Black at Bryn Mawr

The Greenfield Digital Center is currently supporting the work of three students undertaking Praxis III independent study projects exploring lesser-known aspects of Bryn Mawr College history. This week, two of those students — Grace Pusey and Emma Kioko, both Class of 2015 — are formally launching their research project, Black at Bryn Mawr. Readers can stay up-to-date with their research via the Black at Bryn Mawr blog and tumblr. Today, Grace shares the origins of the project, and its goals.

This semester Emma Kioko and I are collaborating on a Praxis III independent study course titled Black at Bryn Mawr, a project that will illuminate the history and experiences of Black students, faculty, and staff at the College. Using Bryn Mawr Special Collections as well as primary sources archived outside of the College, we are analyzing the ways in which Bryn Mawr has chosen to record, remember, and represent racism in its history. Using the archives, we are identifying spaces of both racial conflict and conversation on campus in order to develop a final project in the form of a campus walking tour and a digital historical record.

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#ProjectPerry Preview: Tuesday, January 27 at 4pm

The Relaunching Perry House Committee has been meeting since the fall, and we’re excited to gather on campus this afternoon to share a preview of plans for its reopening, slated for the next academic year.

Details and RSVP here.

Interested in learning more? Earlier this week, committee member Khadijah Seay, Bryn Mawr College Class of 2016, shared some thoughts on her blog, Life at the Mawr.

On the history of Perry House, visit “A Point of Difference: Diversity at Bryn Mawr College,” the digital exhibition created by Alexis de la Rosa, Bryn Mawr College Class of 2015, and Lauren Footman, Bryn Mawr College Class of 2014. Their research provides both the historical context of what was originally designed as a black cultural center at Bryn Mawr College, and highlights some of the original correspondence on the matter between students and administrators in the early 1970s.

As a member of the subcommittees on programming and library space, I’m particularly interested in how we collect the history of Perry House, build on that history, and imagine a vibrant future for the space.

Bryn Mawr College brochure, 1985. See the complete document here.

Bryn Mawr College brochure, 1985. See the complete document on Triptych.

One of the things we’ll be discussing in the coming months is the future of the Perry House library, which officially opened in September 1989. As we know from other explorations of campus history, Bryn Mawr College students have often been library builders.

"Realizing the dream" in The College News, 1989. Read the article here.

“Realizing the dream” in The College News, September 1989. Read the article here.

The Relaunching Perry House Committee looks forward to collecting community input, as well as reaching out to alumnae/i in the next few months. One way to connect with us is on Twitter: #ProjectPerry. A full list of committee members is online, with plans for a blog coming soon. Thoughts? Memories? Connect with us in the comments below.

Bryn Mawr Teach-In on Race, Higher Education, Rights and Responsibilities

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Teach in crop

On Tuesday, November 18 from 7 to 9pm, I joined members of the Bryn Mawr community for a Teach-In on Race, Higher Education, Rights and Responsibilities in Thomas Great Hall. The Undergraduate Dean’s Office sponsored presentations and conversations around the following topics:

  • History of the Confederate flag and its current repercussions in U.S. society and politics, Sharon Ullman, Professor of History and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies
  • Race and higher education, Monica Mercado, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow and Director, The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education
  • Bryn Mawr’s history with regard to race and diversity, Florence Goff, former Associate Chief Information Officer and Equal Opportunity Officer
  • Navigating the rights and responsibilities of free speech, Mary Catherine Roper BMC ’87, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Pennsylvania
  • Well-being, accountability, and living in a diverse community, Reggie Jones, Counseling Service Director, Student Health Services

updated 11/25/14

A recording of the talks has been made available online by the Undergraduate Dean’s office. [link to audio]

We have collected tweets from that night in our Storify account. [link]

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Looking Back, Thinking Ahead: The Greenfield Digital Center Summer Recap

