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213 10 A Poor Woman’s Plight An Introduction to Selections from George Moore’s Esther Waters George Moore (1852–1933) was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer who first wrote poetry and then novels about contemporary life. Esther Waters (1894), probably his best-known work, was, according to his own account , prompted by Moore’s encounter in a London hotel with a maid who aroused his interest in the problems of women servants at the time. The novel was hailed for its candid exposure of the exploitation and wretched working and living conditions of lower class women. Esther Waters is a good-natured, illiterate young girl who is forced into service in her late teens after her father’s death and her mother’s remarriage. When two more children are born, her family is unable to support her; her stepfather turns her out of her home so that she has to fend for herself from an early age onward. At first she has a relatively good position in a large household, where her mistress is kind, although the work is hard. But she is dismissed when she becomes pregnant after yielding to the cook’s son, whose advances flatter her and with whom she falls in love. Too proud to admit her dilemma, she struggles to cope on her own, getting by on the very scant savings she had managed to accumulate. One of Esther’s major problems is how to get admitted to a hospital for the delivery of her baby. Even if the hospital was not a site for research as in Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (chapter 3), it was at that time a source of shame and humiliation as well as of danger to have to resort 214 A Poor Woman’s Plight to a charitable institution. Growing out of almshouses for the indigent, hospitals were a refuge for the poverty-stricken; the middle and upper classes shunned them partly as a social indignity, partly out of a justified fear of cross-infections which were pervasive. Hospitals were seen mainly as places to die for those who had nowhere else to go; those who had homes were looked after there by family and servants. Surgery and certainly births were more safely carried out at home because of the insalubrious conditions in hospitals. Physicians themselves did not favor hospitalization for those who could afford to be cared for in the privacy of their homes. The juxtaposition of Esther Waters with Mann’s Buddenbrooks (chapter 9) illustrates the enormous disparity in the health care available to the have-nots and the haves. By the time of Esther Waters attitudes to hospitals had begun to change as they gradually became less life-threatening with the introduction first of antisepsis and then of asepsis (see Introduction). The availability of x-rays in the closing years of the nineteenth century was a decisive inducement to hospital use since the early machines were too cumbersome for a doctor’s office, let alone for transport to a home. Private, paying patients were separated in comfortable, better ventilated pavilions from the charity cases. With the rapid advance of ever more complex technology and vastly improved hygiene and nursing, hospitals eventually moved in the twentieth century from the periphery to the very core of medicine as centers for research and the most innovative therapeutics. In Esther’s day hospitals were still primarily charitable institutions funded by benefactors’ contributions. In return for their donations regular subscribers had the privilege of a certain number of “letters” per year nominating beneficiaries for admission (see the first selection, “Gaining Admission to Hospital”). The allocation was generally in proportion to the level of the donation so that money played a crucial role in access to health care. Some letters granted hospitalization while others were restricted to outpatient services. Prospective patients had to make the rounds of listed subscribers in order to plead for a “ticket.” Esther is handicapped in this search by her inability to read and write, so she has to try to remember the addresses as they are read out to her. She chooses the closest ones in order to save on bus fares. She also has to suffer moralistic censure and the refusal of a “letter” because she is unmarried. After several fruitless attempts, tired out, she abandons her quest, and decides to wait until she is in labor when she will likely be admitted as an emergency. Once Esther gets...

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