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  • Local, National, Transnational:Situating Women Across Archives
  • Tamara Harvey (bio)
"Women in the Archives: Using Archival Collections in Research and Teaching on U. S. Women," Maine Women Writers Collection's Fiftieth Anniversary Symposium (University of New England, Portland, ME, 11-14 June 2009).

As Jennifer Tuttle, Faculty Director of the Maine Women Writers Collection, observed in her opening remarks, "Women in the Archives: Using Archival Collections in Research and Teaching on U. S. Women" was one of a number of recent conferences treating gender and the archive. Noting that there is "something in the air," Tuttle introduced the symposium as enabling a broadly-conceived reassessment of what archives allow and what they obscure as well as leading us to consider how we may "learn to think about archives differently in order to bring more women to life." That "something in the air" perhaps most obviously includes the vast technological changes that are shaping our understanding of archives and archival research, enabling, though unevenly, more inclusive collections while democratizing both access to and creation of archives. However, this conference was as concerned with the dusty air of libraries and city streets as it was with cyberspace; as befits a symposium hosted by an archive with an explicitly regional purview, the "local" remained a focus throughout. While the conference attended to both the strengths and challenges related to the local circumstances of archives, the lives they contain, and the researchers and students who access them, it left room for further discussion of another topic "in the air": transnational and global studies.

The organization of this conference was particularly thoughtful, not only attending to a range of disciplinary conversations but also providing ample opportunity for discussion and critique. Panels on "Recovering Archival Sources," "Collecting, Archiving, and Curating," "Material Culture and Ephemera," "Photography and Visual Culture," "Pedagogy and the Archive," and "Private Writing and Biography" provided multiple forums for scholars, archivists, teachers, and students to discuss concerns and common ground in the use and preservation of archival sources while a chairs' roundtable on the final day enabled a more lengthy, thoughtful reflection on the conference as a whole than is usually the case. It was, [End Page 125] moreover, a symposium that dealt well with the material conditions that support such a gathering, providing a comfortable atrium with wireless access and laptops outside a large lecture hall, a number of receptions and meals, and relatively affordable registration fees. In short, this was a far cry from the poor repast served in Virginia Woolf's fictional Fernham College. Yet financial support, cultural hierarchies, and the particular conditions shaping women's archives remained key issues. Longstanding questions about finding, preserving, and interpreting texts and artifacts by and about women that do not fit within the "papers of" model of elite men continue to challenge scholars even as the approaches to these problems proposed by panelists are arguably more nuanced and, from an institutional perspective, better supported than those of a generation ago.

In speaking of larger-scale endeavors, panelists stressed institutional mechanisms. Kathryn Allamong Jacob demystified the screening process and restrictions placed on the Schlesinger Library's enormous collection of manuscripts and private papers. Sherrill Redmon and Megan Sniffin-Marinoff explained the labor, expense, and technological limits that shape and constrain inclusive and ambitious projects like Voices of Feminism at the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, which includes a significant oral history component, and the Women Working, 1800-1930 portion of Harvard's Open Collections Program, an extensive online archive. Likewise, Susan Belasco addressed the need for better recognition of editorial work during tenure reviews and institutional promotion of projects that might fill crucial gaps in the accessibility of well-edited, archived papers for major figures like Harriet Beecher Stowe. Challenges related to how diverse representation and democratic access is managed within institutional confines are not limited to large institutional projects. These, along with interpretive and ethical challenges concerning adequate treatment of a single, richly documented life, were discussed by Helen R. Deese, editor of Caroline Healey Dall's seventy-five-year diary, and Kandace Brill Lombart, who is working with an abundance of material from a living poet, Ruth Stone. They highlighted the individual labors...

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