Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2024/spring/Section14/Alfred and Clara Stamey

Early Life
Alfred Stamey was born on February 4, 1908, in Brasstown, NC, to Martha Stamey and G. C. Stamey, a sharecropper from the area. He dropped out of school in the sixth grade to help his father, worked for a time as a copper miner in Tennessee, and eventually went to work as a logger near Murphy, NC, where he met Clara Stamey (neé Lewis). On October 12, 1926, he enlisted in the US army, and was discharged honorably on January 28, 1929, having achieved the rank of Private.

Clara Louise Lewis was born sometime around 1911 in Ducktown, TN, to Francis Otis Lewis and Rosie Killian. Her father died when she was five, and she stopped attending school around 6th grade to help her mother manage a boarding house. Clara's older brother, Oscar, left soon after, and she never heard from him again. Her mother soon married a wealthy farmer, Arthur Carter, and began severely abusing her daughter physically and emotionally. Over the course of the next ten years, Clara claimed to have been daily attacked by her mother with pokers, skillets, and butcher knives, resulting in scars all over her body and face that were visible for the rest of her life, including one over her left eye. After her stepfather's aunt filed a report, Clara testified in a child abuse trial against her mother, who was fined $200 as a result.

Later Life
After the trial, Clara moved to the Cherokee County Home and then began working as a nanny near Murphy, where she met Alfred and the two became engaged. However, her appendix burst, requiring emergency surgery that triggered a mental breakdown related to her mother’s abuse and causing her to spend the next six years in a state hospital.

While Clara was in the hospital, Alfred fathered two daughters - Edith and Louise - with a woman named Cora Sharp, who promptly took them. There is no further record of what happened to the three. He was eventually able to get Clara discharged on January 25, 1938, and the two married the very next day at a church in Mecklenburg. Since the two had married, they moved to a slum in Charlotte, where Alfred worked as a WPA worker until he contracted tuberculosis in the fall of 1938. After he was sent to a sanatorium, he heard word that his wife, left at home and unemployed, had no money and was slowly starving. As a last resort, Alfred checked himself out despite his illness and picked up more work to feed his wife, all the while writing a letter to the local newspaper explaining his situation and requesting aid. He also falsely claimed his missing daughters, Edith and Louise, as Clara's dependents in an attempt to secure additional welfare for his wife. At this time, Mary Northrop interviewed the two, finding that Clara seemed sickly and had a swollen stomach and Alfred, quite ill, was volatile and prone to lying about his and Clara's past. Though Northrop expressed to Clara that she believed her to be pregnant, Clara denied this and expressed fear at the possibility, claiming that it was instead a tumor that had developed after her appendix surgery. Once the baby began to kick, however, Clara slowly accepted the pregnancy and developed affection towards her unborn child.

However, after the interview was conducted, Alfred survived his bout of illness and Clara delivered Loise Louise Stamey on May 29, 1939. He registered his draft card for WWII on October 16, 1940. In 1950, the couple was living on Walnut Ave. in Charlotte, with Alfred working as a carpenter and his daughter Loise living with them, as well as two lodgers. Both were alive and living together as late as 1956.

Death and Burial
Alfred Stamey died at the age of 68 on November 27, 1978, in Gastonia, NC, and was listed as widowed. His daughter Loise Dixon (spelled in the form as "Louise") wrote in to the Veteran's Affairs Department after his death, requesting a headstone in honor of his military service. Alfred is buried in the Hollywood Cemetery in Gastonia.

No information about Clara Stamey's death or burial could be found.

Child Abuse in the Early 20th Century
Until the last century, there were very few protections or organizations in place for children suffering abuse, who were largely considered the property of the parents. In her 1997 book on the US Children's Bureau, scholar Kriste Lindemeyer wrote, "The socio-legal history of child welfare policies has been to leave the child vulnerable to abuse and neglect no matter under whose jurisdictions the child fell: the family, or ... the state.” The first state to pass laws to protect American children was New York, in 1875, and these laws spread across the US quickly over the next half century. The precedent for legal cases against a parent due to excessive force against their children came in 1840, when a Tennessee mother was prosecuted for beating her young daughter. However, most of the court cases resulted in almost no punishment or jail time for those prosecuted. In 1874, however, a woman was found guilty for severely abusing her foster daughter and sentenced to a year of hard labor, indicating a growing awareness around the abuse of children. In 1912, The US Children’s Bureau was created to ensure the welfare of children and improve social services.

Child abuse, particularly when committed by women, was likely triggered or exacerbated by the lack of resources most pregnant women had in the early 20th century. Despite the work of the Children's Bureau and other children's rights groups formed soon after, the effectiveness of these programs was stymied by the constant and widespread causes of abuse: poverty, mental illness, and addiction. According to physician and journalist Marian Eide, "The most effective programs were found to be those that worked to prevent the occurrence of abuse at the outset through education in parenting techniques, through intervention in high-risk situations, such as unwanted pregnancies, and through screening for mental and emotional difficulties." In the conservative nature of the Children's Bureau and other government agencies, however, prevented them from providing women with potentially life-saving resources regarding the pregnancy prevention. Describing the agency's stance toward birth control, Lindemeyer writes, "Preserving the health of American women was only important to the Children’s Bureau because most women were mothers."

Pregnancy and Maternal Mortality During the Great Depression
In 1929, the maternal mortality rate had increased to 69.5 out of 10,000 live births, up from 68.2 in 1921. Approximately 40% of these women would die of sepsis and 25% following an abortion, both induced and natural (although many of the natural were likely undetected induced pregnancies). Due to the financial difficulties of the Depression, women were terrified of having another mouth to feed, and were more likely to attempt risky abortions when they were lower-class or unemployed. In one 1929 study, botched abortions were responsible for the deaths of a third of the unmarried pregnant women studied. Given the risks of pregnancy and birth and the financial cost of raising a child, women often simply did not accept the reality of their pregnancies, further increasing the risk of medical complications and infant and maternal mortality.

"In the mid-thirties, delivering a child had been the single most dangerous event in a woman’s life: one in a hundred and fifty pregnancies ended in the death of the mother," wrote surgeon Atul Gawande for the New York Times, in an article examining the history of medical practices around childbirth in the United States. According to Gawande, doctors regularly violated sanitary practices, injured and infected women with medical instruments, and missed key signs of septic shock and other complications. "In 1933 the New York Academy of Medicine published a shocking study of 2,041 maternal deaths in childbirth. At least two-thirds, the investigators found, were preventable. There had been no improvement in death rates for mothers in the preceding two decades; newborn deaths from birth injuries had actually increased."