Paper Short Abstract:

Torfhildur Þ. Hólm (1845–1918) collected Icelandic folk legends, mostly from women. Her work was not published until 1962, after she had passed away, by Finnur Sigmundsson, who omitted stories that did not fit his idea of “folk legends.” This study examines her collection and the stories Finnur left out, highlighting gendered archival biases.

Paper Abstract:

Torfhildur Þ. Hólm (1845–1918) was one of Iceland’s earliest female authors and collectors of folk legends, gathering stories primarily from women within her community. Despite her significant contributions to the preservation of Icelandic folklore, her collection remained unpublished during her lifetime and was only made public in 1962 by Finnur Sigmundsson, head of the National Library of Iceland. In preparing the collection for publication, Finnur then curated the material according to his interpretation of what constituted as folk legends.

This paper examines Torfhildur’s folktale collection with two key objectives: first, to analyze the themes and narratives present in the stories she gathered, particularly those reflecting the voices and experiences of Icelandic women; and second, to explore the omissions in Finnur’s selection process and consider how his editorial choices reflect broader hierarchies of genre, gender, and knowledge production within the archive. By examining Torfhildur’s collection, this study seeks to shed light on the female voices within Icelandic folklore and to challenge the archival frameworks that have historically marginalized women’s contributions to cultural memory.

Paper Short Abstract:

MUNFLA is a resource for understanding pregnancy folklore in Newfoundland. But the materials are limited, reflecting unequal emphasis given to women's histories. MUNFLA’s entries on pregnancy provide a record of experience, and a corresponding record of silence on this rite of passage.

Paper Abstract:

The Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA) is home to a wealth of traditional materials related to the folk culture of Newfoundland in various forms. Because so much of this archive was collected by students, there is material collected by women, and about women’s issues; at the same time, women’s traditional culture is still unclearly portrayed in the collection. This presentation will explore folklore surrounding one important aspect of women’s traditional culture, pregnancy, drawing on a series of questionnaires on pregnancy, particularly teen and unplanned pregnancy, and education surrounding reproductive health in Newfoundland and a collection of 25 student projects that include references to birth and pregnancy in Newfoundland collected between 1968 and 2017. Much of this material documents women's experiences of pregnancy and reproductive health as being undiscussed within their lives, making the archive a valuable resource for understanding this part of women's traditional culture. However, the available materials are limited and represent a small fraction of MUNFLA's collection of 16,000 manuscripts, reflecting the unequal emphasis given to women's histories in tradition archives. MUNFLA’s entries on pregnancy therefore provide both a written record of experience, and a corresponding record of silence on this integral rite of passage. This presentation explores both the written record and the silences in an attempt to understand the capabilities and limits of a tradition archive to house materials related to this visceral and highly traditionalized aspect of the human experience.

Paper Short Abstract:

In a world rife with social injustices, archivists today have the power to play a role in rewriting female histories in the tradition archives. This paper will discuss the active measures the Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA) has taken to unveil untold “nameless” female contributors and increase awareness on the impact unofficial MUNFLA co-founder Violetta Maloney Halpert had on building Memorial’s folklore collection.

Paper Abstract:

In the 1960s, when the Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA) was first established, it was common practice to refer to a married woman as "Mrs." More specifically, "Mrs. Husband's Name" was an accepted paradigm for recording the names of female informants from whom ethnographic tidbits had been recorded, particularly as part of MUNFLA's Folklore Survey Card (FSC) collection - 6"X 8" index cards often assigned to undergraduate students as an introductory fieldwork exercise. Though likely not deliberate, the failure to identify these women by their own names essentially erased them from MUNFLA's history.

In 2019, after years of reflecting on this frustrating practice, the archivists at MUNFLA created the #MissusMonday social media campaign in an attempt to rewrite, or unwrite, the personal information of these women whose contributions to the Folklore and Language Archive had been recorded, collected, and donated decades prior. The intention of this crowdsourcing campaign was two-fold: to identify these "nameless" women and, ultimately, acknowledge their valuable contributions to MUNFLA.

In wanting to give credit to the females whose contributions upon which the MUNFLA foundation was built, we must also acknowledge Violetta (Letty) Maloney Halpert, wife of MUNFLA founder Dr. Herbert Halpert. Letty was instrumental in the development of a thorough classification system and cataloguing standards for folklore materials at MUNFLA. As The Globe and Mail headline decreed upon her death in 2009, "she helped build Memorial's folklore collection." This paper also seeks to illuminate her role from the shadows of her husband.

Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on a study of Mexican Indigenous Wixárika communities, this paper will consider archives as sites for the reproduction of knowledge, and as a resource to conduct an ethnography of the State (Stoler, 2010) and its production of gendered modern culture.

Paper Abstract:

Drawing on a study of Mexican Indigenous Wixárika communities, this paper will consider archives as sites for the reproduction of knowledge, and as a resource to conduct an ethnography of the State (Stoler, 2010) and its production of gendered modern culture.

Centering our search on women’s voices and documentation of their lives, we carried out an extensive review of sources dating from approximately 1602 to 1970 in colonial, state, federal, and ecclesiastical archives, for the project “Gender, health, and the afterlife of colonialism”. We found that women are practically absent, in their place were the voices of men, who speak, dialogue and negotiate on behalf of the community. However, Wixárika men appear little and our knowledge about them must be accessed through the lenses of colonizers, evangelizers, soldiers and state agents, among others.

An initial question is what does state policy and power indicate about the relationship of Wixárika communities with their territory during the colonial period. Who speaks on behalf of the Wixaritari, how many mediations exist or are visible (for instance, institutions, the discourses of those who make the story, politics, among others). How can we elaborate subject positions that do not fall plainly and simply into those of victim or savior? (LaCapra, 2005). The colonial state centered its relations through a patriarchal order, neglecting women’s presence, at least, in the public space.

Paper Short Abstract:

It is known that several women have had their intellectual relevance and visionary, pioneering or transgressive character eclipsed in the history of anthropology. As supporting characters, some are only mentioned in quick passages or footnotes in biographies, as was the case for a long time with Dina Dreyfus (1911-1999), most often referred to as “Lévi-Strauss' wife” or part of the “Lévi-Strauss couple”. However, in the short period she was in Brazil, between 1935 and 1938, Dina played a pioneering role in the production of ethnographic images of folk culture and indigenous peoples in the country.

Paper Abstract:

They were there: imaginations and inscriptions of Dina Dreyfus in Brazil reflects on Dina Dreyfus' journeys in Brazil, between 1935 and 1938, based on the inscriptions and imaginations of her passage present in photographs, films and texts of the time, a period of institutionalization of Anthropology as a discipline in the country. Ethnographic research in the field involved not only collecting objects for French museums, but also the largest photographic and film production in the career of Claude Lévi-Strauss, her field partner and husband. At the invitation of Mário de Andrade, director of the Municipal Department of Culture in São Paulo, Dreyfus taught a pioneering course in ethnography and folklore, in which he trained various civil servants and students to collect ethnographic materials, teaching different ethnographic techniques, including how to make visual and sound recordings. These guidelines were published in the manual “Practical Instructions for Physical and Cultural Anthropology Research - volume 1”. The course was the catalyst for the foundation of the Ethnography and Folklore Society in 1937 and the Folklore Research Mission in 1938, in which pioneering sound and visual recordings of Brazilian folk culture were made.

Paper Short Abstract:

Subversive archives are an important practice for activists within the Women in Black network in the (post-)Yugoslav space. A key feature of their archival projects is their dynamic and incomplete nature, which makes them a living practice and opens up possibilities for a new model of citizenship.

Paper Abstract:

Activists within the Women in Black network are acutely aware that their acts of disobedience will not be included in official histories or narratives. As a result, they challenge the monopoly on official memory and maintain subversive archives, even though they are not considered legitimate subjects of official history or archiving. They collect and document their lived experiences, which ultimately form a socio-political history of the ongoing, organized repression they face as activists. Through this process, they capture the myriad ideas, issues, tensions, and experiences that shape their daily lives as activists and citizens with incomplete rights. They resist the erasure of their history, practices, actions, and demands. The knowledge and experiences they accumulate offer insight into the dynamics of activism, reflecting on the construction of political power and subjectivity within citizenship regimes.

Their subversive archives take the form of a living, collaborative practice that embraces the complexity of voices, perspectives, and everyday life. As such, they become a dynamic, unfinished, critical, polyphonic, and fragmented "co-archive." These archives intervene in social memory and commemorative practices, deepening our understanding of the past, present, and future.

