The Archival Phase in Feminist Organizations: Methodological Suggestions

Abstract

The article is based on a series of interviews (61) and a multi-sited ethnography conducted during 2019–2021 which traced archival records of 20 feminist organizations in Israel: local women’s peace organizations (FPAs) and Rape Crisis Centres (RCCs). We describe the study and the complex methodological concerns and meta-questions relating to the study of feminist community archives in relation to content (types of testimonials or records), method of organization (archival practices like cataloging or digitization) and activists’ perspectives concerning future preservation and access. In order to overcome these challenges, we suggest six methodological principles which may apply to the study of civil society organizations that were established between the 1970s–1990s: the importance of identifying researchers’ positionality vis a-vis the archive; the politics of knowledge and intersectional identities; avoiding judgment of informal archival practices; identifying who sets the rules; silence and self-silencing; and recognition of invisible labor.

Introduction

How should researchers study feminist community archives? Does the study of feminist archives—including documentation of various forms of violence (such as gender and sexual violence or political violence)—require the development of unique methodologies that differ from general archival studies? These questions guided us throughout an ethnographic research project about informal feminist community archives in Israel: feminist peace archives (FPAs) and the archives of Rape Crisis Centers (RCCs). We aim to explore methodological aspects of studying such archives in a bid to fill the gap between feminist archival theory and feminist praxis, which “is aimed at more than attaining better representation of women in archives” (Cifor & Wood, 2017, P. 2).

In recent decades, there has been growing interest in feminist community archives. This is because many women’s NGOs established between the 1970s to the 1990s have experienced what we call an “archival phase.” An archival phase, as we understand it, occurs roughly two or three decades after a group’s initial emergence and subsequent institutionalization. It is a stage when activists or group members can no longer rely on memory to narrate the groups’ origin story, purposes, projects or successes. Regardless of whether a given NGO or community is still active, the archival phase may also coincide with the aging or death of founding figures, and the quest to preserve individual and collective memory.

Another major factor prompting community organizations and NGOs to address archival matters concerns technological changes in data management, privacy, curation and preservation (Campbell et al., 2023; Okune, 2020). Consequently, various digitization initiatives have been launched to provide services to NGOs, to make their records and collections accessible to the public. These processes pose complex challenges for activists, community members, academics and policymakers. Indeed, scholars have found that while feminist organizations from the 1960s and 1970s have initiated independent grassroots archives (Flinn et al., 2009; Poole, 2020), these archives reflect a particular approach to the problem of “what is left behind” and the documentation of women’s histories (Eichhorn, 2013). Nonetheless, many feminist archives are not well documented (Deitch, 2020; Sadler & Cox, 2018; Stephan, 2022), and some remain closed or inaccessible. Problems of access and curation particularly arise within archives containing direct testimonials of painful pasts (Robinson, 2014)—such as human rights abuses, torture, and rape (Taylor et al., 2021).

According to Michelle Caswell (2021), creating community archives is a form of activism for marginalized groups. Preserving collections, documents and records that reflect community value, is an act against symbolic annihilation. Feminist Peace Archives (FPAs) that include collections and repositories created by individuals and women’s groups that resisted war, armed conflict and militarism (Aharoni et al., forthcoming) serve as an example of the politics of preservation and erasure of feminist activism. Consequently, studying community and NGO archives raises complex methodological concerns and meta-questions.

In this article we seek to address these concerns by describing a collaborative study conducted in Israel. The objective of the overall study was to survey archival content (types of testimonials or records), methods of organization (archival practices such as cataloguing, or digitization), and attitudes of various activists toward records and collections. Since the current “archival phase” involves ethical questions, we also paid attention to the appropriate ways of conduct research on, or in collaboration with, grassroot community archives (such as feminist archives), that are not state archives and therefore impose no official obligations to follow professional archival rules and policies (Okune, 2020). We draw on ethnographic fieldnotes, internal discussions and interviews, to summarize six general methodological principles for studying feminist community archives. These principles concern: (1) the importance of identifying researchers’ positionality toward archives in general; (2) the politics of knowledge and intersectional identities; (3) acceptance of informal archival practices; (4) identifying who sets the rules; (5) silence and self-silencing; (6) recognition of invisible labor.

