The North American Women’s Letters and Diaries digital archive holds over 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from roughly 1,325 North American women from the Colonial era through 1950. The archive is well-structured and easy to navigate and the site offers a “guided tour” which shows visitors how to effectively search the database. Extensive indexing allows users to conduct searches by author, year, historical event, personal event, place, simple word search, as well as by the author’s age, marital status, number of children, race, religion and occupation. The site also offers bibliographic and biographic information.
One can imagine how this database could answer research questions that would be much more difficult and time consuming to explore without using it. For example, this archive would be valuable for someone who is researching how women’s lives changed in the U.S. during the period of transition from a household economy to a market economy in the nineteenth century. It is a broad topic, to be sure, but also one in which the use of personal diaries and letters is practically essential. How did the transition to a market economy affect women’s work and their relationships (both working and personal) with their family members and friends? As people began to produce less household items and purchase more store bought items, how did women spend their time differently? This archive allows visitors to search for diaries and letters written in a particular city, region, or setting (such as cities or towns in general) thus one could explore whether or not changing work tasks differed in cities from more remote areas. One could examine whether or not a relationship between women’s changing work roles and family size or age at marriage existed. The archive provides statistical and biographical information which may allow a researcher to see certain patterns before even consulting census data.
My research idea is certainly not new, as a number of historians have used diaries and letters to explore these and related topics. While searching this and other archives with this week’s project in mind, I had a difficult time thinking of a topic that could not be carried out with a print-based archive. Anything that exists in the physical world can be researched in the physical world; but what this and other digital archives provide is a place for multiple items to coexist online regardless of where the physical documents reside. Furthermore, the North American Women’s Letters and Diaries archive, like many other digital archives, provides indexing which can greatly speed up the process of searching for a letter or diary which addresses a particular topic. If you are interested in what single, childless 19th century women wrote about courtship, for example, you can search using those parameters and you will receive 64 “hits”. Questions that once felt like searching for a needle-in-a-haystack suddenly become more manageable when using a well-indexed, well-documented digital archive.