• History
• Senior Comps
• Writing a Proposal

Senior Comps Proposal

During spring semester, you are required to submit a draft of your research proposal. There are many viable ways of proposing a research topic, but a good proposal must accomplish several tasks:

1. Identify a specific research question
2. Indicate what primary sources are available to you to answer the question
3. Suggest a blueprint for your research plans and your approach to the question

Consider this as a template for your proposal: write three sections (1-2 paragraphs) as listed above. You are not obliged to use this format, but it might make your life easier. What follows is a description of each section and a model of what that section might look like. Each part represents one or more paragraphs, depending on what you need to say:

Part 1

It is best to get right to the point, avoiding large generalizations about human nature. One strategy is to use an anecdote: “When Frederick Douglass spoke at the Worcester Lyceum in 1847, he expressed his surprise at the absence of women in the audience.” This might be a great way to open up a specific question about women and abolitionism. An effective first paragraph can get the reader’s attention by presenting a mystery, a puzzle, or a discrepancy.

Why was Douglass surprised? “A decade earlier, Douglass had mounted the exact same podium and looked out at an overwhelming female audience.” How does his surprise inform yours? “The demise of women abolitionists between 1837 and 1847 seems strange, especially considering that women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton were enunciating a broader vision of female political participation during that decade. The following year, Stanton would assemble a group of feminist men and women in Seneca Falls to proclaim women’s equality.”

And now you offer your topic and the specific questions that frame your project: “My project explores the simultaneous rise of women’s political organizing and decline of female abolitionism. Did changes in the rhetoric and tactics of antislavery at the end of the 1830s force abolitionist women to see themselves as having a distinct political identity? Did the experiences of women as abolitionists in the 1830s provide them with the organizational skills and rhetorical tools to mobilize as feminists in the 1840s?”

Part 2

This is the primary source paragraph. Here you need to convince your adviser that you have an accessible and sufficiently full body of primary sources that corresponds to your research question. You should also tell us where you will access these sources. “The weekly minutes of over thirty women’s antislavery societies have been republished as Female Abolitionists of the 1840s, edited by Joanne Schmidt. This six-volume set, available in the Herstory Archives, excludes the speeches of prominent women, but instead contains over 50 speeches by obscure women at local meetings in towns like Utica, Worcester, and Pawtucket.

"Additionally, women in Rochester published a monthly newsletter, The Gazetteer (available on microfilm) between 1843 and 1846, which contains letters from rank-and-file women. Many male abolitionists commented on women abolitionists in the 1840s, and Oxy owns the published papers of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Theodore Weld. Oxy also owns the reports of every American Antislavery Society annual meeting from 1835 through 1850. Because each of these reports lists the names of female delegates, it will be possible to gauge changes in the rate of women’s attendance.”

Part 3

Here you will want to spell out your strategy and your research plan. This plan may also include key secondary readings listed in your bibliography. You can be specific.

“To complete this project, my first goal is to read Frank Schmidt’s new book Women Abolitionists and the Men Who Loved Them (Harvard U. Press, 2003), especially the chapter on the Rochester women who published the Gazetteer. I then plan on compiling the names of all women participants in the Antislavery Society annual meetings between 1835 and 1850. I can then see if any of these women published autobiographies or whether any of their letters have been published.

I can also check the names of these female abolitionists against the list of attendees of 1840s women’s rights conventions to see if there was much overlap. Finally, I am going to systematically read the 50 speeches in Female Abolitionists to see if there are any common patterns of experience among politicized women in the 1840s.”