Finding Ada: Socially Situated Historical Methods and Nineteenth Century Feminist Activism

Abstract

Ada Metcalf’s 1876 memoir, Lunatic Asylums and How I Became an Inmate of One, is an early feminist articulation of embodied experience and agency. In this article, I develop a socially situated understanding of this memoir’s historical significance through the layering of four types of data onto the archival material: bureaucratic records, genealogical tracing, intertextual tracing, and field observations. I describe each of these forms of data and their contributions to understanding the significance of Ada’s taking back agency over her body through her public argument for women’s control over their own bodies.

Notes

1 Thank you to RR reviewers Susan Kates and Wendy Hayden and editor Elise Hurley for their astute and generous review of this article. A special thank you to Kathy Jones, Adult Services Librarian at the Hudson (Ohio) Library and Historical Society, for her supportive work getting me a PDF of Ada Metcalf’s book from the Library of Congress. I am thankful to you all and to the scholars whose work I cite in these pages for helping me think through the significance of Ada Metcalf’s life and work.

2 Additionally, in various public and genealogical records Ada is identified as Adaline, Adalina, and Ada, perhaps because of the fluidity of names in the Victorian era, or perhaps because those writing her name into the records did not accord respect to getting her name right. For these reasons, I have chosen to refer to Ada by the name she herself used as author of her memoir.

3 Upon approval of this research by the Kent State University Institutional Review Board, IRB protocol number 16-349, the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services granted me access to archival records that I identified in the IRB application.

4 A well-known feminist activist, Gage held a convention in small McConnelsville in 1850 which drew seventy attendees intent on removing race and gender from state requirements for citizenship and voting (they were unsuccessful). A year later, Gage introduced Sojourner Truth at a women’s rights convention in Akron, and twelve years later in 1863, Gage published her revisionist recolllection of Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. Gage was encouraged by fellow women’s rights leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to be the “women’s rights emissary in America’s Middle West.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pamela Takayoshi

Pamela Takayoshi is Professor of English at Kent State University where she teaches in the Literacy, Rhetoric, and Social Practice graduate program. Professor Takayoshi researches the ways people use writing in academic and non-academic contexts to make meaning in their lives, with a particular interest in research methodologies, the digital mediation of written communication, and feminist epistemologies. She is the co-editor of four edited collections in writing studies, most recently Literacy in Practice: Writing in Public, Private, and Working Lives, edited by Patrick Thomas and Pamela Takayoshi, Routledge, 2016. Her articles have appeared in College Composition and Communication, Computers and Composition, Research in the Teaching of English, and numerous edited collections.