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If you time-travelled to a city in the 18^th or early 19^th century, a lot of society may seem different to you. If you were pregnant today, we would look for those wordless blue signs that signify “hospital.” But back then, there might not be a hospital to find — and you’d probably end up in something called an almshouse instead.

These institutions and their impact on today’s modern medical landscape are the focal point of Shayna Murphy’s research.

“My research is on the history of childbirth for marginalized women,” said Murphy, a second-year graduate student in 19th-century U.S. history. “What I’m working on is women who give birth in almshouses, which are like early homeless shelters. I’m interested in the legacy and the roots of public health care for women. A lot of that, for me, is understanding the role that public health has played in helping women in a period where we don’t associate with having welfare.”

These days, most women choose to go to a hospital to give birth, both for comfort and safety reasons. But in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, most women gave birth at home. As industry created an influx of residents in cities — especially poverty-stricken ones — prior solutions to the problem of pregnancy such as in-home births were no longer reasonable for poor women.

Over time, Murphy says, this resulted in the investment of state funding and tax dollars into public infrastructure such as almshouses. In her dissertation, Murphy plans to explore this change and how it contributes to what is known as “the medicalization of childbirth.” Later, this growth would result in specializations, which gives us the hospitals, orphanages and other public works we know today.

“In the almshouses, women are researched and used in clinical lectures and studies, which contribute to the creation of obstetrics,” she said. “This is the first time physicians are beginning to work on scientific interventions like forceps — and marginalized women are participating and contributing to that process. Previously, historians had only looked at how wealthy white women and physicians were spearheading that transformation.”

Murphy, who grew up in Westchester, N.Y., holds a bachelor’s degree in history and anthropology from SUNY New Paltz and transferred as a doctoral student from Stony Brook University to 91����. She first became interested in historical research and archival sources while exploring archelogy as an undergraduate, but her true passion lies in uncovering marginalized stories.

Her employment and volunteer work at Hudson Valley museums (Historic Huguenot Street, Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection, the Reher Center and the Eleanor Roosevelt Center) has also given her experience in public history and a motivation to uncover the lives of women from the past. In the future, Murphy would like to teach as a professor at a small teaching college, though she’s open to working in public history or teaching high school. This future mirrors her past: she first came to 91���� when she realized that the professors are more invested in teaching students.

“The faculty here are so invested in their students and in being mentors — teaching you the etiquette of the field, how to interact at conferences, how to make connections — and they’re very hands on, which is rare for graduate programs,” she said. “A lot of the time you’ll just be one of 10 students vying for the professor’s mentorship, and they’re more focused on publishing. But the faculty at 91���� is different.”

At 91����, Murphy is working with Diane Miller Sommerville, professor of history, while focusing her research at the Philadelphia City Almshouse, which transitioned into a hospital in the early 1900s and remained open until 1970. She calls it a “gold mine of sources.”

“They started recording the births of women very early, because the almshouse is connected to the University of Pennsylvania, and so students did their residencies there,” she said. “Those students were responsible for keeping a birth register that has patient records going back to 1808. Also, Philadelphia is very important for the development of medicine, as a center of medical development after the revolution.”

This is especially important to her work because it shows that, despite the common belief that welfare programs are newer inventions, tax-funded institutions have served women and contributed to research for most of American history — albeit often in exploitive, unethical and complicated ways. This factor, too, leads Murphy to new avenues of research.

“I’m hoping that I can expand my project into women who are giving birth at institutions, which would mean following my project now into the late 19th century and looking at mental asylums,” she said. “I’d like to expand to look at how cultural conceptions of motherhood are made manifest in the policies of institutions, and who gets to keep their babies. In a similar vein, I am also interested in pulling it back into the late 18th century to look at women who are giving birth during slavery in the north.”

Right now, despite the many manifestations of structural inequality that these women experienced, she is currently working hard to center individuals who came to the almshouses on their own. Her goal is to focus on something that hasn’t been well researched: how these same marginalized women held some agency during this period despite their status and personally contributed to the rise of specialized social institutions.

“These poor, marginalized people are playing a role in asking for those services to be created and expanded on,” she added. “I interpret this process as a negotiation, where poor women are trying to solve a need, and they’re looking towards their local city to meet it. I was interested in pulling out the negotiation that’s occurring — how women, sometimes, are seeking out this traditionally restrictive medical care because they need it, and yet, they can retain autonomy over their body in the process and contribute to the field of obstetrics by pushing physicians/city officials to expand these needs.”