Category Archives: News

Taking Her Place Opening Talk: “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic … and Power: Education as Entry to the World”

Posted on by

“If our sons constitute half the nation, our daughters compose the other half; if knowledge in polity, law, physic, or divinity, be necessary in the former; it is equally so, in some degree, in the latter. …surely no one will deny them the right of comprehending what are forms of government, what is right and wrong between man and man, how to preserve health or restore it, and which is the way to Heaven?”

–Sarah Howard, Thoughts on Female Education: With Advice to Young Ladies, 1783. You can read the full text on an iPad provided as part of the exhibition, Taking Her Place.

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

We are thrilled for the upcoming opening of Taking Her Place, the first exhibition of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education. The exhibition officially opens this coming Monday with a talk by renowned historian and biographer of M. Carey Thomas, Professor Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Professor Emerita at Smith College and a member of our Advisory Board. Her talk, entitled “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic … and Power: Education as Entry to the World” will take place in Carpenter Library B21 at 5:30pm. All are welcome to attend the talk, which will be followed by a reception in the Rare Book Room Gallery.

The exhibition will be on display in the Rare Book Room Gallery of Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College, from January 28th until June 2, 2013. Through the collections of Bryn Mawr College, Taking Her Place illuminates a narrative of women expanding their roles beyond the domestic sphere by claiming their rightful place as educated members of their society, beginning with the roots of the movement in the eighteenth century and continuing into and beyond the twentieth century. More information about the content of the exhibition and its digital components is available in our previous post.

A second talk will take place on April 18th, given by Professor Elaine Showalter, Bryn Mawr College class of 1962, Avalon Foundational Professor Emerita at Princeton University. Professor Showalter is regarded as a founder of feminist literary criticism, and her impact on the field of women’s studies has been tremendous. Her talk will take place on Thursday, April 18th, 2013, at 5:30 pm in Carpenter B21.

Also look out for the special book shelf created by Olivia Castello and Arleen Zimmerle outside the exhibition space. This book shelf contains texts related to the themes in the exhibition. If you have any suggestions for texts that should be added, email us at greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu.

Watch this space for further announcements regarding the talk by Professor Showalter and special tours with the curators, Jennifer Redmond and Evan McGonagill, Director and Research Assistant of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education. We encourage all to attend the exhibition, and we welcome your feedback!

Taking Her Place: The first exhibition by The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education launches January 28th

Posted on by

We are excited to be launching our first exhibition, Taking Her Place, later this month (January 28th) at the Rare Book Room in Canaday Library. This exhibition has been inspired by our research into the history of women’s education, which offers a panoply of views, narratives and interesting examples of how women have successfully navigated their way into education and used this to gain access to the traditionally male public world.

As a recent reviewer of Belinda Jack’s new book, The Woman Reader commented, images of women reading  were often layered with meaning beyond simple education. As with other forms of expression on women and learning, morality issues were never far away :

Achtung, women of bygone days! The lesson is that reading leads to neglect of domestic duties and potential failure to fulfil childbearing quotas. Worse, the painting conveys an implicit fear that women might learn things, even – perish the thought – things their husbands or fathers don’t know. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, then more of that knowledge could amount to power – and independence.

Mamie Gwinn

We reference these opinions in a section on popular literature from the nineteenth century which often contained treatises outlining the appropriate kinds of learning for women, or conversely, some passionate arguments for the higher education of women for the good of society. Our exhibition also explores images of women reading and studying, including some familiar faces such as Mamie Gwinn,  intimate friend of M. Carey Thomas and once a professor and a resident of the Deanery at Bryn Mawr.

