Last Archival Blog

Today when working with my archival project I made a few discoveries in Gordimer’s work. I located the “lost folder” I had been searching for and in it found many ideas to continue with my question, also a couple of smaller questions that will aide me in my research. The folder contained two blue book type of documents both filled to capacity with mini book reviews. These were all the books Gordimer had read during the year of 1938. 

Beside each book she wrote the title, author, and her opinion of the book—which was either Bad, Good, Quite Good, or Very Good. I chose to take a closer look at the books which she titled “Very Good”. A couple of authors were traditionally children’s authors, as she was just 15 years old, but the majority were not. Her favorite book out of all of them was “Gone with the Wind”. She found Scarlett O’Hara’s character to be very captivating. Another favorite was “They seek a country” by an author that appears a few times on her list, Francis Brett Young. This is about a young man who comes over to South Africa from poverty, is forced into imprisonment and falls in love with an African girl. This has a very simlar theme as mnay of Gordimer’s works. 

My original question was, How is Gordimer’s work influenced by other authors? I will continue this question by looking more closely at the possible influences these other authors had on her work, but I now want to know specifically how they informed her interest in Apartheid? As a young white South African woman, why would she be so drawn to social injustice? Seems she was so young to be that passionate.

Phase 4: Hapgood

For my final investigative paper, I have decided to look into Hapgood and her approach to social and class issues in her writings. I would like to focus on the Sacco Vanzetti case, but utilize her shorter writings to emphasize her points and to exemplify her writing styles. Her involvment in politics outside her writings shows her obvious interest in social reform and other issues involving class and immigration topics. Hapgood's writings of the Sacco Vanzetti trial prove to canjole readers into a sypathetic state of mind for the immigrants that have been tried and found guilty of murder. I am undecided on which source I will use as a lens, but I have found outside sources to utilize in attempting to pick apart Hapgood's writings. The three sources I have found so far are from JSTOR and they are; The Legislation of Crime and Delinquency: A Review of Theory, Method, and Research by John Hagan, From "White Slave" to Labor Activist: The Agony and Triumph of a Boston Brahmin Woman in the 1910s by Stephen H. Norwood, and a book review done by Hapgood in the Industrial and Labor Relations Review. I think that all of these writings should provide insight into the social reform issues of the time and Hapgood's own thoughts on other writers divulging her review style and issues she finds relevant and style in which it is presented.

Phase 4: Contagious Disease Acts

For my final paper, I am going to use the pamphlets on the Contagious Diseases Act.

I am going to use the Pall Mall Gazetteand W. T. Stead's Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (on childhood prostitution). Stead's document was instrumental to the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act and to the creation of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (raising the age of consent to 16). This is the refernce that Dr. Graban advised would be beneficial for the CDA.

I am going to look at the role of prostitution and how it was viewed fom all standpoints of the authors of each passage. I was going to look at the readings that Dr. Graban suggested and the 3 pamphlets from the contagious disease acts and compare their views on it. I also wanted to bring in Tompkins as a lens because it seems as if this will go well with the CDA topic.

Does this sound like a good idea to anyone else or am I way off? I haven't completely found or done all of my research that I will need to complete the proposal because the description of this final paper is still very unclear for me, so once again if anyone can help that would be awsome!

Phase 4 Haldeman

I want to take the "two mothers of Jane Addams" and many of the letters to Sarah Haldeman and put them into a conversation about how the industrial education is used more for the domestication of women than for the bettering of their social economic status. 

I can see in the Two mothers of Jane Addams that many of the lessons in which she thinks that woman need in their formal education were lessons that her mother gave her as a child. i want to go into the history that inspired her to work for this formalized education for women. we can see that both mothers gave her different types of an education and i want to see which lessons were more important to sarah, the household work or the aesthetic. these lessons can be backed up by finding the parallel in her inquiring letters to deans of preexisting female schools. i feel that using Campbel's feminine style will also be useful in perpetuating this argument. 

i am not exactly certain which author it was that we read in class but it talked about how women with an education make better wives and i want to put that into the conversation with her article in the news paper that says women should be able to manage finances in the home. i want to look at how the information was presented whether the women were able to be passionate about their stance or if they were forced to be docile. 

i feel that i can use all these texts to present the argument that women domestic lives were not dependent on their education but that their acceptance into the male society was dependent on them having some sort of liberal education.

my battery is dying 

The text that I have been investigating at the Lilly Library is Besant's "Is the Bible Indictable". What interested me most in this pamphlet was how Besant drew upon Christian values to make her argument that if the Bible can be published under current law than medical document should be published too. I am interested to see how other author's we have read have drawn upon Christian concepts in order to make their own arguments. In order to show how other women have drawn on Christian ideology to make various claims I will examine Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century as well as Grimke's "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South". My thesis will most likely be something like "Many women authors have called upon their audiences to make changes due to obligations as a Christian". For example, Besant calls upon her readers to object to the ruling that any book considered to excite its reader can be condemned, since under the current law the Bible can be indicted as well. Fuller reminds her readers that God created woman for man, but that man was not meant to be her master. Grimke informs her readers that slavery is a sin and that as good Christians they must speak out against it.

