"Unheard Voices" Brings to Light Three Centuries of American Women at Work
From the time of her marriage in 1743 until her death in 1765, Sarah
Chamberlain, wife of Nathaniel Chamberlain, a blacksmith in Pembroke,
Massachusetts, raised eight children while contributing to the family’s
livelihood by spinning yarn, weaving cloth, sewing quilts, and producing
other clothing and textile items for sale or trade. When she died, her
husband’s second wife, Deliverance, took over these tasks and was
joined in her handiwork by Sarah’s four daughters. Gleaned from entries
in Nathaniel Chamberlain’s account book, this glimpse into 18th-century
American domestic life is one of hundreds of stories about women and work
that is surfacing thanks to a new initiative at Baker Library.
The project, called “Unheard Voices: American Women in the Emerging
Industrial and Business Age,” is a survey of the library’s
manuscript collections that pertain to women’s history. Launched in
1999 with support from Rysia de Ravel (MBA ’83) and a grant from the
Harvard University Women’s Matching Fund, the survey is an effort to
bring previously overlooked information to light. “Over the last
decade, the library has fielded an increasing number of inquiries from
scholars interested in topics beyond traditional economic or business
history,” notes Laura Linard, Baker’s director of Historical
Collections. “We’ve had inquiries from industrial archaeologists,
social and cultural historians, and even scholars interested in the
decorative arts. Part of this new interest has been around the topic of
women in business and women at work.” The problem, says Linard, was
that “we really didn’t know how much relevant information we
had.”
A few collections — such as the 2,500-volume R.G. Dun & Co. credit
report collection and the detailed productivity studies from Western
Electric Company’s Hawthorne, Illinois, plant — were known by
library staff and scholars to contain rich records of women in the
workforce. Beyond that, however, there had never been an attempt to
catalogue information about women across the library’s fourteen hundred
manuscript collections. “It was time to address that need,”
comments Linard. “People’s interests and focus shift over time,
and the way we approach our materials has to evolve to support the changing
scholarship.”
The daunting task of searching through such a wealth of material fell to
survey archivist Laura Cochrane, who is now at the University of Delaware.
Cochrane’s work with 18th- and 19th-century records yielded about two
hundred collections of documents. They range from household ledgers that
detail the hearthside work of women in the agrarian age to photographs of
the legions of women who ran the looms in New England mill towns after the
dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Although she anticipated finding
information of a record-keeping nature, Cochrane was surprised by the number
of personal papers — mostly diaries and family letters — contained
in these business records. “These personal writings reveal the depth of
the Historical Collections and underscore the variety of ways that the
business manuscripts can be used to study the social history of the United
States,” she observed in a recent Business History Review article.
Now up and running, the “Unheard Voices” Web site, www.library.hbs.edu/hc/unheard_voices/,
offers access to a database organized in
four sections: women at work, women in business, women as professionals, and
women’s personal lives. Included are materials as diverse as the
diaries of whaling captains’ wives, wills that show how 18th-century
property laws affected women, advertisements for “female
complaint” medicine manufactured by a pioneering female entrepreneur,
and town records of payments to 19th-century schoolteachers. Some of the
records have already found their way into the elective MBA curriculum as
introductory material in the Women Building Business course.
The initiative is ongoing, and Clara Bouricius, manager of the Women in
Business Project, is currently documenting late-19th- and early-20th-century
materials, which show women’s progress as office and industrial
workers, professionals, and entrepreneurs. “The Western Electric
Hawthorne study is probably the gem from this period,” notes Bouricius.
Led by legendary HBS professor Elton Mayo, the far-reaching study included a
detailed account of the daily activities of five women factory workers over
a period of nine years. However, Bouricius has also uncovered some notable
surprises, including records of two women who worked on Wall Street in bond
sales in the 1930s. “After finding that bit of information, I’m
not sure what other surprises might turn up,” she says.
In addition to expanding the information on the Web site, Bouricius is
working on a printed guide and an exhibition that will open next winter. The
project’s enduring value, notes Laura Linard, is in establishing a link
between past and present. “I think it’s important for anyone in
business to realize that they are building on a foundation that goes back a
lot further than recent memory,” she notes. “Baker Library is
generally known by alumni as a place to track down up-to-the-minute
information about companies and industries, but there is often a strong link
between what is happening today and what happened in the past.
“The materials we are finding are not so much about women in
power,” Linard continues, “but about women woven into the fabric
of economic life. It’s really interesting to look back and see in the
collections that a number of trends that we consider so modern concerning
women in the workplace are not creations of the late 20th century.”
— Deborah Blagg
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All images courtesy HBS Historical Collections, Baker Library. |
Just a few months removed from Wall Street, where he commanded a workforce
of six thousand seasoned financial services pros, Richard S. Pechter (MBA
’69) stood before an expectant group of 12-year-old kids last summer
and experienced something he hadn’t in years: complete panic.
