Scholarship & Research
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/1
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item Mary Meigs Atwater: the many lives of an American new woman(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2020) Biehl, Mary Ann; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Walter Fleming and Robert Rydell (co-chair)This dissertation explores the various parts of one woman's life, chronologically but also thematically. Mary Meigs Atwater, known among a group of artisans as the Dean of American Hand-Weaving, was a New Woman, born in 1878 in a time when Victorian American ideals of the Cult of Domesticity dominated society's conscripted gender roles. However, throughout her life, she proved herself to be a pioneer in many fields, regardless of societal norms. Through study and utilization of primary documents -- letters and memoirs serving as the dominant sources -- I have divided this dissertation, and her life, into six chapters: 'The Six Little Meigs Girls (1878-1893)', 'The Fin de Siecle Artist (1894-1902)', 'The Mining Engineer's Wife (1903- 1916)', 'The Weaver Emerges (1916-1922)', 'The Pioneering Businesswoman (1923-1947)', and 'The Dean of American Hand-Weaving (1947-1956)'. Throughout the dissertation are the stories of Mary's five sisters, who also led extraordinary lives. The three takeaways from this dissertation are: 1) Mary Meigs Atwater was more than just a weaving pioneer -- she was a pioneer in every occupation and task she pursued; 2) the symmetries between events of the past and present are incredibly evident through analysis; and 3) just as Mary Meigs Atwater resurrected weaving during a time of machine-made textiles, humans of the 21st century must continue to create beauty with their hands as technology advances and the Artificial Intelligence automation of professions threatens to make the Humanities obsolete.Item Epistolary archaeology : piecing together 'the self' in Victorian-American love letters(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2009) Biehl, Mary Ann; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Linda KarellEpistolary Archaeology: Piecing Together "The Self" in Victorian-American Love Letters is a thesis resulting from four years of extensive research, transcription, editing, and writing about the question of authorial identity in post-Civil War life writings, particularly love letters. Epistolary Studies first became interesting to me in July of 2005 while I was researching a family-related collection of documents being housed at Dartmouth College's Rauner Special Collections Library. During this week of sifting through 30 boxes of my family's military, publishing, and teaching careers going back to pre-Civil War American times, I uncovered a collection of 142 love letters written from my great-great grandfather, Montgomery Meigs, to my great-great grandmother, Grace Cornelia Lynde, during their trans-Atlantic epistolary courtship of 1875-1876. From this project, I have gained a better understanding of how men and women communicated with one another romantically through letter writing in the Victorian American time period, post-Civil War. A conclusion that I came to through my research methods and applied theories is that the question of authorial authenticity becomes even more complicated when attempting to analyze life writings such as love letters because of the public practices and constraints placed upon writers who attempt to create a private intimate space through letters to one another. However, one can gain a better understanding of life writing authorial identity and can make a more educated assumption of what a writer's personality may have been like by piecing together contextual clues through extensive research. The process of what I call Epistolary Archaeology is shown in practice throughout the following thesis.