"Committed to Memory": Gender, Literary Engagement, and Commemorative Practice, 1780-1920

Abstract

Committed to Memory examines how white women in nineteenth-century New England used everyday objects and stories to engage with the past and to forge social boundaries in their present. The project first reestablishes the close links among acts of reading, writing, and remembering in the early American Republic and highlights the constitutive place of material artifacts within those cultural practices. In particular, I delineate the social authority that educated white women exercised among and enhanced through commemorative activities. The work then traces the feminization and belittlement of material artifacts, especially those associated with domestic spaces, at the hands of emerging academic conventions at the beginning of the twentieth century. Committed to Memory argues that in labeling these artifacts, sites, and practices as marginal to the historical enterprise, scholars have obscured both the lasting significance of these materials and the contexts of privilege in which they originally circulated.

This dissertation draws together typical textual sources, such as diaries, letters, and printed publications, with less conventional artifacts of material culture, including needlework samplers, friendship albums, and inscriptions carved into the physical architecture of houses. In this project, the “literary” extends far beyond canons or specific genres to writing to encompass the presence of text in many forms, and the “historical” transcends the boundaries of scholarly monographs and paper-based archives to include the development of museum collections, house museums, and state historical societies.

Specific sites explored in the project include the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts; the Wadsworth-Longfellow House and Maine Historical Society in Portland, Maine; the Dorothy Quincy Homestead outside of Boston; Mary Balch’s school and the Rhode Island Historical Society in Providence; the Litchfield Female Academy in Connecticut; and the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Among the variety of individuals and groups studied are the families who resided in homes later associated with prominent authors Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, including the Emerson family, the Ripley family, the Wadsworth family, and the Longfellow family; Providence residents Julia Bowen, Rebeeca Carter Jenckes, and Mary Balch; educator Sarah Pierce and her Litchfield Female Academy students; antiquarians Hannah Mather Crocker, Isaiah Thomas, and Christopher Columbus Baldwin; lineal organizations, such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the National Society of Colonial Dames in America; and amateur historians and collectors Eva Johnston Coe, Ethel Stanwood Bolton, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, Jane Loring Gray, Anne Longfellow Pierce, and Nathan Goold.

Committed to Memory demonstrates that educated white women in early national and antebellum New England deployed a full array of material artifacts to draw lines of belonging and exclusion on the basis of race, lineage, and learning. At the end of the century, their descendants – in social and cultural, if not lineal terms – continued to assign historical significance to artifacts and spaces of domestic life. Their work, however, untethered sets of artifacts from the localized, distinctly literary contexts of their making and attached them instead to broader narratives about the Anglo-American origins and progress of the United States. Ultimately, the scholarly distinction among objects and venues of historical knowledge has created a blinding and a silencing: it has kept from view the material complexities of female literary engagement and authorship in the early United States, while simultaneously allowing the narratives about gender, nation, and belonging embedded in those objects to stand uncontextualized.