Inscribing the Self in the Heart of the Family: Diaries and Girlhood in Late-Victorian America

Abstract

SCHOLARS HAVE EMPHASIZED THE DISCONTINUITY IN THE LIVES OF such middle-class women as Jane Addams and M. Carey Thomas, who emerged from sheltered Victorian girlhoods into the social activism and committed vocation of New Women. In particular, they have stressed the role of college education in breaking the dependence of daughters on families. Without minimizing the significance of the collegiate experience for women, this paper suggests that the roots of turn-of-the-century change also extend back into the Victorian family itself. The practice of the diary, for one, contributed to the development of the enhanced sense of self, which one scholar considers central to claims of New Women for a public role. It did so without requiring girls to reject the support or many of the familial principles of home. ' This paper focuses on the function and the practice of the Victorian girl's diary, providing an analysis of the strategies by which girls used diaries both as technique and discipline in their formalization of one kind of self.