KRISTINA R. GADDY
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Come in, the stacks are open.

Headscarves, Fabric, and Secrets

7/25/2018

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Read my article on Het Koto Museum on OZY.

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     Located in a quiet neighborhood near the center of historic Paramaribo, Suriname, Het Koto Museum celebrates the lives and legacy of Afro-Surinamese women. The museum is founded and run by Christine Van Russel-Henar, who is reviving the tradition of the Koto outfit. She shared her knowledge and passion with me during a visit the the museum.

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The Women of the Hull-House

3/20/2018

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     Inspiring women, innovative approaches to living and learning, and pioneering social justice work: sound like something from the #metoo or #TimesUp movements? Maybe, but it was also how women at the Hull-House in Chicago lived and worked over 100 years ago.
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Smith Hall of the Hull House, 1910.
     While I was in Chicago in February, I had a chance to visit the Hull-House and be totally amazed by these women, who I already knew a little bit about. Here is a tour and brief history of the settlement house.

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The Proto-Feminists of Early America

11/11/2017

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Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, Vice President John Adams about the 1793 Valmy Celebrations, where women marched in the streets with men in support of the French Revolution.

Read my new piece on OZY! 

     Just in time for election day, OZY published my piece on how early feminists in the U.S. got inspiration from women participating in the French Revolution. This story was inspired by an essay in Riot and Revelry in Early America, a book that explores the celebrations, parades, and traditions that helped create American culture, even if they have been forgotten. 
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Birth, a Natural Part of Life

7/5/2017

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Midwife Problems, and Solutions, part 4

This is part four of a series on midwifery in Sweden and the United States. To read part one click here, part two click here, part three click here. 
     Johanna Hedén was poised: her hair, perfectly done in a Victorian up-do; her skin, clear and light; her nose, straight and petite, and her eyes, soft and friendly. This was the portrait of a woman who was professional and competent, the perfect image of a midwife. 
     She was born in 1837, actually a decent time to be a woman in Sweden. During her lifetime, she would see the beginnings of women’s emancipation. In 1845, a woman got the right to inherit her husband’s property, and in 1858, an unmarried woman over 25-year old was no longer considered her father’s ward. 
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Portrait of Johanna Heden in the Swedish Journal of Midwifery, Jordemodern.

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God-fearing and Faithful Women

4/27/2017

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Midwife Problems, and Solutions, Part 3

This is part three of a series on midwifery in Sweden and the United States. To read part one, click here, to read part two, click here. 
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Johan Van Hoorn, 1662
​     1697 was a difficult year in Sweden. King Charles XI had died in April. Although he had expanded the Swedish empire, the last two years of his reign were characterized by a devastating famine that spread across the empire. King Charles XII ascended to the throne at only 15 years old. The aristocrats, who made up only a small portion of the population but had a majority of the wealth, now wondered whether the King, just a boy still, would continue consolidating power to the crown or whether they would get some power too. 
      And during all this uncertainty, Johan van Hoorn was hoping someone would listen to him and his talk of jordegumman. Van Hoorn had studied medicine in the Netherlands and Paris, and had returned to Sweden to practice medicine and ended up spreading his gospel of training the midwife.
      In Old English, midwife means with-woman, in Swedish jordemor (the jord comes from the Old Norse word for child or offspring) and barnmorska both mean child-mother. In Sweden at the end of the 1600s, most were untrained women known as jordegummor. Van Hoorn wanted to elevate their status, he wanted to make them barnmorskor. First, he put out the textbook called Then Swenske wäl-öfwade Jord-Gumman in 1697.  In 1715, he published The Twenne Gudfruchtige I sitt kall trogne Och therföre af Gudi väl belönte Jordegummor Siphra och Pua, a textbook of questions and answers for midwives. 

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Across the Atlantic

4/2/2017

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Midwife Problems, and Solutions, Part 2

This is part 2 of a series on the history of midwifery in the U.S. and Sweden. Click here to read part 1. 
     Like Hannah Karlen, Rosa Fineberg was alone when she had arrived in Baltimore in the 1890s. Fineberg had also been a midwife in her previous home, Russia, and planned to continued her work in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Jonestown.  
     Almost daily, she stepped out of her house carrying a large black leather bag. She walked by kosher meat markets and a butcher (who much to the dismay of the city health officials sometimes kept chickens in the basement), a kosher grocery store that advertised wares in Yiddish, and the Russische Shul where she attended temple. Every week, sometimes twice a week, and sometimes even twice in a single day she was called to deliver a baby. Her patients called her Tante Rosa and trusted her.  
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Rosa Fineberg around the turn of the 20th century, courtesy Jewish Museum of Maryland.
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Kosher butcher in Jonestown, with the basement chickens, from Janet Kemp's Housing Conditions in Baltimore, 1907.
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Rosa's daughter Sarah with her husband, Max Siegel in 1899, courtesy Jewish Museum of Maryland.
     Fineberg's daughter Sarah thought her mother had a special, healing power, that was at times unexplainable. When Sarah went into labor in 1901, she called her mother to deliver the baby. And if her mother hadn't been a midwife, she probably would have called another midwife and not a doctor. A midwife’s delivery fee was five to ten dollars, much less than a hospital or private doctor would ask for, and in a time before medical schools were regulated, being a doctor didn't necessarily mean anything. 
      In Baltimore city, over 150 midwives delivered over 4,000 babies a year, and in every city and town in the U.S., you could find a woman delivering a baby, calling herself a midwife. But just like there were no regulations for doctors, there were no regulations for midwives. Why didn't the U.S. regulate the medical profession? And what did that mean for the health and safety of babies and mothers? 

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Midwife Problems, and Solutions

3/19/2017

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(Hey! I'm trying something new here, with a series of short, interconnected posts based on research and archives I visited in the fall of 2015, relating to Swedish midwifery and comparing it to the U.S. Let me know what you think in the contact section.) 
     Hanna Karlen arrived in Boston on October 11, 1901 with four pieces of luggage. She was 36, traveling alone. On the ship's manifest, Karlen called herself a nurse, a statement that wasn't totally accurate. 
"The readers of Jordmodern might be interested in hearing something about their colleagues and our work across the Atlantic." 
     She had trained as a midwife in Sweden, and she must have already known that in the U.S., being a nurse was more respected than being a midwife. Karlen made her way to Elizabeth, New Jersey, a town just outside Newark. In the city directory, she also called herself a nurse.
     She assessed her professional situation quickly, and in 1902 wrote to the editors of the journal of the Swedish Midwives Association, Jordmodern. 

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Votes for Women!

8/23/2016

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Friday is Women's Equality Day, and given Hillary's nomination, now seems about as good a time as any to see some images from the women's suffrage movement. 

"The greatest thrills of the campaign came with the street parades.... I marched in one in Baltimore and in the famous one staged in Washington the day before the first inauguration of President Wilson.... The professional women in cap and gown, lawyers, doctors, teachers and students formed a conspicous section of the parade." - Dr. Lillian Welsh, Reminiscences of Thirty Years in Baltimore
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Photograph courtesy of the Goucher College Special Collections.
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Photograph courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society
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Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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    Come in, the stacks are open. 

    Away from prying eyes, damaging light, and pilfering hands, the most special collections are kept in closed stacks.  You need an appointment to view the objects, letters, and books that open a door to the past. 

    Here, pieces of material culture are examined in the light. The stacks are open. ​Read the stories behind objects and ephemera found in private collections, archives, and museums. 

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