Once More With Feelings...

   While working in the archive in Boston I came face to face with one of my least favorite aspects of archival research...oh, the censoring.

   Because I deal in teenage-girl documents, I run into this a lot.  There's nothing that frustrates me more than being in the middle of what seems to be a fabulous story...and the black descends.  Because weakling 1790s ink doesn't stand a chance against the thick blacks of the 1860s just as the open emotions of a seventeen-year-old in love don't stand against the disapproving pen of a censor fifty years later.

  In some of the cases I've run across it's clear that the censorship comes from the hand of the author as an adult woman.  When her cousin and confidant married in 1825, Anna Cabot Lowell, then seventeen, fearfully pondered marriage in her "ninth private journal".

I may, (& probably shall) live single all my life & then what a comfort will it be to me, to have a never failing source of entertainment & occupation to while away the tediousness of many a solitary hour.  Or if my lot should be cast & I should be destined to become a wife...

I couldn't tell what Anna felt about the possibility of marriage because she thoroughly blotted out the next 5 lines of the diary.  The envelopes containing her diaries bear annotations  - noting the dates that she read or "went over" her old journals - and the matching ink suggests that she made these changes in her forties or fifties.  Sophie du Pont censored her teenage letters (as well as those of her sisters) and diaries around the same time, also noting the years in which she'd read over the documents in adulthood. As adult women, they chose to obscure the scandalous, silly or scurrilous things that they'd written in their youth.  And while that's frustrating to me as a historian, as a woman who wrote very many silly things in teenage diaries, I understand the impulse.  I wasn't prepared, however, for the frustrating censorship in my research so far came in the diary of Elizabeth Cranch.

   Elizabeth Cranch - daughter of Richard and Mary, niece to Abigail Adams, and friend to all -  was a fairly faithful, if not prolific, diarist in her late teens and early twenties.  She began a 1786 diary with the news of the death of her fiancé.  On October 29 "Mama," she wrote, "informed me of the death of my dearest friend"

She goes on to mourn her lost love, in subtle and oblique ways, throughout the rest of the diary.  Yet on that day, in her grief, she wrote another line.  However, her descendant(s), while annotating and commenting on the historically significant people and events in the diary, violently struck out the entry.  While the news of Cranch's dearest friend's death is still legible, what she went on to write is not.

    These holes, in blacked out lines and excised paragraphs, leave me wondering about the stories that the gaps obscure - both the story on the page, indelibly covered, and the other of why those words needed to be hidden.  Betsey Cranch recovered from the death of her fiancé and went on to marry and have a passel of children.  What about her grief over her first love, the man who did not become her husband, so upsetting to her annotating descendant that the evidence had to be so violently covered?  The emotion? The fact that Grandmama Norton had been so deeply in love?  What did Anna Cabot Lowell feel about the possibility of her future marriage and why was that feeling worth hiding as an adult woman?  Inquiring girl historians want to know.

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Intrepid readers~ Want to know more about Betsey Cranch and other nineteenth-century editors of eighteenth-century women?  Check out Kathleen McDonald's fabulous essay for the Women Writers Project Conference - here.