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• 1 media/Dinah_Maria_Craik_(née_Mulock)_by_Sir_Hubert_von_Herkomer.jpg 2020-12-01T13:20:21-08:00 Dinah Mulock Craik 27 Introduction to A Woman's Thoughts About Women by Dinah Mulock Craik image_header 2020-12-07T21:40:20-08:00 1858 53.0027° N, 2.1794° W mid-nineteenth century

  Dinah Maria Mulock Craik was born on April 20, 1826 in Stoke-on-Trent, England. The daughter of a school teacher and Primitive Methodist preacher, Craik was fortunate to receive an education at the Brampton House Academy, a day school near her home in Newcastle-under-Lyme.  Although her family was middle class, Craik reached out to family members and booksellers to gain access to books by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott and took interest in reading. At the age of 19, her mother died, and quickly thereafter, her father abandoned her and her two brothers, leaving Craik to fend for themselves financially. And so, Craik took up writing to make money. Her brothers died soon after (Sally Mitchell).

  However, Craik did not take up authorship as a profession simply out of necessity.  In fact, she writes in A Woman’s Thoughts About Women that she chose to become a writer because it was the only profession where women competed with men “on a level ground — and . . . often beat them in their own field” (Chapter 3).
  
  Originally published in London in 1858 during the Victorian era, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women is a self-help book written by female author Dinah Maria Mulock Craik. She discusses various aspects of life for middle class British women, ranging from education and self-dependence to female friendships and growing old. 

  We are researching a specific copy of the book held by the Santa Clara University archives. It is not an initial copy published in London, but rather an American edition that was published by Follett, Foster & Company in 1858 in Columbus, Ohio. The introduction to this book is written by Reverend Anson Smyth, who was an Ohio State School Commissioner. The introduction conveys Rev. Smyth’s negative opinions towards American women of the mid-19th century and his belief that they are lazy and should read Craik's book in order to improve their character, work ethic, and overall demeanor.
  
  Upon discovering that this copy is actually intended for an American audience, our group questioned why this introduction was written by a religious man for an American audience compared to the original British copy that had no introduction. We generated questions to think about in terms of gender critique, such as if there needed to be an introduction written by a man to assert some validity for Craik as a female author to an American audience. If Craik didn’t need an introduction in her book by a man to be heavily circulated and read in London, why was there an introduction included in the U.S. version? 
  
  

  We raise more questions like these ones within our research that call attention to the power of Craik’s work to assert its own value and validity. We think this aspect of continual questioning is significant when thinking about our anthology project as a whole and how we as a class seek to recover works by feminine authors in order to depict how their work contributes to feminist recovery and gender critique.
  
  Overall, our anthology project is grounded in and guided by questions. We decided to include questions within each section of our anthology entry because we intend to display to readers how our group conducted research, and to convey the inquisitiveness within us as researchers and how our anthology project as a whole questions the traditional female literature canon. 
  
  Our initial questions seek to kick-start our continued research process as we navigate through our findings. The primary and secondary sources that we gathered provide us with more insight into Craik’s identity and the diverse intersectional influences that contributed to the production of this particular work. We think about this research process as a web that continues to grow as sources overlap, lead to one another, and inspire future findings. 

  We want readers to know that our group and other groups within our class do not have all the answers. We will never have them all because we continue to learn and aggregate sources that expand our knowledge and understandings of authors, their texts, and the periods of time in which they lived. There is no stopping place for our research, but that is the beauty of this anthology creation process. We are challenged to ask more questions as we seek answers. As we are learning and questioning and growing through research, we continue to bring new voices to the forefront that have not been included within the traditional literary canon. We connect with other groups in order to inspire more questions about authorship, identity, patriarchal influences, etc. In all of these ways, we continue to inspire more inquiry and critique of the traditional literary canon. We want to question the means and decisions for inclusion of authors and their work in anthologies, and then shape an “anti-anthology” that reshapes and rethinks tradition to bring new voices, identities, and dynamics beyond what readers may be used to or familiar with within a Westernized, white, heterosexual, and male-dominated society.
  
  In the next three pages, we feature three different chapter selections from the book, including chapters "Self-Dependence," "Female Friendships," and "Growing Old."  We explore the specific themes raised by the titles of these chapters in our analysis in connection to Craik's biography and positionality.
   

• 1 2020-11-17T13:17:48-08:00 Victorian Home Remedies 10 plain 1036654 2020-12-08T01:12:10-08:00 Within our recipe selections, we chose two home remedies "To Make Black Medicine" and "Cure for a Cough" because of its inclusion in this community recipe book. We further explored the ways in which medicine was viewed and practiced in nineteenth century England. During the nineteenth century, the foundations of modern medicine were being established. However, in Victorian England, there were a lot of shifts in how medicine was practiced during this time as well. Medicine before the nineteenth century was charity-based (Brown)
  
  
   
• 1 media/BALANCE DEL ALMA copy.jpg 2020-12-01T10:46:55-08:00 Our Project 10 Introduction to the anthology project and contents plain 1041085 2020-12-03T12:02:18-08:00

  This is a work of feminist literary and rhetorical recovery, an anti-anthology of women writers and writing.

  Produced by Santa Clara University students and faculty in the context of a women’s literature course taught online during a pandemic and an election year, it contributes to the project of studying women’s literature by anthologizing women writers, but it does so while centering questions about what women’s literature is, where it has come from, what it has been, and what it might be, and refusing to resolve these questions.
  
