Uncovering the ‘Feminine Touch’ in the Archives of the AIHS:  

Addressing Archival Oversights and Acknowledging Female Contributions

Susan Davey Getz

MSc, Global Premodern Art: History, Heritage & Curation, University of Edinburgh

BA (Hons), Humanities (History and Art History), Open University

The archives of the American Irish Historical Society are a singular resource.  Their very existence demonstrates the strength and import of the Society’s legacy and standing. Since its foundation in 1897, these archives have grown to house “the most complete private collection of Irish and Irish American literature and history in the United States”.^[1]  They were originally intended to address a gap in scholarship that had long been neglected; namely, the history and presence of Irish Americans in the United States of America.  Like so many diaspora groups, the story of the Irish and their contribution to society was largely overlooked and underrepresented in the official recorded histories of the time.  In addition, it was wrongly presumed by many scholars that no Irish were present in America before the 1830s.  The founding members of the AIHS took on the challenge of correcting this error and by the 1920s, a few short decades after the Society’s inception, their archive had taken shape amassing large collections of books, papers, and pamphlets.^[2] 

Today, the AIHS archival project must be centred on the vital task of preserving this unique collection for the benefit of ongoing and future scholarship.  As historians and archivists, our responsibility is not only to safeguard these materials but also to engage critically with them and expand upon the collection’s scope to reflect more inclusive narratives in keeping with the Society of American Archivists’s code of ethics.^[3] Both the Society’s original constitution and its current mission statement further emphasise these commitments, outlining a vision in which the AIHS serves:

• “as a focal point of the contemporary transatlantic Irish experience … where the story of the American Irish is studied and reviewed”
• “to investigate specially the immigration of the people of Ireland to this country”
• and “to promote and foster an honorable and national spirit of patriotism”.^[4]

At the time of its foundation, the AIHS comprised of 50 men born in Ireland, or of Irish descent, making the official emerging voice of the American Irish exclusively male.  This was commonplace in academic institutions globally but for modern scholars, disciplines such as women’s studies as well as readings of archival and library studies and history more broadly through the lens of gender, have begun to create a growing body of scholarship that encourages reinterpreting collections to reflect more inclusive, and accurate, narratives.  In addition to the female authors and artists housed in this archive, there are also female owned and donated collections and objects, records of female domestic servants, administrative staff, and early archivists.  All of which display both the strong presence and significant contribution of Irish and Irish-American women to this society and to Irish America.  While this archive does  indeed display a male-dominant perspective of certain periods of history and this society, it is also uniquely positioned therefore to help us uncover and highlight the existence of ‘feminine touches’ as well.  The phrase ‘feminine touches’ here will be used to reference the gender-coded and tactile practices such as handwriting and collecting that are the prevalent presence of female activity in this archive.  It also calls to mind the more passive and dismissive connotations of this familiar phrase in order to critique the overlooking of female contributions.  Highlighting the ‘feminine touch’ therefore, helps us acknowledge female agency and labour, often invisible, as actively shaping this archive rather than as an ornamental addition.  I propose that researching more fully these ‘feminine touches’ will help build upon the AIHS’ founding vision that sought to: “make a serious effort to leave to those generations which will follow us a clearer and better knowledge of the important work done by men and women of the Irish race on this continent”.^[5]  Thus, considered in this way, the AIHS’ archive stands as an invaluable resource that can help point the way to where we can look and what we can study in order to uncover and make explicit the presence and contributions of Irish and Irish-American women.  

Section 1: Feminine Touches

        Women’s widespread presence is visible here in the multitude of documents that relate to society correspondences, administrative papers, and similar materials.  These traces open several potential avenues for further research, but with notable challenges and limitations.  However, if we look beyond the documentary landscape to objects and artefacts owned and donated by women, we can gain a deeper and more personal insight into how women, too, have shaped and curated the voice of this male-founded archive.  Feminine touches are found in a variety of objects in the archive and include a personal scrapbook (1) consisting of clippings of recipes, poetry, cartoons, and so forth. Such an item, as in all feminist history and art history, is vital in helping to provide an approach to studying previously unacknowledged and marginalised histories.  Even in this one item alone, light is shed on how women exercised their agency, contributed to their society, and inevitably helped shape and influence its defining character today.

Section 2: Mrs. Thomas Miller’s Scrapbook

        The scrapbook (1) is a very literal example of a trace of a feminine touch in the archive.   Owned and compiled by a Mrs. Thomas Miller in the early 1900s, it is one of a number of such books that she filled with her handwritten notes and cut and paste clippings; the very act of making the scrapbook a tactile practice.  However, this scrapbook, when considered with the aim of seeking to uncover female voices and contributions, shows us another kind of feminine touch present in these archives: the choices of a woman recorded.  The traces of her choices help us form a composite, but still relatively intimate, portrait of this woman; what she chose to take note of, what gained her attention, and thus what shaped and informed her perspectives.  Through the scrapbook we can catch a glimpse of the interests, concerns, and daily life of Irish-American women at this time, albeit the life of a seemingly relatively middle-class Irish-American woman.

