Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England

Henigman, Laura; Herndon, Ruth Wallis

doi:10.2307/1559871

The New England Quarterly

2002

DOI: 10.2307/1559871

|View full text |Cite

Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England

Laura Henigman¹,

Ruth Wallis Herndon²

Help me understand this report

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...

Citation Types

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Year Published

2022

Publication Types

Select...

Article1

Relationship

Self Cite0

Independent1

Authors

Journals

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…What were the perceptions and realities of pregnancies from relationships or sexual abuse between Black domestic workers and white employers? While none of these questions are definitively answered in this essay, works by scholars who studied residents living without enough resources in Massachusetts (Wagner 2005;Herndon 2001), those who studied the intersection of poverty, gender, and race during this time period (Adams and Pleck 2010;Klepp 2017), and those who studied Black pregnant women and midwifery (Fraser 1998;Klepp 2017) can shed some light on these Tewksbury cases.…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%

Broken Family Ties: Black, Enceinte, and Indigent at Tewksbury Almshouse

Butler-Mokoro

2022

Genealogy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Tracing family lineage through women has unique challenges that are made only more difficult when a woman has resided in a state-run social institution and is Black. This article focuses on six pregnant Black women who were residents at the Tewksbury Almshouse in Massachusetts between 1854 and 1884. I examine the way the women’s names and other aspects of their identities were recorded in the intake records and in state birth and U.S. Census records. I contend that the women were not treated with dignity and respect, such that their names were often misspelled, shortened, and documented incorrectly. Part of my argument is that this was done partially because many of the women were pregnant with a white man’s baby and were poor, domestic Black women carrying a bi-racial baby out of wedlock. All of this has made it challenging to trace the family ties of the women once they left Tewksbury. I argue that the way in which these women were treated and documented (or not) reflects the devaluing of Black women and, especially, Black pregnant women.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 93%

Broken Family Ties: Black, Enceinte, and Indigent at Tewksbury Almshouse

Butler-Mokoro

2022

Genealogy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.

Contact Info

hi@scite.ai

10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614

Henderson, NV 89052, USA

Blog Terms and Conditions API Terms Privacy Policy Contact Cookie Preferences Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information

Made with 💙 for researchers

Part of the Research Solutions Family.

Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

Broken Family Ties: Black, Enceinte, and Indigent at Tewksbury Almshouse

Broken Family Ties: Black, Enceinte, and Indigent at Tewksbury Almshouse

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About