Natalie Zemon Davis

… BUT I DIDN’T HAVE ROLE MODELS FOR BALANCING CAREER AND FAMILY. Natalie and mathematician Chandler Davis were caught up in the Red Scare of the 1950s and eventually moved to Canada. I met [the late Smith President Emerita] Jill Ker Conway at the University of Toronto in the 1960s. We were the only two women in the history department then, and the feminist movement was just hitting its stride. Together, Jill and I started the first course in women’s history in Canada. I taught the first term, on women in early modern Europe. Jill taught the second, on women in American history. I scoured rare book libraries to find texts by women. This was exhilarating. We were at once writing women into the historical record, examining the experience of gender and sex in different times and places, and re-evaluating the meaning of movements like the Reformation or the French Revolution. We also began to survey the needs of women graduate students, and to make things better. If there was resistance to our efforts, we didn’t pay attention to it. Nothing was going to stop us. For years, I’d been examining legal texts, including hundreds of letters requesting royal pardons for homicide. As with Martin Guerre’s case, I realized that all of these letters were a form of narrative storytelling. These stories were crafted by people of all social classes (including those who could not read or write), filtered through scribes, meant to elicit royal sympathies. This study became my book Fiction in the Archives. Future books—Women on the Margins, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, Slaves on Screen and Trickster Travels—all employed the same approach: They used single events or biographies as a way of teasing out broader historical truths. The stories I discover in the archives represent our human past. Everything we have—bad as well as good—comes from those people who came before us. They enrich our understanding of who we are, and they inform our lessons about where we might go. They remind us that no matter how bleak things get, people find ways of coping, of improvising. They’re just calling out to be responded to. This story appears in the Winter 2018-19 issue of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly .