01/03/2024
Great info. Thank you for sharing, Kelly
"What Is the Dominant Emotion in 400 Years of Women’s Diaries?" A new anthology identifies frustration as a recurring theme in journals written between 1599 and 2015. by Sarah Gristwood, author, Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries
"In 1940, in a suburban house in the shipbuilding English town of Barrow-in-Furness, Nella Last angrily reflected on the changes wrought by World War II: “I always used to worry and flutter round when I saw my husband was working up for a mood; but now I just say calmly, ‘Really dear, you should try and act as if you were a grown man and not a child of 10, and if you want to be awkward, I shall go out—ALONE!’”
"When Last’s husband wistfully told her that she was “not so sweet” these days, she replied, “Well! Who wants a woman of 50 to be sweet, anyway? And besides, I suit me a lot better!” Last would, three years later, write of how “a growing contempt for man in general creeps over me.” The first battles she fought were tiny ones: not having tea always ready when her husband came in, suggesting he take his lunch out on Thursdays when she worked in a wartime canteen.
"But these are the fields on which the grassroots of feminism were fought. Rejecting the rules by which she had lived the first half-century of her life, Last recorded her progress in a diary, published in 1981 as Nella Last’s War, that she wrote for the Mass Observation social research project. The diary’s enduring popularity shows that Last, the subject of the 2005 TV movie Housewife, 49, was not alone in either her resolution or her anger...
"But across 400 years of diarists, perhaps the most dominant emotions were frustration and the resolution born of silent fury. In 1617, Lady Anne Clifford swore that however much pressure her husband put on her, she would never give up her lands in Westmorland—her family inheritance. Two hundred years later, in 1818, Ellen Weeton found herself turned out into the street by her husband and denied access to their child. (“I broke out into complaints; this only was my fault,” she wrote.)
"In 1923, [Iñupiaq Alaskan] Ada Blackjack—sole survivor of a doomed 1921 expedition to Wrangel Island, northwest of the Bering Strait—recorded coolly how a male expedition member held over her the threat of her child back home being taken out of her custody, and the relief, as well as the huge challenges, of life alone in the Arctic after his death. [Hmmm, that was never mentioned in the articles I posted about her.]
"Sometimes, the diarists’ anger and frustration were expressed indirectly, cloaked under a veil of resignation and wry humor. Beatrix Potter wrote a secret coded diary during her long years as a young Victorian lady at home. She was in her 30s when she began publishing the tales that would make her famous, and as she began to find her way in the world, she no longer felt the need to keep a journal. Potter’s diary described all the ways in which she failed to conform to Victorian ideals of femininity, as well as her difficulties in getting her now-noted mycological studies taken seriously by the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. “It is odious to a shy person to be snubbed as conceited, especially when the shy person happened to be right,” she wrote in 1897.
"Domestic abuse of the kind Weeton endured still goes on, but modern women are better placed to protect themselves. “When man injures woman, how can she defend herself?” Weeton wrote in 1825. “Her frame is weaker, her spirit timid; and if she be a wife, there is scarce a man anywhere to be found who will use the slightest exertion in her defense; and her own s*x cannot, having no powers. She has no hope from law; for man, woman’s enemy, exercises, as well as makes those laws.”
"Nelly Ptashkina, a Russian teenager who in 1918 reflected on the terrifying possibility that she might never marry, might frame her fears differently today. And, if she were alive now, Florence Nightingale would surely not have to wait so long before overcoming her family’s opposition to her becoming a nurse. “Oh for some great thing to sweep this loathsome life into the past,” she wrote at age 25. And, in her 30th year, shortly before she began her medical training: “My present life is suicide.”..
"In the early 20th century, Sophia Tolstoy, wife of the author of War and Peace, debated whether she should stay in what had become an abusive relationship. In 1884, sociologist Beatrice Webb wrote on whether she should marry the rising politician Joseph Chamberlain: “I don’t know how it will all end. Certainly not in my happiness. … If I married him, I should become a cynic as regards my own mental life. I should become par excellence the mother and the woman of the world intent only on fulfilling practical duties and gaining practical ends.”
"Webb eventually married another man, the socialist Sidney Webb. But the fact that the world knows her by his surname (she was born Beatrice Potter) is exactly the kind of issue she discusses in her diaries. The diary of Anna Dostoyevskaya, meanwhile, discusses in grim detail the perpetual battle between hope and despair of anyone living with a compulsive gambler, in this case her husband, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky...
"in 1945, Scottish novelist and poet Naomi Mitchison described a group of friends discussing “this business of babies. It really is doing in both Joan and to a lesser extent Ruth. And the same thing has happened to me. … It is rare to have an hour undistracted. Because of this, I know I can never be first class at anything. … We deliberately took on this burden. Yet we didn’t know beforehand how crippling it would be.”..
"What struck me most, in these months of reading women’s diaries, was that sense of familiarity. During the Victorian era, the young Marie Bashkirtseff—a Russian aristocrat and artist who died of tuberculosis at age 25—declared her ambition with an openness we might envy today. “I am my own heroine,” she famously wrote; since her diaries, when published posthumously in 1887, became a best seller, it’s safe to say the world agreed.
"Those of us who grew up in the late 20th century often felt like frontline troops. However vital the victories of second and even third-wave feminism, the war inside our own homes and own heads was one we still fought every day. Maybe we did, maybe we do—but, crucially, not alone. These diaries prove there is an army at our backs, reassuring us, nudging us, urging us on every inch of the way."
Thanks to Cla Dor.
Shown, Anna Snitkina Dostoyevskaya. She graduated from an academic high school summa cm laude and, having no better prospects as a woman to earn her own living, became a stenographer. "Anna did not have the career she planned but she was essential to Dostoevsky's work. She took over sales of his novels, particularly Demons, from their apartment in St Petersburg, and began managing his business affairs." [wiki]
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-is-the-dominant-emotion-in-400-years-of-womens-diaries-180983834/
