About Mary L. Bowers

        Readers of “A Day in the Life of…” will have noticed that today marks a new phase in the history of PastIsPresent.  No longer will the blacksmith be blacksmithing, practicing for his opera, or writing letters to Sara.  As of June, entries from a pocket diary of Mary L. Bowers (1849-1892) from AAS collections will be available here and at PastIsPresent.org.

      While we encourage you to experience the day-to-day life of Mary by reading her diary-blog, we will not be able to add to the mystery of Mary’s life by having clues or a puzzle for you to solve this time around.  Instead, we encourage you to understand Mary, an ‘introspective’, depressed young woman struggling to come to terms with her young adulthood.  Bowers used no emoticons.  She refused to take her ‘anti-depressant’ liver syrup.  Very simply, she thought about life in very short blog-like entries. 

    A young teacher living in Granville, MA, in 1870, Mary Bowers was living at a time when female teachers outnumbered their male counterparts two to one in the Northeast.   Readers will find Mary disciplining her students, struggling with classroom size, and working to maintain emotional balance while effectively instructing her students.

     With the recent news that ‘rumination’ might actually be good for us, we think that a little history about a ‘ruminating’ young woman from 1870 goes a long way.  So we have good news for those of you vegging out on the couch: keep ruminating and reading this blog. 

      From Darwin to David Foster Wallace to Sylvia Plath to Julia Kristeva, the depressed have gotten their share of attention from the academy.  But scholars writing the history of emotions, from Febvre’s call to understand love and hate, to the Stearns’ theory of ‘emotionology’, to Rosenwein’s theory of emotional communities, have given precious little serious attention to depression in American culture or history. 

      During the 1870s Americans were just recovering from a war that tore the nation apart, took the life of one president, and killed over 600,000 Americans.  While William James, proponent of pragmatism, was suffering from neurasthenia and nearly driven to suicide and Mary Bowers was experiencing grief from the failure of a romantic relationship, Americans like the blacksmith were reading fiction like The Gates Ajar, a story of sorrow and grief.  Post-war Americans were suffering under the weight of personal and national anguish.  We encourage readers of this blog, historians and literary critics alike, to help us understand the delicate role emotions play in American history of the post-war period. 

     We think Mary Bowers’ young life will provide a window into the year 1870, a year readers have learned about through the eyes of a blacksmith in eastern Massachusetts.  Each day, Bowers will post her thoughts in blog form.  Readers will also be able to see an image of the original manuscript diary as well as a clipping from one of Mary’s local weekly papers, The Pittsfield Sun.  Enjoy, readers, and experience a day in the life of a schoolmarm.

     So, we now go west, readers, to Granville, to find a schoolmarm living with her brother-in-law, writing in her pocket diary, trying to understand life, just as we all do, either in our blogs, our tweets, our diaries, our thoughts.

(Interested readers should check the archives regularly, as earlier entries from the 1870 pocket diary will be added to the site periodically.  Images of the pages will not be posted online, so be sure to visit AAS to see the original manuscript diary!)

 

 

 

 

ALC