I have a thing about old letters, images, tawny browns, and filtered light. They remind me of times gone by and the first stirrings of a history written for women, about women, by women. Women’s domains no matter how they are parsed were, and largely still are, focused on the home, and relationships among family and a close community. Legacy of any individual woman depended upon artifacts, often fabric ones, and works created in a woman’s lifetime, letters and diaries, that were displayed or archived by those that remembered her or those who were shaped by her.
Embroidery samplers created by young ladies to showcase their skill with a needle and thread, as well as appreciation of home and their piety, are often the only medium for their words to echo on after a life is over.
Only two hundred years ago in the United States education and literacy had yet to become routine for the average women, and writing supplies had only just come to be priced such that common people could afford paper, ink and the time needed for writing.
It is easy to forget that mass communication is a most recent development. For centuries histories were carefully composed and facts sculpted to fit an agreed upon narrative. The information that fed and fueled our society and informed our actions and decisions was closely controlled by very small numbers of individuals until but a historical heartbeat ago.
Newspapers and other periodicals increased the amount of information regularly added to our knowledge base at an unheard of rate in the last 150 to 200 years. Propriety shaped much of the content of these publications and filters were everywhere.
In the last 15 to 20 years real personal publishing developed in both print and electronic forms. Digital information transmission and storage allowed for the generation and consumption of data at a scale unimagined even a decade ago. The size of the dark web of criminal and underworld activity and deep web of information behind firewalls is unknown, but what is available on the open, indexed web is, by itself is creating not only more information than ever before, but of a type never previously collected: the bits and pieces of women’s lives that are creating the first level of a women’s history. The legacy we are writing is not only unique, it is expanding into a new territory. Both the map and the territory are co-evolving.
As some of the women who are creating this new cultural information, online writers, we have tremendous influence over the very nature of this new thing we are building and the trajectories that will be built upon it beyond our lifetimes. This new type and level of influence over communication is fortuitous as several constants of the physical world and humanity’s place on that world for the last many centuries are morphing in unpredictable fashion. We need to be able to anticipate and react in novel ways as the processes of life on Earth transform in the time of an eye blink.
We may not be able to anticipate what the future will be, but we have opportunity to influence the changes that are transpiring before us, and to do so with an openness and a balance that has not been available to us for millennia, if ever.
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Day 8, The Letter H, April A to Z Blogging Challenge
The beginning of your post reminded me of what the author and historian David McCullough said when I recently heard him speak. He wondered how history will be remembered now that writers are using the Internet instead of writing letters and personal journals. His upcoming book about The Wright Brothers was based in large part by the letters and archives he poured over. What will we leave for future generations to pour over? He feels, and I agree, that a lot will be lost. That is a great misfortune.
As women today I agree with you about our responsibility. I love the way you write, Nancy. It is gorgeous.
We just have to figure out how to do it differently. Women are ingenious, and we WILL figure it out. The tactile nature of paper is what we will lose if we are not careful. And thank you for the compliment, you are kind.
I, too, have a reverence for old letters, photos, and items worn by time. I imagine times when letters took weeks or months to get to their recepient, and now, we have communication RIGHT NOW. There are pros and cons to all of it, but there is no stopping faster communications from going forward.
We have to focus on the good and make the tech do what we need it to do!
It is a huge responsibility and one that we must take seriously. Very seriously.
Yes it is a serious responsibility, but we are in such good company! That lightens the load.
Well said! New forms of media are an opportunity… 🙂
@TarkabarkaHolgy from
Multicolored Diary – Epics from A to Z
MopDog – 26 Ways to Die in Medieval Hungary
It is one of those half-full, half-empty situations. It is in the perspective.
I think it is up to us to take this so very seriously!
Seriously, yes. But we need to leave bits of confetti and yummy snack crumbs along the way.
With all of this comes the responsibility to use our voices strategically and make sure we are steering the ship in a hopeful direction. If we take the time to set up the platform we must be absolutely certain that the message is positive, proactive, and purposeful. Otherwise, what is the point…she says peering through the rose colored glasses riveted to her temples :)! Naive or not, I just have to believe that we can shift the world in a hopeful direction Nancy.
Of course we can. We are adding positivity to world. But sometimes I do have to take off my rose colored glasses and take a nap, or bake cookies.
I love everything old, I really do. I have a box of my grandmother and grandfather’s letters that were written when they were in there teens through their late 70’s.
You have me thinking about the responsibility of our words, here online.
Just think of it as sharing. And responsibility can be thought of many ways. I prefer “play” and “stuff to do.”
I too, am fascinated by the legacy the women before us have left through their writing. When I searched our family roots, I found many old letters from my mother’s side of the family as well as a few journal entries. I was intrigued to learn more about my resilient ancestors!
What a treasure to have! Have you scanned them, transcribed them, or put them together into an ePub? So much family material culture gets lost through time, but digital preservation can change all this.