“Educate the Mothers”: The Woman’s Column and the Changing Perception of Women’s Influence

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Evan McGonagill

The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education is celebrating Women’s History Month with weekly blog posts about The Woman’s Column, a pro-suffrage publication from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is the third in the series, following our first and second posts.

This installment is a direct continuation of our second post, in which we discussed an article entitled “Two College Presidents” from March, 1899. The article sought to prove through the example of two Wellesley College presidents who had been raised by suffrage supporters that the children of suffragists were not “apt to be mentally defective,” as claimed by “some obscure professor” in an anti-suffrage pamphlet. Our post explored the article’s focus on genetic lineage by placing it in the context of the debates that took place throughout the nineteenth century over whether women were physically able to withstand the intellectual strain of education: it was often asserted that women’s reproductive functions would be compromised by such stimulation, a fear that we argue had its roots in an anxious drive to control and limit the acknowledgment (and thus, growth) of women’s societal influence. By placing the emphasis on child-bearing, opponents of advanced education for women were able to keep the conversation tightly focused on the duties of wives and mothers, reenforcing the idea that women’s true responsibilities lay only in that realm. In response, advocates of education suggested that the capacity to perform such duties might in fact be enhanced by education, a perspective seen in Mary Wollstonecraft’s seminal treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects.

This next post will continue to explore the argument that women ought to be able to pursue education for the advancement of their altruistic duties, rather than at their expense. On March 19, 1892, The Woman’s Column ran a short opinion piece by Ellen B. Dietrick entitled “Educate the Mothers” that was based on the line of thinking mentioned above–that learnéd ladies were better equipped to serve their families–but re-framed it in an interesting and subversive way. In the brief two-paragraph piece, Dietrick encourages women to make financial gifts that support female education in order to maximize women’s potential to exert their influence as “mothers of the race” through civic engagement.

Click on the image above to view the article “Educate the Mothers”–transcription attached

Though she uses the language of the family-focused arguments mentioned above, Dietrick subtly deviates and turns the claim on its head over the course of the short piece. She placates the traditionally-minded reader by situating the “mothers of the race” as the focal point of the article, but she begins and ends her proposal by putting the power in the hands of two different groups: those “who have money to give,” and the “modern college girl” who does not wish to bear children. The first paragraph imitates the tone and view point of past authors who argued for education only so far as it reinforced femininity—yet she opens by placing agency both financially and grammatically, by naming them as the subject of her sentence, in the hands of financially independent women. Her second paragraph re-envisions the concept of motherhood by asserting that childless and unmarried women can still play a nurturing role in society by serving as “intellectual mothers” to underserved populations through community engagement. Rather than empowering women to choose paths other than motherhood, she is proposing that the educated childless woman could actually perform as a super-mother–a “guardian of the poor,” an “intellectual mother to some thousands of children,” a “mother of the race.” Instead of denouncing traditional womanhood, a tactic that would have made her opinion unpopular, she suggests that education could actually amplify the role. The argument is a compromise: she is bound by a framework of accepted norms, but from within that framework she manages to create new ways of viewing women’s agency and potential. Dietrick urges her readers to think beyond literal motherhood and care of a family, and consider the numerous ways in which they could meaningfully contribute to societal good. Ultimately, she argues, the modern college girl need not sacrifice the virtue of the motherly duties she forsakes. Instead, education expands the ways that women can further the good of the race.

Both “Two College Presidents” and “Educate the Mothers” are engaged with the increasingly antiquated view that women are only significant insofar as they wield supportive or corrupting influence over other members of society. The close of the nineteenth century came after several decades of pronounced anxiety about women’s role in lineage, and the extent to which they had the power to shape—for better or for worse—those around them, either genetically or through social practices. One can see the traces of this preoccupation in both pieces: “Two College Presidents” aims to establish that support of equal suffrage would not impair the ability of an individual to parent effectively, and that it does not betray a genetic flaw that could carry forward into future generations. “Educate the Mothers” begins from within the conservative premise that womanhood is only measured in altruistic potential, but manages to turn the focus on the moral woman’s dedication to a cause beyond herself into an argument for increased agency and political voice outside the home.

