Thoughts on feminism, digital humanities and women’s history

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Posted on May 20, 2013 by Jennifer Redmond

M. Carey Thomas, Bryn Mawr College’s first female president, is the subject of a new digital exhibit to be launched soon

I have been exploring my thoughts on women’s history, digital humanities, and feminism through two separate presentations in recent months, the first at the conference organized by The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education, Women’s History in the Digital World (March 2013), and the second at the Five Colleges Mediating Public Spheres: Genealogies of Feminist Knowledge in the Digital Age conference (April 2013). In a presentation at the latter conference, titled Open Source Technology and Feminist Perspectives: Translating Sources on the History of Women’s Education to the Digital Age I explained my feminist approach to my work at the Digital Center, focusing on a digital exhibit on M. Carey Thomas that is underway and will be launched soon. This blog post represents a synthesis of the two papers, based on work and thoughts in progress… all comments and feedback welcome as I work through some of the concepts I’ve been grappling with.

My thoughts on the trifecta of feminism, digital humanities and women’s history are largely drawn from my experiences using the open source software platform, Omeka, and our institutional enterprise version of Word Press to populate different areas of the Digital Center’s site, in addition to my training as a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow. While I assume that neither of these tools were designed with feminist notions in mind, I’ve come to believe that they have large potential to be utilized for feminist outcomes, particularly Omeka, as I will explain further in this post. Primarily, the Center’s site aims to tell stories in the history of women’s education that emanate from different perspectives. As Hermione Lee has said in her collection Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography, “We all want stories”, and the demand for such stories in the digital age is no less (possibly more, in fact) than ever before.[1]

The digital age and the tools it provides allow for a different mediation of knowledge than standard forms of scholarly communications. As noted by Abby Smith Rumsey these new methods have brought “fundamental operational changes and epistemological challenges [that] generate new possibilities for analysis, presentation, and reach into new audiences”.[2] The exhibit format in Omeka is designed to allow for the easy presentation of original historical material, such as images, transcriptions and audio files. This allows for the greater sharing of primary source materials, itself a way to decolonize and break down barriers to research and access to rare materials. We have created a number of exhibitions on our site, some of which have been generated as a result of student work from a class I teach on the history of women’s education, some of which come from collaborations with other colleges, and some drawn from our own collections and created by me and my team (see here for the full range of exhibits we have developed so far).

Our endeavor to produce digital source material comes from a desire to transmit knowledge and awareness of women’s history to the broadest audience possible: fellow researchers, students, teachers, alumnae, digital humanists and those simply with a desire to learn more about the topic–in essence, the public sphere has expanded in the digital age, although there are still challenges to be faced in greater online access morphing into another form of the ‘digital divide’.

Upon learning the new software platform and becoming familiar with its characteristics, possibilities and constraints, I realized that the Omeka exhibit format allows for the subject matter to be presented in a deconstructed narrative, due to the free form it provides for creating the digital exhibit. This struck me as having strong feminist potential: while the structure allowed by the Omeka format is cohesive in terms of form and flow, the sectioning of a biographical narrative allows for the fragmentation of the story, and in my efforts, for the development of a kaleidoscopic view, or, to paraphrase Henry James, to let the “swarm of possibilities” that nebulously make up a person’s biography to emerge, rather than a “few estimated and cherished things”.[3] This is, in my view, one of the pivotal means by which to incorporate digital media in feminist scholarship and practice.

Image by klmontgomery licensed under a Creative Commons license and available here http://www.flickr.com/photos/klm_digital_snaps/1444968874/sizes/m/in/photostream/

