I thought I’d talk to you today of some of the social history of the women here. This is always my favorite part of learning about a culture. It’s the day-to-day living aspect that always seem to interest me the most. How do women deal with medical care, child birth and care, hygiene and their activities of daily living? That has always been the most enlightening part of a society to me.
I have always been very interested in the folk cures and how medical and veterinary treatments were handled here. When I began collecting folk cures and remedies and learning which plants were used for what ailments, I was surprised when the stories would mention Dr. This or Dr. That. I’d always thought formal healthcare scarce. For a while, I didn’t think about it, but then I asked.
“So, I thought there weren’t many doctors before the clinic was built?”
“Oh…he weren’t a real doctor. He were a veterinarian.”
I’m not even sure it was a real vet that had been delivering babies and handing out pills. It was most likely a “horse doctor”…someone skilled in taking care of livestock.
There were real physicians who would ride up in the hills on certain days of the week. If you needed to see him, you placed a white handkerchief on your mailbox and he would stop and render aid.
But most of the day to day medical and veterinary remedies were wild-crafted. Some of the more useful plants were Queen of the meadow and tetch-me-not. Queen of the Meadow was used by women as a cure for “kidney” problems, that I believe is a euphemism for cystitis. Tetch-me-not was used much like aloe and I’m told if taken internally will cure snake bite. It does help an awful lot with poison ivy. The poisonous mountain laurel was often ground up, mixed with feed and used to worm chickens and cattle. Kerosene taken internally was also quite popular. And then, there was The Fat Stick Cure.
But they also believe that keeping a Chihuahua dog will “take” your asthma.
There was also a very well-known midwife named Granny Nichols. There is a book written about her by her grand-daughter called “Etta, Granny Nichols, Last of the Old-Timey Midwives”. “Granny” was the honorific given to midwives. She delivered over 1500 babies in her lifetime. She was also a goat keeper. Granny Nichols was big on goats. My friend, Betsy, met her toward the end of her life.
Granny held up her index finger and crooked it slightly.
“That there, is all you need to know, for goats or women.” She said.
She was referring to the dilation of the cervix and the point at which the baby was about to crest and come into the world.
There were many superstitions surrounding childbirth and birthmarks. I wrote a piece previously called, “I keep my tail in a jar…” if you’d like to read about pre-birth marking.
Hygiene practices varied from family to family. One of my sources used her husband’s old undershirts instead of pads while menstruating well into the 1980’s.
“Well, I had a house full of girls,” she said. “I had to buy pads for all of them and I’d always been using his old undershirts.”
Laundry was done daily and hung on the line to dry. An electric washer was a luxury item and most women didn’t have one until the 1970’s. I’m not talking about an “automatic” washer like we are familiar with. These were big cylindrical tubs that used electricity to rotate the beaters and had a mangle that you could ring the wet clothes out in. Water was drawn from the creek or the spring and carried up to the house for laundry and bathing. Most women used strong lye soap and sometimes pure lye in the wash. Sometimes a bluing agent was used. Everyone I’ve spoken to about laundry says the laundry got much cleaner this way and they sort of miss it. Now, most women do have modern automatics and dryers.
During the summer months, after May 1st, it was not uncommon for women to send the men and the children down to the creek for a quick wash. During the winter months, they would bathe the children in a big galvanized metal tub in the kitchen next to the wood stove. As I mentioned, hygiene varied from family to family, but I have found that the more fastidious women do tend to gossip about the ones that weren’t. Keeping a very clean house and very clean children wearing clean clothing was a point of pride.
Many of the cabins were very small. There is an original cabin not far from my home that is perhaps 300 square feet with a loft space. A family of six once lived there. The ceilings in most of the homes were very low to conserve heat, which was provided by wood burning stoves.
A woman who had sixteen siblings said they slept in a sleeping loft with two full size beds and the older children slept four to a bed, head to foot.
“I grew up sleeping with a foot in my face until I was sixteen.” She said, smiling wryly.
Given the close living quarters, there was an understandable lack of privacy. In the 1950s, when the younger people were becoming more exposed to the outside world but still coming home to get married and start their lives, this became a problem regarding sexual relations.
One woman I spoke to was horrified that her husband’s parents felt no shame in having sex while sleeping in the same sleeping quarters as she and her new husband. The husband didn’t seem to see this as a problem, having grown up in such close quarters. But she put her foot down and insisted they go ahead and get their own farm before resuming marital life.
Today’s story is about a birth. It’s called, “Mizz Emmy’s Sixteenth”.