Surveying my options of which archives to visit, I found myself intrigued by both the Saturday Evening Girls club and City of Boston photography collections at The Healey Library archives. I emailed a day ahead to let the staff know my intentions to visit on Wednesday morning and received a courteous email within 24-hours from the librarian, stating that the collections would be ready for my viewing promptly at 10am. Of course, thanks to the recent transportation issues in the city, I was running late.

Exasperated by my own tardiness, I reached the library a half-hour past due, feeling a little like the scholar Arlette Farge describes in “She Has Arrived”—fumbling, inconspicuous, and hypervigilant in the dense silence of the reading room. Thankfully, having navigated The Healey Library archives a few times before (and informed the staff of my delay), I could fake the rest of my confidence as the kind man at the front desk directed me to a table. A gray metal cart bestowed one box of file folders from the Saturday Evening Girls collection and two smaller flat boxes from the City of Boston collection. The staff member informed me that the librarian had chosen the boxes as representatives of the full collections. “That’s our largest photo collection,” he said, referring to the City of Boston boxes. Dread knotted in the pit of my stomach. My short time at the archives—a brief sifting through the three perfectly labeled boxes—would not be enough. I would be trying to “conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater,” not only because the boxes’ contents are a fraction of the full archives (which are a fraction of the “infinite heaps of things they recorded”), but because I would not finish—“there will be something left unread, unnoted, untranscribed” before I left for my midday meeting (Steedman 1165). Resigning myself to the inevitable incompleteness of my proposed task, I started with the Saturday Evening Girls club box.

After gingerly pulling off the lid, I surveyed a row of folders, each numbered and arranged in ascending order. I pulled out the first folder. Right away I was sucked into a narrative: Fanny Goldstein, self-described as the first Jewish woman in charge of a public library in Massachusetts, had written a short autobiography, detailing her experiences in the city. The piece was published in the Saturday Evening Girls (SEG) club newsletter in 1954. Goldstein worked at The West End library branch since 1922. She never married. In the accompanying photo, she sits on a beach next to another woman, who is marked “unknown.”

Already, I am making things up: Fanny was there when the West End was nearly leveled, the public and private sectors transforming the area from a “slummy” immigrant community into a more gentrified downtown neighborhood. She never married because of her fierce independence, or her gender, or her sexuality (that could be her secret partner in the photo!). Clearly she only ends her autobiography with a patriotic love confession to America on behalf of her Russian family so she could temper her notable statement that “in the course of the years I have had the extraordinary, rarely experienced by other women,” in which she lists off citations, rewards, lectures, and travels with which she received or partook. Not only am I looking at the photo and written account for “a history of relationships of power,” attempting to “narrate a conflict” that may or may not exist, but I’m also abusively using Fanny Goldstein’s story “as the motor of [my] reflection, the source of [my] own narrative” (45). At the end of the day, the scholar’s point of reference can only be his or her own origin.

In fact, I knew that I would look for any whiffs of female oppression before I arrived at The Healey Library. Farge’s assertion that “it is not easy to separate the history of men and women from that of social relations and antagonisms” somewhat validated my subjective approach to my visit, but I felt guilty as I greedily poured over photo after photo of these women berry picking, folk dancing, glazing, embracing near some rocks at Wingaersheek Beach (44). I chose which narrative to see in these photos before I arrived, before skimming the folders labeled “pottery” (which include stunning photos of the primary-colored bowls, pitchers, and plates the SEG made and sold at Paul Revere Pottery) to peer more closely into the one’s labeled “women.” Filled with pictures of the group’s craft-driven joy and intimacy, I perhaps too presumptuously assumed this community of women existed tenuously in the male-dominated society that originally produced such a politically acceptable, economic-based training program. I chose this narrative over others.

And really, knowing that these photos and their accompanying letters from family members were gathered beginning in 1975, a time of emerging feminism when gender equality may have been a sexy political agenda in good ol’ liberal Massachusetts, a “revisionist history” may actually exist here in a way opposite of what one might expect. While I forgive myself for my imagination—I am in fact a poet more than a scholar—there’s an anxiety I have about “truth” each time I visit an archive. While Farge describes the records themselves as occupying “an ambiguous position,” an intensity and potential intangibility, it’s not the unreliability of the documents I’m worried about—it’s mine.