Can you suggest a book on this topic?

[~Shanna~]

So in my rookie status as a new mom, I'm dying to know how women used to manage raising children while farming, washing clothes, making clothes,preserving food and everything else that I wish I had time for. Is there a book on the history of being a wife and mother?

[simple living mama]

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[*violet*]

I'm interested too. I'm a voracious reader, but I've never seen anything even close. I have a difficult enough to find books about modern-day mothers, imo.

[travlr]

I've also never seen a book on the history of motherhood. I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but if you look up "pioneer" or "homestead" on Amazon or at your library you should find some good books on women who were consumed with all the tasks you listed in addition to raising children. Interestingly, in the books l've read, the women have the toughest time with loneliness rather than the workload. There was a PBS series called "Frontier House" that was a reality-type show that took modern families and had them try to live the pioneer lifestyle. While I didn't love the families they used, it was interesting to see how hard life was, especially for the women. It's available on Netflix.

[PiePie]

according to life after birth, what gave was the attentive style of mothering, and of course v what didn;t exist was the concept of cild as non-worker.

[TwilightJoy]

Oo, I'd be interested in this too! I don't have a book recommendation, but this site is interesting:

http://www.hoover.nara.gov/LIW/pione...in-chores.html

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Pioneering Journeys of the Ingalls Family
Pepin, Wisconsin
Household Chores

For Ma and other pioneer women, each day had its own proper chores. Ma used to say,

"Wash on Monday,
Iron on Tuesday,
Mend on Wednesday,
Churn on Thursday,
Clean on Friday,
Bake on Saturday,
Rest on Sunday."

[Imogen]

Originally Posted by ~Shanna~

So in my rookie status as a new mom, I'm dying to know how women used to manage raising children while farming, washing clothes, making clothes,preserving food and everything else that I wish I had time for. Is there a book on the history of being a wife and mother?

I don't have a book, but I do have a link to the website of a fantastic woman who does just this:

http://www.xanga.com/juliepersons


Peace

[~Shanna~]

Thanks for all the links - I'm hoping to have some time to peruse this weekend.....

[*violet*]

Do you know what would be cool? Like a "Little House" type book for grownups. I have been looking, but can't find anything like that.

[~Shanna~]

Originally Posted by *violet*

Do you know what would be cool? Like a "Little House" type book for grownups. I have been looking, but can't find anything like that.

What a great idea - how are your writing skills? :

[~Shanna~]

Originally Posted by PiePie

according to life after birth, what gave was the attentive style of mothering, and of course v what didn;t exist was the concept of cild as non-worker.

I've suspected this, and even feel drawn to a slightly less intensive style of mothering that is modern. But still, I can't believe that mothers weren't having to make sure little Susie didn't fall into the thresher, right?

PiePie, this is totally OT, but I recently finished a book I think you'd find interesting, called A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear. The author touches on a lot topics that I think are of interest to you, and she's an incredibly intelligent writer.

[AngelBee]

:

[sapientia]

This is also a topic that has always interested me. I have read the Little House books a gazillion times-homesteading books...Pioneer and homesteading topics have a lot of information about day to day life in them.
I have also heard lotsa stories from family-great great grandmothers telling stories about having babies and having to go right back to work out in the field not long after, or go back to work cooking for family and the fieldhands. Unfortunately if they didn't have older children to help out-a lot of crying it out happened. The baby had to 'learn' to wait. Sad all around. The children had chores early on in life. Running a farm was hard work. There was no babymoon, and often very little time for recovery after childbirth.
I know that my gg grandmother had 13 children at home-she uc'd all of them. She was seminole and married a baptist minister. She had a small garden and when she worked it, she kept the baby nearby. She extended nursed her children and all of them (miraculously) lived to adulthood. I remember her daughter(my great grandmother) very well. She had her oldest daughter young and used to work in the strawberry fields with the baby in a basket nearby as she worked. She extended nursed. When the kids got older they kind of took care of themselves.
My paternal grandfather's mother hired a wetnurse to nurse her kids cause she didn't want to be bothered. She also told me a sad story about how she let her babies cry(she only had 2) because they needed to learn to be alone. She died a few years ago at almost a hundred. She was a mean woman.

I can go on and on about farming stories.

[Amaranth]

It's not exactly about being a wife and mother, though she was a wife and mother. It's more about being a woman (and geez, what a lot of work), and midwife at the end of the 18th c. : A Midwife's Tale, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

It won the Pulitzer Prize for history. And is very readable, quite an eye-opener. Ulrich does a lot of explanatory stuff that makes Martha Ballard's life more understandable.

I'm trying to think of something like this, but for the later 1800's, but coming up blank. Huck's Raft, by Steven Mintz is very interesting in terms of parenting responsibilities (and a lot of kids did die in horrible accidents - little Susie may not have fallen into the thresher, but a lot of little Toms and Betsies fell in to the hearth and got burned, or drowned in the river).

[FarmerCathy]

The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald is pretty good. It is a non-fiction book and it shows how life was back when you had to make almost everything and how the government influenced parenting decisions. Very interesting read.
Also a good non-fiction read that has a lot of what your looking for and much more is The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery. She had homebirths and all that. I don't know if this is the kind of thing your looking for, but thought I'd mention them.