I spent the better part of the day working on the Great Work. I pulled together various sources and notes on sources for the first chapter and after a long time off from such work, my brain is slowly starting to move.I do not know how other people work, or write, but at some point (after much struggling and staring blankly at the screen, hands poised over the keyboard), something clicks and I find clarity and direction. (There is nothing magical about this; my brain just finally...works.) Some people, I have observed, write quickly and without the struggles I have. Today, I circled that point of "clicking" and words came to me.
Today, I contemplated Catholic gender expectations for women in the nineteenth century. I also thought (and to a lesser extent) wrote a few lines on the place of women religious* in the nineteenth century. Ruminating about what society expected of women in history is something to which I continually return. That and what the reality of women's lives was. It is a difficult thing to determine, particularly with nineteenth century women religious. I am blessed with more sources than historians of earlier periods, but still there is much lacking from the archives. I suppose every historian hopes to stumble across that long-forgotten and overlooked personal narrative which reveals marvelous detail about women's real lives. Ah, but real historical work does not happen that way, does it? We plod; we mull over bits and pieces. And if we have done our jobs, we come to some conclusions, marvelous or not, that provides a bit of clarity into the past.
* Women religious: In the Catholic context, sisters or nuns.
**Painting: Antoine Plamondon’s 1841 painting of socialite-turned-nun Sister Saint-Alphonse, born Marie-Louise Emilie Pelletier. See David Johnston, "Quebec Exhibit Features 'Canadian Mona-Lisa,'" Times Colonist, April 7, 2008, http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/story.html?id=dd7576df-932b-4cae-9b4e-75b788725752&k=47271.
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