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Summer already feels long behind us, as recently returned Mawrters and their professors get back into the swing of things and the weather cools. Now that everyone is settling in for the new semester, it’s an ideal time to catch up on what you missed over the past season of activity at The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center! We had an eventful summer, both finishing old projects and pushing forward on new ones, and, of course, we welcomed our new Director to campus. Here’s a recap of what we’ve been up to and a preview of some things we’ll be sharing soon:

MonicaMercadoOfficial

  • Monica Mercado arrived in July and immediately hit the ground running. Already she has been through new faculty orientation, CLIR training, an ArcGIS workshop, and more—and somehow found time to return to the University of Chicago to graduate with her PhD in August.
  • The 2013 Pensby Center interns, Alexis De La Rosa ’15 and Lauren Footman ’14, put the finishing touches on their digital exhibit exploring the experiences of students and staff of color on campus. In addition to Lauren andAlexis De La Rosa and Lauren Footman Alexis’s research documenting a history of diversity at Bryn Mawr, results from Alexis’s survey to alumnae about their experiences, and original photography of students and spaces on campus, the exhibit includes a series of new oral history interviews that tell the stories of faculty, staff, and students who were impacted by issues of race and class during their time at Bryn Mawr. The digital project A Point of Difference was released in July and can be viewed hereContinue reading

A Point of Difference: Diversity at Bryn Mawr College

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A Point of DifferenceLast summer, Bryn Mawr’s Pensby Center interns Alexis De La Rosa ’15 and Lauren Footman ’14 began research on histories of diversity on campus, with a particular focus on students and staff of color. Their research took many forms: surveys, new photography, and oral history, as well as research in the College Archives. We’re pleased to announce that their project is now online, and hosted on the Digital Center’s website:

A Point of Difference: Diversity at Bryn Mawr College

Alexis De La Rosa and Lauren Footman

Alexis De La Rosa and Lauren Footman

Over the past year, Alexis and Lauren have reflected on the origins of their project. More recently, Digital Center Associate Director Evan McGonagill considered how we document the experiences of students of color in our archives and institutional histories–what she called building an archive of change. In the conclusion of their exhibit, Alexis and Lauren write:

We hope our work will just be the beginning of an ongoing institutional commitment to research, acknowledge, and document the experiences and contributions of marginalized communities on campus, and join us in celebrating this rich history.

We view this research as necessary, and just the beginning of what we imagine as more projects linking student interest in the history of Bryn Mawr College to our diverse communities. We’re looking forward to continuing these conversations on campus, and in our digital spaces.

Do you have historical knowledge or personal information about diversity on campus in the last twenty-five years (or beyond)? Share your experiences in the comments below, or contact us on Twitter @GreenfieldHWE or by email: greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu.

Bryn Mawr in the New York Times, 102 Years Ago Today

A quick post today to share a neat archival specimen found by College Communications intern Ivy Gray-Klein (Bryn Mawr Banter Blogger and champion of the College instagram). Ivy sent this New York Times archived article from March 10, 1912 our way: “Bryn Mawr Girls Tell Why They Chose This School in Preference to Others–How They Study and Play.” The article is a snapshot of Bryn Mawr life just over a hundred years ago. Some things are different, of course, but many remain the same.

Bryn Mawr Girls Tell_1

An image of the full text is posted at the bottom of this page. The column appears to be only the beginning of a longer piece, the rest of which is not included. Click on any of the images in the post to view and/or download the PDF from the New York Times.

The writer begins with a review of the campus’s picturesque suburban location, noting especially its proximity to the vast cultural offerings of Philadelphia. The “concerts, picture exhibitions, the theater, and the opera” to be experienced there apparently provided the 1912 Mawrtyr with a welcome “relief from work and the too feminine atmosphere,” which at times could “weigh on a student’s spirits.” Though the potential of temporary escape from such a stifling estrogen-drenched environment was an “asset to Bryn Mawr,” the greatest gift of the school’s location was that it provided access to both, whether or not the students made equal use of the two: “the students have all the advantages of a big city close at hand, while having country life at their door. There is little question that the country life is the most enjoyed.”