We note that although most (though not all) FPAs and RCCs discussed in this paper are feminist groups or NGOs run by Jewish women citizens of Israel, the presence of Palestinian feminist activism, and the entanglement of Palestinian histories within Jewish archives (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2022) appeared in the interviews we conducted and locations we visited. Hence, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the colonial logic of Zionist archives plays an important role in understanding the presence (and absence) of Palestinian women from archival projects. Furthermore, despite the practice of shared feminist and peace activism until 2000 (14 local women’s peace groups), the long-term impact of armed conflict minimized collaborations between Jewish and Palestinian women afterwards (Aharoni & Hasson, 2020; Hermann, 2009). In the 2010s, only one new peace organization—Women Wage Peace (2014)—was established (Halperin, 2023; Lion, 2024). We address issues of colonization, violence, and power relations and the methodological dilemmas they entail in the sections on intersectional identities (“Principle #2”), self-silencing (“Principle #5”), and invisible labor (“Principle #6”).

Case Study and Methodology

This ¹ study was conducted between 2019 and 2021. It was designed as a team-based, collaborative feminist ethnography, which included an active survey of 20 collections and materials defined as Feminist Peace Archives (FPAs) and Rape Crisis Centers (RCCs) repositories, ongoing participant observations and 61 in-depth interviews with staff members, veteran activists, academics and archivists. The study was conducted in private residencies, public organizations and offices, and public events, including Zoom. By using a multi-sited ethnography of various organizations in their archival phase, we were able to apply a more nuanced mapping and a broader capacity to link together distinctive discourses, locations and sites (Falzon, 2016).

The first type of archival records we surveyed—which we identify as FPAs—consists of published and unpublished documents and other organizational materials (visuals, objects, posters, audiotapes etc.) produced by 11 activist groups that engaged in peace politics and anti-Occupation initiatives between 1987 and 2018. ² These organizations were selected based on three parameters: duration of activity, historical presence (archival phase), and community-based or intersectional activities. We did not include organizations or groups that collected their historical documents, or those that maintain a regular documenting online system (Authors, n.d.).

Since many of these groups no longer exist, the project was meant to save whatever could be saved, and to better understand the various meanings that women peace activists attribute to archival material and to the possibility of preserving their own political histories. While we were able to locate a few original historical records on Israeli women’s peace activism in the Israel National Library and National Archives, most of these collections have been lost or scattered among various activists in Israel and abroad, or kept in private homes or external storage spaces. We found that the major source of information on FPAs was a feminist community archive known as the Feminist Archive in Haifa, which has received private and organizational collections throughout the years.

The second type of organizations we surveyed were Rape Crisis Centers (RCCs). There are eleven RCCs in Israel that have been established in various parts of the country since 1977. While RCCs are more organized NGOs, their archives—containing thousands of unsorted documents from the late 1970s to the present—have yet to be digitized or researched and are relatively inaccessible to the public. The 9 RCCs we surveyed are active, living organizations with ongoing concerns about preservation of historical data.

The study consisted of three phases. In Phase 1, we created a coding system of archival materials, to better understand their scope and size, and to learn about record-keeping systems and means of preservation of different collections. The initial coding form which was filled for each organization included 22 general questions divided into 4 clusters that captured the time period and type of materials (organizational history, testimonials); the size of collections (number of boxes, folders and approximate number of overall documents); places of storage (geographical spread, private/public spaces, material conditions of storage); system of registry and access to material; digitization and usage of statistics; and language (Hebrew, Arabic, or English). Phase 2 involved a review of existing materials, resulting in a short internal report that we sent to still existing organizations. For ethical reasons, the surveys did not, at any stage, involve the opening of actual registries containing personal data, or exposing any testimonial materials. ³ Thus, the internal reports served as a baseline for open discussions about the possible meaning and implications of our findings, and provided the participants with a clear starting point for conversation about archival practices (Coleman & Rippin, 2000).

During Phase 3, we conducted 61 semi-structured interviews (57 women and 3 men): 21 employees or volunteers from 9 RCCs, 35 peace activists or employees from 11 FPAs and three professional archivists. Some of the interviewees were interviewed more than once. Four additional interviews were reflexive interviews (see below). As 'at-home' researchers, we had previous acquaintance with many of the interviewees, and our interview requests were received warmly and positively.

The majority of the interviewees were Jewish citizens of Israel with only four being Palestinian women citizens in Israel. The low number of interviewees among the Palestinian women was due to our focus on individuals who had been or were still involved in bureaucratic or managerial roles in local RCCs or feminist peace organizations, or both. Most were Ashkenazi Jewish women (only 11 participants self-identify as Mizrahi women), reflecting the ethnic composure of the historic Israeli feminist and peace movement (Lion, 2024). Among them, five immigrated from English speaking countries and five from the Former Soviet Union. Six self-identify as LGBT. Their ages ranged from 30 to 90 years old, with a clear representation of elderly women over 60 (23 women).

The interviews were conducted in Hebrew by the research team members, at premises selected by the interviewees, either in offices, homes or a café. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic that coincided with the study, 18 interviews were held online.