In a feminist postmodern tradition, this approach posits that there is no ONE person for us to study, no One Truth we can ascribe to a person or their life history. In this case, M. Carey Thomas, born in Baltimore, Maryland on January 2, 1857 to a prominent Quaker family. Thomas was the first Dean and later the first female President of Bryn Mawr College and a national leader in women’s struggle for access to higher education and the suffrage movement. My feminist approach to her biography aims to be cognizant of the privilege in stories such as hers: the history of women’s entry into higher education is an elite history, and recognition of this is necessary so that the histories we tell are not merely celebratory without being interrogative.
Here I am focusing on Thomas as she was seen from different perspectives: her own (for example, her ambitious articulations for her education and career in the letters and diaries that span her time at Quaker boarding school, on to Cornell, Johns Hopkins and eventually a summa cum laude PhD from the University of Zurich), those of her contemporaries, lovers, friends and family, the public and the way in which she was memorialized after her death in 1935. I am focused here, however, not on the details of her biography (although this will be in the exhibit) but rather on examining the potential of an open source software tool to present critical historical analysis of this fascinating person. The ability to juxtapose different opinions by placing them on the same page is more visually and comprehensively impactful in a digital exhibition format than would be the effect of a written paragraph: in traditional biographical accounts such as an article or monograph, editorial and stylistic conventions would view such jumping around as incoherent, and yet it can be seamless in an online presentation.

Making sure our metadata is harvested by the major search engines and databases and using social media to reach both scholarly and public audiences will both be crucial in building up a new body of feminist genealogies and for tracing feminist work in the digital era. The metadata itself also needs to be cognizant of feminist principles in describing women’s identities in digital databases, as was mentioned by Professor Laura Mandell in her keynote speech at the Women’s History in the Digital World conference.

It is also imperative that as we do work that mediates the public sphere in the digital age we think about its long term preservation. This requires that choices be made, funding be sourced and policies be formulated now – it would be the greatest tragedy of all if we found ourselves unable to trace back the exciting developments in feminist work that have been produced in online public spaces. The familiar academic mantra of ‘publish or perish’ might be usefully adapted in this context to be ‘archive or perish’. And, as I remarked at the Women’s History in the Digital World conference that was held at Bryn Mawr College, I believe fundamentally in the idea that the ‘add women and stir model’ for any kind of initiative, social, political education or anything else, rarely works.

Photo courtesy: www.hbdi.com

In the new era of digital humanities, women need a seat at the table while it’s still being set, not after the main course has been served. As I researched for this paper, I discovered that others in the digital humanities community have also used the “table” to describe the need to collaborate, critique and engage in new developments. Alan Liu has argued that digital humanists need to be equal partners at the table, not just a servant, when critical conversations are happening about the way forward for the humanities and cautions that digital humanists need to include more cultural critique in their work.[5] Moya Bailey extends Liu’s concerns into more explicitly feminist territory with her arguments that the “ways in which identities inform both theory and practice in digital humanities have been largely overlooked” and that moving from “the margin to the center” gives the opportunity to “engage new sets of theoretical questions that expose explicit structural limitations that are the inevitable result of an unexamined identity politics of whiteness, masculinity and ablebodiness”.[6] Alan Liu’s point was that the “digital humanities have a special role to play today in helping the humanities communicate in contemporary media networks”.[7] I would extend this argument to say that feminists have a special role in mediating the present and future public spheres, through their research, pedagogy and activism. Here the words of M. Carey Thomas are apt: reflecting on the success women had made of educational attainment in the first twenty-five years of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, she stated “The fearsome toads of those early prophecies are turning into pearls of purest radiance before our very eyes.”[8] Let’s hope it’s the same for us as we feminists navigate the new public spheres and create our own genealogies of knowledge.

[1][1] Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2005: 1.

[2] Smith Rumsey , New-Model Scholarly Communication: Road Map for Change (2011: 2).

[3] As quoted in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2005: 1.

[4] Anne Balsamo, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work, Duke University Press: 2011: 51.

[5] Alan Liu, ‘Where is Cultural Criticsim in the Digital Humanities?’ available from http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/where-is-cultural-criticism-in-the-digital-humanities/

[6] Moya Z. Bailey, ‘All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave’, Journal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 1 Winter 2011, available from http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/all-the-digital-humanists-are-white-all-the-nerds-are-men-but-some-of-us-are-brave-by-moya-z-bailey/

[7] Alan Liu, ‘Where is Cultural Criticsim’.

[8] Thomas, Women’s College and University Education: Address delivered at Quarter-Centennial Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, Boston, November 6, 1907.
Available in digital form on the website of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education by clicking here. You can view the original by visiting Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College.