Pembroke Floorplan

Floor plan of Pembroke Hall showing varying prices for each room

Bryn Mawr’s dormitories have also always housed a diverse mixture of students. Unlike many institutions at which the residences correspond to the student’s class, the residence halls at Bryn Mawr were each a cross-section of the school, containing women of different ages and degree paths who commingled in the dorms. The article describes their efforts to practice social breadth at mealtimes:

At dinner the students sit at table with their friends of their own class, but to avoid exclusiveness on two nights a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, the fixed places at table are given up, and the seniors and graduates sit beside and get to know the younger students. “We do it, not because we want to, but because we think it good for us,” was the candid comment of a senior on this apparently altruistic plan.

Economic diversity has also been a long-standing feature of the residence halls. “There is no financial distinction,” reads the Times. “The cheapest and most expensive rooms are scattered throughout all the halls and often side by side, so in a truly democratic spirit the rich man’s daughter and the student who has a struggle to make both ends meet are brought together, to the advantage of both.” This was thought of as unusually progressive and sensitive to class privilege at the time, but we explored the flip-side of this arrangement in the digital exhibit Residing in the Past: Space, Identity, and Dorm Culture at Bryn Mawr College. Though it was a forward-thinking practice to deliberately interweave rooms of different prices, the public nature of the floor plans resulted in a high degree of exposure of social class for students who could not afford the more expensive rooms.

The Times‘s description of the 1912 Mawrtyr’s daily routine reveals some changes (“the student begins her day with attending chapel in Taylor Hall at 8:45 A. M.”) and some things that have remained very much the same (“After dinner there is time for talk, but every one expects to get in about two hours’ work before bedtime”). In the coverage of various College rituals, several familiar songs make an appearance, one annual tradition remains more or less identical in description, and one has disappeared altogether. Check out the full text of the article to find out which!

Bryn Mawr Girls Tell

Click the image to view the article on nytimes.com and download the full text.

 

March 10 1912 NYT After They Leave CollegeAdditional note: a search of the Times archive from March 10, 1912, reveals that the paper seems to have published a second article about the College on that day, shown at left: “After They Leave College: The Kind of Work the Bryn Mawr Graduates are Doing.” Click the article to view a higher resolution image. Though only a clipping is available online, it reveals some interesting statistics about the lives of the early generations–what percentages married, what percentages went into academia, and how many became milliners, are all revealed by the enticing clip. If anybody has a full copy of the Times from March 10, 1912, please do try to find the rest and let us know!

For more historical tid-bits and reflections on the history of women’s education, follow us on Twitter @GreenfieldHWE.

 

“College Tackles Racism and Classism” in 1988: Learning From a Quarter Century of Conflict over Campus Diversity

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HeadlineWhile browsing through a copy of the Summer 1988 Alumnae Bulletin this month, I came across an article in the “What Goes On” column of campus updates entitled “College Tackles Racism and Classism.” Noting its relevance to recent conversations in the college community, I perused the pages to get a sense of the climate of the college around these issues in the ‘80s. In doing so I learned about an event in the college’s history that reveals visible roots of our current dialogues on the topic of diversity.

Flipping through the Alumnae Bulletin in Special Collections

Flipping through the Alumnae Bulletin in Special Collections

THE ARTICLE. The piece begins by setting the scene: “On the morning of Tuesday, April 19, students, faculty, and staff filled Goodhart auditorium to capacity for an all-college convocation on racism and classism….The convocation was in response to a statement, written by two undergraduates and signed by more than 400 members of the college community, which asserted: ‘[E]ven though the administration may have fooled itself into thinking that it is actively opposed to racist and classist prejudices, it certainly has not fooled us,’ and went on to cite examples of prejudice from students quoted anonymously.” The story then includes several quotations that illustrate students’ encounters with prejudice on campus (shown in a graphic below), as well as describing demands brought by the student body and the response of President McPherson. I followed the trail to The College News–the paper known in its current iteration as the Bi-Co News–and read further coverage of the petition and the convocation incident in the April 8th, 1988, and April 22nd, 1988 issues, which are available on microfilm in Special Collections.

