Reaction: The Legacy of Farm Women Realized

I re-read my post about farm women. Here's the deal: I'm up for this summer internship at Carriage Hill. If I get the internship, I would be able to dress up in a period costume and give tours of the Daniel Arnold House, built in 1830. This is a working farm that is set in the antebellum period (from 1840-1861) In order to seem like a smarty pants, I went to the library! I picked up some books about farm women. I know what you're thinking: Farm women in the antebellum period?! How interesting. . .  No, no, I'm gonna read this History of Yawning instead. But, as I read more and more of the historiography, I encountered this strange dichotomy. Either the author believed that farm women embraced the cult of domesticity and truly enjoyed a patriarchal domestic structure or the author insisted that farm wives and mothers were stripped of their agency by a strict patriarchy, victims of a cruel, male dominated system. In writing my first piece, I was hoping to highlight the ridiculousness of this dichotomy. A good historian should rely, for the most part, on primary sources. Without them, you have no support for a thesis. As Bill Nye the Science Guy once said: "Extraordinary conclusions require extraordinary evidence."
 The reality of the primary sources stand clear to me: Women are proud of their accomplishments, especially extra-domestic capital earning skills like cooking or sewing. Antebellum literate women relied on an intra-gender kin network for support. Finally, antebellum women who were mothers were markedly proud of their children's accomplishments.
In reading my second piece, it is obvious that we had just discussed verbal snapshots. I was lucky enough to be in the archives when I wrote it. If there was a treasure map of Ohio University, the clichéd X that marks the spot would have to be on the Mahn Center for Special Collections. In relating the descriptions of the room, I was hoping to convey to my reader how awesome this resources is at Ohio University. I also like the different character that I invented as my narrator. The creativity of this exercise has made me question how well I know the basics of writing. How can I manage to describe all elements of a scene?