Personal identities and changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity can be reconstructed over several generations. Material from New England families of disparate social standings composes a rare portrait of class experiences and changing attitudes over two hundred years. In four journals kept between 1829 and 1837, this precocious adolescent describes the activities and travels of her family and their many visitors. Brothers and sisters are the subject of numerous entries, especially when they are ill or dying. Later journals include lists of books read as well as reflections on self-improvement.
Some collections reveal the impact of influential New England intellectual trends on everyday life.
Anne Sargent Gage identified with the transcendentalist movement. The personal papers of Anne Sargent Gage and her descendants embrace four generations of a Waterford, Maine, and Worcester, Massachusetts, family and are a rich source of family, personal, and intellectual history. Adopted by Rev. Lincoln Ripley and Phebe Emerson Ripley of Waterford, Maine, she became the cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her friendship and longtime correspondence with Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, another well-known transcendentalist, reveal their attitudes toward slavery, abolitionism, and social scandals in Boston. In extensive family correspondence, particularly that maintained by women, researchers can uncover the worldviews of family members.