This is a collection of 18 articles dating from between 1975 and 2013, some published before and some written for this edition, that focus on different aspects of archives and history related to women. The book is divided into four thematic sections. The first section, “Reclaiming Our Past” covers the history of the development of women's archives, the identification of core collections, and this development's relationship with the development and institutionalization of women's history. The second section looks at the diversification of women's archives, after initial work to identify collections about women as a single group, when attention focused more closely on specific aspects of women's lives or specific groups of women. The third section focuses on the archival profession and practice, discussing particular collections including those of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, within the Library of Congress and non-institutional archives, in the form of self-published magazines and journals. The final section contains two essays, one reflecting on the development of women's history and on its possible future, and the other reviewing the essays in the collection with a view to demonstrating the importance to women's archives of feminist politics and academic historians. These narratives and the analysis thereof contribute to the three themes that the editors in their Introduction identify as being of ensuring significance for women's collections: collaboration between archivists and historians of women's history, challenges of accessibility, and the importance and challenges of community archives and the “citizen archivist”. Although in content the articles refer broadly to women and to women's history without limitation, the context is exclusively the individuals, institutions and history of the USA. The focus is on archival collections, mainly formal collections in academic, governmental or national institutions, with the exception of one article on collection of zines (non-commercial, small circulation magazines, often on-line).
The reciprocal nature of the relationship between the archivist and the academic historian is demonstrated throughout all four sections. Interestingly, it seems that it is the historians who are most often the driving force behind surveys or other initiatives devised to seek out and catalogue relevant collections. It is not surprising, perhaps, that early enterprises of this nature were given their original impetus by the first wave of feminism at the end of the nineteenth century, focused on the right of women to be allowed to vote. The politicization of the role and rights of women in society also had an impact on the development of women's history, and if one of the barriers appeared to be a dearth of primary sources, then an obvious response was to go and find such sources. This balance seems unchanged in articles written in and after the late 1990s. Archivists appear in the troika of those behind the continuing development of women's collections – of scholar, archivist and activist – during the second wave of feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s. But the impetus for this as described here was the combination of activists themselves wishing to ensure the perpetuation of the movement's history, and the maturation of women's history as a discipline seeking more, and more diverse, sources. As represented in this collection, there seems to be little direct engagement between archivists and activism, without the mediating presence of the historian. The articles contain little suggestion that archivists were prompted by ideas in archival theory, or whether archival theory had itself begun to adopt any ideas from feminism or black activists (or postcolonial, postmodernist or any other critical framework) and, if true, this is somewhat depressing.
The articles reflect more than once on the fundamental question of whether or not women's archives or women's collections should exist, or should continue to have a separate identity rather than simply becoming part of the mainstream archives. Several reasons are proposed or implied, but two of the most nuanced reflections are in the article co-written by Voss-Hubbard and Zanish-Belcher, and in Lerner's second article, “Holistic Histories: Challenges and Possibilities.” The former presents as a value of archival separatism that it “enriches the possibilities for collecting and documenting groups outside the mainstream” as well as validating women's experience documenting the lives of women. The latter took the view that in the last 40 years the focus for women's history has been on accounting for how women coped with the constraints placed on them by a patriarchal society and this insufficient to produce a women's history: the history of how diverse groups of women actually lived, and the impact that their activities had on mainstream life. Lerner is unambiguous about the value she sees of such redress, not only for women, but for men (to whom “the distorted patriarchal version of the past has been sold”) and for history as a currently astigmatic discipline. Her first article, “Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges,” begins with a succinct observation on a fundamental difficulty of writing the history of any group of people: that different women, and different groups of women (black, gay, poor) have different historical experiences.
One significant weakness of the reader is the scant contextualization. There is a short overview of the context in the Introduction, and the final article summarizes the content. There is no on-going presentation of the whole picture, nor critical analysis of the articles, their ideological significance or of any opposing theories or ideologies. Many of the articles have no clear date of writing, a strange omission that is both disorienting and frustrating. Articles that have previously been published have their publication information as an end-note.
The articles are thought-provoking, regardless of whether one agrees with the conclusions, and the analysis of the development and continued presence of women's archives could be transferred to the records of other marginalized groups. The editors initially wished to have an international, as well as national, element and this would have been a valuable diversification. All of the collections and sources referred to are within US institutions, of the kind in which 14 of the 15 authors are working either as practicing archivists or as academics. While the authors discuss a wide range of records types and sources, within the book itself the margins from which voices are represented is limited.
The quality of the articles is high, they are comprehensive and provide solid background (though with some overlap between articles) on their particular topics. The article on records related to human reproduction is interesting but it is a little difficult to envision the kind of record the author thinks is missing from “collections associated with the act of procreation and human biology.” Given the multiple sources she lists from medical, public and legal environments, as well as existing research papers, it seems that it is the private record that is absent, in which case, the issue might be a sense of privacy rather than cultural discomfort about the subject. The least convincing article is Audrey T. McCluskey's interesting if short comparison between how black women have been portrayed historically and how, in their own records, they have perceived themselves. Hers is a sweeping and somewhat emotive style, and the impressionistic result seems a little misplaced in a reader where all of the other articles are written within a more traditional academic discourse. Kären M. Mason's account of the survey to find sources for women's history is particularly engaging, Gerda Lerner's two articles are easily the most heavyweight and reflective pieces, while Virginia Corvid's discussion of self-published zines is a welcome inclusion from outside formal archives.
The editors are quite clear that their original intention – to bring together all academic writing on women's history and archives – was too ambitious to be achieved due to the volume of literature. So any articulation of questions left unanswered is less an identification of a gap and more a concurrence with the editors' own stated desire that the reader be the start, rather than the culmination, of such a history. Some questions the editors themselves touch upon in the introduction: how does one contextualize records of a virtual or on-line community? What is the relevance of archivists? To these can be added questions prompted but not answered by the articles. For example, if women's archives have developed in parallel with feminist, lesbian and other politics, has there been any analysis of the wider political significance of the archives, the archives interpreted as a mechanism for enabling injustice, rather than merely reflecting it? For those unfamiliar with the history of archives or of feminisms in the USA, this reader is a good introduction, and it will also be valuable to any archivist who needs to, or wishes to, think inventively about representation and absences in their collection.