Taking Her Place has eight separate sections, tracing the history of women’s education through the treasures of Bryn Mawr College’s Special Collections. It includes a focus on some famous alums, among them many pioneers of new knowledge in their fields as well as the first women to occupy prominent positions (we won’t spoil it by telling you who they are, come and see for yourself on January 28th!). M. Carey Thomas herself admired genius and innovative thinkers, and revealed in 1908 that she hoped gender would be irrelevant in the realm of intellectual endeavor:

In the world of intellect eminence is so rare, and excellence of any kind so difficult to attain, that when we are dealing with intellectual values, or genuine scholarly, literary or artistic excellence, the question of sex tends to become as unimportant to men as to women (Women and College and University Education, 1908, page 69)

The question of sex, however, was very important in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it came to education. As the exhibition also traces, there were many who objected on grounds of propriety, or on the basis of misguided ideas of women’s ability to learn, to the full and equal education of women. Despite this, there were many vociferous women who defended their and other women’s right to learning. Indeed, it seems having the confidence to advocate for learning, and for women’s wider role in society, was key. The importance of learning for self-development and discovery and the transformative effect reading can make on our lives was recognized by Catharine Maria Sedgwick in 1839 as she pondered the magic of knowledge:

It is only by attention that as our eyes pass over a book, we transfer its knowledge into our own minds. No book will improve you which does not make you think; which does not make your own mind work.

Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Means and Ends of Self-Training (available on Google books)

Our Advisory Board member Professor Mary Kelley has written about the historical importance of women’s reading and their participation in literary and voluntary societies for their growth in self-confidence. This led many to believe in their ability to contribute to society both inside and outside their homes. In Learning to Stand and Speak, Kelley has traced the histories of many women and her work in this field has inspired one of the sections in the exhibition.

Taking Her Place will feature a number of events throughout the time it is being displayed, starting with the opening lecture by Professor Helen Horowitz and also includes a guest lecture by Bryn Mawr College alum and eminent feminist critic, Elaine Showalter, Avalon Foundation Professor Emerita at Princeton University. All events are free and open to anyone who would like to attend. We will also be conducting some special events for alumnae, including a local Philadelphia chapter event, and guided tours as part of Alumnae Reunion weekend.

Keep up to date with the events of the exhibition by visiting our website and following us on Twitter – @GreenfieldHWE. If you have any queries about the exhibition, please email greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu

Call For Papers: Analize – Journal of gender and Feminist Studies

Posted on by

Call for Papers

The editorial board of “Analize – Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies”
is pleased to welcome submissions for the 2013 issue of the journal.

Motivation
After decades of conceptualization and refinements, reflection on gender
deserves “a place of its own” wherefrom it can be critically explored,
assessed and creatively developed further. In Romania, but also in the SEE
and CEE Region, such an editorial space is still limited although there is
an increasing mass of gender experts and scholars in need for dialogue,
for enlarging their possibilities to share ideas, findings, doubts,
dilemmas and directions of research in the field of gender and feminist
studies.

About the Journal
“Analize – Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies”
(http://www.analize-journal.ro/) is an on-line, open access, peer-reviewed
international journal that aims to bring into the public arena new ideas
and findings in the field of gender and feminist studies and to contribute
to the gendering of the social, economic, cultural and political
discourses and practices about today’s local, national, regional and
international realities.

Edited by The Romanian Society for Feminist Analyses
AnA, the journal intends to open
conversations among eastern and non-eastern feminist researchers on the
situated nature of their feminism(s) and to encourage creative and
critical feminist debates across multiple axes of signification such as
gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, ethnicity, religion, etc.

The journal publishes studies, position papers, case studies, viewpoints,
book reviews from practitioners of all grades and professions, academics
and other specialists on the broad spectrum of gender and feminist
studies.

Regarding submissions, papers that fall outside the issue’s main topic
launched for each number are also to be accepted. In addition to a
thematic issue the journal also includes a “Lab” of ideas, images, tools
for investigating the gendered world, a storytelling section (AnAStories)
for sharing lived experiences and life (his/her)stories together with
“News” and a “Press review”.

CALL FOR PAPERS
The topic for the upcoming issue is:  What kind of feminism(s) for today?

We invite authors, scholars and researchers to critically reflect on forms
of feminism(s) in practice today and how/if they serve the interests of
women in the 21st century.

Feminist thought and movements, as we have come to know them, are going
through permanent metamorphoses, adapting to the times. Like all
traditions, the feminist ones also change over time responding to various
criticisms. Feminism was “accused”, among other things, for being rooted
in western terminology, hard to adapt to other cultures, adopting an “us
against the world” identity politics, being sometimes “more” an academic
than a social justice tradition, excluding more than including lives and
contributions of “others”- women and men alike, etc.