New Exhibit: The Woman’s Column

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Evan McGonagill

As part of our celebration of Women’s History Month in March, we published a series of four posts highlighting higher education articles in pro-suffrage newsletter the Woman’s Column, which was printed in Boston between 1887 and 1904. The Column was published by Alice Stone Blackwell, daughter of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, the team behind the better-known suffrage newspaper the Woman’s Journal (1870-1920). Together, the two publications were the printed voice of the AWSA (and the NAWSA, after the merge of the NWSA and the AWSA in 1890), an organization that had a tremendous influence on the suffrage movement.

We have consolidated and added to our posts on the Column in a new digital exhibit that is now available to browse on our site. One of a host of digital exhibits that we have curated, this exhibit prefaces the text of the four posts with an expanded history of the two papers, the family who ran them, and the role of print in the fight for suffrage in the United States.

Head over to the The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Higher Education website now to view the exhibit and learn more about the Woman’s Column in the struggle to reform women’s rights!

CFP: Issue 7 of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Jennifer Redmond

CFP: Issue 7 of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative

Papers accepted on any theme relating to the TEI. Papers due 28 October 2013

http://journal.tei-c.org/journal

The Editors of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative are delighted to announce a CFP for Issue 7 of the Journal. This is an non-themed issue. We welcome a broad range of articles on any aspect of the TEI.

Submissions will be accepted in two categories: research articles of 5,000 to 7,000 words and shorter articles reflecting new tools or services of 2000-4000 words.

Both may include images and multimedia content. For further information and submission guidelines please see http://journal.tei-c.org/journal/about/submissions

Closing date for submissions is 28 October 2013. . The Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative is a peer-reviewed open source publication hosted by Revues.org.

We would be delighted to answer any questions about this issue. Please direct them to journal@tei-c.org

Susan Schreibman

Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative

“I’m not a historian but I am interested in people’s stories”: Lianna Reed ’14 reflects on working on Bryn Mawr College oral histories

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Jennifer Redmond

In this guest post by Lianna Reed ’14, you can learn more about the digitization of the oral history collection held by the Special Collections department of Bryn Mawr College. As part of its work, The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education is converting the audio tapes into digital files which will eventually be hosted on the Tri-College digital repository site, Triptych.

Previously, student worker Isabella Barnstein worked on the project and wrote about her experiences. We are further along with the work now and finding out more and more about alums from the past. Some of the material has been used in our Taking Her Place exhibition which can be linked to by scanning QR codes on certain labels. These include the 1935 radio broadcast by M. Carey Thomas and interviews with faculty, staff and students in the past (you can find them by clicking this link to our site). The exhibition runs until June 2nd and after this it will be made available as a digital exhibit on our site so make sure to visit the digital exhibitions section of the site ….

Guest blogger and Special Collections student worker, Lianna Reed ’14.

I have been working on the oral history project with The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education for three months and not only have I learned how to digitize cassette tapes to mp3 files but I have also been absorbed into the lives of Bryn Mawr women from ten, twenty even eighty years ago. I’m not a history major or English major, in fact my academic work doesn’t usually relate to my work with Special Collections. I actually appreciate this difference because working here is a release from my academic life as a double major in Political Science and French. I get to come to work and listen to alumnae talk about their time as students in the 1940s, sneaking out of the dorms past curfew (10pm) and going to the cemetery down the road. I become immersed in the details of women who became renowned archaeologists, politicians, activists, tutors, and the list goes on and on. Oral histories are an interesting form of history because they involve someone else, usually the interviewer, prompting the interviewee to respond to certain questions. However with Bryn Mawr women, these questions are often disregarded as the women believe that they themselves aren’t interesting. I have heard so many women say “Oh, you don’t want to hear about that. It isn’t interesting.” Actually, most things are interesting, especially anecdotal commentary. Even when the women describe how challenging Bryn Mawr was and their feelings about not using the degree, prompting them to feel unworthy of their degree, it is interesting and valuable for the history archives and also for those of us that are soon to be graduates.

