In my undergraduate directed reading class with Professor Colleen McDannell, I utilized
the remarkable resource of the Ramona Wilcox Cannon Papers in the Clyde Archive to
address the attitudes and practices of Utah women with wage labor in the 1950s. Cannon
wrote an advice column for the Salt Lake Tribune for 27 years beginning in the late
1940s. As “Mary Marker” receiving letters from average women, then she responded to
some of them in the newspaper. The Clyde Archive contains several boxes with 1,400
of these letters. I spent the first month of my research on this project working solely
in Special Collections at the Marriott Library to access the Archive, reading hundreds
of letters in order to find letters that included reflections about wage labor. The
Clyde Archive resources were invaluable to my research. Primary sources are an incredibly
rich source for historical analysis, and these letters are particularly useful because
they are the reflections of everyday women. The Cannon papers allowed my analysis
to expand beyond what Latter-day Saint church leaders were teaching to understand
how women actually felt about reconciling wage labor with their religious values.
Based on my previous survey of the entire Clyde Archive last summer for Dr. McDannell,
I believe the Cannon papers are representative of the Archive in toto. The Cannon
papers provide an important account of women and their attitudes toward modern life,
including wage labor, and represent the Archive’s overall goal to provide a view of
women’s attitudes in the 20th century. I hope to find additional opportunities to
research the Clyde Archive to address the historical development of modern attitudes
of women and the workforce.