This paper explores how subversive co-archiving practices within the activist network empower them to control what is archived, how it is archived, and the broader social implications of these actions.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines the literary voices of Finnish-American migrant-settler women in diasporic and alternative archives. Their writings, reflecting cultural preservation and settler colonialism, offer insights into women’s lives while silencing other marginalized voices in the archives.

Paper Abstract:

The archival materials that document migrant history, cultures and traditions are diasporic memory sources often underrepresented in national memories. Furthermore, studying migrant women requires engagement with “alternative archives” (Smith and Watson 2021). This paper explores the literary voices of Finnish-American migrant women found within these diasporic and alternative archives.

One significant medium for conveying female voices was the transnational socialist women’s newspaper Toveritar (The Comradess), published from 1911 to 1930 in Astoria, Oregon. The establishment of a Finnish-language women’s newspaper represented a considerable achievement for women, a process that spanned several years. The editor, Selma Jokela-McCone, recognized the potential of preserving women’s and working-class history in the paper, and actively encouraged readership contributions to Toveritar. Consequently, numerous women across North America submitted stories, poetry, and local news, in addition to sharing their expertise in vernacular healing and practical advice for adapting to a new homeland. Beyond their contributions to the newspaper, women wrote ephemera, autobiographies, plays, books, and songs as well as translated others’ texts.

The writings of these women reflect their experiences as migrant women and mothers striving to preserve the Finnish language and culture while contributing to settler colonial structures. These literary voices constitute a vital alternative archive that provides insight into the everyday lives, values, and traditions upheld by these women. This paper also addresses how preserving migrant sources contributed silencing other marginalized voices in the archives. It directly engages with the panel’s themes of “Implicit, female voices in the archive” and “Female histories and silences.”

Paper Short Abstract:

The paper examines the leading role of women folklorists in establishing a new research paradigm in early folk song studies based upon empirical collecting and archival documenting. It discusses the example of two leading scholars in early Swiss folklore studies.

Paper Abstract:

Women folklorists were leading, although hidden, figures within the developing ‘thought collective’ of early folklore studies. However, they were participating in the creation of this new ‘thought style’ (Ludwik Fleck) coping with scarce resources and institutional obstacles in academia.

The paper examines early folk song studies, focusing on the example of the Swiss Folk Song Archives (founded in 1906 by the Swiss Folklore Society). The paper pays attention to the contributions of the folklorists Adèle Stoecklin (1876–1960) and Elsa Mahler (1882–1970) for the establishing of the new methods and approaches in the field of folk song research. In particular, the emergence of collecting as a new research paradigm, with its new techniques of empirical recording, ordering and documenting ephemeral ‘folk culture’ in the archive, is analysed. The article highlights their contributions for finding new empirical and "modern" research paths that replaced older romantic song collecting and editing activities. As a part of the (so-called) ‘folklore canon’, this approach remained valid until the dawning of the new paradigm of the everyday which was established in German speaking folkloristics in the 1970s.

The research draws upon archival records of the Swiss Folklore Society (today: Cultural Anthropology Switzerland) and historical publications in the field of folklore.

Paper Short Abstract:

The paper presents an ethnographic record of a researcher who was not a professional anthropologist. Irena Czechówna, participant of a field expedition in the then Polish, today Belarusian region of Polesie, documented a comprehensive female narrative on everyday village life, full of poverty and violence. Her archive reveals also information on sex and family life usually unavailable to male researchers.

Paper Abstract:

My paper points to the importance of the role of female ethnographers in the study of traditional communities, where due to gender restrictions the sphere of women was hardly available to male researchers. Irena Czechówna (1911-1970s) was an assistant of the social anthropologist Józef Obrębski, who conducted a field expedition in the eastern Polish region of Polesie (today Belarus) in the 1930s. In 1937 Czechówna participated in collecting materials on youth and families in the village of Olmany. She was at the time a journalism student, not a professional anthropologist. Nevertheless, she proved to be an outstanding ethnographer. Her record (showing proficiency in East-Slavic dialect) comprises almost 300 pages of transcription of conversations and interviews, mainly with women, all of them illiterate. This female narrative focuses on the disintegration of patriarchal family, sex life of the youth, poverty and violence. It not only shows a vivid picture of everyday life in a pre-war Orthodox village, but also contains information omitted in traditional ethnographic/folkloristic documentation, which deconstruct a romantic picture of idyllic village. The archive of Irena Czechówna, stored in the „Obrebski Collection” of UMass Archives in Amherst, undoubtedly deserves to be published, and its author to be remembered.

