@Consolation: A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary is one of my favorite books. I believe it won a Pulitzer?? Or some other important prize.
Warning to potential readers: It is nonfiction and written by a history professor. She found this midwife’s diary (written between 1785 and 1812) and, based on its passages, she discusses the medicine, society and customs of the time. I found it particularly interesting that not a small number of births were out-of-wedlock. Even then!
ETA: I just reserved Pioneer Girl at my library. (I don’t buy books anymore; see The Bag a Week thread.) Can’t wait!
Me, too. The dads would often postpone the marriage decision until it was clear that both mother and child would survive the birth. As I recall from reading the book years ago, it was only truly scandalous if mom and baby survived and the daddy wouldn’t marry at that point.
Have you ever toured a historic home or cabin with a huge walk in fireplace and wonder how they kept their kids from toddling into the fireplace? According to the Midwife’s Tale, there were quite a few burned toddlers. Sad but not surprising.
I read all the Little House books aloud to my kids. The very first words D read aloud were “Pa’s Bet” which is a chapter title in one of the books.
One time when we were driving from IL to TX, we went through Mansfield MO to see the LIW house and museum. Do you know what is in the museum? Pa’s fiddle!!!
I think I’m going to go to my grave wondering why Laura never visited Ma again after Pa’s funeral. I’ve heard all the explanations: travel in those days was not easy, it was hard to leave the farm if one is running it essentially alone, etc. But there were 22 years in between Pa’s funeral and Ma’s death, and I find it almost impossible to believe Laura couldn’t have visited if she wanted to. She did, however, manage to drag herself across the country by herself to visit Rose in San Francisco during that time period, so that kind of negates all those arguments for me. What in the heck kept her from seeing her mother for two decades?!?!?!?!
@albert69, Ma had been ailing throughout the winter of 1923-24, but the illness which claimed her in April of 1924 apparently was of short duration. I can see how Laura might not have been able to get there to see Ma at the end (nor did she attend her funeral), but there were 22 years between Pa’s death and that of Caroline’s. Just makes you wonder…
There are many things about Laura and her family we don’t have lots of details about. She and her daughter Rose had a close yet also difficult relationship. Rose once said this about her mother:
Rose seemed a tad rebellious if I remember correctly. (It’s been several years since I read them.) There was a fair amount of friction between Rose and Laura in the Rose books. Rose seemed to sneak around and get into trouble a lot.
That is strange about Laura and Ma. I do think that she was closer to Pa though.
True. Just the mere fact that she got divorced was probably HUGE for her parents to understand and deal with. I doubt this was anything which had touched their family before that. We are talking about a woman who didn’t allow Almanzo to even kiss her until he had asked her to marry him! And she didn’t have a problem with laws which did not allow women to vote; she even said she didn’t want the privilege. So yes, two women who seemed far more than one generation apart!