By Sara Shepherd ’26

This past summer, I took a trip to Massachusetts supported by the department’s Evalyn Clark Memorial Travel Fellowship. There, I visited historic sites and performed archival research to aid me with my senior thesis, “‘The Oversoul Wafted All the Men Away’: Women’s Work at the Transcendental Utopian Communities Fruitlands and Brook Farm, 1841–1847.” Transcendentalism was an important philosophical, literary, and spiritual movement in nineteenth-century American culture, out of which these two short-lived utopias grew. Women’s experiences in these communities were highly different from men’s, a fact which has been underanalyzed in past scholarship. My thesis examines the ways in which the women of Brook Farm and Fruitlands were burdened with more domestic labor and emotional carework than men, unveiling a hypocrisy at the core of two experiments intended to “liberate” their members.

I began my trip by heading towards Boston, where I spent a day at Harvard’s Houghton Library, an archive dedicated to the university’s collection of rare books and manuscripts. There, I worked with letters, log books, and diaries from members of the two communities, which gave me vital insight into their lived experiences. Equally important to my research project was the time that I spent at local museums. I spent a day in Concord, where I was able to visit two historic house museums: Orchard House and the Old Manse. Orchard House is best known as the home of Louisa May Alcott and the setting of her most famous book, Little Women, but it also fostered Concord’s Transcendentalist circle. Meanwhile, the Old Manse stands right next to Concord’s North Bridge, a key site from the 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord. In the nineteenth century, the Old Manse became home to famous Transcendentalist authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who were involved in the two utopian communities in various ways.

Perhaps the most powerful part of my trip was my visit to the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, which preserves the site of the Fruitlands experiment—unlike Brook Farm, from which no buildings survive. Getting to stand in the same farmhouse I’ve been writing about for months was an incredible experience, and provided a new dimension for my thesis-drafting process. I am very grateful for the Clark Fellowship for allowing me to visit new places and dip my toe into the world of archival research, and for helping me transform my thesis for the better.