The interviews began with an open-ended general conversation about personal or organizational histories (Roulston & Choi, 2018), to allow the interviewees to establish their own stories and definitions of the terms archive or collection. The conversation then shifted to their perceptions and practical engagements with archiving, women’s histories, and the politics of archival memory in the two fields. Only then (usually during the second meeting) did we ask the interviewees to open actual storage spaces (such as closets, drawers, or cabinets) and let us see their contents. The interviews lasted between 1.5-3 hours and were recorderd and fully transcribed. All interviews presented here have been anonymized.

Our feminist standpoint—which required us to reflect upon our presence, and the implicit rules governing informal community archives—was woven into the research design. The method presented here was based on teamwork, group reflexivity, and a dialogical approach that combined multiple perspectives, disciplines and experiences (Barry et al., 1999, pp. 30–31). All members the research team were personally involved in either RCCs or feminist peace activism in the past. Hence, we conducted a series of reflexive interviews which were also transcribed and analyzed. These reflexive interviews laid the foundation to our conceptual framework and dialogical approach and helped us to critically engage with a field with which we were already personally and politically affiliated.

Studying Feminist Community Archives

This section sums up our main findings through a series of methodological principles which reflect dilemmas and insights about archival fieldwork in feminist community archives.

While the examples a based on a specific case study, we argue that these could be used as general guidelines for similar ethnographic projects.

Principle #1: Researchers’ Positionality

The first principle we implemented is rooted in the notion that feminist researchers have complex relations of personal and professional proximity to institutional knowledge, especially in the field of gender expertise (Bustelo et al., 2016). Like many other contemporary ethnographies on feminist activism encompassing positionality and politics (Davis & Craven, 2020), we found that reflexivity and attention to pre-existing knowledge and first-hand experiences was crucial in clarify our motivations as researchers of the archives.

Consequently, the study involved active documentation of continual dialogues between the team members, in a bid to clarify our positionality toward the “field.” By doing so, we wanted to gain a deeper understanding of each other’s attitudes, knowledge, and experiences about feminist work and activism. Since all three of us were involved in feminist-political actions and have worked at feminist organizations in the past, we consider ourselves ‘at-home’ researchers. We are rooted in Israeli feminism, self-identify as veteran activist scholars, and were able to enter the field from a position of proximity. The two research assistants conducting material surveys and interviews were also chosen for their past experience as volunteers or workers at feminist NGOs. As insiders, we have intimate and in-depth knowledge of the community archives we are studying, we are well acquainted with the various practices recorded in them

The following excerpt is an example of how our internal dialogue process was used to better understand our motivations and position toward the field:

This interview has several goals. The first is to try and document as many details as possible from your personal and private memories, from the time when you volunteered at the Rape Crisis Center. The second goal is to think together what is the importance of the RCC archive, from a historical perspective, in light of your perspective as someone involved in writing many of the documents stored therein. (First author interviewing second author, 29 December 2019. Emphases added).

During these conversations, we shared personal stories on how we had become involved in feminist activities, the kinds of actions we had taken part in, and the emotional repertoire we had developed over time. We identify this as a dialogical approach, based on self-reflection and a back-and-forth movement from the personal to the professional. This process was key to moving toward a shared understanding of formal and informal institutional practices within Israeli feminist NGOs: training, documentation, secrecy, publicity and silencing. Mapping our position(s) within the archival terrain clarified our epistemic standpoint. We used explicit field notes to address complex emotions and interactions, and to acknowledge disagreements over the “appropriate” ways to preserve feminist archives and historical documents.

The fact that we are “insider ethnographers” also means that we are intimately acquainted with the women activists we study (as individuals), and with local community archives. As insiders, our own names, images, handwriting or private stories are kept in some of these archives. This position—dubbed critical friendship (Chappell & Mackay, 2021; Holvikivi, 2019)—involving striking a balance between contradictory actions of proximity and critique. The following excerpt is a self-reflection written by one of us after visiting an intimate archive—namely, an archive of an NGO she used to work for:

This organization is a charged place for me. It is charged with memories of many deeds, but also heartache. It’s a place that stores complicated emotions—of belonging, suspicion, excitement and fatigue. In recent years, many things have changed. The place remains familiar, but it is not mine anymore. I come into the archive, knowing that it stores bits of the past, and that I am part of that past. I am extremely curious and anxious about one question: Which part of the past has been kept? Who is recorded in it? Am I in there? (Second author, field notes, 20 May 2020. Emphases added).

