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Women and Minorities: the Different Ways of Archiving

Introduction

The Project

The idea to exchange experiences, ideas, and practices in the field of women and minority archives came up some years ago as a result of the long years of collaboration between Austrian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Macedonian scholars especially in the framework of the yearly "Winter Balkan Meetings". The deficit of documents and catalogues in this field challenged us to develop a project "Women and Minority Documentation". In 2007 the project got the support of the ASO Ljubljana-Sofia, which made possible the exchange of ideas on workshops and conferences, and finally to publish a book.

The main objective of the project was to organize a functioning network between the partners, to inform each other about the state of art in our countries in order to develop a future collaboration. We planed three workshops - in Bulgaria (Razlog), Serbia (Belgrade), and Austria (Vienna) - and a final conference in Blagoevgrad. We had also to elaborate a project website and to make initial steps in the digitalization of the archive information about women's and minorities' documentation.

The first workshop "Women and Minorities: Ways of Archiving" which was held in Razlog (10.09-12.09.2007) brought together 12 specialists in Archive Studies and Gender and Minority Studies from Sofia and Blagoevgrad University. The existing memory prescriptions and practices of preservation of the women and minorities documentation in Bulgaria in the second half of the 20^th century were identified and discussed.

The second workshop "Women and Minority Documents in the Social Memory of South-East Europe" took place in Belgrade (26.10-27.10.2007). Historians from Austria, Serbia, Macedonia, Romania, and Bulgaria shared their experience in archive practices, elaboration of catalogues, and inventories of regional and national archives as well as the different publication policies. Common gaps and deficits concerning women and minorities documentation were identified; we discussed also the possibilities of developing thematic digital catalogues and data bases in this field. Two young scholars from the University of Belgrade recommended by Prof. Miroslav Jovanoviæ _ Slobodan Mandiæ and Jovana Pavloviæ, joined the project. We visited the historical Archives of

Belgrade and had the possibility to observe the process of digitalization of documents and to discuss the opportunities the digital collections offer to researchers.

Our Austrian partners hosted the third workshop "Women Archives _ Realities, Desires, Reflections. Women and Politics" (Vienna 30.11._ 01.12. 2007). The organisers invited representatives of various archives and museums: the Austrian State Archives, the National Library, the Jewish Museum Vienna, the Women's Archive Bozen, the Johanna Dohnal-Archive in the trust of Bruno Kreisky-Archive, the STICHWORT. Archive of the Women's & Lesbian's Movements. The Collection of Women's Estates at the University of Vienna was also presented as a successful example of archive, educational, and scientific work which attracts more and more students and encourages them for gender history research.

It was most interesting, astonishing for some of us, and consoling for all of us to learn that altogether the women's and minorities' archives have to deal with the same problems and challenges _ albeit sometimes on different levels. Very often the starting points of women and minority documentation trace back to some private or at least personal initiative. The histories as well as the current conditions of these archives are characterised by long-time and time consuming struggles for money. It means writing countless applications to potential financiers and public authorities, and working hard on convincing various publicities about the need for women and minority documentation, about the necessity of the public visibility of these social groups marginalised by the official memory policies. And once established, very often the archives have to work at rather low if not poor standard, because high requirements of adequate archiving can not be met within the existing framework. This especially is the case when it comes to technical equipment for storage and conservation, where, of course, all the experts know about the state of the art.

It is easier to meet the own demands when it comes to contents and questions of accessibility and support of users. Of course, in this field lack of resources causes restrictions but regularly they are made up by personal engagement. For example, all of the institutions represented at the workshop appreciate being used by differing target groups with differing claims. This openness on one hand causes great effort concerning customer liaison and support, but it is vital for public relations on the other. It was most interesting to think about new methods of collecting, describing, and cataloguing of the archived documents, and to rethink the established systems with reference to their ad

vantages and drawbacks.

A hot topic aloof finances and resources are ethical concerns _ for example when dealing with ego- and other personal documents. Should these relicts of individuals be published (p. e. online) in the name of research, in the name of education, of public memory? In this concern, it is important to point out the theoretical background of these initiatives and institutions: It is based on a non- and anti-hierarchic concept of history and memory. History no longer confines itself only to `big names', the experiences and the perceptions of various social groups and the so called `ordinary people' entered many areas of historiography.

