Seeing the Past through Archive-tinted Glasses

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    This week in the archives, our group had a lot of discussions about how to approach the topic of "Women and Gender Activism" with an expansive view of gender and avoid reifying gender stereotypes and the gender binary. Many of the folders and boxes we looked at this week focused on the publications and events put on by the Crozier Center at Kenyon, which has historically been a space reserved for women. We talked about how gender activism goes beyond solely women's activism, and could include a variety of genders and transgender causes as well. So far, we have included items that document events like "women's week" and "women's retreats", as well as documents that show Kenyon student's support for procedures like abortion, a reproductive justice issue that affects people of many genders. The question then became how to limit our scope, and how much we want to distinguish between gender and sexuality activism, which have historically been intertwined (though not without conflicts of their own).  As we combed through the available boxes in the archives to decide which ones we were interested in requesting, we ran into an interesting issue: very few are explicitly labeled as "gender" related (it's mostly either "women," "men," or "queer"), and many archival items that may give us insight into gender activism are not labeled as such (like sorority and fraternity documents).

    In "The Past in the Present versus the Present in the Past," sociologist Michael Schudson outlines the factors that impact how successfully a person or group is able to manipulate the past. These are the structure of the available past, the structure of individual choices, and conflict about the past. I'd like to focus on the structure of the available past in this post. Schudson uses this phrase to mean that our "available materials are far from infinite" and that certain events or ideas about the past hold a lot of influence and "self-perpetuating rhetorical power" while others are passively forgotten or not commemorated. Classic novels or works of art are examples of items that have this kind of power, are enshrined in the canon, and only become more embedded over time. In sociology, for example, the work of Weber, Marx, DuBois, and Durkheim are considered essential to the canon of sociology, and any sociologist unfamiliar with this canon will not be taken seriously. Even if one wants to challenge the canon, they have to study it first.

    This idea of the available past is quite relevant to our group's efforts in two ways. The first is that Kenyon holds and enforces a certain idea of itself and its past which often does not acknowledge its exclusion of women. To explain what I mean, consider the founding story. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard about Philander Chase's choosing of Kenyon's geographic location with the phrase "this will do". His name and story are commemorated in the songs we sang in our first year, one of the first things we learn about the history of the college. On the other hand, I actually don't know when women were first allowed to attend Kenyon, or how that change came to pass. While this is information that I am now determined to learn, I think it is interesting and telling that it isn't shared, commemorated, and repeated in the same way as the "founding moment" of Kenyon is. Another way the structure of the available past shapes our thinking is through the organization of the archives -- beyond simply not having access to every material about the past, professional archivists choose to organize the information in a certain way. This inherently impacts how we think about the information available to us. For example, as we discovered, it was easy to find information about "women's" activism, but much harder to pin down where to look for gender activism as a more expansive term. Of course, we are not confined to the structure of the archive entirely -- as I mentioned, our group is thinking carefully about how to frame our topic and strategically use the archives to gain a more full understanding of what gender activism means at Kenyon before narrowing down our focus. However, just like the past shapes our perception and understanding of the present, the way that archives are organized influences how we in the present look back on and understand our past. 

 Reference:

Schudson, Michael. 1989. “The Past in the Present versus the Present in the Past” Pp. 287-290 in The Collective Memory Reader, edited by Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

 

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