Before 1845, Irish women typically migrated as part of family units but from 1850 onwards, a great shift is seen in this trend where “young single women” left Ireland as “economic migrants in their own right”.^[6]  By the turn of the century, Mrs. Thomas Miller could have been a new arrival to America or, having been living here for over a decade, may now be a newly married Irish woman who has left behind domestic service work for the domestic labour of her own home required by her marital status. Unfortunately, due to a lack of provenance on Mrs. Thomas Miller’s scrapbooks and little recorded information on Mrs. Miller herself, we struggle to put this uniquely female curated collection into a more meaningful context.  As in studies of female collections gathered into Kunstkammer (cabinets of curiosity), or of seventeenth-century Dutch dollhouses that allowed women a miniature world in which they had control, further research on this scrapbook and similar items of material culture will help to keep expanding the “definition of what counts as a collection”.^[7]  Rather than relegating this feminine object to the realm of frivolous domestic pastime, study of the feminine touches in items of material culture within our archives, such as this scrapbook, allows us to see the domestic, female space as one that “carries crucial insights about female experience and identity formation”.  

Mrs. Miller’s scrapbook follows in the tradition of Gilded Age America that saw collecting remain a powerful vehicle for the “feminine consciousness”,^[8] allowing private concerns to be transformed into public narratives or expressions.  What the scrapbook displays is a plethora of information, of ideas, and of the traces of the choices made by one woman, a kind of kunstkammer contained on the page. And, much like how the objects in the kunstkammer or a dollhouse may reflect female experiences in life, so too can the topics on which this scrapbook enumerates.  The largest collection in this scrapbook is of ‘reliable’ recipes ranging from tips on how to make the perfect chicken fricassee to a sort of agony aunt column conducted by an ‘Aunt Sarah’ called Kitchen Chats.  This almost singular focus on the kitchen reflects the domestic role and duties of women, particularly the Irish women who as servants formed a significant presence in middle-class American domestic culture.  However, the time afforded to Mrs. Miller’s careful compilation of her scrapbooks supports the notion that Irish women in America never intended for domestic service to be their lifelong career.  Rather, it was marriage that they aspired to as a way of escape from this harsher way of life.  Marriage could afford them time for independent pursuits such as collecting, and also a domestic space that allowed them to create a woman’s world, albeit under the omnipresent watchful presence of the man of the house, at home. Clippings found in Mrs. Miller’s scrapbook, include advice and recipes shared from other women, typically housewives, who wrote in to various publications, their names and addresses recorded.  A Mrs. G Politzer on 62nd E120th St, New York and a Mrs. G. MacNamara of 14 Preston St, Worcester, Massachusetts offer recipes for cream coffee and lobster croquettes respectively.  This is an important record of social history, where we begin to see an unfolding of the solidarity of these women, in diverse diaspora communities around New York, over their shared experiences and worries.  It allows us to glance into the feminine domestic space and consider how in their recipes, their sharing and gathering and storing of culinary and domestic wisdom, women could cultivate both their independent voice and a world away from the prying eyes of men.  Rather than disregard such a collection of clippings and recipes as irrelevant domestic ephemera, we can aim to reframe their place in this archive supported by the historian Dianne Sachko Macleod argument that women “view their collections as a means to console their psyches …. Clarify their identities, and foster their empowerment”.^[9] 

Above Image: Extract from Mrs Thomas Miller’s Scrapbook  Source: Archives of the AIHS, 991 5th Ave, New York, NY.

In this context, Mrs. G MacNamara’s putting of her name and address into print by writing in for publication her recipe for lobster croquettes, for example, can be understood as a statement of identity and an expression of female agency.  Likewise, we have evidence of Mrs. Miller’s own statement of identity in examples of her own handwriting; a direct and overt ‘feminine touch’.  In addition to her clippings, she adds in a few handwritten recipes.  One is a recipe for ‘mustard pickles’, in her script and on a slip of notepad paper from the Village Hotel in Vintondale, PA., that she tucked inside the scrapbook.  Another telling example is on the opening page of the scrapbook, where she claims its ownership.  Though it is not to be ignored that the names recorded here are actually that of their husbands, as was the norm.

Above Image: Example of Mrs Thomas Miller’s own penmanship from her scrapbook  Source: Archives of the AIHS, 991 5th Ave, New York, NY.

Another compelling detail of Mrs. Miller’s scrapbook is the fact that these numerous clippings are not pasted into a clean, purpose made book but rather, affixed on top of the pages of a book titled Thirteenth Annual Report of the Interstate Commerce Commission (1899).  On many pages the words of this book are on display, the words and world of men colliding and interacting with the feminine domestic world on the page.  This interesting textual juxtaposition becomes a portrait of gender roles and gender segregation in the landscape of late 19th and early 20th-century America.  It also hints at support for Macleod’s belief that through collection women can “foster” their own “empowerment” with this very visual example of a woman quite literally overriding a man’s words with her own.^[10] 

