How did they carry children around?

[Amy Denison]

I've got a 19 lb. 6-month-old daughter. I can hold her for about 10-15 minutes before my arms start getting really tired.

So I'm wondering, how did women carry their babies around back then? Just in their arms? What about when they were away from home (going into town, or visiting relatives, whatever) and needed to take the baby with them? I know we have those handy baby slings now but I'm really doubting that those existed back then...

[Emmanuel Dabney]

Re: How did they carry children around?

Well, actually there was a backpack for at least one baby, but it was something contrived out of love and survival.

" As we went out in the morning, I observed several women, who carried their young children in their arms to the field. These mothers laid their children at the side of the fence, or under the shade of the cotton plants, whilst they were at work; and when the rest of us went to get water, they would go to give suck to their children, requesting some one to bring them water in gourds, which they were careful to carry to the field with them. One young woman did not, like the others, leave her child at the end of the row, but had contrived a sort of rude knapsack, made of a piece of coarse liven cloth, in which she fastened her child, which was very young, upon her back; and in this way carried it all day, and performed her task at the hoe with the other people."

--Charles Ball "Fifty Years In Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave" which can be found online at: http://docsouth.unc.edu/ball/ball.html

Lydia, the woman's name, was whipped for being late to the evening roll call, though Charles had attempted to spare her the lash by telling the overseer she was just a moment behind him.

An engraving of a woman at work in the fields with a baby in a backpack was printed in the Illustrations of the American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1840 (New York, 1839) and was reprinted in Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South (Richmond, University Press of Virginia, 1991).
Be mindful however, of the socio-economic levels plus, in this case the feeling of "This is my child and I'm not going to leave him under a tree."

A 1867 British CDV illustrates: http://www.cartes.freeuk.com/dec/noacf.jpg

In the brief Google searching I did, I found the baby (sometimes I found children's) carriage was invented in 1850. I then decided to look through Making of America hosted by University of Michigan and found a 1859 story in which a baby carriage is mentioned but not described. However, there were 12 matches with the term "baby carriage", 10 of the matches post dated 1875.

[Amy Denison]

Re: How did they carry children around?

Thanks for the CDV, I'd never seen anything quite like that before.

I've seen mainstreamers hauling kids around in "goat carts" but I'm not going to resort to that.

[ElizabethClark]

Re: How did they carry children around?

Amy, don't forget to configure your automatic signature--your name is not showing up at the bottom of your posts.

If you're portraying a field slave, Em has given a great option for hauling babies. If that's not an impression you're undertaking, keep looking for engravings and images showing non-enslaved farming operations for idea.

What I've found most often is:

Holding the baby
Perambulators (Prams) or push carriages
Holding the baby
Making someone else hold the baby.

More later--I'm going to be late for church!

[Crockett]

Re: How did they carry children around?

Just a note to say I recall hearing my relatives mention similar situations where the mother would make a pallet out in the field where they were working, thus creating a place for the child to lay or play.

I doubt they were carried around all day, cradles have been around a long time. Also, siblings carried the brunt of caring for younger siblings as well, thus freeeing the mother to do what mothers do.


Joe Mode

[Cottoncarder]

Re: How did they carry children around?

Does this ever bring back memories.

All of our cotton was maintained and harvested by hand in the same fashion as in the narrative cited by Emmanuel up until the late 1960s. The operation described with a hoe was known as “chopp’in cotton.” That is where the weeds were cut down from around the small cotton plants to ensure their survival.

Come harvest time, the cotton bowels were pulled by hand (husk and all) and thrown into a long muslin bag slung from one shoulder and drug on the ground behind you. Back breaking, grueling work! Lean over the row and with both hands going, you stripped the plants clean until your bag was full. Empty the bag in the wagon and go at it over and over from sun up to sun down.

Being their oldest grandchild, my grandparents and mom were forced to take me in the field with them. When I was very small, they put me on a pallet, but the minute I started crawling, Grandpa constructed a picket playpen out of old fence posts and bailing wire and such to keep me in one place. When I was old enough (about 5) Grandpa sawed off the end of a hoe handle and turned me loose on the field. Until I was old enough to handle one of the big bags, I was given a burlap bag with a cotton sling sewn on to it to put my cotton in.

Grandpa called me “whistle britches” until the day he died because this was the sound my corduroy pants made when I toddled from one end of that play pen to the other. I realize now that was the conforting sound he listened for when he stopped to get an ear on where I was and that I was safe. Oh Lord how I miss him!