DEAR, OH DEAR, DIARY
Toronto’s Stephanie Little struggled with the ethics of posting online a woman’s diary from 1938,
Stephanie Little made a New Year’s resolution to write a diary. But instead, on Jan. 1, 2017, she decided to share someone else’s, releasing an excerpt on social media each day.
As Little began her own diary, she found it difficult to write consistently. Then she remembered three diaries she bought for about $40 at the St. Lawrence Sunday Antique Market two years before.
Written by an unmarried, 27-year-old Toronto woman during the Great Depression, they detail her daily life — cooking and cleaning, working at department stores such as Kent’s, setting her hair, going to the Georgian Room to see the fashions and listening to Empire Club of Canada speakers on the radio.
“It was really the coolest thing I’d read in ages and I thought other people would think so, too,” Little said. She wanted to share this glimpse into the city’s history so she set up a Twitter account, @DiaryDear, and an Instagram account, @DiaryDear1938.
On Jan. 1, she sent out her first tweet, a line from a diary entry dated Jan. 1, 1938: “I hope we all have health and happiness this year.”
Sharing the woman’s diary — something most people don’t expect to become public — wasn’t something Little took lightly. She had concerns about sharing personal thoughts of someone who hadn’t meant for their words to be read by others.
The ethics of sharing someone else’s personal life after death was highlighted recently in the podcast S-Town, which detailed the life of an eccentric and outspoken man in Woodstock, Ala., before and after his death. In the podcast, journalist Brian Reed uses voice interviews he did with John B. McLemore to tell a story about a small town.
He then shares intimate details gathered from friends, family and acquaintances after McLemore’s death to make the story more about McLemore.
The ethics of the S-Town podcast have been scrutinized in numerous publications from Time magazine to the Atlantic.
Articles explored questions of who owns the rights to someone else’s personal history and what are the implications of making that public.
Some argued that the podcast shouldn’t have been made because McLemore was unable to give consent for recordings of his voice to be published. Others asked whether the “art” of the podcast was worth the pain it may have caused the town and those who knew McLemore. Overall, the podcast sparked the debate of how private information becomes public property in the digital age.
Little struggled with the ethics of making the diary public and settled on sharing it anonymously.
“I just felt conflicted,” she said. “When you write a diary, you’re not expecting it to be on the Internet . . . I had them a while before I made that decision.”
She thought it would interest others to read about Toronto from a historical perspective. And since, for the most part, the diary reads like an activity log, she felt nothing was too personal to share with online readers — except for her name.
Since that initial tweet, Little has sent more than 230 posts on each platform. Though she has a meagre number of followers — 81on Instagram and 30 on Twitter — the feedback has been positive — one follower even started listening to one of the Lux Radio Theater programs the diarist wrote about. (Broadway plays and films were adapted for Lux, a radio anthology series that started in 1934. American filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille was one of the hosts and presented listeners with radio adaptations of films.)
The posts Little shared include details about the woman’s relationship with her mother, how she dressed and her circle of friends. “Mom made a fuss over me wearing red velvet,” she wrote on Feb. 9, 1938, “so I wouldn’t wear it.” The woman’s personality also comes through in her description of others, for example when she refers to a man named Mr. Brown as “the old horse.”
Camille Bégin, historian and Heritage Toronto’s plaques program co-ordinator, said sharing the diaries through social media is an innovative way to get people interested in the city’s history, as well as reflect on the ways we’re all creating our own histories.
“We can draw parallels between this woman’s diary and our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls: We are all sharing little aspects of our lives that makes us happy, sad or proud. Our Twitter feeds will, someday soon, be amazing sources for historians who want to know about our days, our emotions, or political beliefs.”
Bégin said the diaries are also valuable because information about women’s daily domestic work was rarely recorded in traditional sources.
“Her diary tells us a lot about food preparation, domestic chores and beauty habits,” Bégin said.
Bégin, who writes about historical figures, said she generally waits until someone has been dead about five years before publishing information about them “so that we can appraise someone’s legacy in its entirety and not in the immediate shock of their death.”
She said it’s important to involve the family of the deceased out of respect.
“They knew their family member intimately and may be able to explain aspects of the historical record that may remain enigmatic otherwise. On the other hand, historians can provide context and interpret the sources. So, really it’s a back-and-forth.”
Little did try to find the woman and her family before she shared the entries online. She is still searching. She signed up for Ancestry.ca, a searchable family history record site, and discovered the diarist was living in the Bedford Park area with her sister, mother and stepfather in the late 1930s, around the time she began writing the diaries. Little also learned the woman would marry and that she died in the 1980s. She knows the diarist had a son but has found no information about him oth
er than his name.
After diving into all the research, Little felt a greater connection to the diarist. It was a “lovely feeling” to read about her walks to Yonge St. and Eglinton Ave., trips to Old City Hall or the Eglinton Theatre, Little said.
So who has the right to publish someone’s words after they die?
Canadian copyright law protects the intellectual property of an author — in this case a diary — for the author’s life and for 50 years after death, said Giuseppina D’Agostino, copyright expert and associate professor at Osgoode Hall law school.
In the case of orphan works, which don’t have “parents” to enforce the rights, an attempt must be made to contact owners or family members, she said. But if no owners are around to seek legal action, there likely wouldn’t be any repercussions.
D’Agostino said once an applicant has “made all reasonable efforts to locate the owner” an application to have an orphan work approved for publication can be submitted to the Copyright Board of Canada.
In this case, Little owns the diary, but the woman’s words are still the author’s property for about another 20 years. Little said she won’t be seeking publishing permission and is not sure if she’ll post the remaining two diaries, written in 1940 and 1942. The diary she is posting ends on December 31, 1938.
But she said that after her fruitless search for relatives she is interested in speaking to friends of the diarist and hopes someone recognizes the writer by the posts.
“I imagine this sassy lady going about her day, being a little bit harsh to people but in a funny way,” she said. “I would love it if someone knew her and (could say), ‘Yes, she’s the one that was just cracking everyone up all the time.’ ”