Thoughts From the Symposium: Bringing Women's Voices to Life

In the months following the Women’s Archives/Women’s Collections: What does the Future Hold? symposium that was held as part of the 2013 SAA conference, I began thinking more meaningfully about the stories we might tell about women’s contributions and women’s lives through collections housed at the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries. 

How do women become a part of the historical record? How do women’s stories intersect with the broader historical context? How do our collections facilitate a scholarly analysis of the human experience? 

The legacy of Susan B. Anthony echoes throughout many of our collections. Anthony lived in Rochester as an adult and her home became one of the sites in the campaign for women’s suffrage. In addition to the Susan Brownell Anthony Papers, we’re also able to work with scholars to tell stories using our collections and go beyond Anthony and her life-long campaign for women’s rights. 

Beginning in the fall of 2011, we began a project to put Anthony and other social activists in conversation with one another, by working with students to digitize and transcribe nearly 2,000 letters written in the nineteenth-century to and from Isaac and Amy Post. The project’s website went live in 2012 with 200 letters, and we anticipate finishing the digitization of the collection in the summer of 2014. 

The Post family lived in Rochester and their home served as a stop on the underground railroad. The family members supported the newspaper Frederick Douglass published in Rochester, as well as helped to plan the second women’s rights convention that took place shortly after Seneca Falls in the summer of 1848. Their correspondents include Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Harriett Jacobs, William Cooper Nell, and Frederick Douglass. By reading these letters, scholars can better understand the involvement and impact a family like the Posts had on the major social movements of the nineteenth century, and how their involvement was very much a part of the fabric of their daily lives. 

In a letter written to Amy Post after the Civil War, Anthony shares her delight that the Post family will be coming to visit she and her brother at their family farm. Referring to herself in the third person, Anthony writes: 

And Susan B. in 
particular will be very 
happy to see thee & both &
plan about Anti Slavery,- 
as well as visit – 

It’s not completely clear what Anthony means when she says “anti slavery.” Should could be referring to the ongoing debate regarding black male suffrage, or she could be assuming the term anti-slavery to describe women’s status at the time. It’s hard for us to imagine Anthony sitting still long enough to write a letter- while campaigning nationally for suffrage and equal rights- let alone welcoming visitors to her family’s farm. In between the lines, we can read the careful balance women struck, to both assume and cast off societal expectations of women. 

This collection and project helps to underscore one of my big take-aways from the symposium, which is that we find women’s stories in nearly all of our collections and these stories celebrate not only those notable and well-known figures, like Susan B. Anthony, but also those women, who remain silent within the historical record. Bringing these voices to life is one of the things I like best about being an archivist.

Lori Birrell
Manuscript Librarian
University of Rochester

Categories: digital content, symposia, Women

Discovering Women in Political Papers

I became interested in Jeannette Rockefeller during the UALR Center for Arkansas History and Culture’s honoring of Winthrop Rockefeller’s 100th birthday anniversary. The Center holds the Winthrop Rockefeller Papers, UALR.MS.0001. Winthrop Rockefeller was born May 1, 1912. On May 1, 2012, the Center debuted an online exhibit devoted to the highlights of his life. I participated in a small way with the creation of this exhibit and found myself wondering: “But what about Jeannette Rockefeller, Winthrop Rockefeller’s wife?”

At the time, I knew almost nothing about Jeannette. As my curiosity increased about this woman, I discovered that little had been written on her life and interests. Fortunately for me, as a graduate student in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s master of arts in public history program, my curiosity resulted in an approved thesis topic: Arts Advocate: Jeannette Edris Rockefeller and the Founding of the Arkansas Arts Center.

 Jeannette’s interest in establishing an arts center in Little Rock, Arkansas, was just one of her many passions, e.g., education, women’s empowerment, mental health research, and civil rights. My thesis concentrates on the early years of the Arkansas Art Center and Jeannette’s role in its creation. But there is so much more to explore with respect to this fascinating woman’s life. Jeannette, as well as her husband, Winthrop, made enormous contributions to the state of Arkansas. Hopefully, future scholars will examine additional aspects of this dynamic woman, an Arkansas activist.

Kaye M. Lundgren
Archival Assistant
UALR Center for Arkansas History and Culture (Little Rock, Ark.)

Categories: political collections, repositories, Women

Women's Archives/Women's Collections: What does the Future Hold? - Women's Archives Symposium

Register now for a Women's Archives Symposium - Tuesday, August 13, 2013 (during the SAA Annual Conference)

Symposium Overview: Perspectives on Women's Archives: A Reader (ed. Tanya Zanish-Belcher with Anke Voss) will be hot off the press when SAA convenes in August.  Join us to celebrate its publication and ponder some of the issues it raises in a one-day symposium just the day before the opening of the conference.  Panelists will offer remarks to generate discussion on several topics:  the continuing relevance of separate women's archives, the impact of the digital world on record creation and use, and the role of the citizen archivist.  We look forward to a lively conversation among archivists, scholars, and the Reader's authors about the future of women's archives.