Paper Short Abstract:

Overlooked for nearly a century, the magnitude and scope of the uncovered contributions of the exceptional, female, Irish folklore collector, Kathleen Hurley, are considered alongside the potential of her contributions to substantially broaden knowledge of the absent voices and lost lore of Ireland’s women within the National Folklore Collection.

Paper Abstract:

In 1935, the Irish Folklore Commission (IFC), tasked with saving Ireland’s folklore, failed to consider gender in its design, structures, or administration. The IFC’s disinterest in women’s lore, and ignorance of the fundamental importance of female collectors and informants, left Ireland with a prodigious archive of folklore, the National Folklore Collection (NFC), that is undermined by the cavernous holes never filled with the lives, lore, and traditions of women. This paper considers the implications of the preliminary findings of the first substantive, comprehensive study of a female IFC collector, Kathleen Hurley. Hurley’s contribution of approximately 3,000 pages of correspondence, questionnaire replies, and folklore languished in the archive for nearly a century. In the period of Hurley’s collecting (1937-1952), Irish women were often excluded from spaces and circumstances where men shared folktales, and were restricted by social codes from discussing gynocentric matters in mixed-sex spaces. Despite this, Hurley collected versions of common folktales with unique aspects distinctly focused on female perspectives and experiences, including those that expressed motherly love, women’s desires, grief, domestic violence, and other harsh realities of Irish womanhood. Defiant in adhering to her own collection methodologies, Hurley recorded inestimable contextual details, including: observations, descriptions, opinions, and emotions. Although there is no remedy for the voids within the NFC where the voices of Irish women should be, unearthing and resuscitating the contributions of Kathleen Hurley has the potential to provide invaluable insight into the lost lore of Ireland’s women.

Paper Short Abstract:

A study of a 19th century folk music tradition based on the works of the Icelandic poet Guðmundur Bergþórsson (1657-1705) with a focus on the role that gender dynamics play in the transmission, recollection and documentation of this tradition.

Paper Abstract:

This paper analyses a 19th century Icelandic folk music tradition based on poetry attributed to the male author Guðmundur Bergþórsson (1657-1705). Unlike other folk traditions based on his life and works, women comprise a significant proportion of those who performed, transmitted and documented this tradition. This study is based on tape recorded performances and discussions, mostly collected by married couple Helga Jóhannsdóttir and Jón Samsonarson between 1963 and 1971. In these tapes, popular epic poems are more commonly sung than the metrical romances that made Guðmundur famous. Audiences comprise of multiple generations, and the stage is the baðstofa- a communal living, working and sleeping quarters found in old Icelandic turf houses. Performers discuss their relationships with the texts, related musical traditions, and their work and family life. Women describe singing while completing childcare and handiwork tasks, and touch on the role played by these performances in the upbringing of children, at a time when education largely took place within the home.

Júlíana Þóra Magnúsdóttir identified the audio archive as having greater source value than printed corpuses on Icelandic women’s narrative traditions and cultural and spatial experiences (2018; 2021a; 2021b). This analysis studies how the ways in which informants’ recollections of this tradition could be influenced by gender-specific experiences of culture and social spaces, and how gender dynamics could in turn have contributed negatively to the attention this material has since garnered. Lastly, it considers the role of Guðmundur Bergþórsson’s physical impairment, which made the domestic sphere his sole working environment.

Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on collections of the Finnish Literature Society, I explore the agency and diversity of female hitchhikers. The diaries and an extensive ethnographic questionnaire material spanning eight decades provide a rich perspective on women’s resourcefulness and experiences on the road, challenging traditional stereotypes such as victimhood.

Paper Abstract:

As a largely undocumented social practice, public perceptions of hitchhiking have been heavily influenced by media portrayals and popular culture. These narratives have often portrayed female hitchhikers either as victims or as morally questionable, promiscuous women. Today, however, this image has largely been replaced by that of a thrill-seeking backpacker.

The extensive collection of hitchhiking narratives donated to the Finnish Literature Society (SKS) archives provides a much richer perspective on women’s experiences on the road. Drawing on material consisting of diaries and responses submitted to an ethnographic questionnaire conducted in 2020, I explore the agency of female hitchhikers spanning eight decades. Open road has offered women freedom of mobility but also many possibilities to test one’s abilities and finding one’s potential. The stories highlight remarkable resourcefulness. While these women encountered risks such as harassment or unsafe drivers, they also developed strategies to navigate dangers, learning from and mentoring fellow female hitchhikers.

