2Īlthough they lived in Sugar City, the Thatchers were closer to the salt of the earth. Laurel thus learned early on and vividly the ways that writers and editors alike re-fashion stories and even homely details to suit particular purposes: a valuable lesson for someone who ended up being a historian, as well as a writer. In an effort to evoke pastoral ideals, they converted an episode in which a sheep farmer brought lamb chops to Laurel’s family for Christmas breakfast (itself somewhat embroidered) into one in which a dairy farmer carried a pail of cream to them (though no dairy farmer in Idaho in the 1950s would have put cream in a pail). This first venture into print was a fanciful account of the Christmas season in her small Idaho hometown, made even more fanciful by the magazine’s New York editors. Her first publication, “Sugar City Magic,” appeared in Seventeen in 1957, when she was a sophomore studying English and journalism at the University of Utah. 1 Even before this epiphany-indeed by the time she was in the fifth grade-Laurel knew she wanted to be a writer.
“I was raised to be an industrious housewife and a self-sacrificing and charitable neighbor, but sometime in my thirties I discovered that writing about women’s work was a lot more fun than doing it.” So declared Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in her most recent book, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. By Sarah Pearsall, Oxford Brookes University, and Kirsten Sword, Indiana Universityįrom the General Meeting Booklet, 2010 AHA Annual Meeting A Pail of Cream
0 kommentar(er)