Encountering historical objects and documents from the past can trigger emotions. Here is how one of us described her reactions to a particular folder she found that contained historical records of sexual violence:

At a certain point I felt a stab of pain in my stomach. A very harsh physical reaction. What I noticed was that I recognized handwritten notes. […] Gradually, I realized that many of the documents I was reading were written by women who are friends whom I know very well! […] It was quite shocking, because I understood that I wasn’t just reading archival materials, but viewing the lives of my friends, as volunteers. (First author in conversation with the third author, 26 January 2020. Emphases added).

We found that positionality—or encountering evidence of our past selves and those of others we know—produced instant intimacy. However, the above quote also clarifies how intimacy in the archive can be disturbed. The archive can create a sense of alienation, or of displacement—a place that is at once familiar and strange. Hence, surveying archival materials as a resource for historical reflection on collective pasts can be complicated by living memories and the feelings they invoke.

Thus, unlike professional archivists, our own histories of activism are part of the studied registries and collections. Many research participants shared their knowledge about us—knowledge created in shared feminist spaces and actions. For the most part, they willingly engaged in conversation and confided about shared public and private experiences, which in some cases we ourselves had witnessed firsthand. At times, it seemed as though our very presence triggered their memories. Thus, the archive conversations flitted between past and present, and covered issues such as aging, loneliness, friendships, failures and successes—conversations that continued well after the interviews were over, through emails and instant messages. Occasionally, our deep “insider” organizational knowledge also sparked ill feelings with the women we encountered. Nor did the shifting between past and present, and the cascade of memories and emotions, skip us: during the ethnographic fieldwork, we too experienced a need to engage in critical reflection over our emotional and political engagements with community archives. Being aware to these aspects prompted us early on to reflect upon attitudes, feelings, and the power relations present in the field and to recognize the impact of these on the data-collection phase.

Principle #2: Intersectional Identities

Principle #2 adds another dimension of positionality. By focusing on intersectional identities as a principle, we move beyond the specific histories that tie us, as insiders, to the field, to acknowledge structural aspects of gender, age, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation (Deitch, 2020; Henry et al., 2009). In this section, we engage with the various ways in which intersectional identities played a role in shaping expectations, communicating research questions, and interpreting findings. While all of us self-identify as middle-class Israeli Jewish women, our research group was diverse in terms of ethnicity (Mizrahi and Ashkenazi),⁴ sexuality (LGBT and straight), and age.

Questions about identities led us deeper into the field and its dynamics, which is still reflected in existing archival materials. Aspects of language (Hebrew or Arabic), volunteer training, organizational culture, and even the development of certain forms and bureaucratic practices were affected by ethnicity, class, and education. These made certain materials more visible than others. This is how one old feminist⁵ we interviewed described the ethnic bias in Israeli (and Jewish) feminist archival projects:

In Israel there is an over-documentation of Jewish, white and Ashkenazi women. It is a clear cultural and class bias. Twenty years ago, before the 20th anniversary of the RCC, I handed over a list of the names of all volunteers from earlier years. They wanted to invite all the veteran volunteers. But, later, the actual publication reflected a disproportionate and unfair documentation, only of volunteers who had responded to the call. […] Some elderly women didn’t want to share stories, and others had simply dispersed, disappeared, or died. (Interview #37, 13 July 2020)

To better understand patterns of marginalization and silencing within the types of community archives we were studying, we also followed Mizrahi archival activists. At an event organized by the Archi-Parchi Project (Rowland, 2020)—a civic archive of social struggles in Israel (est. 2018) titled “All-Night Mizrahi Feminism,” evidence of the Mizrahi women who had participated in peace activism—was revealed. Prior to the event, local women were invited by the organizers to bring their own private archival documents and share them in small workshops, “to create a community archive” (Recording #17, 02 March 2020, and field notes from event). One of the documents presented that night was a letter written in 1996 to the board of Bat-Shalom—a prominent Jewish-Palestinian women’s peace organization that existed at the time in Jerusalem (Golan & Kamal, 2005). One activist, who had worked there as a community organizer with working-class Mizrahi women, and subsequently became a leading human-rights lawyer, read from her private archive in public:

My decision to leave Bat Shalom is an act of protest, because I cannot continue working in an organization which lacks a clear conceptual perception of what it means to be a feminist-leftist [Bat-Shalom is a] group that is essentially Ashkenazi.

Later, during our archival survey of Bat-Shalom’s scattered archives, we asked about the tensions between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi women. Despite the passage of time, memories were still harsh and traumatic. A former director of Bat Shalom recalled: “Wow, it was the nightmare of my life, that project. A complete nightmare!” and admitted that back then, Jewish-Ashkenazi women had no clear vision of how to link peace with intersectional oppressions based on gender, ethnicity, and class (Interview #60, 27 May 2020). The fact that our team included scholars who self-identify as Mizrahi feminists made it possible to investigate the (in)visibility and absence of certain women from FPAs. It enabled us to pose direct questions about Mizrahi women’s participation, presence, and patterns of joint/separate organization. Our intention to recover the illusive presence of Mizrahi histories made us sensitive to specific archival objects and systems of organization.

