Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Conceiving reproduction: Trans-disciplinary views
- The social management of fertility
- 3 Agency and fertility: For an ethnography of practice
- 4 Invisible cultures: Poor women's networks and reproductive strategies in nineteenth-century Paris
- 5 The power of names: Illegitimacy in a Muslim community in Côte d'lvoire
- 6 Marginal members: Children of previous unions in Mende households in Sierra Leone
- Gender, class, and clan: The social inequality of reproduction
- Afterword: (Re)capturing reproduction for anthropology
- References
- Index
4 - Invisible cultures: Poor women's networks and reproductive strategies in nineteenth-century Paris
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Conceiving reproduction: Trans-disciplinary views
- The social management of fertility
- 3 Agency and fertility: For an ethnography of practice
- 4 Invisible cultures: Poor women's networks and reproductive strategies in nineteenth-century Paris
- 5 The power of names: Illegitimacy in a Muslim community in Côte d'lvoire
- 6 Marginal members: Children of previous unions in Mende households in Sierra Leone
- Gender, class, and clan: The social inequality of reproduction
- Afterword: (Re)capturing reproduction for anthropology
- References
- Index
Summary
Twenty-eight-year-old Marie Madeleine Ditte worked as a cook, and in March 1873, when she first feared she might be pregnant, asked the concièrge of her building what she could take to restore her menstrual periods. A little later she also chatted with a pregnant neighbor whom she met on the stairway of her building, and from whom she obtained the name of a midwife. Ditte's employer, a doctor, soon thereafter dismissed her for “bad conduct,” forcing her to look for a new job and new housing. Ditte moved across Paris to a furnished room and immediately found a job in a workshop making rugs. She now lived near Madame Clèmence Baronne, a compatriot from her home town in the Haute Marne about 150 miles to the east. In June she confided to Mme. Baronne that she had not had her periods for three months. She then sought help from a fresh-produce peddler who told her that she needed to drink a beverage including extracts of the plants rue or savin. When she asked her pharmacist for these herbs, or for something to bring on her periods, he replied that he did not know the right ingredients. Finally, Ditte went to the unlicensed midwife recommended by her former neighbor whom she had met on the stairway of the building where she had served as a cook.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Situating FertilityAnthropology and Demographic Inquiry, pp. 86 - 107Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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