The findings are fascinating!

My name is Lisa MacMurray and I am a student at Temple University studying Secondary Education – Social Studies.  This semester our Social Studies Methods class wanted Temple students to help fellow history institutions in showcasing the importance of National History Day to both teachers and students throughout the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania region.  Sam Perry (my classmate) and I interviewed with several institutions; however, we were thrilled to have been chosen to intern with Bryn Mawr College’s Greenfield Project and the study of women in education.  This is an area of history in which both Sam and I are very much interested.  Jennifer Redmond, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow and Project Director, The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education, has been our mentor throughout the semester and has helped guide us through the research process.

Part of our research has been to get a clear understanding of how hard it was for women to achieve higher education in a college that was not simply a “finishing school” but one that would demand more from them and help expand their knowledge and intellect.  Additionally, Sam and I have been reviewing entrance examinations from the late 1800s through 1920 from several Seven Sister colleges, as well as, men’s Ivy League schools.  We started by comparing and contrasting the examinations between Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe and Wellesley.  Additionally, we have since looked at Yale, Harvard and University of Pennsylvania’s men’s colleges to compare their requirements to those of the women’s colleges.  The findings are fascinating!  The women colleges required just as much as the men’s colleges; yet, they were not allowed admittance to the men’s schools.  Originally, we focused on large segments of the examinations; however, since we are Secondary Education – Social Studies majors, we decided that the primary focus should be on the History/Geography sections of the examinations.  I have noticed that Bryn Mawr College has the hardest requirement with regard to History/Geography questions as compared to the other women’s colleges.  Bryn Mawr’s History/Geography sections are compatible with Yale and Harvard.  I could not compare University of Pennsylvania’s examination to Bryn Mawr as they had no examinations available for review, yet, we were able to gain much insight into the University of Pennsylvania’s discrimination against letting women into the university to earn a degree.

Now that our time at Bryn Mawr College is coming to a close, we will be making a lesson plan, along with test questions and, adding Bryn Mawr College’s entrance examination online so that teachers will be able to teach a lesson to their students to show how women did whatever they could to gain a higher education and, to have the students take the test so that they will see how difficult these examinations were.  For one, Bryn Mawr required perspective students taking the examination to have enough knowledge to be able to translate Greek, Latin, French, and German, along with extensive knowledge in the English language.  Students taking this examination online will most likely fail the test since they do not possess knowledge in all the language areas, let alone all the other content criteria that is included in the examination.  I also feel that teachers can give their students (both males and females) better insight into the challenges that women had to overcome in order to earn a college degree and that no matter the inequality, they overcame and endured and many became influential women in society.

I have enjoyed my time at Bryn Mawr College and I am going to miss Jennifer and the program.  I will begin Student Teaching in January so my time at Bryn Mawr will soon be finished; however, I have gained much knowledge during my internship and, if I have any available time, would love to help Jennifer with any other projects that the Canaday Library may be focusing on with regard to the Greenfield Digital Center.

The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education announces its first undergraduate essay competition!

 

Photo courtesy of the Bryn Mawr College Archives

Want to win $500? Got something to say about studying at a women’s college? Then enter the inaugural undergraduate essay competition for a chance to express your views and win a prize!

Bryn Mawr College was recently awarded funding from The Albert M. Greenfield Foundation to initiate an exciting new venture in digital humanities – the launching of the Digital Center for the History of Women and Higher Education. The Digital Center will comprise of an online portal to promote and support original research, teaching, and the exchange of ideas about the history of women’s education, both in the United States and worldwide.

Given recent media attention to the issue of single sex-education (see President McAuliffe’s recent piece in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/10/17/single-sex-schools-separate-but-equal/bucking-the-trend-at-womens-colleges) we want to hear what current students think about the impact of studying and living at a women’s college in the twenty-first century. Does it matter whether an institution is single-sex or co-ed? What is the impact for young women attending a single-sex college? What do you think is the future? We want to know!

So, for this competition we invite you to address the following topic in 1,000 words or less:

‘Why single sex education matters today’

Agree? Disagree? Have a persuasive argument either way? Write it down and be in to win.

The winner will receive a $500 cash prize, kindly sponsored by Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Library, and the winning entry will be posted on The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center’s website. The deadline is Friday 27th January 2012 and all entries should be emailed to me, the Director, at jredmond@brynmawr.edu

This competition is open to current undergraduates of Bryn Mawr College only, but please check back for alum related events and get in touch if you are an alum with an idea for the Digital Center

Get involved! Have your say!

M.Carey Thomas, a Ouija Board, and a Moment of Reflection

The only thing missing from last year’s course, “History of Women’s Higher Education,” was a Ouija board. As a class, we spent part of the semester examining the various representations of M. Carey Thomas  through her letters, biographies, and first-hand student accounts. Often times, this would lead us to use these archival artifacts to muse about what her response might be to the Bryn Mawr of today. Still, I was tempted to sneak down to the cloisters and attempt to resurrect her formidable spirit.

Recently while reading the speech of M. Carey Thomas in Special Collections, I could not shake the feeling that Thomas had risen from the Cloisters, sans Ouija Board. I felt included—or more accurately, implicated—in the opening “I doubt the most imaginative and sympathetic younger women in this audience can form any conception of it means… to be able to say…the battle of the higher education of women has been gloriously, and forever, won.”

Immediately, I focused on the fallacy of her absolutism of “forever won,” but I would like to linger for a moment on the first half of this declaration. It is true that I cannot comprehend a time when the mere fact of my sex would prevent me from attending college, especially as an alumna of women’s college with such a rich history. In some ways, this lacuna in my own memory speaks to Thomas’ intrepidity and the work of all those who labored towards creating higher institutions which did not discriminate on the basis of sex.  While I cannot imagine wanting so desperately to learn Greek that I would rather die than be told of my innate inadequacies (as Thomas declares in her speech), it is the presence of this communal  memory –no matter how hyperbolic that it might seem to us today– that creates a responsibility to remember in whatever available medium.

The experiences of women who have struggled to eliminate gender biases in education cannot be fully comprehended today, but their memories, their words, and their notable silences are marked with a tangible urgency that defies temporality. While working on the Greenfield Archive, I look forward to sifting through the voices and discovering those fragmentary moments when the past does not seem so distant and can be briefly beckoned to the present.