Posted by Kate Ozment; special thanks this month to Cait Coker, Madeline Keyser, and Kandice Sharren for providing feedback on a draft in progress.

For Women’s History Month 2019, we wrote and posted thirty-one daily profiles on women who worked within bibliography broadly defined, ranging from the nuns of San Jacopo di Ripoli in the fifteenth century to the Off Our Backs feminist-run periodical which ended in 2008. We used the hashtag #31daysofwomensbookhistory to create a searchable collection, and the profiles were posted on our Twitter and Facebook accounts. Based on a quick Twitter poll, we focused this year on historical printers, librarians, cataloguers, and archivists.

These profiles all grew out of another query, where we asked the SHARP-L listserv (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing) and our social media networks for examples of women working in bibliography. We compiled all the answers in this spreadsheet, and most of the Women’s History Month profiles were selected from this larger list. The institutional knowledge offered by those who shared examples has been invaluable for our research and teaching because it has shown us the ways that studies of the book has drawn its disciplinary boundaries, and consequently the ways that I as a scholar of the book in the twenty-first century have inherited those divides.

This is a common issue with women’s work more broadly, and I see it often in the women’s writing that I teach as a literature professor. Recently, my graduate class on the global eighteenth century encountered documentary traces of Native American women’s lives in the (personally recommended) anthology Early Native Literacies edited by Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss. These documents were testimonies taken in the infanticide case, and in her commentary Ann Marie Plane writes about how we define what is “women’s writing” can work to devalue certain kinds of histories:

It is arguable that these documents are out of place in a collection that focuses on Native literacy. After all, other than the mark (a vertical line) that Sambo placed, in lieu of a signature, on a bond for her appearance, none of these women can be said to have written a word—not here and, as far as we know, not at any time in their lives. That, however, is precisely the dilemma that faces scholars who are interested in women’s writing in general and Native American women’s writing in particular. Of the few documents that reveal aspects of women’s lives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all but a handful were written by men. Of the documents that speak to the experiences of Native American women—certainly among the records I combed for a larger study of Native American marriage in southeastern New England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—not one was actually penned by a Native American woman. Thus, although purists may wish to adhere to a strict definition of “women’s writing,” doing so both elides and erases women in general and Native women in particular from the pages of history. (88)

Native American women’s writing has its own set of particular circumstances that are not the duty of this post to unpack (but can certainly be explored in that anthology and Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith). But the disciplinary and material definitions that Plane characterizes are similar to the distinctions that I have seen made by scholars in the areas I am researching for our book project: Early Modern women’s writing, African-American print culture in the nineteenth century, and queer zine cultures of the late twentieth century. How we think about and define keywords matters, and often definitions created from a narrow set of lived experiences and material objects can work to erase those who do not “fit.” This is the experience of many of the women bibliographers included in our profiles.

This is not to say that we have, superwoman-like, plucked these women from obscurity. On the contrary, many of these women are justifiably well known within their circles. Lillian H. Smith has a branch of the Toronto Public Library named after her; Smith College Special Collections has named its rare book room for its longtime curator Ruth Mortimer; Katherine F. Pantzer and Marie Tremaine are honored with named fellowships from the bibliographical societies of America and Canada, respectively; those who study women in libraries have probably heard of Dorothy B. Porter or Henriette Avram; several of the women printers we highlighted like Charlotte Guillard and Anaïs Nin have whole books about them. And it is not surprising to us at all that much of our information about women librarians is coming from other women librarians, blogging about their institutions and personal research.

Instead, for me as a scholar who is reassessing what it is exactly that I do and how can I define it in a way that is useful and flexible enough to encompass a broader range of texts and experiences, learning this information that just so happens to be about women and just so happens to be generally left out of studies of the book has brought up several suggestions that I am exploring. Our profiles were biographical; they focused largely on people with a few presses thrown in. But to teach feminist bibliography is to teach these subjects’ work as contributions to a larger conversation (and there is something to be questioned about whether or not we needed biography as a starting point or why was my impulse to go there to begin with). Here are two lessons I have learned from these women and their work:

First, there are the norms of modern academia, which value articles, monographs, and peer-reviewed published texts. But by focusing on certain kinds of scholarly output and activities as more important than others, we have missed a rich history of women’s labor that can and should dramatically reshape the way we conceptualize the history of the book. Other labor also matters: the teaching of librarians and archivists; the training of future bibliographers; the building of card catalogues; the creation of infrastructure like MARC; the building of special collections and the collecting of books and archival materials, especially for under-represented genres and populations. More than one obituary discussed someone’s teaching as a distraction from her publishing, and while it is harder to “assign” someone’s career in a class like one would an article, we should absolutely recognize that training an entire generation of librarians and bibliographers is valuable work.

Secondly, when we look to the not-so-distant past when women could not go to the same universities or training programs or for various gatekeeping reasons didn’t publish articles, it becomes clear that we must redefine what is valuable or we will lose these women’s contributions. Similarly to Plane’s point about Native American women’s writing, being bibliographical purists works to erase women and other minority bibliographers from our field. Wonderful work has been done on these subjects, and bringing them explicitly into the history of bibliography will only strengthen our understanding of books as material objects with cultural significance. Without them, we impoverish our discipline.

This experience has allowed me to articulate a few paradigms that I am going to adopt as I move forward with my teaching of books as material objects. These are of course informed (as is everything I do) by my training as a literature scholar who is still learning how much there is to learn about the interdisciplinary work of studies in the book:

Teach about the interpretive aspects of analytical and descriptive bibliography; discuss how no person is capable of complete objectivity and instead we should be critical and transparent about the beliefs, values, and goals we bring to the analysis of a book or other object or text. Teach about the function and structure of archives and special collections alongside how to read the rare books, manuscripts, and materials we use from them; in particular, students should understand how cataloguing functions, the structures that cataloguers and preservationists work within, and the subjective and interpretive choices cataloguers can make. Teach about the theory of the archive and special collections as both spaces and historical desires; students should understand that archives are political spaces like any other and be introduced to the concepts of queering and decolonizing the archive; in particular discuss how archives are colonial and imperial constructions that can put problematic interpretive frameworks on texts and histories. Teach canon-building, but not just as a literary history or narrative; teach how book collecting and sales influence value and prestige and how institutions’ missions and goals can affect what sorts of material are collected; teach about how building collections around marginalized or under-represented topics is an act of interpretive scholarship itself that can also dramatically change the work other scholars do.

It is true that this class will look dramatically different than any book history class I have ever taken. But it is also true that these are some of the first steps toward training bibliographers and book historians who have the theoretical tools and frameworks to read material books within the context of their production and the context of our current moment. As feminist book historians, we need to be doing both.

About the Author

Kate Ozment is assistant professor of English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Currently, she is working on a book project titled Women and the Book that theorizes feminist bibliography with her WBHB co-editor, Cait Coker. Contact her at: keozment (at) cpp (dot) edu.