Susan Ericksen
Author
Description
This enthralling work of scholarship strips away abstractions to reveal the hidden-and not always stoic-face of the "goodwives" of colonial America. In this book we encounter the awesome burdens-and the considerable power-of a New England housewife's domestic life and witness her occasional forays into the world of men. We see her borrowing from her neighbors, loving her husband, raising-and, all too often, mourning-her children, and even attaining...
Author
Description
Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier. Between 1785 and 1812, a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in twenty-seven years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel...
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