In The Archival Turn in Feminism, Kate Eichhorn notes that â…what might be properly described as âwomenâs archivesâ or âwomenâs collectionsâ have long been governed by the teleological assumptions upon which most archival collections are structured, there is nothing necessarily teleological about the development of explicitly feminist archives and special collectionsâ (Eichhorn, 2013, p.31). One might even say that feminist archives and special collections exist in order to complicate seemingly innate assumptions of a singular narrative of history. The question of how to ensure a feminist method of curation and even that the act of archiving itself is a mode of feminist action has been a prevalent dialogue among various publics.
The question of how to ensure a feminist method of curation and even that the act of archiving itself is a mode of feminist action has been a prevalent dialogue among various publics.
In 2014, Smith College launched an initiative to create a distinctive, womenâs-focused, liberal arts-grounded Massive Open Online Course, âThe Psychology of Political Activism: Women Changing the World.â It launched in early 2016. The course is based off of a seminar that has been taught for over a decade by Smith Psychology Professor Lauren Duncan (who also is the MOOC instructor). Core to its MOOC iteration was inclusion of Smith undergraduatesâ research.
Through the framework of psychological theory, students of Duncanâs Spring 2014 seminar mined primary resources from the Sophia Smith Collection of Smith College, the oldest and one of the largest womenâs history collections in the United States and specializing in womenâs activism, social justice, reproductive justice, rights, and equality across racial and class boundaries. Each student chose one of nine activists, Virginia (Ginny) Apuzzo, Byllye Avery, Joan Biren (JEB), Katsi Cook, Luz Alvarez Martinez, Loretta Ross, Gloria Steinem, Nkenge Toure, and Carmen Vazquez, selected from the Voices of Feminism Collection in the Sophia Smith Collection and spent at least four hours a week in the archives over the course of a semester. From the activistsâ oral histories and donated papers, students used Trello and then Timeline JS to curate timelines, which highlighted key moments in the activistsâ personal and political development. Their scholarship is central featured in the MOOC as each unit of the MOOC highlights a different contemporary activists. The timelines are foundational for each week in the MOOC course, which focuses on a different contemporary activist.
When we embarked on the MOOC, we made a commitment to our teamâand to ourselvesâthat it would a feminist project. … Defining what a feminist project could be was a challenge.
In her foundational essay, âThe Masterâs Tools Will Never Dismantle The Masterâs House,â anthologized in the equally influential This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (1981), Audre Lorde foregrounds how crucial the process of inclusion must be from the very seed of feminist project: âWithin the interdependence of mutual (non-dominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant to effect those changes which can bring our future into beingâ (Lorde, 1983, p.107). As a feminist collection and archive, the Sophia Smith Collection is rich with many womenâs voices, documenting the diverse lived experience of women, especially through the Voices of Feminism Collection which the activists were selected from. As such, the seed project was feminist in concept and expression.
However, despite the misconception in some public quarters that archives are stagnant fragments of the past, we believe that archives must not only document the past and its silences but that they must also inform the present and guide us in crafting a future. As a result, the way we (re)present the digital manifestations of archives must revisit the kinds of questions asked when such collections were created as well as additional questions that address new capacities, especially circulation and scale.
We believe that archives must not only document the past and its silences but that they must also inform the present and guide us in crafting a future.
The âact of translationâ in digitizing these womenâs stories could have easily blunted the feminist foundations of these activistsâ personal collections. To curate activistsâ stories from their collections and display them without a dialogue would be recreating the dominant-submissive spectator dynamic that feminist critic Laura Mulvey exposes in her essay, âVisual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.â Mulvey notes that in the medium of film, âA woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude” (Mulvey 1989). While the genre/dynamic of a male-female fictional narrative is not present, Mulveyâs work reminds us that the politics of viewing are inherent whenever we designate a âsubject.â
Questioning dynamics of viewing, we began to consider: Whose feminism are we representing? Who has agency? How can the power of digital representation be distributed? Structures such as the legal obligation to filter activistsâ materials through intellectual property (IP) rights were further challenges of mediation. Did these practices limit the self-representation of the individuals involved? Conversely was IP, exercised through a stringent feminist ethics sieve, a better way to ensure authenticity of self-representation?
Our answer was to co-create the content with students and activists. As noted earlier, students generated content in the form a digital timeline, making appraisal decisions that weighed content value against visual interest against creating signposts for psychological theory. Each of the nine activists to be featured in the MOOC were invited back to the Smith College campus to review and revise the narrative timelines studentsâ curated using each of the activistsâ collections, to speak back to the psychology theories that were chosen as a framework, and to learn about signing off on this project would mean for the circulation of their collection. Continual feedback loops between all layers of the partnership affirmed the process as iterative and inclusive.
We knew that a feminist approach to labor, in addition to a less hierarchical structure, meant fully acknowledging and compensating our partners whether that be through honoraria, paid internships, or class credit.
Feminist theory should have the room to imagine perfection without constraint, because although we cannot ever reach it in practice, it suggests a vision that makes its realization worth grappling with. As we move into new modes of representation such as digitization, however seemingly âonlyâ technical or easily translated, we must make space to do the hard work of theorizing alongside it. To do so is to fulfill the ethical obligations we have as stewards and feminists. To not do so is contribute to the building of a house we do not want to live in.
Bibliography
Eichhorn, K. (2013). The archival turn in feminism: Outrage in order. Philadephia, PA: Temple University Press.
Hayles, Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2005. Print.
Konnikova, Maria. “Will MOOCs Be Flukes?” The New Yorker. N.p., 7 Nov. 2014. Web. 10 June 2016.
Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. By Gloria AnzalduÌa. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color, 1983. N. pag. Print.
McPherson, Tara. “Designing for Difference.” Differences 25.1 (2014): 177-88. Web.
Moraga, CherriÌe, and Gloria AnzalduÌa. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color, 1983. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures (1989): 14-26. Web.

- This article is an overview of thinking and questioning throughout the process. Because of the limited scope of this piece, we could not fully represent all of our questions and challenges throughout our case study. Instead, we hope the points weâve chosen spark dialogue to continue to think through all aspects of process. ↵
- Credit was another mediation. Our goal with credit has always been to acknowledge the foundations of other feministsâ work and scholarship we built upon. However, we also know that all histories elide labor. This endnote is an imperfect marker of collaboration to acknowledge the many hands across time and place of this work. ↵
- We would like to note FemTechNetâs DOCC model (Distributed Open Collaborative Course) which revises the format of MOOCs in order to create a feminist distributive framework. We share the commitment of FemTechNetâs principles to learning, diversity, collaboration, history and transparency, and experimentation. We offer this MOOC as complementary model which does not change MOOC framework but rather turns it on its head. ↵
About the authors
Jen Rajchel is Archival Project Manager at Smith College Special Collections. Elizabeth Myers is Director of Smith College Special Collections.