Biographical or historical notes - smith-special-collections/sc-documentation GitHub Wiki

See DACS 2.7

In general, these notes should:

• be no more than a few paragraphs long
• should focus on the elements of the biography or history that is relevant to the records being described
• should use an inverted pyramid style that places the most important, overarching information in the first sentence or two
• Include years of birth and death in parentheses after the name at the first reference

For information on what names to use in the Biographical note, see the Pseudonyms section.

Always cite the sources you use, following the Chicago Manual of Style. This includes email communications with donors or creators. For example:

• Source: Deb Friedman, email message to Special Collections staff, March 18, 2021.
• Source: Professor Jon Glover, phone call to Special Collections staff, August 13, 2001. [Note: Professor Jon Glover is the nephew of Grace Stuart.]*
• Source: Abod, Jennifer. “About Jennifer Abod.” Jennifer Abod. Accessed September 15, 2019. http://www.jenniferabod.com/about-jennifer-abod.htm

*A note that provides contextual information on the relationship between the source and the person being described may be added in brackets.

If using a biographical or historical note written by the creator, donor, or any other outside source, start the note by clearly stating the author and (if known) the date.

The following biographical information was written by Gena Corea:

Gena Corea is the author of <title render="italic">The Hidden Malpractice</title> (1977), which <title render="italic">The New Our Bodies, Ourselves</title> wrote “remains the most stunning investigative journalism extant on American medicine’s shameful history toward women”; <title render="italic">The Invisible Epidemic</title> (1992), on the politics of the AIDS epidemic for women; and <title render="italic">The Mother Machine</title> (1985) which The San Francisco Chronicle wrote “is to the politics of birth, reproduction and reproductive technologies what Susan Brownmiller’s book, <title render="italic">Against Our Will,</title> was to rape: A lucid, compelling, relentless visionary analysis that sounds a clarion call to which we should all listen….” In addition, Corea has chapters in 31 anthologies published in the United States, Austria, Canada, Australia, France and Germany.

Corea describes her work this way: “I bring hidden things out into the open. That’s a theme of my work, expressed in my book titles, The Hidden Malpractice and The Invisible Epidemic. In the first half of my life, I listened to women carefully and put their reality out into the public world in the concrete form of books. In these books, I exposed and protested the violence against women in the fields of obstetrics, gynecology and the new reproductive technologies.”

In the later part of her life, Corea listened to men who had committed violence against women. She first moved inward, engaging in a body-centered practice called Focusing. This work prepared her to engage with male convicts in creating a “first-person science of criminology” described in her forth-coming book <title render="italic">Table in the Clearing</title>. In this work, men who had committed violence against women used Focusing to explore what led them to attack women and what needs to shift inside men to end such violence. In the collection, the manuscript, in its various drafts, is sometimes titled <title render="italic">The Stone Child and Dropping Keys All Night</title>.)