Andie Tucher's part 1 of ch 9 is an informative overview, sprinkled with delightfully playful language (such as her description of President Harrison as "an image, not a man-- the sizzle, not the steak(408)), and compelling statistics. And yet I just couldn't get excited about writing a blog posting after reading this part of the chapter. So, I went on and read parts 2 and 3, looking for something to tickle my intellectual fancy. I found it in part 2 by Mary Kupiec Cayton and her discussion about Harriet Newell, a missionary to Burma. Since I have read a little on missionary women (and was a missionary myself in New Zealand for 18 months) I thought this section would be more engaging than part 1. What fascinated me was Cayton's examination of Newell's life, memoir, print culture, women's lives, and most importantly, that missionary women became "cultural heroines" and "important players on a global stage"(409). Though I had read about and thought about women mission memoirs before, especially after hearing Dr Sarah Robbins discuss her work on Nellie Arnott (http://www.parlorpress.com/pdf/arnott-flyer.pdf), I had not thought of them as engaging women in the public sphere until reading Cayton's essay. The thought that struck me was that, really, these memoirs were a gateway to woman's participation in print culture. As Cayton points out, originally women's stories were told by men -- usually in their funeral sermons. Eventually women began to speak for themselves through letters and diaries that were quoted in these biographical narratives that promoted women's religious experiences. Eventually poetry, letters to the editor, and their own first-hand accounts were published.
What intrigued me about Cayton's argument is that texts and periodicals, which could easily be classed as confining and restrictive, were actually entry points of female engagement and public discourse. As she puts it, these women "became visible in them, both as subjects and as authors"(411).
Something else that struck me was that women also played an important economic role in evangelical print culture by fund raising and contributing to the various missionary and evangelical associations. Restricted from official membership in the societies, the women could "circumvent" that restriction by joining the women's auxiliaries and by donating money and purchasing texts. Their exclusion was really in name only -- they were contributing both cultural and monetary capital to print culture's nascent moment. They were a "new breed"-- women whose "domestic piety" in the missionary memoir allowed them "to be publicly heard" and "to make a difference"(416). Good work, ladies! As one of your literary daughters, I thank you.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Monday, October 24, 2011
Blog for Oct. 25th
Reflections and Questions upon Reading Richard D. Brown's "The Revolution's Legacy for the History of the Book"
One of Brown's opening assertions is that, "only an informed citizenry could properly identify and repel threats to liberty" (58) leaves me wondering how WOMEN were able to fulfill their part as de facto citizens. Obviously, it was through reading, as Brown points out that women were able to become "informed" so they could "identify and repel threats to liberty" -- and yet not all women had access to print and print culture. There were exceptional cases, as Mary Kelley points out, in the lives of women such as Polly Warner (who received a 155-volume library from England for her 16th birthday in 1765). This leads me to ask how were women, especially the elite classes, able to gain access? Even though Brown does not attempt to answer this question, it is one that niggled at the back of my mind while reading his chapter in An Extensive Republic.
Brown does point out that, "Women and girls read extensively to become fit wives and mothers to citizens" (71) -- not a new idea for those of us who have read books about Republican Motherhood (such as Sarah Robbins' Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women's Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century and Mary Beth Norton's Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800). They read, according to Brown, the Bible and "other religious works" along with periodicals, "compendia, and textbooks" (71).
This is a good summary of the scholarship out there about white women's reading practices in the privileged classes of the Early Republic. But Brown overlooks obvious texts that would have been crucial in formulating women's reading AND writing practices -- letters, diaries, and cookbooks. He doesn't mention poetry either. All these texts were in circulation. Maybe he leaves them out of his discussion because he is focused on the public (male) sphere of information and print culture. But I would argue, along with other feminist scholars, that accounts written in "private" forms like letters and diaries were considered "public" by the women who wrote and read them. But perhaps Brown does not consider them "public" because they weren't printed for mass consumption like newspapers were?
I really appreciate Brown's points about women and his including them in the discussion of the history of the book, but his chapter leaves me with so many more questions. For instance, if women were to, as part of an educated citizenry, "identify and repel threats to liberty" there were caught in a double bind because they themselves were left out of the notion of citizens. Their own liberties were threatened by the practice of citizenship in the Early Republic. As merely the mothers and wives of citizens, they were merely a conduit of knowledge that marginalized their place in the republic. Or did they have a role that was fulfilling and important, but I haven't read enough yet or discovered the scholars who wrote about them? Is there a diary of a women reader hidden in an archive somewhere, detailing her own reading habits for herself -- and not to pass on to a man or boy? These questions are fascinating and I hope to find out their answers soon.