Nonetheless, our intersectional perspectives were most evident in conversations with four Palestinian women citizens of Israel who had taken part in historical activities related to feminism, peace and/or sexual violence prevention. In an attempt to recover an important feminist community archive, we interviewed a woman who served for six years as the Palestinian co-director of an NGO that closed due to financial reasons. After apologizing that she “does not remember anything” and has no knowledge about the archive’s whereabouts, she explained her positionality as an outsider:

In my personal perception, I don’t… I don’t see myself as a true representative of the organization. So, now you ask me to give information, and this signifies authority and status, but I don’t see myself as a representative of the organization. (Interview #18, 5 February 2020. Emphasis added).

Palestinian women citizens of Israel described the practice of collecting and preserving archives as an act of privilege, which required not only time and financial resources, but also a sense of place and continuity. For them, the inability to keep archives was yet another manifestation of depletion tied to the “tragedy of Palestinian written and oral histories” (Interview #18), and of statelessness. One of the Palestinian activists carried around her personal archive in a suitcase for twenty years, as she moved from Haifa, to Nazareth, Jerusalem and Ramallah. She spoke about the politics of building trust as essential to making her archive accessible to future generations:

The personal archive is a collection of documents and things, but I want it to be placed within a context. I want for those who get access to it to go over a text that places the events in the appropriate political context (Interview #35, 8 July 2020).

Another well-known Palestinian peace activist explained that joint political work has cultivated an understanding that “we cannot build a future without taking responsibility for history, without taking responsibility to open up the debate about 1948 1948 [Israel’s War of Independence, known by Palestinians as the Nakba–“Catastrophe”] (Interview #39, 13 July 2020). In other words, when memory is linked to authority, “not remembering anything” coincides with questioned status, and insecure belonging. Thus, authority may be reclaimed by suspending access to memory, and by determining the conditions by which archives are presented, debated, and handled. Our dialogical approach revealed that, from an Palestinian perspective, community archives are spaces that preserve constant struggles and ongoing debates on cross-national cooperation and independence, language, resources, and even geographical boundaries. Thus, a member of an Arab speaking RCC said:

We are part of the Association of RCCs in Israel, because working together provides very important power, and it is an achievement for our own organization. But, there are a hundred thousand things that we do not, and will not, take part in. (Interview #38, 13 July 2020).

Principle #3: Avoid Judgment of Messy Archives

The third principle is based on acknowledging and accepting the incoherent pasts of feminist communities and their archives. While archival projects aspire to create systems of registration and classification, the messiness of these particular communities is part and parcel of their internal logic. This paradox may create an inevitable tension between community memory “keepers” and archivists. To overcome this tension, our work with feminist community archives was designed to reflect feminist ethical reasoning and practices of self-care and safety. Specifically, we adopted one of the major ethical foundations of feminist hotlines—namely, the epistemology of believing survivors’ narratives, and avoiding judgment. We note that RCC volunteers and service providers aspire to promote in-control decision-making that may contribute to regaining a sense of autonomy, which is often achieved by validating survivors’ decisions and acknowledging that they are the best judge of their own needs (Decker & Naugle, 2009). Hence, avoiding judgment became a core tenet of the evaluation process we conducted.

Feminist archives seldom look like “real archives”: they are not consistently organized, and many materials are lost, or preserved in ways that might seem irresponsible to trained historians. We arrived in offices or private homes where historical documents were stored in various conditions. Some of them were arranged in boxes and well-organized binders; but many others were stashed away in closets, cellars, or bomb shelters, in precarious conditions. Some of the organizational and political documents we found in private homes were mingled with personal diaries, family photos and children’s drawings.

We noticed that those who opened their homes were often embarrassed and apologetic about the storage conditions of these informal archives. One of the participants, who kept historical records of feminist anti-militarist activism under the kitchen sink, said: “I don’t want to open that kitchen cupboard, because the smell is sharp and unpleasant. But they’re there.” (Interview #20 12 February 2020.) Many women put off, delayed or turned down our request to visit, despite their profound curiosity and excitement, on the grounds that “everything is a mess.” We realized that the tyranny of the imaginary clean house—an unrealistic gendered ideal—haunts even feminists in their private spaces.

In keeping with feminist principle of listening, avoiding judgment and respecting autonomy, we made sure to address these hesitations by reassuring participants that we would like to see things as they are. We made clear that we are interested in women’s invisible work within “real homes,” and addressed the messiness as a structural-collective condition, not as a personal problem.

