Bonnie Huskins & Michael Boudreau
Ida Martin, a working-class housewife from Saint John, New Brunswick, kept daily entries in a series of five-year diaries from 1945 to 1992. These diaries are the basis of a manuscript for McGill-Queen’s University Press that we are currently revising. They are the focus of the reflections here, which also consider the importance of “life writing” and inter-generational writing contributions to what might be termed a family diary project. Although the diaries provide a unique glimpse into the social and working-class worlds of post-war Saint John, we initially approached the idea of a monograph with some trepidation, for Ida Martin is Bonnie Huskins’ maternal grandmother. This project has become a manifestation of what Ruth Behar calls “vulnerable writing,” in which one feels more exposed than usual by drawing attention to the personal.Historians have been more reticent than scholars in other disciplines to incorporate the “I” into their research and writing. So how have we overcome this dilemma? How have we negotiated our personal connection to the diarist?
Photo of Ida Martin
In our interactions with the diaries, we have found it useful to borrow insights from feminist literary scholars. Helen M. Buss argues that having a “special passion” for the “archives of those close to us…encourages the full revelation of bias.” Literary scholars also point out that “each of us has a certain autobiographical impulse” and that we have an “ethical responsibility to acknowledge and respect” our personal interactions with the source material.
We have found the concept of “life writing” to be a helpful framework for describing our analysis of Martin’s diaries. Diaries allow readers to “explore how women, otherwise often silent in the public realm, represented themselves through writing.” Life writing is an interdisciplinary feminist approach that encourages the “writing out of a life” as well as the personal connection between scholar and subject. In essence, as Mary McDonald-Rissanen has posited, writing in their diaries allowed women to write themselves into existence. As Ida solemnly noted in her diary following the death of her husband in 1986, “I ate supper alone. Lonesome.” Life writing describes and enables collaboration in two forms: intergenerational and the partnership between the authors of this project.
As the diarist, Ida Martin is the centerpiece of this intergenerational life writing exercise. Continue reading
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