Methods of Cataloging: Process

The archive I chose to catalog is “What Women Wants to Know” from the Harvard Digital Collection, which looks at advertising pamphlets in America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The collection reflects the cultural and consumer expectations of women’s interests and sphere during this time period.

The archive is broadly categorized into 5 groups: Cooking, Household Appliances, Cleaning, Health, and Beauty. I chose the “Cooking” archive to further examine.

Link to the archive HERE

The website provided very detailed information of each pamphlets and books from the published year to their origins. I initially started by organizing the provided information in to tables.

What-Women-Want-to-Know-Cook-Book-Sheet1Download

While organizing the data, I found it interesting that more books were published in certain regions than in others. Below is a categorization of the books based on the place of the origin.

Method 1: Place of Origin

It is evident that the concentration of publications is in the Midwest and Northeast regions, likely due to these areas’ historical prominence in industry, agriculture, and manufacturing.

Method 2: Feminism

The primary advertising demographic consists of middle- and upper-class white women, with gender and racial representations reflecting the cultural stereotypes and biases of the time, when women’s roles were highly limited and regulated. This historical background is evident on the book covers through various elements such as illustrations and text. For the second method, I categorized the books based on visual elements on the covers into three distinct groups: Feminine, Masculine, and Neutral.

1. Feminine

Most of the illustrations shows images of women and girls cooking or serving food for men/family. There are also many phrases that are very patriarchal, such as:

• for little girls and their mothers
• Featuring Little Recipes for Little Girls
• The way to a man’s heart
• Let’s make cake the men will cheer again

2. Masculine

Compared to books with feminine elements, those with masculine elements are noticeably fewer and are specifically used to depict occupations such as chefs, scientists, or doctors.

2. Neutral

The books that fall under the Neutral category only has illustrations of food or ingridients or only contain text on the cover.

From this point, I thought it would be interesting and humorous to redesign all the patriarchal book covers as if they reflected a matriarchal society instead.

Below are few experiments I did by changing the illustration and the title:

Method 3: Graphical Elements

The third method of categorization is based on the various graphical elements presented on the book covers. I divided these elements into the following categories: Borders, Patterns, Ribbon Banners, and Shapes.

Feedbacks:

• The second method is very interesting and should be further carried on to convert more book covers
• should consider how and where this new archive could be presented

For the second week, I continued to convert the gender factors in the book covers.

(re)presenting

*the image on the right is the original and the one on the left is the converted version

For the new archive I thought a website would be suitable:

Feedbacks:

• The conversion of the book covers are humorous and the new version matches the aesthetic of the original covers
• good that I created many examples >> also provides an insight of the designs, colors, image of women at that time period
• find a different way to present the archive >> maybe creating a “fake” archive with only the converted book covers >> sort of like creating a fictional past

Initially, I planned to present the archive on a website. However, after receiving feedback during the mid-point assessment, I decided that creating a publication would be a better approach, as it allows the audience to clearly see both the original and re-created versions of the pamphlets and book covers. Since the goal is to highlight the differences between the two versions, I thought it would be humorous to present the archive as a “spot the difference” quiz book. This format encourages engagement while making the comparison more interactive.

For the cover design, I took inspiration from American cookbooks from the same period in which the archived items were created—the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the original archive is titled What Women Want to Know, I satirized this by adding a description on the cover that says “A Dainty Quiz Book for Both Men and Women“. The word dainty repeatedly appeared on many of the original book covers, often used to describe the books themselves.