silences in the archives

update this became a whole project

Silences in the archives is a well discussed if hotly debated phenomenon among the twittersphere (see ArchivesNext summary).  I use it here to refer to the gaps in archival collections around gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class, as well as a "difference" that has been less discussed, academic status or standing.  My current book project is an intellectual history of the rise and fall of women's culture in activist and academic feminism.   I've gotten pretty skilled at writing through the silences, incorporating the gaps as part of my narrative (WHY something is not there is as significant as things that are there), or making the very most out the fragments that remain.


However I find myself well and truly stuck right now.  I'm at the part of my book where I'm discussing the pivotal role of a series of conferences from 1978 to 1982.   I'm able to go into some depth about the papers given at some conferences and not at all about others due to the silences in the archives. 

Some of these silences aren't too unexpected.  The one gap that is particularly difficult relates to the March 1981 Conference on Women's Culture in American Society held at the Los Angeles Woman's Building.  I've been all over the archives of this organization for the better part of two decades and have come to the conclusion that they did not collect the papers as they did for other conferences.

Perhaps most troubling is the absence at the Schlesinger Library in the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Paper collection of any paper from the panel Power, Oppression and the Politics of Culture: Lesbian Perspectives with Pamella Farley, Bernice Goodman, Emily Jensen, and Barbara Smith.  (It is my impression that the scholars themselves deposit the papers so I'm not blaming the Schlesinger, although I'm not clear on the process. I for example have presented at the Berks and have never been asked to submit a paper). Audre Lorde published her paper in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women's Culture and in her collection Sister/Outsider. Barbara Smith's paper seems to be have been an early version of "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism (1982)."   You can also read Pamella Farley fascinating discussion of how she herself ended up with no copy of her paper.

Let me just say THANK GOD for the Lesbian Herstory Archive, which already saved me by getting me a copy of a paper given at the Second Sex Conference. They have DIGITIZED the tapes of the Power, Oppression and the Politics of Culture.

In writing about the Berks, or the Scholar and The Feminist Conferences, I'm able, in large part to either trace the papers to publications in academic feminist journals, or in later years, to anthologies on academic presses. However, since the point of my narrative is that activists have largely been written out of the history of the development of concepts like women's culture, I'm especially sensitive to taking an even-handed approach. I find myself with two choices, to deliberately not use fully the materials of academic feminists because they are disproportionate to those of activists or activist organized histories, or to keep dig dig digging, emailing still living participants (which sometimes opens a can of worms). At what point though do I accept the silences for what they are? Evidence of the disparate status, at least today, of the production of knowledge by and in two very different groups of feminists?

UPDATE

I hit another silence, this time on the identities of two women, described as black feminists, who spoke on the panel that provided Audre Lorde with the first platform for the Master's Tools. I found it strange that Lorde would criticize these women, and started digging.

Lorde, relegated to the role of “commentator” ) on the closing panel of the Second Sex Conference at NYU “The Personal and the Political” instead delivered, according to her biographer Alexis de Veaux a scathing indictment of “papers written by Linda Gordon,  Camille Bristow,  Bonnie Johnson, Manuela Fraire, and the conference coordinator, Jessica Benjamin — as embodying the limitations of the conference's scope”[Warrior Poet, 248]

A little digging revealed, from the fabulous Internet Archives text based version of the PDFs of Heresies created to accompany the documentary The Heretics that 

Camille Bristow and Bonnie Johnson signed letter by Combahee River Collective to Heresies in 1977  (Heresies #4) THE COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE  SECOND BLACK FEMINIST RETREAT November 4, 5 and 6, 1977  Cessie Alfonso Somerset, N.J. , Lorraine Bethel  Gwendolyn Braxton  Camille Bristow  Margie Butler  Nivea Castro-Figueroa Cheryl Clarke Charley B. Flint Domita Frazier Cecelia B. Homberg Gloria T. Hull Bonnie Johnson Audre Lorde  Carroll Oliver Linda C. Powell Sharon Page Ritchie Barbara Smith Beverly Smith.    

