In my dissertation, I spend a fair amount of time talking about the history of feminism, the politics of gender, and the way women's participation in society was constrained in general in the U.S. and in Britain, circa 1890 to 1935.
When I tell people this about my dissertation, they're usually not surprised (my feminism shows, maybe, more than I think it does), but it came as a bit of a surprise to me. Up until about a year and a half ago, I didn't know that my dissertation would involve these topics. My plan was to write about the history of physiological psychology as it pertains to Modernist literature. I won't bore you with the details of how or why my dissertation topic developed to include a focus on the women's movement, but suffice it to say, on or about March 2015, my day-to-day life suddenly included a bunch of reading about women's suffrage and related turn-of-the-century political rhetoric (and counter-rhetoric).
One novel I write about is The Judge. The book is by Rebecca West, who these days is known almost exclusively for writing a WWI novella called The Return of the Soldier, even though her literary career spanned from the 1910s to the 1980s. No one really reads The Judge, meaning that most people also wouldn't know that the novel isn't actually about professional judging, but instead follows the story of a young Scottish woman whose life basically falls to shambles because of her overbearing mother-in-law and emotionally volatile husband.
There's a passage early in the novel where our heroine, Ellen, spends the day roving around the idyllic Edinburgh countryside with her future husband, Yaverland. West has a knack for gorgeous scenic description, and she evokes a sense of graceful abandon as she describes "a wide moor of dark moss-hags, flung like a crumpled cloth on a slope that stretched as far as the eye could see to the base of blackhills about which clambered white mists." Ellen sprints through the fields, deer-like, for no other reason than the fact that the Pentlands are a landscape that demands joyous sprinting. As she runs, her legs jostle the items in her pockets, and they rattle noisily.
You don't often find girls or women running full-sprint in turn-of-the-century British literature. Literary women are more likely to be reposing creatures, sometimes walking but rarely running. If they're running, they're usually fleeing something in panic. The Judge seems to acknowledge this, as Yaverland, observing Ellen with some wonderment, remarks, "In a way, you're awfully like a boy."
This passage pops into my mind every now and then when I'm on the treadmill at the gym. There's a pretty significant gap between running gleefully through overcast Scottish moors and running for the sake of cardiovascular fitness on an indoor rubber loop, but that's kind of the point. It cheers me to picture myself not in a smelly gym, but in Ellen's place, under clouds with the "magnificent quality of mountains," ecstatic simply to have the opportunity to be outside and use her body in an athletic way.
And it cheers me to not be in Ellen's place. Unlike Ellen, I do not regard running as a rare treat that typically only boys get to enjoy. I do not have to run in skirts. Unlike Ellen, my freedom to run, at will and in shorts, is consistent with other freedoms. After Yaverland likens Ellen to a boy, she retorts, "I wish I was. But I'm a girl, and I've nothing before me." This crosses my mind while I'm on the treadmill, too.
Because I spend much of every day working on my dissertation, I'm frequently in this in-between mental space, swimming through the literature, politics, and culture of the 1910s as I go about my day in the 2010s. Mundane happenings or turns of phrase will resonate with things I've read in my research. Particularly when it comes to the opportunities available to women.
The 2016 election, I think, would have been meaningful to me regardless of my current job. But I'm glad my dissertation work is lining up the way it is.
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