Phase Four: Mulock-Craik in Conversation with Barlee

I have chosen to investigate Dinah Maria Mulock-Craik's A Woman's Thoughts about Women. Her view of the importance of the self-dependence and education of women for personal enlightenment and social advancement greatly intrigues me. I have also chosen to put part of Ellen Barlee's Friendless and Helpless in conversation with my primary text. I believe that Barlee will offer insight into the flaws of women's education and employment.

Some critical questions that the text has led me to ask are: How is the commitment to oneself, commitment to the community, and commitment to God related? How does the education of women affect their self-reliance? According to Mulock-Craik and Barlee, what are the components of a proper and practical education for women? I believe some of my main points will be how Mulock-Craik's concepts of women's education and independence disrupt the status quo and complicate the subject of gender.

Both Mulock-Craik and Barlee rely on Biblical references to disrupt constructions of the complete subservience or the complete equality of men and women. They focus on more of the notion that men and women were made for each other, rather than exactly like each other or one subservient to the other. I would like to further explore the importance of this balance in Mulock-Craik's definition of a self-reliant woman.

As for secondary sources, I have explored the possibility of using Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor. The Reading Room attendant could only find a more recent, edited version called Mayhew's London which has excerpts from London Labour and the London Poor. It offers excellent insight into the education-based reasons for the prevalence of poverty, but I would have to explore this text further before deciding on its place in my final investigation.

Mulock-Craik makes frequent use of "feminine style," especially in the concepts of empowerment, consciousness-raising, and arguments from expediency. I believe that Campbell's "Man Cannot Speak for Her" will prove useful as the primary lens in my investigation. I am also considering using Killingsworth's "Appeals to Time" and Ong's "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction."

Phase Four: Taking Stock and Moving Forward-- Haldeman

During our time in the Lily, I've had the chance to look at a lot of the materials for Sarah Haldeman. The driving force behind the tasks I completed involved questions about "industrial education" for women during the early 1900s. For the final paper, I intend to further investigate what "industrial education" for women at this time really meant and what role Haldeman really played in this education. 

Many of the letters that I found in this collection will help me with this task. What I find particularly interesting is the dissonance of the values seen the letters that Haldeman received from various girls' schools and the letter she received from her mother. The letters from the different schools expounded on the way the girls learned how to cook, iron, sew, decorate, etc. All of these letters seemed to be giving Haldeman advice for how to structure the curriculum of her own school. The values seen here seem to vary drastically from the values seen in the letter from her mother. Mrs. Addams praised Haldeman for the way she raised her daughter, Marcet. However, this praise did not come for Marcet's housekeeping abilities but more for her intelligence-- as seen with the compliments Addams gives concerning the girl's letter writing skills.

Major questions I would like to investigate: What do the letters from the school imply about what industrial education was? How do the values differ from Haldeman's values? How did Haldeman receive the suggestions for her school's curriculum? Based on the dissonance seen between the letters, what role did Haldeman play in regard to this education? What did industrial education mean to Haldeman?

In addition to the information I found in the letters, I would like to find the following things:

-More models of the different schools, perhaps including what happened with Haldeman's school and if Haldeman actually took the other schools' advice

-Information concerning Haldeman's role in society (especially as a banker) and how that might effect the way she intended to teach girls / her own daughter and what she believed "industrial education" was.

Phase Four: Mulock-Craik

I have been studying Mulock-Craik’s book, A Woman’s Thoughts about Women, and I am interested in how the book works within the model of “womanly” rhetoric as well as how Mulock-Craik invites audience participation.

When I looked at the preface through the lens of Campbell’s essay Man Cannot Speak For Her, I found examples of the balance that Mulock-Craik had to find between her rhetorical aims and her feminine positions. As an author in general, was Mulock-Craik successful in maintaining this balance? I would like to research some biographical information about her as well as some critiques or reviews of her work to help answer this question.

Another aspect of feminine rhetoric is inviting audience participation. How does Mulock-Craik invite readers to participate and interact with her ideas? Who is her intended audience? Much of her writing seems to be directed toward women, but she also appeals to men. She says that her thoughts are not original and that many women have had similar thoughts. How does she appeal to readers who already agree with her views and to readers who disagree with them? I will use Ong’s essay about audience construction to analyze how Mulock-Craik constructs her audience.

I looked at another work by Mulock-Craik to try to get another view of her writing. I looked at One Year: A Child’s Book, In Prose and Verse. The book is divided into twelve sections, one for each month, and there are illustrations. There are three stories in each section, and the third story in each is a description of the typical activities in the childhood of the author and two other children. Throughout the narration of these descriptions, Mulock-Craik uses first and second person in order to establish a dialogue with the reader. I was only able to skim through the descriptions of her year, but I saw some themes that relate to A Woman’s Thoughts about Women, such as the importance of being self-dependent and of being a good Christian.

