Let the Countdown Begin!

Well, only 87 hours until I start making my way from my home in Green Bay, Wisconsin to my 2012 summer adventure abroad in Cambridge, England. It's Sunday evening, and I just have to survive the mounting anticipation of my departure until 11:00 AM Thursday morning. Needless to say, Thursday seems like it is much to far away for my liking...

My bags are (mostly) packed, as much as they can be at this point. And at the moment they are far too full and way too heavy, so I'll have some thinning out to do over the next few days.

I haven't made as much headway as I would have liked on my list of pre-arrival required readings. I only remembered I had this list after I moved back home to Green Bay for the summer, so I've only been working on it half-heartedly over the last month; my non-academic summer to-do list often took priority. Whoops.

I actually feel kind of bad because I really should have figured out specifically what direction I'll be going in for my senior thesis next year. It's been quite the adventure so far: back in April I submitted a proposal for a research award through the history department. At that time, I was interested in looking into the early days of the European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner to the modern European Union, and trying to determine what factors led to Britain not joining into the early European integration efforts. However, I suppose luckily, after attending a political science research conference on the EU, I realized I was less interested in the politics of the EU than I had initially thought. It's not that I'm no longer interested, just simply that I have found another project that seems to have much more potential than the early politics of the ECSC.

Now I'm working on a project on gender and women's issues in early twentieth-century Britain. I became interested in what I call 'the phenomenon of the upper/middle-class Anglophone woman' after reading a book about indigenous child removal in the United States and Australia in the nineteenth century and the role women played in the formation and implementation of child welfare policies. These women often acted as experienced mothers, and often removed children from the care of indigenous mothers who were deemed sub par in the art and science of child rearing. From the Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century to the end of the First World War in 1918, there was a dramatic shift in the way motherhood was perceived in Britain. During the Boer War, mothers were blamed for their ignorance in rearing children when only two of five volunteers were healthy enough to serve in the armed forces; with the passage of the Maternity and Child Welfare Act of 1918 it was finally realized that a number of factors (beyond just the competence of mothers) determined the health of the nations' children. I don't know exactly why yet, but I'd like to find out why it was that this change in attitudes took place.

I've got a whole list of places that I'd like to visit once I arrive, some of them university libraries and archives! Hopefully I can manage to find a healthy work/play balance, because as much as I'd really like to see as much of England as I can, there is truly no better place for me to conduct my research than England. We'll have to see how it goes!