There are many factors that lead me to my research topic. When I first saw that I would be doing this assignment, I was completely unaware of what I would write about. The class discussions and readings in the first couple of weeks of the semester are what inspired my topic choice. The first two readings for the class were May Henry’s memoir and Charlotte Whitton’s biography. I was very interested in Whitton’s life story, as she was a woman who came across many barriers throughout her life and she achieved many things despite them. She was a strong, feminist woman who lived in the twentieth century, choosing to go to school and have a successful career, rather than marry and have a family. The project for the class was to research a topic that could be connected to May Henry’s memoir, and this is where I had some trouble. I found the memoir incredibly interesting and entertaining to read, however I was unsure how to connect it to Charlotte Whitton’s biography. I brought these concerns to one of the first class discussions, and in this discussion, with the help of my professor and fellow classmates, I was able to see the connection.

May Henry, like Whitton, did not get married and instead chose to work in her adult life. She was also raised during the same general time period as Whitton, and they both grew up to have feminist attitudes. Henry was not told in her childhood that there were things she couldn’t do because she was a girl. She took part in nearly all of the farm duties along with the rest of her family. She stated excitement as a teenager when women gained the right to vote, which displayed her feminist ideal as well. Although it was not incredibly easy for me at the start to realize these feminist themes in her memoir, after the discussion I realized that they were most definitely present, and I could use them to support a topic about feminism. That was when I determined my research question, “what did it mean to be a feminist during the 1930s and 1940s?” I did not know right away what decades I would focus on specifically, however after further research, I was most inspired by this particular time period.

There are other reasons that inspired me to choose my topic, which you can read about in the next section, “Connection with My Life Story.”