Expelling frogs and binding babies: conception, gestation and birth in nineteenth-century African-American midwifery

Abstract

That pregnancy can be perceived as a blessed or cursed event is well-recognised in many contemporary societies, but it was a lived and embodied experience for African-American women in the Deep South of the United States in the 19th century. Oral histories from healers, root doctors and midwives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries paint a portrait of the fetus as an invasive spiritual malignancy to be driven from the body, or an ephemeral spirit that could be accidently frightened from an unwelcoming body. This paper explores these beliefs and practices and examines their archaeological signatures. It considers how during and after birth, the infant remained only lightly bound to this world with the spiritual world beckoning beguilingly to them and where spiritual-medical intervention was required to entire the infant's soul to anchor itself to the physical body.

Imagining Archaeologies without Ableism

“…Archaeology, as detailed by a number of these authors, has a rich history of looking at the materialization of health care practices and systems through a range of theoretical frames, be in consumerism (e.g., Larsen 1994 ); understanding disparities in access to health care (Hosken and Tiede 2018 ; Psota 2011 ; Rathbun 1987 ); continuities in particular ethnomedical traditions (e.g., Fennell 2010 ; Linn 2010 ; Lun 2015 ; Wilkie 1996a , 2000 ), the politicization of reproductive health (e.g., Barnes 2021 ; Carnevale et al 2016 ; Kozub 2018 ; Wilkie 2003 , 2013 ); community approaches to health care (e.g., Fisher et al 2007 ; Geismar and Janowitz 1993 ; McCarthy and Ward 2000 ); or the politics of institutionalization (e.g., Beisaw and Gibb 2009 ). Within this wide range of approaches to understanding healthcare have emerged issues of race, class, sex and gender, yet seldom has disability theorizing entered into archaeological discourse—with bioarchaeology only recently thinking about impairment and disability rather than paleopathology (see Byrnes and Muller 2017 ; but especially Kincopf 2020 ) and archaeological works discussing disability not necessarily engaging with disability theory (e.g., Psota 2011 ; Spence et al 2014 ; cf.…”

“…While these products were available due to their role in maintaining bowel health, they have also been long associated with their use for inducing abortions during early pregnancy. While birth control was increasingly promoted as having a role in family planning in the early twentieth century, abortion was increasingly criminalized and undertaken carefully (Carnevale et al 2016 ; Kozub 2018 ; Wilkie 2003 , 2013 ). I note that Komara makes no mention of whether any of the most common medical instruments popularized by the bowel-cleansing movement—the enema kit– product available in multiple varieties and styles through the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs, were found at the site.…”

Behind the Scenes of Hollywood: An Archaeology of Reproductive Oppression at the Intersections

“…2020; Wilkie 2003), and intersectionality is reinvigorating the archaeological literature, as researchers explore how archaeology can aid in the analysis of intersecting power relations as they emerge over time and how this type of research may be emancipatory (e.g., Flewellen 2018; Hodge 2016; White and Fennell 2017; Woehlke, Springate, and Spencer‐Wood 2017). Historians are examining the economic value of enslaved people from infancy to their senior years (Berry 2017), the sexual economy of slavery (Hartman 1997; Morgan 2004), and sexuality as a tool of control, exploitation, and repression and as an expression of autonomy, resistance, and defiance (Berry and Harris 2018), but archaeologists are slow to take up Laurie Wilkie's (2013) call to examine the effects enslavement had on parenting and reproduction.…”

“…Physicians soon professionalized their status to control the lucrative domains of gynecology and obstetrics, and states moved to stop this behavior (McGregor 1998; Ross and Sollinger 2017, 23–24). Up until the invention of the stethoscope and the ability to detect the fetal heartbeat, quickening was the legal standard to recognize the beginning of life (Mohr 1984, 119; Wilkie 2013, 275). As a result of the new technology, physicians worked with members of state legislatures to eliminate women's prerogative to ask midwives or physicians to “restore their menses,” or to terminate their pregnancies (McGregor 1998; Mohr 1979, 1984).…”