One of Brown's opening assertions is that, "only an informed citizenry could properly identify and repel threats to liberty" (58) leaves me wondering how WOMEN were able to fulfill their part as de facto citizens. Obviously, it was through reading, as Brown points out that women were able to become "informed" so they could "identify and repel threats to liberty" -- and yet not all women had access to print and print culture. There were exceptional cases, as Mary Kelley points out, in the lives of women such as Polly Warner (who received a 155-volume library from England for her 16th birthday in 1765). This leads me to ask how were women, especially the elite classes, able to gain access? Even though Brown does not attempt to answer this question, it is one that niggled at the back of my mind while reading his chapter in An Extensive Republic.
Brown does point out that, "Women and girls read extensively to become fit wives and mothers to citizens" (71) -- not a new idea for those of us who have read books about Republican Motherhood (such as Sarah Robbins' Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women's Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century and Mary Beth Norton's Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800). They read, according to Brown, the Bible and "other religious works" along with periodicals, "compendia, and textbooks" (71).
This is a good summary of the scholarship out there about white women's reading practices in the privileged classes of the Early Republic. But Brown overlooks obvious texts that would have been crucial in formulating women's reading AND writing practices -- letters, diaries, and cookbooks. He doesn't mention poetry either. All these texts were in circulation. Maybe he leaves them out of his discussion because he is focused on the public (male) sphere of information and print culture. But I would argue, along with other feminist scholars, that accounts written in "private" forms like letters and diaries were considered "public" by the women who wrote and read them. But perhaps Brown does not consider them "public" because they weren't printed for mass consumption like newspapers were?
I really appreciate Brown's points about women and his including them in the discussion of the history of the book, but his chapter leaves me with so many more questions. For instance, if women were to, as part of an educated citizenry, "identify and repel threats to liberty" there were caught in a double bind because they themselves were left out of the notion of citizens. Their own liberties were threatened by the practice of citizenship in the Early Republic. As merely the mothers and wives of citizens, they were merely a conduit of knowledge that marginalized their place in the republic. Or did they have a role that was fulfilling and important, but I haven't read enough yet or discovered the scholars who wrote about them? Is there a diary of a women reader hidden in an archive somewhere, detailing her own reading habits for herself -- and not to pass on to a man or boy? These questions are fascinating and I hope to find out their answers soon.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Blog for October 18
It is difficult to know what to blog about since much of what we read in Robert Gross's introduction to An Extensive Republic is familiar from reading Starr and Davidson. But I did find one intriguing idea that merits exploration -- or at least it is interesting to me so I am going to blog about it. This idea specifically is that while print was unifying the nation and homogenizing our culture, certain people were still left out of the conversation about building the new nation. For example, Gross points out that Godey's and Graham's both positioned themselves as mainstream periodicals, yet neither one ever made mention of slavery and abolition before the Civil War (50). How can we have an "extensive republic" if important voices are left out? And how can we call ourselves "democratic" when the voices of the powerful elite (such as southern plantation owners) dictate the content of periodicals and the print culture they produce?
Luckily for us, some of those excluded voices were included in the conversation thanks to powerful mentors. (While these examples are a little bit later than the time period we have been discussing, I hope you will accept my ideas on their merit.) For example, Harriet Jacobs' voice were heard thanks to Lydia Maria Child. Her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl gives us an important insider view on the horrors of slavery, especially for women. The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, facilitated by mentors like William Lloyd Garrison, allowed Douglass' voice to be heard and become part of the conversation about slavery. Both Jacobs and Douglass point out that slavery degrades everyone -- the enslaved and the enslavers. Indeed, both show how the entire nation was "degraded" by slavery. Thanks to the hugely popular novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, and its other iterations, the nation began to realize the horrors occurring because of slavery. Print culture was pivotal in ending slavery and bringing about emancipation in 1863.
