Harvests of the heart: Themes from the diaries of nineteenth-century New England farm women

This dissertation draws upon the previously unexamined and unpublished diaries written by nineteenth-century New England farm women. This dissertation finds that taken as a body, these diaries reveal certain commonalities, which for the purposes of this dissertation are called themes. These are: work, hired help, illness, death, mourning, family relationships and obligations, neighborliness, and socializing. These themes are examined in five case study chapters. The four remaining chapters discuss the rural North, historiography, diary theory, women's history, farming, art and literature, poverty, archiving, preservation, conservation, and female literacy in the nineteenth century. The case-study diarists represent northern New England: Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. They are a cross-section of single, widowed, married, and separated women. Some live in nuclear families, and others with extended families. While the diarists are white, they do not overwhelmingly represent the middle class. Instead, they come from the working and lower-middle classes; only one diarist is middle-class. The discovery of these diaries expands definitions of diary-keeping practices in the nineteenth century, which historians have typically found to be expressive first of an upper-class, but increasingly a growing middle-class consciousness. While the dissertation examines diaries of 135 diarists, the text of the dissertation cannot accommodate all of the voices and circumstances without creating a fictitiously homogenized nineteenth-century New England farm woman diarist. Therefore, information from most of the diaries in this study appears in 18 appendices. These quote liberally from the diaries on the themes of the dissertation. Diarists are further discussed in 3 diary directories created by the dissertation writer, to assist other scholars in locating and studying these archived but largely uncataloged diaries.