In her book Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic, our advisory board member Mary Kelley illuminates the connection between the culture of women’s higher education, the growth of female political engagement, and the societal standard for female virtue and morality:

In linking the right to an advanced education to the fulfillment of gendered social and political obligations, post-Revolutionary Americans forged an enduring compromise. Instead of claiming that women had the right to pursue knowledge for individual ends, those who were constituting gendered republicanism debated the boundaries of the domain within which women ought to meet obligations to the larger social good. Those who subscribed to the more conservative model insisted that they deploy their influence only as wives and mothers. Others pressed those boundaries. Although they acknowledged that responsibilities to one’s family remained primary, they asked that women take the lead in instructing their nation in republican virtue.” (277)1

Thus, while women were still not expected to pursue education for the same ends that men could claim–that is, knowledge for the sake of personal enjoyment and development–they were able to carve new avenues of access to education by incorporating it into existing structures of gender. While some perceptions of womanhood were still too deeply-ingrained to buck against with any hope of cultural acceptance, articles like “Educate the Mothers” strove to re-frame the context such that women could continue to move forward and outward one step at a time.

1. Kelley, Mary. Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Women’s History in the Digital World – March 22nd to 23rd 2013

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Jennifer Redmond

It’s almost time for the inaugural conference of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education!

Women’s History in the Digital World offers a packed schedule of digital humanities projects that focus on women’s history. Participants are coming from across the US and the world to showcase their work, share information on tools, research, funding and practices, and most of all, meet each other in an environment wholly dedicated to women’s history issues in the digital era. Members of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education and its Advisory Board members will be in attendance to inform you about our work and our future plans.

Our keynote speaker, Laura Mandell is Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture and Professor of English at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999), a Longman Cultural Edition of The Castle of Otranto and Man of Feeling, and numerous articles primarily about eighteenth-century women writers, and Breaking the Book (forthcoming). She is Editor of the Poetess Archive, on online scholarly edition and database of women poets, 1750-1900, Director of 18thConnect, and Director of ARC, the Advanced Research Consortium overseeing NINES, 18thConnect, and MESA. Professor Mandell will speak on ‘Feminist Critique vs. Feminist Production in Digital Humanities’.

Registration is open and you must register online if you are planning to attend the conference by going to the registration page of the official conference website. It’s not too late to register! Registration fee is just $30 and this gives you access to the full conference, including the keynote and reception on Friday, all panels, coffee breaks and lunch on Saturday and a special closing reception at the gallery in Canaday Library to see Taking Her Place, a show curated by The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education. This will give conference attendees a final chance to engage with each other, view the collections of Bryn Mawr College, and wind down after a productive and fruitful gathering.

Don’t forget that, as advertised on the official conference website, we are also offering a free tour of campus at 3.30pm on Friday March 22nd before the conference begins. If you would like to attend the tour, please email greenfieldhwe@brynmwar.edu with ‘RSVP Tour’ in the subject line of the email.

Presenters at the conference are offered the ability to upload their presentations and related material to our institutional digital repository so they can be shared afterwards.

Our official conference hashtag is #WHDigWrld so if you’re coming to the conference don’t forget to promoted and follow the conversation using it, and as always, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @GreenfieldHWE

For any queries about the conference, including registration, please email greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu. For specific queries about the work of the Center, please email the Director, Jennifer Redmond, at jredmond@brynmawr.edu

Come join us – we look forward to seeing you!

“Two College Presidents”: Quelling the Anxiety Over Suffragist Mothers in The Woman’s Column

Posted on March 14, 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 from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bryn Mawr College Special Collections recently acquired a large holding of print copies of the Column, and we will be blogging about articles and findings from the newsletter every week during March. This post is the second installment in that series; check out our first post on this amazing newsletter here.

Alongside the general news updates on suffrage activity and women’s rights, The Woman’s Column regularly published short opinion pieces and commentary responding to specific remarks made by public figures or commonly held opinions of the day. This post highlights an article which illustrates some of the interesting cultural shifts that were taking place at the end of the nineteenth century.

Click on the image above to view the article “Two College Presidents”–transcription attached

The short piece on the left, entitled “Two College Presidents,” points to the well-documented support of equal suffrage espoused by the parents of two prestigious women’s college presidents. The author uses the two examples as a counter-argument to the recent claim, attributed to “some obscure professor,” that “the children of woman suffragists are apt to be mentally defective.”

