institutions; and political forces that are hostile to preserving or making available
certain documents. The example of the International Institute of Social History
(IISH) in Amsterdam is instructive here. It was founded in 1935 to create a place for
the books and archives of left-wing individuals and organizations under threat by
Nazism and Stalinism6 and still sees the rescue of endangered materials as part of its
mission. Sometimes these external factors work towards saving more documents, as
when the rise of the women's movement in the 1970s made the Dutch government
decide to increase the IAV's funding. In East Germany in 1989, the public managed
to save thousands of documents of the State Security Service (Stasi) that were
already shredded and are nowbeing reassembled. And after decades in which Dutch
historians criticized the etatist criteria used for preserving and destroying
government archives, according to which the remaining records (on average 5
percent) only have to allow researchers to reconstruct the main lines of government
policies, their criticism is nowbeginning to be heard.7
Second, the perspective of archival institutes as neutral repositories of facts also
misses the many moments of intervention in the creation of archival collections
- by the creator of the archive, institutes and their policies, and archivists - and thus
the many levels at which archives are wo/man-made and hence subject to being
'steered' and influenced, and to (political) choices, control, and even manipulation,
the "politics of the archive", to borrow a phrase from Derrida.8
In a nutshell, first the individual or organization that created the archive/archival
collection makes decisions about which material to preserve, which material to
discard, and which papers to hand over to an archival institute. Different motives
may lead to the withholding or intentional destruction of documents. The wish to
save a reputation or to keep in tact a carefully built up public image sometimes
induces the creator of an archive or her relatives to destroy papers. Examples that we
know of include the lifelong diary of the adventurous British Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu (1689-1762), whose diary was destroyed by well-meaning relations, and
the letters Dutch feminist leader Aletta Jacobs (1854-1929) received from her
husband C.V. Gerritsen, which Jacobs appears to have destroyed after writing her
autobiography.9 In 1950, at the height of the Cold War Communist witch-hunt in
the U.S.A., the later pioneer of women's history, Gerda Lerner (1920-2013), burned
all her "papers, reports, publications and correspondence" about the Congress of
American Women (CAW)in which she had been involved since its founding in
1946. The CAW, a left feminist organization affiliated with the Women's
International Democratic Federation, was investigated by the House Un-American
Activities Committee and subsequently forced by the Justice Department to disband
because of its alleged Communist orientation. "As for burning the papers, I should
not have done that. Obviously, many others did the same, for it has been
inordinately difficult for historians to retrace the history of the organization for
lack of documentation".10
Subsequently, what public and private archival institutes are willing and able to
collect and keep depends on legal requirements, their own policies, and financial,
spatial and other considerations. State archives in the Netherlands, for example,
have the legal duty to preserve government documents (though not everything is
saved; on average 95 percent is destroyed).11 Private archival institutes have their
own policies; thus the International Institute of Social History collects archives of a
socialist/leftist/progressive character; the Aletta Institute focuses on archives of
women and the women's movement; and lesbian archives such as the International
Homo/Lesbian Information Center and Archives (IHLIA) in the Netherlands and
the Lesbian Herstory Archives in the U.S.A. collect materials by and about lesbian
women - to name but some examples.12 The fact that Dutch state archives would
not consider keeping the archives of women and women's organizations was one of
the reasons in the early twentieth century to establish the IAV in the first place.
Telling in this context is a remark made by Robert Fruin, state archivist of the
Netherlands from 1912 to 1932, about the archive of a Dutch school that trained
women in cooking skills for domestic purposes: "Neither society, nor science, nor
the arts would lose anything if this archive were not preserved but would be lost".13
The third moment of intervention in the creation of an archival collection occurs
after the 'raw' archive has been acquired by an archival institute and the archivist
processes it. This is a complex process for which more or less clear guidelines may
exist, and during which the archivist makes numerous decisions about which
documents will be preserved and which not. Obvious and common-sense reasons
shape some of these decisions, but other factors also come into play. Both the
archivist's daily, practical decisions and official frameworks such as the Archival
Law (in the Netherlands in existence since 1918) are also informed by (partly
unexamined) value judgments and assumptions about how the world is, or should
be, ordered. In addition to Fruin's words quoted above, another example is a Dutch
guidebook from 1972 (reprinted in 1995) about how to deal with family archives, in
which the archive creator or archivist is advised "for convenience sake" to place the
documents that concern the married couple under the husband's name. Thus,
following the logic of the contemporary gender system, in which the man was seen
as the head of the family and the woman gave up her own name, archivists were
given advice that made it harder to find women's papers, the effect of which was that
women became all but invisible in inventories of family archives.14
Before a historian even starts her/his research, then, the archival material has
already been thoroughly influenced by the broader context and handled and shaped
by its creator (or her/his representative), the archival institute, and the archivist.
ARCHIEFVORMER EN PARTICULIER ARCHIEF
6 Jan Lucassen, Tracing the Past (Amsterdam 1989).
7 Paul Brood et al (eds.), Selectie. Waardering, selectie en acquisitie van archieven ('s-Gravenhage 2005).
In September 2007 the National Archives published a report, Gewaardeerd verleden. Bouwstenen voor een
nieuwe waarderingsmethodiek voor archieven, which advocates an integrative method for archival appraisal
of both government and private archives.
8 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression (Chicago 1996) 4. Recent important reflections on
archives, in addition to Derrida's book, include Burton, Archive Stories and Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz
and Mary Elizabeth Perry (eds.), Contesting Archives. Finding Women in the Sources (Urbana, Chicago and
Springfield 2010). For the writing of history and its many complexities, see Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of
History. Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge MA and London 1998).
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FRANCISCA DE HAAN AND ANNETTE MEVIS THE MAKING OF THE COLLECTION INTERNATIONAAL ARCHIEF
VOOR DE VROUWENBEWEGING (iAV)
9 Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford 2001Mineke Bosch, Een onwrikbaar geloof in recht
vaardigheid. Aletta Jacobs 1854-1929 (Amsterdam 2005), 28-29. Jacobs's memoirs were published in Dutch
in 1924 and in an abbreviated form in English in 1996 as Memories. My Life as an International Leader in
Health, Suffrage, and Peace (New York 1996).
10 Gerda Lerner, Fireweed. A Political Autobiography (Philadelphia 2002) 273-274.
11 'Discussiedossier archiefvernietiging' Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden
(BMGN) 108 (1993), 739.
12 For an overview of women's archives and libraries worldwide, see http://www.aletta.nu/aletta/eng/
collections/.
13 Robert Fruin, 'Over de verzorging van private archieven' Nederlandsch Archievenblad 25 (1916-1917) 28.
Our translation, FdH and AM.
14 E.P. de Booy and G.M.W. Ruitenberg, Zorg voor het familiearchief (Houten 1995) 29.
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