*    The class took individual and group quizzes.  A reminder: such quizzes cannot be made up unless the instructor is notified in advance of a student's absence.

*    The TA went over guidelines for taking class notes.  Students then signed up for one class meeting at which they would take notes.  If you did not sign up, see the TA as soon as possible.

The class then discussed Valerie Lee's "Sistah Conjurer" in relation to "The Midwife's Tale."

*    Looking at "Sistah Conjurer" and "The Midwife's Tale," what are some problems facing historians attempting to reconstruct the past?
    *    Granny midwives, for example, left little documentation of their work.
    *    The distance of these cultures from our own makes it difficult to truly understand them
        *    In this respect, it is easier to understand the lives of granny midwives, because they worked in an era closer to ours.

*    It is important to note here that literacy should be understood as a social construction.
    *     Who had access to reading and writing?  It was illegal to teach slaves to read and write.
    *     Lee asserts that oral history is literacy.
    *     The accuracy of oral history is surprising to many in our "paper-based" culture.
    *     Written records have flaws, too.
    *     Martha Ballard's life proves the fallacy of written records.  Without her diary, there would be no record of her life, 
            even though she was an important member of her community.
    *    Look at Ulrich's "fictionalizing" of Ballard's diary.  Did she fill in the gaps correctly?  We have only one version of the
            truth.
    *    We have been imaginatively recreating the lives of famous men based on historical records and treating those
            imaginative reconstructions as truth.
   * We must be careful reader and thus, careful interpreters.

*    Mammies under the control of white owners were not strictly regulated, as the granny midwives were.
    *    Granny midwives were mobile, and were thus supervised by the state health department.

*    Ultimately, midwives were pushed out in favor on university-trained physicians.
    *    Before this, however, there were occasionally men midwives.
    *    Midwives' work was very different from that of physicians.
    *    The poorer you were, the more likely you were to have a midwife at your birth.
    *    This is why it was difficult to drive them out for so long; poor non-whites couldn't afford doctors' fees.
    *    Midwifery is illegal in many states, illustrating yet another way for the government to control women's bodies.
    *    In addition to aiding in births, midwives also practiced abortions, for doctors didn't know how; in making midwifery
            illegal, it was easy to make abortion illegal.
     *    This issue is similar to female birth control methods and the way they are regulated in the U.S.

*    Role of religious views in the political realm.
    *    Catholicism was looked down upon in the U.S. Until fairly recently; they didn't have the power to regulate birth control
            and abortion.
    *     These issues have more to do with controlling women's bodies than with their religious implications.
    *     Birth control was often seen as a license for women to have sex without consequences.  The thought prevailed that if
            women had to pay for their actions, they would be less likely to do them.
    *    The birth control pill is a fairly recent invention.  However, we have lost a long history of herbs, etc, use by midwives 
            to prevent/abort pregnancies.