"Working Women: Unseen Labor in the Library of Congress" is a conceptual art project conceived by Christine Sloan Stoddard when she was an M.F.A. candidate in Digital & Interdisciplinary Art Practice at the City College of New York (CUNY). Below is her artist statement:
Maria Popova, founder of the popular blog Brain Pickings, writes that naming someone “confers dignity upon life and gives meaning to existence.”[1] So what does it say that the Library of Congress features thousands of unnamed women in its photo archives[2]? Without names, these archival women lack basic human dignity, ostensibly because they were not considered important enough to have their names recorded. Many of them are working women—plantation slaves, housewives, telephone operators, factory workers, etc. These women are unidentified in image captions far more often than their male counterparts. That means that their labor (and its importance) also goes uncredited. These women appear to have little value other than being generic female placeholders in the annals of American history[3].
For this project, I have sourced images of unidentified working women from the Library of Congress online archives and created a new online archive (libraryofcongresswomen.weebly.com). My website mimics the style and format of online library archives. I present two sets of images as digital photos with captions. One set shows the women with their original Library of Congress captions, in which they are unnamed. The second set shows the women with my re-imagined captions. These new captions use fictitious names and elaboration on the women’s stories. Though the captions are fictitious (due to the library’s original information gaps), I root them in historical issues and situations prevalent at the time the photos were taken. As such, my reimagined captions highlight women’s unseen labor and professional challenges. Examples include the unfair division of domestic tasks between husband and wife in traditional households to lower pay for women in the workplace. I have designed the archive so that I can keep adding to it and eventually name the full collection of unnamed Library of Congress women.
[1] Popova, Maria. “How Naming Confers Dignity Upon Life and Gives Meaning to Existence.” Brain Pickings. https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/23/robin-wall-kimmerer-gathering-moss-naming/
[2] The full scope of my research on this topic is available here: http://awomanspowerandplace.weebly.com/
[3] The Library of Congress is an agency of the legislative branch of the U.S. government and the country’s official library.
For this project, I have sourced images of unidentified working women from the Library of Congress online archives and created a new online archive (libraryofcongresswomen.weebly.com). My website mimics the style and format of online library archives. I present two sets of images as digital photos with captions. One set shows the women with their original Library of Congress captions, in which they are unnamed. The second set shows the women with my re-imagined captions. These new captions use fictitious names and elaboration on the women’s stories. Though the captions are fictitious (due to the library’s original information gaps), I root them in historical issues and situations prevalent at the time the photos were taken. As such, my reimagined captions highlight women’s unseen labor and professional challenges. Examples include the unfair division of domestic tasks between husband and wife in traditional households to lower pay for women in the workplace. I have designed the archive so that I can keep adding to it and eventually name the full collection of unnamed Library of Congress women.
[1] Popova, Maria. “How Naming Confers Dignity Upon Life and Gives Meaning to Existence.” Brain Pickings. https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/23/robin-wall-kimmerer-gathering-moss-naming/
[2] The full scope of my research on this topic is available here: http://awomanspowerandplace.weebly.com/
[3] The Library of Congress is an agency of the legislative branch of the U.S. government and the country’s official library.