Though daybook records of work are said to show mere facts, the aim here is to use one to trace the sense of bodies at work, affect, and emotion in the notes kept by a housewife/mother/grandmother (1837–1914) – trying the conditions of class and gender.
Beneath the notes of a work journal (1890-1914) by a housewife, affect and emotion is to be traced. The family moved from a rural estate into a railway-village adjacent to the local military cantonment. They built a house, while taking part in the social life of the community, keeping the household ticking over, notifying each social call. As the parents grew old, the daughter married. Disaster hit with the death of the daughter in 1913, leaving young children behind. With her death, the atmosphere of the home changed. In 1914, the keeper of the record passed on. A stepmother took over, the cantonment mobilized as war broke out in the world outside, and the family left for the town.
The eldest sibling became my mother-in-law. She provided context to the diaries and the collections of her uncle. She talked of her childhood paradise.
Tracing signs of sense, affect, emotion against class and gender, I will clarify her strive to create a home for a respectable middle-class family – the way possible for the soldier’s daughter, the handmaid who rose to matron, married the owner, inherited the estate, married again. This family climbed the social stairs for a new life.
The perspective is phenomenological, focusing how actors appear. Emotion is perceived as e-motion, making bodies connect (Ahmed). Non-representational-theory calls for understanding of the ethnography made by this housewife. Keeping a diary is related to materiality (ANT): by means of writing citizens of modernity develop; the book is a stable and mobile actant.

Åsa Ljungström, PhD in Ethnology, Associate professor in Ethnology, formerly senior lecturer at Mid Sweden University, living in Uppsala, Sweden. Among her research interests are material culture and folklore studies, i.e. crafts, arts and crafts, narrativity. Her thesis (1997) deals with artefacts triggering narratives of life stories, emotions and values of life. Among her recent research interests are articles on narrativity and materiality, small stories, farmers trading long-distance from Lapland to Stockholm and back, narratives of women’s history, consequences of the contraceptive device, folk medicine, folk legends, 18th century manuscripts of black books of magic.

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