Workshops: Goods

Workshop 11: Coming to Good End:
Women, Legacy Writing, and History

Conveners:

• Megan Matchinske (E), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Claire Schen (H), Wake Forest University
• Olga Valbuena (E), Wake Forest University

"This past, moreover, reaching all the way back into origin, does not pull back but presses forward, and it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past."

-Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York, 1961), 10-11.

Making wills, writing legacies, doing history-each of these tasks fulfill a significant social function-as memory keeper, as revealer of "transcendent truths," as mirror to and maker of culture. In its myriad forms, the past haunts us, shaping our stories and calling us to account. Using sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wills and mother's legacies as our point of departure, we wish to pose the following questions:

1. What happens to women's historical legacies when they are framed by and through men (historians, editors, executors)?
2. What are the relationships, past and future, between end narratives, critical practice, and historical meaning?
3. What should writing and naming women's pasts mean to and in our work?

In this workshop we explored the active and radical recovery of end narratives, early modern and post modern, tracing why it is that we as women must learn to live with memory and in history, through constant and recurring conversation with the past.