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.