Confronting the Archives, Disciplines, and Ourselves
In researching, writing, presenting, and rewriting this new history with women at its centre, I encountered numerous struggles both internal and external. Certain historical narratives are so engrained within a culture and even indoctrinated within one’s own thought process, that it is difficult to see beyond them.
Complicating this is how historical archives are arranged and indexed and how they can reinforce standard histories. Moreover, when writing women’s history, or the history of any marginalised or underprivileged group, we as historians must often read against the grain of our documents and ask what our documents are hiding or not saying. We become experts at reading silences and innuendo, giving rise to the question, how much evidence is enough to make our arguments? Finally, how our new stories are received by our colleagues and the wider academy influences the extent to which one has the space and support to tell new and different histories.The discipline of legal history in the U.S. is itself a somewhat strange field, fitting in somewhere between history and law. What is considered to be legal history is often up in the air and, at least in the U.S., needs to please our colleagues in both law schools and history departments. In the years that I was first embarking upon my legal aid project, histories about or including women and gender were largely missing outside of family law. In contrast, in the discipline of history, more generally women’s history was widely accepted and there was a rich and sophisticated literature on women’s organisations. How could these fields be combined?[896] In fact, women’s history had progressed so far that writing about middle-class white women and their fin de siecle organisations that provided legal aid to poor women could seem stale. Would the discipline of history tolerate a somewhat heroic story about white women’s middle-class organisations? Would the legal academy be interested in such a story as it was so widely presumed that women’s organisations had absolutely nothing to do with the legal profession.[897] Thus, at moments, there seemed to be very little room to manoeuvre between the disciplines of law, legal history, and women’s history.
These, however, would be questions that I would later confront. First came the archives and trying to create a story that might bring together these disparate but related fields.I remember the bright autumn day when I entered New York City’s municipal archive. The archive is located in the city’s magnificent Surrogates Court and the bustling archive was filled with ordinary people seeking to locate old deeds and birth certificates. The archives contained the papers of virtually every mayor of New York City. I was trying to write a dissertation on how late-nineteenth-century women’s organisations interacted with municipal officials and helped build the bureaucratic municipal state. I further wanted to learn about how such organisations used law. I was thus searching for women and women’s organisations who may have written letters to the mayor. With really nothing else guiding me, I simply sifted through box after box of these papers and went through the material page by page. On that particular day, I found a letter from a woman asking the mayor for assistance in receiving her deceased husÂband’s Civil War pension. The mayor’s office replied that she should seek the help of the Working Women’s Protective Union (WWPU).[898] I felt that I had hit bronze if not gold. This must have been, I thought, an organisaÂtion of working women providing some sort of help to other women. Was it a Union? Did it have anything to do with law?
After months and months of scouring archives, digital sources, newspaÂpers, and the internet (in its earlier days), my documents established that the WWPU was founded in 1863, during the middle of the U.S. Civil War, in New York. It was originally organised and run by women working in the needle trades, who demanded higher wages and a union for women run by women.[899] Soon, however, it was taken over by a group of profesÂsional men who found the women unruly and perhaps too radical and they transformed the Union into an organisation where women could seek legal assistance in collecting unpaid wages.[900] Each annual report heralded the awesome power of elite male lawyers to provide legal assistance to poor working women who had not received their wages.[901]
The Union employed a female superintendent, as was the case with many organisations that provided services to women, but she was rarely mentioned in the organisation’s documents.[902] Documents did, however, discuss the process through which such women would obtain legal assistance.
Such women would go to the office of the WWPU to lodge their complaints and tell their stories to what I presumed was a male lawÂyer, a demand letter would be sent to the employer, and then the Union would summon the employer to negotiate and settle the claim.[903] The WWPU was entirely funded by private charitable contributions and throughout its long history made abundantly clear that they only took cases in which they believed the complaining woman’s story. Indeed, annual reports engaged in a cultural trope which told of virtuous hardÂworking poor women who without their wages stood on the precipice of having to sell their bodies. Only law and male lawyers could save a woman from such a fate.[904] I thought that I had a story about how gender and masculinity functioned in the mid-to-late nineteenth century bar as well as a narrative about wage labour, capitalism, and the origins of legal assisÂtance in the years during and following the U.S. Civil War. Even using gender as a category of analysis when thinking about the nineteenth-cenÂtury U.S. legal bar was generative.[905]I continued to collect everything that I could on the organisation through the years, but certain elements of the Union’s history simply did not make logical sense. The Union claimed that it handled thousands of cases per year, yet it employed only a part-time lawyer. Having searched court records, I found no indication that any case ever went to trial. Pursuing the records of a variety of lawyers who were on the board of directors or who spoke at Union events produced no evidence that any of them ever dedicated their legal services to the Union, rather they raised funds for the Union.[906] Who could have done all this labour? Who could have spoken with so many clients and negotiated settlements of hundreds of cases per a year?
And suddenly, I came across an article by an art historian discussing the late-nineteenth-century illustrations by Georgina Davis.20 Two of Davis’ illustrations depicted the WWPU and each showed its offices filled with women clients with the superintendent and her female staff ministering to the many women present.21 The WWPU was depicted as a female space and it seemed only logical that it was the female superintendent and her staff that did the large bulk of the work of the union. Could this in fact be women essentially engaged in the practice of law before most states allowed for women to practise law and there were few female attorneys?22 Yet the material that I most hoped for such as letters or reports by the superintendent discussing her role were simply non-existent. Other than census material, I found little about the backgrounds of the Union’s superintendents or their own thoughts and experiences. For the most part, their labour, like so much of women’s labour, was invisible.