Perry House

Perry House

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF. Stumbling upon this outcry of frustration1 from a past generation of students felt like déjà vu. It brought to mind a period during my freshman year in spring, 2007, a similar campuswide crisis around the handling of race and class. The headline printed at the beginning of this post will also remind many of the more recent dialogues around the loss of Perry House,2 which have been both painful and productive. Feeling a disturbing sense of resonance between the 1988 episode and the various others that have occurred in years since, I was led to the question: are we reliving our own history over and over again? Are we cycling through the same ruptures with every new generation of undergraduates, losing all of the healing and the learned experience every four years?

MEASURING PROGRESS. The challenge of assessing how far we have moved forward since 2007, 1988, or 1885 is in the fact that campus climate on issues like these is always diffused across the beliefs, behaviors and tacit cultural knowledge of a diverse and fluctuating group—making quantifiable analyses elusive. I made a first attempt at numerical measure by turning to the course catalog. Students in 1988 called for an increase in classes featuring non-Western populations and minority groups. My rough comparison between the course guides from spring 1988 and spring 2014 shows an increase of almost 30% in classes that fit that description (from 28 to 36).3 The change is good to see, but I would speculate that it is also indicative of a globalizing national culture and a general shift towards more inclusive worldviews, rather than being reflective exclusively of attitude changes at Bryn Mawr.

A less scientific angle is to analyze whether the institution is doing a better job of supporting dialogue and accountability around issues of racism and classism. Part of the impetus for the 1988 convocation was that a group called the Minority Coalition (made up of several sub-groups of minority students’ associations) submitted an impressive list of demands for institutional action. These included increased enrollment of minority students and hiring of minority staff and faculty, more focus on non-Western populations in the curriculum, designated spaces for minority groups on campus, and support for programs and inclusive conversations addressing race and class.

Mary Patterson McPherson, the sixth President of Bryn Mawr College

Mary Patterson McPherson, the sixth President of Bryn Mawr College

In response, President McPherson established an Affirmative Action Advisory Board and directed the Deans’ Office to organize a series of anti-racism workshops to be held each fall. These measures, though far from “fixing” the problem, seem in retrospect to be the seeds of an important shift: they acknowledge the responsibility of higher level administration to foster institutional self-awareness and accountability, and they attempt to remove some of the “burden…[ from] the students, particularly the minority students, to call the college to task,”4 a concern that was expressed at the convocation. They create sustained infrastructures to address the problem, rather than relying on an approach of issuing too-little-too-late responses to eruptions on campus.

It appears to me that, since the outburst described in the article, the administration has taken a stronger lead in creating, supporting, and fostering discussion of diversity on campus. This page contains a short history of appointed positions and offices of diversity, beginning with the actions taken by President McPherson in 1988 and continuing through the formation of the Diversity Leadership Group and the Diversity Council and the 2004 founding of the Office of Intercultural Affairs (recently re-branded as the Pensby Center).

2013 Pensby Interns Lauren Footman and Alexis De La Rosa with Pensby Center Director Vanessa Christmas

Pensby Interns Lauren Footman and Alexis De La Rosa with Vanessa Christman

Despite the loss of Perry House, the school has also designated more physical and digital space to the topic. The Multicultural Center (now also referred to as the Pensby Center) was constructed in 2001 but didn’t come into greater use in the community until 2003-4,5 when it was the site of regular conversations around diversity led by faculty members Anne Dalke and Paul Grobstein, from which an archive and forum still exist on the web space Serendip (the series continues today at the Pensby Center; attend the next one this Thursday, February 27th, at 12 noon.) Since a main concern of the students in 1988 was that support for cross-cultural learning and awareness was too often initiated by the student body, it is significant that these conversations were convened and led by faculty members, involved participants from all sectors of the community, and took place in an institutionally endorsed space.

