Finding Women in the Archive: Introduction

Fatima the Berber slave, Frances Nacke Noel, Amy Jacques Garvey, and Krishnobhabini Das are hardly household names. With the possible exception of Garvey, even when they might be known in their respective historiographies, they are at best obscured by more important public figures, by large–scale events deemed more significant than those which frame their lives, and by grand narratives that may touch on contexts of significance to them but which effectively brush by them, in part because of the comparative lack of archival trace to secure them in the sightlines of history. In this forum, which began as a panel at the 2005 American Historical Association annual meeting in Seattle, Washington, called "Women in the Documents," four historians grapple with the challenges not just of unearthing heretofore unknown women, but also of coming to grips with how and why the "smallness" of their work or their worlds illuminates dimensions of the past we need urgently to understand—in part because the project of encounter which each example provides requires us to scrutiny the practice of "recovery" and to engage its limits and possibilities as historical method.

So we begin with Fatima (also known as "Ana"), who erupts into the historical record in only one extant document—and a highly prejudicial one at that. Mary Elizabeth Perry reads the Inquisition record both against the grain and in the context of what we know and can surmise about the cosmopolitan universe of sixteenth–century Malaga. Fatima emerges as a woman of purpose—if not in control of her own destiny, then at least probably mindful of her limited power in the several communities (religious, cultural, and socioeconomic) she traversed. Her defiance of the ecclesiastical machinery means that she survived in history, even while her ultimate fate is unknowable. Sherry J. Katz immerses us in a completely different world—that of radical California women at the turn of the last century—and in so doing, she argues that these women were at the heart of some of the key transformations of Progressive reform and vision. Despite the localness of their work—and of course because of it—socialist–feminists like Noel pioneered a dual political strategy that anticipated national feminist methods. Katz also documents her own equally important, dogged attempts at re–suturing the public and private lives of her subjects, plotting the frustrations and the thrill of discovery in turn. Ula Taylor's piece on Jacques Garvey continues in this metanarrative mode, describing the "crisis of archival recognition" that historians of African American women face and which undergirded her book project on the life of a woman scarcely known except as Marcus Garvey's wife—scarcely known in part because of the apparent paucity of genuinely archival materials. The "textual snapshots" Taylor was able to glean from her research enable her to draw a fuller picture of what she termed in The Veiled Garvey "community feminism," itself a challenge to what have historically been individual–centered impulses of women's history as a practice. Taylor's commitment to materializing "the reality of multiple narratives" is neatly reflected in her own account, which underscores the many–tentacled lives of women and men that enable us to appreciate who Jacques Garvey was and what her legacy is not just to African American women, but to women's history more generally as a political project and a method of representing the past. Last but not least is the history of Das, which Nupur Chaudhuri sets out in considerable detail. Like Fatima, Das's life is evident from a single text; like Noel, she struggled with the relationship between public and private; like Jacques Garvey, she was both linked to and uncontained by a conjugal relationship that at least in part enabled her to register as a subject in and of history. Chaudhuri suggests that in Das's travelogue we have an invaluable archive of gendered subjectivity—one that is not necessarily representative of Bengali women of the time but which contributes to our knowledge of how movement through imperial spaces helped to produce critical—and even feminist nationalist—ethnographies of colonialism in...