“If so,” the author comments sardonically, “it is odd that they should so often be chosen as college presidents.” This pithy article, published on March 11^th, 1899, is a mark of the incredible pace of changing ideas at the dawn of the twentieth century about what was best for women and what they were capable of.

At the time, higher education was still being established as a respectable and appropriate pursuit for young women. As recently as the 1870s, authors like Edward H. Clarke and others had captured public attention with their assertion that the rigors of higher education could have disastrous consequences for women’s physical health due to their weaker constitution. Amidst the debate over women’s capacity for intellectual activity, the colleges known as the Seven Sisters were successfully established between the years 1865 and 1889 and defined a site upon which the advocates and opponents of female education would see their theories proven true or false. As one Wellesley alumna from the class of 1879 recalled, “We were pioneers in the adventure—voyagers in the crusade for the higher education of women—that perilous experiment of the 1870s which all the world was breathlessly watching and which the prophets were declaring to be so inevitably fatal to the American girls.”¹

The idea that women might be somehow genetically unfit for learning therefore colored the early years of schools like Wellesley: while female higher learning was at stake, the reputations of the institutions that offered it were very unstable until women demonstrated their success in the academic sphere and beyond throughout the following decades. (The emergence in this period of institutions of women’s higher education, and the societal perception that developed around them, is more fully explored in our exhibition Taking Her Place, currently on view in Canaday Library at Bryn Mawr College. Click here to learn more.)

The reference to Wellesley in the article mentioned above therefore suggests that by 1899 a surprisingly advanced shift had taken place in the status of women’s colleges in the public view. It is, of course, expected that a publication dedicated to equal suffrage rights would be in support of equal education as well (as we explored in our previous post), and opinions published in The Woman’s Column should not be taken as a broadly representative of public perspectives². However, the article boldly implies that the opinion of this “obscure professor” is universally discredited based on the evidence that the children of suffragists are not, in fact “mentally defective.” Only two decades after the public vocally doubted that women could physically survive a college education, affiliation with an institution of women’s higher learning was being used to validate the reputation of the individual, and to lend credit to the suffrage movement as a whole by association. Women’s higher education had become stable and respectable enough, in the eyes of many, to shoulder the weight of bolstering another movement that was receiving scrutiny.

Edward H. Clarke

In some ways, however, the landscape had not changed very much at all since Edward Clarke’s gloomy prophesies of thirty years before: the points of the debate still centered around parental lineage and the effects of radical ideas upon future generations. The arguments against women’s education in the mid-nineteenth century were often motivated by anxiety over women’s reproductive habits and abilities: the crux of the anti-education stance was that education would inhibit reproduction, either by causing stress that could physically wither women’s reproductive organs (see Clarke, Smith), or by diminishing their interest in marriage and child-rearing. The arguments boiled down to a single point: whatever dangerous consequences education held for women could trigger a magnified ripple-effect upon the race as a whole.

Education proponents also leveraged this idea: a more popular and persuasive alternative to arguing that women should be able to access education for their own sake was the notion that education could improve a woman’s ability to perform her familial and maternal duties. As a companion to her husband, a keeper of a household, and a mother and teacher to her children, women’s ability to enhance the lives of those around her could be furthered by some measure of education. This line of thinking is well documented in publications such as The Ladies’ Companion and The Ladies’ Garland, monthly magazines that were considered proper reading for respectable middle-class women.

Click to view an e-text of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication

Mary Wollstonecraft famously argued this position in 1792 in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, a work that is widely considered to be the first feminist treatise (a first edition of Vindication, and several ladies’ periodicals like the ones referenced above, are featured texts in our exhibition Taking Her Place). As a compromise between the radical ideal of education for the sake of intellectual development and the conservative conviction that women were not fit to be educated at all, it was palatable to both sides to argue that women’s education should hinge on their role as mothers and wives. It was through these roles that they wielded their influence: under-educated mothers might not be prepared to instill essential knowledge and moral values into their children, and it was ultimately for the benefit of those children (especially the sons) that women should be educated.

