Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Summer II/Section 09/Eliza Grant

Overview

Eliza Grant was an African- American who was interviewed for the Federal Writers' Project from December 5-12, 1938 by Harry Fain. She was a midwife in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Biography

Early Life

Eliza Grant was born in 1880 in Raleigh, North Carolina to Mr. Curtis and Mrs. Tempie Curtis . Both of her parents were former slaves, with Tempie Curtis coming from a family of eleven children her mother, Liza Cook, had at the hands of the salve owner Dr. Cook.

After the end of the Civil War, Grant’s parents worked cooking and washing jobs for white families. Those jobs only paid about a dollar and a half a week, so her mother became a midwife, which paid thirty dollars a month and board . Grant’s parents saved up to buy land in Oberlin Village in Raleigh, which became a cotton field where the men in the family worked.

A sign describing the historcal Oberlin Village.

Later Life

Grant married Andrew Grant, who was a porter for the school board. They had three children- Don, Thelma, and Chester- together before he passed away when the kids were still young. Grant gave birth to all three children at home, as a doctor was too expensive. Her youngest, Chester, who born in 1908, was an accident as Grant had taken a pill before, which was newly introduced and said to prevent pregnancy. Don passed away when he was thirty-two and left behind a ten- year-old son and wife. Thelma married a man named William, who had a problem with drinking and became easily jealous. They lived next door to Grant with their one son. William worked as a chauffeur and Thelma got jobs washing. In 1938, Chester still lived with Grant on the same land her parents had purchased, although it was no longer a cotton field. .

To get by, Grant worked hard washing, cooking, and midwifing. She held several jobs at once, even raising hogs later in life. She believed in hard work and did not believe that gender was an excuse to get out of it, like some of her clients did.

Social Issues

Midwives in the 20th Century

Midwifing was a successful business in the early 20th century, as only a few rich white women paid for doctors while giving birth. In fact, in “1900, over 90 percent of all births occurred in the mother’s home.” Many midwives in the South were African American, as it was a practice that was “handed down through a matrilineal system of recruitment and training from the period of enslavement throughout the twentieth century.” Unfortunately, white midwives were still preferred and paid more than black midwives. Each midwife had their own technique to help move the birth along. Some used herbal remedies, like fungi, while others relied on their knowledge of positions and movements. While midwives used a combined system of traditional and modern medicine, they still lacked proper childbirth education, which resulted in a high maternal mortality of six to nine women dying for every one thousand live births. By 1950, ninety percent of births took place in a hospital, where there was a lower chance of maternal mortality and anesthesia.

A picture depicting an at-home-birth with a midwife present.

Birth Control

In the 20th century having children was expected of a woman. During the 19th century the average family had seven children, with enslaved African American women averaging more. After the end of slavery, African American women started having fewer children. By 1900 the average family had 3.5 children, and by 1933 that number dropped down to 2.3. Still, it was extremely rare to see a woman and man living together with no children. The decline of children in families is also partly due to the rise of birth control and family planning. In 1914, the birth control movement began with Margaret Sanger, who started circulating information about contraception and where to get access to it, as women previously were misinformed about the pill and relied on word-of-mouth. By the 1930’s a few state departments, including North Carolina’s, had begun to work with public hospitals to provide family planning services.

Women and The Great Depression

Up until the Great Depression, many women did not have jobs unless they needed to. Instead, they took care of the household and children. The exception was African American women who had been in the workforce since 1865 because “’black families had virtually never been able to survive on a single wage.’” The Depression brought white women into the workforce because there was now a need for them to work. While the Depression brought some women into the workforce, others were losing their jobs and being put on federal relief. One-fifth of all Americans receiving federal relief were black, and mostly in the rural South. But, farm and domestic workers had “no pension or safety net” and those were the main areas of work for African American women.