|
Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
The field of women's history emerged and developed through the joint efforts of scholars, librarians, and archivists. When the field emerged in the early 1970s, the combined labor of individuals in these academic disciplines unearthed otherwise obscure archival evidence, shaped a new framework for research, and fueled dynamic inquiry into the historic experiences and modern understandings of women's lives. Despite such collaborative origins, historians do not always incorporate a broad understanding of library and archive practice into their scholarship. By illustrating efforts to reconstruct the life of one eighteenth-century woman on the Kentucky frontier, this essay illustrates how knowledge of archival collection and provenance provides vital perspective on historic experience. Given the long tradition of collaboration between librarians, archivists, and women's historians, this essay suggests that renewed attention to such relationships will provide important new opportunities for future research.
**********
The work of women's history brings the ordinary, the forgotten, the pedestrian, and the subtle realities of experience into sharper focus. By filling in silences and challenging basic narratives, scholars over several decades reshaped what we consider historically important. Scholars dug into archives to uncover the plodding regularity of housework, the private acts of reading or writing, the everyday acts of resistance, the hidden histories of sex and sexuality. Through dogged efforts to navigate archives designed to obscure such topics, women's historians located such evidence and explored its significance. Although the methodological approaches that framed such projects changes significantly with each generation of scholars, the basic impulse to dig deeply into archives and revive elusive evidence remains constant.
The work was not always easy. Locating evidence for any minority population in archival resources requires a certain level of suspicion. Searching for a needle in a haystack was part of the job. Scholars must reconcile the fact that certain subjects were not deemed historically important or worthy of preservation for many generations of scholars. Given such shortcomings, scholars learned to "read against the grain" of documents to tease out hidden stories or to point out the ubiquity of things so ordinary they are rarely seen.
Even today, searching for such evidence is not always a clearly marked endeavor and, as a result, an essential part of research in women's history involves creative collaboration with librarians and archivists. Doing such research involves reading the subtexts of card catalogs and online database entries for evidence of what they conceal. It means reading finding aids for what they gloss over more than for what they reveal. It involves seeking out the collections and documents that are deemed unimportant or uninteresting. Most importantly, it involves a level of reliance on librarians and archivists to provide roadmaps to rich and complex collections.
The importance of collaborations between scholars, librarians, and archivists cannot be understated. When the emergence of feminist politics in the late 1960s inspired historians to question assumptions about women's past lives, so too did librarians and archivists revisit the conventions of their own profession. The ways that libraries and archives sort, value, and present collections today is deeply connected to the efforts inspired by the social revolutions of the 1960s. Research institutions revised their card catalogs, finding aids, and collections in order to tell a new story. They began to change what they collected, how they structured guides, and how they conceived of and presented collections. They created a new landscape that contained valued, rather than obscured, documents by and about women.
Despite the centrality of archivists to the historian's craft, few seriously engage their work today. There is little scholarship about how the changes within libraries and archives facilitated more effective research in women's history. When women's historians talk about documents, they focus primarily on creative ways to read documents. Scholars discuss, for example, how to think about law as narrative, or how to read diaries as self-consciously constructed documents, or how to consider material objects as embodiments of cultural moments. They seldom question the broader processes by which such evidence came to be saved, placed in an archive, cataloged by a professional, and listed in a card catalog.
In this essay, I suggest that a fuller understanding of archival history and practice can help provide scholars with a richer understanding of their own subjects. I describe how my own efforts to reconstruct the life of one eighteenth-century woman, Anne Henry Christian, sent me into unexpected questions about provenance and documentation that fundamentally changed how I understood her life specifically and women's history broadly. Understanding "Annie" Christian's life, I discovered, was contingent upon understanding why her material survived, who collected it, and how it was cataloged. Tracking down the history of her collections led me to larger questions about the way we value documents by and about women and how such values have changed over time. Ultimately, I suggest here that historians take a closer look at their long-standing collaborations with librarians and archivists and use the knowledge of such relationships to help better navigate source material and understand its shortcomings.
Historians could learn important lessons from archival practice. Archivist Susan Grigg, for example, claims that a better understanding of archival provenance would open valuable avenues for historical research. She criticizes the "juridical" model of research that most historians engage. In this model, the historian acts as "judge" over the "testimony" contained in documents. It is a binary relationship in which the historian is focused solely on the narrative contained within the text of their evidence. This approach, she argues, fails to take into account the concept of provenance that traces the broader circumstances in which a document was produced and saved. Taking such issues into account illuminates "the growth of [archival] collections has been as much a historical process as the events they document and the scholarship they foster" (Grigg, 1991, p. 234).
I would have appreciated a fuller understanding of such issues when I began my research into the lives of women in eighteenth-century Kentucky. When I told archivists that I was researching women on the eighteenth-century frontier, they would apologize and tell me that there was simply not much material. There is much better material for nineteenth-century women, they explained. Have you considered moving your project forward in time? Then they would point me to the "w" section of their card catalog and inform me that that is where I would find the women. At the time, the "w" section of the card catalog seemed like a natural enough place to look for women's documents.
When I first began work in the archives, however, I had not considered that I entered a highly constructed world with a history all its own. In hindsight, my project would have been much better served had I entered the archives with a better understanding of how, why, and when women's records got relegated to the "w" section of the card catalog in the first place and how the meaning of who constituted a legitimate "w" changed over time. As my research soon revealed, not all women are represented in the "w" file in the card catalog. Historically, the women represented within this particular file were, for...
|
