Jennifer Tuttle publishes paper on women's literary recovery

Jennifer Tuttle, Ph.D., Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health in the University of New England School of Arts and Humanities and 2021-2022 Ludcke Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has published a peer-reviewed essay titled “Recollecting Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Archival Labor and Women's Literary Recovery.”

The essay appeared in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature in the second of two special issues on “Women and Archives” (vol. 40, no. 2, fall 2021).

Tuttle's essay began as the 2015 keynote address for the Sixth International Charlotte Perkins Gilman Conference at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University on the theme of Gilman and the Archive. In the essay, Tuttle analyzes the acquisition of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers by the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe.

Although the prevailing conception of women's literary recovery — the laborious process of finding and studying women's writing that has been lost, obscured, or deliberately ignored — tends to focus only on scholars’ acts of discovery while conducting archival research, Tuttle draws on the Schlesinger Library's institutional records to challenge this view. Using the Gilman Papers as a case study, she posits instead that recovery is a recollective process in which archivists play a formative role as equals and partners of scholars in the reconstruction of historical memory.