Project Showcase: Women’s Literary Club of Baltimore
Recovery Hub project showcases synthesize materials submitted by the project team and reports from peer reviewers to highlight the interventions of peer reviewed projects from a variety of viewpoints.
Project URL:
https://wlcb.github.io/archive
Project Team Materials
Project Team
- Jean Lee Cole
- Elizabeth Danyel James
- Clara Love
Project Abstract
The Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore was founded in 1890 by a group of educated women who wanted to get their words into print and read collectively together. Over the next five decades, they met every Tuesday afternoon between October and June, hearing lectures on various, but mostly literary, topics, appreciating each other’s written contributions, enjoying refreshments and each other’s company. Erased from the historical record during their lifetimes and after, they and their work are being made accessible again through the WLCB Archive.
This site is a digital repository of the papers and publications of the Club, consisting of thousands of pages of meeting minutes, over a thousand meeting programs, and more than one thousand publications by Club members recovered by a research team of undergraduate students and volunteers. The documents are supplemented by author/member biographies, maps of where the author/member’s lived, and other online exhibits that provide historical contexts for Club members and their writings.
The Club championed women’s intellectual capacity, advocated for social and education reforms, and included women from a range of social classes (society women, teachers, wives of clergymen and tradesmen, and professional journalists, editors, and writers). It also included Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish women. Yet many of its members opposed suffrage and espoused deeply racist views, evidenced in their writings as well as their participation in organizations such as the Daughters of the Confederacy and their exclusion of Black women from the Club. One goal of the Club was to promote the establishment and development of regional Southern literature that featured Maryland as its intellectual center. That desire meshed with many aspects of Lost Cause ideology, which promoted segregation, fueled racist violence across the nation, and laid the foundation for state-sanctioned racism that continues to the present day. The project has grappled with how to handle this aspect of the Club’s history as it gradually emerged during the research process, and that work is still ongoing. We believe it is important to bring the history of racism in the United States to light as part of the nation’s reconciliation with slavery even as it is also important to amplify and make legible the accomplishments of women.
The site has been conceptualized and designed to allow for expansion and continuing exploration, and we seek peer review of the entire project with its future potential in mind.
Reviewer Highlights
Reviewed by Alice Martin and Fallon Murphy
Summary of the Project’s Place in the Humanities
The Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore Archive’s humanistic fields are situated in the recovery of women’s writing, publishing history, and reading practices in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Whiteness studies, reception histories of women writers in the United States, digital scholarship, and digital humanities pedagogy.
The project contributes to an ongoing conversation in the field of American women’s writing about how we might responsibly recover and “value” women writers and forms of writing that might otherwise seem unremarkable. This includes the recovery of previously overlooked or anonymous women authors—which this project does through its Member Biographies and its Virtual Library, to name a few of the site’s resources—but also the recovery of unpublished genres. One of the project’s biggest interventions is its inclusion of meticulously transcribed meeting minutes, programs, and other forms of archival materials that are central to women’s organizing labors but are still often ignored in literary and historical scholarship alike. These kinds of materials are rare to come across so well transcribed, organized, and collected in digital formats—particularly in the case of meeting minutes, which tend to go overlooked in favor of printed annual reports in such collections. Yet they provide unique insight into the many organizing and editorial labors women have historically shouldered that remain taken for granted.
In addition to its contributions to the field of literary studies—specifically nineteenth- and twentieth-century American women’s writing—the site plays an important role in recovering and contextualizing overlooked elements of American regional histories—in this case, that of Baltimore-area history. Positioned, particularly during this time period, as a pivot point between the North and South, this Mid-Atlantic region was an emerging but still under-discussed center of literary culture and civil rights movements. The project team was dedicated to digging into the nuances of a women’s club that expanded to include women from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and yet nevertheless struggled to cohere around questions of suffrage and still clung to racist Lost Cause ideologies. This dedication makes the site an important space for grappling with America’s sexist, racist, and classist fault lines, particularly in classroom settings.
Summary of the Project’s Use of Technology
The project team has made many underutilized resources searchable through this archive. To be able to search for keywords and metadata, especially in the context of the meeting minutes collection, for example, is a real feat of technological accessibility. While there are still some materials that do not have complete searchable functionality, the majority do.
The site also makes clever use of visualization and data analysis tools (like ArcGIS and TimeMapper), to present more interactive exhibitions that serve as important contextualization methods for the raw materials the site shares. The “Where They Lived” map, for example, uses its filtered legend function effectively to communicate its point about the changing class dynamics of the club over time. These exhibits are great examples of how the team uses technology to advance its goals of making these overlooked materials accessible and contextualizing them.
The project went in many stages to advance its goal of being a stable, open-source, and sustainable digital resource for scholars, students, and interested community members. The project was originally hosted on Omeka but converted to a static website using Jekyll and GitHub. The transition toward a GitHub-supported template was surely a time/labor-intensive one but a valuable one in terms of long-term maintenance and growth. The site highlights transparency in its use of technology by including a “Collection as Data” section on its homepage. This section helpfully shares its metadata, source code, and template resources, inviting others to engage with and use their sustainable methods.
Other Important Contributions of the Project
The project team’s commitment to recovery in the classroom is inherent in many of its rhetorical, organizational, and aesthetic choices on this site. On a rhetorical level, the introductions on the site—such as the description on the “Home” page, the introduction to the “Virtual Library,” the “About the Archive” description, etc. —take a clear, accessible approach to explaining the project’s components to students and emerging scholars. While they focus on the literary and historical value of the collections, they are broad enough to appeal to a wider audience of non-scholars as well, avoiding jargon or field-specific terminology. The bibliography under “Resources” also strikes a nice balance between materials that could be useful to those new to studying area history but also appealing to field-specific scholars who are already well-versed or invested in studying American women’s writing in the period.
The site’s distinct sections are also useful in appealing to a potential audience of students. Easy-to-identify headings like “What They Wrote,” “About the Club,” and “About the Archive” point to its simple navigability. And the categories along the homepage’s sidebar—“Time Span,” “Writers,” and “Objects”—continue to do this while suggesting the importance of history, authorship, and archival materials to this project’s larger fields. Finally, the site’s “Projects” begin to do good work in making these materials more accessible for non-scholars and students. Some of these projects, like “What Happened at a Meeting,” seem to have special potential to speak simultaneously to non-scholars and scholars alike, inviting those who may be unfamiliar with how to analyze these particular types of materials into this specific type of overlooked archive. The project team’s ongoing investment in encouraging pedagogical use of the site is essential to its success as a recovery project.
The project reminds us that recovery work is never finished, but can continue to be sustained by engaging with such materials and overlooked women writers in the classroom by undergraduate, graduate, and volunteer researchers. Indeed the site was used in the classroom and recovery was performed in semester segments. In the metadata of the site, there includes information on the people who recovered, digitized, and conceived of the distinct webpages.
Pedagogical Resources
Literary Recovery: Women’s Literary Club of Baltimore (Assignment by Jean Lee Cole)