Sylvia Hickman
10/4/11
Helen Tufts Bailie Papers:
An Introduction
Manuscripts, especially journals, often allow the reader a rawer, more personal
connection to the writer’s ideas and motivations behind them than a polished, published work. It
is a desire to explore such personal connections that led me to the journal of Helen Tufts Bailie.
A political and social radical for most of her life around the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she
defied contemporary conventions for women and turned her convictions into political actions.
Her remarkable story is extensively documented through a journal she kept for most of her life,
which I hope will provide insight into how her beliefs were developed over the course of her
lifetime, and how they affected her daily life. I am also attracted to the idea of simply being able
to experience the story of someone’s life through so many of their own words.
My interest in early women activists and radicals was what initially attracted me Bailie’s
journal. I am fascinated by women who defied conventions and stood up for their beliefs, both
individually and collectively, at a time when such actions were almost unheard of. Helen Tufts
Bailie, mainly through the influence of her older friend Helena, became interested in anarchism,
vegetarianism, dress reform, “compassionate marriage,” and communism, among other things.
Later in life, she became involved in a controversy with the Daughters of the American
Revolution over blacklisted speakers, as well as naval disarmament, and teachers’ loyalty oaths
to the constitution. Throughout this time, from 1886 (when she was 12 years old) until 1959, a
few years before her death, Bailie kept a journal, updated usually every few days.
Within her journal, I am most interested in the development and embodiment of her
principles in her daily life. I am curious to learn how her radical interests developed, how early
their roots can be found in her childhood, and the intersection between her political and social
ideas and her daily life. There must have been repercussions to living such a progressive
lifestyle in that era, one example being the disagreement between Helen and her father over her
lifestyle choices and her friendship with Helena. There was also a larger struggle for women’s
rights at the time as well as pockets of radicalism in the United States, and Baile’s journal may
help place her within that context. Similarly, her journal contains accounts of everyday life
during important historical events, most notable the two World Wars. Such a detailed, longrunning journal can shed a new light on a historical time period, as well as describing what it was
like to live in a certain era with a specific set of ideals.
I was also drawn to these documents by the simple hope for an engrossing story- an
opportunity to get to know someone throughout most of their life through their own words.
These journals do not cover every single day’s events, and she clearly must have left things
unsaid. Yet with such a large body of writing taken over such a wide swath of time, it becomes
possible to really get a sense for someone as a person, or at least a sense of how they portrayed
themselves in writing. Helen Bailie once said her journals were “a picture of [her] life, at home
and outside. Only to [her] journals did [she] reveal [her] struggles.” Writing was clearly for her
an extraordinarily personal and emotional act. Bailie writes in prose, which starts off choppy but
gets more eloquent as she gets older. However, she is not writing for literary aims, but for
personal release. So while I will analyze the journal’s literary style, I will focus most on the
thought that went into her entries and what the act of writing them meant to her at the time.
The current manuscript of the journal consists mainly of two boxes full of typescript
pages. At some point after she had begun writing her journal, it was neatly typed and organized.
The physical pages themselves are yellowed and crinkled, but the type is clearly visible. The
pages are divided by the day of the entry and arranged chronologically. Bailie wrote entries
erratically, usually at least one every few days to a week, but would sometimes go for close to a
month without writing. The fact that she didn’t write every day indicates that the act of writing
in the journal was not some robotic, automatic action she had to fulfill, but instead was only
undertaken when she had something she wanted to say (and had the time and inclination to
write). Each day’s entry is labeled with the month, day and year, followed by an entry, usually a
paragraph or two long (although her entries as a young child were shorter.) The pages are
numbered, and the whole document is broken up into six “books” of about 300 pages, each of
which is numbered starting at one. This is probably because if the entire document was
numbered together, some pages would have ludicrous page numbers going into the thousands. It
is unclear whether the level of organization and neatness were present in the original manuscript,
or if the organizational structure was added with the typescript. It is impossible to know, as it is
also impossible to know what exactly could have been changed in the typing process. There are
some corrections and revisions made to the document in pen, but they appear to be fixing small
spelling and grammar issues, perhaps typing errors, as opposed to making large revision.
Despite these uncertainties, the act of typing the journal raises some interesting questions and
insights.
Initially, I assumed that the journal was written by Bailie, then typed up by some later
historian, archivist, or family member. However, on closer inspection, a few details of the
manuscript suggest that Bailie herself typed up her journals. The journal begins with a ten page
section titled “Introductory”, describing her memories of her childhood up to the age at which
she started writing in the journal. It is followed by a single page with the handwritten title
“Notes on Some Revolutionary Ancestors,” followed by just that. She signs and dates the paper
(1956) at the bottom, suggesting she was the one who typed it. Another hint that she typed the
manuscript comes in a fascinating passage surrounding the death of her friend, Helena. Her
actual journal entries for that time very extremely short and factual- often only one sentence,
saying she visited the hospital, for example. Even the entry for Helena’s death is short and to the
point. However, also typed is a very long and emotional account of that time for her, written
well after the fact. When Helena was dying, perhaps Helen was too distraught, or simply too
busy to write much. But with the help of time, she was able to record her actual feelings. While
it’s possible she handwrote those additional notes and someone else typed them, it seems most
likely that Helen herself typed up her journals, adding information in places that it was missing.
The fact that she does this adds a whole new layer of analytical possibilities to the manuscript.
Not only can I see what she felt at a certain point, I can sometimes see her later reaction to that
feeling, illustrating how time and distance have changed her perspective. Benefits aside, it is
unclear why Helen typed up her own journal- she must have either had some idea of her
importance to history, or she was specifically typing so that relatives or researchers could one
day read it. Either way, her action displays remarkable forethought, as well as courage in her
ability to publicize such intimate material (unless, which I doubt, she had been planning on
showing around from the beginning).
At the end of the journal, from 1958-1959, the journal is entirely handwritten and no
typescripts exist. It is unclear why the last part of her journal is not typed- perhaps she lost
interest, or the motor control necessary to complete the job. The journal is written with ink on
small loose leaf sheets (approximately 4”x7”) in relatively large, legible handwriting. I wonder
if this part of the journal still exists in its original form, what happened to the rest of it? She may
have passed it on to family or gotten rid of it. It is nice to be able to see at least a part of her
handwritten journals, because they allow a more tactile, physical connection to the act of writing,
and subtleties and discrepancies in the script are lost when typed. However, there is no way to
know if the earlier parts of the journal resembled the later handwritten ones (for example,
whether they were in a bound book or on loose leaf paper), and it can be assumed the appearance
of her writing also changed from when she was 12. I am grateful to have both typed and
handwritten parts of the journal to work with. The typed pages allows for me to read large
amounts of the journal, understand the content, and effectively analyze and compare the
information and really understand what she was saying. The presence of the handwritten pages
grounds my analysis, serving as a reminder of the medium and the act of journaling. I am
excited to begin reading Helen Tufts Bailie’s journal, and learning about an extraordinary life
from the woman herself.