In addition, we became aware that feminist community archives contain testaments of ongoing struggles and political contestations. For activists, the request to open up an organizational archive or a private collection is an act of accountability that provides an opportunity to weigh the successes and failures of feminist politics. Historical documents provide evidence of success stories, and play an important role in constructing collective narratives of silenced and marginalized groups—but also contain accounts of failures and mistakes. This is why archival interactions are so emotionally charged, and may spark reluctance, or fear of judgment (Preser, 2016). Accordingly, it is, once again, crucial for feminist researchers to foster a dialogical process. Caswell and Cifor (2016), in their discussion of the affective responsibilities of archivists, identify this approach as “radical empathy.” They argue that such radical empathy is necessary for shaping the “relationships between archivists and records creators, between archivists and records subjects, between archivists and records users, and between archivists and larger communities” (p. 25).

As we adopted radical empathy, we learned to suspend judgment and were able to discover the unexpected richness of materials and discourses that were hidden in these messy spaces, as well as the cultural and gendered scripts that govern “appropriate archival practices”.

Principle #4: Who Establishes the Rules?

Applying a dialogical praxis for studying feminist archives involves a shift of attention from an outcome-driven approach to a process-oriented one. This principle addresses issues of authority and control. While our initial drive to track down original or unique documents played a defining role in the design of this study, we knew that feminist community archives are not collections of women’s pasts, but places of the present (Eichhorn, 2013). As previously noted, feminist archives are very private spaces, and should be treated as such. Instead of rushing to succumb to one’s curiosity to read actual documents, we found that communicating with record-keepers and engaging in archival ethnographic work was most productive when it involved observing, lingering, and pausing action.

Christen and Anderson (2019) dub these practices “slow archiving.” They argue that in indigenous community archives, in particular, “slowing down creates a necessary space for emphasizing how knowledge is produced, circulated, contextualized, and exchanged through a series of relationships” (p. 90). The archives we surveyed possessed a distinct temporality. For example, one research assistant—who had been an active member of one of the organizations and had a profound knowledge of its culture—wrote the following field note after one meeting:

The gathering was very informal and relaxed in terms of schedule and participants. We started late and only one woman joined us. I saw a pattern, and wondered if this was the overall way of doing things (informally), or was it related to the study? Was this a manifestation of their hesitation to cooperate and tell the archive story? Or was it because they couldn’t fully grasp how the archive survey would benefit the organization? During the meeting, we needed to demonstrate a lot of patience and adapt to our hosts’ pace. (Field note, 26 December 2019).

Despite our position as insiders, which gave us access to the field, there were still invisible doors that remained firmly shut and only gradually opened as trust developed. For example, one veteran peace activist who agreed to discuss her personal archive insisted on meeting at a neutral space (a café), rather than at her private home, specifically because of her ongoing friendship with one of us. Thus, the act of setting boundaries meant that the actual archival materials were not revealed, and remained in their original, private space. Complying with the keepers’ rules can create a paradox: while many of the documents and objects in these archives are highly important for understanding silenced histories, their keepers are often reluctant to reveal and share them. Only after we understood the broader logic of preservation or destruction, and internal codes of classifications, could we draw attention to the actual content of the documents stored within these archives.

In the course of our study, we identified multiple practices of record-keeping and preservation—including systematic destruction and shredding of personal and organizational documents containing private information (mainly related to sexual violence). Our feelings toward the active destruction of what we identified as archival materials were mixed, and at times we found it hard to conceal our surprise or even disappointment at the lack of documentation. Often, there was a tension between the archival motivation to preserve in order to help other survivors (Campbell et al., 2023), and the activists’ perceptions and daily engagements with their communal histories.

This dilemma concerns the political aspect of preservation and the access of future generations to community archives. What should be done with this knowledge? Are we willing to join the gatekeepers’ perspective, knowing that these archives may never become public? As previously noted, our method was designed so as not to involve the opening of actual registries or exposing any testimonial materials, at any stage. This methodological decision was not just for ethical reasons. It also offered us a chance to “follow the boxes” and understand the broader pattern of organization and classification, amidst the archival “mess.” A senior professional Israeli archivist explained to us that: “the first thing is to understand the logic of those who organized the materials” (Interview April 30, 2019). Following the keepers’ logic of preservation or destruction of various materials created an opportunity to ask new questions and an in-depth understanding of motivations and actions. The principle of “Who set the rules?” helped us see how feminist archival activists operate as self-regulators and keepers, and to record their logic of preservation and destruction.

