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
Thursday, July 03, 2014
Wednesday, April 03, 2013
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
Monday, October 31, 2011
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.
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