Archive Librarians are my Homies and Other Musings
On Thanksgiving, I was excited about being able to travel on my own two feet and not face any transportation woes to get to my friend’s house in Harlem for dinner. Since I live in the Upper East Side now, I walked on 5th Ave along Central Park. That’s when I saw the statue I read about in the book Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington. The statue is across from Mt. Sinai Hospital on the E 104th block. It is of J Marion Sims called the “Father of Gynecology” because of the breakthroughs he made in female reproductive health surgeries in the 1800s. In the book, Washington revealed what many did not know about him or chose to overlook – the risky surgeries he performed on black slave women against their will and often without anesthesia. These accounts helped influence me on this journey to uncover and reveal the voices of those who have fallen victim to medical injustice, especially women.
This is what led me to this project of uncovering the voices of women of color in the feminism movement of the 1970s in New York. Thus far, there have been two archive libraries that have given me the most media for this project – The Tamiment Library at NYU and The Centro Library for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. Shannon was right about getting to know archive librarians and making them your friends. Both Hanan (pictured below) at Tamiment and Yusef (pictured above), have been lifesavers in helping me with my project and leading me in the right direction. With some patience and active listening, they both shed light on my research and I couldn’t have found the media for this project without them.
My favorite experience at the archives thus far was going through the boxes of Karen Stamm at the Tamiment Library. She was one of the members of the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse and one of the founders of the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse here in New York. Her boxes were full of posters, meeting notes, newspaper clippings, newsletters, etc. There were a total of 13 boxes in her collection and it took me over 6 hours to get through it all. I was fascinated by all of the content she held onto and I am grateful that I was able to get a peak into what it was like to be on the front lines of women’s rights in that decade. The jaw-dropping moment came when I found her handwritten testimony accounting the first time she had an abortion. See one of the pages below.
I was taken aback by her courage to tell her story. It was unclear where she may have given this testimony, but I know it was written in 1976, so I will try to connect the dots on where she gave this speech. It reminded me of a recent piece the New York Magazine did on abortion in the 21st century and why it is still a taboo subject. There were 23 brave women who added their stories to this piece. Read here: http://nymag.com/news/features/abortion-stories-2013-11/
So, I am ready to begin transferring the data I’ve collected to URT. The challenge I’ve had thus far in finding data is finding audio or video of these women. I will try to search further and see what I can find. I believe it would not be complete if I didn’t actually bring these “voices” to the map itself.
That’s it for now!
What a heartening story, Carmel! I’m so glad you’ve discovered the joys of archival research (and that all that digging has reaped some great rewards). You’ve found a wealth of great material in these archives — and this alone could be sufficient to create a compelling map. But you’re right: if you can actually capture the “grain” of one of those voices — in audio or video — it would be the perfect way to make those long-silenced voices heard. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this will happen for you within the next couple of weeks.