Though shorter and less substantial than many of the other pieces of writing published in The Woman’s Column and its sister publication, The Woman’s Journal, brief articles such as this one help to illustrate the intricacies of a monumental shift in the public view of women’s proper role and her scope of power. Next week this train of thought will be continued with another short article from The Column that references and provides an interesting twist on some of the same cultural beliefs discussed in this post. Watch this space for the next installment!

^{1. LMN, “Speech for ’79 and the Trustees at Semi-Centennial,” 2, Unprocessed LMN Papers, WCA; also LMN, “A Wellesley Retrospect,” WAM 14, No. 2 (Dec. 1929): 54-56.}

^{2. Public opinion was still very much split over the issue, and the gap between conservative and radical positions was widening dramatically. Indeed, just eight months after this article ran, Harvard President Charles Eliot delivered a speech at the inauguration of Wellesley College President Caroline Hazard that was full of remarks that would not have been out of place two decades earlier. Among the (even then) antiquated notions that he espoused were the ideas that women should be discouraged from academic rigor for medical reasons, and that intellectually vital women’s colleges were irrelevant because there was no viable place for women outside the home. M. Carey Thomas, President of the fourteen-year-old Bryn Mawr College, was present at the inauguration. She expressed her disdain for his views in a personal letter: “Eliot disgraced himself. He said the traditions of past learning and scholarship were of no use to women’s education, that women’s words were as unlike men’s as their bodies, that women’s colleges ought to be schools of manners and really was hateful.” (M. Carey Thomas to Mary E. Garrett, Oct. 3, 1899, Papers of M. Carey Thomas, reel 22, frame 540)}

Happy International Women’s Day!

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Jennifer Redmond

Happy International Women’s Day!

We hope whatever you are doing you are doing something to celebrate women.

As part of the celebrations we created a Tumblr from images of suffrage activism from 1913 from the Carrie Chapman Catt Albums, part of the Carrie Chapman Catt Papers at Bryn Mawr College. Click here to view it and make sure to follow us!

We’ve been forwarding info on Twitter all day about events, blogs, conferences and interesting archival pickings that we’ve heard about so make sure to follow us @GreenfieldHWE and @RedmondJennifer to keep up with the celebrations.

The Woman’s Column: Tracking Women’s Education in a Pro-Suffrage Publication

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Evan McGonagill

Alice Stone Blackwell, editor of the Woman’s Journal and Woman’s Column

As part of our celebration of Women’s History Month, The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education will be showcasing content from March issues of The Woman’s Column, a very exciting recent acquisition of Bryn Mawr Special Collections. Published between 1887 and 1905 and edited by Alice Stone Blackwell, The Woman’s Column was a weekly newsletter focused on developments in suffrage and other related women’s rights issues. Its better-known sister publication, The Woman’s Journal (1870 – 1931), is more widely available, but thus far we have been unable to locate a print collection of the Column that is as complete and well-preserved as the one we have acquired. We are currently taking steps to have the entire collection digitized and made available for free on Internet Archive.

The original purpose of the Column was to serve newspapers with a regular source of copy on women’s suffrage, but private subscribers soon became numerous as well: at only 25 cents per year, it was an easy and relatively inexpensive way to keep a finger on the pulse of the women’s rights movement. A quick glance through its collected pages shows that it kept its readers apprised of a wide variety of happenings: in addition to regular updates on the various regional, national, and international legislative battles over women’s rights, the Column also published concise rebuttals to common anti-suffrage arguments, profiles of influential women and career success stories, and opinion articles regarding women’s role in society.

Content about the availability of education to women, especially higher education, was a regular feature of The Woman’s Column. Articles appeared nearly weekly detailing developments in the policies of specific schools, changes in legislation, updates on women’s education in specific regions or abroad, and profiles of notable college women. Occasionally the magazine would publish a piece collecting tidbits from many different institutions, such as the one featured here.

Click on the image above to view the article “In Schools and Colleges”–transcription attached

This article serves as a very broad account of the happenings of various American institutions, ranging from fund-raising updates and a notification of new fellowships to be offered by Bryn Mawr, to the lighter recounting of the Women’s Medical College of Chicago’s first celebration of “University Day” since becoming a department of Northwestern University. The Column describes the festivities as lively indeed, “characterized by college songs, college yells, college pranks and college jollity,” but also assures the mindful reader that “as it was conducted on the co-educational plan, nothing discreditable occurred.”