My first oral history was my most memorable. Fleta Blocker was a bell maid in Radnor who came to Bryn Mawr as a teenager on the recommendation of her sisters. Too young to work she was put on staff for a trial year before she was hired permanently. Fleta would end up working for forty years at Bryn Mawr College. Honored as one of the longest serving employees at Bryn Mawr, Fleta wasn’t just a bell maid, she was a friend and a student herself at Bryn Mawr. Fleta saw more change and development at Bryn Mawr than anyone else. But what does it means for Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections digital archives to have Fleta’s interview? Who will listen to her tell her story? Who will understand what it meant to her and, of course, the students, to have her there in the dorm? While Fleta’s interview is linked on the website of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education and featured in the Taking Her Place exhibition and we can track who listens and in what language, we can’t always know how they might understand Fleta’s time at Bryn Mawr in the college’s history. Maybe oral histories are like podcasts and while you can’t force anyone to listen to them, they are an integral piece of history that is accessible, not just for the Bryn Mawr community but for the community of women’s education around the world. Faculty are always celebrated for their accomplishments and their connections with publically accomplished students, but what about the other people who supported and encouraged students to become the people they are remembered to be?

What does working on this project mean for me? As I said I am not a historian but I am interested in people’s stories. I am interested in doing research in sub-Saharan Africa on the effects of transitional and restorative justice. Oral histories are one of the most important forms of archival material that we have as humans. Oral tradition is the way we know and remember songs, family history, and recipes we love to cook. Oral history and oral tradition help to clarify the ways in which restorative justice has impacted the lives of many. For example, the gacaca courts in Rwanda are an oral tradition that are both a method of enacting justice and also a form of history as the plaintiffs, witnesses and criminals participate in an open dialogue. These histories are invaluable to the success and development of Rwanda in the present day. I hope that after having listened to hundreds of different interviews from people reluctant to talk and people more than enthusiastic at Bryn Mawr I will be prepared for whatever might come my way in the field. When I am out in the field I can gather information necessary to create a dialogue, not only amongst those I am interviewing but also with the wider international community producing a discourse that gathers many people’s individual stories, much like the archives at Special Collections at Bryn Mawr College.

TONIGHT: Professor Elaine Showalter to speak as part of Taking Her Place Exhibition Program

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Jennifer Redmond

This is a reminder that The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education will host Professor Elaine Showalter, Bryn Mawr College class of 1962, Avalon Foundation Professor Emerita, Princeton University at Bryn Mawr College tonight. This is part of the Friends of the Library exhibition program in which we also hosted Professor Helen Horowitz to open the show. Taking Her Place will run until June 2nd 2013, finishing with a series of dedicated tours as part of Alumnae Reunion Weekend.

Professor Showalter’s talk is titled: “Bryn Mawr Before Betty Friedan: The Problem Without a Name in Women’s Higher Education, 1958-1962″.

The talk will be held on Thursday April 18th 2013 at 5:30pm in Carpenter Library B21.

Professor Showalter’s lecture will be followed by a reception at the Taking Her Place exhibition, Rare Book Room Gallery, Canaday Library, at 6.30pm. All are welcome to attend.

For directions to the campus, please see http://www.brynmawr.edu/campus/visiting.shtml

There is no need to RSVP, but please direct any questions you have about this talk to greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for regular updates – @GreenfieldHWE

Becoming Bryn Mawr: An Essay by Emily Adams, Class of 2014

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Evan McGonagill

In anticipation of the upcoming Bryn Mawr College student awards ceremony on April 25th 2013 at 6.00pm, we are excited to share the second winning entry from our annual essay competition. This year we invited both current undergraduates and alumnae to respond to the prompt “Transformations: How has the Bryn Mawr College experience made you the person you are today?” Our alumni winner, Kären M. Mason, class of 1975, was announced on the blog in March. The winning undergraduate essay was written by Emily Adams, class of 2014, and you can read her submission below. Congratulations to Emily!

I have to be honest—this essay was extraordinarily difficult to write. I spent weeks thinking about what to say, mulling it over as I walked to and from class, poring over my old college application essays for inspiration. I wrote and rewrote dozens of opening paragraphs. I seriously considered simply submitting a list of all the different majors I considered before I finally settled on my current one (which is light-years away from my original plan in high school). And I made a lot of bad jokes about the steadily-decreasing length of my hair (the infamous “Bryn Mawr chop”), the sudden appearance of a rainbow of flannel shirts in my wardrobe, and my inability to be on time for anything, ever.

