Diaries and Letters of Women Writing in 18th or 19th Century

[BookCat]

I would be grateful for recommendations of books of the diaries or letters of women, particularly those written in the 1700s and 1800s.

The main aspect of their lives I'm interested in is childbirth and infant mortality. A friend, who is an historian and myself, were talking about this. I'd noticed the very pragmatic way that childbirth is dealt with in novels of this period, and how pregnancy is hardly mentioned - babies are just magically born, with only a slight reference to a "condition".

We came to the conclusion that this was a mixture of prudery and the high risk of death to both mother and child during birth and the months and early years following. Anyone who has been round an old churchyard will have seen gravestones on which are carved the names and dates of children who die in close succession.

So if you know of any diaries written by women during this period and in ebook format, please tell me.

Lots of thanks in advance.

[pdurrant]

This list at goodreads, although including many modern diaries, should help you get off to a good start.


A brief search suggests that maternal mortality before the mid 1800s was around 5 per 1,000 births. That's about 50 times higher than the current rate.

The interventions of doctors in the 1800s and early 1900s actually increased the maternal mortality rate, due to lack of hygiene resulting in more deaths from sepsis.

[BookCat]

pdurrant: yes, they died from puerpural fever. Doctors would attend to women straight after examining cadavers, with no washing in between. It was probably safer to give birth at home. I would imagine most births were home births until the 1960s. My mother had all her children at home, I was born in the late '50s, at home.

[BookCat]

Having scoured that list at goodreads, I can't find any written in the correct period and by women likely to bear children. Very few were available as ebooks.
Thanks anyway.

[Historiann]

Topics relating to childbirth and pregnancy frequently turn up in women's diaries and letters in the 19th century but as you've discovered there aren't many available as e-books. If you don't mind reading a work by a historian, you might try Judith Walzer Leavitt's Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950 which is available for kindle. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale--also available on kindle--is based on the diary of a late 18th/early 19th century midwife; it covers a wide variety of topics in addition to childbirth and pregnancy. Sally McMillen has written a book about pregnancy and childrearing in the Old South (ca 1820-1860) but there isn't an e-book version. All three of these books were written by professional historians so you may find them a bit dry. Robert M. Myers' Children of Pride isn't available as an ebook but is a magnificent collection of family letters that cover all of the topics family members discuss, including pregnancy and childbirth. I realize that none of these books fulfills your request exactly but you might find them of interest. I'd be very interested if you find anything that is closer to your specific request so please share! Thanks.

[BookCat]

Thank you so much for the recommendations Historiann. Unfortunately, I would really like books written by the mothers themselves in the form of diaries or letters. I have several books of letters/diaries written by female authors, but none of them had children. For example, the Brontes; the closest they came to being mothers was Charlotte's death from extreme morning sickness. I have letters and the diary of Virginia Woolf, who was childless.
There must have been some woman who kept a diary, or liked writing letters, who experienced pregnancy and the constant loss of children to childhood illness.
I can just imagine a woman on the Grand Tour with her husband saying something like "Little George died the other day. We are going to Italy next week and looking forward to it very much."
Were they that casual about the loss of a child because it was so common? This is why I want to read their writings.

Thanks lots.

[Catlady]

What about The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker?

The journal of Philadelphia Quaker Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker (1735-1807) is perhaps the single most significant personal record of eighteenth-century life in America from a woman's perspective. Drinker wrote in her diary nearly continuously between 1758 and 1807, from two years before her marriage to the night before her last illness. The extraordinary span and sustained quality of the journal make it a rewarding document for a multitude of historical purposes. One of the most prolific early American diarists—her journal runs to thirty-six manuscript volumes—Elizabeth Drinker saw English colonies evolve into the American nation while Drinker herself changed from a young unmarried woman into a wife, mother, and grandmother. Her journal entries touch on every contemporary subject political, personal, and familial.

Focusing on different stages of Drinker's personal development within the domestic context, this abridged edition highlights four critical phases of her life cycle: youth and courtship, wife and mother, middle age in years of crisis, and grandmother and family elder. There is little that escaped Elizabeth Drinker's quill, and her diary is a delight not only for the information it contains but also for the way in which she conveys her world across the centuries.

[BookCat]

Thanks Catlady; I've put that on my Amazon list and may buy it when I've recovered from all the spending I've done lately.