This post was originally published on February 1, 2016, during Nursing Clio’s Undergraduate Week, when we brought you amazing work […]
Finding a Voice: Agency and Trans Issues
It’s Undergraduate Week at Nursing Clio! All this week we are proud to bring you amazing work written by students […]
Pink Brain, Blue Brain: Do Opposites Attract?
It’s Undergraduate Week at Nursing Clio! All this week we are proud to bring you amazing work written by students […]
Femme Fixation and The Male Gaze
It’s Undergraduate Week at Nursing Clio! All this week we are proud to bring you amazing work written by students […]
Adventures in the Archives: The First Time
The possibility of having an “adventure in the archives” always seemed a bit far-fetched. My perceptions of academia, particularly as […]
Adventures in the Archives: Living in a Material World
By Jacqueline Antonovich
A wise woman once remarked, “We are living in a material world and I am a material girl.” And while this ode to consumption may have been referring to the procurement and enjoyment of luxury items, I think Madonna may have been on to something – though perhaps not in the way she intended. You see, over this past summer I had an unintentional, but deeply meaningful, love affair with . . . material culture.
Adventures in the Archives: The Dangers of Legal Abortion
This summer I worked with Professor Carolyn Herbst Lewis and three other students on a research project in which we […]
Adventures in the Archives: Tales from the Crypt(ic) Rules of Archive Etiquette
This summer I, like many of my colleagues, packed up my laptop and #2 pencil and headed out to foreign […]
Adventures in the Berlin Archives
By Rachel Epp Buller
As historians, we often work with primary sources – documents about a place or records of a person’s existence. Paging through issues of a journal from a hundred years ago can feel like traveling through time, and reading personal letters now held in an archive offers not only remarkable insights but also feelings of intimacy and privilege. But, what happens when you see something that you wish you hadn’t?
“Blossoms of Hope”: Our Cultural History of Pregnancy and Infant Loss and Grief
By Ginny Engholm
In a recent Adventures in the Archives post, Adam Turner recounts a moving story of grief and loss he found in Today’s Health of a woman whose daughter was born three months premature due to a hemolytic disease in the 1950’s. In the comments section after the post, blogger Historiann remarks, “I find it fascinating that she writes of her RH baby as being born ‘just three months too soon,’ and very much as a daughter rather than as a fetus or a patient. Even now, a 3-months preemie is still an extremely premature child with no guarantees–it’s interesting to know that some woman in 1950 thought about her daughter in the ways that seem familiar to [how] those of us in the post-Roe, post-ultrasound era think about pregnancy & children.” The commentator’s surprise at this mother’s conception of her fetus as a “daughter,” I think, mirrors a current trend in the feminist scholarship of pregnancy and childbirth that seems to divide cultural ideas around pregnancy, fetuses, and infants into pre- and post-Roe. Furthermore, advances in prenatal technology, particularly the development and increasing use of ultrasound technology, encourage us to imagine that women today have different, and in some ways, more personal relationships with their children still in the womb. And no doubt we do.