It’s not that I don’t have anything to say. On the contrary, my time at Bryn Mawr has been the most incredible, meaningful, and transformative two-and-a-half-years of my life. Every time I come home on breaks, my parents comment that I seem older, stronger, wiser, more sure of myself and the world around me. I, too, can feel the transformation, in the way I carry myself, in the way I approach new challenges, in the way I redefine my sense of self with every new experience. Indeed, I certainly do not suffer from a lack of material. The problem, then, lies in verbalizing those changes, in putting a lifetime’s worth of growth into a concise, coherent essay.

I fell in love with Bryn Mawr the second I stepped on campus, as an eager high school senior with her heart set on a women’s college. I gushed to my dad about the intelligent conversations I’d overheard at the dinner table, about all the fascinating people I’d met in just one overnight visit. And he gushed back about the wonderful things he’d heard from Public Safety and the Dean’s Office, the beauty of the campus, and, of course, the food (we were both smitten by the pizza at Haffner). A few days later, I sent in my deposit, and I’ve never, ever regretted it.

My first year passed by in a blur of new friends and new experiences. I worked my first food service job, where I made a lot of mistakes, learned from all of them, and emerged on the other side with a solid understanding of what hard work really is and what it means to be part of a team. I got my first chance to explore a big city without my parents. I took one English class and promptly abandoned my planned Psych major with a Neuroscience concentration. I took a lot of risks—trying out for a capella groups, speaking at a national conference, signing up for classes I didn’t know anything about—and every time, I emerged with a clearer vision of my life and a stronger sense of confidence in myself. I learned that I really didn’t want to be a neurologist, that I was a terrible fencer, that close friendships often emerge from the most unexpected situations (crumbling feta cheese at Haffner, for instance, which is how I met my heller).

My second year was more difficult. I began to find myself confronted by assignments which stretched my knowledge to its limits, which forced me to dig deeper and try harder than I ever had before. I took classes which made me re-evaluate the ways in which I perceived the world and re-examine things I had never thought much about—the representation of women in food commercials, for instance, or the social implications of Russian’s neutral pronoun—and with every day, my world became larger and more complicated, and I was quite certain I would never be able to fully understand the things I was learning. But I finally made it through with a newfound ability to think critically and to question everything, and to view each class and each assignment as an intellectual journey within itself. I left my classes last spring not just with grades, but also with a more well-rounded sense of personal identity and a more focused understanding of the “real world” I would one day enter.

This semester, I am studying abroad in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Though I’m not on campus, I still consider this semester to be an essential part of my Bryn Mawr experience, as I never would have ended up here if it weren’t for the Russian classes I took my first two years and the professors who encouraged me to study in Russia. This semester has been the most difficult and the most meaningful of my college experience thus far, and I am grateful to Bryn Mawr for teaching me that the greatest trials offer the most valuable rewards, and that anything worth having is worth fighting for. Without the lessons I learned at Bryn Mawr—taking advantage of every opportunity, doing the things you think you can’t do, never giving up, even when the problem seems insurmountable—I would have never made this decision, and I would have never met the fascinating people I’ve met and seen the incredible things I’ve seen. Everything I do here, as well as everything I do in the future, is a direct result of Bryn Mawr having guided, pushed, and occasionally dragged me in the right direction.

A Bryn Mawr education is difficult. It will take time, it will take effort, and it will, at times, feel impossible. That’s all part of the process. Bryn Mawr recognizes the passion that’s already starting to glow inside of you, shelters it, and builds it up until you’re burning brightly for all the world to see. It makes you into the person you always hoped you would be and reminds you that there’s still room to grow. It pushes you to the very edge of your capabilities and then demands more, knowing that you will rise to the challenge. I wrote in my high school application essay that Bryn Mawr is the very best place for unconventional women to be nurtured and to thrive before heading out into the world to do great things. Three years later, I still believe that, and every day I am honored to be one of them.