Bonnie Johnson immediately popped up via google as coauthor  with Cheryl Clarke, Jewelle Gomez, Evelynn Hammonds, and Linda Powell "Black Women on Black Women Writers," Conditions: Nine (1983), 101 an oft-cited article, but pretty much the only information I could find for her.

Hours of google searching yields the following information 

• student of Gerda Lerner’s at Sarah Lawrence (From Acknowledgements in Lerner's books)

• that her thesis was titled "There’s No More “Getting” on Their Knees’: An Historical Overview of Household Employment in the United States"  (from
Sarah Lawrence website)

and that she was one of three former Lerner students who who organized plaque commemorating 1979 Lerner at Sarah Lawrence after her death (from Sarah Lawrence Website)  Google also gives me the tantalizing snippet that she 

• was a teaching assistant along with Pam Elam, Carole Nichols, and Peggy Pascoe, perhaps at the Sarah Lawrence summer women’s history institute or for a class Lerner taught?

Reading the article in Conditions via Reveal Digital I find that she wrote for Womanews and New Directions,  was born 1949, and described herself as a Historian of black women, teacher, counselor, and trying to make it” living in montclair NJ.  I also find that she seems to be acquainted with Alexis De Veaux, Lorde's biographer, as De Veaux's play No is one of the works discussed in the article. Why then would De Veaux think that Lorde meant her and Bristow in the Master's Tools. Looking at Lorde's piece it seems clear that her targets are not the papers on this particular panel, but rather the conference panels themselves:

“to read this program is to assume that lesbian and black women have nothing to say of existentialism, the erotic, women’s culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power.”  (emphasis added). Looking at the conference panels from the Second Sex Conference, it becomes clear that those topics are the topics of the panels that occurred.

 Via search in Reveal Digital I find Bonnie Johnson in four more places

• credited with image accompanying article of Scholar and the Feminist WomaNews, Vol: 2, Issue: 5, (May, 1981), 10  

• credited with photo accompanying book review by Blanche Wiesen Cook, ironically entitled The Historical Denial of Lesbianism
WomaNews Vol: 2, Issue: 6, (June, 1981),4

• taught course on Second Wave Feminism: Black and White at New York Marxist School Feb 23 with Christine Greene WomaNews, Vol: 5, Issue: 2, (February, 1984):11

• Found also Talk she gave at Hofstra April 12 1984 on black women’s history WomaNews 5(4):12

So far it took about 4 hours using 6 different online sources (two from universities but not official archives) to locate information on this woman who co-authored one of the most frequently cited pieces about black women writers. She appears only twice in scholarly writing (Olson and De Veaux), both times mentioned only as on the panel when Lorde gave her famous speech.

The invisibility of lesbians of color was an oft-discussed topic during the 1970s, and the disappearance of lesbians of color from official archival repositories is frightening. It has led me to think of a new digital project, unghosting the apparitional lesbian with machines, that I want to enact via Scalar to submit to the upcoming issue of Ada on queer digital media praxis

More digging, this time via Google, reveals that Camille Bristow was associated with the NY based Center for Public Advocacy Research  She gave a paper on Teen Romance  The Sexual Politics of Age Relations at the Sex Wars conference (thank you Barnard Center for Research on Women for putting Scholar and the Feminist online). She appears in the Diary of a Conference on Sexuality and in Pleasure and Danger. It seems clear from Google Book seach that she is a researcher on teen sexuality. Later I realized via google that I should look for her in Conditions as well, which I do, finding her via Reveal Digital in one issue Vol: 1, Issue: 4, (Winter, 1979), 64 as a participant in another extremely well known article on Black women's letter writing by Barbara Smith and Beverly Smith "'I am Not Meant to Be Alone and Without You Who Understand': Letters from Black Feminists, 1972-1978." Conditions Four 4(1):62-77. This article cites Caroll Smith-Rosenberg's Female World of Love and Ritual and provides further evidence for the exploration of women's culture by black women as well as white.