Working in Women’s Archives: Researching Women’s Private Literature and Archival Documents

128 Pages·2001·1.9 MB·English

by  Marlene Kadar

Life Writing Series
Life Writing Series
In the Life Writing Series, Wilfrid Laurier University Press publishes life
writing and new life-writing criticism in order to promote autobiograph-
ical accounts, diaries, letters and testimonials written and/or told by
women and men whose political, literary or philosophical purposes are
central to their lives. Life Writing features the accounts of ordinary
people, written in English, or translated into English from French or the
languages of the First Nations or from any of the languages of immigra-
tion to Canada.Life Writingwill also publish original theoretical investi-
gations about life writing, as long as they are not limited to one author
or text.
Priority is given to manuscripts that provide access to those voices that
have not traditionally had access to the publication process.
Manuscripts of social, cultural and historical interest that are considered
for the series, but are not published, are maintained in the Life Writing
Archiveof Wilfrid Laurier University Library.
Series Editor
Marlene Kadar
Humanities Division, York University
Manuscripts to be sent to
Brian Henderson, Director
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
75 University Avenue West
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5
Working in Women’s Archives
Researching Women’s Private
Literature and Archival Documents
Helen M. Buss and Marlene Kadar
editors
w
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities
and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the
support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We
acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Working in women’s archives : researching women’s private literature
and archival documents
(Life writing)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-88920-341-5
1. Women authors, Canadian (English)−Biography−History and criticism.*
2. Canadian literature (English)−Women authors−History and criticism−
Theory,etc.* 3.Women authors, Canadian (English)−Archives.* I.Buss,
Helen M. (Helen Margaret). II. Kadar,Marlene, 1950- .
PS8089.5.W6W65 2001 C810.9′9287 C99-932232-X
PR9188.W65 2001
©2001
Copyright is retained by the authors. Permission to reproduce the journals
of Marian Engel granted by Charlotte Engel and William Engel.
Cover design by Leslie Macredie. Front cover image based on a cross-
written letter in the hand of Susanna Moodie (NAC, MG29 D81, Ms.
Division). Back cover image: Connie Kerr ’s dance card, University of
Toronto, 1895. Courtesy of Rosalind Kerr.
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5
∞
Printed in Canada
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3S6.
Contents
Introduction
Helen M. Buss ............................................................................. 1
Locating Female Subjects in the Archives
Carole Gerson ............................................................................. 7
Constructing Female Subjects in the Archive: A Reading
of Three Versions of One Woman’s Subjectivity
Helen M. Buss ........................................................................... 23
Researching Eighteenth-Century Maritime Women Writers:
Deborah How Cottnam—A Case Study
Gwendolyn Davies .................................................................... 35
‘‘ADusting Off’’: An Anecdotal Account of Editing the
L. M. Montgomery Journals
Mar yRubio ............................................................................... 51
Reading My Grandmother’s Life from Her Letters: Constance
Kerr Sissons from Adolescence to Engagement
Rosalind Kerr ............................................................................. 79
Personal Papers: Putting Lives on the Line—Working with
the Marian Engel Archive
Christl Verduyn .......................................................................... 91
An Epistolary Constellation: Trotsky, Kahlo, Birney
Marlene Kadar ......................................................................... 103
Afterword
Marlene Kadar ......................................................................... 115
Contributors .................................................................................. 119
v

