Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1177/03631990221097844
Cassandra Crisman
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
{"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}
Pub Date : 2022-05-02DOI: 10.1177/03631990221098625
Shannon K. Withycombe
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
对许多美国人来说，出生证明是一份有价值的文件，但只是为了获得其他“官方”文件(驾照、护照、结婚证等)。我们大多数人很少看我们的出生证明，但把它保护起来，因为它是我们存在的“证据”，值得政府考虑。公民身份取决于出生证明，但公民身份也在出生证明中构建，每个方框和空格都填满了据称是客观的信息。苏珊·j·皮尔森的新书《出生证明:一部美国历史》揭示了这份简单文件令人担忧的历史。她研究了出生证明是如何一直表明谁有资格成为“美国人”，谁不是。在皮尔逊的作品中，许多社会团体和政治机构所描绘的是一个人存在和身份真相的简单代表，相反，这是一个复杂的、分层的、有争议的系统，将个人划分为有价值和无价值的群体。皮尔逊指出，在19世纪末和20世纪，“作为身份证明的出生证明越多，他们的‘事实’就越不稳定。(124)皮尔森着手追踪美国出生证明的产生、发展和挑战，并以令人钦佩的深度完成了这项工作，创作了一本资料非常丰富的书。她从19世纪中叶的波士顿开始，统计学家和公共卫生改革者Lemuel shatuck在19世纪50年代提出了他的计划，在他的州进行系统化和普遍的生命登记。像当时许多其他有影响力的白人一样，沙塔克相信，有了足够的数据和正确的数字，就可以确定人口的健康、力量和价值。皮尔森将生命登记与生育的变化、种族焦虑和殖民主义联系起来，调查了19世纪下半叶无数主张某种“准确”出生记录的个人和组织。关于19世纪美国接生员从助产士到男性医生的转变这一广为人知的叙述，皮尔逊能够补充另一个重要的考虑因素，因为出生证明更青睐受过教育的男性，而不是女性，因为女性很少接触识字和书面官僚主义的官方渠道。随着各州开始通过出生登记法，支持者发现，说服医生、助产士、家庭和其他可能参与分娩的人相应地改变他们的做法，比他们想象的要困难得多。成立于1912年的美国儿童局(United States Children’s Bureau)填补了这一角色，并不知疲倦地在全国范围内传播出生登记的福音。作为进步时代俱乐部妇女、公共卫生官员和努力获得专业垄断的医生普遍关注的问题，婴儿生存和儿童福利成为需要国家解决的问题。儿童局认为准确的出生登记是解决这些问题的关键。如果不知道有多少婴儿出生，他们就无法确定婴儿死亡率的真正威胁(特别是按种族划分)。如果没有对每个儿童年龄的真实测量，他们就无法推动禁止童工的立法。许多其他组织也加入了儿童局的行列，致力于减少婴儿死亡和童工现象(如书评)
{"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}
Pub Date : 2022-04-18DOI: 10.1177/03631990221092992
S. Duff
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
{"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}
Pub Date : 2022-04-04DOI: 10.1177/03631990221088298
Leonie Price, Manuel Llano
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.
{"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}
Pub Date : 2022-03-30DOI: 10.1177/03631990221080066
D. Kowalsky
{"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}
Pub Date : 2022-03-28DOI: 10.1177/03631990221084934
K. E. Nielsen
{"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}
Pub Date : 2022-03-07DOI: 10.1177/03631990221081448
Linda A. Pollock
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.
{"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}
Pub Date : 2022-03-07DOI: 10.1177/03631990221079783
M. Meier, Karen Vallgårda
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.
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Pub Date : 2022-03-03DOI: 10.1177/03631990221079752
Karen Vallgårda
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.
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Pub Date : 2022-03-02DOI: 10.1177/03631990221080065
K. Burke
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.
{"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}
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