At the end of her preface in A Woman’s Thoughts about Women, Mulock-Craik says that she is sure that her book will have a good effect. I wonder if there is some way for me to get an idea of what effect her book had at the time she wrote it. Through historical British newspapers and other online resources, I hope to find references to her book to help me better understand what effect her audience construction and feminine positioning may have had on society’s response to her writings.

Task 4 - CDA's: Taking Stock and Moving Forward

Throughout studying the three letters concerning the Contagious Disease Acts, several curiosities come to mind:

First, I am interested in gaining further information about the context surrounding the Acts. What other legislation was the British government writing and passing at the same time? Were there any other acts that dealt with public health? What about laws dealing with divorce rights? Were their other industrialized countries passing similar acts?

Second, how was medicine practiced? What where the newest advances in medicine? I'd like to read some of Nightingale's work, especially something about her views of the CDA's and women's health in general.

Third, how was the church/religious beliefs a part of writing, arguing for/against, and repealing the Acts?

Although these three questions deal mainly with historical content, and not the literary and rhetorical content, I believe that understanding the historical context of these Acts will allow me to formulate a deeper and more well-informed examination of the Acts through a rhetorical lens.

For my archival project, I would like to investigate the appeals to religion - perhaps religion as a trope - and look at how religion was used to argue for/against other public health legislation in the same time period. (Probably within the same decade.)

For further investigation, I will compare religiously based moral arguments to secular moral arguments.

The three critical essays that would possibly be helpful in this project are Killingsworth's "Appeals to Time" (to look at audience contruction, assigned sociatle roles, and time as a trope - since the arguments were specific to a certian piece of legeslation at a certain time), Campbell's "Man Cannot Speak for Her" (to examine women's letters to newspapers and other types of writing to see to what extent style is dependent on rhetorical situation), and Tompkin's "Sentimental Power."

Related materials from the Lilly Library, or one of the other Bloomington libraries, will include the original contents of the Contagious Disease Acts, Miss Garret and Mr. Hill's letters, and if available other public health legeslation, some of Florence Nightingale's writings and hospital records.

some archival hints

Hi, everyone.

I've been searching for some archival hints since today's class. During Phase Two, most of you realized that the Lilly website currently provides very limited access. Thus, your best bet is to determine the type of source you are searching for and look it up on the massive card catalogue wall and/or to ask the Reading Room attendant to help you identify the type of source you are seeking. If you're feeling a bit tentative at this stage, do not panic--that's all a part of this kind of archival exploration. Explore with a vengeance(!) and remember that you're doing one of the hardest things of all: letting a critical question emerge.

Here is the detailed scope and content note on the exhibition of books related to medicine and surgery. Scroll all the way down to see the full holdings, and you'll notice that only selected images have been uploaded. You'll want to request individual items according to call number. If you are working with Florence Nightingale, these may provide interesting and relevant cultural backdrops via their images and texts, especially helping us to know what arguments formed the basis of medical practice at the time that Nightingale wrote her "Notes."

Also, if you are working on Nightingale and don't know where to focus, you might try the excerpts I identified on the archival project overview and collection list. You do not need to limit yourselves to those passages, but I started there because they seemed to represent the kinds of arguments she made.

For anyone interested in "Beauty's Triumph," Professor Cape provided me with the call number: HQ1201 .B385. It is an illustrated manuscript dated 1751 (about 100 years earlier than Barlee, Mulock-Craik, and the London Lowlife materials) but it was featured as part of an artificial collection created by Professor Cape called "Freethinkers, Reformers, and Suffragettes."

An interesting document to read alongside Mulock-Craik may be Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those Than Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work (1861-1862). This is in Box 15 of the BBC MSS portion of the "Cleverdon MSS II" collection.

The London Lowlife collection does have an extensive collection list with an item-by-item description of all 8 boxes and 4 oversized folders. The call number for this collection is DA676. If you're working with the Contagious Diseases Act and/or other 19th century texts, I highly recommend this list. The visual ephemera are so unique! You may be able to request a copy of the list--or request a copy to look at--from the Reading Room attendant. That collection may also house the Pall Mall Gazette
and 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).

If you're working with Annie Besant, feel free to request and look through any of her other leaflets. The call number information is: BL2727 Box 1 Freethought Publishing Co. Items 11-27. It is a nice set of materials, but they are quite fragile and difficult to handle.

If you're working with the Haldeman MSS, there is another folder of materials that might be useful (if it hasn't already been pulled and placed with our collection). The call number information is LMC 1447 (Haldeman, Mrs. S.A., mss), Box 1. There are some news clippings about Sarah Alice Haldeman dated April 18, April 20, and April 27 1916 about her motivation to go into social betterment, about housewives economizing, and about women in banking. There is also an article dated January 4, 1907 on Haldeman's views on money and business, and a small clip called "Women and Banking" dated January 10, 1903. These items will probably have to be requested by date, since the collection list I have doesn't indicate which folder contains them. You might also look to the Haldeman MSS lists and the Mrs. SA Haldeman MSS lists to get a fuller sense of genealogy so you know who is related to whom.

