A Midwife's Tale

Movie shown to help us understand the Country of the Pointed Firs called A Midwife's Tale.
Women left few documents for us to study to understand the world they inhabited. This Diary tells a story among the overwhelming quantity of details.
Feel free to peruse the origional diary and use tools to help make the pages more readable by clicking on this page from January 23 - February 7, 1785.

Helena Viramontes. Under the Feet of Jesus

This book is in the daily reading after spring break but is not in the book reading list in the syllabus.

About $5 on Amazon
Not stocked in the Knowledge Center

Mappings: feminism and the cultural geographies of encounter

Susan Stanford Friedman. (1998). Mappings: feminism and the cultural geographies of encounter. Princeton University Press. Retrieved February 11, 2010, from Google Books database

Graduate Presentation by Micah Drew

Susan Stanford Friedman. (1998). Mappings: feminism and the cultural geographies of encounter. Princeton University Press. Retrieved February 11, 2010, from Google Books database

Theory connects
Jane Smiley. The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
and
Caroline Kirkland's (pen name Mary Clavers). A New Home, Who'll Follow?
Friedman says identity constantly evolving and not tied to origin - we go to places; values add at each pause (153). Migration

Theme of Moving
They can never go back to who they were at the beginning.
Lidie cannot go back to Quincy.
Mary cannot go back to the East.
What happens to a women forced to change rapidly and quickly?
What future does she have - how to be a woman?
Does the novel narrate Lidie's escape or path to jaded acceptance?

How to Contribute

If you send me an email at jkolbet@gmail.com,
I can add you onto the blog so you can post your own ideas, questions, links, or all the other things to occur in your brain that would not reach the class otherwise to open more discussion.
If you have a gmail account, I can connect you easily; but with only a few additional steps, you can post without the account.

Anyone is free to post comments to blogs without sending me an email first. Just leave the "Comment as:" on "select profile..." do not change it to "Anonymous."
I will not change this feature unless an outside advertiser takes advantage and posts unrelated content.

Contribute or Undermine

Professor Dupree told me that she was contemplating the support women exchange with other women and the strategies they use to undermine other women when she first chose books for this curriculum (Dupree, personal communication, November 24, 2009).

She seems to have settled, in the syllabus (January 19, 2010), to the more abstract and academic topic - women contributions to genre. The books continue to include her initial exploration and open discussion about woman's dependency on other women as we are all dependent on vast networks with alternative priorities.

But we may loose a bit of time digging for these relationships; the statement "we'll discuss the discourses about gender" generalizes and risks creating an archetypal discussion about men and women (Dupree, 2010, Course Description). As a class, we should overcome the barrier to explore person to person networks in the novels. As individuals, we rely on support and mitigate efforts to undermine our goals. These women authors provide narrative among give and take. We can analyze the structure of the novel's relationships to give more to one another than the syllabus alone demands.

Sui Sin Far. Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings

Digital Google Access
Not stocked in the Knowledge Center