Becoming a woman in rural Black culture

Introduction

The study is related to the book that is “Becoming a woman in rural Black culture”. This book, one in the series of case studies in anthropology, is a welcome addition to the literature on Afro-Americans. The emphasis of the book that is “becoming a woman in rural Black culture” is on the rural south and women contrasts sharply with the more familiar studies portraying urban street corner men.

Discussion

Dougherty's description of the community of Edge Crossing located in north central Florida is reminiscent of Spout Spring and the discussion of “Kin- ship, Family, and Childhood”. The ethnographic material presented in Part Three, “Female Adolescence-A Rite of Passage,” is the only portion of the book which offers strikingly new insights and analysis to readers conversant with the literature on Black Americans. Dougherty's experience as a staff nurse in hospital maternity wards enabled her “to examine the social and emotional meaning of birth and parenthood for women and their families in various segments of this society”. The female adolescent leaves childhood by joining peer groups and entering the courtship phase, but she becomes a woman over a longer period of time through a process marked by three sub - phases that is pregnancy, childbirth, and assuming the role of mother (Dougherty, 12 - 64).

Adolescents in Edge Crossing frequently become pregnant before graduating from high school, and the period is marked by anxiety and withdrawal from normal social life. The girl is humiliated, and her female kin express disapproval of her being “messed up.” The prospective father, if he recognizes the child as his, becomes more solicitous of the girl and is increasingly brought into the kinship network, but there are no further expectations beyond his providing what financial support he can. The community expresses the belief that a girl is entitled to one pregnancy before marriage, and even in the event that there are more, the girl is rarely put out of her home (Dougherty, 12 - 64).

In addition to this, the changes in the cultural construction of motherhood over the course of the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries are reflected in the issue of infant and child death. Through the 19 th century, infant mortality remained very high, yet attitudes shifted substantially. In early America, mothers and fathers alike tended to adopt a much more passive and fatalistic stance toward childhood sickness and death. Colonial Americans did not blame themselves when children fell prey illnesses or accidents, and they urged one another to display proper resignation in the face of child death (Crittenden, 56 - 82).

In contrast, 19 th century middle - class mothers intensely feared childhood illnesses, which they reported at length in their correspondence and diaries. Historians Nancy Schrom Dye and Daniel Blake Smith have suggested that 19th-century mothers displayed greater anxiety because “they were coming to believe despite persistently high infant death rates that good mothering could somehow ensure a baby's survival.” This conviction contributed to an increasing ...