The second part of the Viennese workshop for example was dedicated to women and politics. Four studies located in Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, and former Yugoslavia assembled and analysed online sources allowing work on the history of female suffrage. Doing so they contributed to the emerging compilation of (new) electronic thematically organised catalogues, which will create better research opportunities for scholars engaged in women's, gender and minority studies.

The final conference of the project took place in Blagoevgrad (16.02_18.02.2008). Scholars from Sofia University and the National College for Information Technologies, Institute and Museum for Ethnography in Sofia and others _ as well as the project members from Austria, Macedonia, Serbia _ took part in the Conference Panel "Women and Minority Documentation and Digital Presentation". The main topic for the discussion was the need of initiatives of preservation and presentation of women's and minorities documents Krassimira Daskalova presented the history of the women archives in the last century and their appearance in the framework of women's movements in Europe as well as their importance for Gender Studies and as contribution for the democratization of history. It was in the twenties of the last decade as the President of the Bulgarian Women's Union Dimitrana Ivanova informed about the Women's Movement Archive in Amsterdam and discussed the need of archiving documents. She ordered her personal archive and left it in the Historical Archive of the National Library in Sofia. This archive of course is a very important source for the women's history. The digitalization of guides, catalogues, inventories or documents also offers new possibilities for research. The project website about women and minorities in Bulgarian State Archive system is a step to make the access to information easier.

The volume "Women and Minorities: Ways of Archiving"

The initial thematic concept of the volume's structure was to start with the presentation of the different state polices and strategies of archiving. It seemed to be a good approach to explain the deficits of documents, inventories, or catalogues for women and minorities. But this approach also prescripts a general view of women and minorities as "victims" of state archive policies. To avoid this black and white perspective, after reading all texts, we decided to reach this topic of the archiving policy step by step after presenting the importance of the women's and minorities memories, different women's documentations, and corresponding activities. The aim is to reveal more unused archives and documents stressing not the deficits but their diversity and research potential. We start with an interview with Edith Saurer, one of the initiators of the Collection of Women's Estates of University of Vienna in order to present the women's initiatives for preserving their memories. In the interview Edith Saurer gives a glance in the history of the collection and the large opportunities it offers for research and education. Li Gerhalter, who runs the everyday business of the Viennese Sammlung Frauennachlässe (Collection of Women's Estates), represents the archive _ its founding, its development, its holdings, and its management. After this general introduction she focuses her interest on the aspect of how women's personal testimonies reach the archive, showing in a very impressive way the range of circumstances and accidents taking effect in such a process. She inspired some sort of motivation research by outlining only some of the reasons why women's estates are given to an institution such as the Collection of Women's Estates. They reach it from wanting to be memorised, to contribute to scientific progress, to get rid of something without chucking it out. Nikola Langreiter introduces a source kept in the Collection of Women's Estates at the University of Vienna _ the diary of Wetti Teuschl _ and focuses on the question whether this journal rather was an instrument for remembering or an instrument for forgetting. The records, containing just a few years of a long life, bear a manifold story rich in tensions. While the first part of the book is typical for a young girl's diary, the second part accompanies the rapid financial and social descent of a married couple during the economic crises of the 1870s. The diary shows how engaged and vehement the woman tries to oppose _ not only with the means and strategies assigned to her gender. Through the autobiographies and other documents, preserved in the private archive of the prominent Stanchioff's family, Mari Firkatian presents the preservation of memory as a deliberately intergenerational affair of both women and men in this family, who played an important role in the Bulgarian political life as

ministers and diplomats in a long period of more than 100 years and preserved their archive tradition in emigration. Milena Angelova researches the documents of the state centralized memorial movement in socialist Bulgaria during the 1980s and traces the place of the women's memoirs in this huge records collection. Renate Telser introduces the Frauenarchiv / Archivio storico delle donne / Women's Historical Archives Bolzano / Bozen (Italy) which goes back to a political decision on the communal level _ it was not a grassroots project, but it was established in 2003 by a group of women from different cultural and social backgrounds. In the following years it was integrated in a broader structure of associations and in an infrastructure which includes a women's bar (Frauencafé). The Frauenarchiv collects material with a special focus on the twentieth century. Furthermore, the archivists involved are preparing a main catalogue of documents concerning women's history that are available in South-Tyrolean archives. In 2007 they also launched an oral-history project on women's biographical memories. STICHWORT _ a Feminist Archive and Library in Vienna is presented by the head of this organization, Margit Hauser. STICHWORT is a political project of the autonomous women's and lesbians' movements. Since 1981 it has collected all kinds of documents, such as, for instance, posters and leaflets, journals, or books which, at that time, were not bought by mainstream libraries. Thus STICHWORT has some unique documents that are not, like in other archives, hidden in patriarchal categories or keywords. It provides access to a broad range of literature relevant for students, artists, activists and others who do feminist research; since 1999 it has also been offering services to feminist researchers. STICHWORT also organizes a wide range of events, such as readings, discussions, exhibitions, workshops, etc. Information about its activities can be found in the bi-annual "Stichwort-Newsletter".

