The Archaeology of Mothering

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

“…In this cosmology, you want to get inside a person's head rather than their heart. Spells to bind may be done to connect a person to another against their will (love spells) or draw upon an existing emotional connection to transfer strength from one person to another (Wilkie 2000b(Wilkie , 2003. An excellent example of this is the practice of a laboring woman wearing the baby's father's hat to help ease her pain.…”

“…African-American ideas about health and the body were also influenced by African-rooted philosophies, Native American herbalism and an array of medicinal and magical practices shared with European-Americans (Fraser 1998;Wilkie 2003).…”

“…In the case of this particular spell, the man's spiritual strength, conveyed through his essence in his hat, is providing additional strength and comfort to the woman. The role of bodily substances in binding spells is relevant to the structure of labor, birth and the period immediately following birth as well (Wilkie 2003).…”

“…The site pre-dates the Federal Government's imposition of licensing on lay midwifery in the 1920s. Materials from the site are a rich source of insights into how Perryman juggled traditional ways of understanding the physical and spiritual nature of the maternal body, as well as her attempts to treat her patients with knowledge acquired from the sanitation and hygiene movements of the late nineteenth century (Wilkie 2003). For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on how the assemblage sheds light on the relationship between the fetus, infant and mother.…”

“…Revealed is a coherent set of understandings that situate pregnancy and birth as a state in which the spiritual and physical worlds come into contact and coexist, with each dimension bringing potential harm or potential benefit to the other. In this paper I will be drawing mainly upon archaeological evidence from AfricanAmerican households in the American South, with particular attention to materials from the late nineteenth-to early-twentieth-century Alabama household of midwife Lucretia Perryman (Wilkie 2003). Perryman was called to midwifery as a vocation as a widowed mother of five children in the mid-1880s and continued her work through the first decade and a half of the twentieth century.…”