I think Killingsworth's "An Appeal to Times" will be an especially useful secondary source because the authors I focus on all appear to be writing as if addressing a crisis of the times. I also think that Campbell's idea of a feminine style will be useful in analyzing these texts. She writes that women were often considered to be morally superior to men and that this morality often manifested itself in the works of women authors. I also think that her idea of consciousness raising plays an important role in the texts I will investigate by Besant, Fuller, and Grimke.

Phase 4- Taking Stock and Moving Forward: Besant

 In the Lilly I have been consistently working with Annie Besant and the Free Thought Publishing Collection; more specifically with her text English Republicanism. While searching the Lilly for more resources within the Free Thought Publishing Collection I discovered that Besant wrote many pamphlets with Free Thought and that the two originally given to us at the Lilly were really just the tip of the ice burg pertaining to the information available. While searching those related sources I discovered that although many of her pieces within the Free Thought Group were related to a more republican society, there was one text that clearly stood out from the rest titled Modern Socialism. The plain dissonance between just the title and her other work interested me; Why would such a revolutionary woman want to enlighten her audience about the role of socialism and its benefits in modern society? 

From this question and some help from Dr. Graban I was able to come up with a tentative question for my paper. I plan to look at Besant's writing path throughout a specific number of years writing for Free Thought and the shifts that occurred throughout that time period based on three of her pamphlets within the Free Thought Collection. To unpack this question I plan to look at several different evidences that I can track throughout her pamphlets are: the structures of her argumentation, her consistency or inconsistency in her ideology, and the larger social context within the time of each pamphlet. 

My argument will center around Besant's English Republicanism and two other pamphlets within the Lilly collection, although I don't know specifically which two other articles I am going to use. In addition to three of Besant's works I plan to utilize outside sources from some of the resources within the class website. Again I don't know specific articles, but I will be looking for ones that will give me more information related to the social context surrounding each pamphlet I use. Hopefully though all these actions I can log Besant's rhetorical and political behavior in regards to what was happening in mainstream society. 

If anyone has any suggestions, questions or comments please tell me them! I am totally open to any help/knowledge given with a new set of eyes.  

Phase 4: Contagious Disease Acts

I am going to look at the pamphlets on the Contagious Diseases Act for my research paper. Comments, suggestions, or any constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated.

I plan to look at the three pamphlets from the Pall Mall Gazette that were offered to the class and put them into conversation with each other regarding the role of men in prostitution.

My ideas are not yet fully developed on this as I have not had time to examine each piece as closely as I would like to, but I am having them copied currently and already have some ideas. It seems that each writer, Mrs. Malleson, Justina, and Anonymous have an opinion of the role men play in perpetuating prostitution. They all seem to think that men hold at least some (if not most) of the responsibility. One of the reasons is at this time men had more economic power than women and the lack of economic power forced women into this work. Another reason is that it was men who frequented the prostitutes so not only were they helping to continue employment as prostitutes but they were also then spreading disease to their wives and children.

I would like to explore this idea of men's responsibility and lack of accountability with regards to prostitution. I think my goal would probably be to answer the question: How do each of these writers differ in their opinion of the role of men (as clients) with regards to prostitution and the spread of diseases?

For this I would the only sources I have at the moment are the three pamphlets I looked at in class. For aditional sources it is a possibility to look further into the London Lowlife Collection, but I'm not sure how much I want to complicate my research with aditional opinions. One source I will look into, however, is "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon." This is also from the Pall Mall Gazette and looks into the issue of what was called "white slavery" basically forced prostitution and child prostitution. This writing could help me find more about the way this issue was viewed at the time.

I have quite a bit more work to do before I can turn in a paper proposal, but I am hoping I can work with this question, because I find it highly interesting.

Phase Four- Taking Stock and Moving Forward- Nightingale

I have been working with Nightingale all throughout these exercises and have grown very interested in her texts. I have now had several opportunities to look at her "Notes on Nursing" and "Notes on Matters" and would like to use these two texts in developing my final paper. Previously, I had tried to uncover her use of audience construction in these texts, but her texts contain such profound arguments and ideas about medicine of her time that I would like to turn my focus to other issues.

To find out more about the ideas and topoi of the time, in order to possibly develop a better understanding of Nightingale, I looked at a different text from the Classical Works in History of Medicine and Surgery collection, William Charles Wells' "An Account of a Female of the White Race of Mankind..."; This text, published in 1818, uses a comparison of the races to demonstrate that evolution of the human species exists, involving natural selection of the most favorable traits, or in other words, "survival of the fittest." His ideas coordinate with those of Darwin, but he came before Darwin's time. However, Darwin then published his famous ideas in the 1860s, right around the time that Nightingale wrote many of her texts. A question that came to mind was, would Nightingale support this theory of survival of the fittest, or would she be more likely to support that everyone has an equal opportunity to survive, as long as they take the proper measures necessary for good health. Would Nightingale say that we, not nature, decide our health and our survival? I thought it would be interesting to investigate how she would respond to these ideas since she was writing right in the midst of this time period.

