Using Social History to
Research Women
Adapted from an article first published in
Notable Women Ancestors: The Journal of Women's Genealogy & History
Vol. I, No. 3, Spring, 1999
©1999 Susanne "Sam" Behling (GFSSam@aol.com)
What makes genealogy fascinating to most of us is not the collection of names, dates and places we amass, but resurrecting the characters and personal histories of our ancestors. Discovering the personalities of our female ancestors is, of course, a challenge, since women were not accorded the same legal status as men prior to this century. When women do show up in records, quite often their full name is missing and they are listed merely as "wife of" or "daughter of" a male family member.
The use of social history is one of the most important keys to re-discovering the lives of our ancestors. Genealogists have been doing this all along with male ancestors. It is quite easy to take an ancestor who fought in the Civil War and, by studying published material about other Civil War soldiers, to reconstruct the probable life of this ancestor. If most of the soldiers from a specifc regiment in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania wore a certain type of uniform, chances are your ancestor from this regiment wore the same outfit. If these soldiers sometimes marched barefoot, probably your ancestor did also. If hardtack was a mainstay of their diet, it was probably something your ancestor ate daily as well. This example is admittedly an over simplification of the idea, but it shows the general concept of using social history, and the same thing can be done with female ancestors. Reconstructing the lives of some of our female ancestors is not easy, but it is not impossible, even if all you know is a first name. (See Sharon DeBartolo Carmack's book A Genealogist's Guide to Discovering Your Female Ancestors: Special strategies for uncovering hard-to-find information about your female lineage for a step-by-step procedure in reconstructing the life of ANY female ancestor.)
For those of us in the over 40 age group, our exposure to women's history was probably minimal in school. Enrolling in Women Studies simply was not an option for many of us because it didn't exist then. We may have known of Betsey Ross, Annie Oakley and Pocahontas - as watered-down "legends" at best - but we rarely, if ever, heard mention of Mary Dyer, Mother Jones, Abigail Duniway, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Blackwell, or any other of the thousands of notable women we should all know about.
Your female ancestors deserve no less recognition, even if they were not considered historically noteworthy. The women in anyone's family were more than just names, more than just the "wife of" or "daughter of" a male family member. Women need to be given their own voices, their own histories. Fortunately, there is a wealth of women's social history available today which can be read, studied and used to fill in the missing gaps of personal history.
The material which has been published in the past two decades - and therefore readily available to researchers - is astonishing. A quick check at Amazon.com reveals that there were close to 500 mainstream books on women's history published last year alone, and already close to 300 published in 1999. Subjects cover every conceivable time frame and facet of women's lives. Here is a very small representation of books and authors from the past few years - and keep in mind that this does not include the hundreds of biographies written about individual women:
+ Ar'N't I A Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South - Deborah Gray White
+ Audacious Women: Early British Mormon Immigrants - Rebecca Bartholomew, Ralph Bartholomew
+ Covered Wagon Women: Diaires & Letters from the Western Trails - (7 volumes) - Kenneth L. Holmes (Editor)
+ Demeter's Daughters: The Women Who Founded America, 1587-1787 - Selma R. Williams
+ The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England - Carol F. Karlsen, Marty Asher (Editor)
+ Discovering Women's History: A Practical Guide to Researching the Lives of Women Since 1800 - Deirdre Beddoe
+ Education and Women's Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban America, 1870-1930 - John L. Rury
+ Everyday Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony - George Dow
+ Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society - Mary Beth Norton
+ Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 - Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
+ The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement - Julie Roy Jeffrey
+ The Illustrated History of the Housewife, 1650-1950 - Una A. Robertson
+ The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America - Joyce Antler
+ Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 - Mary Beth Norton
+ Linoleum, Better Babies & the Modern Farm Woman, 1890-1930 - Marilyn Irvin Holt
+ Medicine Women: The Story of Early-American Women Doctors - Cathy Luchetti
+ A Mouthful of Rivets: Women at Work in World War II - Nancy Baker Wise, Christy Wise
+ The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century - Catherine Clinton
+ Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States - Alice Kessler-Harris
+ A Quilt of Words: Women's Diaries, Letters and Original Accounts of Life in the Southwest, 1860-1960 - Sharon Niederman
+ Southern Women in Revolution, 1776-1800: Personal and Political Narratives - Cynthia A. Kierner
+ Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845 - Catherine A. Brekus
+ Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives - Huping Ling
+ A Woman's Place: Yesterday's Rural Women in America - Norton Juster (Editor)
+ Women in Early American Religion, 1600-1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions - Marilyn J. Westerkamp
Equally important is the vast amount of unpublished material that remains to see the light of day. Many libraries, court houses, universities and historical societies are jam-packed with letters, diaries, manuscripts and other documents and many of these collections are now accessible from the Internet. While only a few sites as yet have actual documents available on-line, many provide indexes and all provide addresses and other information for accessing these records for your own use. Keep in mind that letters and diaries may turn up in a State other than the one in which the woman lived, so look everywhere.
