1930s–1950s: (The Archive’s Bias Grain — LFAS Women Engaging the Archive as Researchers Within a Frame Set Between Subject and Object Observer and Observed, …

1930s–1950s: (The Archive’s Bias Grain — LFAS Women Engaging the Archive as Researchers Within a Frame Set Between Subject and Object Observer and Observed, the Complicated Power Dynamic of Collecting Data and Publishing Research About Women Whose Lives Few Scholars Had Documented While Also Documenting Their Own Proximity to Other Women for Personal Professional and Political Reasons, the Scattered and Partial Archive of Elite Women Contrasting with the Many Pages About Peasant and Working-Class Women — Elite Women Not Exposed to the Same Exceptional Curiosity and Surveillance That Peasant Women Were Conscripted Into, Where Silences in the Archives of Black Women Are Often Created by Colonizers or Men These Silences Were in Some Cases Co-Constructed Between Women, Archiving Named as an Articulation of Women’s Citizenship): LFAS women engaged with the archive as researchers within a frame of study set between subject and object, observer and observed. They contributed to the material study and documentation of Haitian peasant, poor, and working-class women, but were also documenting their proximity to other women for personal, professional, and political reasons. The scattered and partial archive of elite and middle-class women contrasts with the many pages of information about peasant and working-class women. Elite and middle-class women were not exposed to the exceptional curiosity and surveillance of research in the same way that peasant, poor, and working-class women were conscripted into — and refused — these studies and political agendas. Where silences in the archives of Black women are often created by colonizers, foreigners, or men, these silences were in some cases co-constructed between women. Sanders Johnson builds on Caribbean historian Marisa Fuentes’s charge to not only see power in historical narratives but also name and actively work against the bias grain in the archive, observing that the respective paucity and abundance of information about different women shows how different and similar these women’s lives were. Attending to these women’s national belonging beyond the state and rights and through their archival practice is to name their archiving as an articulation of women’s citizenship — their respective and overlapping archival locations account for their historical existence, but they also catalogue their varied embodied experiences of womanhood and how they were positioned in relation to gender, race, and class in Haiti.