How feminism(s) reacted to such critiques? Which are the ways feminism
adapted to the new social, economic and techno-cultural environment of the
21 century? What is nowadays the relation between the academic and
activist feminism? What kind of feminist movement is most efficient today
in the technologized and virtual society we live in? Is gender
mainstreaming or the intersectionality paradigm the “inclusion solution”?
Is the ontological turn of feminist thought (human/non-human embodiment,
post-humanities, biopolitics, material feminism, etc.) a way out from
certain research pitfalls? How are we to assess the postmodern proposals
to “undo gender”? What approaches to gender are better from a
methodological and practical perspective? What/how feminism(s) should be
delivered in academia – what is more needed: Women’s Studies, Gender
Studies and Feminist Studies? What type of relationship exists between
gender and feminist studies? Do we speak of (strategic) cooperation,
latent tension or something else? Is feminism requiring a particular
political commitment?

Information for Authors
1. The manuscript should be original and has not been published
previously. Do not submit material that is currently being considered by
another journal.
Submitted manuscripts should be written in academic English of
international standard in order to be considered for review.
2. Manuscripts may be of 3000-10000 words or longer if approved by the
editor. They must include abstract (maximum 300 words), summary in English
(maximum 500 words), keywords (maximum 5) and the author’s short biography
and current affiliation.
3. The manuscript should be in MS Word format, submitted as an email
attachment to our email address. The document must be set at the A4 paper
size standard. The document (including the notes and bibliography) will be
1.5-spaced with 2.5 cm margins on all sides. A 12-point standard font such
as Times New Roman should be used for all text, including headings, notes
and bibliography.
Submissions should conform to the notes and bibliography version of The
Chicago Manual of Style.
4. The journal is committed to a double blind reviewing policy according
to which the identity of both the reviewer and author is always unknown
for both parties.

Manuscripts should be sent to:
contact@analize-journal.ro<mailto:contact@analize-journal.ro>
<mailto:Safana.ro@gmail.com>
Submission deadline is 08.03.2013

Henry Mosler’s Civil War Diary, a digital exhibition

Posted on by

The Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art recently launched “Henry Mosler’s Civil War Diary,” a digital exhibition at http://civilwardiary.aaa.si.edu in recognition of the sesquicentennial of Mosler’s diary and the Civil War.

Henry Mosler (1841-1920) was a painter and illustrator who worked primarily in Ohio, Kentucky, New York City, and Europe. Mosler began his career during the Civil War. Henry Mosler’s diary dates from October 1862 when he served as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly and an aide-de-camp to General R. W. Johnson as part of the Ninth Indiana Volunteer Regiment. Mosler wrote about his movements with the Union troops and mentions encampments, encounters, and, occasionally, his work for Harper’s Weekly. He recorded these impressions in a slim pocket diary. Though not lengthy at only thirty-seven pages, the diary provides a first-hand account of the suffering and weariness of war.

The website includes several features:

  • a digital reproduction and transcript of the diary. The transcription helps to make his 19th century handwriting legible. Until now, his tiny cursive notes in faded and smudged pencil had been difficult for researchers to decipher.
  • an interactive map. The map allows visitors to trace Mosler’s movement around the state of Kentucky during October 1862, a period in which Mosler and the men marched more than 275 miles.
  • a timeline. This tool enables visitors to follow Mosler’s activities through his busy period as a war correspondent and artist.
  • an image gallery. The gallery includes more two dozen illustrations in Harper’s Weekly between June 1861 and November 1862. The images depict the landscape of war: battlefields, infrastructure, and street-scapes principally in Kentucky, but also in Ohio, Tennessee, and Alabama.
  • and a series of brief articles about aspects of the diary. At present, these include a word cloud analysis of the text and further information about illustrations. Articles will be added periodically.

Mosler began his career in Cincinnati, Ohio, lived in Germany and Paris for at least two decades, and finally settled in New York. He enjoyed financial and critical success during his lifetime. The larger collection of Mosler’s papers documents his life and career through biographical material, personal and professional letters from members of the military, museums, family, friends and colleagues, writings, personal business records, printed material, artwork and sketchbooks, and photographs. This exhibition focuses on one primary source: the diary.