Additionally, it is important to note that while recipes and culinary advice are the main topic and overriding theme of Mrs. Miller’s scrapbook, it is not the sole topic of this particular collection.  Alongside recipes, there is the frequent inclusion of song lyrics or poems both humorous and plaintiff in tone.  Many of these lyrics lean into the sentiments of distinct cultural groups within America, like the Irish. One such song is titled ‘Three Leaves of Shamrock’, and tells the story of a dying Irish girl who sends shamrock to her brother across the sea encapsulating the sorrow of immigration and the leaving behind of one’s homeland and family.  Another, titled ‘Save My Mother’s Picture From The Sale’, details the selling of household possessions at auction after the death of a beloved mother.  These sentimental words filled with longing and sadness permeate the scrapbook’s pages.  There is a prayer, a ‘Litany of our Blessed Lady of Victory’, and a news clipping that announces Philbin as the “fourth district republican” nominee but below it, in the same clipping, a death notice with funeral information for a Mr. Mark M’Donnell.  Politics, faith, and even recipes, all mingling here with an overarching sense of sadness, hardship, and anxiety; often the hallmark of immigrant and diaspora identity.  Overall, as a collection, there is little levity.

There is less of the melancholy in clipped articles such as: “Flowers for City Gardens”, “How To Lie When Sleeping”, or for recipes that will “promote beauty”.  Nevertheless, there is still a sense of this overriding seriousness in tone and a focus on instruction, displaying clearly both the constraints and the anxieties of women and their domestic domain.  This scrapbook clearly supports the argument that the act of collecting allowed women to cultivate an independent world for themselves and, piece by piece, clipping by clipping, form a voice that was not always granted to them.  However, such a collection not only allows women to see but to be seen.  The diversity of topics within the scrapbook reflects the diversity of women’s lives and activities but accordingly, also displays their worries and concerns, and the rigid social structures that confine them.  The constant instruction and commentary on domestic tasks and duties reflects the weight of the responsibility placed on women’s shoulders to keep their home and loved ones afloat and societally acceptable.  These responsibilities were often underacknowledged both by their society and by the historical studies that followed and thus, women’s work in the home constitutes a form of invisible labour.  Women had to constantly endure societal pressure to keep up with shifting guidelines on how to be feminine, and thus, acceptable.  This scrapbook features articles such as the ‘Praise for Old Fashioned Dinners’; a scathing review of trends such as “the eight-course dinner” and the over consumption of the new “preserved foods”.  Instead, it instructs that “the old fashioned meal of roasted or boiled beef served up with its own juices with two plain vegetables and a pudding” is far more wholesome and preferable for creating strong constitutions.  Additional articles on how to ‘Tell Good Eggs’, ‘Prevent The Smoking Of A Lamp’, ‘Soften Your Skin’ and ‘How To Take Care Of Your Piano In Moth Season’ together begin to give us an awareness of these pressures and their widespread presence, calling for constant effort and restraint, in all aspects of women’s life.

Section 3: Conclusion

        The scrapbook alone as a study demonstrates the strengths of material culture in the archive, especially as an avenue for exploring feminine touches and female contribution.  Additionally, this strengthens the argument for further research to be done in order to contribute to the appropriate elevation of both material culture and female contributions, or feminine touches, within the academic landscape of the archive.  There are countless more items within the AIHS archive ranging from the signatures of secretaries, female made and owned Irish lace, and similar, that with more dedicated scholarship will allow us to contextualise these items more accurately and broaden the archive’s scope.  This also encourages interdisciplinary work as there is opportunity for collaboration and overlap with projects such as The Dictionary of Irish Biography.  This research project pioneered by the Royal Irish Academy, among others, would be beneficial in addressing the AIHS’ missing provenance information, including useful information on Mrs. Thomas Miller.  Further research would help keep this particular archive relevant for contemporary scholars and secure the AIHS’ future position in academic fields.  Moreover, without addressing this archival gap, the AIHS cannot fulfill its mission and the archive’s original intended purpose.  The founding member’s own guiding principles do not suggest a completed narrative but rather, invite an ongoing inquiry into the range of experiences that have shaped the diaspora. In this light, it becomes clear that making explicit the contributions of women, whose presence has been overlooked, is not a departure from the Society’s mission but a fulfillment of it.  

Above Image: Irish lace collar piece.  Source: the archives of American Irish Historical Society, 991 5th Ave, New York, NY.

As it has typically been women, “who have outnumbered men leaving Ireland in many decades since 1871”, by engaging more fully with the roles women have played, we are able to suitably honor the complexity of the Irish diaspora, the American Irish experience, and female participation.^[11] I believe that this, in turn, will more faithfully realize the Society's founding vision by continuing to strengthen and uplift the diaspora voice making these archives a dynamic part of ongoing Irish and Irish American scholarship.

Author Bio:

Susan Davey is a postgraduate at the University of Edinburgh studying Global Premodern Art History, Heritage, and Curation. Her research interests include female agency in early modern art, with additional interests in Irish Women’s Studies, Renaissance and early modern art, the Irish of the early modern period, and interdisciplinary approaches to dance and art history. She presented her work on 15th-century Northern Italian paintings depicting dance at the Renaissance Society of America annual conference in 2023 and completed an archival internship with the American Irish Historical Society in New York in 2025. Outside of academia, she works as both an actress and as a storyteller through her company, Hearth.