Principle #5: Pay Attention to Self-Silencing

The fifth principle we adopted concerns the well-documented problem of archival silences, and the ways in which communities and activists choose to expunge certain documents and testimonials. In community archives that preserve indigenous or marginalized knowledge about resistance or violence, archival silences may appear in the form of refusal, resistance, or non-participation. Consequently, working with such archives requires a practice of “reading for omissions, voices, and silences in archival” (Crater, 2006, p. 17), and acknowledging that due to the selective preservation of documents, we may never know what happened to certain individuals, or at specific events.

Since archival absences or silences vary, it is important to collect information about bureaucratic practices, material infrastructures, and attitudes toward privacy and documentation, before actually engaging with archival materials. In this study, we learned that feminist activists and NGO workers created diverse practices and abilities to codify and enforce norms about history and silence. For example, all RCCs operate according to a code of strict anonymity and “have no interest in making their archives public.” As one of the coordinators explained:

Our contract with anyone who calls the hotline—and the reason why she is calling us, and why we have over 10,000 calls each year, unlike the police, who receive less than 17% of complaints—is because that they know that here it [their case information] is kept in the most anonymous way possible, and no one else can see it. Ever. (Interview #5, 30 October 2019. Emphasis added).

These practices of “documenting while keeping secrets” distinguishes both the sayable and the unsayable. They determine the presence or absence of certain words, descriptions and even the name of specific activists. Sometimes, important women are mentioned only in passing, and their archival traces are visible only to those familiar with the particulars of that community. Here, for example, is how one of us described her reaction to an historical folder she found that contained testimonials by Palestinian volunteers when the center was still considered a Jewish-Arab organization:

[The folder is from] the period prior to the split in the RCC, before the [Arab group] created their own center. All of a sudden, I could see the presence of Arab women in the folders, and that this organizational reality really really really [existed], and that almost no one speaks of it today. You know, there were things [in the folder] that I could grasp instantly and completely, because I know the organization. And I could read the concealed organizational subtleties and drama that took place in the 1990s, hidden in this text. (First author interviewing the second author, 26 January 2020).

Cifor and Wood (2017) argue that by engaging in meaningful cooperation with community members, feminist archival studies can better understand these paradoxical systems of erasure and voice. Also, in order to meet diverse community needs, it is necessary to build a critique of norms relating to preservation as “good” archival practice.

Feminist political histories are produced through various elements of silence and self-silencing (Harel-Shalev & Daphna-Tekoah, 2016). This is why combining ethnographic methods, interviews, life stories and material-object analysis with actual archival surveys was essential to learning about the mechanisms of preservation or destruction of materials. We were able to trace the reasons and motivations behind self-silencing and absences by listening to the activists’ memories and negative emotions of frustration, anger, pain, and hardship. Although we found thousands of original documents, we also learned about the missing archives. Some of the participants told us that they decided to erase the past and to throw out organizational documents because of the emotional difficulties involved in keeping them. This is how one of us described a home visit and conversation with a former activist, a Palestinian women citizen of Israel:

She was glad to meet me, but said that she doesn’t think she could help. She had been a noted political activist, which was why I refused to believe that she hadn’t saved anything. I thought that women tend to devalue their work, and their archives, as well. I met her at her home. We were happy to meet each other after so many years […]. Once we started the interview, she seemed tense. Although she cooperated, it seemed that talking about that time was not easy. She smoked a lot, rarely smiled and tried to be nice and helpful. She had documents and archival materials, but hadn’t kept anything. She said that there was a flash drive with organizational records, but she didn’t know where it was. The conversation was long, and we talked about her feminist activities. But not a single actual document remained. (Field note #5 February 2021).

Encounters like this, which reflect the refusal of activists to keep or to disclose archival materials, could be frustrating. But, retraction or destruction of archival materials could be interpreted as a form of willful silence that is not imposed, but chosen (Parpart, 2020). Moreover, we can think about the lack of documentation as an affective resonance (Caswell & Gilliland, 2015): although we were unable to track down actual materials, speaking about the archives’ absence created a shared emotional process of remembering events, actions and ideas that may not have been available in written texts.

Nonetheless, we found that among the reasons for lack of documentation were privacy, and fear. Some of the participants explained that papers had been destroyed to protect women and men from future political prosecution. One of the participants told us about a police raid on the office of their organization—an anti-militarist group which published information about pacificism:

There is a practice of erasing identifying information of people after a certain period—total erasure. I personally never keep identifying information. Whatever I remember in my head is fine […] because if the police come again to investigate, I don’t want them to find a piece of paper with a list of names. Because they actually found such a piece of paper […] and everyone who was mentioned on that piece of paper was called in for questioning. (Interview #20 12 February 2020).