Overall, I am still yet to uncover some of Nightingale's deeper and more significant beliefs about human health and good healthcare. Is the goal of her texts simply to pass on her knowledge in order to create a healthier society? Clearly her ideas were effective, judging by her lifespan, which was unusually long compared to others of her time (1820-1910, lived to be 90 years old). I would like to investigate all of these ideas in my final paper to find out how Nightingale's beliefs corresponded to other beliefs of the time, and to gain a better idea of why she wrote her texts in the first place.

Phase Four: Gordimer

I have been working with the Gordimer collection all along, and have developed a question that I would like to turn into my essay.  I wrote down three possible things to explore, and I will share them with you since you might have more feedback and may persuade me to change my mind. 

1. How did Gordimer affect/change apartheid in South Africa? 

This would involve a lot of historical research about how it was before she began writing and what it is like now.

2. How were Gordimer's writings about apartheid influenced by other South African writers?

She began so early that there must have been someone who influenced her as a writer

3. Which piece from Gordimer's collection most greatly influence her winning the Nobel laureate prize? Why was it so effective?

I feel a little iffy on this question, but it would be interesting to know if there was one particular work that stood out and why it did. I could gather critics essays on her as well. 

After talking briefly with Dr. Graban, I believe I will try to elaborate on question number two. Obviously Gordimer is a leader in the field of writing, but some of her early works were from when she was 12. Prodigy yes, but someone somewhere influenced her writing then, and I am sure now as well. I know this from the correspondence I found between her and another playwright in South Africa whose manuscripts are also in the Lilly. Fugard had a wife who was an actress who performed in many plays about apartheid as well. They were not merely acquaintances but good friends--which you can see from the letters. She thoroughly enjoyed his work, and was equally upset when it was not given the attention she believed it deserved. She wrote one play that I read, and wonder if this was influenced by the playwright. 

Gordimer also wrote (for a class I believe) about all the things she read in a particular year. She was quite young and read  many things. She rated them, and I think it would be interesting to take a look at what she was reading. Maybe those are the clues to how she was influenced, and to also see if she had any types of relationships with those authors as well. 

*Gordimer is still alive and when this is all over I am writing her and telling her about it!

Phase Four: Hapgood

For my archival research project, I have decided to utilize Hapgood's work over the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. Though only two chapters of "No Tears for My Youth" are on hand, she explores a tremendously wide variety of ideas that extend beyond the trial. Some of the things that I feel would be most interesting for me to concentrate on in my paper would be the stance that she takes while she presents the information and how she positions herself to be a persuasive author while still presenting the facts. Also, I feel that really looking into her version of what "crime" really means would be a very interesting topic to explore. I feel that this woul be interesting because of the fact that the Sacco-Vanzetti case is so controversial and it seems that their guilty verdict depended mostly on their immigrant, poor status rather than their actual guilt. I think that exploring the class systems and what those social standings infer during that time period could be very enlightening.

Some of the sources that I found that are directly related to the case include: The Case that Will Not Die by Herbert B. Ehrmann and The Untried Case by William G. Thompson. I am having trouble deciding what lens I could use to really discuss these details in depth. I could possibly utilize Ong to discuss how Hapgood fictionalizes her audience as she takes positions on certain subjects. I'm not sure if Addams or Harper would be beneficial or not, but I could possibly incorporate them as well? I also found an article on JStore called "Social Hierarchy and the Death Penalty: A social Dominance Perspective" by Michael Mitchell and Jim Sidanius. This article looks into the social aspects of why individuals are put to death at a higher rate than in other areas. I feel like this could be an interesting attribute to my paper.

Phase Four: Answers in Nightingale

For the purpose of the final paper I have decided to work with Nightingale's "Notes on Matters" and "Notes on Nursing", suplimented by our Anthology and a few other sources through the Lilly. Throughout the semester I have stuck with Nightingale's texts as I always was left wanting to read more about her findings and the accomplishments and respect she gained during her years as a nurse, this curiosity has also left me with some burning questions which I would like to get to the bottom of-in steps my paper. The primary question I hope to find answers to through the paper is, "What made Nightingale such a force to be reckoned with that Generals and other very important men of the time saught her out and listened to her suggestions?" Women still were not looked on as all that capable at that time, yet these men saught after her advice and took it readily, producing models after her ideas and findings.

In order to investigate this question I hope, through further exaimination of her texts and those secondary texts available I can acquire a good background understanding of where Nightingale came from, why she (of all people) would be asked to overhaul the military hospitals, and get the larger picture of the common medical beliefs of the time through pictures, texts and diagrams.

The main points I hope to address would include a short background of where Nightingale came from, the history of how she came to be a nurse, what accomplishments she made in order to be saught after by military officials, and perhaps delve into what made her do what she did (or find what made her "tick" so to speak).