Looking back, I wish that I had gone deeper into my research right from the beginning. I had to wait for some sources, and was only pointed towards others later on as I got further in my reading and became more interested in specific aspects of my research. Unfortunately, this led to a lack of cohesion in some parts of my research paper. Although I tried to maintain a connection between my research and the memoir of A. May Henry, I found that my research into romantic friendship and Boston marriages interested me more that the realities of the average single woman. As I became more aware of the history behind Boston marriages, I realized that they were a phenomenon that had always been sensationalized, and that perhaps I was doing the same thing. As I mentioned in my methodologies discussion, I tried to ground my research around the role that societal thought on women and sexuality had in creating room for romantic friendships and Boston marriages.

One of the drawbacks to my research was that I was sometimes unable to find sources that were specifically Canadian. Unfortunately, other than Charlotte Whitton, most of the examples of Boston marriages that I found occurred in the United States. Although I wish that I had more examples of specifically Canadian relationships, I used the American examples with the confidence that social patterns in the united states were (and are) hugely influential in Canada.

Another challenge that I have faced with my research is my experience with fiction. My research includes both fictional and non-fictional primary sources. While my interests in literature have helped shaped my interests when studying history, this has come with some challenges. I have had to be careful to separate my knowledge from fictional sources with my knowledge from historical sources. But, as the articles from our course readings that I discussed in my methodologies section have helped me to understand, the delineation between fiction and non-fiction is not as clear as I had previously thought. This is fascinating to me because fiction from the period in which I did my research demonstrates how real aspects of social history were turned into consumer products (books), which could have the effect of normalizing, sensationalizing, illuminating, misconstruing, etc. a social phenomenon. As a student of English, I am likely to overanalyze the language that is used in both fictional and non-fictional works, and perhaps draw conclusions that are not historically accurate. To help to avoid this, I have tried to back up my arguments based on historical writing with empirical evidence and secondary sources. Nonetheless, the social themes that appear in fiction often reflect reality.

Finally, I have also had to be careful not to apply my 21st century perspective of women’s sex and sexuality to my readings of documents about female cohabitation. Secondary sources, like Lilian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men, have been helpful in informing me of the historical opinions surrounding sex and sexuality. It took me a while to properly understand romantic friendship, and as I researched it more, I became more aware of the fact that it could mean very different things for different women, and was unlikely to have been defined as anything beyond friendship in most cases, while in others it may have been what is now defined as lesbianism. In my interpretation of the research, I was careful not to interpret the living arrangements of 19th and 20th century women in ‘Boston marriages’ through a 21st century perspective. Given the delicacy afforded to all subjects involving sex and sexuality in most early twentieth-century documents, it was impossible to determine the degrees of platonic, romantic and sexual, in ‘Boston marriages’ and even romantic friendships.

Overall, I have become more aware of the gaps that are a natural part of studying history. I have learned to be more skeptical of historical narratives, and to be careful how I present my own.  Ulitmately, I realize that there is no perfect represenation of history, but that history as an ongoing and constantly changing process, that requires many perspectives and backgrounds to be done as accurately as possible.