Week 5
Three themes: Individual project
● One of the themes I plan to address in my project is gender and diplomacy. The letters written between the women of New Stockbridge and Quaker Women set the scene for strengthening the relationship between these two communities while also campaigning for young Stockbridge women’s educational opportunity. On both sides of this correspondence, women were building the social foundation for diplomatic interaction and exchange.
● The second theme I will be looking at is continuity. I plan to review these letters through the lens of community health and cultural sustenance. One actor whom I plan to focus on is Ester (Eshter or Esther) Littleman, a Stockbridge woman mentioned in one letter and co-author of another to the Quaker women of Philadelphia. In a secondary source I will be using entitled “Caring for Our Affairs Ourselves” by Kallie Kosc, Ester is identified to be the only person left of the reservation in the 1790s who could weave cloth and she was not able to keep up with the needs of her community. Women were campaigning for their daughter’s education not only for the strengthening of support from the Quakers but also to acquire skills like sewing to bring back to their community. Ester was mentioned in a letter as someone who “desired to join.” I have not been able to find much mention of Ester elsewhere, but I hope to call attention to her position as a young practitioner and caretaker in her community to address what material and cultural benefits women would have sought through this relationship to the Quakers.
● The third theme I hope to address is the connections between religion, identity, and access. Throughout these letters, both men and women from New Stockbridge refer to themselves as “sinners” or “poor Indians/women in the wilderness”. Parsing out this language in the context of religious assimilation and communal efforts toward continuity, I am hoping to look into the encoding of these letters. What this language achieves in terms of educational opportunity and material support for their community and how it might engage the psyches of Quaker missionaries, potentially playing into mythogloies such as the “noble savage” to garner access and build networks of support.