One such web site is the Sophia Smith collection at Smith's College (http://www.smith.edu/libraries/ssc/home.html), an internationally recognized repository of manuscripts, photographs, periodicals & other primary sources on women's history. Among other things you will find:
+ Over 300 Manuscript Collections consist of papers accumulated by individual women or by families. They include such materials as letters, diaries, scrapbooks, and photographs. Among the most widely used collections are those of birth control crusader Margaret Sanger; Ellen Gates Starr, co-founder with Jane Addams of the Chicago settlement, Hull House; Mary van Kleeck, social researcher and reformer; and the Garrison, Hale, and Ames families. More recent acquisitions include the papers of broadcast journalist Pauline Frederick, and author and activist Gloria Steinem.
+ Organization Records - archives of women's association: minutes, correspondence, reports, publications, and related materials of more than 60 organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the National Board of the YWCA.
+ More than 600 periodical titles representing fifty subscriptions of current and historical women's magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and other serials are Ladies' Companion (1840-44), Woman's Journal (1870-1916), Lucifer: The Light Bearer (1897-1901), Eugenesia (Mexico, 1943-45), Church Woman (1943-49) and Black Sash (South Africa, 1956-72). Early women's liberation periodicals, such as Shrew, Rat, and Velvet Fist are also well represented.
Another gigantic web site, an absolute "must" for researchers, is A Guide to Uncovering Women's History in Archival Collections (http://www.lib.utsa.edu/Archives/WomenGender/links.html). Nearly every State is represented here and each State has links to numerous libraries and archives. Here is one small sample of what can be found from just one institution, Clements Library in Michigan (very partial list):
+ Bird Family Papers, 1821-1947
Nearly two feet of letters, speeches, and journals spanning five generations of a Bradford County, Pennsylvania family. Includes the papers of a W.C.T.U. leader, a courtship correspondence (1878-1883), and a schoolgirl in West Chester (1912-1913).
+ Elizabeth Camp Journals, 1819-1825
Journals of a supremely religious woman who spent the summer of 1820 teaching school and providing religious instruction to the Stockbridge Indians in New Stockbridge, New York, just two years before they were relocated to Wisconsin.
+ Elizabeth Carter Journals, 1774-1795
An Englishwoman's dozen journals documenting the daily activities of an entire household, and their frequent interactions with an extended network of family and friends.
+ Annie Hobbs Journal, 1876
Detailed, entertaining 31 page account of a New Hampshire woman's experiences at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.
+ Jewett-Lee Family Papers, 1850-1900
34 letters and manuscripts written by some of the first settlers of the Saginaw Valley in Michigan and their offspring.
+ Philena Kendall Papers, 1820-1895
95 letters of an unmarried Quaker woman and her family, who lived in New Castle County, Del. & Chester County, Penna.
+ Blanche & Lena Smith Family Papers, 1870-1931
Over 500 letters and a large amount of ephemera relating to a young woman who died of tuberculosis in 1906, and her sister Lena, who was the recipient of an barrage of letters from a man she eventually married. The collection also includes material relating to their parents and siblings.
+ Young Ladies Union Society of Danbury, (Conn.) Record book, 1826-1842
Constitution, minutes, membership, and annual reports for a benevolent society that raised money by selling the fancy articles they made.
For additional women's history web sites, see http://www.rootsweb.com/~nwa/women.html
Whether you plan to use your genealogy research to write a family history for publication, or simply to share with family members, "remember the ladies." We genealogists have the unique opportunity to write women back into history by rescuing our own female ancestors from obscurity.
Suggested further reading:
A Genealogist's Guide to Discovering Your Female Ancestors: Special strategies for uncovering hard-to-find information about your female lineage. By Sharon DeBartolo Carmack. Published by Betterway Books, 1507 Dana Avenue, Cincinnati, OH 45207. 1998
The Hidden Half of the Family: A Sourcebook for Women's Genealogy. By Christina K. Schaefer. Published by Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 1001 N. Calvert St., Baltimore, MD 21202-3897. 1999.
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