- 'A Continuing Supply of History':Thoughts from the Archive
I have been wondering how many HWJ readers, other than those I personally emailed, saw the press release from The Women's Library of 23 May 2011. This announced that eight documents - five from TWL, three from the Parliamentary Archives, all relating to the campaign for the female parliamentary franchise - had been awarded 'UNESCO Memory of the World' status. To quote from the press release:
UNESCO's Memory of the World programme was established in 1992 to promote preservation of and access to the world's archive holdings and library collections. . . . The UK Memory of the World Register was established in 2010 to highlight documentary heritage which holds cultural significance specific to the UK. The Register is managed by the UK Memory of the World Committee and complements the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register, which is a catalogue of documentary heritage of global significance and outstanding universal value.
If none of you saw any of the above, then either the jubilation of historians, feminists and archivists may require taking down a decibel or two, or these three sections of the intellectual community need to work harder to explain why this is such an exceptional award.
In the first place, the award designates the history of women's struggle for political equality as being of permanent national significance - a recognition that this struggle, and its ongoing resurgence in other forms, is of the essence of democratic relationships. In the second place it designates (some of) the records of that struggle as worthy of permanent preservation - an acknowledgement that the bland term 'heritage' embraces uncomfortable political narratives. In the third place, although this may seem more than obvious, this is an accolade for documents. It is not for the kinds of artefacts which more commonly capture the public imagination - the nation's favourite stately home, a work of visual art by Leonardo or Titian or Canova, nor is it for anything as televisual as the mediaeval Mappa Mundi or the Magna [End Page 251]
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Carta, but for nineteenth and twentieth-century papers whose texts are produced by pencil, pen, typewriter and the printing press. This is remarkable, because archives, and those for the modern period in particular, are usually the unglamorous also-rans of 'heritage' concerns - and the true costs of conserving them and making them available for research are not always understood, even by the scholars who appreciate them more than any other section of the public.
A huge amount of thought went into this bid for recognition. The selection of items was designed to 'illustrate the extensive dialogue between the people and Parliament', beginning with the 1866 petition in favour of women's suffrage presented to the House of Commons by John Stuart Mill (Fig. 2), and ending with Stanley Baldwin's letter of congratulation to Millicent Garrett Fawcett in 1928 (fig. 4). The inclusion of documents relating to both Fawcett, the strictly constitutional campaigner, and Emily Wilding Davison, who went on hunger strike in prison and later met her death under the hooves of the King's horse on Derby Day, was intended to 'give a personal narrative to a movement whose size and complexity is often only partially recognised' (see fig. 3).1 But if these important and well-known individuals may have been needed to catch the eye of a non-specialist panel member, the application also emphasized the fluidity of the suffrage movement, and the widespread and variegated forms taken by its grass-roots activists. By great good fortune...