The digitization of the Henry Mosler papers was made possible through a generous donation from the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation. Joseph F. McCrindle (1923-2008) was an art collector, literary agent, publisher, and philanthropist. He was the great-grandson of Henry Mosler.

The Archives of American Art is the world’s preeminent resource dedicated to collecting and preserving the papers and primary records of the visual arts in America. With major financial support from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Archives has maintained the Terra Foundation Center for Digital Collections, a virtual repository of a substantial cross-section of the Archives’ most significant collections.

For more information, especially if you would like to use the Mosler digital exhibition or other digital collections in your classroom teaching or research, please do not hesitate to contact me. –Kelly Quinn

Kelly Quinn
Terra Foundation Project Manager for Online Scholarly and Educational Initiatives
Archives of American Art
Smithsonian Institution
P. 202.633.7972
F. 202.633.7994

FedEx, UPS, and DHL deliveries: 750 9th Street, NW (at H) | Suite 2200 | Washington, DC 20001

U.S. Postal deliveries: PO Box 37012 | Victor Building, Suite 2200, MRC 937 | Washington, DC 20013-7012

Email: quinnk@si.edu
Visit the website at http://civilwardiary.aaa.si.edu/

Fellowship: History of Women in Medicine

Posted on by

Deadline March 15th

The Foundation for the History of Women in Medicine will provide one $5000 grant to support travel, lodging, and incidental expenses for a flexible research period between July 1st 2013 – June 30th 2014. Foundation Fellowships are offered for research related to the history of women to be conducted at the Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School. Preference will be given to projects that deal specifically with women physicians or other health workers or medical scientists, but proposals dealing with the history of women’s health issues may also be considered.

Manuscript collections which may be of special interest include the recently-opened Mary Ellen Avery Papers, the Leona Baumgartner Papers, and the Grete Bibring Papers (find out more about our collections at www.countway.harvard.edu/awm). Preference will be given to those who are using collections from the Center’s Archives for Women in Medicine, but research on the topic of women in medicine using other material from the Countway Library will be considered. Preference will also be given to applicants who live beyond commuting distance of the Countway, but all are encouraged to apply, including graduate students.

In return, the Foundation requests a one page report on the Fellow’s research experience, a copy of the final product (with the ability to post excerpts from the paper/project), and a photo and bio of the Fellow for web and newsletter announcements.

 
Application requirements:

Applicants should submit a proposal (no more than two pages) outlining the subject and objectives of the research project, historical materials to be used, and length of residence, along with a project budget (including travel, lodging, and research expenses), a curriculum vitae and two letters of recommendation by March 15th, 2013. The fellowship proposal should demonstrate that the Countway Library has resources central to the research topic. The appointment will be announced by April 2013.

Applications should be sent to:

Women in Medicine Fellowships,
Archives for Women in Medicine,
Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine,
10 Shattuck Street,
Boston, MA 02115.

Electronic submissions of applications and supporting materials and any questions may be directed to jessica_sedgwick@hms.harvard.edu.

For more information, visit:
https://www.countway.harvard.edu/menuNavigation/chom/fellowships/about.html#3

Essay Competition: Submit by the End of the Month

Posted on by

Margaret Bailey Speer at her desk in Yenching

The November 30th deadline is approaching for the second annual essay competition of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education! We would like to remind and encourage both current students and all alumnae to submit essays addressing the topic of:

‘Transformations: How has the Bryn Mawr College experience made you the person you are today?’

Consider how your experience at Bryn Mawr has shaped you, be it academically, personally, professionally, or otherwise. What have been the most surprising challenges? How have the people you met changed you? How has Bryn Mawr served as a lens or an entry point into the world? We want to hear your stories, memories, and reflections.

Prizes have been kindly sponsored by the Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Library: the winning student essay will earn a prize of $500, and the alumna winner will receive a gift pack including a copy of Offerings to Athena, among other items related to the college’s history. All entrants will also have the chance to have their work published on the Greenfield Center website. Past entrants Kai Wang, Wendy Chen, and Emily Adams had their essays on the relevance of single-sex education posted on this blog.

