by Jessica Mitford (1993)
Three decades ago, Jessica Mitford became famous when she introduced us to the idiosyncracies of American funeral rites in The American Way of Death. Now in a book as fresh, provocative, and fearless as anything else she has written, she shows us how and in what circumstances Americans give birth. At the start, she knew no more of the subject, and not less, than any mother does. Recalling her experiences in the 1930s and 1940s of giving birth - in London, in Washington. D.C., and in Oakland, California - she observes, "A curious amnesia takes over in which all memory of the discomforts you have endured is wiped out, and your determination never, ever to do that again fast fades." But then, years later in 1989 - when her own children were adults, and birth a subject of no special interest to her - she meet a young woman, a midwife in Northern California who was being harassed by government agents and the medical establishment. Her. Sympathies, along with her reportorial instincts, were immediately stirred. There was a story there that needed to be explored and revealed. Far more than she anticipated then, she was at the beginning of an investigation that would lead her over the next three years to the writing of this extraordinary book. This is not a book about the miracle of life. It is about the role of money and politics in a lucrative industry; a saga of champagne birthing suites for the rich. And desperate measures for the poor. It is a colorful history - from the torture and burning of midwives in medieval times, through the absurd pretensions of the modest Victorian age, to this century's vast succession of anaesthetic, technological, and "natural" birthing fashions. And it is a comprehensive indictment of the politics of birth and national health. Jessica Mitford explores conventional and alternative methods, and the costs of having a child. She gives. Flesh-and-blood meaning to the cold statistics. Daring to ask hard questions and skeptical of soft answers, her book is necessary reading for anyone contemplating childbirth, and for everyone fascinated by the follies of human activity. It may even bring about some salutary changes in the American way of birth.
Tom Licence
"In this highly readable little book Tom Licence reveals how everyday objects, dug from the ground, contribute to the bigger story of how our great grandparents built a throwaway society from the twin foundations of packaging and mass consumption and illustrates how our own throwaway habits were formed"--
Paul Lerner
Department stores in Germany, like their predecessors in France, Britain, and the United States, generated great excitement when they appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. Their sumptuous displays, abundant products, architectural innovations, and prodigious scale inspired widespread fascination and even awe; at the same time, however, many Germans also greeted the rise of the department store with considerable unease. In The Consuming Temple, Paul Lerner explores the complex German reaction to department stores and the widespread belief that they posed hidden dangers both to the individuals, especially women, who frequented them and to the nation as a whole.
Deidre Shauna Lynch
At the start of the eighteenth century, talk of literary "characters" referred as much to letters and typefaces as it did to persons in books. Yet by the nineteenth century, characters had become companions to their readers, friends with whom readers might spend time and empathize. Although the story of this shift is usually told in terms of the "rise of the individual," Deidre Shauna Lynch proposes an ingenious alternative interpretation. Elaborating a "pragmatics of character," Lynch shows how readers used transactions with characters to accommodate themselves to newly commercialized social relations. Searching for the inner meanings of characters allowed readers both to plumb their own inwardness and to distinguish themselves from others. In a culture of mass consumption, argues Lynch, possessing a belief in the inexpressible interior life of a character rendered one's property truly private.
Catherine Gallagher
"The Body Economic revises the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain by demonstrating that political economists and the writers who often presented themselves as their literary antagonists actually held most of their basic social assumptions in common. Gallagher demonstrates that political economists and their Romantic and early-Victorian critics jointly relocated the idea of value from the realm of transcendent spirituality to that of organic "life," making human sensations - especially pleasure and pain - the sources and signs of that value."--Jacket.