The Good, The Beautiful and The True: Lessons from a Temperance Lady on Facing Change and Moving Forward
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Date
2020-12
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
This is an interdisciplinary project between the English and History departments, as I am a double major. It is on a local woman I discovered while interning for the Delaware County Historical Society named Harriet Calista Clarke McCabe. Her life transcends much of American History. Her father's father was in the revolutionary war and her family was a huge influence on the growth of Methodism in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Her life took place during several key American transitions. She saw both the Civil War and First World War. She fought for women's and civil rights, was a leader in the nineteenth century temperance movement and eventually became a suffragette. She was a scholar, an activist and a mentor. She was also a wife, a mother and a plain woman who has remained virtually unknown to the rest of us.
Originally, this paper was going to be about progressive womanhood, but as the protests and pandemic ravaged our country this past year, I felt the need to look inward. Harriet had an amazing ability to survive and even thrive during some of America's most trying years and I have always wondered how she managed not to spend most of her life huddled under a blanket, horrified of the world – my typical reaction to the constant bad news cycle. I placed myself in her world and it made me not only reflect about myself, but about the first woman I ever looked up to – my own mother. This paper is me asking how to cope among the tumultuous setting we have found ourselves in and asking how anyone can persevere through it. Especially, someone like a pre-nineteenth amendment American woman. Harriet Calista Clarke McCabe, for lack of a better phrase, handled it. This paper is my journey into her world and discovering how it changed mine. What I found is that same old reoccurring lesson, we can only spend so much time in the past before we must face the present. This paper is me learning how to do just that.
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Keywords
Temperance, Memoir, Progressive, WCTU, Feminism, Suffrage, Literary Society