Helen Cam and Eileen Power in Cambridge Archives

This summer, I was given the rewarding opportunity to delve into the archives of the medievalist and legal historian Helen Maud Cam, and her contemporary, the economic historian and medievalist Eileen Power. Cam’s papers, held at Girton College and Churchill College, Cambridge, consist of vast quantities of personal and professional correspondence, awards, hand-drawn sketches, photographs and book contracts. Girton College also holds a small collection of Power’s papers, which include a variety of material, from letters and postcards to popular articles and newspaper cuttings.

My experience of archival work was limited before beginning work on the papers of these two women, so it was a joy to first learn how to properly handle and interpret the materials they left behind. Checking postmarks for dates, comparing typed carbon copies to handwritten originals and becoming intimately familiar with both women’s handwriting and that of their main correspondents required significant patience. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the feeling of carrying out detective work, especially as I began to fill in more of Cam and Power’s historical and social context and my picture of their lives became more vivid.

It was hard not to become attached to them both as their personalities emerged from their letters. Cam appeared clearer at first, with her incisive turn of phrase, strong sense of social duty, and deep reserves of patience for her friends, colleagues and students. However, I soon also recognised Power’s insatiable intellectual curiosity and sharp wit, the latter of which seems to have occasionally landed her in trouble, since in her letters she is frequently to be found begging forgiveness for some off-colour remark given lightly at a dinner party or LSE staff meeting!

Beyond the solely biographical details that I built up over the course of my time in the archives, and by subsequently trawling through the material again, I learned about Cam and Power’s experiences as women academics. Despite being members of a generation in which they were not automatically given the respect they deserved, they both accumulated a long list of achievements. Cam was made a Doctor of Letters in Cambridge, UK, and a full professor in Cambridge, Mass., and Power was made Chair of Economic History at the LSE and was the first woman to receive the Albert Kahn travelling scholarship, which allowed her to visit India, China and Japan. Even with these honours and more, they both expressed frustration at the position of women in academia, higher education and wider society. Power wrote of arguing with boorish uncles about the women’s suffrage movement, while Cam scribbled statistics in the margins of her letters to highlight how far behind other universities Cambridge was in terms of the numbers of women it admitted. Many colleagues and friends remarked that they had, on first meeting her, assumed Power was not a particularly serious character due to her stylish wardrobe and sociability. Cam was passed over for a sabbatical period to which she was entitled due to conflict with the plans of a male colleague and eventually left the University of Cambridge in 1948 for Harvard, which at the time offered greater recognition of her knowledge and abilities. These frustrating misogynistic episodes arise repeatedly in the archives and demonstrate that although Cam and Power both had successful academic careers, they also had to bear the additional burden of other people’s prejudices.

To return to the process of research itself, besides the initial struggle to read hundred-year-old handwriting, and of becoming accustomed to Cam’s habit of using the back of any and all scraps of paper to take notes, the work presented some difficulties that I had not anticipated.

The most significant of these was that it involved making a continuous series of decisions about which aspects of the archive merited particular attention when aiming to sketch an intellectual history of the two women. For example, in Cam’s case, I quickly realised her personal and professional lives were distinctly intertwined, due largely to her remarkable ability to become an integral part of every community she was involved in, and to maintain connections from these periods long after moving elsewhere. She continued to correspond throughout her life with friends from Bryn Mawr, Royal Holloway, Girton and Harvard, as well as contacts from ‘Welfare Work’ in Austria, pacifist networks, Christian socialist groups, and the Cambridgeshire Labour Movement.

Moreover, the frequency with which she was asked for and contributed references for friends and former students is astonishing; she must have been extremely generous with her time and her recommendations. This is all technically biographical but informs my sense of how Cam was in her professional life; she must have been patient, warm enough with her students that they chose to write to her after graduating and firm enough that they waxed apologetic about disappointing her with sub-par Tripos results. She used her position as a Lecturer and Vice-Mistress at Cambridge to create more opportunities for a younger generation of women scholars, supporting the foundation of New Hall (now Murray Edwards) and providing a constant stream of advice and admonishments to Girtonians, old and new, while navigating the College’s complex internal politics and near-permanent difficulties with funding. Colleagues wrote to her frequently asking for information, rare books and edits on their work. By the time she reached Harvard, she was so well-connected in the field of Medieval Studies in England that she was consulted about that circle of academics as a particular authority.

Overall, I feel lucky to have learned more about the lives of Cam and Power through their archives, and to have a sense of the significance of their contributions to their respective fields and to the position of women in academia today.

*Isabel Chua is an undergraduate at Queens’ College, Cambridge, where she is studying for her BA in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Her work with Lorren Eldridge on the next Selden’s Sister book this summer was generously funded by the Queens’ College Summer Internship scheme and the El-Erian family.*