Archive Task #2

I went to the Schomburg to find the January 1979 copy of Ms. featuring Michele Wallace on the cover that inspired my project. I found it in box 6 (call number MG 739) of the Michele Wallace papers.

I wanted to revisit the document because I had only really glanced at it during our first class visit, and wanted to 1) capture images of the feature article on Black Macho, and 2) peruse the issue for any and all other mention of black women. It was absolutely as interesting as I’d hoped, as it included a review of a poetry collection by Audre Lorde, a national list of black female groups/alliances, and a small list of black women who had suffered as a result of the cutoff of federal funds for abortion. The work was fairly visually compelling to me from the perspective of editorial design, but I really would’ve liked to see some ads featuring black women, which were not included in the issue. The employees at the Schomburg and I had a slight difficulty accessing the finding aid for Michele Wallace’s papers, and then the boxes were mislabeled, but otherwise the process was fairly easy. However, I did spend quite a while searching for her letters about the Ms. coverage and didn’t find anything, and it’s frustrating to not know if I somehow missed something, or if they’re in some other box somewhere.