What does this article tell us about the publication, about the way women’s education was approached in the late 19^th century, and about the culture of the women’s rights movement? It is notable that the article does not contain any direct mentions or links to suffrage, which was seen as the key motivating issue of the publication. The frequency and scope of the education-related content in this issue and others speaks to the degree to which women’s higher education was considered to be germane to the women’s rights movement, since education-related content did not need to directly reference suffrage to be considered worthy of inclusion in the pages of The Woman’s Column. Both suffrage and education were important sites of leverage for increasing women’s role in the public sphere, and for giving them greater capacity to shape their own lives. It also suggests that the readers of the magazine, and women interested in suffrage in general, would be invested in the cause of women’s education perhaps because they were largely college graduates themselves. If The Woman’s Column audience did not have a personal background that included college culture, it seems doubtful that the items focused less on legislation and more on social events, such as the account of the “University Day” celebrations, would have been featured.

We will be featuring a different excerpt from The Woman’s Column every week throughout March to celebrate this important new acquisition and to mark Women’s History Month. For further reading on the history of the publication, or on Alice Stone Blackwell and her mother, Lucy Stone’s influential role in shaping the voice of the women’s rights movement, the following sources are recommended:

Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Social and Political Issues, edited by Kathleen L. Endres, Therese L. Lueck

Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman’s Rights, by Alice Stone Blackwell

Transformations: How has the Bryn Mawr College experience made me the person I am today? by Karen M. Mason, Class of ‘75

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Jennifer Redmond

Karen Mason today. Photograph courtesy of Karen Mason

Kicking off our Women’s History Month Celebrations we have the entry from our alumnae winner of our annual essay competition. Kären M. Mason, ‘75 answered the essay’s prompt: Transformations: How has the Bryn Mawr College experience made me the person I am today?

Kären is Curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives, University of Iowa Libraries, a position she has held since the archives’ founding in 1992. She earned degrees in history from Bryn Mawr College, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Michigan, where her dissertation focused on US women’s history. Kären will be presenting at the Women’s History in the Digital World Conference here at Bryn Mawr College on March 23rd, make sure to register by visiting the conference website if you are interested in seeing Kären’s talk.

Read her winning response to our essay competition question now….

Karen Mason in her 1975 Yearbook Photo. Courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Special Collections

In the fall of 1970 I was a senior at a suburban Minneapolis high school, pondering my future. I clearly remember a phone conversation between my parents, myself, and my brother John, who was then a junior at Haverford College. My father asked John “Do you think Kären should apply to Bryn Mawr?” John hesitated before replying, “I guess so.” That ringing endorsement was good enough for my father, who encouraged me to add Bryn Mawr to the Midwestern liberal arts colleges on my list. I did apply to Bryn Mawr, but that spring I sent my $100 deposit to Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, fully intending to matriculate there. No doubt it was my father who urged me to visit Bryn Mawr after learning I’d been accepted there.

When my mother and I arrived at Bryn Mawr on a sunny spring day, the campus was in bloom. The sunlight and flowering trees showed off the gothic architecture in the best possible light. We were smitten. I recall no campus tour, only a meeting with admissions director Elizabeth Vermey, who was warm and kind and made me feel very welcome. I must have visited a dorm, though, because the appeal of a suite or single room over the one-room triple I’d been shown at Carleton made an impression. But to be honest, it was a dinner at the Haverford dining hall with my brother and his handsome and charming friends that sealed the deal. To summarize: blossoms, admissions officer, single room, Haverford. So, like many high school seniors, my decision was based on a gut feeling, not on a rational weighing of pros and cons or academic programs. I opted for Bryn Mawr despite its being a women’s college, not because it was a women’s college. I would not have gone to Bryn Mawr if not for the robust bi-college community.