MicroaggressionsComposite

DIVERSITY AT THE COLLEGE TODAY. Though I am admittedly missing some historical knowledge about diversity at the college between the 1950s and late 80s, the 1988 episode strikes me as a turning point to which we can trace many institutional structures and cultural values that endure today. From the creation of President McPherson’s Affirmitive Action Advisory Board we can draw a line through the Diversity Leadership Group and the Diversity Council to the founding of the Office of Intercultural Affairs. Pensby currently fosters both regular conversations and opportunities for deeper engagement with the issues through programs like the Pensby Internships.6 Students also continue to play an active role in stirring conversation, raising awareness, and calling Bryn Mawr to hold itself accountable. One example of a grassroots student-led project that is open to the whole community is Leverage: The Zine (find it on Facebook, Tumblr), which documents microaggressions on campus. And, yes, the microaggressions still happen–though we may have moved forward since 1988 in many ways, prejudice and problematic language continue to exist in our community. And students are still angry. I sent the statement above from the 1988 petition (“the administration may have fooled itself into thinking that it is actively opposed to racist and classist prejudices, it certainly has not fooled us”) to Pensby Intern and recently elected Vice-President of SGA Alexis De La Rosa, asking whether she felt that the bitterness of those words still accurately represents students’ attitude towards the administration and its attempts to foster diversity at Bryn Mawr. She responded:

AlexisLauren-300x207_000I do think that there are students on Bryn Mawr’s campus that felt/feel that way. It is not easy being a student of color at Bryn Mawr when you feel like you are not represented within SGA, the faculty of the college, and even administration. I think that feelings of resentment built up for many students that rose to the surface last year, and although students rallied together around the issue of Perry House, emotions ran very high. The biggest complaint I heard from students last year was that they felt silenced; their thoughts and opinions were not being heard. I do however think that there was a major (positive) shift the moment President Cassidy and Interim Provost Osirim took over. President Cassidy immediately addressed student concerns and apologized for the college’s past mistakes, which had not been done before in a way that seemed sincere to students of color.

REFLECTIONS ON PROGRESS, AND BUILDING THE ARCHIVE OF CHANGE. To review documents like these and see so many instances of crises and outbursts over the same issues can feel like a community failing. I return to my original question: does it mean that we aren’t learning from our past mistakes, that history is repeating itself? My personal answer is no, for several reasons:

  • First, my review of the history suggests that we have made significant progress. While some of the comments and complaints can feel chillingly familiar to the 2014 reader of an article written as early as 1988, I believe that the Bryn Mawr administration now does a much better job of weaving diversity education into the fabric of the student experience. It is now recognized as an institutional priority rather than an inconvenient issue to be neglected until the pot boils over.
  • Second, the country and the world are changing at their own pace. We live within permeable walls here, and we cannot expect to be impervious to influence from problems in the greater culture. This effect is magnified by the fact that the majority of our community members are only present for four years at a time, and a new group of students must begin their social education every year from scratch. Racism and classism will remain present at Bryn Mawr as long as it exists beyond, and while we cannot untether ourselves from the slow pace of global change, we can hope to lead it.
  • Third, the nature of historical research is that sometimes only the big eruptions make it into the record, and many day-to-day realities slip past undocumented. If the pattern of growth were a smooth line of progression rather than one punctuated by episodes of conflict, we might have a less rich repository to draw on today while tracing these histories. Perhaps, therefore, it is a productive model of change rather than a failing to see so many crises written about in the College News and the Alumnae Bulletin: the conversations that are big enough to happen in public are the ones that form the narrative we look back on in the future.
A page from the Pensby Interns' digital exhibit, a timeline of diversity at Bryn Mawr College

A page from the Pensby Interns’ digital exhibit, a timeline of diversity at Bryn Mawr College

Building upon the third point, there is another effect that makes me think that episodes of rage and fierce debate have a productive function for our self-awareness and learning. Though I cannot speak for those who were here in 1988, I can say that the pivotal events in 2007 and in 2013 inspired students to both look back to the historical record and to deliberately create new material for the archives so that present lessons could be preserved for future eyes. In 2007, two students reacted to the events by “gathering stories of discrimination from current students and pertinent stories from The Bi-Co News and Bryn Mawr College archives in order to aid Bryn Mawr’s institutional memory,”7 and a play by People IN Color in 2008 used materials from Special Collections to generate a more reflective account of the SGA rupture and create new dialogue around the incident. Today, the ongoing work of the Pensby Interns draws on historical information held in the college collections while simultaneously generating new accounts of Mawrtyr experiences of diversity in the form of an oral history project, a survey to alumnae, and a digital exhibit consolidating their findings which will be published imminently on our website.