For more information and to register visit the symposium website:
http://tulane.edu/newcomb/womens-archives-womens-collections-what-does-the-future-hold.cfm

Categories: conferences, SAA 2013, symposia, Women

Kelly Wooten- Make Your Own History

I recently co-edited the anthology Make Your Own History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century (Litwin Books, 2012), with Lyz Bly, an instructor of gender studies and history at Case Western Reserve and Cleveland State Universities, who earned her doctorate in American History from Case Western Reserve University in 2010.  

I started thinking about this book three years ago in 2009 when Emily Drabinski, the editor for the Litwin Books Series on Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies, emailed me out of the blue and asked if I would be interested in writing a book about zines after being referred to me by Jenna Freedman, the zine librarian at Barnard. My initial reaction was no, thanks, but then I realized this was a great opportunity to further explore some questions I had been asking about how to document the modern feminist movement beyond zines. I also knew that I wanted to explore these ideas from a variety of perspectives, and to produce a volume that was accessible to a variety of audiences—not just librarians, archivists and academics. To this end, I invited Lyz Bly, who I knew through her time at the Sallie Bingham Center as a Mary Lily Travel Grant recipient when she was researching the zine collections for her dissertation Generation X and the Invention of the Third Feminist Wave.

Once we started exploring this topic, we realized it was hard to address without including pieces about queer activism and second wave feminism due to the intersectionality and fluid nature of feminism. I hope this book will highlight the Bingham Center’s leadership in documenting the modern feminist movement, but also share the other work being done at other institutions and encourage other archivists and activists to participate in this process since these movements are far too big for just a handful of archives to document. 

Make Your Own History addresses the practical and theoretical challenges and advantages of researching, documenting, and archiving recent and contemporary activists in the feminist and queer movements. Chapter topics include zines, documenting the LGBT community, the future of collecting electronic and online records, and how the women of the Second Wave continue to contribute to the feminist movement.

Janice Radway, Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and professor emerita of Literature and History at Duke University, recommends that this collection “should be read by librarians,  archivists, and book historians everywhere who are thinking critically about how best to preserve and study the record of lives lived outside and beyond the limits of the conventional.”

Read more about this book in an interview with Michele Burger on her blog “The Practice of Creativity”: http://micheleberger.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/archives-as-activism-documenting-feminist-and-queer-activism-interview-with-author-kelly-wooten/

Post submitted by Kelly Wooten, Research Services and Collection Development Librarian for the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and Librarian for Sexuality Studies for Perkins Library.

Categories: feminist archives, LGBT archives, new books, Spotlight, Women, zines

Women & the Civil War: Exhibit, Symposium, and CFP

Paper proposals are invited for a half-day symposium entitled “Women and the Civil War,” to be held April 27, 2012, at the University of Maryland, College Park. The symposium in being organized in connection with an exhibit at the university’s Hornbake Library, Women on the Border: Maryland Perspectives of the Civil War, which draws on materials in the University Libraries’ Special Collections. The exhibition focuses on the lives and experiences of ordinary women living in Maryland during the Civil War, using letters, diaries, photographs, sheet music, rare books, and other special collections materials as sources. A digital version of the physical gallery exhibition is being planned and will launch within the next few months. To learn more about the exhibit please visit: http://www.lib.umd.edu/mdrm/gallery/index.html

The symposium will provide a forum for discussing the multitude of roles women played in the war and the many ways in which the war affected them. The keynote speaker will be Thavolia Glymph, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Duke University. The symposium committee is especially interested in scholarship relating to Maryland women and the Civil War or to women’s experiences in the border states. Proposals relating to these topics will be given preference, but proposals relating to other aspects of the topic of women and the Civil War will also be considered. The committee welcomes proposals from graduate students as well as more experienced scholars. Papers should be no longer than twenty minutes when delivered. Paper proposals (500 words or less) and brief presenter bios should be e-mailed to Elizabeth Novara at enovara@umd.edu.

Submissions deadline is November 15, 2011, and the program committee expects to notify successful applicants by December 15, 2011.

Categories: call for papers, exhibits, repositories, symposia, Women

New Collections at SJSU

San Jose State University Special Collections & Archives has been working to build collections that document women's social movements in the Bay Area and records that document women in politics. San Jose became known as the "Feminist Capital of the World" in 1974, when Janet Gray Hayes was the first woman to be elected mayor of a city with a population over 500,000. She and others created a female dominion in local politics from 1974-2000. Gray Hayes donated her political papers to University in 2003, and we continue to build on her legacy. A few examples include:

• Silicon Valley YWCA Records (1903-present)
• San Jose League of Women Voters (1945-2002)
• National Organization of Women San Jose Chapter (1971-2005)

We recently brought in the records of the Women's History Museum Records, which document the early the formation of the International Museum of Women. To learn more about IMW, visit their website at: http://www.imow.org/home/index

These are some of the happenings in our archive, and the WCRT leadership team would love to post information on your holdings and new collections. Consider sending a brief post and we will publish it for you.

Danelle Moon
Director
SJSU Special Collections & Archives
Danelle.Moon@sjsu.edu

Categories: SJUS, Women