Undergraduate Study Guide

LIT3383: Women in Literature (Female Friendship in Early American Literature)

Goal of this unit’s readings: to examine the (female) homosocial space within Milcah Martha Moore’s Book through a close reading of entries focused on friendship, supplemented by literary, biographical, and historical scholarship.


For the weekly reading schedule, please refer to your syllabus.

Required readings (primary source material) for class include the following:

The following entries from Milcah Martha Moore’s Book:

• MMMB #1, “An Essay on Friendship” (Hannah Griffitts)

• MMMB #21, “To a Friend.—On some Misunderstanding” (Susanna Wright)

• MMMB #22, “On Friendship” (Susanna Wright)

• MMMB #24, “My own Birth Day.—August 4th 1761” (Susanna Wright)

• MMMB #25, “To Susa. Wright. On some Lines wrote by herself on her Birth-Day” (Hannah Griffitts)

• MMMB #26, “S.W. to Fidelia. In answer to the foregoing” (Susanna Wright)

• MMMB #39, “To Sophronia. In answer to some Lines she directed to be wrote on my Fan. 1769.” (Hannah Griffitts)

• MMMB #58, “A few Extracts from E. G.’s Journal” (Elizabeth Graeme)

• MMMB #89, “The Invitation” (Elizabeth Fergusson)

• MMMB #96, “Primitive Friendship described” (Hannah Griffitts)

• MMMB #108, “Steady Friendship. Jany. 1777” (Hannah Griffitts)

These entries are available as a PDF file in Webcourses.  Please make sure to bring your copy of these entries to class to assist with discussion.  

I have included three images in this PDF file: the title page of MMMB, and entries 81 and 82 so you can see the original manuscript.  Note that Wright writes in the margins, commenting on Griffitt’s two poems.

• “To my Burrissa—” by Annis Boudinot Stockton (1736-1801).  Stockton is the childhood friend of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson.  The poem is available via GoogleBooks in Only for the Eye of a Friend: The Poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton, pages 78-9. 

Required scholarship readings for class include the following:

• “Commonplace Book” on Notes by Notes website: http://notesaboutnotes.com/Notes/CommonplaceBook.html

• “Women’s Poetry: From Manuscript to Print” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature (7th Edition, Volume A), pages 710-11.  (Available as a PDF file in Webcourses.)

• Hayes, Kevin J.  “Preface.”  A Colonial Woman's Bookshelf.  Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1996.   ix-xv.  Print.  (Available as a PDF file in Webcourses.)

• Brief biographical sketches on Milcah Martha Hill Moore, Susanna Wright, Hannah Griffitts, and Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson and history of the book scholarship about Moore’s commonplace book in the preface of Milcah Martha Moore’s Book, pages xi – xviii.  (Available as a PDF file in Webcourses.)

• The DLB entry, “Margaret Morris,” is available via UCF’s Library Databases.  Margaret Morris is Milcah Martha Moore’s older sister.

• Source Citation: Gilroy, Amanda.  "Margaret Morris (21 November 1737-10 October 1816)".  American Women Prose Writers to 1820.  Ed. Carla Mulford, Angela Vietto, and Amy E. Winans.  Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 200.  Detroit: Gale Research, 1999.  245-253.  

• From Ivy Schweitzer’s Perfecting Friendship read the section “Women and Friendship” from the “Smoke and Mirrors” chapter, pages 64-7.  (Available as a PDF file in Webcourses.)

Contextual information:


Definition of commonplace book from Oxford English Dictionary, to help you understand the genre:

Formerly Book of common places (see COMMONPLACE n. 3). orig. A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement. (OED)

Commonplace n. 3 definition: A striking or notable passage, noted, for reference or use, in a book of common places or COMMONPLACE-BOOK n. (OED)

Definition of the (female) homosocial from The Columbia Dictionary, to help you understand what to look for in the selected entries from MMMB:

According to [Eve] Sedgwick, female homosocial ties, on the other hand, are not so emphatically opposed to homosexual ties between women.  Lesbian relations, in her view, are seen in our society as more continuous with the sanctioned relations between mother and daughters, between female friends and coworkers.  It is precisely this broad spectrum of women’s homosocial loyalties that Adrienne Rich has referred to and celebrated as the “lesbian continuum.” (The Columbia Dictionary 139)

Definition of the lesbian continuum from The Columbia Dictionary to help you understand what to look for in the selected entries from MMMB:

…lesbian continuum refers to the broad spectrum of intimate relations between women, from those involving the experience of or desire for genital sexuality, to mother-daughter relationships and female friendships, to ties of political solidarity – all of them “forms of primary intensity between and among women.”  [Adrienne] Rich associates such bonds, within each woman’s life and throughout the course of history, with resistance to heterosexuality and male domination.  (The Columbia Dictionary 167)

Scholarship & Discussion Questions:


Read the following quotes which are followed by a corresponding discussion question.  Please come to class prepared to engage in discussion with your classmates on these issues.