While these contributions to the archive of institutional memory may not prevent conflict from returning, they do mean that future Mawrtyrs will be able to read each moment of learning as part of a larger story of growth. It is our responsibility to learn from our own history and document the struggles of our present so that the importance of diversity can be an essential part of every Mawrtyr’s Bryn Mawr education.

 

Do you have historical knowledge or personal information about diversity on campus in the last twenty-five years (or beyond)? We would love to have your contributions. Share your experiences in the comments below, or contact us directly by tweeting @GreenfieldHWE or by emailing greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu.

Footnotes

1 Tracing the story back to the College News, that particular week also featured articles sexism and anti-racism at Haverford: see articles “Haverford Women Fight Against Community Sexism” and “March Responds to Racism“. Evidently, racism and classism were felt pervasively by certain students at the bi-co and the topics were being regularly addressed in public.

2 Concerns about the financial neglect of Perry House are also raised in the 1988 article.

3 Measuring against the spring yields a conservative estimate of improvement: fall 1988 featured only 21 courses offered, which compared to the course guide of spring 2014 would stretch the increase to over 70%.

4 Paraphrase of a statement by Joyce Miller, Director of Minority Affairs, excerpted from the 1988 Alumnae Bulletin.

5 History according to Vanessa Christman, Assistant Dean and Director of Leadership and Community Development.

6 We have been collaborating since this past summer with Pensby Interns Alexis De La Rosa and Lauren Footman and will be presenting some of their work later in the week. Watch this space!

7 I have not heard what the status of this project is and whether the collection survives in any accessible form; I have reached out to one of the students to find out and will update this space if I get more information.

Blogs, Exhibits and Tweets: Summer at The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education

ParkMarion6

Marion Park, President of Bryn Mawr directly after M. Carey Thomas. Park was a Bryn Mawr College alum and is the subject of a new exhibit to be developed over the summer for the website

The summer is here and we thought we’d share our plans for developing the Center’s site with you. We will be working hard over the next few months on developing new content, and continuing to reach out to you on social media (if you don’t follow us already, get to it @GreenfieldHWE or find our facebook updates on the Friends of Bryn Mawr College Library page).

Omeka

See http://omeka.org/ for further details on the platform we use to power our site

We are excited to be making two significant improvements to the site. The first of these is to make the site mobile compatible, so all of you who like to browse on your tablet or phone will be able to do so more easily once the changes come into effect around July. The second improvement is something that more directly affects our experience – we are in the process of upgrading to the new Omeka 2.0 platform, a huge improvement on the previous version from our initial poking around! If you are using the new platform and would like to share your experiences, be sure to get in touch (greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu). The biggest change on the user end will be the search functionality, which will be greatly enhanced from its present version. Aside from the search, users will not notice differences or disruptions (we hope!) but the streamlined back end is definitely an improvement and will help us in our mission to digitize and display in the best way the resources we hold in the history of women’s education.

Marian Edwards Park was President of Bryn Mawr from 1922 until 1942 when she retired. When she came to Bryn Mawr as a student she was among the early generations of women who enjoyed higher education for the first time. A member of the class of 1898, she won the European Fellowship upon graduation, the college’s highest honor at the time. She returned to complete her PhD in classics in 1918. She therefore experienced life at Bryn Mawr from all perspectives: undergraduate, graduate and administrator. She oversaw the school through some dramatic times, namely the Depression and the beginning of World War II, and she was also president during the period in which it first allowed African American students to attend as undergraduates and as members of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers. Park also led the celebration of the College’s 50th anniversary, a major milestone of achievement in the ‘experiment’ of education for women. Because she  followed in the rather intimidating shadow of M. Carey Thomas, her contributions have not loomed as large in the historical record. However, Park will be the subject of a new exhibition this summer, examining in particular her condemnation of the increasingly horrifying events in Europe that led up to World War II. The exhibit will include evidence on her efforts to host Jewish scholars fleeing the Nazi regime. Keep an eye on the site for the exhibit and make sure to let us know what you think.

