Food For Thought(s).

How has your reading and/or research changed and/or deepened your view of the text? About what are you most excited (or somewhat interested in)? How do your analyses and hunches mesh with those of your colleagues?

How has this step in the process changed and/or deepened your sense of where you want to take this project? What strategies worked and/or failed? For what aspects of this process will you need help, and about what are you most confident?

Before getting help on the process of research (with Professor Logan), I wasn't completely sure where my topic could go. I am interested in the fashion portion of this book, where Foster links dress with age, class, and--most interestingly—propriety. After perusing the articles I found, I realized there is much to consider for my paper. Who was dictating the fashion of women? How important to the whole society was women's fashion? What was happening politically that affected the choices women made in dress? I'm sure I'll know the answers soon...

I am excited about my group. I am doing fashion, Kassey is doing needlework, Alle is doing the boarding school experience, and Justine is doing reading and/or education. All of those ideas interconnect and complicate each other. How did the boarding school experience change what people read, wore, and did?

Food For Thought - 10/19

As I was reading the first twenty or so pages of The Boarding School several things were grabbing my attention. Some of which may just be me looking in between the lines a little to hard but it is still something that distresses me. I noticed that Foster is trying to convey that women need to be educated and learn lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic, music and dancing, and dress: to name a few. Yet she also stresses something very opposite of these things at the beginning of this novel - that women need to learn to be domestic i.e. be able to do needlework. This novel is a "walking" contridiction, in my eyes. As I was reading though my sources I noticed that they have all noticed the same thing: education is stressed in young women but that it is not what is going to get them through their lives. Reading through these sources also helped me understand the historical context I should be reading this novel, though I may have my opinions as a 21st century scholar; this novel was written by a lady of the 18th century.

Preliminary Bibliography

Key Issues:
Needle Work
Domestic Duties in the 18th Century
Women’s education in the 18th Century
Women’s roles in the 18th Century
Widows in the 18th Century
Boarding Schools

Works Cited:
Chambers, Jacqueline M. "'Thinking and Stitching, Stitching and Thinking': Needlework, American Women Writers, and Professionalism." Famine and fashion : needlewomen in the nineteenth century (2005): 171-184.

Kelley, Mary. Learning to stand & speak : women, education, and public life in America's republic. Williamsburg: Chapel Hill, 2006.

Martin, Theodora P. The sound of our own voices : women's study clubs 1860-1910 . Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.

Mays, Dorothy A. Women in early America : struggle, survival, and freedom in a new world. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004.

Nash, Margaret A. Women's education in the United States, 1780-1840 . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Winterer, Caroline. The mirror of antiquity : American women and the classical tradition, 1750-1900 . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.