Why is an archive for women's papers, and, by extension, of women's studies, important, even essential, at this point in 2008?

Actually, it has been important, even essential, for a long time.

I became aware of the grevious lack of women's personal papers--diaries, journals, letters, even lists (I continue to believe that a whole history of an era could be compposed using womne's daily lists)--when I was researching my memoir, "Passion and Prejudice" (Allfred A. Knopf).

Whereas the men in my family, going back six or so generations, were well-recorded in newspaper articles, speeches, and books, the women had compltely disappeared.

I'm not talking about the remote reaches of tme. On my father's side, there was no record of my grandmother or step-grandmothers other than a few family portraits of my grandmother; even the names of the two steps were gone, and I had hardly known that they existed.. They had excited the opposition of the men in the family, for various reasons, and therefore they had been expunged.

Remember that women until very recently wrote many letters, sometimes several a day, in the many decades before telephones and email; they also kept accounts, diaries, scrapbooks, and records of their daily lives. Perhaps these were stored away in closets and trunks but, over time, descendents decided these records were not worth keeping; libraries and archives were not interested in them; and so eventually they went into the garbage and were lost.

As a result, and perhaps in some unconscious way, an intended result on the part of the patriachy, the substantial part of history that is represented, and recorded, by women, was lost. Think, of example, of the loss if Mary Boylston Chestnut's "Diary from Dixie" had been destroyed; it is one of the rare documents that talks about the secrets of plantation life, the rapes and mixed-race children, the oppressed women, both black and white, who shared the so called "Great houses".

And so, twenty or so years ago, I was able to establish the archive at Duke University, with the support and encouragement of the excellent librarians there and of the university itself, first to house and preserve my own papers, and then to begin to collect the papers of women writers, initially southern women writers, but now branching out to other regeions; the imperilled records of feminist organizations which died in the early nineties, and other important records, such as zines.

The archives are used by undergraduates as well as scholars, and insure that our history is not maimed and distorted by the deletion of women's records.

I hope eacb woman who reads this will begin to think about her own records--how to organize them, how to prevent the complete disappearance of letters by printing emails, how to insure that they are preserved after her death, and avilable to the public. SB

A rewarding three-day event at the New York Society Library in New York City--one of the few member libraries left in this country--helped me to think further about MY READER. The emphasis in publishing on the number of books sold, the best seller list, the merchandising of books by the chains, and the decline of readers has, I think, induced most of us who are writers to think in terms of bulk: so many thousand copies sold, rather than of the individual reader. Since writers make very little money, even when a book sells well, the fruit of this frame of mind is, basically, the publisher's profit. This leads to a lack of appreciation of the singular reader (singular, perhaps, in both senses) who makes the increasingly serious decision to buy a book and to read it, and even, perhaps, to read something else by the same writer.

It is precisely this singular reader that I want to honor. it is her (most readers of fiction are women, which is a loss for men) reaction, her acknowledgement of the existence of my newest boo, and, by extension, of my existence as a writer, that supports and authorizes my endeavor. I may never meet her, may never know whether she found my books satisfying, but her existence provides the invaluable link in the slender chain that connects me with my audieence. Each of those links is equally precious, from the woman browsing in an independent bookstore who happens on one of my books, and is attracted it it (usually for mysterious reasons), to the reader alone in her room, reading, to the thoughtful critic who talks about my book to her friends, or even writers an on-line review.

I plan to address you, my singular reader, more frequently on this webpage, in the hope that we may set up a correspondance. Your views, your reactions, are precious to me. The seal of silence that has been set between reader and writer needs to be broken.

My books exist because of you--not you in your thousands, or in your hundreds, but in your singularity.

Blessings on you. SB

© Siona BenjaminThe statistics about violence against women in the United States have a deadly sameness that can numb minds and hearts: 95 thousand rapes a year and untold numbers of sexual abuse, often unreported. Both continue at record rates for a so-called "developed" country in spite attempts that began with the women's movement of the early 1970s to develop shelters, programs, police education and public awareness.

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