A New Hope
It continues to surprise (and anger me) how little I have found about working women in the years–literally, years–I have been researching this topic.
As part of a new strategy to get some traction on this project and finish, I begin each day with an hour of writing. (Although, interestingly, since I begin this strategy after meeting with a “new” writing partner earlier this week, I have spent most mornings not writing but just doing more research. In other words, it has not been a time of just straight writing, I just added an hour to what I was already doing, which is not really the point of the exercise. The point is to write. So that is what I am going to do.)
I am torn between four different directions with what I should be doing (in terms of my entire approach to this project, not just my morning writing time):
- Continue doing primary source research. I’ve gone to the California State Library a few times in the past month because they have a whole slew of sources to investigate and I have oodles of digitized primary sources on my hard drive that I continue to process.
- Write up a draft/thought experiment based on my existing research notes. I tried this recently in preparation for an end-of-September deadline I was working towards. It was not very encouraging; I stopped three-quarters of the way through (I have hundreds of pages of notes); I did end up with a pseudo outline. But, perhaps I can go back through these same research notes with this outline in hand and start writing up a more structured draft.
- Write short entries in my blog (in both the Project and Teach pages), just to get some writing and thinking done. It struck me as a bit funny recently as I recalled that I usually tell my students not to wait until they have a fully-formed argument in their heads to start writing. “Writing is thinking,” I tell them all quarter long. And, yet, I seem to expect of myself a fully-formed argument before I start writing.
- Quit.
My solution, at the moment, is to blend all three. I am going to use these morning sessions to follow road #3; I will utilize my days to continue researching; and I will let my previous efforts guide all of this work. Of course #4 has won the day in my head a number of time the past few months as well. All options should be left "on the table" as they say.
I recently discovered that California* established an “industrial farm” for delinquent women. The topic of my next entry…
*Although I have stubbornly clung to San Francisco as my location for this project, I am intrigued by the subject of how the State rather than just the City intersected with working women. The size of the state and the immediate complexity that direction brings when Los Angeles is added to the equation makes me hesitant.
(You saw what I did there with this entry’s title, right? Star Wars is all the rage in my household at the moment.)