In the case of RCCs, we found that self-silencing and silence were an integral part of their daily work. Each RCC had its own documenting system, interpreted through an organizational narrative that distinguished between the sayable and the unsayable. We learned that while all RCCs are “paranoid” institutions that invest considerable efforts in preserving the security of women and keeping their secrets, their systems differ from one another. Some RCCs document all the anonymous calls in a computerized system; some use handwritten forms; and some destroy all traces of personal testimonials by shredding, or even burning, papers. Accepting these variations was key to understanding the diversity of the field.

Principle #6: Pay Attention to the Invisible Labor of Feminist Activists

The final principle we adopted addresses the ways in which feminist community archives preserve collective labor. Invisible labor includes daily tasks of community building (arranging meetings, making phone calls, editing newsletters, organizing demonstrations, assisting victims, sending petitions, etc.)—often on a voluntary basis. Many of these activities leave no archival trace. For example, the combined hours in which volunteers were sitting near a desk at the RCCs, waiting for a call to the hotline, and then the time spent answering a call, writing down a testimonial and keeping track of the case—is often overlooked. What is often left is a single piece of paper, in handwriting, with a very short description of a rape.

One of the participants—a feminist peace activist—described the invisible efforts of community building and care as follows:

I think that the most important materials we have are actually these conversations [the interviews]. I mean, what is left are the changes in time [sic] that are like air, which you don’t notice anymore. That’s the actual substance […] it’s like air. That is our grand archive. This air, which no one can see, this thing that no one can feel. History is very important, but feminism is a dynamic process, it’s not just words. And we preserve these dynamics in our lives. Our grand archive is our lives. (Interview #40 24 July, 2020).

For her, feminist archives are not physical spaces or website collections, but are either “like air” and cannot be located in a certain place, or preserved “in our lives” and embodied by the activists themselves. An integral part of feminist archives is the act of doing feminism, so feminist activists’ stories are expected to carry these deeds from the past to the future. Approaching invisible work when studying feminist archives means that we must pay attention to “the air”—i.e., the gap between activism and documents. The feminist archive, by definition, captures invisible labor, yet relies on visible traces that activism leaves behind.

One way to understand invisible labor is by listening to women’s entry stories (after asking “How did you become a peace activist?” or “How did you get involved with this group?”). This is how one of the women described her work with Palestinian women citizens of Israel, political prisoners, during the First Intifada [Palestinian uprising]:

In the early 1990s, two women peace activists came to my house. They said that there were two female prisoners at the Moskovia [Detention Center in Jerusalem], and they wanted to provide them with clothes. “Are you ready to help out?” I said “Yes,” and they came and brought two bags and I went over there, and it was the first time that I saw how the security check worked: half of the things were not allowed in. I returned home with one bag. That was the first time I met the group. (Interview #44, 20 August 2020).

Another way is to ask questions about the expertise and training of volunteers. Here is an excerpt from an interview describing RCC volunteer courses in the 1990s:

The training course is a marathon of personal stories. This is what transforms someone […] from being an ordinary woman to a rape crisis volunteer. It is a true rite of passage. The thing that you carry with you, your personal experience gives you the power to provide assistance. (Interview #8, 29 December 2019).

This description of training and apprenticeship underscores how feminist practices of consciousness-raising and sharing of lived experiences are essential to the creation of bureaucratic practices, such as keeping a log-book, collecting statistics, publishing reports etc. Women, on both sides of the hotline, are on the same spectrum—as listeners, as witnesses, as storytellers. This process creates a strict norm of knowledge production and record-keeping rules that turn into scripts about “how to document stories about sexual violence”, what “to write”, and what “to omit”. The volunteers themselves are carriers of communal knowledge—not only of their personal experiences, but of others. They are living archives. As one of them put it: “Our grand archive is our lives.”

Conclusions

This article highlights the dialogical nature of studying the act of archiving, by a group of “inside researchers”—a unique position that informed the study’s design as a consciously shared and reciprocal process of knowledge production. The principles we proposed here are the product of contending with challenges and hindrances encountered when researching archives dealing with feminist histories of anti-violence activism, and their current reverberations. In researching the act of archiving, our principles underscore that feminist community archives should not be treated as simple repositories, but as constructions of collective memory and current identities. As such, they record unresolved social realities and feminist tensions that should be captured in nuanced ways.

The methodological principles we outline are relevant to other fields of activism. They offer practical ways to engage with different dillemmas that emerge during the archival phase of civil-society organizations and local communities. By posing questions about the appropriate ways to conduct research on, or with, grassroot community archives, it is possible to explore how power relations, silence/self-silencing, and invisible labor—are integral parts of historical knowledge production. Consequently, we argue that reflexivity, collaboration and dialogue are essential methodological components for conducting research on marginal communities and their records.