Nancy Reddy on Researching Beyond the Archives

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For most of the many years I spent working on The Good Mother Myth, I thought it was a book about the (mostly male) midcentury scientists whose work has shaped what we think it means to be a good mom. It wasn’t until I’d gotten deep into the drafting that I realized something: these men who spent their lives researching motherhood, who lectured women about how easy and natural it was to devote themselves solely to their children’s needs, they’d had kids, too. So who was caring for their children, as they spent long hours in the lab and countless months traveling to attend conferences and conduct their research?

The question answers itself—it was their wives—but I was humbled by the fact that I didn’t even think to ask it until fairly late in my research. Once I did, though, it unraveled a whole new layer of the story. Each of the men who’ve become famous for their work on motherhood—psychologist Harry Harlow; pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, creator of the term “good-enough mother”; Dr. Spock, whose Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care outsold every book but the Bible for decades; and more—married exceptionally smart women, left the actual work of parenting to them, and then staunchly refused to hear what they had to say about it. Because those women never matched their husbands’ accomplishments in public life, it was harder to find their lives in the historical record.

As I worked to recover those women’s stories, I developed a set of research strategies that will prove useful for any writer using historical sources to inform their work. Often there are gaps or deliberate deletions from the historical record. These gaps most often impact archives and histories of women, queer people, and minorities—basically anyone who isn’t a white man who was already seen as the main character in his own lifetime.

Sometimes the information we need is in the historical record but hard to see. I discovered the first set of wives on my third or fourth re-read of the major biography of psychologist Harry Harlow, whose work on maternal attachment in infant monkeys is at the foundation of attachment theory. Harlow’s first wife, Clara was brilliant (like, mathematically; she was part of Lewis Terman’s studies of gifted children at Stanford) and they met when she was a graduate student in psychology at the University of Wisconsin, where Harlow taught. (She wrote to her family that “When I began making As in physiological psychology, Harry Harlow began escorting me home,” a note that claims for Harlow a notable place in the long and ignoble tradition of professors pursuing their smartest students.) Marrying Harlow meant leaving graduate school because university nepotism policies at the time meant she’d never be hired at the same place as her well-known husband.

After they divorced, Harlow married another accomplished woman, Margaret (Peggy) Kuenne, an assistant professor at Wisconsin, who also had to leave her job. She spent the next decades of her career as an unpaid assistant in Harlow’s lab. She was finally appointed a lecturer in the Department of Educational Psychology in 1965, and she began working on her own research. Though she’d edited countless articles during her time in the department, the only two with her name on them were published after her early death of breast cancer at 52.

Reading sideways requires a willingness to re-read, to wander through a set of sources, to widen your gaze. Sometimes, though, the answers continue to elude us and the record remains incomplete.

Here’s what was most startling to me about Clara and Peggy: they weren’t actually hidden. They’d been right there, all along, in Harlow’s biography. But Harlow was the main character, so they got only glancing mention. Despite my own avowed feminism, my experiences as a woman in academia, my training in feminist research methodologies, it took me years to even think to look for them. This realization forced a bracing reconsideration of how I was reading and where else I might look to find the fuller story.

This is a technique I’ve come to think of as reading sideways: looking for the fragments and traces of other stories inside the available materials. Once I started paying attention to Clara and Peggy, they appeared. Harlow talked about his wives in interviews, including a particularly combative one in Psychology Today toward the end of his life, in which he said about Peggy that “being a smart woman, she knew it was better to marry a man and lose a job than hold a job and not marry a man.” Peggy only published those two articles, but they were easy to find, once I thought to look.

Reading sideways requires a willingness to re-read, to wander through a set of sources, to widen your gaze. Sometimes, though, the answers continue to elude us and the record remains incomplete. Alice, Donald Winnicott’s first wife, was my favorite of the wives, and she was also the hardest to find. In the scholarship on Winnicott, Alice is widely described as artistic and unstable, as if she’s a weight he had to shed before his genius finally bloomed in his second marriage. It took me an embarrassing number of reads of descriptions like this before I finally clocked the trope—she was the Madwoman in the Attic!

