Describing Her Work: How Archives Shape Perceptions of Women's Labor

This exhibit explores how archives shape the way women's labor becomes visible, celebrated, overlooked, or erased. Rather than treating archives as neutral containers, it exposes how descriptive choices such as captions, tables, slogans, and metadata guide what counts as meaningful labor and what does not. Drawing on scholarly conversations about memory, archival power, and the limits of representation, this exhibit shows how institutions cultivate certain narratives while obfuscating others. By placing various forms of labor in conversation through their modes of description, the exhibit invites viewers to think about how women's work enters the historical record and why those choices continue to influence what today's labor will mean in the future.