Reviews for Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

The average rating for Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-12-05 00:00:00 Mayssa Alwani Kessler-Harris's work is a classic read in understanding labor patterns of women and how they have shifted dramatically over the last few hundred years in the United States. The book focuses mainly on European peasant/workers and American slave/servant transformation to the outside workspace - inside homespace in how "women's work" evolved. Kessler-Harris divides the book into thematic six chapters that follows the theme generally from the colonial period to roughly the present (the 1st edition was published in the late 70s so much of the updates are contained in the last chapter.) She begins by noting in pre-industrial societies (which I believe she means Europe) that most of the economic activity took place in the home, such as sewing, laundrying, making useable objects, cooking, and more, and that nearly everyone participated in it by necessity. Over the course of the late middle ages as merchants began demanding specific goods instead of just selling whatever was available, work became less specialized and gendered spheres began to carved for ordinary people outside the "respectable classes." Most people worked constantly with the seasons, without pay, yet industrialism redefined what was men's and women's work into paid men's outside-the-home labor and unpaid women's inside-the-home labor. Kessler-Harris makes the case that this was never completely the case, as poor women, especially enslaved black women, were always expected to perform work alongside men, even if separate by task. Mills in 1820s-50s New England were filled with unmarried daughters whom were cheap and replaceable, for instance, later replaced with immigrant women. Women's work, considered illegitimate and for immoral fallen women, became fabric/garment industries (a natural extension of the home textiles), service, domestic workers, and nursing. All the while, respectable women were only supposed to work on the side and temporarily until they married, and then devote themselves to upkeep of the home. Of course, these morals were only enforced on the "better classes" and by 1910, a fifth of all workers outside agriculture were women. Even so, women workers were restricted from "respectable" work early on, with the exception of teaching. Middle class to affluent women demanded access to education, which spawned women's colleges and nursing schools, though many were left without work after they finished that education, falling into teaching, social work, welfare work, and less prestigious medical professions. Interestingly, as industrialism took off, the amount of children women were expected to produce over a life time fell from 10-11 to 5 as more survived (though only in urban industrial areas, in rural areas the preindustrial patterns held up until the 1930s as electricity and water did not become reliable until then.) As such, moral reformers sought to tightly control management of the household, teaching manners and time management in household chores for women, especially as technology reduced the need for middle class women to hire servants. Even with these patterns, and preference of employers to hire women for lower wages, women became involved in union struggles to push back against exploitation, sexual harassment, and unsafe conditions at the dawn of the 20th century. Through a mix of direct action and pushing for protective laws (the first hourly limitations on work were aimed at women workers) women were often leaders in strikes or key support. Over the 20th century, gender barriers were slowly eroded in traditional men's work, particularly when women would fill jobs when men were called off to fight total wars. By the 1960s, women's groups were actively pushing for anti-discrimination laws that by the end of the 1970s, men began relenting on. She notes the scores of advancement women have had into formerly preserves of men's work across the board, though Kessler-Harris also notes that much work still needs to be done since often women are allowed into professions while men's domination is preserved. She notes that women, as the title goes, have always worked and work and labor should never be thought of as explicitly a male domain.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-03-14 00:00:00 Vera Tovino I am just not a fan of Kessler's writing style. This book is literally her book "Out to work" cut down substantially, and then some updates to what happen after it came out in the 1980s. Like literally this books includes word for word passages from her previous book. While I want to appreciate that she attempted to include non-wage earning women in this book, it fails to do so. There are better books on women's labor history out there.