Giving Voice to Archival Silences: The Invisible Working Women of the Encyclopédie

The ARTFL Project, a collaboration between the French government and the University of Chicago, is a rich archive of digitized French literature with English translations. The Encyclopédie is the “crown jewel” of the “Legacies of The Enlightenment.” Labor laws and Guild restrictions of that time forbade women employment. Yet illustrations confirm women were working with men in these forbidden roles. Undocumented, women are not “searchable,” in effect rendering them silent. I created a finding aid (publication pending) with descriptive introduction and metadata indexing the working women, giving future scholars a more complete understanding of women’s historical significance within the workforce.