Introduction
Helen M. Buss
The essays in this collection are the product of seven women’s research
experiments while working in the laboratory of archival collections of
women’s writing. Each contributor began by working on her own, with
a belief that the discoveries from her research in women’s archives
would yield new insight into women’s lives and women’s culture. The
articles in this collection reflect diverse starting points, as contributors
write of the challenges and opportunities that arise from encounters
with female archival subjects. These investigations occurred at the tenta-
tive beginnings of what we now see as the fortuitous coming together of
feminist theory, the breaking of traditional limitations set by the idea of
a literary ‘‘canon’’ of great writers and the increased use of archives to
rescue a female tradition in writing. Such efforts help us to theorize moti-
vations, methods and directions for future work in women’s archives. In
the Afterword Marlene Kadar offers some preliminary observations on
the constitution of the archive as a complex and incomplete site of femi-
nist knowledge. As a way of introducing this collection, I would like to
consider the variety of approaches and feminist preoccupations that link
the individual contributions.
Carole Gerson reminds us that whatever our motivations or goals are
when we enter the archive, our methods will be dictated in the first
instance by the problems of locating subjects for continuing study—the
detective work that uncovers the often hidden, poorly documented and
incomplete record of female persons. Archival research is always a
painstaking and time-consuming activity, but is made more so in a coun-
try like Canada, which has been organized as a national unity for little
over a century. The problematic nature of archival research increases
when we are dealing with the activities of marginalized people, those
not of the traditional white male elite. When we add to this our wish to
research private papers in order to map out the daily life experiences of
1
2 Working in Women’s Archives
women as well as to find their lost manuscripts, research in women’s
archives demands more than the usual patient search. Gerson’s research
has uncovered many helpful methodologies to help us, and in ‘‘Locating
Female Subjects in the Archives’’ she shares her knowledge gained in
such projects as the ‘‘Publishers’ Papers Project’’ at Simon Fraser Univer-
sity and in her continuing work on early Canadian women writers. Ger-
son asserts that archives are not neutral sites of primary research
materials but collections developed from specific social assumptions that
dictate what documents are valuable, social assumptions that construct
priorities that often exclude women’s documents. Her description of
print and electronic sources for finding women’s documents represents
an invaluable guide to researchers.
My own contribution to this volume, ‘‘Constructing Female Subjects
in the Archive,’’ follows from Gerson’s warning that the archive is not a
‘‘neutral’’ site. I find that it is not only not neutral in that society does
not value all documents equally, but that it is not ‘‘neutral’’ in terms of
the assumptions readers bring to it. I explore the problems I confronted
in bringing a balanced reading to the autobiographical documents of a
nineteenth-century Métis woman, Marie Rose Smith, by showing how
one portion of her memoir, that concerned with her being married off
for money, has been differently constructed by her first editors, the pub-
lishers of The Canadian Cattlemen (a magazine devoted to a settler view
of the West), by her granddaughter (whose Métis identity brings a differ-
ent reading to her grandmother’s archival materials) and by myself, a
white, academic feminist. Comparing the different constructions of
Marie Rose Smith leads me to understand my own ability to distort the
female subject in the archive and to advocate a more self-conscious and
complex exploration of the researcher’s subject position, her assump-
tions, biases and desires, as part of archival research.
Gwen Davies coins the term ‘‘re/deconstructionists’’ to describe the
complexity of the multiple goals that women academics in our times
bring to archives, as we both deconstruct the traditional views of the
female subject and reconstruct female subjects from the anonymity of
history. To carry out this double goal, Davies extends the idea of
archives as a paper repository of letters, diaries, newspapers and other
documents to include paintings and samplers, as well as gravestone and
monument inscriptions and designs. Davies also makes clear in ‘‘Research-
ing Eighteenth-Century Maritime Women Writers’’ that research into
women’s lives and art lost from the historical record is a work of
patience and perseverance. As she observes, ‘‘It has taken twelve years of
putting bits and pieces together to be able to say that I now have nine
Buss / Introduction 3
Cottnam mother or daughter letters and seven poems of one of our ear-
liest Canadian women writers’’ (Deborah How Cottnam).
While researchers such as Davies must spend years seeking relevant
material on their little-known subjects, editing the journals of a well-
known writer such as L. M. Montgomery creates another whole set of
problems. Mary Rubio’s autobiographical account of her many years of
research and editing offers a timely reminder to a new generation of
researchers and editors in a seemingly more welcoming atmosphere: that
the respectability of working with women’s lives and art has been a long
time coming and still presents special challenges. Rubio and her co-
editor Elizabeth Waterston faced problems that ranged from SSHRCC
juries that, in the early eighties, saw Montgomery as having a ‘‘very lim-
ited appeal and challenge’’ for scholarship to a publisher who, while
keen for a saleable publication, nevertheless found that, from a male per-
spective, many of Montgomery’s concerns were ‘‘trivial.’’ After publica-
tion the editors faced the anger of female fans who found the complex
subjectivity Montgomery’s Jour nals revealed to be profoundly disturbing
to the ideally ‘‘happy’’ Montgomery that popular myth maintains. In ‘‘‘A
Dusting Off’: An Anecdotal Account of Editing the L. M. Montgomery
Journals,’’ Rubio tackles almost every editorial headache that can plague
the researcher working with diaries, memoirs and letters, including how
to condense a lifetime of entries into several book-length volumes, how
to use footnotes productively in order to make an earlier culture alive in
the present and how to make a publication that is both rigorous in its
standards of scholarship and good reading for the general public. Most
importantly, Rubio deals honestly with her own difficulties in making
the ethical decisions that involve balancing ‘‘the individual’s ‘right to
privacy ’ against the public’s ‘right to information,’’’ when the revela-
tions of a sharp-tongued, articulate but often intolerant Montgomery
can hurt people still living, people who do not have the privileged access
to expression that theseJour nalsrepresent. Scholars planning editions of
a productive writer’s private literature will learn much from these
‘‘anecdotes,’’ including the helpful hints in the seventh of Rubio’s notes,
which details the problems of claiming hard-earned payments for ardu-
ous editing tasks from the Public Lending Rights Commission.
The centrality of the personal anecdote to autobiographical accounts
of feminist experiences in archival research is nowhere more dramatic
than in Rosalind Kerr ’s‘‘Reading My Grandmother’s Life from Her Let-
ters,’’ which begins by revealing Kerr ’s intense and ‘‘ambiguous’’ feel-
ings for a grandmother whose ‘‘austere demeanor’’ reflected her careful
obedience to patriarchal values. In her effort to find a more ‘‘resistant’’