"Broke in Spirits": Death, Depression, and Endurance through Writing

Abstract

Women's history has often been described as an attempt to recover lost and hidden histories. Within those hidden histories are the voices of generations of mothers and grandmothers, women who may have been too reticent to share many aspects of their lives, even with those closest to them. Although the parameters of women's history have widened considerably in the last thirty years, there are many facets of the female experience that have yet to be explored fully. The public lives of American women are fairly well documented. Women in government and in the workplace left tangible, visible evidence of their presence. The private lives of women and their families are another matter altogether. The evidence of how women lived their lives within the home tends to be scattered and fragmentary, often leaving questions of enormous interest to historians unan