“Handmaidens of history”: speculating on the feminization of archival work

Abstract

The figure of the handmaiden seems particularly resonant today, in part due to the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Activated simultaneously as a symbol of passivity and resistance, the handmaiden occupies a contradictory position within our present milieu. In the archival discipline, the metaphor of archivists as “handmaidens of history” emerged out of nineteenth-century characterizations of archival neutrality and persisted up until the 1980s. In contemporary practice, archivists are no longer considered passive stewards; rather, their work is understood to be inherently political and interventionist, and however, despite this critical paradigm shift, archival work is routinely feminized. Drawing from the feminist practice of “doing speculatively”, I suggest that the metaphor of “the handmaiden” is an interesting point of entry for exploring how archival work, once considered mechanical, servile and invisible, has become powerful and disruptive, offering opportunities for political intervention and social change. This article positions the handmaiden as a discursive tool for telling stories about our profession and the many bodies—feminized and otherwise—who have built and continue to influence our field.