“This is a female text, composed while folding someone else’s clothes. My mind holds it close, and it grows, tender and slow, while my hands perform innumerable chores.”

 ~ Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

A Ghost in the Throat, by award-winning poet and essayist Doireann Ní Ghríofa, is a book I highly recommend for its insightful prose that flows seamlessly between memoir, poetic verse, and historical inquiry. It tells the story of turbulent motherhood and Ní Ghríofa’s compulsive re-envisioning of an eighteenth-century woman, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, all but erased by history.

Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, also known as Eileen O’Connell, was married to an army captain labelled an outlaw. He was twenty-six years old, and she, twenty-three. When his blood-drenched horse returned home riderless one day, she rushed off to find him. She discovered him near death on a roadside and, according to the lament she’d later write, drank his escaping blood from her palms. The lament, which commemorates her husband, has stood the test of time and became a commonly assigned reading for Irish students much as Alfred Noyes’ The Highwayman has been for many of us.

What an irony that A Ghost in the Throat ends with Ní Ghríofa giving up her search of historical texts for details of Eileen O’Connell’s life story. No mention of Eileen surfaced, even in her son’s archived papers.

This stoked an already lit fire in me. Where is the representation of women in the historical text?

The introduction to No Place Like Home: Diaries and Letters of Nova Scotia Women 1771–1938 addresses the challenge of locating individual women’s histories. The editor explains that “women’s papers” were usually grouped under the male family head. Families often showed surprise when asked for their female ancestor’s diary versus a patriarch’s journal.

Whenever the editors found anonymous writings that described “food preparation, housecleaning, and family relationships,” they assumed that Anonymous was a woman.

I’ve accumulated a modest collection of journals by women of the past: Catherine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Ann Langton, and Laura Berton, to name a few. They wrote about social visits, church events, personal hardships, family, and worries about political unrest and world events like war. Their entries often read like an inventory of what they accomplished in a day—they canned a dozen jars of apple sauce, picked a bushel of cucumbers or laundered and ironed all morning.

Perhaps women wrote about productivity and accomplishment as a means of bolstering their self-worth because society undervalued women’s work. Perhaps the aim was to leave a record for their descendants, so something of them would survive. They didn’t want to be erased.

For economically-challenged women, ensuring their families’ survival took precedence over documenting their days. In the 19th century, they were also largely unschooled and illiterate. It’s through wealthier women’s journals that we learn about them. These women of privilege recorded observations of them in public spaces or in homes where they laboured as servants and helpmates. Therefore, descriptions of their daily lives and habits come to us filtered through the lens of literate women’s relative privilege.

Catherine Parr Traill (1802–1899), daughter of a well-to-do British family, emigrated to the Peterborough area of Upper Canada in the 1830s. She observed that newly arrived immigrants were using Yankee words to express their new feelings of freedom, and exhibiting offensive behaviours. “You would be surprised to see how soon the newcomers fall into this disagreeable manner and affectation of equality, especially the inferior class of Irish and Scotch; the English less so.”

I take this as fair warning to consider bias when encountering analyses of other peoples in a journal. What women wrote in their journals reveals much about personal and societal values of their era.

Confession time. I wasn’t sure what I’d write about this month. But I have learned to follow my creative spidey senses, and something told me that journaling was the thing. I decided at the beginning of June that, for a month, I’d keep a diary in the style of these women. My husband and I were ramping up for summertime activities on our 1-acre homestead where we are self-sufficient in eggs, vegetables, and some fruits. Also, I was writing madly toward the finish line of my novel. There’d be plenty to write about in a diary.

I envisioned novelesque entries with flowy prose. One week in, I was truncating sentences by dropping pronouns and articles. It is work to diarize one’s day. Two weeks in, I closed my journal. That was enough. At the end of the day, my brain was tired from working on my novel and performing writer admin. The diarists I listed earlier would have had so many more critical schedules to sustain and still, they chronicled their days. I am coming away from the month with admiration for the women of history who consistently did so for years.

Had I finished the project, I wonder what entries I’d have opted to share. What would’ve been my selection criterion? Would I have resisted the urge to edit and revise? Polishing would enhance readability and make entries more engaging. But is that the point? I guess it depends on the audience—readers seeking entertainment versus readers seeking pure history and the ‘voice’ of that particular woman diarist.

Would my choices differ from an editor’s 100 years in the future?

Once a woman’s words are altered by others, do we still feel her essence? Is a certain nuance lost? Yet, at the same time, every diarist isn’t necessarily skilled in writing craft, and then, there is the possibility that period writing and expressions will negatively distract modern readers.

Before seeing a note in the introduction to No Place Like Home, I’d never thought much about the entries having been edited. “We have decided to take that risk, confident that the rhythm of women’s life chronicles have a coherence and compelling quality all of their own.”

I second that opinion. Ironed smooth, something of the entries’ authenticity would be diminished. Perfect or imperfect, the diaries of the women who came before us are acts of resistance, a refusal to be erased. By most standards, my brief stint at diary keeping might be viewed as a failure, but the connection I felt to those women—and my experience of the effort it took to document consistently and clearly, with informative detail—is precisely what I’d hoped for.