uppercase F

Work! June 3, 2008

Sorry I don’t have any pictures this time. I hate blogs without pictures. I tend to find them dull and tedious to read (with the exception of Jonathan’s, of course- I have to throw that in there). But I felt that whipping my camera out at work might be slightly inappropriate. The last two days I started my first full week of work, and began the preservation and archiving work at the Women’s Library. It was flipping amazing. On Monday I did preservation work. At first I cleaned some French books that were about STDs. Gratefully they were in French, so I couldn’t get too grossed out. Then I got to go through some recent donations to the library. This was awesome because they were suffrage magazines from during World War I, and belonged to a woman named Jill Craigie who was a filmmaker and wife of the labor party MP Michael Foot. My job was to go through these journals and find annotations that the two had made to the articles. The articles were interesting- covering topics like the forced feeding of women political prisoners and birth control- but my favorite part was seeing the ads. They had ads for corsets, food, and hair supplies, which would be considered pretty ironic nowadays if included in a feminist magazine.

Today I worked on an archiving project, which was incredibly nerve racking because I’ve never done any archiving or taken any classes on the subject. I was handed two boxes of stuff and told to get to business. So I spent all day going through the personal papers of a communist feminist named Nan Berger. She was an extremely interesting lady, and published a lot of material all around the world. It was interesting to see all the pseudonyms she had to go under to protect herself from the anti-communist forces. It felt a little creepy though, going through her personal correspondence. Especially when I got to the ‘death’ folder, and read the obituaries collected by her daughter. It’s weird having someone’s entire life- from birth to death- painted for you in a day.

I start my job at the Natural History museum tomorrow, so hopefully everything will continue on being super.