The section Women & Minority Archives discusses the interaction between minority people and state in the process of documentation. Daniela Koleva introduces in her article the importance of oral history sources. She analyses the interviews with Jewish women of different generations in order to explain what was "to be Jewish" for them and the changes of Jewish identity as cultural capital through the generations. The question about the differences in the documentation written by and concerning the Roma minority in the socialist Bulgaria is analysed by Anastasia Pashova. She explaines why Roma people became a "silent" minority in the archives as well as the state strategies of their assimilation by changing their religious and ethnic identity. Gabriele

Kohlbauer and Wiebke Krohn from the Jewish Museum Vienna present their exhibition "Best of all Women. Female Dimensions in Judaism", pointing out which gaps had to be overcome between ideas and implementation possibilities. They focus their attention on the roles of Jewish women in religious, economical, social, and cultural contexts. Doing so they also displayed how some `female' or `male' points of view very often lead to completely different perceptions of history. The two historians especially reflect on their strategy to work with biographic examples without wanting to tell life stories. In the exhibition they tried to stress all kinds of activities conducted by Jewish women rather than exposing persons. The two of them neither disguised the pitfalls of such an approach nor the difficulties they had been confronted with finding support for a show concentrating on a presentation of women's history through women's objects and documents.

Georgeta Nazarska draws our attention to the state strategies of religious and ethnic assimilation. She discusses the question why Muslim women become a state priority during the socialism and how official state policies uses women's societies to integrate Muslim women in its assimilation efforts.

The third part of the volume "Women in State Politics" is dedicated to the documentation of the political participation of women in the 20^th century. Nurie Muratova and Kristina Popova have based their joint research on the documents of the first participations of women in the elections in Bulgaria in the late 1930s, following their inclusion/exclusion from the organization of the elections, the state's strategy to connect their participation to the family life and the attempts of the Bulgarian Women's Union to encourage their own choice.

Maria Steiner presents the Johanna Dohnal Archive in Vienna. This institution, department of an archive dedicated to the estates of one of the most famous Austrian politicians, Bruno Kreisky, has to put up with most severe financial problems. The documentation hosts all sorts of sources considered not official enough to be kept in the Austrian State Archive, audio material, letters, photographs, brochures, grey literature, bills introduced to the parliament by Johanna Dohnal, the first Women's Minister of Austria, and her two successors. The archive tries to digitalize the `most crucial' documents as well as the most attractive sources (such as posters, and other campaigning material) to provide easy access to teachers, researchers and non-professional users. Maria Steiner discusses the most delicate questions of privacy rights and public interest, as well

as the matter of taking fees or not. Roxana Cheschebek analyses the discussion about women's suffrage in Rumania since the beginning of the women's movement in 1894 as well as the role of the different women's societies in the next decades. The rising of the political importance of women is also presented by Jovana Pavloviæ and Slobodan Mandiæ in their contribution about the Belgrade daily newspaper "Politika" and its `women's page'. Through publications and cartoons "Politika" supported also some traditional biases and stereotypes about the political participation of women. An important group of political privileged women is presented by Petar Vodenicharov and Milena Angelova. They have researched the social and educational background, biographies, and political activities of the women _ former guerrilla fighters and members of the Unions of the Fighters against Fascism in socialist Bulgaria which became in the course of time male clientelistic units.

