Digging In

I'm sitting on my porch armed with my dog for company and chocolate covered pretzels for morale and ready to begin my research in earnest.  I found exactly what I needed in the Minnesota History Center Museum archives to tell the heart of my story (more on this later); now I need to step back and impose order on the mass of background information in front of me.  The first step?  Weeding out the library books that are interesting vs relevant.  This is hard to do because there are so many cool stories here!  Case in point:  a book written in 1942 called So Your Husband's Gone to War!  It has chapters with intriguing titles like "Hire for Wages" (a new concept?!), "Where's Daddy, Mummy?" (heartbreaking), and "Don't Let Yourself Go!" (a warning against having too many wild parties? a caution against too many chocolate covered pretzels?!).  I could spend all afternoon here, but I really do need to stick to my research questions and focus on how the war changed things for women in journalism.  Anyway, on to the task at hand!