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Raising the archival consciousness: how women's archives challenge traditional approaches to collecting and use, or, what's in a name?
Library Trends, Fall, 2007 by Karen M. Mason, Tanya Zanish-Belcher
ABSTRACT
This article examines archival collecting, taking as case studies two women's archives. Drawing on their experiences building the collections of the Archives of Women in Science and Engineering (Iowa State University) and the Iowa Women's Archives (University of Iowa), the authors explore how such efforts challenge traditional approaches to collecting. Proactive collecting, such as oral history projects focused on Latinas or women scientists, helps fill gaps in the historical record by encouraging people who have not traditionally been donors to participate in building and using diverse archival collections.
INTRODUCTION
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In 9000, we coauthored "A Room of One's Own: Women's Archives in the Year 2000," an article focused on the growing number of women's archives in the United States and the impetus for their creation (Mason & Zanish-Belcher, 1999). We argued that women's archives were founded on the premise that women's lives and activities were not being adequately documented in traditional repositories and that women's archives turned collection development on its head in the 1970s by insisting that the papers of women be preserved and made accessible to researchers. These early archives, like the incipient field of women's history, focused on the contributions made by women to American society and history, highlighting prominent women with public roles. Like the field of women's history itself, however, women's archives have evolved over the past several decades, gradually broadening their collecting scope to include previously underdocumented groups. Women's archives continue to seek out the papers of groups and subjects whose histories are not being preserved, in order to document a broad range of women and to build a diverse set of collections. Women's collections archivists work proactively to capture the parts of society so often left out of the mainstream and in so doing give a voice to the disempowered. As a result, women's archives have altered the landscape of archival collecting, improving the overall documentation of culture and society in the United States. This article considers the methods and techniques women's archives utilize to document underrepresented groups and the uses that are made of the collections thus acquired.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Since the early 1970s, there have been occasional articles on the subject of women's archives in the library and archival literature but analyses of the cultural context and impact of women's collections have not kept pace with the establishment of women's archives. For the most part, publications on the subject have been concerned with compiling and disseminating information about women's history resources in archives. It is important, however, to view the articles specifically about women's archives in the context of a larger scholarly literature on the nature of historical documentation of women. Archivists do not work in a vacuum; they interact with scholars and other researchers and respond to and encourage new areas of research.
When Martha Bell's article on women's collections appeared in College and Research Libraries in 1959, it focused primarily on collections of published material, reflecting how few women's archives existed at the time. By 1973, the women's movement had sufficient influence on the fields of archives and history to warrant an entire issue of the American Archivist devoted to the role of women in the archival profession and to the necessity of rethinking archival collecting and description to include women. Articles by archivist Eva Moseley (1973) and historian Joanna Schneider Zangrando (1973) considered the impact of feminism on history and archives. Moseley's article reflected the uncertainty that surrounded this new field of women's history. She argued that women should be included in history and that archivists had a responsibility to preserve women's papers, but if all archivists did a good job of documenting women there might be no need for separate women's archives in the future. (1) Three women's studies journals founded in the 1970s--Feminist Studies, Signs, and Frontiers--helped solidify the scholarly claims of the field. Each included articles in the field of women's history, and Signs had a section entitled "Archives," which printed documents along with introductions by archivists or historians. The archives section underscored the existence of varied, interesting archival sources for women's history. The 1970s also witnessed the publication of a number of guides to women's collections within mainstream repositories, well as the mammoth Women's History Sources (Hinding, 1979), a compendium of brief descriptions of manuscript collections held by repositories across the country. (2) The 1970s were, thus, a time of making the case for women's history by demonstrating that there were indeed enough historical resources to support this field of study.
By 1980, the field of women's history was maturing and changing, increasingly influenced by social history. No longer were historians interested solely in "great" women--those active and prominent in the public sphere. Writing history "from the bottom up," social historians brought to the foreground groups that had previously been ignored or forgotten by historians. The underlying philosophy of social history likewise influenced the perspective and functioning of women's history and women's archives. Eva Moseley (1980) explained the changes in women's history to her archival audience and suggested to mainstream archivists how one goes about collecting women's papers. Furthermore, she noted the lack of sources created by groups such as working-class women, but was not yet ready to embrace the concept of an activist archival profession in which archivists would create documentation through means such as oral history in order to fill gaps in the historical record. To her (and to many other archivists), the notion of the activist archivist was still a somewhat radical idea. The implication was that historians should conduct oral history interviews, not archivists.
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