Please submit essays of no more than 2,000 words to the Director of the Center, Dr. Jennifer Redmond, at jredmond@brynmawr.edu, by Friday, November 30th, 2012. See our earlier post for more information.

Purchasing Privilege

Posted on by

Pembroke Hall Interior

Money has played a vital role in women’s higher education from the earliest days of its establishment, both as the means for change and as a lubricant for societal acceptance of that change. It is tempting to view women’s path into higher education as a narrative about dismantling privilege across the board, which in many ways it has been. However, privilege is multi-faceted, and exists in many overlapping and entangled forms. Like many histories of rights and access, this complex entanglement has resulted in a slow and graduated pattern of progress rather than a straight upward trajectory, partially because of the participation of many agents with varied approaches and priorities: some of the institutions that fought the oppression of women early on did so from a foundation of financial and racial privilege, while others took more radical approaches to economic and racial diversity without directly addressing gender.[1] M. Carey Thomas firmly believed that women’s intellectual capacity matched that of men, but her approach to securing gender equality (as embodied by Bryn Mawr) was based on appropriating, rather than dismantling, the elite status associated with the liberal arts education.[2] In the process of carving out their own stake in education, women have often used money to reify the elite status of the educated rather than changing the tone of the debate to include a broader view of equality. However, though the disparities and contradictions of early progress in educational access may not be consistent with the interpretation of “equality” that we attempt to hold ourselves to today, they should not be considered failures. Rather, they are indicative of the complexity and length of time that it takes to apply holistic change to society.

The strong association between liberal arts education and elite status is deeply rooted[3] and self-reinforcing: not only does it require access to a source, such as books or tutors, but traditional education also demands time and space in which to study—both of which are derived directly from wealth. Virginia Woolf asserted that the material prerequisites of education were not to be romantically discounted, famously declaring that intellectual productivity demands not only “a room of one’s own”, but also the rather significant income of at least five hundred pounds per year.[4]

Our recent look back at nineteenth-century college entrance exams makes these requirements feel tangible: would the passage of any of these exams been conceivable for an applicant that did not have the financial means to acquire tutors and study materials, find well-lit and heated spaces for study, and apply the ample amount of time that the work requires? The actual tuition of attending a school like Bryn Mawr, hardly insignificant, is only the crowning expense atop a pyramid of socioeconomic privilege that made attendance an imaginable possibility. Nor was it the final expense: Jen Rajchel, in her exhibit “Residing in the Past”, has also discussed the ways in which the exposure of economic privilege was woven into the fabric of daily life once the student arrived at school.

In addition to the material aspects of education, money can purchase immaterial advantages. A physical setting for the school could have been acquired without indulging the sumptuous details boasted by the Bryn Mawr College campus, but the institution in any lesser form would not have embodied the future of women’s education as envisioned by M. Carey Thomas. The campus’s deliberate mimicry of the magisterial style of its predecessors was an intangible but crucial component of the political statement that Thomas was making about the educability of women, and it would have been diluted or lost had the school been a different (less expensive) physical environment.

The achievement of higher education for women simply cannot be imagined without the role of financial privilege in the narrative: the sum of the tangible and intangible things afforded by money is that wealth grants a public space in which to pioneer change: at Bryn Mawr[5] and Johns Hopkins[6], dissenting voices were only overcome and outweighed by the Garrett family fortune. Women’s right to education may have been fought for heroically in the cultural battleground of public opinion, but it was also purchased. This fact, though not always flattering, is an important part of our history and must inform any discussion of our institutional identity.

Research assistance by Jessy Brody.

 

Sources:

Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Penguin Books, London, 1945.

