Having our babies
For the past few weeks I have written about family history in Arkansas—from romance to marriage. This week I am taking a look at the history of child bearing in Arkansas, a topic that is as difficult as it is interesting.
Prior to the modern era, expectant mothers seldom documented their pregnancies, deliveries, and nursing. But we do know that families could be quite large, delivery could be challenging or even deadly, and for much of our history, midwives delivered most of the babies born in Arkansas and the South.
Conevery A. Bolton, a historian who has published extensively on women’s health, speculates that the reluctance of many Arkansas women to discuss “pregnancy and birth may have been a product of their fears of the birthing process.”
Whatever the cause of this reticence, Matilda Fulton wrote her husband, Territorial Secretary William S. Fulton, in 1832, telling him of the birth of their son (the spelling is her own): “I was in the midst of [slaughtering and curing] my pork the day befor I was taken sick. [A female slave] and myself cut up nine hogs. I spent the day in the smoke haus without seting down until night. The next morning I was very sick but thought I had fatigue[d] myself and it would ware off . . . I found at night I was getting worse, and I did not think it prudent for me to stay a lone. I sent for Mrs. Field [and] she came and staid all night with me. The next morning I sent for Mrs. Collins and Mrs. Pope and Mrs. Ellis [and] the Child was born on sunday.”
Eventually Mrs. Fulton had nine children, but only three lived to adulthood. This is dramatic evidence of the many afflictions that took the lives of children born to both the rich and poor, white and black. Of the 5,481 live births in Arkansas in 1850, fully 390 of these children died before age 1 and another 453 died between ages 1 and 5.
It should not surprise us that many babies and their mothers suffered terribly during the birthing process. This was especially the case with young mothers. In March 1871, Dr. Wilson R. Bachelor, a physician living near Ozark in Franklin County, visited a 17-year-old patient facing a difficult delivery. The patient had a “narrow pelvis” and her fetus was in “a breech presentation.” Using a rope, called a fillet, the fetus was eventually delivered alive—but the mother “soon fell into an hysterical condition which lasted three months.”
Outside cities and towns, physicians were seldom called on to deliver babies unless complications developed. Midwives, often called “granny women,” delivered most babies in rural areas, even into the 20th Century.
When future U.S. Congressman Wilbur D. Mills was born at the family home at Kensett in 1909, both a physician and a black midwife attended the difficult birth. Born a “blue baby,” caused by inadequately oxygenated blood, the Mills baby was given up for dead—until the midwife demanded the infant and worked with him until the baby’s cries filled the room.
An interesting exchange took place in 1953 when folklorist Mary C. Parler interviewed Mrs. Mary Briscoe of Berryville and asked about her childbirths. Mrs. Briscoe’s mother was a midwife, and she delivered her daughter’s first child—along with 58 other births in Carroll County. When asked if she had ever delivered any babies, Mrs. Briscoe replied: “I caught two or three … the doctor didn’t git thar and I had to do all I could.” Multiple births proved especially challenging, which probably explains why antebellum Arkansas newspapers prominently reported on such deliveries. On the last day of 1828, the Arkansas
Gazette reported an instance of “remarkable fecundity” in Clark County when a woman “delivered of five living children, at one birth, three of which were alive several days afterwards, and (with the mother) likely to do well.”
A few years later, the Gazette reported that “a lady at Batesville . . . presented her husband with a fine pair of twins, being the second pair she has presented him within the last nine months and 26 days.”
When the prominent William Cravens family of Fort Smith had triplets in 1875, people came from miles around to see the mother and children—entering through the back door, parading past a bed containing the mother and the tiny babies, and exiting through the front door.
The public also had a morbid fascination for extremely large babies, and the newspapers always found space to report on these oddities. The wife of a soldier stationed at the Little Rock Arsenal in 1874 delivered a 15-pound child, while even more remarkably, in September 1879, a Little Rock woman delivered twins, each weighing 16 pounds.
The development of chloroform and ether in the 1840s was a major step toward relieving the horrible pains involved in giving birth. However, some religious conservatives opposed their use in the belief that birth pain was a religious curse put upon women due to Eve’s tasting of the forbidden fruit. As you might expect, all these clerics were men.