Women in the Time of the Revolution, Part two

It is one of nature's little cruelties that such a book loer as myself should be losing my eyesight, but so it is. I have Fuch's Dystrophy. For a couple of years, I have been weeding out books and donating them to the Free Books Project at Newton Friends Meeting i Camden, NJ. I have 3 cartons ready to go in my car. This gave me the idea of donating my Women in therevolution collection to the young woman I met who volunteers at the Red Bank Battlefield. She is away at present studying in England, but a friend of hers is volunteering at Red Bank so I called a volunteer friend of mine, Harry Schaeffer, and asked him if he would pick up and take to the Whitall House, a tub of my collection of books about the Women in Revolutionary America. He came over and picked up the tub and also walked the dog with me. I gave him a treasured and relatively new book on an interest that we shared: runaway indentured servants. It was really nice seeing Harry again and I felt really good about letting those books go to young women who may be able to enjoy and use them. Here is the bibliography of the books I donated:

Belonging to the Army, Holly Meyer Margaret Morris, John Jackson Betsy Ross, Marla Miller Women in Colonial and Revolutionary America1607-1790, Bonnie Eisenberg Remember the Ladies, Linda Grand DePauw Great Women of the American Revolution, Brianna Hall Never Caught, Erica Armstrong Dunbar Not All Wives, Karin Wulf Weathering the Storm, Elizabeth Evans Fron Slaves to Soldiers, Robert Geak Camp Follower, Suzanne Adair When Heroes of the American Revolution, Susan Casey Sally Wister’s Journal Abigail Adams, , Phyllis Levin Founding Mother Cokie Roberts Glory Passion and Principle, ,Melissa Bohrer Following the Drum, Nancy Loane The Diary of Hannah Calendar Sansom, Sex Among the Rabble, Claire Lyons Revolutionary Mothers, Carol Berkin Patience Wright, Charles Sellers Betsy Ross, Jennifer Silate Terrible Virtue, Ellen Feldman One of the things I learned about the way women during Revolutionary times were portrayed seemed particularly cruel and evil minded The only women you tended to hear about were what were called "Camp Followers" who were said to be prostitutes that followed the army and were a pestilential torment to George Washington because they had to be fed from army rations. The truth was that the camp followers were laundresses, cooks, nurses, and most were the family members of the men enlisted. They ahd been left behind on small farms or in other circumstances with no way to support themselves or survive, so they were forced to follow their husbands, fathers, any male upon whom they had depended for their food and lodging. In return, they provided the necessities of the soldiers - laundering, cooking, nursing the sick and wounded. Probably among them were women who were forced to traffic in sex for food and survival, but they were not the primary inhabitatnts of that group of unfortunates with squalling babies on their backs, pushing wheel barrows of pots and pans, or dragging bundles of tents and bedding. You have to read books by women historians to get the real story, and by the tiem I was a history volunteer there were many women histories putting a proper balance to the historical record, at last. I hope my gift carries the torch to another generation of historical scholars. When I was a young student, college access had been out of the reach of many young women. Some colleges, like Princeton, were still all male. The Women's Revolution, along with the Student Revolution changed all that and the college doors were blown open, so that intellectually vigorous readers and learners like myself could have a chance. Soon enough, books came out of those opportunities, written by women in graduate programs all over America and we met our ancestors in literature, Art, history at last!

Women in the time of the Revolution - Book essay

When I first began to study Literature for my first college degree at what was then, Glassboro State College in Glassboro, New Jersey back in the late 1960's, I looked for the women writers. I had read male authors my entire life and I was a book worm, so I read a LOT. In fact, I had cut my teeth, so to speak, on the classics of American Leterature and European Literature, thanks to a bookshelf in my Grandmother Lavinia Lyon's basement. No one else had any interest in those books but to me it wa like discovered treasure. My Mother read to me and bought me books and that must have been the origin of my enchantment, because enchanted I was! For most of my childhood, all I wanted to do was read, read, read! I was particularly captivated by sea stories for some reason, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson. Perhaps I felt that after I had been in the amniotic sea, I had found myself shipwrecked on a mysterious island too.

Among the many sets of books in my Grandmother's basement book shelf, were the whole collection of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. I read them all, although I must confess I didn't finish A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Twain. I couldn't understand it at all. Among the classics of European literature in the set on the shelf were books by Boccacio and de Maupassant. I read the Last Days of Pompei from that set as well as The Decameron. In my teens, after I moved from Philadelphia to New Jersey and got a library card, I expanded my reading with sets of books more appropriate to my age, which I devoured like candy: Cherry Ames. Student Nurse, Nancy Drew, Detective, and others. They had been inspired by one book from the basement shelves called OUTDOOR GIRLS ON A HIKE, which I loved wih all my heart. It was in a special class of beloved books which was shared with Anne of Green Gables also from the basement. Later in my more turbulent teens, I came under the sway of the Russians, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Pasternak. Their work seemed to suit my tormented teenaged soul.

What I loved about all of those books was my TOTAL IMMERSION in those other worlds. I was that kind of strange child with that kind of strange concentration. Those other worlds transported me and also prepared me for a life among humans, for better or for worse. So, of course, when I went to college to study literature, I wanted to learn the magic art of writing books, and having met, by that point mostly male authors, I was eager to see the world through the eyes of women, but where were they? After a dispute with a literature professor over a coarse called Survey of World Literature which included NOT ONE female author, I did my own indepencdent study and created a bibliography of lost, forgotten, or ignored women authors and I read them beginning at the beginning with Lady Murasaki and the Tales of Genji, the first novel written around 1000 a.d. I worked my way through the famous ones like George Sand and Edith Wharton, and the Bronte' sisters, and I sought out women who had been good enough to be published but who had later fallen into the dustbin of history, Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

Similarly when I studied Art in my 2nd Bachelor's degree at Rutgers, I looked for the Women Artists and again it was a true excavation through the lives of male artists. But I found Artemisia Gentileschi, Marie Laurencin, Mary Casatt, Georgia O'Keefe (soon to become famous again thanks to the Women's Movement). Fortunately I had a woman professor who had written a book on lost women artists, Wendy Slatkin: Women Artists - Antiquity to the Present.

I am going to finish this in a new entry because the blog has limited the amount of text space I can use. to be continued.