For Gordimer, here is the full guide and online finding aid, as well as a general collection description. I believe in Box 4, Folder 21 marked "Early Writings" there is a kind of diary in which Gordimer kept track of and reviewed all books she had read that year.

As you find things, feel free to share with the rest of us!

-Dr. Graban

Phase 3 Option 2

I looked at Box 4 folder 25 of Nadine Gordimer's early writings. The first story in the folder was an untitled story about WWII. This story was difficult for me to find anything that resembled her usual themes of social inequality and apartheid. However, in all of Gordimer's work she uses explicit metaphors, and lots of description. The story was of men who worked fixing the communication line during the war in Egypt. The men face a near death experience that eventually the come out of alive, however we get to witness first hand through Gordimer's writing what they were thinking and feeling and how they were preparing to die. Some of the men don't seem to care, others are concerned with strictly monetary things, and one said, "I am bitter, and I am afraid, because I know life, and i am loath to let it go" I thought that this was the most interesting statement of this short story. In my idea it breaks the norms of what Gordimer wrote about. She projects this unjust society in most of her work, but this main character seems to not want to let go of anything about it. He is constantly looking forward to getting out of the war and back to society, and wants to live his life.
The second short story I read was called "Babe". It had very obvious themes that related to apartheid. The story was of a young woman who was born from a black woman and a white Irish man in South Africa. Her mother died in childbirth and her white father raises her for awhile. The girl detests everything about her that is black. She dies her hair blond, powders her face, and paints her nails to hide their "blackness". She meets a man who treats her poorly but is none the less infatuated with her. While on vacation she catches him cheating on her with a white woman, and loses it for just a second. You hope that this is when she develops pride for herself, but she does not. The man sends her away calling her awful names. Eventually the girl finds another white man who has the same disgust/intrigue for her, and she tells herself in the mirror she isn't so bad. Gordimer uses the girl to show the horrible way some white people look upon the entire black population. They are intrigued. They need them to have a stable economy and do the work they do not wish to do--so they are intrigued by them. But a part of them despises them and believes they are all that is wrong with their society and put them down. It is an odd relationship that Gordimer has worked out perfectly between this woman and white men.

Phase 3: Option 2

In A Reply to Miss Garrett’s Letters on the Contagious Disease Acts, Mrs. W.T Malleson shows many blunt examples and arguments which show what was customary at this time. Socially, men were considered the “higher power” over women, regardless of their class, which is explicitly shown by the Contagious Acts itself. The Contagious Disease Act solely punishes women for their sexual misconduct without even looking at the fact that men, married men even are acquiring these services from these women, or prostitutes. She spoke in a very sarcastic tone on the very first page of her book, stating things such as “if the true work of our doctors is to make people, if possible, a little healthier, treating them as animals merely…; of our teachers to spread the not very satisfactory attainments of the so-called educated classes somewhat lower in the social scale; if this were so, Miss Garrett’s widely- read letter in defense of the “Contagious Disease Acts” might be as true and faithful, as it is clear and intelligent. ” Off hand, when I read this quote, I was drawn to believe that, in actuality, she was stating how ignorant and unfair the Act was, mainly to women as a whole. These are the morals in which women of their time were accustomed to.

Malleson also talked about in their days how it was considered bad taste to allude to religion out of the pulpit or the nursery, which she thought was an even more powerful operation than the CDA itself, which she obviously did not agree with and felt strongly about opposing. Malleson also pointed out how ironic Mrs. Garrett’s arguments were in so many words. She stated that Mrs. Garrett writes “In answer to the very obvious object that a law is unjust, which, in dealing with a crime necessarily common to women and men, lays its hand upon women only, Miss Garrett says “there would be force in this objection if there were any parallel class among men.” Mrs. Garrett was clearly saying that the women who receive money for prostituting form a class; conversely, she was saying that the men who give women the money for the same purpose do not! But the whole thing on both parts is an unjust act, and the object in question was to never be sold nor bought, which shows unequal legislation and adds to injustment and whose only sanction is the right of the strong to oppress the weak, meaning that men overpowered the women. Although the men and women makes the choice, in the end, women are punished but the men aren’t. Malleson appeals to the women in this situation, in this book because back then women were considered “precious” or “superior” beings and Malleson used this a lot to make it be known in her writings. Overall, she poses the women in this situation as victims by pointing out what was moral but never showing how, in the end, men and women should have both just been seen as immoral people for the acts that were occurring.