ABOUT

This website is a project of Scribbling Women: Gender, Writing, and the Archive, a class at Johns Hopkins University, cross-listed in English, the Writing Seminars, and the Program in Museums & Society. We are looking at the speeches, private writings, and published poetry, fiction, and journalism by North American women from the 1820s through the 1930s who brought attention to race-, gender-, and class-based inequities in their work, with a focus on authorship and publication as activities that offered particular challenges and possibilities for women in relation to the growing movement for women’s suffrage. The texts we examine are in the form of letters, diaries, manuscripts, periodicals, pamphlets, and books held by the Sheridan Libraries.

Working directly with rare books, archival materials, and digital primary sources, students are also thinking through the complexities of literary history as it is narrated through its material remains, what gets left out of the archive and why, and the value of archives in the digital era.

This site is managed by Gabrielle Dean, PhD, William Kurrelmeyer Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University. If you are interested in learning more about the class or our projects, please write me at gnodean at jhu dot edu.