Dissertation Reviews launches Gender and Sexuality Series

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Evan McGonagill

DISSERTATION REVIEWS (http://dissertationreviews.org) has been featuring research on gender and sexuality in a number of our existing series, whether in Chinese Literature, South Asian Studies, Medical Anthropology, or elsewhere. The time is now ripe for DR to feature a standalone Gender and Sexuality Dissertation Reviews series, edited by Caroline Walters, which will bring you friendly, non-critical overviews of recently defended, unpublished dissertations from this brilliant field — one that has long been vigilant in raising powerful
and insightful critiques of the ways in which we think and the ways in which we live.

As with our 20 existing series on Dissertation Reviews, Gender and
Sexuality Dissertation Reviews will also feature reviews and guides
for archives, libraries, and collections, providing up-to-date
introductions to foundational as well as overlooked research
collections. If you are interested in having your dissertation
reviewed, please fill out the Review Application Form on our webpage.
If you are interested in helping out in some other way, please contact
the Editor-in-Chief Thomas Mullaney (Associate Professor in History at
Stanford University) and the Managing Editor Leon Rocha (Research
Fellow at University of Cambridge).

Introducing Our New Field Editor

Caroline Walters is a Visiting Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
at Middlesex University. She is currently working on her first
monograph, which is adapted from her 2012 dissertation, entitled
“Discourses of Heterosexual Female Masochism and Submission from the
1880s to the Present Day” (University of Exeter, supervised by
Professor Lisa Downing). She is the contributing co-editor of “Fat
Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism” (in preparation) and a
special issue of the peer-reviewed journal “Sexualities” on
“Theorising Fat Sexuality” (forthcoming). She has organized several
conferences (“Bisexuality and Mental Health” in Bradford, UK 2012;
“Public Engagement in Gender and Sexuality Studies” in Newcastle, UK
2011; “Forgotten Bodies” in Exeter, UK 2010). Broadly her research
focuses upon the intersection between literary, filmic, theoretical
and scientific texts as they formulate discourses of sexuality,
particularly in its “non-normative” forms, mental health and “fat”
bodies. Caroline Walters can be reached at
caroline.walters@dissertationreviews.org.

http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/2128

Conference Presentations Available Online: Women’s History in the Digital World Repository

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Evan McGonagill

On March 22nd and 23rd, 2013, a compelling group gathered for the Women’s History in the Digital World conference to discuss an array of the fascinating projects that are emerging at the crossroads of the digital humanities and women’s and gender studies. The conference sparked dialogues across both the physical and the digital realms, as animated exchanges took place on Twitter alongside those that were ignited in person (viewable as a Storify of tweets using the conference hashtag, #WHDigWrld, thanks to the creative ‘wordsmithing’ of presenter Michelle Moravec). One of the most exciting outcomes of the event is the extension of those conversations beyond the spaces in which they originated: we are now looking to gather the presentations from the weekend in the form of speaking notes, slides, links to project and social media pages and other supplementary materials, to make them available to all on our conference website. For the many who were not able to attend in person, this resource will provide an opportunity to engage with the work and see the variety of research endeavors that are currently underway in the field. For those who were present, the repository offers a new chance to view presentations that conflicted with other panels, or to revisit work that may have stirred thoughts that called for deeper inquiry. We hope that the site will serve to sustain the conversations that emerged at the conference, as well as foster new dialogues with a wider participatory base than those who were able to convene in March.

Several participants have already sent in their materials. In addition to the abstracts and bios we have uploaded the conference related materials we have been given so far. You can search all of this material on the conference website using the search box in the upper right hand side as seen in the screen shot below.

The conference repository can be searched by keyword, presenter name, institution etc., whatever term you would like to use to draw together material from the many different conference presentations. We encourage all presenters to send us their materials – you will not be able to upload the documents yourself, this must be done by us.

Update: presentations with materials uploaded are now marked on the Saturday schedule with a red “presentation available” indicator to make browsing easy.

Among the work that has been uploaded so far are the presentations on DYKE, A Quarterly: Blogging an Online Annotated Archive; Mining Hymns: Exploring Gendered Patterns in Religious Language; Digital Diaries, Digital Tools: A Comparative Approach to Eighteenth-Century Women’s History; and The New Hampshire Historic Dress Project. These and others can be found on the conference site as described above, or you may click the images below to view the materials directly.

