By the time early American women’s letters made it to professional archives, other decisions made it harder to find these sources. In many cases, these materials end up in collections cataloged under the names of men, often the woman’s husband, son, or male correspondents. While many primary sources can be found in edited documentary collections, decisions about funding such projects have also shaped access. The papers of the 18th-century South Carolina planter Eliza Lucas Pinckney and First Lady Dolley Madison are cases in point. For decades, there has been financial support for projects compiling the documentary record of men from America’s founding era, but only recently have projects on Pinckney and Madison been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
As Lorri Glover notes in her 2020 biography of Pinckney, the early generations of academic historians turned to the papers and publications of male leaders because of greater accessibility and because the history that mattered to them was the history of the nation-state told from the perspectives of its most well-known leaders. That’s not to criticize those historians for making choices based on accessibility or interest—we all do—but to emphasize that their professional focus was another in a series of decisions that helped obscure sources about women’s history. Increasingly, archivists and museum staff are now adding women’s names in collections metadata. (Thanks to the leadership of the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative, such work is underway for records of objects and documents at Smithsonian museums and archives.)
All that’s to say that women aren’t missing from our textbooks and public memory because there aren’t rich sources for studying them or because earlier generations wholly ignored women’s history. True, white men born to wealth or prominence or who became wealthy or prominent left more records and have received greater attention. But in some cases, the ways a woman’s story was told in the past no longer resonate as widely as they once did and may, therefore, get overlooked. In the case of US history, 19th-century writers saw women such as Isabella Graham or Catherine Ferguson as relevant and particularly important for girls. Similar to today’s popular Rebel Girls series, with its successful formula of short pieces depicting bold women in a range of fields, 19th-century volumes such as the 1833 Sketches of the Lives of Distinguished Females followed a familiar Christian narrative pattern to present readers with strong, resolute women who modeled piety, benevolence, and other virtues.