The third part of the volume "Women and Family, Women and Society" connects the history of law and gender history. Margareth Lanzinger's paper on marriage contracts focuses on several essential points of pre-nuptial negotiations. Contracts mediate between the law and personal interests and therefore serve to reconcile norms and practices as well as norms and preferences. The analysis of marriage contracts reveals what men, women, and their families felt necessary to be based upon mutual agreement. Therefore this material is, from a gender-history perspective, a particularly rich source: it shows the various roles and scopes of action for both women and men, and it reveals gender-specific inequalities and possible forms of action in order to modify and mitigate certain inequalities. Last but not least, the paper shows that negotiations in the context of marriage and the various forms of settlement were based on gender-related concepts. Also in the field between law and gender history, Anastasia Pashova exposes some of the popular myths about the patriarchal Balkan family popular in the Bulgarian family research. Based on a large church documentation about divorces from the end of the 19^th to the first decades of 20^th centuries, she argues that women were initiators of the divorces in most of the cases. The last contribution in this section is that of Jovana Pavloviæ and Slobodan Mandiæ who represent the documentation of the Yugoslav University Educated Women Association in the 1920s and 1930s which had intensive international contacts. The Association published a bibliography of the women's writers in Yugoslavia and had an important place in the public discourse.

The Policy of Archiving in the frames of centralized state archive systems in the former socialist countries is a central topic in the volume. The lack of concepts of archiving women's and minorities' documentation is a common issue for the Macedonian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Romanian scholars. Marijana Piskova analyses the prescriptions of archiving in Bulgaria during the socialist period as well as the different levels of presentation of women and minorities in the archives: inventories, catalogues, publications. The article shows how the universalistic approach and criteria in archiving led to a marginalization of these groups in the process of documentation and archive description. Biljana Ristovska-Josifovska presents the Collections of Women's Documents in the Central Archives, which started in 1929 in Macedonia (then part of Yugoslavia). Further on she describes different women's societies and initiatives, and the documentation they left. She underlines their contribution for the democratic process in Macedonia and for the women's political participation. Jovana Pavloviæ and Slobodan Mandiæ also describe the development of the Serbian archive system after its beginning in 1898 and the place of women and minorities. With the present process of digitalization it becomes possible to make this groups more visible.

The last thematic field in the volume concerns the Digital Women Archives and Presentations. Regina Wonisch presents an internet multimedia project, casting a feminist view on museum exhibits: "MuSieum _ displaying gender". The term "MuSieum" combines the German word for museum with the female pronoun (sie = she). In this way the title visualizes the aims of the project: the claim that female history should be made more visible in museum presentations, and the demand to focus the display on the way in which female history has already been included in the visual programme of the museum. What can the exhibits tell about the history of men and women? Several objects of four Viennese museums have been selected and regrouped, from a feminist perspective, in new configurations under different labelling to open up novel vistas in the virtual room. The project is to facilitate the formulation of key questions pertaining to the presentation of gender topics in museum displays and collections. Lydia Jammernegg describes Ariadne _ a knowledge portal and virtual library of literature and information sources for Women's and Gender Studies. Ariadne's main areas of work are the collection and documentation of women's, feminist, and gender studies, the elaboration of the library's historical holdings, and an online database (including articles from journals and anthologies). The Ariadne online project "Women in Motion" pre

sents documents of the Austrian historical women's movement (1848_1918) with a chronology of its most important events, with information on outstanding persons, associations, organizations, schools, and educational institutions, and with women's periodicals and texts. The Ariadne team provides full online texts, supplemented with thematic, alphabetical, and chronological indexes as well as a bibliography. It also conducted various projects, such as "Women vote!", an online exhibition of "85 years of women's vote in Austria". In addition to these activities and offers, Ariadne provides an online content index and online articles from selected Historical Women's Journals.

At the end of the volume Nurie Muratova presents the first web catalogue of women and minorities archive fonds in Bulgaria. The website reveals that there are many fonds and documents we did not know about. This proved that the most importance precondition for the research is the interest for these documents and histories, despite of the differences between the free initiatives to preserve documents and the centralized state way of archiving.. That's why we decided to start a book serial in Women's and Minority Archives, which named DocWoment.

For developing the project as well as for the publishing of the book we would like to thank to all participants who joined and supported the project activities: first of all to Martin Felix Gajdusek, head of the ASO Sofia. Many thanks to the Belgrade University, the Research Platform Repositioning Women's and Gender History at the University of Vienna and the South-West University where the interesting discussions took place. And also to our colleague and friend Timothy Ashplant who was so very kind to edit some of the English versions of the articles.

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