A daughter of a friend recently found a diary when cleaning out her deceased great-grandmother’s things. Of course she wanted to read it, but didn’t feel right about it. I don’t know what she decided, but she mentioned that her granny’s writing (cursive) was hard to read anyway, so she might not even be able to read it. I hadn’t thought about diaries in a long time and I don’t remember keeping one.
Well before the “The Diary of Anne Frank” it was pretty much assumed that most teenage girls kept a diary. They were such a staple in the fifties that a gift of a diary to a girl was a safe choice; pre-teens would probably want to start one and then they’d always be needing a new one.
I don’t know exactly when diaries became a mostly female occupation but in my time boys didn’t keep a journal, or at least none would admit to it.
But historically, men did record their thoughts and opinions first since they got their education first. Monks kept daily records, and when reading and writing filtered down from royalty keeping a journal was what you did if you were a male in the gentry. As an obligation upper class men wrote a lot of letters and expressed themselves in writing, even if they had no intention for a mass audience.
As time went on, educated women took up the practice of daily journals. Looking it up, I found out that the earliest known diaries were kept by young Japanese women in the tenth century, called “pillow books” because that’s where they were hidden. Traditionally a diary was supposed to be private, kept somewhere like in a drawer under folded pajamas; for extra security they were likely to have a lock and key.
I think many people old enough to have lived in the time of diaries are now posting online and by definition sharing with everyone. Facebook and Instagram are now common for people who like to write their own history. Statistics of people who post regularly show a big gender gap towards females, just like diaries.
Younger people (studies show females and males) post on platforms like Snapchat. Meant to be shared only with a personal group, Snapchat posts are interestingly semi-private, as content goes away after a set timer, the default being ten seconds.
Do young people physically write their thoughts down somewhere? I know they don’t do it in cursive – my grandson can’t read any note I write in cursive. Somehow I can’t imagine a world without cursive –it’s so much easier than writing in print, and I can’t imagine a diary not written in cursive.
Today how many people write on actual paper with an actual pen or pencil? I would have guessed not many, so it was a big surprise to me that Amazon offers a huge selection of diaries. They look traditional, female, girly, some with hearts and flowers type designs—and many come with locks and keys!
Apparently, the world of diaries still exists, probably a lot smaller than before the internet. But I want to know who’s buying them, who’s writing in them? And are they writing in cursive?
Marilyn Stokes was a public school teacher in Fort Worth for 15 years and subsequently worked at KERA public television for four years. She retired after 15 years at Ford Motor Company, Southwest Region where she was zone manager for small dealers in the southern half of Texas.