Susan Pedersen writes:

Beier stresses the coercive character of the valorisation of sexual ignorance, but she also makes clear its limits and its logic. If female chastity was prized, female helplessness was not, since a poor family’s health and well-being depended almost entirely on the mother’s knowledge and skill. ‘M’mother was the doctor,’ informants reported, and when it came to caring for their children’s health, the masquerade of innocence vanished. Mothers were trying to keep their children alive in the face of a host of deadly threats – diphtheria, measles, polio, scarlet fever – eager to claim them, and they threw every ounce of their energy and accumulated wisdom into the battle. Their children, in their own old age, vividly recalled the weapons of that fight: the onion poultices and goose grease rubs, the cod liver oil and opiate-laden cough syrup (‘it were gorgeous’), the scratchy woollen underwear and the constant struggle with damp.

(LRB 28 May 2009)

Ohio State | hardback 409 pp. |ISBN: 9780814210949