Hey hey, the class begins!
Jean Lee Cole, January 23, 2018
Faithful subscribers may have noted a sudden flourishing of postings to the Aperio Log. That’s because the spring semester at Loyola has begun—and at long last, so has our class on the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore. The course has the auspicious number EN389 and is titled in the online course catalog, “Reading Women, Writing Women, 1890-1920: The Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore.”
Our class met for the first time last night in the, shall we say, cozy seminar room in Loyola’s English Department. We had a great time discussing some stories from Anne Boyd Rioux’s wonderful anthology Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century—including Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody–who are you?,” Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “The Poetess” (1890) and Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Miss Grief” (1880), as well as Edith Wharton’s painfully comic story about “Writing a War Story” (1919). The thought-provoking posts from Ellen, Sydney, Katie, Clara, & Hunter posted to plant seeds for our discussion give you a good idea of the range of ideas and responses.
We were also graced by a visit from our volunteer researcher and assiduous transcriber, Cynthia, whom only Clara had met before last night. Cynthia first put the WLCB papers on the radar of archivists and libraries in the 1970s when she was tasked, as a graduate student and fledgling archivist, with finding “hidden collections” of women’s writings in archives across the country. Unfortunately, no one until us had answered her clarion call for over 40 years.
Cynthia had wonderful stories to tell about her work in archives as well as some piquant observations about her recent interactions with the Club as a transcriber. One story she mentioned was about founding member Louisa C. O. Haughton’s horror when she presented the documents to incorporate the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore to the notary public, and he mistakenly read the name as the “Woman’s Liberty Club.”
“We are not seeking freedom!” she said (I think I am horribly paraphrasing and will revise this once I am reminded of what she actually said. ETA: see comments for the actual quotation.). The majority of the Club members were ambitious, but sadly, not suffragist revolutionaries.
Over the next few weeks, you’ll be introduced to the dozen or so new members of the project– new students to the EN389 course at Loyola, and a new group of 8 seniors at Friends who will be transcribing the minutes detailing the activities of the Club during World War I.
To close this post with the epigraph which began our class last night, Emily Dickinson encapsulated many of the ideas of women’s ambivalent desire to reach an audience in print, as well as women writers’ need to establish a supportive audience among one another, in the following poem. It’s emblematic, in many ways, of this group of Baltimore women who sought recognition as writers and intellects but were feared the glare of public exposure.
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
This content was migrated from the The WLCB log: Documenting the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore 1890-1941