Library to index role of women in history

Yellowed letters and dusty family albums can signify old memories to family, but such documents are also essential to historians trying to get a clearer picture of the past.

"People don't know that their stuff is valuable," said Rachel Onuf, director of the new Women in History project at the Clements Library, which, by coincidence, commences during Women's History Month.

Onuf and her assistant Carrie Bickner will spend the next 18 months sifting through nearly 1,500 manuscript collections in order to create a comprehensive index of the library's holdings on women.

"It's a luxury to be able to spend all day reading manuscripts," Onuf said.

The collections include letters, photographs, theater programs and newspaper clippings of women throughout history.

SARA STILLMAN/Daily Rachel Onuf works at the Clements Library yesterday to archive the library's collections of manuscripts and letters by and relating to women.

In current library indexes, such documents are usually lumped under the category "family correspondence," with no description of the content.

This oversight renders much of the library's vast resources virtually inaccessible.

"There is a real need to flesh out the woman content," Onuf said.

Bickner emphasized the benefits of the index for future research.

"It will help researchers overcome a gender bias that is built into the means for accessing historical information," she said.

A library search on the Civil War, for example, only would yield topics such as military campaigns, weaponry, economics and diplomacy - areas dominated by men in the 1860s.

"The materials are often by and about men," Bickner said. "This gender problem is especially true for materials that were catalogued by an older generation of librarians who did not need to support research on the history of women.

"We are ... creating a means of direct access to sources by and about women," she said.

The project also holds personal benefits for the historians.

"The materials that we are reading and describing are quite rich," Bickner said. "I am now reading a series of letters from a Civil War Union soldier ... and the woman that he eventually marries.

"The language ... is so crisp and vivid that I am getting to know these people and their relationship to this period in history," she said.

The project's focus on personal documents reflects an ongoing change in the way all history is done, Onuf said.

"People aren't just writing biographies of dead white men anymore; they are doing social history - the mundane daily life and the 'nobodies,'" Onuf said.

Abigail Stewart, director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, noted the importance of this change.

"In exploring contemporary women's lives, we have many resources available: interviews, observation, questionnaires from the women themselves and from people they know," Stewart said. "When, however, we try to understand women's lives in the past, archival records - correspondence and diaries - are the closest thing we have to direct, first-person accounts."

Onuf said she hopes the in-depth index, when completed, will provide a model for archiving all historical manuscripts.

"I'm uncomfortable about thinking about it just as women's history. It is about women's roles within social systems," which also involve men, Onuf said.

The Women in History project received funding from the New Century Fund for Diversity, a grant program within the University that targets progressive research projects.

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