 

[1] Often, different forms of privilege were in dialogue with one another during the formation of institutional identity. In her biography of M. Carey Thomas, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz reports that Harvard president Charles W. Eliot cautioned against coeducation while advising the Thomas family on school policy for Johns Hopkins University: as paraphrased by Mary Thomas, mother of M. Carey Thomas, “coeducation does very well in communities where persons are more on an equality, but in a large city where persons of all classes are thrown together it works badly, unpleasant associations are formed, and disastrous marriages are often the result.” (Horowitz, p. 48)

[2] Several of the resources on this site, which are part of an effort to process our own history, have explicitly acknowledged that in most cases the documented use of the word “women” is a recognized stand-in for “white, middle- or upper-class women”. For example, see Jessy Brody’s exhibit, “Athletics and Physical Education at Bryn Mawr College, 1885-1929“

[3]In ancient Rome, the liberal arts were the near-exclusive property of men of the ruling class; to be educated was to be elite, and only the elite were educated, as William V. Harris describes in Ancient Literacy. The Renaissance and Enlightenment saw the revaluation of the classical canon and its integration into early modern education, influencing the elite who led the American Revolution. Liberal education remained essentially a classical education throughout the 19th century. Even today, remnants of the philosophy of ancient education remain in the idea that the liberal arts prepare one to be a good citizen, able to lead and succeed in high-status, male-dominated occupations such as politics and business, even without conferring profession-specific qualifications. The liberal arts, albeit in changed form, remain a mark of social status. For more information about the development of the liberal arts in the United States, see Classica Americana, Reinhold, The Culture of Classicism, Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900, The American College in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Roger Geiger, The Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence and Growth of the Contemporary System, A History of American Higher Education, Thelin, American Higher Education, A History, Lucas.

[4] Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Penguin Books, London, 1945.

[5] As early as 1883 Carey Thomas had a desire to install herself as president of Bryn Mawr College. However, her path to the presidency was to be long and drawn out. Upon the resignation, due to failing health, of the College’s first president, the trustees responded to the subject of her potential appointment with the admission that they were “terrified at the thought of putting a woman in sole power.” Thomas’s eventual installation as president was effected through an exchanged in which Garrett offered the school $10,000 per year, or more than 10% of the annual budget, on the condition that Thomas be given the presidency. (Horowitz, p. 257)

[6] Though M. Carey Thomas had originally enrolled at the Johns Hopkins Medical School (which was part of the university that several male members of her family had helped to found), her frustrating first year resulted in her subsequent departure for Leipzig. Though she was allowed to sit for exams and consult with professors, she was not permitted to attend classes. (Horowitz, p. 98) Coeducation remained a subject of conversation, but was strongly opposed by a large percentage of the board. When the medical school needed money, Mary Garrett took advantage of their desperation and offered to raise the needed sum on the condition that the school begin admitting women on equal terms with men. It was only by applying pressure during a moment of financial need, and the contribution of a humongous sum, that Garrett was able to secure coeducation despite its unpopularity with the administrators. (Ibid, pp. 233-35)

We are live! Announcing the launch of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education

Posted on by

The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education is proud to announce the official launch of its website! We’ve been in beta for some time now, and while the site continues to grow, we can now proclaim to you all that we are live and ready to receive your comments….

The past year has been one of exciting growth for The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center and we are delighted to finally share the fruits of our hard work with you. The website will serve scholars in the US and across the world by providing free, open access to materials on the web related to the history of women’s education. We have digitized a variety of our own resources and built partnerships with other colleges to feature related original sources in their possession. An example of this is our collaboration with Dr. Anne Bruder’s class at Berea College. Dr. Bruder (editor of Offerings to Athena and Advisory Board Member) challenged her class to create a digital exhibit reflecting on the gendered histories of Berea College (the exhibit can be found here).

The website also features thematic exhibits on past alums, such as Margaret Bailey Speer, lesson plans created by Temple University students as part of the Cultural Collaboration Fieldwork Initiative, and current Bryn Mawr undergraduates’ work on the scrapbooks created by students in the early years of the college. We are focusing on digitizing prominent or unique items in our collections which will be freely available for teaching, research or general interest to users across the world.

The Center’s team has been led by Jennifer Redmond, and consists of a number of key members focusing on both the digital and research components of the Center:

  • Cheryl Klimaszewski, Digital Collections Specialist in Canaday Library, has continued as the technical lead on the project
  • Jessy Brody (BMC ’10), a Digital Assistant on the project, has been heavily involved in the digitization of scrapbooks and research on athletics at Bryn Mawr
  • Jen Rajchel (BMC ’11) recently finished her role as Digital Initiatives Intern and is currently the Assistant Director of the Tri-Co Digital Humanities Initiative
  • Evan McGonagill (BMC ’10) is a Research Assistant working at the Center, focusing on researching the collections and is in charge of the social media presence of the Center. (Click here to see the Center’s team and click here to see the Advisory Board members).

