My obsessions…
maybe not the post you were expecting from the title, but here goes.
My research deals with how college rhetoric and writing classes were taught a century ago, so I spend a lot of time alone in damp library basements, painstakingly thumbing through old journals, reading correspondence from people (mostly women) long dead, staring glassy-eyed into a microfilm screen, writing letters to historical societies, hanging out in college archives, and searching, always searching for something. & if you’ve got the smell of moldy books in your nose and the damp chill of an over-air conditioned room creeping up your arm, you’ve got my research agenda in a nutshell.
When I started this research, I had no idea how much I’d love it. But then I didn’t really understand the work until I was elbow-deep into one professor’s college files.
There’s this moment in the archives when you stumble across a lock of hair in a yellowing envelope, or find a 100-year-old grocery list tucked between the pages of an old book, when it hits you…these real, real people.
Two summers ago I got a grant to research a women’s literary society at a former normal university. I spent 2 glorious weeks in the archives & library mostly just scanning & copying as many files as I could get my hands on, not digesting the material much…this was just a quick gathering mission.
Everything was going fine until the drive back to Michigan…then, somewhere along the way I started thinking about this one woman, a great speaker & the first to win the university’s debate contest in 1900. Women weren’t encouraged to speak in public at the time, of course, & to have a woman debating with a man on a public stage, well! & then to have her win the contest, oh dear! & I started thinking about the man she loved, also a much-loved student of the university, who must’ve loved her enough to let her be herself. & then the obituary I found in the school newspaper: they’d married shortly after graduation & he’d died only 6 months later. She spent the rest of her life alone, traveling as a church deaconess to places as far away as Alaska. Maybe she never found another man like him.
So, I was fine until the drive home, when suddenly I burst into tears, remembering all these amazing women whose lives I had just glanced at in my frantic scanning and copying, women so very much like me. The fact that they were like me made it even harder to imagine their lives when most of the men they knew took them to be idiots, when their government believed they were too stupid and emotional to be trusted with the vote, when they had to choose between the careers they may have loved and the men they wanted to marry, when they had no sexual freedom, when they had no freedoms at all really. Some got lucky & fell in love with people who appreciated and understood them, who let them be intellectual and sexual and emotional beings. But many didn’t.
Anyway, I was reading a new blog this morning by a woman who surived a pretty crappy relationship to finally find love & it reminded me that not only were these women 100 years ago so like us, but we are so very much like them.
Anyway, the point of this story, for those of you wise enough to skip to the end is that I’m really very grateful to have this community of exceptional women to write and share with.
Have a great day chicks!