  Having studied the genre of anthologies, particularly anthologies of women writers and scholarship on recovery and gender critique, we call this volume an anti-anthology because we are conscious of the pitfalls of “rescue, recovery, and reinscription” (Kirsch and Royster)—the ways our attempts to include some voices can serve to exclude others. We have asked ourselves:

  How do we study the diverse array of women writers and writing in ways that don’t allow us to slip into essentialism or tokenism? That don’t fall into the same logics and systems that excluded women in the first instance, but instead allow us to continue to question our own assumptions and judgements while reading? That reveal the networks of human and non-human others that have produced the work, and produce our reading and writing in response to it?  That make us--and our embodied experiences as readers, researchers and writers--part of the story? And how do we do this work while knowing, as one student in this course said, that we are destined to fail?

  Facing the seeming paradoxes of feminist recovery head-on, our project was to study women’s writing not by attempting coverage of the “most important” or most deserving or most canonical authors—an impossible feat—but to study the very act of recovery itself, and use our research and writing to produce an volume that works against the centripedal (and ultimately conservative and exclusionary) impulse of anthologization that has long been observed by feminist theorists in rhetorical and literary studies (see Bizzel; Sharer).
  
  We did so by setting boundaries around our work:
  we read and researched only those texts that happen to be held in our own institution’s archives.
    Our constraints were like the formal constraints of poetry: a paradoxically enabling structure that allowed us to ask different questions, seek different answers in our study of women’s literatures.
  
  Focusing on our own archives allowed us to make the politics of the archive a part of our attention. As a historically male college (made coeducational only in 1960) as well as a primarily white and economically privileged institution, our archival holdings have reflected the interests and identities of the institution and its members. We attended to the pervasive whiteness of our (and many other) archival holdings, and our own identities and privileges as well. This is a reality, a material condition that we might be tempted to work around. Instead, making the structural inequity that undergirds all work of literary production, circulation, reception, and preservation part of our work helped to reveal the structures of power and privilege that they represent—structures that have been (and continue to be) crucial to shaping women’s lives and literatures.
  
  With our select authors and texts in hand, we then set out to create a born-digital anthology that might record and extend this process by connecting the work of these authors and of our student authors to readers like you—and to do so in a way that might preserve its own status as a provisional and limited artifact, merely a snapshot of the “story so far” that these women and these students together are telling. To gesture towards this goal, we have provided here a non-linear anthology with multiple pathways for you to explore, each revealing different connections between and among writers, places, times, experiences, identities, and textual forms.
  
  There are likely other connections here that we have not yet considered ourselves, but remain for readers to observe. We hope this supports the project of revealing a literary and rhetorical history (as Sarah Noble Frank put it) not “as such” but “as if”—the enactment of an alternative theoretical approach to feminist recovery in English studies.
  
  As an enacted theory of literary and cultural recovery, we hope that it serves both as a contribution to the work of women’s recovery in literary and cultural history and as a model for how to advance that work in other archives and classrooms, where students might produce alternative anthologies to further elaborate the rich history of women’s literary and rhetorical practice. Your anthology will look different, because your institution is different, your archive is different, and you are different. We hope you will connect your work to ours and to continue to build the network of feminist readers and writers that this work seeks both to represent and to initiate.
• 1 2020-12-07T16:53:16-08:00 Social Class 5 General tag for social class plain 2020-12-08T00:37:07-08:00 Throughout the creation of this anthology, a common theme that we wanted to be aware of -- within ourselves, as writers, the women that we are working to recover, and in our analyses of these women writers-- was privilege. With this, we have viewed social class to be one of those privileges that we have found within our own individual positionalities along with identifying social class as a privilege that was relevant within our selected pieces of texts and/or the positionalities of the women writers featured within this anthology. Social class is a fairly modern concept that was born out of the reorganization of society which was brought about by the industrial movement in England during the 1800s (Ash). With this global shift to capitalism that was catalyzed by England's industrial movement, social class started to become a determining factor for various outcomes of individuals within societies. Over time, this determining factor starts to become noticeable among the factors of race, class, and gender. As the benefits of having a high social class afforded better treatment in society, this has become a privilege that needs to be acknowledged. 

  In thinking about the readings that we discussed throughout the quarter, Francher's text comes to mind in thinking about recognizing and identifying the privilege of different class statuses within our own positionality as writers and within the texts we are analyzing within this anthology. Francher discusses that us, as feminists, need to: 

  "Build our own tools, innovate technologies by and for women, and design interfaces that reflect feminist purposes, we may be able to redraw the power dynamics encoded into our technical landscape. We may be able to find more spaces for diverse bodies, communities, labor practices, and feminist practices"

  
  In order to accomplish what Francher is calling all those in feminist studies and rhetoric studies, we need to be able to recognize privileges like social class, specifically within our analysis of the texts that we are trying to recover in order to create this digital (anti)anthology that does not reproduce the same power dynamics that we are trying to be hyper-aware and critical of. 

• 1 2020-12-05T18:21:16-08:00 Erasure 3 General tag for erasure plain 2020-12-07T17:00:28-08:00 Historically, erasure has been the process of ignoring nondominant groups in relation to race, class, and gender. In this process of ignoring, there is also a sense of "collective indifference that renders certain people and groups invisible" (Sehgal). Further, erasure does not have one form as it can take on multiple forms (i.e. through revisionist history, alienating a nondominant group from society, etc.). It is especially important to note that while forms of erasure can happen to virtually any nondominant group depending on the context of that particular form of erasure, one has to keep in mind the origins of this concept of erasure traces back to naming the treatment of Indigenous people (Hall). Although, throughout this anthology, indigenous erasure will not be the focus of why we use this term, we have to acknowledge where and the context of where this word comes from in order to not create a revisionist history within our anthology that erases the originally meaning of word itself. At the heart of this anthology, we are working to recover women who have been rendered invisible for a multitude of reasons. Through this, erasure is a theme that will be found in several selections within this anthology.