Likewise, I have been thinking about how inclusion and exclusion still happen today. For example, our print culture is still wrestling with the questions about what voices should be heard and how they should shape our nation. The recent protests known as the Occupy Wall Street movement are an exciting example of how print culture allows the "weak" --those outside the positions of power -- to have a voice. From their website, they describe themselves this way: "Occupy Wall Street is a people-powered movement that began on September 17, 2011 in Liberty Square in Manhattan’s Financial District, and has spread to over 100 cities in the United States and actions in over 1,500 cities globally. #OWS is fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations. The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims to expose how the richest 1% of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future." http://occupywallst.org/
Thanks to social media the movement is spreading quickly. Hopefully, real change will happen and our country will begin to find ways to bring us back to a society that truly is governed by the people and for the people, a society where teachers can make a living wage, and where graduate students can get funding. A society were those who were ignored will be heard -- and thanks to the exploding electronic print culture, I can write these thoughts, post them on my blog, and anyone in the world with internet access can read them. Amazing!
If you want to think about the explosion of print culture and information in more detail, watch EPIC 2015 on YouTube.
Luckily for us, some of those excluded voices were included in the conversation thanks to powerful mentors. (While these examples are a little bit later than the time period we have been discussing, I hope you will accept my ideas on their merit.) For example, Harriet Jacobs' voice were heard thanks to Lydia Maria Child. Her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl gives us an important insider view on the horrors of slavery, especially for women. The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, facilitated by mentors like William Lloyd Garrison, allowed Douglass' voice to be heard and become part of the conversation about slavery. Both Jacobs and Douglass point out that slavery degrades everyone -- the enslaved and the enslavers. Indeed, both show how the entire nation was "degraded" by slavery. Thanks to the hugely popular novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, and its other iterations, the nation began to realize the horrors occurring because of slavery. Print culture was pivotal in ending slavery and bringing about emancipation in 1863.
Likewise, I have been thinking about how inclusion and exclusion still happen today. For example, our print culture is still wrestling with the questions about what voices should be heard and how they should shape our nation. The recent protests known as the Occupy Wall Street movement are an exciting example of how print culture allows the "weak" --those outside the positions of power -- to have a voice. From their website, they describe themselves this way: "Occupy Wall Street is a people-powered movement that began on September 17, 2011 in Liberty Square in Manhattan’s Financial District, and has spread to over 100 cities in the United States and actions in over 1,500 cities globally. #OWS is fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations. The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims to expose how the richest 1% of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future." http://occupywallst.org/
Thanks to social media the movement is spreading quickly. Hopefully, real change will happen and our country will begin to find ways to bring us back to a society that truly is governed by the people and for the people, a society where teachers can make a living wage, and where graduate students can get funding. A society were those who were ignored will be heard -- and thanks to the exploding electronic print culture, I can write these thoughts, post them on my blog, and anyone in the world with internet access can read them. Amazing!
If you want to think about the explosion of print culture and information in more detail, watch EPIC 2015 on YouTube.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Dear Ms. Davidson
October 4, 2011
Fort Worth, Texas
Dear Ms. Davidson,
I have really enjoyed my time reading Revolution and the Word again, especially under the guidance of Dr. Dan Williams and my esteemed colleagues. I especially enjoyed reading chapter 4, "Literacy, Education, and the Reader” since it reminded me a lot of Dr. Sarah Robbins book Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women’s Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century. Like you, she also writes about women as educators and readers. After reading her book and yours again I have had time to reflect on my own literacy and how the written word has shaped my identity. Last week I wrote to you about my experiences as a reader. I told you about how fictional heroes like Laura Ingalls, Caddie Woodlawn, Lucy Pevensie, and Anne Shirley all taught me important lessons about being a strong girl and woman.
I have really enjoyed my time reading Revolution and the Word again, especially under the guidance of Dr. Dan Williams and my esteemed colleagues. I especially enjoyed reading chapter 4, "Literacy, Education, and the Reader” since it reminded me a lot of Dr. Sarah Robbins book Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women’s Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century. Like you, she also writes about women as educators and readers. After reading her book and yours again I have had time to reflect on my own literacy and how the written word has shaped my identity. Last week I wrote to you about my experiences as a reader. I told you about how fictional heroes like Laura Ingalls, Caddie Woodlawn, Lucy Pevensie, and Anne Shirley all taught me important lessons about being a strong girl and woman.