Quote 1: “Exemplified by their manuscript commonplace books, women’s memory practices adapted the eighteenth century’s new modes of learning based on accumulation, order, and classification into a feminine art of collecting…Making learning more readily available to women, commonplacing was an invaluable method of reading and storing information in the early United States” (Stabile 12).

Quote 2: “By adapting commonplacing and other domestic arts into a feminine art of artificial memory, these well-educated, privileged, literary women forwarded a unique way of knowing, which undercut, subverted, and reapplied what might be understood as a limited female intellectual capacity” (Stabile 16).  

• Discussion Question: Do you think the genre of commonplace books lends itself to fostering and preserving women’s relationships, based on Stabile’s assertion that commonplacing became a distinctly feminized art form in the eighteenth-century?  Why or why not?  Give examples from MMMB that support your answer.  Can you think of any modern examples that mimic commonplacing and the creation of a female homosocial space?  (Hint: BlogHer, communities on LiveJournal, Fan Pages on Facebook, “Mommy” bloggers.)

Quote 1: “In a sense this commonplace book is a kind of literary diary*, but it is also a documentary testament to the significance of women’s literacy for forming relationships and expressing sentiments on subjects ranging from politics and war to marriage and housework, and to the complexity of the Quaker culture of the eighteenth-century Delaware Valley” (Wulf 1).

Quote 2: “In fact, Moore’s manuscript is evidence that in the pre-Revolutionary colonial world, poetry was a medium that brought women together in mutual support for writing” (Blecki 79).

• Discussion Question:  In addition to the theme of friendship, can you find the above mentioned topics (politics, war, marriage, and housework) within the selected entries?  Does the co-mingling of these varied topics surprise you, as a modern reader?  How difficult is the medium of poetry for you, as a modern reader?

Quote: “In her commonplace book, Moore was documenting her affiliations as much as she was conserving a body of work and copying other significant writings.  These works knitted Milcah Moore and her circle closer together.  Whether she was corresponding with someone across the Atlantic or simply across the Delaware River, the words she wrote reinforced bonds of intimacy and common knowledge” (Wulf 22).

• Discussion Question: Are these “bonds of intimacy” present in the selected entries?  If so, how do you identify them?  Do you agree or disagree that the entries create a female homosocial space?  Would you categorize these bonds of intimacy as operating on the lesbian continuum?  Why or why not?  

Quote: “…the American Revolution and its Enlightenment ideas were supposed to have swept away Puritan zeal, predestinarian gloom, and top-down relations of obligation in order to install rationalism, egalitarianism**, and liberty in their place.  During the eighteenth century, thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic began reconceiving bonds of passion and coercive authority, especially those between parent and child and husband and wife, as mutually sustaining, affectionate, and consensual ‘contracts’ modeled on the voluntary egalitarianism of friendship.  But…women have been excluded historically and philosophically from friendship with men and have had their same-sex bonds trivialized” (Schweitzer 23).

• Discussion Question: Are there entries which illustrate egalitarian*** female friendship, or the breaking away from top-down relationships?  Also, Schweitzer states that female friendships were often trivialized; in what way does MMMB’s entries on friendship fight for the value and/or validation of same-sex friendships?  Cite specific lines and/or passages from the entries.

Quote: According to Schweitzer, tropes present in the history of friendship include “similarity, equality, and interchangeability” (28).

• Discussion Question: Locate examples of these tropes in the entries assigned.  How effective are these tropes in evoking the classical model of friendship?

Quote 1: “Literary representations of friendship serve as a mode of transmitting the cultural and political meanings of same-sex affiliation in various historical movements and…among surprisingly diverse populations” (Schweitzer 5).

Quote 2: “Friendship fares better than love between the sexes in Moore’s collection probably because two of the main contributors were single women, who were not on the ‘marriage market’” (Blecki 93).

• Discussion Question: Based on the entries, can you piece together the friendships between Moore, Wright, Griffitts, and Graeme Fergusson?  Pretend that you know nothing about these women and tell me about their friendship.  (Hint: entries 24, 25, and 26 represent a poetical conversation between Wright and Griffitts.)  Can you observe a Quaker influence on same-sex friendship or the institution of marriage and spinsterhood?    

Footnotes:

• *Recall Margo Culley’s rubric for reading women’s diaries: 1. What role does the audience assume for the writer?  How does she address the diary/audience? 2. What is repeated?  3. What organizing ideas shape the persona?  What symbols come to represent the subject?  4. What actions are repeated and how do these create structure?  5.  Look for “silences” in the text—places where the text doesn’t say something.

