I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in the past. Surrounded by adults, my childhood was filled with stories and secrets about people who had died or been banished to the frontier. To my family, that meant California. I loved attics and spent rainy afternoons sifting through family history. I can still see my father’s ice skates and my grandmother’s riding outfit hanging in the dry and dusty eaves of my grandparent’s farmhouse.
As a young adult, I entertained the idea of becoming an attorney so I could enter politics. I did a stint or two as a community activist in rural America and followed that up as a low-level bureaucrat in a national anti-poverty agency. But I always went back to history. After an excruciatingly lengthy process of gaining all of the proper credentials, I became a college professor. There were many parts of this chapter in my life I loved. I am a researcher through and through. I truly thrilled at the touch of an old letter revealing unknown historical events, or people, or feelings. No matter how many faculty meetings, or tenure reports, or student exams I endured, I never lost the excitement of turning up another historical diary or photograph in an archival collection. I tried to bring this feeling to my classroom—to help students understand that history is not dead but rather vestiges of it live on in us. That our lives are shaped by those who came before us as documented in the pubic record and in the artifacts of our famiies’ attics. I think a few got it. But ultimately, the satisfactions of the teaching life were not enough for me, and I walked away from the security of a tenured position.
I have spent most of my professional life researching and writing about women in American history. My academic publications focused on women’s urban philanthropic endeavors during the Progressive Era and later, and I co-edited a book on the YMCA and YWCA. Through a quirky set of events, I have now settled on the World War I period. I have spent the past few years, off and on, researching the 18,000 to 24,000 American women volunteers in France during the Great War. A couple of fellowships from Smith College and Oberlin College were particularly helpful. While walking in a churchyard in Burford, England a few months ago, I decided to use some of this research in a novel. The protagonists are based on women I have researched but the story is entirely fictional.
