Barbara Brookes – författare

Paper has been the material of bureaucracy, and paperwork performs functions of order, control, and surveillance. Knowledge Making: Historians, Archives and Bureaucracy explores how those functions transform over time, allowing private challenges to the public narratives created by institutions and governments.

Paperwork and bureaucratic systems have determined what we know about the past. It seems that now, as the digital is overtaking paper (though mirroring its forms), historians are able to see the significance of the materiality of paper and its role in knowledge making – because it is no longer taken for granted.

The contributors to this volume discuss the ways in which public and private institutions – asylums, hospitals, and armies – developed bureaucratic systems which have determined the parameters of our access to the past. The authors present case studies of paperwork in different national contexts, which engage with themes of privacy and public accountability, the beginning of record-keeping practices, and their ‘ends’, both in the sense of their purposes and in what happens to paper after the work has finished, including preservation and curation in repositories of various kinds, through to the place of paper and paperwork in a ‘paperless’ world.

The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice.

Paper has been the material of bureaucracy, and paperwork performs functions of order, control, and surveillance. Knowledge Making: Historians, Archives and Bureaucracy explores how those functions transform over time, allowing private challenges to the public narratives created by institutions and governments.

Paperwork and bureaucratic systems have determined what we know about the past. It seems that now, as the digital is overtaking paper (though mirroring its forms), historians are able to see the significance of the materiality of paper and its role in knowledge making – because it is no longer taken for granted.

The contributors to this volume discuss the ways in which public and private institutions – asylums, hospitals, and armies – developed bureaucratic systems which have determined the parameters of our access to the past. The authors present case studies of paperwork in different national contexts, which engage with themes of privacy and public accountability, the beginning of record-keeping practices, and their ‘ends’, both in the sense of their purposes and in what happens to paper after the work has finished, including preservation and curation in repositories of various kinds, through to the place of paper and paperwork in a ‘paperless’ world.

The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice.

Over the decades from 1900 to 1967 abortion was transformed from an important female-centred form of fertility control into a medical event, closely monitored by the State. This transition, the author argues here, took place against a background of debate over fertility control and its implications for women’s maternal role.

The book, originally published in 1988, suggests that the inter-war years saw a crucial mapping of boundaries in the debates over abortion. The distinction between methods of fertility control used before and after conception was more sharply drawn. The abortion law was difficult to enforce and in 1936 the Abortion Law Reform Association was founded by feminists to call for safe legal abortion as a woman’s right.

Resort to criminal abortion continued in the post-war years and the number of therapeutic abortions also began to increase. The medical profession’s attempt to create a distinction between worthy medical and spurious social reasons for fertility control gave way in the face of women’s demands for safe and effective means to plan when and if they would have children. After a hard-fought battle, the abortion law was reformed in 1967. The abortion decision, however, remained firmly in the hands of the medical profession.