March is Women's History Month, and there's a new book that provides a glimpse into the past.
Love, family, the balance of work and play and societal issues are common entries throughout the 400 years of diary entries that Sarah Gristwood put together.
Her book is called, "Secret Voices - A Year of Women’s Diaries." She spent years collecting the entries. Thanks to technology, she was able to find the stories of women who weren’t upper middle or upper class. The book starts in January, and as you read, different dates come from different women. In one paragraph, you’re in 1971; the next, you’re in 1868.
As far as New York women go, there’s Dawn Powell from the 1930s. She was a novelist and playwriter. There is also Anne Lindbergh, whose baby was famously kidnapped from her New Jersey home in 1932. And then there is Agatha Christie, a famous author known for her 66 detective novels.
“You've got Elizabeth Fry 200 years ago, Quaker prison reformer, writing about how difficult she found it to combine life with her husband and children and her vocation, her career, basically," said Gristwood. "Now we think of those as problems that only we discuss. But guess what? [That was] 200 years ago. And I think there's a huge sense of support there for women today to know that our foremothers were fighting the same battles.”
Gristwood goes on to talk about how the diary has changed. While a lot of us might not have a paper journal, social media has certainly changed the way we document our lives.