lovehistory.net

• What is your inquiry question?
How have memories and artifacts of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the United States in the 1960s and 70s survived to the present day? Is it possible to gather and collect them in one place so that they can be presented to both a scholarly and lay community in the interests of cataloging the history of that movement, as well as complicating the existing historical narrative of that movement?

• What do you want your users to learn?
Initially the site will allow users to evaluate sources so as to construct their own narrative of Second Wave feminism based on historical evidence, however, at later stages the site itself will expand to include exhibits, based on the archive, which provide a scholarly interpretation of the evidence for users. It is impossible to find or develop the “real story” of Second Wave feminism, but I feel it is important for users to remember or “learn” that it happened, and through interacting with artifacts and oral histories, to read and understand how those who participated in or observed the movement itself felt about the event they were creating or watching.

• What is your methodological stance?
Though an archive may lack explicit narrative, I believe my methodological stance is definitely cultural and feminist. Cultural because I am seeking sources beyond print media in order to contextualize them and read them for their own historical significance as texts and symbols unto themselves. The feminist approach to historiography may seem self-evident, as the archive positions feminism and women’s history at the center of the narrative. Indeed, those are its feature components. The archive, because of its subject matter, will naturally focus on questions of gender that are essential to feminist scholarship.

It will be important for the archive to also attempt a multi-cultural, and perhaps post-colonial and global approach to collecting material as well, as feminism in the United States did not operate in an isolationist vacuum, but instead learned from and informed other women’s and social movements around the globe. Also, it is important to remember that feminism was not a white, middle-class female movement, though it is often portrayed that way, and very often acted that way, consciously or not. Other ethnicities inside the United States also participated in Women’s Liberation, and their stories/resources must be included in the archive as well.

Also, the site will use digital history methods that seek to build an online community and to encourage user participation in the creation of the archive. Users will be sought out and solicited both in the real world and online to submit their memories and their memorabilia. The site will build connections with other feminist history projects online and in the real world, and well develop a blog and a discussion board to facilitate the growth of a community related to the site that will not only contribute to the archives but will begin a dialog between users (and between users and builders) that will shape the nature of the archive and future exhibits, as well as work to build a consciousness about feminism and feminist history.

• How does your design work to support these goals?
The design of the site is incredibly simple and privileges access to the archives as well as the archive submission page. Omeka’s simple and easy to use interface will make submitting to the archive easy. The blog will provide users with an informal narrative structure of the archive for curious users, and the discussion board will allow for questions to be aired publically. The user will therefore have many forums to express themselves and contact site maintainers, and will also have easy access to the archive whether submitting, researching, or browsing. The builders themselves will also, therefore, have easy access and direct connections to their users as well, allowing a continuous and productive feedback loop.

• What new things do you need to learn?
Collecting data for this project will present many challenges, which may be one reason why a project of this scale has yet to be attempted. First of all, especially in regards to print media, much of the primary source material (i.e pamphlets, flyers, posters, etc.) created about this event was self-published and highly ephemeral. It was not meant to be kept but was created to rapidly disseminate information among members of the movement. Tracking it down may prove difficult, and it is hard to predict its level of decay, as much of it may exist in private holdings that the original owners took no steps to adequately preserve.

Secondly, because this was a recent movement with many political dimensions, this site will present challenges in relation to privacy concerns, and valid fears of harassment or retribution as people share their stories. How will we filter through posts that may contain bias or threats? How can we create an environment where our participants feel safe to share openly and honestly?

Another important point is that many women and men who interacted with Second Wave feminism did not identify themselves as feminists. Many had a consciousness of the movement and its goals at the time, and may even have lived its principles, but neither then nor now would they label themselves as feminists. This experience is actually considered by some to be the dominant narrative of women’s experience in entering public life in the 1960s, with the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left as catalysts and everyday women capitalizing on the Civil Rights Act and following old trends flooding the workplace while feminists pushed the boundaries of intellectual conceptions of gender that were not always reflected in public consciousness. How do we entice and solicit the important stories from participants who acted from the sidelines? Will they be turned off by the overtly feminist focus of the site? How can we engage them as well as our pre-existing and at first glance easily labeled user base?

• How will you go about learning these things?
A simple and complex solution seems to be we will learn by doing. In terms of answering all of these questions the most important tool seems to be community building, especially in reaching our last goal. If we start through personal connections and connections with pre-existing communities we can create a credible environment where people feel safe to share with us. We can solicit submissions from people who have sources cataloged in other archives or buried in their attics as advertising and word-of-mouth spread. And through building these networks, hopefully we can reach those sideline participants who may have stories to tell us as well, and in privileging their narrative in the archive along with explicitly feminist narratives, they may feel included and therefore more likely to share their version of events. To reiterate, for this purposes creating an inclusive environment will be key.

• What is the rational for the decisions you’re making about source choices (by type, collection, time period, etc.)?
Sources will be collected that relate to the Women’s Liberation Movement in the United States in the 1960s and 70s, or what is also known as Second Wave Feminism. Many of the materials collected will have been created during these two decades, however, we will also archive any material related to these decades, whenever their creation date may be. This will allow us to include oral history resources created after the time period specified, for example. Historical “events” are often isolated by historians as a means of categorization or a type of narrative shorthand, however, no event can truly be isolated from the time periods surrounding it/narratives preceding and following it. Though this archive seeks to feature materials that tell the story of Second Wave feminism in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, it will do so by collecting all sources related to this time period no matter their date of creation in order to place this occurrence within the narrative, or contextualize it, as well as reconstruct or re-create the narrative of the events themselves.

Because this is a recent movement that occurred in tandem with the explosion of mass media and mass culture in the United States, I expect to be able to collect all types of media beyond traditional print sources, including ephemera, memorabilia, video recordings, and audio recordings that catalog the history of Second Wave feminism. Because it is a recent event, I also expect to be able to collect a sizeable number of oral histories created by participants and observers that recreate the event. All these types of media will be collected in the interests of presenting the most complete picture possible or the most sizeable database possible of historical sources concerning this movement. We “lose” history every day, and this archive will work to preserve these artifacts and memories, no matter what form, before they too are completely lost to the passage of time.

• What questions remain for you to provide a convincing grant application?
Just answering these questions has made me feel like my application may become more convincing, though they also seem to have raised so many more challenges! Sharon and others have pointed out that my work plan needs attention, and I think in viewing their comments on this plan as well as my own thoughts above, my greatest challenge will be in writing convincingly of how to envision building this “community” that is so crucial to my archive’s existence. I believe this means I have to ponder my audience a bit more. I want it to be a scholarly source, yes, but it seems like many of users are likely to not be academics, especially those who I anticipate will end up submitting sources. How can I target these two communities simultaneously? What is the degree of overlap?