Black at Bryn Mawr: The Walking Tour

Poster by Grace Pusey.

Poster by Grace Pusey. 

The Greenfield Digital Center has been proud to support the work of Praxis III independent study students Emma Kioko ’15 and Grace Pusey ’15, whose semester-long project Black at Bryn Mawr includes a new walking tour of campus featuring their research. In February, Grace shared the origins of the project with readers, and since that time, they have presented their work-in-progress at Bryn Mawr’s Community Learning Day in March and at the Telling Untold Histories unconference earlier this month.

Emma and Grace will debut their walking tour on campus the week of April 21. For more details, see their blog, Black at Bryn Mawr. The project will also be featured at the final Friday Finds event of the semester, this Friday, April 24 from 4-5pm in Canaday 205 (Special Collections Seminar Room).

In May, Grace will debut the project’s digital component, a map of campus built on Google Open Tour Builder, at Women’s History in the Digital World 2015. Future project-related events will be featured on the Black at Bryn Mawr site.

 

Bryn Mawr College Community Learning Day: March 18, 2015

Cross-posted from LITS blog:

Library & Information Technology Services staff and student employees are excited to participate fully in Bryn Mawr’s first Community Learning Day, scheduled for Wednesday, March 18. A number of the day’s interest sessions have been planned by staff and students associated with LITS. They include:

  • Women of Summer, a screening of the documentary film on the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry and discussion with filmmaker Rita Heller ’59 and Greenfield Center Assistant Director Evan McGonagill
  • Experiences of African American, Latina/o, and Asian American Staff panel, featuring Rod Matthews, Multimedia and Computer Specialist
  • Back Talk: Experience, Challenges & Controversy Working with the Bryn Mawr College African Art Collections, highlighting the new Special Collections exhibit in Canaday, including discussion with exhibition organizers Whitney Lopez, ’15 and Brian Wallace, Curator/Academic Liaison for Art & Artifacts
  • Black at Bryn Mawr: Walking Tour and Archives Project conversation with Emma Kioko ’15, Grace Pusey ’15, and Greenfield Center Director Monica Mercado, who are working to share stories of Bryn Mawr’s history of race and racism
  • Building Institutional Memory workshop, featuring Charlie Bruce ’16 and Rachel Appel, Digital Collections Librarian

These and all of the day’s events are designed to welcome a wide range of participants to learn together. The website will be updated with descriptions for all the interest sessions in the coming week, and you can follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #Mawr2learn. We’ll be tweeting from @BrynMawrLITS and @GreenfieldHWE.

All three libraries will be open, and event programming is scheduled for Carpenter and Canaday.  We look forward to learning with you!

For more information and a schedule for the day, including a link to preregistration: https://www.brynmawr.edu/community-learning

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

WC_headerAs 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.

Click the image above for an enlarged view and full transcription

Click the image above for an enlarged view and full transcription

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.

Click above for an enlarged view and full transcription

Click above for an enlarged view and full transcription

WC_3-28-1896_OxfordNotReady2A 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 thatthe 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.