That said, I loved college. I made good friends and socialized and had excellent professors. I lived in a palatial suite in Denbigh my freshman year with my first single bedroom ever and a lovely view of New Gulph Road and the outside world. There were teas given by upperclassmen and serendipitous gatherings in the “smoker” (an unfortunate term for the lounge in a building with a 90-second fire life, but perhaps not as anachronistic as calling the lovely woman who watched over us a “warden”). Some of my favorite memories are trips to Zonkers for music, incense, and other necessities for a seventies dorm room; the Paoli local; the walk to Haverford, especially the last part through the woods; the College Inn; occasional meals at Hot Shoppes and Roy Rogers; Frisbee and flag football on the Merion green; and seeing Bonnie Raitt, Arlo Guthrie, and Taj Mahal at the Main Point, and the Grateful Dead and Traffic at the Spectrum. Some of my least favorite memories are Hell Week and the dogfish I dissected for weeks upon end until all that remained was the smell of formaldehyde. Academically, I especially liked the anthropology courses I took, and felt a real sense of accomplishment when I completed my six-week paper on “Fate in the Novels of Thomas Hardy” for Freshman English.
But Bryn Mawr College was a culture shock. I referred to myself as “the Minnesota quota.” Although I had been at the top of my class at an excellent public high school, I felt totally unprepared for the rigors of Bryn Mawr academics. Comparing myself to the prep school graduates in my French class who had spent vacations abroad and were already fluent, I soon jettisoned my plan to be a French major. I floundered until taking a US history course with Roger Lane at Haverford my sophomore year, the semester I had to declare a major. When Professor Lane passed out the budget of an immigrant family to give us a window into turn-of-the-century working class life, I discovered that history was not just about war, politics, and great white men, but about all people. I took history courses on both campuses, and benefitted from the breadth of options thus provided. Majoring in history changed my life and set me on a path that ultimately led to my becoming an archivist.
Nonetheless, by my junior year I had become ambivalent about Bryn Mawr, a feeling that never left me. I later framed my college years as a time when I explored the East Coast, visiting my brother Chris at Johns Hopkins and spending holidays in New York City, Boston, and elsewhere with Bryn Mawr friends, but deciding I was a Midwesterner at heart. I often said that Bryn Mawr had taught me how to write but that Haverford did a better job of teaching students how to think critically. I received an excellent education and I know that my Bryn Mawr degree opened doors for me.

So why the ambivalence? In part, it was that seventies “question authority” attitude toward institutions of any kind. And partly it was my Midwestern anti-elitist bent. But recently when preparing to be interviewed for a University of Iowa television program, I spent some time reflecting on my experience at Bryn Mawr. More and more I realized how important the college’s feminist underpinnings had been to me. I didn’t realize the extent to which Bryn Mawr had inculcated feminist values in its students as we learned about M. Carey Thomas and the history of the college. We scoffed at the oft-repeated phrase “our failures only marry.” And we snickered at the Maypole tradition and the Paoli local mnemonic “old maids never wed and have babies.” What not-so-subtle and oh-so-contradictory messages were we receiving? And yet feminism was a given at Bryn Mawr. My friend Marianne, who was a year ahead of me, loaned me Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful to read over the summer after freshman year. And that is when the pieces fell into place. I began calling myself a feminist after reading those books, but my freshman year at Bryn Mawr had prepared the way and the remaining years cemented my feminism. Bryn Mawr brought me into contact with smart, feminist women—students and professors and guest lecturers—and nurtured my feminism in ways I didn’t recognize at the time or for many years later.

I stumbled into the archival profession, as most archivists do. Straight out of college, there were no jobs in museums, the career I had imagined for myself as a history major. After a stint doing secretarial work, I was interviewed for a job as an editor for the path breaking Women’s History Sources Survey at the University of Minnesota in the late 1970s. I am sure I landed the interview because I was a Bryn Mawr graduate, since I had absolutely no experience or qualifications to be an editor. But that interview led to a volunteer position, and soon thereafter a paid position, working on the survey. It was through this job that I discovered an affinity for archives and women’s history. I went on to earn a PhD in history, writing my dissertation on an extraordinary group of women in Progressive-Era Chicago and cutting my teeth as an archivist at the University of Michigan.

