Sometimes panels constructed from individual presentation submissions turn out to be perfect matches. That was certainly the case yesterday at the “Women Making Histories” panel created by the FemRhet program committee.
Allison Douglass and Kristen Garrison presented “On Women Making Women’s History: Interrogating Assumptions, Suspending Expectations,” speaking to their research into the Elsie Slaughter archives at Vassar College. The presentation was rich with details of Allison and Kristen’s first and continuing encounters with Elsie Slaughter–and how their work with the archive revealed to them their own (sometimes problematic) assumptions about archival research and about the historical enterprise itself. They note a critical shift in their assumptions when they move from a mode of “recovery” to one of “discovery” in engaging the archive.
They commented that the important shift in their work came when they asked themselves, “Who is this woman?” and “How does she know any of this?” The questions moved them toward “strategic contemplation” proposed by Royster and Kirsch in Feminist Rhetorical Practice and demonstrated just the sorts of engagements and principles I proposed as part of my discussion of peripheral methodologies.
The two presentations, I believe, complemented one another as well as any two presentations could. I was able to refer directly back to their work with Elsie Slaughter as a means of demonstrating just the sort of work that is being done in feminist historical research but for which I (and I now think others) don’t really have a name.
Vassar College Archive Subject Listing
For example, Kristen and Allison noted the wide range of topics in the Slaughter archive, as represented in the Vassar subject listing (right). We can see just from this listing the various and rich ways historians might narrate any number of stories about Slaughter. She exceeds categorization and exceeds any single representation. Examining her life and work through a methodology that enlarges rather than limits our vision, we avoid dismissing her because she doesn’t meet some standard or expectation of achievement as marked by publication, notoriety, or contribution to the arts and therefore has no “value” for historians. Instead, by moving to “discovery,” Kristen and Allison are positioned to represent the “contours of women’s lives” apart from the masculinist chronological master narratives of achievement and success (Ware 413, 417, 429). Elsie Slaughter strikes me as an eminently valuable figure for historical study.
Works Cited
Garrison, Kristen, and Allison Douglass. “On Women Making Women’s History: Interrogating Assumptions, Suspending Expectations.” Arizona State University. Memorial Union, Tempe, AZ. 28 October 2015. Panel Presentation.
Ware, Susan. “Writing Women’s Lives: One Historian’s Perspective.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 11.3 (2010): 413-35. Print.
