Composed by RAD member Sandrine Guérin
At times in history, patriarchal laws and social norms suppressed the rights and identity of women. "Coverture"—a legal concept introduced in England by the Normans around the eleventh century—declared that women had no legal identity independent from their spouse. Coverture became a practical rule by the eighteenth century in England and was subsequently adopted as common law in the United States. While American women reclaimed some legal rights over two centuries, the naming convention continued. Prior to the 1970s, married American women could not get passports, driver’s licenses, or register to vote unless they assumed their husband’s last name.
The custom of identifying married women by their husband’s names, and unmarried women solely by their father’s surname, omitting the woman's birth name, erased the identity of women in administrative, cultural and archival records. The in-house style guide at The New York Times referred to married women using the construction “Mrs. Husband’s Name” until June 20, 1986, when it announced that it would start using ‘Ms.’ as an honorific in its news and editorial columns. Archival description practices, which reflect the accepted values and practices of society of a certain time, have contributed to the erasure of women in the archival record. In some instances, research can identify the women whose birth names have been erased or obscured and allow them to be acknowledged and remembered as themselves.
In April 2020, the Reparative Archival Description Working Group established a task force to identify full name information for women previously identified only by their surnames or husbands’ names in Yale Special Collections.
To start, the team, assisted by Yale Library metadata specialist colleagues, ran a query to retrieve agent records in ArchivesSpace with “Mrs.” or “Miss” in the name string. This included women who were only identified by their husbands’ names (e.g., “Arnold, Mrs. Edwin G.”), identified only by a surname (e.g. “Abrams, Miss” and “Bicknell, Mrs.”), lumped in with their spouse’s agent record (e.g., “Anderson, Mr. and Mrs. Lee”), or identified by both their and their husbands’ names (e.g., Deming, Anna (Mrs. John)).
The team then sought to locate full name information for the women using online sources including Ancestry.com, Findagrave.com, obituaries and marriage announcements in digitized newspapers, as well as consulting Yale’s own archival description (e.g., notes in finding aids and catalog records), and the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF). They also collected, when available, information for a brief biographical note in the agent record.
Once the information was collected and sorted according to the type of updates needed (e.g., name revision; name revision and biographical note; name creation), changes were reviewed for accuracy and implemented in ArchivesSpace. Overall, 207 agent records were created or updated. The team generally retained previous name forms as variants, displayed on the agent page, to allow for searchability (see example screenshots below).
Cornelia Thayer Baldwin Lane, approximately 1921.
From the Arthur Bliss Lane Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
Cornelia Thayer Baldwin Lane was previously identified in an ArchivesSpace agent record as “Mrs. Arthur Bliss Lane,” and her full name information was added to the record.
The public view of Cornelia Thayer Baldwin Lane’s agent record in Archives@Yale, including a brief biographical note.
Additional information about the project:
Articles of interest:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/arts/mrs-women-identity.html
https://libguides.mnhs.org/naturalization/s4
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