The figure of the handmaiden seems particularly resonant today, in part due to the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Activated simultaneously as a symbol of passivity and resistance, the handmaiden occupies a contradictory position within our present milieu. In the archival discipline, the metaphor of archivists as “handmaidens of history” emerged out of nineteenth-century characterizations of archival neutrality and persisted up until the 1980s. In contemporary practice, archivists are no longer considered passive stewards; rather, their work is understood to be inherently political and interventionist, and however, despite this critical paradigm shift, archival work is routinely feminized. Drawing from the feminist practice of “doing speculatively”, I suggest that the metaphor of “the handmaiden” is an interesting point of entry for exploring how archival work, once considered mechanical, servile and invisible, has become powerful and disruptive, offering opportunities for political intervention and social change. This article positions the handmaiden as a discursive tool for telling stories about our profession and the many bodies—feminized and otherwise—who have built and continue to influence our field.

中文翻译：

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“历史的女仆”：推测档案工作的女性化

今天的女仆形象似乎特别引起共鸣，部分原因是玛格丽特·阿特伍德（Margaret Atwood）的《女仆的故事》在电视上的改编。同时激活作为被动和抵抗的象征，女仆在我们目前的环境中处于矛盾的位置。在档案学科中，档案工作者的隐喻是“历史的使者”，源于19世纪档案中立性的特征，并一直持续到1980年代。在当代实践中，档案保管员不再被视为被动的管家。确切地说，他们的工作本质上是政治上和干预主义的，但是，尽管发生了这种重要的范式转变，但档案工作还是常规地女性化。借鉴女权主义的“投机性”做法，我认为，“女仆”的隐喻是探索档案工作的一个有趣的切入点，档案工作曾经被认为是机械的，奴役的和无形的，如何变得强大而具有破坏性，为政治干预和社会变革提供了机会。本文将女仆定位为讲故事的工具，用于讲述有关我们的职业以及建立并继续影响我们领域的许多机构（女性化或其他形式）的故事。