The work of the Center continues to be overseen by Eric Pumroy, Director of Library Collections and Seymour Adelman Head of Special Collections; and Elliott Shore, Chief Information Officer and Constance A. Jones Director of Libraries and Professor of History.

As part of the launch of the site, we are announcing the second annual essay competition, again kindly sponsored by the Friends of the Library. The theme is ‘Transformations: How has the Bryn Mawr College experience made you the person you are today?’  Further details on the competition can be found here.

Our first exhibition, Taking Her Place, will be hosted in the Rare Book Room gallery in Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College, from January to June 2013. Given the intense scholarly interest in the lively field of women’s educational history, we feel the exhibition will be a welcome addition to exploring the history of women’s reading, learning, scholarship and their battle to take their education and expertise from the private to the public sphere. It will also be a way to visually narrate the journey many women traveled to achieve their ambitions of becoming learned women.This show will explore women’s worlds of reading, learning, educational attainment and entry into the world of work and the public sphere. The exhibition will be launched by Professor Helen Horowitz, renowned historian of women’s education, biographer of M. Carey Thomas and one of the keynote speakers at the ‘Heritage and Hope’ conference in 2010 which celebrated the 125th anniversary of the founding of the college. Her talk on January 28th 2013 will be on “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic…and Power: Education as Entry to the World”. On Thursday April 18th 2013 Professor Elaine Showalter, Bryn Mawr College class of 1962 and Avalon Foundation Professor Emerita at Princeton University, will also be coming to give a speech as part of the exhibition program. Please check back here for further details on these exciting events. A digital version of the exhibition will be made available online after it closes.

The exhibition is jointly curated by Jennifer Redmond and Evan McGonagill. We are creating ‘Taking her Place’ with the assistance of our colleagues in Special Collections, Eric Pumroy, Brian Wallace, Marianne Hansen, Lorett Treese and Marianne Weldon, with the digital expertise of Cheryl Klimaszewski and Jessy Brody.

Finally, we are also announcing the first Call for Papers ‘Women’s History in the Digital World’, to be held at Bryn Mawr College, Friday 22nd and Saturday 23rd March 2013. We are honored to have as our keynote speaker Professor Laura Mandell, Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture and a Professor in the Department of English at Texas A&M. The conference will bring together scholars working on women’s history projects with a digital component, exploring the complexities of creating, managing, researching and teaching with digital resources. We will explore the exciting vistas of scholarship in women’s histories and welcome contributors from across the globe. This will be the first conference held by us, but hopefully this will become an annual event. We wish to bring together both experienced and newer scholars in the world of digital projects on women. Watch this space for further details!

There will be other public events throughout the Spring so please check back regularly at http://greenfield.brynmawr.edu/ and follow us on Twitter (@GreenfieldHWE). Announcements will be made also through the Friends of the Library Facebook page. 

We welcome your feedback on the new site, please leave comments here or else get in touch directly with the Director (jredmond@brynmawr.edu or via Twitter @RedmondJennifer)

 

How has Bryn Mawr transformed you? Announcing the Second Annual Essay Competition, deadline November 30th

Posted on by

Undergraduates and alumnae of Bryn Mawr College are invited to write an essay on the topic of:

‘Transformations: How has the Bryn Mawr College experience made you the person you are today?’

The essay competition’s theme is ‘Transformations: How has the Bryn Mawr College experience made you the person you are today?’ The competition this year is open to current students and to alumnae; the student prize is $500, the alumna prize will be a gift pack including a copy of Offerings to Athena edited by Anne Bruder and issued for the 125th Anniversary celebrations of the founding of the college. All entrants will have the chance to have their work published on the website.

This is the second annual essay competition of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education, and this year we are delighted to welcome alums to join in after the many requests we received last year to hear your voices.

