By Emily Chaika
The Sara Elizabeth Neal Letters are a collection of letters from 1910 and 1911 that Sara wrote to Edward Brown Rogers while he was away playing professional baseball in Georgia, before the two married in 1911. Sara is the author of all 23 surviving letters, and Edward’s responses are not included in the archive. The letters detail her daily activities living in Arkansas and Texas. She writes about going to the circus with her friends which she describes as an exciting event in “this drowsy, sleepy village,” and updates Edward on gossip and people in the neighborhood. Sara’s tone is very cheerful and playful, yet longing. There is almost a childlike quality to her writing. She reasons that they should write in code so that “the stupid mail clerks” cannot read their letters. Sara also tells Edward she was asked to play the lead role as an “Indian princess” in a play at a newly completed air dome. The letters include a code that Sara invented, the reasoning being to maintain privacy from the mail clerks. One letter contains a message in the code, reading “I’m sure absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
While Sara wrote the letters in the south in the early 1900s, a time of racial turmoil, the letters do not reflect that. A majority of Americans in the south most likely experienced much more instability than Sara did, due to her wealth. Black people were oppressed in the early 1900s under Jim Crow laws, race riots, and lynchings. Sara’s letters do not reflect the political landscape of the Jim Crow south because of the protective bubble in which she and many other white, middle- and upper-class women were privileged to live in. Her life seemed to exist in her neighborhood with her friends.
While letters, especially romantic letters, can be overlooked or discredited as a useful historical source because of their personal nature, Sara’s letters are important because they also demonstrate gender roles. As scholar Sonia Cancion argues, the intimacy of love letters is exactly what makes them useful for historical studies. Sara’s letters show subtle adherence to gender norms and attitudes of the early 1900s, specifically in a part of her letter where she calls herself foolish and jokingly asks Edward not to laugh at her. She also writes about how when she received the letter, she was already in bed like “the good little girl” she is. Sara emphasizes her good behavior and adherence to gender roles in her letters while Edward is away. The historical importance of the Sara Neal letters is the demonstration of how love letters can be a vehicle for intimate, emotional thoughts and a means to reveal gender roles.
Citations
Cancion, Sonia. “The Language of Gender in Lovers’ Correspondence, 1946-1949,” Gender and History 24, no. 3 (2012): 755-765.
Sara E. Neal letters, ca. 1910, Sara Neal, Manuscripts Division, William L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Mich.