Good Wives by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Author:Laurel Thatcher Ulrich [Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77297-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-28T16:00:00+00:00

Table 4. Incidence of Travel During Pregnancy and Lactation1

All three women, however, remained close to their homes during the last two months of each pregnancy. This seems to have been true even when unusual circumstances might have impelled them to travel. Late in September of 1755 Elizabeth Patten remained in Bedford while her husband attended her own father’s funeral in nearby Londonderry. She was just one month away from the delivery of her fourth child.54 Pregnancy may have been a “nine month sickness” as the midwifery manual said, but these women were slow to succumb. A more dramatic restraint on travel is apparent in the next period—the first ten months of each baby’s life. This is undoubtedly related to lactation, which in many ways placed more demands on the mother than pregnancy. Although a woman might leave her infant for a short while, perhaps relying for an occasional feeding upon a neighbor who was also nursing, she could not travel far or long without taking the child with her. Mrs. Green and Mrs. Patten occasionally traveled with infants (James Patten was baptized in Londonderry, New Hampshire, at the age of seven months while his parents were visiting there).55 But all three mothers avoided traveling during the third quarter of their child’s first year. One reason is obvious. Compared with a newborn infant, a baby seven or eight months old is simply not very portable, being both heavier and more active. If he or she were still dependent upon mother’s milk, the only practical solution was to stay home.

But for all three women, the most significant pattern is not the restraint on travel during pregnancy and infancy but the sudden jump in activity after the tenth month of each baby’s life. For Elizabeth Collins, this is especially dramatic. For six of the nine babies mentioned in the diary, her first journey after birth was between ten and fifteen months. For the other babies, the second journey after birth fell into this same crucial period. A similar pattern is discernible for Mrs. Green. The timing suggests some connections with weaning, a possibility confirmed in Joseph Green’s diary entry for April 12, 1702. Green noted that on this day he took his wife to her parents’ home in Wenham, then “came home to wean John,” who was then seventeen months old.56

There is supporting evidence in less-detailed diaries of the period for the idea of the “weaning journey.” From January 1740, when Nicholas Gilman began his daily diary, until late in August of 1741, his wife, Mary, apparently never left Exeter, New Hampshire, where they lived. This period included the last eight months of her fifth pregnancy and the first year of their son Josiah’s life. But just before Josiah’s first birthday she took an unexplained three-day journey alone to her grandmother’s home in Newbury, Massachusetts.57 There is a similar example in the almanac diary of Edward Holyoke of Salem. In January of 1730 his wife made a two-week visit to her parents’ home in Ipswich.

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