As with last year we have partnered with the Friends of the Library in running this competition. Last year, we asked students to consider the relevance of single-sex education in the twenty-first century. The winner was Kai Wang ’14 and her essay can be read here. Two other entrants to the competition also published their pieces on the blog: Wendy Chen, Class of 2014, published her reflections on the importance of single-sex education in her experience, which can be read here; Emily Adams , also class of 2014, looked at the issue from multiple perspectives, saying she wouldn’t have it any other way (click here to read her post).

We invite you to think about all aspects of your college experience, either presently or in the past:

  • What made you choose Bryn Mawr over other colleges?
  • How has your Bryn Mawr experience shaped your life?
  • Did you learn any surprising lessons? About yourself? Or other people?
  • Was it a culture shock or a nurturing haven, or both?
  • What are your abiding memories of your time here?
  • In what ways has it been a transforming experience for you?
  • What are the key moments of your time at the college?

The essays should be no longer than 2,000 words and all essays must be submitted by Friday, November 30th, 2012 via email to the Director of the Center, Dr. Jennifer Redmond at jredmond@brynmawr.edu

Click here for the essay competition poster and be sure to tell all your friends:

Essay Competition Poster 2012 FINAL

Guest post: Ada Kepley, women’s education and the law

Posted on by

Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons

Historical Spotlight: Ada Kepley, the First Female Law School Graduate

It’s difficult to imagine a time when women couldn’t become lawyers in the U.S. However, in the 1870s, when Ada Kepley hoped to become a lawyer, it was unheard of for women to practice law. Kepley was the first woman in our country to graduate from law school. When Kepley graduated from Union College of Law in 1870, the state of Illinois informed her that women were not legally allowed in the learned professions. It wasn’t until 1873 that the laws barring women from practicing law were overturned.

According to the Illinois Bar Journal, Ada Kepley and two other Illinois women, Myra Bradwell and Alta Hulett, played critical roles in opening up the doors to the law profession for women. All three women applied for the Illinois bar in the 1870s and actively spoke out against discriminatory practices in the legal field. It was eighteen-year-old Alta Hulett who finally convinced the Illinois Legislature to permit women to practice law, through persistent and ardent lobbying. Kepley and Bradwell were then allowed to take the bar exam and become practicing lawyers.

Kepley, Bradwell, and Hulett were, in part, able to make the strides they did in the Illinois legal field with the help of Henry B. Kepley, Ada Kepley’s beloved husband. Mr. Kepley was a lawyer in Effingham who ardently encouraged Ada Kepley to pursue law. When Kepley was told she couldn’t become a lawyer, Henry B. Kepley drafted a bill that would outlaw discrimination based on gender in the learned professions in Illinois. It was the bill that Henry B. Kepley drafted that would eventually become a law in 1872, after Alta Hulett’s efforts came to fruition.

As Ada Kepley celebrated the victory of being able to practice law, she had other pressing matters on her mind as well. The women’s suffrage movement and temperance movement became particularly important to Kepley. She joined forces with the likes of Susan B. Anthony and Frances Willard to rally and lobby for equal voting rights for women. Additionally, she helped found an organization called Band of Hope, which aimed to educate the young adult population about the perils of alcohol abuse.

Kepley’s vocal support of prohibition legislation got her into some trouble in her local Effingham, Illinois community. In fact, according to Marilyn Willison, author of The Self-Empowered Woman, Kepley was beaten by two different liquor enthusiasts, and the son of a liquor dealer actually tried to shoot her (but missed). These harrowing events didn’t stop her from speaking out in favor of temperance, however. Kepley remained a passionate supporter of making alcohol illegal for all of her adult life.

Ada Kepley’s legal career was made possible mostly because her beloved husband, Henry Kepley, was also a lawyer. Ms. Kepley was able to join her husband’s practice and work for Effingham clients alongside him. At the turn of the 20th century, it would have been quite difficult for a woman to practice law without some sort of support from a man. Ada Kepley may not have achieved the goals of equality she longed for in her lifetime, but she certainly paved the way for future women to achieve those goals.

Katheryn Rivas is a freelance writer and professional blogger who frequently contributes to www.onlineuniversities.com and other education sites. If you have any comments or questions, drop Katheryn a line at katherynrivas87@gmail.com. Please see our Editorial Policy on guest posts for the Educating Women blog