Working with items from the Rare Book Room to create this project has been an exciting challenge. Even though I am a senior at Saint Mary’s, I had no idea that College has a Rare Book Room that houses so many interesting rare books and manuscripts, and I am hopeful that this project will expand awareness of and access to these rare materials. I really enjoyed digging through all the treasures the Rare Book Room holds, from cuneiform tablets to medieval manuscripts in Latin and Italian to 20th-century works signed by famous people, and the biggest challenge of them all was choosing only a few of these items to focus on. 

Another challenge in this project was fitting a variety of different interests together into a cohesive narrative and deciding on an overall theme as a group. Our class has many passionate individuals with a great variety of majors and interests, and it took some time to figure out how we could fit all of the different books and manuscripts that were of interest to each person into one frame. We began with the idea that the overarching theme could be women’s education, but eventually segued through group discussion into a broader theme of connecting the past to the present while retaining women’s education as a subsection, which worked well.  

I chose to work with etiquette books and women’s literature because I find it interesting to examine what behavior was acceptable in the past, how that has changed over time, and how this reflects the values of a society and the cultural moment they lived in. I find it extremely interesting to see points of view from the past and how they are similar to or different from today. I often found myself amazed at the strength of the author’s voice in the books I perused and found expressions of the same hopes, problems, and fears we have today. I noticed that many of the problems we have in our modern world are continuations of problems from the past and that we, as humans, continue to grapple with questions of what our place in the world is and how and if we should seek to create change. It seems as though an invisible string, as Taylor Swift might describe it, runs from the past to the present. Though we often think the past is far behind us, the reality is that things that were going on hundreds of years ago ripple through time; we are still seeing the impacts of things such as the switch from women midwives to male physicians handling births, as discussed in the section on Reproductive Education. As I worked on this project, I continued to marvel at how connected I felt to people from centuries past. I found myself returning to the William Faulkner quote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I hope that whoever views this project will see the worth in studying books from the past, just as we have in this class.

I believe this project has great significance for preserving and spreading knowledge about these materials. I hope the audience will feel connected to the past by viewing rare primary sources that express the same values, hopes, fears, etc., that we have today. By preserving and sharing the information contained in these rare books, the audience will gain greater insight into modern debates, especially through material like Our Bodies Our Selves and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It is also fulfilling to recognize the achievements of little-known trailblazers such as Sister Mary Eleanore, the author of Talks with Our Daughters and one of the first people to receive both an undergraduate and a graduate degree from the University of Notre Dame.