Nearer My Subject to Thee : Twenty Years of a Documentary Editor\u27s Engagement with Emma Goldman

I am honored to be speaking today in the city where, in 1908, the editor of the St.Louis Mirror proclaimed that Emma Goldman was the daughter of a dream and that there was nothing wrong with her gospel except that she was 8,000 years ahead of her age. Here, at the twentieth anniversary of the Association for Documentary Editing, the Women\u27s Interest Network breakfast has become a time to bond in the early morning hours with my sister-editors (and brother-editors, too) and to reflect upon our own experience as women, as documentary editors, as people who have devoted many years of our lives to making sure that the life and work of others become an indelible part of the historical record. We are a particular kind of family, often misunderstood by the very people we assume would appreciate our work most-the historians, the archivists, the scholars and students who somehow cannot imagine how we can sustain our interest and work in something that requires such singular devotion. And yet there is much pleasure to our special field