As kind of a follow-up to that big commemorative year of 2020, during which I focused on Salem women’s history every Saturday in commemoration of the centennial suffrage anniversary, I have spotlighted notable Salem women on social media every day during this Women’s History Month of March. So this is a summary post of that effort as we near the month’s end. My primary motivation was to feature women who are seldom featured on social media because there is no visual image attached to them: no photograph, no portrait, not even a romantic Victorian illustration. Social media is of course a very visual medium, so a lot of people from the past, women and men, get left off and out. My impression, however (and it is just an impression, not a scientific survey), is that there are 10 photos of men for every 1 of women once we get into the photographic age, however, so I think women get left out more than men. Before photography, all bets are off, but visual depictions are likely a bit more gender-neutral as only the elites get “pictured”. I think about this lack of visualization, mostly because I see the same images of Salem women popping up all the time, mostly illustrations from books or from English pamphlets of the poor women accused of witchcraft in 1692. These women seem to be the exclusive representatives of Salem women in the seventeenth century, so I was also motivated to feature some some Salem women from that century who actually had nothing to do with the Salem Witch Trials. To represent women who have no visual representation, from that century and after, I had to be a bit creative: essentially I created “silhouettes” from prints or photographs of contemporary women. There was a lot of image doctoring, I admit freely! I just wanted to get these women’s stories out there. Below are some collages of my posts as well as a few individual ones: they were accompanied by relatively short narratives and I really want to dig deeper into some of these women’s stories here. I’d love to hear who intrigues you, and who is missing!

I don’t know what the very impressive chairwomen of the Salem Sanitary Society, who worked tirelessly to collect and send supplies to Salem soldiers at the front(s) during the Civil War, really looked like, nor Salem High School student Margaret Tileston, whose great diaries at Harvard really capture schoolgirl life in the 1880s. But we there are extant images of Salem Normal School’s (now Salem State University) first Japanese student, Kin Kato, and the extraordinary Anna Northend Benjamin, the first female war photojournalist in American history: I can’t believe these women, and so many women, have been lost to (in) history. After more than a decade of blogging and an entire manuscript on Salem history, I thought I knew a bit about it, but no, there’s always much more to learn.

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