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  • "Nothing Remarkable Took Place"1:Discovering the Flynt Sisters
  • Jessica Lang

I discovered the Flynt sisters quite by accident. About ten years ago, as a graduate student in the midst of coursework, I took a wonderful course on biography, autobiography, and oral history. The course met at Harvard, but the students were from all over, both institutionally and disciplinarily. Historians abounded. But there were also representatives from Anthropology, Sociology, American Studies, Women's Studies, and at least one student from English—myself.

The objectives of the course were clear: to read, analyze, discuss, and then produce texts representative of the genres we were studying. While the three professors who team-taught the course planned the readings, each an expert in at least one of the specified genres, students were given autonomy over their research subjects. Most students used the written assignments as an opportunity to explore an individual who might figure into their dissertations. I did this, too, but with an approach that was, for better and for worse, more broadly conceived and more narrowly executed than the approaches of many of my peers.

My project for the biography was only loosely defined in my own mind when I first stepped into the Connecticut Historical Society, near where I was raised in Hartford, Connecticut. I knew that I wanted to work with primary documentation written by a woman author around the time of the American Revolution. I also thought it would be useful and interesting to examine the papers of an unknown figure instead of someone as well known as, say, Mercy Otis Warren.2 So the question I worked out for myself—I am struck now by its sheer naïveté—involved discovering a woman representative of normalcy, a picture of average, during the post-Revolutionary period. I had some idea that my dissertation would look at novels written by women from around the period of the American Revolution and I thought it would be interesting and worthwhile to investigate a woman author/reader who was not published, not widely known, for whom the idea of audience was largely limited to the family and intimate friends who might read her correspondence. This figure, I reasoned, would reveal some of the trappings of everyday life in a period fraught with political upheaval and social volatility—at least, these are the rather [End Page 165] sensationalized qualities regularly recorded in the semi-historical fiction, published letters, and essays of the time.

In determining the scope and line of inquiry of the course project, I was also acutely aware of the limitations around it. "Average" came to mean white, middle-class, literate, usually married, and living in a small New England town. There certainly are many other representatives of the "average" woman. Unfortunately, however, many of these communities left no traces of themselves. Poor women, illiterate women, servant women, Native American women, slave women, and black women only very rarely left personal (or, for that matter, any) written accounts. The extremely limited primary documentation related to these communities that has been salvaged reflects both a paucity in production and, too, a failure to preserve the texts that may have been recorded. In response to this limitation, I redefined my goals and revised my project in my own mind, thinking of it more as engaged in, for lack of a better word, "uncovery" rather than discovery. "Uncovery" is a process of research that is more reflexive, reactive, and flexible than the often more clearly defined, proactive approach involved in research. Uncovery, in my mind, often precedes discovery; it is a method, a framework of inquiry and methodology, that then leads to a more aggressive and defined pursuit of information. In my case, once I was able to assess the limitations of the material in the area (New England, women, late-eighteenth to early nineteenth-century), I broadened my search and tailored my criteria in order to find material of interest.

My second limitation, almost as drastic as but more practical than the first, was the severely limited time I had available, initially, for both research and production of a biographical essay. The Goldilocks principle was at work: too large an archival...

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