The Good Elves failed to mark all of my exams last night, so I spent this morning packing for a holiday trip and grading 21 final essays by my women’s history students. And they rocked it! Broadly speaking, I asked them to analyze five primary sources (two of them published engravings from the American Antiquarian Society’s collections) using the last three books on our syllabus and make an argument either for continuity or change in free women’s lives in the period 1750 – 1820.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, they chose to emphasize change in women’s lives, although most still recognized the challenges these women faced in the societies they lived in, which were still characterized by a great deal of continuity in its gendered expectations of marriage and sexuality. While I find that students are eager to seize upon any evidence that things might be getting better for anyone, that message may be particularly important in the wake of the electoral college victory of the Human Stain. My students in this stack of exams put a great deal of emphasis on the change women were enacting in their own lives, regardless of broader efforts at social control.
Because I think the images they got to write about are so fantastic, and because I think more of you should check out the rich collection of digitized material that the American Antiquarian Society makes freely available, here they are (above and below), along with a link to the larger database they’re from, the Charles Peirce Collection of Social Caracatures and Ballads. Take a look at the top image carefully–I’ve included a link to the AAS site’s digitization, which is enlargeable to a fair-thee-well–so rich with wonderful details about the unhappy marriage it depicts.
This is the collection that features the only copy of the famous “A Philosophic Cock,” one of the most explicit political jokes in American history, and the AAS has digitized it! It’s also the only known attempt to depict Sally Hemings in her lifetime–although I’m sure it wasn’t drawn from personal knowledge, it’s notable for its existence at all.
(Warning: bad rape joke straight ahead.)
See you from my secret vacation location tomorrow–
Historiann 
Have a great vacation, Ann. I’ve still got exams to give and grade. I hope get those wrapped up and be thinking vacation thoughts by the 23rd!
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Ditto on your trip, Ann. My only consolation for not packing, yet, is that I’ve whittled my stack down to the point where the last 100 or so papers I read will contain at least one, and presumably a dozen or more, references to Esther Wheelwright. That said, it will be officially winter before I can hit “send” on grades.
People who liked “Marital Harmonics” also bought “Keen-ish Sport in Cox’s Court!! Or., Symptoms of Crim. Con. in Drury Lane. May 1824.” Digitized by the British Museum, but possibly also in the AAS collection. Check it out. It resonates nicely with the lead print above.
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Wow. I just read an essay that totally, totally nailed it on Wheelwright! Out of maybe fifty that I read today, many of which were not half bad. But this one wove it back to literally the first day of the course. Better than I would have done. With that, I’m going to sleep on my luck. To all a good night!
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It’s so awesome when your students nail it in a final!
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Enjoy your vacation. I’m still trying to track down our exams written late last week. Our registrar’s office keeps closing at semi-random hours in the afternoons which has caught me out Friday and Monday now. Geez!
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Somewhat off-thread, but for two interesting recent history-of-women-in-STEM stories, check out the sketch about Ruth Hubbard, biologist @ Radclffe, in the Sunday New York Times magazine’s “People Who Died” feature, pp. 46-47, and the long obituary for Vera Rubin, astronomer @ Carnegie Institution, in the NYT on Wednesday, Dec. 28, p. A-18, where she is credited with having contributed to a “Copernican-scale change in cosmic consciousness.” Nothing categorically new or different, beyond that last point, maybe, but just interesting.
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