Many thanks to those who have shared their work in this open access forum. If you participated and would like to make your presentation materials in any form available to the public, please send them to greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu and we will make sure to post them for you! Don’t forget to include your website and/or social media information. You may direct questions to our Director, Jennifer Redmond, at jredmond@brynmawr.edu. Or find us on Twitter @Greenfield HWE

DYKE: A Quarterly

Mining Hymns

Digital Diaries, Digital Tools

Renowned Scholar Elaine Showalter to visit Bryn Mawr, Thursday April 18th 2013

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Jennifer Redmond

The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education is excited to announce a forthcoming talk by Professor Elaine Showalter, Bryn Mawr College class of 1962, Avalon Foundation Professor Emerita, Princeton University. This is part of the Friends of the Library exhibition program in which we also hosted Professor Helen Horowitz to open the show. Taking Her Place will run until June 2nd 2013, finishing with a series of dedicated tours as part of Alumnae Reunion Weekend.

Professor Showalter, a renowned feminist literary historian, theorist and critic, will speak on the following: “Bryn Mawr Before Betty Friedan: The Problem Without a Name in Women’s Higher Education, 1958-1962″. Known chiefly for her work on women writers of the past and her invention of the genre ‘gynocriticism’, Professor Showalter will discuss the period in which she experienced higher education at Bryn Mawr, a time of social upheaval, changing social values and the dawning of the ‘Swinging ’60s’.

Professor Elaine Showalter at her 50th Reunion at Bryn Mawr College. Photograph courtesy of Elaine Showalter.

Professor Showalter’s long and successful academic career saw her produce many of the foundational texts in feminist research in literary historical studies. Included in her body of published work are Toward a Feminist Poetics (1979), The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture (1830–1980) (1985), Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990), Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997), Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001) and A jury of her peers: American women writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (2009) among many other scholarly articles and books. To explore more of the Bryn Mawr College Library’s holdings of Showalter‘s work, follow this link. The cover image of her seminal book, A Literature of their Own (1977) is a poster for the play, The New Woman by Sydney Grundy and is shown as part of the Taking Her Place show.

The talk will be held on Thursday April 18th 2013 at 5:30pm in Carpenter Library B21.

Professor Showalter’s lecture will be followed by a reception at the Taking Her Place exhibition, Rare Book Room Gallery, Canaday Library, at 6.30pm. All are welcome to attend.

For directions to the campus, please see http://www.brynmawr.edu/campus/visiting.shtml

There is no need to RSVP, but please direct any questions you have about this talk to greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for regular updates – @GreenfieldHWE

“College Women Abroad”: Updates on International Education in The Woman’s Column

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Evan McGonagill

As part of our celebration of Women’s History Month, The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education is featuring content from The Woman’s Column, a pro-suffrage publication that ran from 1887 through 1905. We have been posting weekly blog entries that feature individual articles from the Column that were published in the month of March and address the matter of women’s higher education, although the publication addresses many other issues related to women’s rights and their access to political life and the public sphere. This post is the fourth and final installment in the series; see our first, second, and third posts to learn more.

In addition to changes in policy at American universities, The Woman’s Column chronicled the state of women’s higher education abroad. Not purely for the globally-minded, such information would have been personally relevant to many American ladies: though the establishment of the women’s colleges known as the Seven Sisters had made the BA much more accessible to academically ambitious girls, more advanced degrees were difficult to obtain within the country. Bryn Mawr, which launched in 1885, was the only women’s college to open with a full graduate program. Several coeducational schools offered examinations and tutelage for female students, but were unwilling to confer an official degree, such as Harvard University. Europe, however, became an attractive option for graduate study, housing as it did centuries old universities that offered an array of graduate training. Travel to Europe was also an opportunity to broaden one’s cultural horizons, to see famous monuments, meet important scholars of the day, and to round out an American education that for many readers, may have consisted solely of single-sex environments in sheltered campuses across the country.