When I was able to recognize the misogyny inherent in this characterization of Alice, I wondered what else I’d missed. I found excerpts of her letters quoted in articles about her husband. In one plaintive letter from 1961, 10 years after their divorce, she wrote to Winnicott, “I wish so much you could have been happy with us. My old mare has a baby foal + they are grand together, living just behind us.” I treasured finding this sliver of her voice, but in the Winnicott scholarship, it seems she’s quoted mostly to show how pitiable she was.

As I kept digging, I began to see a different story. Alice studied at Cambridge during the years when women could attend and take exams but wouldn’t be granted degrees. She worked in the National Physical Laboratory for five years before marrying. She offered occupational therapy during the war. She maintained a pottery for decades, and the dinnerware produced there was sold in a department store in London. Two of her paintings are held in collections at Cambridge and in Plymouth. She’s hard to find, but she’s not invisible.

Writing about Alice required the use of “critical imagination,” a strategy I’d learned about in my PhD coursework but had honestly never fully grasped before I had the opportunity to apply it. The feminist rhetorician Jacqueline Jones Royster defined the term “critical imagination” in her book Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women. As Royster defines it, imagination is not about making things up but is instead a rigorous process, a “commitment to making connections and seeing possibility.” In her scholarly work, as in our creative work, “imagination functions as a critical skill.”

Practically, using critical imagination means giving yourself the space to think beyond the available sources, to consider the stories that have fallen through the gaps, and to dream a little in the research process. Those hours I spent trying to imagine Alice’s life after her divorce, to find a fuller story among the fragments—that’s critical imagination. Critical imagination also meant asking bigger questions about the culture that shaped her life. I was reminded of an article I’d read years earlier about the first women who enrolled at Cambridge.

Returning to that scholarship helped me to imagine Alice’s years there more fully and grapple with the ambition of women who’d enroll in a wildly demanding and competitive program, knowing that their work would never be recognize with a degree. I found her paintings and gazed at her brush strokes. (Ultimately, my editor had a talk with me about just how much Alice my book actually needed, but I regret nothing about the time I spent imagining her life!) Critical imagination is an invaluable tool for writing about people like Alice, who are compelling figures but exist only at the edges of the archive.

I learned one final strategy from my friend Emily Van Duyne, whose Loving Sylvia Plath uncovers a vision of Plath that’s funnier, bitchier, more nuanced than the caricature of a woman with her head in the oven that’s circulated in the culture. Van Duyne did a lot of her research in the Plath and Hughes archives, but she also visited the places of Plath’s life. In This Ghostly Archive, Peter Steinberg and Gail Crowther call this approach to research “the living archive.” They argue that an archive is not just the papers housed in a library, but that “a place, a house, even a room can contain an archive because it houses time, events, memories, and past histories.”

Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers provides another example of living archive research, when Shapland lived for a month in Carson’s childhood home. Shapland conveys the embodied nature of this research practice in a lovely passage considering her qualifications to write the biography. “Who am I to her?” Shapland asks, before answering, “I slid my arms up the sleeves of her long lime-green wool coat, I folded her nightgowns, I labeled her socks. I made biscuits in the kitchen of her childhood home and I walked in the park where she used to play by herself.”

Most of us won’t be able to make biscuits in the homes of our research subjects, but visiting the rooms and walking the streets where our characters spent their lives can help us see them more clearly. (I don’t know if this would count for Steinberg and Crowther, but I’ve done a portion of my own living archive research via google maps. It’s not always possible to travel to visit a place, but you can recover some details and see a place differently using street view.)

What all of these strategies have in common is an openness to reading, re-reading, and looking in unexpected places. Sometimes research is simply a matter, as Jacqueline Jones Royster and her co-author Gesa Kirsch put it, of being willing to “look and look again, listen and listen again, think and think again.”