• **From the OED: “the doctrine or condition of such equality.”

• ***From the OED: “That asserts the equality of mankind.”

UCF Student-Created Commonplace Books & Research Online:

• Bonds of Intimacy: Blog that charts the process involved in researching Milcah Martha Moore’s Book for graduate course LIT6216 Issues in Literary Study at UCF, Fall 2010.  Author: Jay Jay Stroup.
• http://bondsofintimacy.blogspot.com

• Commonplace Book: Blog is part of a midterm project for undergraduate course AML3286 Early American Women’s Words at UCF, Spring 2009.  Authors: Steve Acquaviva, Carolina Arana, Kate Buehler, and Novi Peroldo.
• http://colonialnarratives.blogspot.com

• WOMENSCPB:  Journal is part of a midterm project for undergraduate course AML3286 Early American Women’s Words at UCF, Spring 2009.  Authors: Genovefa “Gee” Castiglione, Hickory Holcomb, Colleen Pieters, and Trisha Vaughn.
• http://womenscpb.livejournal.com

Works Cited:


Blecki, Catherine La Courreye, and Karin A. Wulf, eds.  Milcah Martha Moore's Book: a 
Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America.  University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997.  Print.

Blecki, Catherine La Courreye.  “Reading Moore’s Book: Manuscripts vs. Print Culture and the Development of Early American Literature.”  Milcah Martha Moore's Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America.  Ed. Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf.  University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997.  59-106. Print.

"commonplace, n. and adj."  OED Online.  November 2010.  Oxford University Press.  4 
December 2010.  Web.

"common place-book, n."  OED Online.  November 2010.  Oxford University Press.  4 
December 2010.  Web.

Culley, Margo, ed. and intro.  A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present.  New York: Feminist Press, 1985.  Print.

"egalitarian, adj. and n."  OED Online.  November 2010.  Oxford University Press.  4 December 2010. 

"Homosocial."  The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism.  Ed. Joseph W. Childers and Gary Hentzi.  New York: Columbia UP, 1995.  138-39.  Print.

"Lesbian Continuum."  The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism.  Ed. Joseph W. Childers and Gary Hentzi.  New York: Columbia UP, 1995.  167-168.  Print.

Schweitzer, Ivy.  Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature.  Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006.  Print.

Stabile, Susan M.  Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America.  NY: Cornell UP, 2004.  Print.

Wulf, Karin A.  "Milcah Martha Moore's Book: Documenting Culture and Connection in the Revolutionary Era."  Milcah Martha Moore's Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America.  Ed. Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf.  University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997.  1-57.  Print.

Further Readings:

Durbin, Janice.  "Deborah Norris Logan (19 October 1761-2 February 1839)".  American Women Prose Writers to 1820.  Ed. Carla Mulford, Angela Vietto, and Amy E. Winans.  Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 200.  Detroit: Gale Research, 1999.  236-239.

Harvard University Library.  "Open Collections Program: Reading, Commonplace Books."  Harvard University Library: Open Collections Program.  Web.  04 Dec. 2010. <http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/reading/commonplace.html>.

Hayes, Kevin J.  “Reading Women.”  A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf.  Kevin J. Hayes.  Knoxville: The U of Tennessee P, 1996.  1-27.  Print.

Pettengill, Claire C.  “Sisterhood in a Separate Sphere: Female Friendship in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette and The Boarding School.”  Early American Literature 27 (1992): 185-203.

Rich, Adrienne.  “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”  Signs 5.4 (1980): 631-60.  

Schweitzer, Ivy.  “Introduction: The Renascence of Friendship: A Story of American Social and Political Life.”  Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature.  Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 2006.  1-26.  Print.

Schweitzer, Ivy.  “Hannah Webster Foster’s Coquette: Resurrecting Friendship from the Tomb of Marriage.”  Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature.  Ivy Schweitzer.  Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006.  103-131.  Print.

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll.  "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America."  Signs 1.1 (1975): 1-29. 

Stabile, Susan M.  “Female Curiosities: The Transatlantic Female Commonplace Book.”  
Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500—1800.  Ed. Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly.  Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2008.  217-243.  Print.

Stabile, Susan M.  “Introduction: The Genealogy of Memory.”  Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America.  NY: Cornell UP,  2004.  1-16.  Print.

Stabile, Susan M.  “Pen, Ink, and Memory.”  Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of 
Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America.  NY: Cornell UP, 2004.  74-125.  Print.

Winterer, Caroline.  “The Female World of Classical Reading in Eighteenth-Century America.”  Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500—1800.  Ed. Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly.  Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2008.  105-123.  Print.