If you had told me last year that my favorite summer job would involve typing citations and searching for historical periodicals about homemaking, I would have thought you were crazy. But here I am, after 10 weeks of work, thankful that I spent part of my time doing this work instead of only doing administrative assistant work at my office job (although the office did give me free chocolate…).

The beginning of the summer started out with a task that seemed a bit overwhelming: writing the provenance note for the book, which gives the original sources for all of the works in the anthology. While citations may seem like an easy task for someone like myself who is constantly putting together works cited pages for papers at school, the fact that I had not personally found all of the sources made things a bit more difficult. My classmates had worked hard throughout the spring semester to gather the works of the authors that they were assigned, and used a combination of different physical and online sources to do so. While this gave us a wealth of information that was more than we could have ever hoped for, it also created some complications for citations. Many works had been published in several places, so I had to determine the original publication. For online sources of periodicals, the page numbers were not always clear or even included, and there is still ONE JOKE for which I have not been able to find a publication date. In addition, Dr. Cole and I had to determine what would be the best way to cite some of our more unique items, such as an unpublished play, in Chicago-Style, because the format is not necessarily made for such works. Similar creativity was employed for our more prolific writers in the anthology: we made detail oriented decisions regarding the manner in which page numbers would be presented in a way that was easy to read without looking cluttered.

In addition to this, I had to opportunity to do more literary recovery for Mary Dorsey, known by her pseudonym Marian V. Dorsey. Dorsey mainly published in periodicals, though much of her writing recovered thus far does not cover current events. Instead, Dorsey focuses on a variety of topics that relate to women’s interests and homemaking: cooking, decorating, and party planning. Many of these would not be out of place today in Real Simple or even Martha Stewart Living, sharing family recipes and explaining how to use plants to decorate a room tastefully. My favorite article, however, is something that would never get past an editor today: “Birthday Parties for Old People.” Though the topic is not something that would be out of place in a magazine today, the title is certainly a product of the time in which it was written.

This summer was an incredible experience for me to be able to learn more about a career path outside of teaching (which I have studied for the last three years), and I am so thankful that I have had the opportunity to further explore a topic that struck my interest in class this past spring.