In May of 2019, I was hired to work on a project that has helped shape who I am as a scholar. Equally as important, it has influenced how I see myself as a scholar who also happens to be losing her eyesight.
It wasn’t until a week into the project that I understood just how much this project and I were connected.I am the digital content editor for the Marguerite Hicks Project, and as I gathered information for the website, I learned that Hicks and I had many similarities. Hicks was a scholar from Metro-Detroit who began losing her sight as she aged, just like myself. Hicks obtained her Bachelor’s degree in English from Wayne State University and went on to pursue her Master’s degree in early modern women writers. What stopped her from obtaining her PhD, she says, was her failing eyesight. Hicks and I both began losing our eyesight during our time in college. Though Hicks was in her forties when she matriculated, I felt connected to her. Knowing that a woman like Hicks could still continue to do important work—like collect over seven hundred books by women —inspires me to continue my education, and in a way, to get the PhD that she couldn’t.
As I worked with the collection itself, the books became living things in my hands, with a life’s journey sprawled out in their pages and along their covers. I could feel every sensation that Hicks had felt when she obtained a new text. I could place myself completely in the shoes of a blind woman whose collection she’d never actually see. As heartbreaking as that sounds, I feel as though Hicks would feel like me, moved to collect, and be with the collection.
I’m glad to bring my expertise in website design, alongside my love for literature on this project. To honor Hicks, an important mission for my position is to make the project’s social media and web presence as accessible as possible. Websites aren’t always blind-friendly, so preparing each picture on the website with an alt-text (a description that is embedded into a picture for a screen-reader to assist someone with a visual impairment) is extremely important. If Hicks herself could not read about the Project, then we weren’t doing our job to accurately represent her intellectual endeavors. This task taught me that it isn’t always easy and convenient to make things accessible, but it still should be a priority to make everything as accessible as possible, especially scholarly resources. It is our responsibility to use twenty-first century technology advances to serve the blind community in our scholarship, services that would have served Hicks, who didn’t have much accessibility with her own collection—none of her collection is in braille. She owned a large collection that she largely couldn’t read by herself. The work that I do toward accessibility for the project is essential, so that everyone, regardless of ability, can learn about and enjoy Hicks’ collection as an important contribution to feminist history. I’m incredibly proud to have made it as accessible as possible.
While working on the project, I learned about manuscript marginalia, library subscriptions, bookplates, and book ownership. Hick’s love for women’s literature has inspired me to look more into seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers, to learn more about their trials of publication in a man’s world. I am also thankful for meeting Marguerite Hicks in this way, because working with her collection has taught me that the status of my eyesight will not impede my ability to, fight for women’s honor in literature.
