Kathryn Gehred has a master’s degree in Women’s History from Sarah Lawrence College and was part of a team of editors who completed The Papers of Martha Washington, a transcribed collection of all of Martha Washington’s known correspondence published by UVA Press in 2022. She began releasing Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant in 2020 as a personal side project because she thought a podcast would be a great way to share some of her favorite 18th-century women’s letters with the world.

Take it away, Kathryn!

What inspired you to start Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant?

I used to be a tour guide at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and while working there I came across dozens of letters from Thomas Jefferson’s daughters and granddaughters that I thought were hysterical. Letters where sisters talk about getting ready for dances and their dresses falling apart, really mean gossip, family news, that kind of thing. However, when I tried to quote from the letters on tour they almost never landed, because there wasn’t enough time to introduce all the people involved and set the scene. Later, when I began to work as a documentary editor at the Martha Washington Papers project, I discovered even more fascinating letters, and I acquired the research skills to really dig into the context. I thought that a podcast would give me a way to share my joy and interest in these letters with other people who would think they are as interesting as I do. So that was how I came up with the format of the podcast. I decided to focus on one letter, set up the context, read it from beginning to end, and then dig into what makes it interesting.

How would you describe the purpose of the podcast?

I think of the podcast as a different approach to doing public history. I’m not trying to teach my listeners about a specific event or make a vast historical argument, I am sharing the way that one individual person experienced one specific moment. And since we are all one individual person experiencing the current historical moment together I’ve found that it really brings the past to life. My favorite letters are the ones where you feel like you get to know the writer a little bit by the end of it, even if the letter doesn’t reference any major political moment.

What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?

I think one of the most challenging things about researching historical women is how, to a certain group of people who consider themselves “history buffs,” because my work focuses on women it doesn’t count as “real history.” Women’s history has made great progress, but there are still a lot of folks out there who think history=dead white guys, and anything outside of that is irrelevant. I know that you should ignore everything that you see on Twitter (I’ll never call it X), but I saw a guy complain that he didn’t see enough women history podcasters out there. I was like… what universe are you living in? I only listen to women’s history podcasts and there are too many for me to keep up with! But because this guy only listened to a certain type of history podcast he just assumed that there weren’t any women interested in history. But GOOD historians are including women and women’s perspectives more and more, and that makes me optimistic for the future.

A question from Kathryn:  Do you have any favorite women’s history podcasts that you enjoy, and what about them do you like?

It’s hard to choose. Like Kathryn, I listen to many women’s history podcasts, as well as history podcasts in general. That said, the two I come back to most often are the What’s Her Name podcast and The Exploress. In both cases, I am drawn by the diversity of topics, the humor, and the distinctive voices (in the literary rather than the physical sense) of the hosts.

I also strongly recommend Unsung History, which is not explicitly a woman’s history podcast but often includes episodes on forgotten and under-reported women, as well as many other stories about marginalized populations in American history.

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Interested in learning more about Kathryn and her work?

Listen to the podcast: https://www.r2studios.org/show/your-most-obedient-humble-servant/ 

Follow her on Bluesky

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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Elaine Weiss, author of Spell Freedom.