Archives, Access, and Agency

Archives, Access, and Agency

On unearthing women’s histories and sustaining feminist learning

Video: Uncovering Ancestral Women: A Historian's Journey a Community Conversation with Max Dashu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdld79vMbMk)

The story of feminist knowledge is also the story of who gets to access it. Generations of feminist thinkers have wrestled with the tension of how to make learning accessible without burning out the people who teach it. Free community conversations, paid workshops, and university lectures might seem like three separate worlds, but they are all tangled up in the same question of power, survival, and value.

In this emerges the story of Max Dashu, who for over fifty years, has been excavating “suppressed histories,” a global record of women’s authority, spiritual power, and cultural leadership that has been systematically obscured by patriarchal gatekeeping. The Suppressed Histories Archives was founded in 1970, before women’s studies programs existed, when women’s history was described as literally a joke, as Dashu herself mentions. 

As she explains in this conversation with herbalist Linda Conroy, she left Harvard knowing she needed “evidence for everything” because any claim countering “the dominant narrative of male supremacy since the beginning of time” would be challenged. Unable to survive in an academic setting hostile to her research questions, she became an independent scholar, scanning library card catalogues that listed women only under “marriage, family, mothers, fashion.” What she found in the margins, in archaeology, indigenous oral traditions, rock art, ceramic paintings, and burial goods, would become a massive visual archive documenting women’s power across cultures and millennia. Her work recognises that women's authority has been systematically suppressed rather than naturally absent.

But here’s the catch, and where Dashu’s work cuts through the romanticism. Radical accessibility has a cost that cannot be ignored. Someone still has to pay the rent, the printing bills, and the website fees. “I’d love to give everything away,” Dashu says, “but I do have to somehow eke out an existence.” Feminist knowledge isn’t born in some utopian space outside capitalism; it’s shaped, constrained, and sometimes distorted by it. However, it must sustain the producers of it.

The broader feminist movement has long struggled with this balance. In the 1970s and 1980s, community-based feminist learning was prevalent: consciousness-raising groups, free schools, weekend workshops. Knowledge was not treated as a commodity to be acquired and gatekept but as something to share, a way to make sense of the world together. Accessibility was built into the model, meetings were sliding scale or free, childcare was often provided, and the teachers were women from the same communities they were teaching.

Then came the rise of women’s studies departments. On one hand, it was a victory: feminism had fought its way into the university. On the other hand, something shifted. The grassroots educators who had kept these ideas alive found themselves excluded from the new “professional” feminism. Knowledge that once circulated freely became something you needed institutional access to receive.

You can feel that tension today in the way feminist learning has fractured across different spaces. Universities hold conferences that charge hundreds of dollars for entry. Activist groups host free teach-ins on Instagram Live. Independent educators run workshops with sliding-scale fees, trying to survive between the two worlds. None of these are wrong, but they point to an unresolved question: who is feminist education really for?

The idea isn’t just to make learning cheaper, but to recognize that teachers, especially women working outside institutions, deserve to be compensated. Feminism’s goal has never been to romanticise unpaid labor; it’s been to make the work visible and valued.

The digital age has cracked open new possibilities. Dashu’s Suppressed Histories Archives now lives online, with photo essays, livestreams, and tens of thousands of followers. The internet has become the new grassroots space, global, searchable, and, in many cases, free. The internet has become a new kind of commons.

But digital access doesn’t automatically equal equity. The same algorithms that spread feminist history also bury it. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram can erase accounts or throttle reach overnight. Independent scholars like Dashu live at the mercy of engagement metrics and ever-changing visibility rules. And while online followers may number in the hundreds of thousands, only a fraction of them contribute financially. Free access still relies on someone doing unpaid labour to keep the doors open.

This is the double bind of feminist education today. If knowledge stays within academia, it becomes elitist. If it stays in the community, it risks burnout. If it moves online, it’s at the mercy of tech platforms and invisible algorithms. The question isn’t just about money or technology, it’s about legitimacy. Who gets to be called an expert? Who gets cited, paid, or invited to speak? Dashu’s fifty years of scholarship, done without a university title, challenge the assumption that authority must come from institutions. 

And yet, even as we celebrate that independence, it’s worth asking what support structures feminist educators need now. How can we build ecosystems that don’t rely on self-sacrifice? Imagine if feminist education were funded like public infrastructure, because that’s what it is. Imagine if communities, collectives, and governments saw this work not as a side project but as vital cultural memory-keeping.

Dashu’s journey reminds us that accessibility isn’t only about lowering a price or opening a gate. It’s about reimagining the whole landscape of knowledge, who creates it, who tends to it, and who benefits from it. Her archives, her talks, her decades of unpaid labour, all of it point to a truth that the university system still struggles to grasp: feminist knowledge is not a commodity to be bought, but a practice to be shared.

The accessibility question, then, doesn’t have a single answer. It’s an ongoing negotiation between generosity and survival, between sharing and sustaining. It’s about showing up, contributing what you can, and making sure the next woman doesn’t have to start from zero. Recentering those historically pushed to the margins expands our understanding, revealing far more of what can be known and honouring the subtle, infinite dimensions of knowledge itself. When boundaries to knowledge are imposed deliberately, driven by agendas rather than a lack of curiosity or capacity, they do a disservice to communities across both ends of the timeline. This is the inverse of “you reap what you sow;” such barriers do not merely leave the land barren, but rather poison the soil.

Zainab Khambaty is a researcher at the Department of Sociology, Monk Prayogshala, India. She examines how social media shapes communication, digital agency, and systemic inequalities, aiming to inform culturally responsive policies and inclusive support systems.