What I'm learning is that everyone is right when they say the first dissertation chapter is hard because you have to learn HOW to do something at the same time you are attempting TO do it. There are other reasons its harder than writing, say, a seminar paper. The stakes are higher-- I'm expected to come up with wholly original research and insights. The scope is also larger-- I have to cover a lot more ground in the chapter, which is going to be around twice as long as any seminar paper I ever wrote. My scope is particularly large for this chapter, since I've decided it's necessary to cover six novels. As a point of comparison, I've read entire dissertations that cover six or fewer novels. I am finding that this larger scope also makes organization more of a challenge-- how can I best manage to make several related arguments, rather than just one central argument? It's also a challenge to think about how the chapter will fit into the grander scheme of the dissertation, but I'm trying not to worry about that piece until after I get a draft done. It also requires SO much more reading than any single paper I've written before. I had to read a ton to figure out my ideas, and read a ton to figure out how my ideas fit into what has already been said, and now I have to figure out how to articulate my ideas while situating them within that larger conversation. Without forgetting which ideas were mine, which ideas were inspired by someone else's, and which ideas were someone else's to begin with. And so on.
The other struggle for me is that I hate-- I HATE-- prose that is difficult to understand. I would leave graduate school right now if I didn't think I was capable of writing a dissertation that would be fairly easy for, say, undergraduate students in an English class to understand. But so much of what I read is just NOT written with that type of goal in mind. Trying to figure out these peoples' arguments is difficult enough, but for my purposes, I also need to figure out how to explain them more explicitly in my own writing. That's tough. So anyway, in case anyone is interested, I thought I'd include a two paragraph chunk of the introductory part of the chapter I'm writing about Josephine Herbst and abortion. When I copy and paste from Scrivener (the program I'm currently using to write the dissertation), none of the footnotes are transferred. So just know that there are like 10 citations/footnotes in this chunk of text, too. I don't know if these paragraphs will make a WHOLE lot of sense out of context, and they need to be heavily revised, but here they are in case you are REALLY curious what I'm up to.
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When Reagan insists upon conceptualizing abortion as an “open secret,” she credits American women with private defiance of the laws that criminalized abortion and labeled discussion of it obscene. The push to make abortions inaccessible to American women was two pronged. Between 1860 and 1880, laws were passed throughout the United States that illegalized the termination of pregnancy at any point, despite the commonly held belief that there was nothing wrong with ending a pregnancy before “quickening”— the point at which the pregnant woman can feel the movements of the fetus. Additionally, the Comstock Act of 1873 “included abortion and birth control in federal antiobscenity legislation,” making it illegal to distribute any information about contraception or abortion techniques, including advertisements for related products, in the U.S. mail. When American women living in the early twentieth century privately helped one another find ways to terminate pregnancies, they were helping one another break the laws that illegalized abortion. But even when they merely talked amongst themselves about the termination of pregnancies, they were violating the spirit of the Comstock Act, which attempted to shut down the circulation of this type of information. Their willingness to assist one another despite the increasing vilification of abortion in the early twentieth century is, indeed, necessary to acknowledge.
However, theorization about the practice of open secrecy reveals that its dynamics often reinforce the power of the modes of discipline it attempts to circumvent. D.H. Miller’s influential insights about open secrecy reveal that “the function of secrecy… is not to conceal knowledge, so much as to conceal knowledge of knowledge.” He argues that when an individual conceals knowledge of knowledge in order to avoid being penalized for possessing the knowledge that is obscured, often “the costs of social discipline have been averted only in an equally expensive self-discipline.” This understanding illuminates why the Comstock Act was effective even though its legal enforcement was uneven. Because its supporters attempted to penalize people and publishers for making information about abortion and contraception publicly available, the law set the dynamics of open secrecy into motion. Following the law’s passing, advertisements for products that aided in contraception and abortion stopped making explicit claims about those properties but emphasized hints about feminine hygiene that were fairly easy for women to decipher. The fact that women were willing to discuss abortion in private, but often only after an unwanted pregnancy had been conceived, shows that the Comstock Act succeeded in convincing the public that these topics should be treated as obscene. While women did not stop speaking about abortion, they did discipline their own speech about it. Sharing advice with women who have already conceived unwanted pregnancies is certainly more transgressive than remaining wholly silent about abortion techniques, but treating abortion as an open secret perpetuates the notion that abortion is obscene and prevents useful knowledge from circulating widely enough to reach all of the women who might benefit from its open exchange. In other words, women who participate in open secrecy about abortion practice the very censorship of information that the Comstock Act sought to ensure, and in so doing, reinforce the power of that law.
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