When understanding topics like gender and sex within 19th-century America, I wanted to form my thesis around: how newspaper headlines and other popular media often helped shape (both positively and negatively) public opinion of female husbands in America. 

For my project, I decided to go into a topic as it’s something I have always been interested in, but I never had the opportunity to do a project on it before. I first heard the term female husband in a book by Jen Manion. In the introduction, they had given multiple examples of different factors that determined how the public viewed female husbands. One of the topics that I liked the most was how newspaper headlines shaped how people had conversations about gender. This topic was relevant to today, as a lot of the debate around gender that is happening now was happening then, just with a bit more categorical language. 

When I had to decide on a medium for my project, I was a bit torn, as I was having a hard time figuring out what medium would best present the information I had. I had originally thought of doing a story map, and tracing where the newspapers had reported significant stories of female husbands, however, I had used a story map last semester for a project and wanted to try using a medium I had not used prior. Additionally,  I had realised I had a lot of information concerning heavy topics, and it felt like talking it out was the most efficient way to get my point across and still make sense. 

I’ve never made a podcast before, so I was surprised at how easy it was to find the correct apps, edit the podcast, post it to Spotify, ect. However, I did have some issues with the recording of the podcast. I was unaware of how monotone I speak until listening to it back, so it was a lot of re-recording and re-listening as I didn’t want my voice to sound dull. I think the hardest part of the project was figuring out the order to put the information. It makes most sense to go in chronological order, but each case of a female husband is different, and it was hard to follow chronological order, as some female husbands got married multiple times sporadically. 

I also had a bit of difficulty with editing out information, I may have found something interesting about female husbands, but unrelated to how newspapers were affecting them. If I thought it was cool, I had to tell myself not to include it or to edit it out because it is not relevant to my argument. (It was a bit difficult to not include fun facts.) 

Overall, I enjoyed this project because I was able to take it in my direction looking through different newspaper databases., Additionally I got to spent a lot of time on a topic I had originally known nothing about.