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| Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery |
Today I would like to reflect on women who taught me to be a writer and how that has shaped my identity. But first I must challenge a point you make about women writing, and the need for writing in the early republic. First of all, you point out that scholars claim many women left school (those few who had a chance at schooling) before they had learned writing. They only learned reading and therefore were unable to sign a name, only an X, when required to sign any kind of document. You say, "Women, after all, had no legal status, and so, since their signatures proved nothing, there was no real reason for them to learn to sign or, by extension, to write" (125). An interesting claim, that women would learn writing only to participate in the male-centered sphere of business and politics. But knowing what I know about women's lives, this claim disturbed me. So I looked at your end note 18 to see what other points you might make; I was very disappointed with what I found. You make the assertions about women in the early American republic and writing based on a BRITISH study. You even undercut your assumption yourself by saying, "While all these studies illuminate aspects of English education, it is not at all clear that generalizations based on English data apply to the different tradition of American Puritan education" (403). This was a move I would expect from an undergraduate student – but not from you, my idol and the champion of women authors. What can I say? Simply this: I am crushed. How could you ignore the rich history of women's texts? And I don't mean just novels, poems, songs, histories, and other printed texts. What about women's letters and diaries? What about a hand-sewn sampler, like this one pictured here?
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| http://stenton.org/index.php/history-collections-and-interpretation/the-ins-and-outs-of-the-stenton-collection/ |
What about recipes? (They called them receipts in the early republic.) Don't you know that many mothers and daughters would make their own cookbooks, carefully copying down favorite family recipes? A young bride would take this book to her new home and rely on it in her mother’s absence. What about your own points about women writing in the margins and end papers of their few precious books? It seems to me that your explanation about women and their inability to sign more than an X is resting on a very shaky foundation. Perhaps you have not seen databases like North American Women's Letters and Diaries. TCU has access to it, and it contains, according to its welcome page, “the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters. […] The materials have been carefully chosen using leading bibliographies, supplemented by customer requests and more than 7,000 pages of previously unpublished material. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.” This is, I am sure, just a small sampling of the women's writing out there. So, please, if you ever expand upon the expanded edition, please expand this point.
Now, I did promise you a little bit about my experiences as a writer. While Paul Starr would probably call me an exceptional case, I have been a prolific writer ever since I can remember. I started by writing letters to my grandparents and aunts and uncles who lived far away. That came about as a response to the cards and letters they wrote to me and my family. This was when long distance phone calls were expensive (the 1970s) and postage was cheap (13 cents). It was wonderful to get a birthday card, especially from Grandma Schumann since hers usually included 2 dollars. And when my first grade teacher, Mrs. Gunn, sent me a letter before school started, I thought that was wonderful! And of course I could read it all by myself since I had learned to read in kindergarten. As I got older, and began to learn writing in first grade, I crafted stories and letters of my own. I would write to my grandmothers and they would write back! My own personal and private communication with them – what a gift to a child in a large family who had to share everything.
Now, I did promise you a little bit about my experiences as a writer. While Paul Starr would probably call me an exceptional case, I have been a prolific writer ever since I can remember. I started by writing letters to my grandparents and aunts and uncles who lived far away. That came about as a response to the cards and letters they wrote to me and my family. This was when long distance phone calls were expensive (the 1970s) and postage was cheap (13 cents). It was wonderful to get a birthday card, especially from Grandma Schumann since hers usually included 2 dollars. And when my first grade teacher, Mrs. Gunn, sent me a letter before school started, I thought that was wonderful! And of course I could read it all by myself since I had learned to read in kindergarten. As I got older, and began to learn writing in first grade, I crafted stories and letters of my own. I would write to my grandmothers and they would write back! My own personal and private communication with them – what a gift to a child in a large family who had to share everything.
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| http://www.nps.gov/safr/historyculture/c-a-thayer.htm |
Along with my journals and letters, I also have an extensive collection of recipes, written out by hand by myself, my mother, grandmother, or women friends. I just inherited my grandmother’s recipes after her death in February and was so tickled to find mixed in with the recipes various lists, like shopping, things to-do, and even little inspirational quotes. So even though my grandmother never went to college, she still was a writer, as I suspect many women in the early republic were-- even if their families did not save their shopping lists and other ephemeral texts.
All in all, it has been fun revisiting your text. I am sorry to say goodbye, but hope for now it is just "see you again real soon.”
All in all, it has been fun revisiting your text. I am sorry to say goodbye, but hope for now it is just "see you again real soon.”
Larisa
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