Paper Title
Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
North America, labor/business, motherhood, reproduction
Abstract
Congratulating her friend on the arrival of a new baby girl, Agnes Burns Wieck moved from gushing -- “How I’d love to see her!” -- to a reflection of childbirth’s trials. “What I experienced in a perfectly normal delivery,” she wrote, “was indescribable agony.” Medical techniques bewildered Agnes: “We never heard of such a delivery, do you mean that the two assistants worked with their hands to push the baby down?” Wieck’s note revealed curiosity about the female body. “I am wondering if a part of your trouble [sic] were due to the bones not giving.” Her ruminations were grounded in private and political relationships she made as a coal miner’s daughter, journalist, and WTUL activist. Wieck spoke with confidence and sophistication about class struggle. But she was less sure about her body’s “perplexities,” naming fewer scapegoats to explain her pain (in childbirth, nervous exhaustion, and hemorrhoids).
In “Perplexities Enough,” I use social biography to examine how Wieck articulated, masked, and endured the physical and emotional pain she confronted as a laboring woman who was beholden to her working class roots but also drawn to the bourgeois lifestyle she witnessed in the WTUL (where she saw distinct class expressions of comfort, abuse, and silencing of female bodies). My analysis formulates how bodies reveal the material and constructed discourses of the past by using anthropologist Rebecca Lester’s conjoining of “flesh and bone” with what Ava Baron and Eileen Boris term the “corporeal.” Among the sources I use are Wieck’s personal papers and those of the WTUL’s School for Active Workers.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Download
"Perplexities Enough": Agnes Burns Wieck and the Proletarian Maternalist Body in the Early 20th Century
Congratulating her friend on the arrival of a new baby girl, Agnes Burns Wieck moved from gushing -- “How I’d love to see her!” -- to a reflection of childbirth’s trials. “What I experienced in a perfectly normal delivery,” she wrote, “was indescribable agony.” Medical techniques bewildered Agnes: “We never heard of such a delivery, do you mean that the two assistants worked with their hands to push the baby down?” Wieck’s note revealed curiosity about the female body. “I am wondering if a part of your trouble [sic] were due to the bones not giving.” Her ruminations were grounded in private and political relationships she made as a coal miner’s daughter, journalist, and WTUL activist. Wieck spoke with confidence and sophistication about class struggle. But she was less sure about her body’s “perplexities,” naming fewer scapegoats to explain her pain (in childbirth, nervous exhaustion, and hemorrhoids).
In “Perplexities Enough,” I use social biography to examine how Wieck articulated, masked, and endured the physical and emotional pain she confronted as a laboring woman who was beholden to her working class roots but also drawn to the bourgeois lifestyle she witnessed in the WTUL (where she saw distinct class expressions of comfort, abuse, and silencing of female bodies). My analysis formulates how bodies reveal the material and constructed discourses of the past by using anthropologist Rebecca Lester’s conjoining of “flesh and bone” with what Ava Baron and Eileen Boris term the “corporeal.” Among the sources I use are Wieck’s personal papers and those of the WTUL’s School for Active Workers.