We hope to continue work on digitizing primary sources, particularly the rich collection of oral histories that we have been engaged in translating from cassette tapes to digitized recordings for over a year. This is slow, meticulous work, but we hope to be able to share them with you eventually on the Tri-College digital collections site, Triptych. If you haven’t seen them already, there are a few examples from the collection that were digitized as part of the Taking Her Place exhibition, available on our site here. This is a fascinating collection, including narratives from student, staff, faculty and alumnae, with memories stretching back to the first decades of the college’s existence. Work will be ongoing for the next year and more, but we will be releasing recordings to celebrate special events or for use in digital exhibits as appropriate when we can do so. There have been a few reflections from students working on this collection over the past while which you may have seen already, the last of which was by our most recent student helper on the project, Lianna Reed ’14.

Special Collections is also hosting a number of interns for the summer, two of which have been awarded brand new internships through the Pensby Center to focus on tracing histories of diversity at Bryn Mawr College. Lauren Footman ’14 will be examining the experiences of the African diaspora on campus, including sourcing participants to create new oral histories to add to our collection, a most welcome addition to our work at the Center in trying to uncover stories from that past for which we have little or no documentary evidence. Her fellow intern, Alexis de la Rosa ’15, is looking at Latina histories and will be surveying current students and alums later in the summer. Alexis and Lauren’s work will be available as a digital exhibit on our site at the end of the summer, and they will also be writing blogs about their experiences doing this important research. Both Alexis and Lauren are also jointly engaged in cataloging the papers of Evelyn Rich, class of 1952. Evelyn Rich was one of the first African American students to live on campus, and her extraordinary achievements span education, the labor movement and politics. We are lucky to have acquired her papers.

WHDW home pageThe popularity of the Women’s History in the Digital World conference repository continues – there have been over 300 full-text downloads from the repository so far. We are so proud of our wonderful contributors for sharing their work and hope anyone who hasn’t done so already will be inspired to. Plans for the next conference will be going into gear in the fall, so keep an eye out for updates and think about submitting an individual paper or a panel if you have been working on a collective project. You can also follow the recording of the conference by visiting our blog post which detailed the Twitter archive, Storify and blog posts on the conference and you can listen to Professor Laura Mandell’s inspiring keynote here.

As some of you know, I will be going on maternity leave for this summer, so if you wish to get in touch with someone about the work, please contact the Center’s Research Assistant, Evan McGonagill, who will be managing communications throughout the summer (you can contact her through the general email address: greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu).  There will be more blog posts and updates so don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and to visit the Educating Women blog. You can comment on any blog post you see, and we always look forward to hearing your comments so stay in touch, and happy summer!

 

Maids, Porters and the Hidden World of Work at Bryn Mawr College: Celebrating Stories for Black History Month

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

We have previously referred to the maids and porters who worked at Bryn Mawr College in other posts and here we reflect more on their presence and significance at the college as part of our celebrations of Black History Month at Bryn Mawr College. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out the Tri-Co Chapter of the NAACP on Facebook and on Tumblr for details of their events throughout the month of February. We have been working with them to assist in their research and their exciting program should not be missed.

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

We are interested in the campus as a space, one that housed different groups across the years and one that is often remembered due to its distinctive architecture and beautifully kept grounds. In thinking more about campus communities and space, it seemed appropriate to examine what evidence we had on those who were integral to maintaining it: maids and porters, the majority of whom historically were African American.

