Lauren Lockett, Week 8

Response to "Historians Who Love Too Much"

I found Jill Lepore’s “Historians Who Love Too Much” to be a refreshing take on historical writing that challenged me to think more critically about how I’m utilizing my own primary sources and nature of the story that I intend to tell. Making important distinctions between the arts of microhistory and biography, Lepore opened my eyes to fascinating questions of attachment and historical storytelling that I had not previously considered.

I suppose if Lepore were to judge my own intentions for my paper, she would consider it to be a microhistory, as I am focusing on the life of a professional African-American woman in the early to mid-twentieth century to better understand the roles and burdens of these women within their own culture and wider American society. Although I am probably not personally in danger of it in this ten-week period, the question of what happens when a historian becomes too attached to his or her subject fascinated me. As I write about Black professional women, one of which I aspire to be one day, who were facing harsh discrimination on account of both their race and gender at the time, I find it difficult not to admire these subjects. In many ways, they set the precedence for roles, of Black female professional motherhood, that I may very well fall into one day. In this way, much as Lepore’s fourth proposition alludes to, I unexpectedly find myself as a character in my own writing.

I also appreciated her affirmation of “ordinary” subjects who may have not been in the spotlight during their own lifetimes, and thus left behind less artifacts than the historian may desire. Because I researched women who were so rare in their era, writing a history that was selective, and even somewhat elitist, rather one with inclusive and broadly representative characteristics was a major concern of mine in the writing process. However, Lepore’s writing reassured the value in fleshing out the importance of these “incompletely documented lives” in the wider contexts of culture and society. 

Primary Sources

This primary source helps to contextualize the way in which the Black community thought about women, particularly mothers. From this article, it is evident that Black women were asked and expected, even within their own communities, to bear a burden in shouldering their work, family and community responsibilities. This article also addresses some intersectionality of discrimination that black women face.

This is an excerpt of an oral history transcript by Lena Edwards, a Black female physician who married, had 5 children and practiced medicine in Texas during the Jim Crow Era. In this interview, she discusses the importance of her raising her children and her experiences with discrimination as both an African-American and a woman in twentieth century America. In this particular excerpt, she mentions feeling that through her own having and rearing successful children, she feels that she is positively contributing to the African-American race. I can use this and other parts of the interview to understand how Black women utilized their motherhood as a source of racial and societal empowerment.