What problems do archives raise in trying to reconstruct the lives of women who leave no written record? My first contact with these problems relating to sources can be traced back nearly 40 years ago to my post-graduate studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada. As part of my Master’s course I took a module on Slave Societies. The tutor, Michael Craton, had written a seminal text on slave resistance in the Caribbean, Searching for the Invisible Man. It was this text that gave me the inspiration for the research into African and African Caribbean slave women that was transformed into my first book. Where was the ‘Invisible Woman’ and what was her contribution to slave resistance? What I discovered was that slave women were far from ‘invisible’; they existed in parliamentary papers and reports, contemporary published accounts, illustrations and unpublished diaries, plantation records and ship’s logs and registers in various archives. But such sources revealed the slave woman of the white imagination, what Maya Angelou described as a ‘fabulous fiction’ of multiple, predominantly negative, identities.
Archival sources and published accounts provide descriptions of slave life refracted through white, mostly male, eyes and, on the surface, reveal more about the preoccupations, prejudices and fantasies of contemporary observers than the realities of slave women’s lives. The same may be said of accounts by white women, pro-planter and abolitionist, for whom female slaves reinforced their own sense of racial and class superiority. Additionally, such sources recorded only aspects of slave life that directly related to European interests. Slave owners had little interest in the culture of the slaves unless it directly threatened those interests. Moreover, there is evidence that slaves were keen to protect certain aspects of their lives from prying white eyes.
Nevertheless, we can glean insight from archival sources by reading them against the grain and with a fresh eye. For instance the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, a small-scale slave owner in Jamaica in the latter half of the eighteenth century, are often cited in relation to sexual exploitation of slave women and related cruelties. Yet his diaries can also enable us to piece together the lives on his long-term slave ‘wife’, Phibba, and her close female kin, their entrepreneurial activities and contribution to the slave community life. The women in Thistlewood’s world were clearly immersed in the shadowland of African rituals of which whites had little knowledge or understanding.
Thistlewood’s diaries are exceptional in their richness and detail but, in general, when working with archival and other sources, we can only catch glimpses of women’s inner, private lives, as opposed to their public persona as economic units of production and reproduction. Thus such sources provide but limited insight into how female slaves subjectively experienced the trauma of enforced migration and the Hobbesian fabric of their everyday lives. Can we ever really get into the minds of women such as Thistlewood’s ‘Old Sybil, bit with a spider….delirious [and] singing her country’? Arguably, to gain a more rounded understanding such women’s lives and those of their free descendents in the African diaspora, we must also incorporate interdisciplinary sources such as anthropological and archaeological evidence. Perhaps more controversially we need also to draw on oral traditions, and ‘sites of memory’ which embrace cultural forms such as dance. The value of such sources in reconstructing the histories of oppressed groups who leave few written records now has fuller recognition. Searching for the ‘invisible woman’ also demands a degree of what the late Eric Hobsbawm termed ‘imaginative empathy’ to compensate for absence of sources. But in using less conventional approaches one is exposed to criticisms stemming from a deep prejudice on the part of historians (often male) who are wedded to the archives and orthodox history writing. This raises the question as the whether there is a hierarchy of subjects deemed suitable for allegedly ‘real’ historical research. At the top of this hierarchy are studies of essentially masculine power and privilege, for which ample archives exist, whilst working class, Black and indigenous women, marginalized or absent in such archives, are located at the bottom.
My latest research has moved on to the lives of African and African Caribbean women in the era of late colonialism post 1918 and I have made extensive use of the rich archival sources at LSE relating to colonial development and decolonisation. Sources for this period are plentiful. However, I have encountered similar problems with the ways in which African women are represented in white writings and archival collections such as personal diaries. The official archives are either silent on women or reiterate historical stereotypes going back to the slave era. Women focus primarily when they are seen as a barrier to modernizing development policies, or a threat to colonial stability as with the Women’s War in Southern Nigeria in 1929. An important development in this era is the expansion of archives left by women. This reflects the emancipation of women after 1918 which enabled them to more fully participate in academia and the colonial project. Yet white women continued define their own superior identities in relation to African women with whom who they found little common ground and this is reflected in archival collections.
In conclusion, I have always had a difficult relationship with the archives, in particular the allegedly authoritative, official archives. I recognise the importance of archival sources but also the need to subvert them, to read between the lines, and to go beyond the contemporary discourses and knowledge frameworks in which they are embedded. I am irritated by dismissal of what are regarded as less valid sources that can help illuminate silences in history, particularly the invisible women of the past who are usually not part of the consciousness of the originators and gatekeepers of archives. This raises important issues relating to the very nature of archives; is there a gender bias in the way they are selected, catalogued and prioritised in relation to historical worth? Who determines what subjects are historically valid? Are women’s archives, including the letters, diaries, life memorabilia of ordinary women, regarded as less valuable than men’s as sources of ‘authoritative’ history? Here lies the indispensable value of the Women’s Library as a unique resource to protect and promote sources for researching women’s and gender history that can challenge the masculine bias in archival and other sources that are fundamental to working with the past.
Barbara Bush (c) March 201
Barbara Bush is convenor of the Women’s History Network and Emeritus Professor, Sheffield Hallam University.
This was my contribution to a panel discussion on ‘Working With the Past’, organised by Asiya Islam, Equality and Diversity Adviser, London School of Economics and Political Science, on the 12th March to celebrate Women’s History Month and to promote the rich Women’s Library archives, recently relocated to LSE library. The other panel members were Sally Alexander and Kate Murphy and the three brief presentations generated a lively discussion about archival research. Thanks to Asiya and her colleagues the evening was a great success.