One finding we have made from the research we have conducted at The Albert M. Greenfield Center for the History of Women’s Education on maids and porters at the college is that despite the fact that they were often incredibly close to the students, they rarely feature in the memorializing students did of their lives here. Why is this? Were they so fundamental to the experience of living in the dorms that it was almost too obvious to acknowledge their presence in their reminiscences? Were many maids and porters shy about getting their photos taken? How would they describe their experiences if we could speak with them today? Although we have many questions, we do know, however, through scrapbook evidence, that the maids and porters produced a theatrical show every year and the College Archives contain some photographs of the ways in which students and maids and porters interacted in the dorms.

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

We also know that there was a night school, a Sunday School and a Maid’s Club which offered classes to interested maids. The Maid’s Club kept a library in their club room and it was reported in the College News of November 15, 1922 that the maids were ‘particularly enthusiastic about singing’ and often sewed while they met (see Offerings to Athena page 103 for more on maids at Bryn Mawr).

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

 

 

Jen Rajchel’s exhibit on our site examines dorm cultures at Bryn Mawr and Jessy Brody’s work on scrapbooks has revealed their virtual absence from the photograph albums and scrapbooks she reviewed – over one hundred in total – that span the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is despite the fact that students and the staff who looked after their domestic needs in dorms across campus had multiple daily interactions, either in person or through the transmission of goods or services. Seeking out their experiences has required a little more detective work and a stronger reliance on source material from oral histories, memoirs and personal letters, rather than traditional documentary sources that can be used in the construction of ‘important’ historical figures, or those who maintained personal archives.

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

One such example is a wonderful interview with Fleta Blocker, which you can listen to in its entirety here. Blocker began at the college as a bell maid, a position that revolved around answering the telephone in dormitories, but she progressed in her roles at the college, ending her four-decade career as a Hall Manager, a role previously only held by white women. Her life was rich and full: active in her church, she traveled the world, inspired by the Bryn Mawr environment to see places such as Oxford and Africa. We included a link to this interview in the new exhibition Taking Her Place at the Rare Book Room Gallery in Canaday Library (on view until June 2nd 2013) in the Broadening the World of Bryn Mawr section, as there was a connection between maids at the college and the women who attended the Summer School for Women Workers. (A digital exhibit on the latter group is coming to the site soon!) The women at the Summer School, many of whom worked in poor conditions in factories across America, were moved to complain about the living conditions they saw the maids had, living in the attics of dorms without proper ventilation in the heat of summer. This was an issue that resurfaced again and the ‘living in’ arrangement was eventually phased out.

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

We also learned from an interview with alum Jane Drucker (whose interview, along with many others, will be available later this year on the Tri-Co digital repository Triptych), that it was a student rather than a member of the staff who headed the Maids and Porters Association for their dorm. This was not a staff association as such, and Drucker recalls her main responsibility as being to organize end of year gifts for the staff who looked after her dorm. It was not, therefore, despite its name, an association to advocate for staff. Looking back, Drucker thought this was odd, but at the time it was the norm that women students would fulfill such a role.

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

Photographs of the work that maids and porters did, however, are a feature of the college archive collections and many personal scrapbooks and photograph albums. The immaculately kept dorm rooms appear regularly in scrapbooks, catalogs and what appear to be college commissioned photographs so their importance in the life of the college cannot be underestimated. Many of the photographs show elaborately decorated rooms that imitate parlors in houses where ladies would sit; it is obvious that much effort has been put into creating environments that are comfortable and appropriate for college women. It’s worth considering, therefore, the people who worked to maintain such homely environments.

At The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education we are interested in representing the diversity of experiences in education and illuminating the world of women at Bryn Mawr and other colleges in the past. Examining the lives of those who helped them to focus more intently on the ‘life of the mind’ rather than domestic concerns is another angle of vision on past worlds. As we uncover more information through our research activities, we will be adding it so keep watching the site. In the meantime, this great timeline about the “Invisible Women” in domestic service in US history created by Mother Jones is well worth visiting.

Finally, if you have memories you would like to share or any comments, make sure to add them below!