Bibliographies and the past pitfalls of being a Mrs.

Written by Dr Alina Kozlovski
Santa Barbara Museum of Art | The University of Sydney

Constance Phillott, 1890, 'Eugenie Sellers, Mrs Arthur Strong' - Image courtesty of The Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge.

Over the last few years there have been many initiatives to improve how much we know about the contribution of women to the study of the ancient Greco-Roman world. These include calls to cite more women (and non-binary) authors. Achieving this can require a little detective work since markers of an author’s gender in books and journal articles are often not clear and have sometimes been deliberately avoided. While doing some of my own research, I discovered another, rather grave, problem which has sometimes effectively erased women from bibliographies altogether.

We have all seen old (and not so old) contexts which refer to a woman by her husband’s name with a Mrs attached. In the 1960s, Samantha from Bewitched became Mrs Darrin Stephens; in the 1990s Marge became Mrs Homer Simpson, and even today married women’s names sometimes get subsumed under their husband’s by banks and other institutions.  

In the academic world, this older naming system meant that when women did publish their own research while they were married, it would be using this naming convention. A good example is Eugénie Sellers Strong who, among many other academic achievements, was Assistant Director of the British School at Rome (1909-25). In her many publications she is variously cited using her family name as Eugénie Sellers, her family and married names as Eugénie Sellers Strong, and her husband’s name as Mrs. S. Arthur Strong (This S is for Sandford which was Arthur Strong’s first name, initialised in his own publications). Having so many variations is confusing enough, but the convention of using a married name presents a big problem for not only citing, but also finding, the work of women in older scholarship.

Today, Mrs. is fast going out of style. In academic works, titles usually get omitted altogether in favour of using just a person’s surname to identify them. With modern standardised citation styles there is rarely a space to put a Mrs., Mr., or similar into a bibliography. Many authors, I’m sure usually with good intentions about modernising how women are referred to, see an older work and drop the Mrs. from their own bibliography when citing it. Unfortunately, with the Mrs. being the only marker that distinguishes the wife from the husband, the wife’s work then is referred to only using his name.

And so, Eugénie Sellers turns into Mrs. S. Arthur Strong upon marriage which then simply becomes S. Arthur Strong in a modern bibliography. In her case, this confusion is further complicated by the fact that her husband was also an archaeologist and published in his own right. Out of curiosity I googled the titles of some of her publications and, sure enough, in modern works they are sometimes found under his name rather than hers. We already know that a lot of work by women often goes uncredited, but in this case even when it was originally credited, it has become lost since. 

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The beginning of the list of articles that come up if you look up ‘S. Arthur Strong’ on the Cambridge University Press website. S. Arthur Strong specialised in ancient Middle Eastern archaeology. Eugénie Sellers Strong specialised in ancient Greek and Roman art. All of these are credited to him.

The discrepancy becomes clear when you open the actual articles and see that the one on Architectural Decoration is credited to Mrs. S. Arthur Strong.

An example where a work by Eugénie Sellers Strong is credited to her husband in a book’s bibliography because the Mrs. has been omitted (screenshot Flower 1996, 386 - as found on Google books).

An example where the same work is credited to E. Strong instead in an endnote (screenshot of Warburg 1999, 408 - as found on Google books).

Eugénie Sellers Strong is almost a celebrity when it comes to 20th century Greco-Roman archaeology. Her many contributions to the field are well known and not so hard to track. A bigger worry is how many other women’s names have fallen out of bibliographies when well-meaning researchers have wanted to modernise their citations. It is hard to know what women thought about being published under their husband's names in the contexts in which they lived. As today, the Mrs. might have been a symbol of oppression for some. For others, it might have been a source of pride. 

​Bibliographic conventions are not neutral in how they organise information and evolve as society’s standards change. As such, we have to be aware when we are dealing with an older system and double check that information is being carried across correctly. Who knows how many people’s contributions have been hidden behind someone else’s name.

Upon my discovery of this issue I asked Cambridge University Press to change how this article is cited on their website and they returned the Mrs. for this one article. I asked them to fix it for the rest of her articles, but they haven't replied.

Resources

Readers might also find these other resources useful:

• Suggestions on how to cite trans authors: https://medium.com/@MxComan/trans-citation-practices-a-quick-and-dirty-guideline-9f4168117115
• Suggestions on how to cite the knowledge of indigenous people and groups originally recorded by non-indigenous researchers: ​https://archivaldecolonist.com/2020/05/07/indigenous-referencing-prototype-non-indigenous-authored-works/

References

• Flower,  Harriet. 1996, Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture. Clarendon Press, New York.
• Warburg, Aby. 1999, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: contributions to the cultural history of the European Renaissance. Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Los Angeles.