Women's Work: Making Families

The Černovír miller’s wife was 23 when she gave birth to her first baby, a fine healthy girl named after herself. Almost every other year afterwards, Terezie Schromm (1779-1832) produced another baby until there were 13 in all. Although each began life as a healthy newborn, nine of her babies did not live to see their fifth year, many dying in their first year.  Thus, after 23 years of childbearing, the miller’s wife could only claim four living children in her family.

Although more prolific than some, Terezie was typical of her time, when a wife might spend some 20 years or more, producing children who would make up the family workforce and later, support their parents in old age. Depending on the age at which she married (mid-twenties being the norm among rural Czech women) and her reproductive health, a 19th century woman had the potential to produce quite a large family by modern standards. Terezie’s reproductive life can be put in the context of a larger population as shown by a cohort of 68 mothers in her local area. The majority (54%) of these women gave birth to 7-10 children each (blue bars), but with some of the highest infant and childhood mortality rates in Europe, this locality ensured that not all of children would survive. Indeed, these mothers lost a fair share of their children, i.e., on average of 3 children died per family. Most (58%) families could claim only 3-5 children who survived to adulthood (yellow bars), with most, like Terezie Shromm’s, dying before the age of five. In most years, children's deaths outnumbered those of adults.

Averages however, are inadequate to describe the losses for individual families; rather, they seem to be randomly assigned. Some families lost all their children, while remarkably, about 11% of mothers had the good fortune to see all of their children grow up. These lucky few shared no obvious common characteristics; they were the mothers of few or many children and came from all walks of life:  from the farmer’s wife to the farm servant. One, a farm worker and unwed mother, Barbora Wondra raised five of her babies to adulthood, an example that belies the common stereotype that poverty is the inevitable precursor of childhood mortality. Although it was the poor who preferentially experienced malnutrition, exposure to infectious disease and bad drinking water was shared by all, whether rich or poor. Even for the well-to-do, in a pre-antibiotic and pre-vaccine world, there was little in the way of effective medical treatments.

With the inevitable loss of children, it was the mothers who carried the burden of bearing excess children and the attendant dangers of childbirth.  Although maternal deaths in childbirth were more frequent than today, in the past, they represented only a few percent of total women’s deaths. More commonly, frequent pregnancies led to a general erosion of a woman’s health and a greater susceptibility to infectious disease.  Death records bear witness to the price that mothers paid for producing families.