a project to investigate, share, and re-imagine the stories of white “New England” women in a way that is relevant and exciting for the 21st century

Diana Limbach Lempel, a creative historian with a background in American studies, public humanities, urban and landscape history and food justice. I left a PhD at Harvard in order to tell stories that were weirder, less bound to the archive, and more embedded in daily life than I could have done as an academic.

Annsisters began as a research project dedicated to the spaces that women make together, whether physical, emotional, or metaphorical. Initially, I was focused on writers from the pre-Civil War era around Boston, who had a flourishing culture of collaborative self-education. These women used historical subjects as part of their community building and activism. In studying them, and the histories that they studied, I realized that women’s history is more filled with creativity, creation, and intellectual camaraderie than I had ever known, and that white New England women were both radical and retrograde, admirable and deeply flawed. I realized that I couldn’t tell their story as historians usually do. So I started to find another way. I had to go back in time, just like they did, and I had to go to the future.

Before the history profession was open to them, “lady historians” were active storytellers of their local and national pasts. They used the past both as an object of study, and as an imaginary gathering place for themselves and their friends to think together. Like them, I create historical fictions, host community conversations, write edit and publish essays, work with my hands to make food and fiber, include my family, home, and faith in the work, and try to be open to the ghosts and spirits I might find along the way.

History and whiteness are at the center of public conversation right now. The white women storytellers of the 19th and early 20th century were at the forefront of similar conversations about race, national identity, what we remember and what we forget, during the time of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Depression. They edited abolitionist journals and demanded voting rights. They crossed classes and asked questions about technology and women’s liberation. They worked outside the traditional academic and professional worlds because they were excluded from them; they also were enormously dynamic, prolific, and courageous. They also were often the architects of the systems we are trying to dismantle today: the founders of museums and collections, the tellers of stories that we were meant to think were “eternal.” We can’t move forward without them.

Climate change is changing our understanding of time and of place, as the future rapidly becomes a present that is unrecognizable to us. We need new ways of being storytellers for ourselves, and for our descendants, that don’t depend on the methods created by white male academics in the 20th century. Turning to white women “lady-historians” is one way that I am finding access to other ways of knowing. So much of women’s folk knowing practices in Western European culture has been lost, especially for settlers in “New England,” but these women worked to retain a connection to these traditions which are mine to inherit, revive, and reimagine in order to be of service to the changing world that I Iive in.

“Annsisters” is a pun on the word “ancestors,” based on the way Elizabeth Palmer Peabody misheard the word as a child. As the descendant of 17th c white settlers and 20th c Italian immigrants, I believe that connecting with the specificity of white lineages in dialogue with the specificity of the places where we live today is an essential component of re-establishing ties based on mutual responsibility with other people and beings. As it was for the “lady historians,” my history work is an ethical and spiritual practice.

Suzette Haden Elgin, a feminist writer and linguist, believed that science-fiction was the ideal genre for feminists because it was the only way for us to imagine a world outside of patriarchy. Women historians have also found that they need speculation for studying the past, because so much of women’s lives are not represented in the sources traditionally incorporated into the “historical record.” We are always listening to silences and giving shape to the invisible. My stories dance between the past and the future, the documentary and the imaginary, using design, performance, space and story to practice the speculative art of “world building.” In this work I also seek to acknowledge that feminist science fiction has a long history of reinforcing white supremacy, even as it created spaces for white women’s liberation.

annsisters has developed in dialogue with Christin Ripley Studio, Savannah Rusher, Tessa Kelly and the Mastheads, Rick Rawlins and the Lesley Community Design Studio, Sarah Montross and the deCordova Art Museum team (and baby Lake), Shana Dumont Garr and Fruitlands Museum, Miranda Garno Nesler, Rayshauna Gray, Lisa Fazio, Morgan Curtis, Caylin Carbonnell, Kim Schwenk of Lux Mentis Books, Bryn Hoffman of Pyewacket Books, the team at Second Shelf Books, Tim Devin and Maggie Norcross Devin, Miranda Dietz, Aliya Caler, Ruth Erickson, Jane Marsching, Kristina Lamour Sansone, Paige Johnston, Gillian Osborne, Nicole Lattuca, Meg Rotzel, Eve Blau, Jennifer Roberts, Marla Miller, Jay and Diane Rizzetto, Corinne and Mandy Limbach, Brenda Gutstadt, Orion and Ronan Lempel. It is inspired by the work and writing of Silvia Federici, Tiffany K. Wayne, Suzette Hayden Elgin, Dolores Hayden, Jesmyn Ward, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Michael Twitty, Patience Gray, Adrienne Rich, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Annette Kolodny, Eve Laplante, Rebecca Solnit, and more.

Our stories exist in dialogue with our plants, our dirt, our watersheds and weather, our geology and tectonics, and our non-human animal neighbors. We can’t leave them out.