This material highlights the significance of the archives in amplifying diverse voices. By capturing and preserving these recollections, the archives confront traditional stereotypes, including the perception of women as victims.

Paper Short Abstract:

This lecture will focus on stories describing relationships between women and cows in the old Icelandic farm society from a post-humanist perspective. Using archival material from the ethnographic collection of the National Museum of Iceland, unheard histories of women and cows, multifaceted and complex relationships and gender dynamics will be recounted.

Paper Abstract:

This lecture will discuss stories of the relationships between women and cows in the old Icelandic farm society from a post-humanist perspective. Using archival material curated in the ethnographic collection of the National Museum of Iceland, untold histories of women and cows, gender and power will be recounted. These are stories about multifaceted and complex relationships, gender politics and unbalanced power structures between men and women, as well as stationary and roaming animals as companion species. These stories are excellent examples of multispecies cohabitation including humans and non-humans.

Within this presentation two specific archived questionnaires focused on cattle and milk production at the farm will be discussed. The focus of the questionnaires was to gather knowledge about farm practices concerning milking and dairy products, superstitions concerning the animals, and the treatment of animals by their human companions on an everyday basis. However, by looking at the questionnaires through the lenses of feminism and posthumanism, untold stories start to surface, stories that have never been written nor heard. These are stories of gender-based injustices, complicated relationships between humans and non-humans, and voices that were unable to speak.

Fleshing out multispecies relationships visible in the archives, draws attention towards the untold stories of human-animal relationships in the past, providing new understandings and insights better suited for our posthuman future.

Paper Short Abstract:

In the second half of the 20th century, women were only marginally represented in folk music programmes on Swiss television. The search for female traces in the archives of Swiss television aims to give women a voice and put an end to their silencing.

Paper Abstract:

Swiss television (SRF) is approaching its 100th anniversary. Since 1939, Swiss television has been broadcasting an increasingly varied programme to the Swiss population, first sporadically and then regularly from 1958. From the very beginning, the main target group was considered to be families – and therefore women as well. Early in SRF's broadcasting history, a folkloristic programme was established that stylised a mix of music, folklore and landscape into an ideal of "Heimat". Although women made up a significant proportion of the Swiss population – and thus of the audience – as well as of the idealised, family- and tradition-oriented image of "Heimat", they were marginalised in the programmes.

The aim of this lecture is to locate and make visible the women in the archive who have made a significant contribution to the programmes. The specific practices, experiences, and ideas of women about their lives and activities will be presented. The conditions and possibilities for a career in television (behind and on screen) will be explored. And, in the sense of an unwriting of the television archive, the proposed lecture aims to trace the mechanisms that made women invisible – both within the television company and on television itself. By starting to write the unwritten female stories in the archives of Swiss television, using folk music programmes from the second half of the 20th century as an example, women are to be given a voice and their silence ended.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper shares how overlooked resources, specifically from the domestic realm, inform my work considering historic women’s experiences and what knowledge can be gleaned to support women today. Additionally, this paper considers how communicating the evidence from the historical record can provide an antidote to the dangerous movements built up by romanticising women’s history.

Paper Abstract:

Are women’s historic stories “unrecoverable” (as some have said) or is it that researchers have to change how and where we look? Of course erasure, among other issues, contributes to women’s lack of visibility in the historical record; however, evidence of women’s lives does persist and from this, we can glean information about their social circumstances as well as their day to day existences.

These “unrecoverable” stories are essential to my work (meaning-making and personal sanctuary in times of precarity). Using information from the archeological and historical records in an approach best described as experimental folklore, I weave together methodological and conceptual threads from multiple disciplines to approximate people’s experiences. This unique approach is necessary due, in part, to the incomplete nature of women’s representation. One aspect of my work draws on material culture finds, especially those related to times of precarity. I engage with aspects of them in an attempt to understand the perspective of the maker as well as what information can be learned to support women today.

This paper discusses how these often disregarded resources, specifically from the domestic realm, can help us understand historic women’s lived experiences. I articulate how those findings can offer some solutions to modern day concerns, especially in times of health precarity. Finally, I address the way that the romanticization of women’s history has led to dangerous movements in the present, and how understanding and communicating facts from the historical record can be an antidote to this.