","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03631990221081448","url":null,"abstract":"expectations, even though everyday life remained difficult. In her chapter on this era, Engel is right to emphasize the way in which the “double burden” affected women’s lives. Ironically, men’s “marginality in the household would contribute to a perceived crisis of masculinity in the late Soviet era, for which women would again be held responsible” (185). Grandmothers stepped in to fill the void and they are fixtures in female-headed households down to the present. In her final chapter, Engel addresses the catastrophic impact the collapse of the USSR had on family life. In the 1990s, state supports for women and the family disappeared entirely, and the birthrate fell even further as the economy contracted. Patriarchal rhetoric, and occasional pro-natalist campaigns, have flourished in the media but have had little actual effect, given that women’s work remained vital to family budgets. Indeed, in 2017—in other words, long after the worst effects of the economic collapse of the 1990s were over—48.6% of the Russian workforce was female (206). Socio-economic inequality was a hallmark of Russia’s transition to a market economy, and rural poverty was simply staggering once the collective farms were dismantled. Having children became a luxury in rural communities. Engel also describes how exploding rates of alcoholism not only reduced male life-expectancy, but also led to an exponential increase in domestic violence—something which admittedly had never truly disappeared from everyday family life in the three hundred years covered by her book. As one can see from the contents of this review, Barbara Engel’s well-written new book offers quite a comprehensive look at all aspects of Russian family life in the modern era. Hence, it is both a welcome addition of the scholarly literature on the history of the family in Europe and an impressive resource for teaching.","PeriodicalId":45991,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Family History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46389911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Family as a Locus of Illness: Secrecy, Suffering, and Institutional Practices","authors":"M. Meier, Karen Vallgårda","doi":"10.1177/03631990221079783","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03631990221079783","url":null,"abstract":"The family has long played a key role in the perception, interpretation, and treatment of mental illness across Europe and North America. Yet, historical studies of psychiatry tend to neglect the complex relationship between psychiatric institutions, patients, and their families. Using a Danish nerve sanatorium as a case, this article traces the shifting meanings attached to the family and the home as a potential cause and cure of mental illnesses from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s. While the family figured prominently in conceptions of mental illness throughout these decades, the specific interpretations and treatment practices, as well as the degrees of secrecy, altered significantly. From offering discretion and seclusion and focusing on outer, objectively verifiable circumstances regarding family relationships, doctors increasingly emphasized internal psychodynamics between family members and encouraged openness as a path to healing. The findings call for greater scholarly attention to the complicated intertwinements of psychiatric practices, family history, and changing knowledge practices in the shifting historical configurations of experiences of mental illness.","PeriodicalId":45991,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Family History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44453131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: The Politics of Family Secrecy","authors":"Karen Vallgårda","doi":"10.1177/03631990221079752","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03631990221079752","url":null,"abstract":"Histories of family secrecy are often emotionally, morally, and politically ambivalent. They entail fear, shame, pain, and repression, but they also often involve solicitude, tenderness, and degrees of tolerance. This special issue takes secrecy practices as a lens through which to examine the emotionally charged micropolitics of the family and its intertwinements with macropolitical currents, institutional practices, economic patterns, and wider social norms. The present introduction reflects on the key concepts of secrecy and family. In addition, it places the different contributions of the issue in a wider context by outlining some of the main questions and problems related to the historical study of family secrets in dialog with existing literature on the subject.","PeriodicalId":45991,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Family History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48992125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Women of the Country House in Ireland, 1860–1914 by Maeve O’Riordan","authors":"K. Burke","doi":"10.1177/03631990221080065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03631990221080065","url":null,"abstract":"amended. The carefully collected evidence upholds most of what we know about the early modern landed family. The organization by relationship rather than theme makes for some repetition and confusion and prevents more wide ranging interpretations. O’Day sticks closely to the archive, paying meticulous attention to the welter of detail contained there. Her conclusions are brief, often perfunctory, and resolutely non-speculative. Thus, notwithstanding the length of the book and the extensive appendices, we are left wanting more: more engagement with recent scholarship, more nuanced discussion of the copious quotations, more of an overall argument, more probing of the issues, and more pushing the boundaries. Take court cases, for example. These seem to testify to the existence of frayed relationships. Yet, even during court proceedings, Peter and his father enjoyed a close relationship. There were very few periods of time when the Temples were not involved in lawsuits. They spent their lives worrying about money. Everyone apparently had a deep knowledge of their rights and were alert to any diminution of these. Lawsuits may be less evidence of discord but a routine—even if time-consuming and expensive—method of settling matters so as to prevent a family falling apart.","PeriodicalId":45991,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Family History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47818331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}