Reconstructing a Life: The Archival Challenges of Women's History

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.