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“I am happy to still have my two little ones as they have kept me alive,” a French widow wrote to a group of women in Mississippi more than 100 years ago. Anna Laborde’s husband had been killed in World War I, as had her brother. Her mother had also recently died. Although her children, she wrote, had kept her alive, they were too young to lighten her heart “in the moments of sadness that often come.”
It is one of 13 World War I letters written to the members of the Woman’s Book Club of Oxford, now archived at the University of Mississippi Libraries. When students at the university translated the letters from French to English this past year, they did not simply complete a class assignment. They uncovered the story of a family that in France had become a war statistic. In Mississippi, they recovered a piece of history. Their work reminds us that the value of a university education cannot always be measured in salaries or job placements in the workforce.
I discovered the handwritten letters several years ago as I researched the history of the book club, of which I am a member. Other than dates and a few words that I could recognize, I had no understanding of what the letters contained. In fact, I assumed they were business correspondence, likely confirming the club’s participation in a relief program known in the United States as the Fatherless Children of France, coordinated through the Army Orphanage, a French nonprofit organization.
I knew that for several years the Oxford women contributed $36.50 a year, the equivalent of 10 cents a day, to help a French woman feed and clothe her child. But it was not until the students recently translated the letters into English that I began to understand how the letters did more than acknowledge the club’s financial contributions.
Photo of Henri Laborde, the French youngster who lost his father during World War I and who was discussed in letters his mother exchanged with the Woman’s Book Club of Oxford in the 1910s. Credit: Courtesy photoThe World War I letters preserved evidence of the friendship that developed between women on two continents. The women wrote about their children and in one, Madame Laborde expresses concern for the brother of a club member who is serving with American troops in France. In another, she writes about the Allies’ victory as the war ends. “Truly, I am glad the war is over, but it is a new heartbreak for me,” she said. “One’s heart hurts so much when one sees some return and not others. At least, thanks to the brave Americans who wanted to join us, the country was saved.”
The students, enrolled in a graduate-level French translation class, had unlocked a source of history and cultural understanding that otherwise had been largely inaccessible.
Trustees of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning Board recently moved toward a new funding model that could tie public support for state universities to graduation rates, student retention and workforce outcomes. Part of the proposal outlines how universities could earn additional dollars by producing graduates who earn competitive wages and align student success with the state’s workforce needs.
Such a formula raises an important question. What would become of those university programs whose full value cannot be measured in terms of salary and immediate job placement?
It’s fair for our leaders to ensure that public funds advance the state’s economy. We need teachers, healthcare workers, engineers, computer scientists and other skilled professionals. We need our university graduates to earn well-paying salaries so they can build lives in Mississippi rather than move elsewhere.
But a model that assigns value primarily on the basis of whether a degree program can be mapped to high-paying jobs overlooks the value of other work that universities perform – preserving records and history, interpreting cultures and helping us understand lives beyond our own.
The students who translated the letters from Madame Laborde had to know more than French vocabulary and grammar. They had to understand French culture as it existed in 1918. The word veuve, for example, literally means widow.
When Anna signed herself “Madame Veuve Laborde,” she was doing more than reporting that her husband had died. She was evoking the public identity and respect associated with a woman whose husband had been killed in war. Elsewhere in the letters she wrote that she and her children “are also considered heroes among the fallen.” To translate her signature fully, the students had to understand not only the meaning of a word, but the social context in which she used it.
Their translation led me to pause and think about a war I knew little about, to think about it in terms of families and people and not just battles and victories. The humanities help us develop the empathy we need to understand people whose experiences are different from our own.
Certainly, Mississippi needs to find ways to counteract the “brain drain” that leads too many graduates of our universities to move out of state. But we also need to value the university programs that help our students whose work increases our knowledge and our understanding of other cultures, places and experiences.
Madam Lamborde’s letters had largely sat inaccessible in the university archives for more than a century. With the translations the students provided, her voice can now be heard again. That, too, is a return on Mississippi’s investment in higher education.
Shirley Wimbish Gray lives in Oxford. A retired writing instructor and science editor, she writes about what is often overlooked or forgotten, particularly in the American South. Her recent essays have appeared in Earth Island, Brevity Blog and Persimmon Tree. More information can be found on her work at her website, (shirleywimbishgray.com.
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