“Painful Leisure” and “Awful Business”: Female Death Workers in Pennsylvania

Speaker: Karol Weaver, PhD, Associate Professor of History, Susquehanna University

Time: 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM

Location: Claire Fagin Hall, Room 2019, Floor 2U, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

Click "Visit site" above to register.

Abstract: In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, women were the primary caretakers of the dying and dead. Known as watchers and layers, they included the female relatives of the dead, neighbors, and women who offered their services for pay. One watcher was poet Annis Boudinot Stockton, who kept vigil as her husband Richard Stockton died of oral cancer. Writing to a friend, she described her watch as “painful leisure.” Once death occurred, other women known as layers out of the dead took over and tended to what Quaker diarist Elizabeth Drinker referred to as “that awful business.” Eventually, “painful leisure” and “awful business” no longer occupied most American women. In the second half of the nineteenth century, death moved from the bedroom to the hospital room and from the front parlor to the funeral parlor due to changes in warfare, industry, and medicine.

Bio: Karol K. Weaver is an Associate Professor of History at Susquehanna University. Weaver also serves as the coordinator of the Women's Studies Program. She is the author of two books. Her first book, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2006. In 2011, her book Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Region, 1880-2000, was published by Penn State Press.