In 1974, I completed my doctoral dissertation on autobiographical writings of 17th and 18th century English women at the University of Pennsylvania. It was uncharted territory at the time, scholarly speaking, and for fifteen minutes I was probably the world’s expert on the topic. In fact, I was probably the only person in the world who had even read all these books. My dissertation sponsor, Maurice Johnson, certainly hadn’t.

I considered trying to find a publisher and revise it into a book, but I was deflected by the professional Darwinism of the seventies. Not much thought was being given to matching supply to demand at Penn or anywhere else, and the number of applicants for tenure-track positions greatly exceeded the number of positions available. There was one job opening in the Philadelphia area–a one-year part-time appointment at Haverford–and I didn’t get it. In order to have even a chance of obtaining a faculty appointment, I would have to commit to a commuter marriage. I probably wouldn’t have considered it anyway, but the fact that my younger daughter Aimée, then aged 3, was hospitalized for several weeks with a life-threatening illness during the time I went on the job market reinforced my decision not to pursue such a course. Instead, I took a job as the director of an oral history project on women physicians at the Medical College of Pennsylvania and subsequently developed an interest in scientific research, and my life turned in a different direction.

Nearly two decades later, the same daughter Aimée–by now a women’s studies major at the University of Michigan–told me a fellow student had found my dissertation on a supplementary reading list for one of her courses. "I didn’t know you’d done anything like that," she said, and I realized that this chapter of my life was a total mystery to her and her sister. Moreover, the only way anyone could possibly read my dissertation, short of going to the University of Pennsylvania library, would be via the microfilm version. It struck me that if I word-processed the text, it could be made much more readily accessible to the casual reader and distributed to the few who might be seriously interested in a friendlier format. You are holding the results in your hand. Except for correction of a few obvious typos, the text has not been revised or updated. I have moved on, and undoubtedly modern scholarship has gone far beyond where I left this topic in 1974. But I offer it for what it’s worth to anyone who may find it interesting or useful.

This "reissue" is dedicated to my two daughters, Julie and Aimée Pomerleau, who were unbeknownst to them the inspiration for this project. Thanks are due to Char Olson and Jennifer Richardson for a word-processing job that proved much larger and more difficult than any of us had anticipated. I also wish to thank my friend Abby Stewart and my cousin-in-law Alan Wald for their kind words reassuring me about the value of the undertaking. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to Ovide Pomerleau, who may be the only husband who’s ever been called upon to be supportive through the same doctoral dissertation twice,

Cynthia S. Pomerleau, Ph.D.

Ann Arbor, Michigan

December, 1996