Editorial Note: Reading Women in the Archives

The articles in this final issue of volume 23 broaden our definition of archives to transform the ways that we understand women’s lives across time and through space. This innovative scholarship challenges us to rethink histories of sexuality, family, community, and identity by literally expanding archival evidence, analyzing unusual sources and surveys, rereading demographic history, and reassessing the communicative power of visual media and films. They reflect one of the striking characteristics of scholarship in women’s history since it entered the academy in the 1970s: the creative use of archival sources and other materials to uncover and make meaning of the traces of women and gender relations in the past.

Charu Gupta in “Writing Sex and Sexuality: Archives of Colonial North India” maps out a new approach to colonial archives, using neglected materials and reading them in creative new ways. She treats popular Hindi writings, with their particular “idioms, languages, codes, and practices,” as an archive of their own and reads them with and against official colonial archival documents. Her work applies Foucault’s insight about the marginal yet ubiquitous place of sexuality in modern life to colonial north India, where she examines pervasive sexual anxieties and obsessions with the homosex, women’s reproductive roles, as well as female Dalit (outcaste) bodies among colonial rulers and within nationalist discourse. Colonial administrators and national elites disagreed on many things, but they shared normative assumptions about the gender order and caste hierarchies. Gupta’s close reading of official texts against the vernacular literature shows the contested nature of sexual knowledge in colonial India and its contradictory place in affirming and subverting caste hierarchies

Nancy Locklin’s “‘Til Death Parts Us: Women’s Domestic Partnerships in Eighteenth-Century Brittany” reinterprets a distinctive legal provision in the marriage code of the French province of Brittany. Originating in 1554, this law codified “natural and tacit societies” between unmarried individuals, including “two unmarried women” who were “tied by friendship.” To obtain legal recognition, nonmarital associations required “a legal agreement—such as a mutual donation or testament.” The provision is emblematic of the complexity of early modern Europe’s customs, traditions, and legal codes, which long confounded the efforts of dynastic and nation-state builders to impose legal uniformity on a bounded territory. Locklin uses statistical and demographic data, tax rolls, and testaments to describe the different groups of women who formed these societies. Because the practice preceded the science of sexology and the wide circulation of normative representations of sex, its relevance to current concerns about same-sex marriage, for example, remains unclear. The arrangements appear not to have been controversial at the time. They also demonstrate that, contrary to standard interpretations by early modernists, women could survive outside of marriage or the convent.

The next two articles reflect projects of imagination—an imagined community and a vision of modernity. The first one takes us to mid-nineteenth century Bohemia in the early decades of Czech nationalist awakening and the second one to occupied rump Bohemia toward the end of World War II. Beyond sharing geographical space, both articles center on close readings of previously unexamined archival sources.

In “‘A Matter of Physical Health and Strength’: Disciplining the Female Body and Reproducing the Czech National Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century” Dáša Frančíková interprets a little known 1850 patriotic text written by Jan Špott entitled “Marriage.” According to Frančíková, the publication was unique in the context of Czech nationalist thinking, because it related the health of the national community to the health and reproductive practices of the family. But it also reflected nationalist efforts elsewhere to remake the ideal community by controlling women’s reproduction. Frančíková focuses on the biopolitical content of the document—an early example, perhaps, of a Foucauldian understanding of power, with its turn from sovereign authority as agent to an internal process of individual self-disciplining. There was no Czech “state” at the time so Špott put his hopes in education to guarantee a healthy population which he placed at the heart of the new national community. Špott relegated women...