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A report from an alumna and former teacher at Mount Holyoke College was published in The Woman’s Column on March 11, 1893, stating: “German, Russian, Polish, etc., women, denied the privileges of education in their own countries, are attending the University [of Zurich].” “Lepsic [sic] [Leipzig],” she writes, “is the only place in Germany where women are tolerated as university students….And at Leipsic a woman receives no credit from the University for her work; however, many of the professors are very kind in giving assistance, as far as possible, to women in their studies.”

For those familiar with the early history of Bryn Mawr College, much of this will sound familiar. M. Carey Thomas, the school’s first Dean and second President, followed a complex path through several universities before eventually earning her Ph.D. summa cum laude in linguistics from the University of Zurich. After receiving her undergraduate degree from Cornell, she attended Johns Hopkins University for a single year before departing, frustrated: though she was allowed to study with professors and sit for examinations, she was not permitted to attend classes and therefore found the experience challenging and inadequate. Given the dearth of American schools that allowed women to attend classes with men, she saw the European universities as her only path to a graduate degree. She went on to complete the bulk of her literary work at the University of Leipzig with the knowledge that such study could be only preparatory–for, while the lectures were open to her, Leipzig did not grant degrees to women. Gottingen University, however, seemed to operate with reverse policies: women could not attend classes, but there was no official rule prohibiting them from receiving degrees. Once she had taken her studies as far as she could at Leipzig, she transferred to Gottingen to complete the final hurdle to the doctorate. However, despite the lack of a formal ban, she learned after preparing her dissertation that the all-male faculty had voted not to grant her the doctorate on the grounds of her gender. Thomas, indefatigable, moved on to the University of Zurich, where she successfully prepared, presented, and defended the thesis that finally earned her the Ph.D. she had long sought. Thomas’s convoluted path shows the difficulty, not to mention the required time and financial resources, that stood in the way of the American woman intent on a doctoral degree.¹

As we have previously discussed on this blog and in our exhibits, there were many well-documented arguments about why to keep women out of the educational system altogether. Aside from doubts about women’s inherent ineducability, many argued against coeducation for social reasons. For instance, Harvard President Charles Eliot cautioned that coeducation in urban schools could lead to dangerous class mixing and undesirable marriages, as we have previously discussed. But what was the logic of letting them study among men while refusing them the qualification that they had earned by it? Oxford University provides an interesting case that can help us understand the terms of the debate.

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A March 28th, 1896 article in The Woman’s Column entitled “Oxford Not Ready” recounts the University’s decision to reject a proposal to open the BA to women. Many female students were already completing the work that would have qualified a man for the degree, much in the style that Leipzig had made its coursework but not its official recognition of achievement available to women. The Oxford motion was struck down by 75 votes, 215 vs. 140. The leader of the opposition, Mr. Strachan Davidson, held that “the life [at Oxford and Cambridge] stamped a special character on the man, and it was to that that the B. A. certified. Examinations were only secondary, but the degree testified to the man’s career as a whole. The women could participate in the examinations, but not in the life. He did not wish to say one word hostile to the ladies’ colleges, but the life there was not a University life.”

We have spent more time previously discussing societal opposition to women’s education that centered around the female body and the importance of her traditional role in the home. However, another important factor was that the established institutions were having trouble imagining where women would fit into the existing culture of higher education, as indicated in the critique of Davidson at Oxford above; gender appeared to be a barrier to the immersion in campus life. Assuming that women could be educated at all, the issue remained that the degree had come to stand for much more than academic achievement alone: it was the mark of induction into a culture, mutually constitutive with the identity of the elite society gentleman.² Improving women’s access to higher education was not just a matter of opening doors, as it turned out, but a matter of re-imagining the spaces themselves.

The article ends on an optimistic note:

“Of course it is only a question of time when this decision will be reversed. Conservatism thaws slowly, but it thaws surely. Meanwhile the women will have the scholarship for which a degree should stand, if they have not the degree; and they can comfort themselves by thinking,

It is not to be destitute
To have the thing without the name”

^{1. The educational path of M. Carey Thomas is charted in detail in her biography by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. See Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.}

^{2. For a thorough exploration of the culture of masculinity of Oxbridge, see Oxbridge Men. Deslandes, Paul R. Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850-1920. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005.}

Educating Women

Blog of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women's Education at Bryn Mawr College