Difference between revisions of "Week 9 Questions/Comments"
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The woman I felt bad for was Mary Ballou. Reading her account of life out in the Gold Rush territory sounded awful. She was far away from her loved ones and laboring in a boarding house. It just did not seem like the life that anyone traveling out west to get rich would be expecting and I couldn't help but feel sorry for the poor woman. I was also intrigued as to how often she referenced her faith and how "no one but her maker knows her feelings." It must have been absolutely terrible. --Kelly Wuyscik | The woman I felt bad for was Mary Ballou. Reading her account of life out in the Gold Rush territory sounded awful. She was far away from her loved ones and laboring in a boarding house. It just did not seem like the life that anyone traveling out west to get rich would be expecting and I couldn't help but feel sorry for the poor woman. I was also intrigued as to how often she referenced her faith and how "no one but her maker knows her feelings." It must have been absolutely terrible. --Kelly Wuyscik | ||
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| + | Maybe I was just seeing it tonight, but so many of these women seemed so miserable and trapped in their situations. I've always known women's lives were difficult and unhappy, but that was the big theme I'm taking away from all of this. Emma Willard seemed very unhappy with the marriage situation, Catharine Sedgwick seemed lost and miserable as a single woman, Sarah Ayer's suffering was evident in the list of deaths alone but she describes crying as she writes, the girls in the Choctaw school--especially Hannah Bradshaw and her sister Frutilla Townsley seemed miserable and sad. The author writing in the Lowell Offering carefully dodges her friend's question about contentedness, claiming no one is content because she cannot write she is content, and admits that the work "tried her patience" until she became numb to it. I'm not expecting a rose garden, but this was the theme I was seeing.--A. Meyer | ||
