Working Women: Unseen Labor in the Library of Congress

By Christine Sloan Stoddard

Yesterday was July 4th, but it was yet another birthday I didn't feel like celebrating. Not that I ever celebrated July 4th the way many Americans do. My Salvadoran mother, who became a U.S. citizen when I was 5 or 6 years old, observed Independence Day with gusto. The rest of the family followed suit. Mommy encouraged the whole clan to wear red, white, and blue. She cooked up a feast worthy of a TV commercial: hotdogs, macaroni and cheese, corn on the cob, baked beans, the requisite green vegetable (usually green beans or peas.) And don't forget the fireworks! She was all about them, and whatever parade or concert led up to the show. We weren't celebrating the United States and its "victories" so much as we were celebrating a new home and beginning for my mother. A fresh start. An escape from civil war in her country of birth. Gratitude for survival. At a young age, my siblings and I learned about the sins of our home country, the land of Reagan, and how those sins had impacted El Salvador and other countries around the world. Our father, a product of the American public school system, opened our eyes to the sins committed within our country, too. American exceptionalism was never our family value. 

My upbringing in Virginia, the site of many U.S. history milestones, by two skeptical parents—an immigrant and a journalist—groomed me for early critique. One thing that has always bothered me is the abundance of anonymous women in Library of Congress archival images. So I decided to confer names upon some of these women myself. This undertaking became a conceptual art project I began as an MFA student at The City College of New York. It's called "Working Women: Unseen Labor in the Library of Congress." You can read all about it and see samples of my parafiction here.