Women's Studies Interest Group Program visits the Maine Women Writers Collection
On Monday, May 20, 2002, nineteen librarians from Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire traveled to the Westbrook College Campus of the University of New England, in Portland, to visit the Maine Women Writers Collection.
After an informal social hour with coffee and pastries, the WSIG group held a short business meeting, in which outgoing co-chair Sarah Mitchell handed out a report listing all of the programs offered by WSIG in its 10-year history. She and co-chair Chris Smith (who will stay on for one more year in a transitional position) asked for volunteers to carry on this tradition. We are pleased to announce that Beth Lindsay, Literature, Languages and Women's Studies Librarian at UMass Dartmouth, has accepted the offer to serve as co-chair.
The program began with a talk by Dorothy M. Healy Endowed Professor of Literature and Health, Jennifer Tuttle. Professor Tuttle teaches in the English Department and has a role in the direction, development, and use off the Maine Women Writers Collection. Her presentation was entitled "Doing Archival Research on Women and Health in the Maine Women Writers Collection."
Tuttle has been doing research in 19th and early 20th century literature on how women used notions of health and illness in their writings, and how they used medical theories to negotiate other aspects of their lives, such as social issues. One such example is Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who fictionalizes an experience of the "rest cure" in The Yellow Wall-Paper. Whereas women with "nerve disease" were prescribed complete bed rest, men were frequently sent out west to go hunting and camping. Men got better while women went crazy. Tuttle wrote an article for Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers (vol. 17, no. 1, 2000, pp. 83-94) on letters from writer and invalid Elizabeth Stuart Phelps to S. Weir Mitchell, a physician and major proponent of the rest cure. Tuttle discovered the letters (unbeknownst to Phelps' biographer) in Mitchell's papers at the College of Physicians library in Philadelphia.
Ms. Tuttle then shifted her focus to the Maine Women Writers Collection, and how it can be used by scholars. She passed around postcards created from materials from the collection of Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat, a literary critic and Portland philanthropist. The postcards use photographs, architectural features from her house, and diaries to highlight her contributions to Portland.
Newly arrived from San Diego last fall, Professor Tuttle began teaching an English class at UNE entitled Writing and Women's Health. The course explored ways in which American women have used writing to understand and negotiate the experiences of health, illness, and healing. Coursework included choosing a primary source related to women's health in the Maine Women Writers Collection. Many of the Westbrook College students are enrolled in the College of Health Professions, which offers dental hygiene, nursing, social work, physician assistant, OT and PT programs. Topics covered in the class included invalids, women healers, mental illness, cancer, and modern maladies. Student papers included the following: an analysis of The Nervous Housewife (1920) ; Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (about a woman healer); a post-WWII book entitled Babies Keep Coming; a novel for adolescents on selfless models of womanhood, on Mother Went Mad on Monday (1944); and the 1853 Married Woman's Private Medical Companion.
Tuttle worked very closely with Archivist Cally Gurley and other library staff. She shared copies of the syllabus, which included a bibliography of MWWC items related to women and health and a schedule of class sessions held in the library or the MWWC reading room. Undergraduate students should not be sent to a special collections with an assignment to "go and find something to write about." Rather, they need some structure (such as provided by a list of relevant titles in the collection).
MWWC Archivist Cally Gurley's presentation was entitled Information Adventures in Women's Studies, Women's History, and Women's Literature.
Background information on the collection (from the MWWC web page):
Cally had handouts on the collection available, including an article she authored in volume 27, issue 4 (October 2000) of NEA (New England Archivists) Newsletter, entitled "Analysis of a Special Collection: The Maine Women Writers Collection at the University of New England."
Activities of the MWWC include in-depth reference services; talks and presentations, biennial conferences (such as the upcoming June conference, The Complex Web of Women's Friendships), donor relations, acquisitions work (through dealers or the creators of the materials), cataloging, archival processing, storage, equipment and climate control oversight, and outreach.
With respect to access, the MWWC has initiated a project to enhance existing catalog records for the collections. These enhancements include: LC class numbers, and the addition of LC subject headings and genre terms. Examples include:
They also added a 610 field with the corporate name Maine Women Writers Collection and the name and code UNE, allowing for a separate collation of the collection (which can be searched in Maine InfoNet, the statewide library catalog).
Cally showed us the MWWC home page and the results of the Women and the American Experience class, which studied primary source material in the Maine Women Writers Collection, and "selected, researched, described, and transcribed original material from the Maine Women Writers Collection for display and study on the University of New England Internet site." One such project on Woman Suffrage resulted in the identification of the author of an anonymously written diary.
This points to some of the obstacles in researching women's information: women's names change through time; women's writings are often anonymous because women have not been in positions of authority and credited as such; and historically, institutions and special collections have not considered women's materials important to collect. Additionally, women's names are rarely included in indexes or registers unless the indexes are specifically on women.
There are a number of reference works on women in archives:
Working in Women's Archives: Researching Women's Private Literature and Archival Documents, edited by Helen M. Buss and Marlene Kadar. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2001.
Women's Collections: Libraries, Archives, and Consciousness, edited by Suzanne Hildenbrand. NY: Haworth Press, 1986.
Subject headings for finding such resources include:
There are other obstacles and challenges, including staffing; the non-circulating nature of the materials; the need to forge relationships with faculty to bring this material into other courses of study; and the gatekeeper syndrome: the dilemma of a controlled access environment (and sometimes brittle materials) and the imperative to bring patrons in to experience the collections.
Cally concluded with some suggestions on what we as librarians can do to enhance access to women's collections. These include:
Following the program, WSIG members toured the facilities of the Maine Women Writers Collection before heading off to work, lunch, or home (some via Amtrak's new Downeaster service from Portland to Boston's North Station).