In 1992 I was hired by the University of Iowa as the first curator of the newly-established Iowa Women’s Archives. For the past twenty years I have nurtured the archives, building the collections, teaching students about the treasures therein, assisting scholars, mentoring future archivists. It is a rewarding job. In this position I meet women of diverse backgrounds and experiences from all walks of life and persuade them to donate their personal papers—letters, photographs, diaries, scrapbooks—to the Iowa Women’s Archives. In so doing, I am saying to each woman that her life has been important, that others can learn from her experiences, that history is about everyone, not just the rich and powerful, and not just about men. As I ask women about their lives, I find that the backstory is often just as significant as the activities by which they define themselves to the larger world. I try to draw out these backstories and ascertain what documents might illuminate them. The results are gratifying: rich collections for the archives, and for the women who contribute their papers, a sense that their lives have mattered.

Reflecting on my own life in the way that I ask donors to reflect on their lives, I see that I have a backstory, too, and that Bryn Mawr College is a large part of that backstory. It’s not just a line on my resumé. What I learned at Bryn Mawr—outside as well as inside the classroom—is deeply embedded in me. The job I have today weaves together my feminism, my love of history, and my curiosity about the human experience, passions that arose from my experiences and studies at Bryn Mawr. A feminist grounding, together with a superior education and rigorous academic requirements, provided me with the foundation that helped me succeed in a wonderful career that I never imagined while at Bryn Mawr.

For editorial policies on guest blogs please see http://greenfield.blogs.brynmawr.edu/sample-page/

Women’s History Month Celebrations at The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Jennifer Redmond

The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education is delighted to announce its program of events to celebrate Women’s History Month!

We will kick off the celebrations by publishing the two winning essays of the recent essay competition sponsored by The Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Library. The two winners – one alum, one current student – responded to the competition’s theme, “Transformations: How has the Bryn Mawr College experience made you the person you are today?” In different but equally thoughtful essays, current student Emily Adams (class of 2014) and alum Kären Mason (class of 1975) reflected on the ways in which their time at the college challenged them, shaped them and led them to questions, opportunities and unique experiences. Kären Mason’s essay will be published on the site on Friday March 1st with Emily’s Adam’s contribution being published in the third the week of March so keep an eye on the site for updates.

The celebrations continue with a weekly blog post dedicated to a brand new acquisition, The Woman’s Column, a pro-suffrage newsletter that recorded events from around the world. Our collection spans from 1892-1903 and features fascinating articles from some of the best known political and social campaigners of the time. Read the extracts for insights into what women thought about the issues of their day, what organizations they were involved in, and what public rhetoric they had to argue against in their quest to allow women throughout the world the right to vote.

By Trailer screenshot Uploaded by Lobo512 at en.wikipedia Public domain

On Thursday March 21st we will have a film screening in conjunction with the Bryn Mawr College campus chapter of the global initiative She’s The First and Half the Sky who are working to raise money for girls across the world accessing education for the first time. We will be showing one of Katharine Hepburn’s best known films, Adam’s Rib, in Thomas 110 at 6pm. Don’t miss your chance to see this iconic film! For further info on the film click here

Refreshments will be served and She’s the First will be selling cupcakes for $2. The money raised will go toward a scholarship for Namtasha, a junior involved in AfricAid’s The Kisa Project so please come hungry and support this fantastic cause. .

Follow the She’s the First campaign on Twitter @STF_BrynMawr and follow Half the Sky @half

These are important causes to ensure that women’s education keeps progressing throughout the world and the legacy of those who fought for women’s access to education in the past continues into the future.

We are also having our first conference, Women’s History in the Digital World, on Friday March 22nd and Saturday March 23rd. For access to the conference schedule, please visit the official conference website.

The conference brings together scholars, archivists, technologists, librarians, graduate students and those involved in the arts, heritage and cultural sectors to discuss their work on women’s history in the new realm of the digital world of research and teaching. Our keynote speaker, Professor Laura Mandell is Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture and Professor of English at Texas A&M University. She will speak on ‘Feminist Critique vs. Feminist Production in Digital Humanities’ at 5.30pm in Wyndham Alumnae House. This event is free and open to the community and will be followed by a reception, also at Wyndham. We have free student places available for the entire conference and are asking all students to RSVP in advance to secure their place by emailing greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu with your name and student ID number.

Are you arranging any Women’s History Month events? Be sure to let us know, we’d be happy to help you promote them (email greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu)

We will be tweeting regularly so don’t forget to follow us @GreenfieldHWE

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

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Jennifer Redmond