My name is Rhia, and I’m currently working on my master’s degree in Gender Studies at Stirling University, and diving into the archives here at Glasgow Women’s Library. As part of a project with Glasgow Women’s Library, I’m investigating the ways ephemeral items are considered in the archives.
In this final blog, I want to try to tie together all of the ideas I’ve talked about in my last three entries, and find out about the significance of the archive for women’s history.
Museums and archives are places of preservation, where history is remembered, recorded and kept in trust for those who will come after us. But what is also happening in museums is a creative process – museums create a canon of history, and that canon usually excludes women. There are lots of reasons for that, but usually it is a conscious choice made my curators and collectors – with limited budgets, and funding which continues to reduce year-on-year, decisions must be made to preserve or destroy items. That decision is one which ultimately decides what the public, you and I, know about the past.
If a woman drives an ambulance in world war two, but nobody keeps her photographs or commission papers, did her engine really make a sound?
In my blog entry about Dorothy Dick, I talked about how her photographs of family and pets and her working life help us to draw nearer to her experience of wartime Glasgow. Without the work being done here at the Library, her experience would be lost to us. Her record of her life, now open for us to access, allows us to re-imagine the second world war as a time of real vibrancy, in the same way as Catherine Morrison’s photo albums from her travel in the war, working as an Ophthalmic nurse. Elaine Burton’s travel album is an enchanting look at post-war North America, and an insight into her charming personality, while standing as a testament and reminder of how easily women’s items can be lost outside of the precarious archive situation.
The vision of GWL is “a world in which women’s historical, cultural and political contributions to society are fully recognised, valued and celebrated by all,” and crucially, for that to happen, we must have access to the contributions of women, which have been ignored for far too long. The GWL archive is a publicly accessible resource working towards a surer future for women’s histories. The power of these stories, in the archive at Glasgow Women’s Library, is to re-write the historical canon. Preserved, these women’s lives will continue to add to our understanding of the past, and the rich lives women have led.
Finally, I’d like to add that, sadly, there are so many aspects to these collections that I haven’t had the space or the time to tell you about, and so many items I haven’t been able to show in my blog entries. I’ve included photos of some of the items from the three collections which I found fascinating, but there are even more items to explore, from jigsaws and cocktail recipes in Dorothy Dick’s collection, to college pamphlets in Elaine Burton’s travel album, and the fascinating Kukri, a curved knife given to Catherine Morrison during her travels.
If you would like to visit the Library to access the collections I have been looking at, or any others, and to enquire about donating materials, please contact the Library by clicking here.
