From a midwife in the 18th century to a labour ward in London in the 1970s, Sarah Knott’s reading suggestions for Mother’s Day
What do we read to find out about other mothers’ lives? Sarah Moss blends history and fiction stylishly in Night Waking, which I picked up a little feverishly with an infant close at hand, looking for something clever and non-prescriptive. In the 1870s, a nurse travels to a remote Scottish island where infant mortality is desperately high. She brings her modern medicine, but not much understanding of island life, to hardscrabble homes. In the novel’s present day, a new mother in Scotland, an academic on a working holiday, digs up one of those infant skeletons. Her attempts to cope with small children, and with a husband whose parenting plays second fiddle to his work, unfold next to her struggle to understand what happened to the buried baby.
“Safe delivered of a very fine Daughter”. We go back even further, to 18th-century Maine, in the hands of historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. A Midwife’s Tale draws on a terse diary kept for 27 years by the New England midwife Martha Ballard. She slipped the folded half-sheets of her diary into her bag when she headed out, and numbered deliveries down the diary’s left-hand margins. The women gave birth in the arms and laps of the midwife and neighbours: perhaps three women around the bed, perhaps five. Rum, sugar and tea were the usual labouring comforts. The midwife added an “XX” to the diary’s margin each time the charge was paid, in shillings, textiles or food. In almost 1,000 births, she never lost a mother during delivery.
Continue reading...from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2YCIrJX
Comments
Post a Comment