Before Harriet Blogged: Notes on Girls with Notebooks

Abstract

Before Harriet BloggedNotes on Girls with Notebooks Bonnie J. Morris (bio) She ran into her room and flung herself on the bed. She lay quietly for a minute looking reverently at her notebook and then opened it . . . there was her handwriting, reassuring if not beautiful. She grabbed up the pen and felt the mercy of her thoughts coming quickly, zooming through her head out the pen onto the paper. What a relief, she thought to herself. —Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy She dug into her bag, drew out her notebook, scribbled something, and tucked the pen in her hair. . . . Was it being a girl, Suzie wondered, that made this idea so difficult? A girl was really at the mercy of other people's thoughts, wasn't she? —Hope Campbell, Why Not Join the Giraffes? For many young girls, keeping a journal or diary is an important rite of passage: a statement of private identity, a narrative of self-importance, and (often) a transgressive act of describing intimate truths shielded from parents and peers. Private writing is also a privileged activity in a world where literacy and access to free time and writing materials are unavailable to millions of girls and women. Ironically, the hours or even years invested in journal writing by girls with such opportunity may end up in ashes: the deliberate burning or shredding of adolescent pages marks a separation from the earlier, embarrassed self. Such erasure also shields, from a parent or friend's prying eyes, observations that revealed forbidden truths. While Internet blogging has exacerbated all these factors, from complications of access to technology to panic over an intimate blog "gone viral," in this essay I am primarily interested in old-fashioned writing by hand; pen on paper. I was a girl with a journal; I remain interested to this day in other girls with [End Page 47] journals and how they used self-expression in navigating the path to womanhood and a writing life. Women who like to scrawl by hand in journals are a uniquely modern clan, a tribe that would be unrecognizable to our Paleolithic stone-age ancestors. Instead of prioritizing sheer survival against the elements, we place finding time to write at the top of our agenda. We prefer gifts of pens and paper to milk and honey or the fat of the lamb. Our cave-dwelling ancestors' bodies were oriented to absolute basics: hunting, gathering, feeding, reproducing, and staying warm; yet we turn down social invitations of food, alcohol, and even sexual companionship in order to spend nights alone, in a cold apartment, narrating life into a bound volume. How does any woman dare to write her life down? How does that start? Writing is, after all, a relationship. If keeping a journal marks one as an antisocial oddity, how much more so when one is female, expected to be available to others, always sharing, other-directed, keeping nothing back. Too much thinking has always been jeered as unfeminine: witness the centuries of cruel jokes depicting brainy girls as ugly, unlikely to marry. Thinking is masculine; caring for others, feminine. Even a progressive writer like John Steinbeck used this gender binary in The Grapes of Wrath, when the earth mother Ma Joad famously intoned, "Woman got all her life in her arms. Man got it all in his head." History books rarely acknowledge the personal, reflective writings and diaries left by women. Instead, we usually learn about great men, and their ideas, until we think that only men made history. My job as a women's history professor is to unlock the female past; to help students believe it could be women who drew on the cave walls at Knossos. But these students arrive in my classroom only after a lifetime of learning that important men, generals and clergy and politicians, are the ones who seized leadership and who wrote in public places. The inner visions of these few men ("Man got it all in his head"), shared with the world, created the rules and revolutions for Western culture. Moses held up his chiseled Ten Commandments, and Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to a church door. Acknowledging that...