Tag Archives: Connecting the past with the present

Process, memory and form: exploring the spoken and the written word in the Bryn Mawr College collections

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This post is brought to you by Amanda Fernandez (’14) who has been working as a project assistant in Special Collections throughout the summer, specializing in digitizing material for The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education. Here she reflects on the difference between digitizing and transcribing oral and written records, both of which illuminate the lives of alums in the past, finding frustrations and fascinations again in comparing epistolary and oral practices in recording memory and interpreting impressions from the past ….

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Summer being almost through, most student workers still happily off at their summer destinations, clinging to what remains of sweet summer and denying the soon to come scholastic year, I have stayed and carried on with my letter transcribing here in Special Collections. In addition to this, in order not to find myself enveloped (no pun intended) in a monotonous workflow, which would eventually incite distaste towards the project (as well as M. Carey Thomas and Mary Garrett), I have taken up another task. The project, which once belonged to Isabella Bartenstein (who is now happily gallivanting about Avignon!), involves listening to and digitizing a collection of interviews of alumna and long retired staff, all in order to compile a digitized collection of the Oral History Project. The project started in 1960 and was an active effort on behalf of the Alumnae Association to collect personal accounts of students’ and staff members’ experiences at Bryn Mawr and how it affected their lives.  In 1981, the OHP became more of a collaborative project when the paper work and cassettes were moved to the archives. Caroline Rittenhouse (BMC class of 1952) conducted many of the later interviews and directed the project when she became the College Archivist in 1987. The transferring of these audio tracks from the ancient medium of cassette tape to mp3 on a digital recorder by means of a tangle of wires that turn my workspace into jungle, can be tedious or thrilling, depending on the entertainment and interest value of the interview as a whole. Some of the most interesting interviews turn out to sound more like conversations which is suggested against in the general interview guidelines but, is almost entirely inevitable considering that the dialogue usually occurs between two alums.

I’ve found that audio recorded interviews relay much more information than the hand-written letter does. Letters, more specifically the letters that I have been transcribing, are not capable of lending me as accurate an insight into M. Carey Thomas as would an interview I think.  In transcribing and reading the letters, I tend to peel out my own conclusions—imposing my assumptions in order to erect the shadows of two people and a dramatic exchange draped over their correspondence. To be honest, I have gone as far as judging M.C.T. for the way she’s dotted her i’s.  In retrospect, something seems obviously askew in that practice—how could I understand enough about the culture of written narrative (which entails so many variables; structure, etiquette and subsequent tone, the relationship between the addressed and the addressee etc.) in that time and setting to  mold detailed personalities? I could also draw illusory conclusions from an audio recorded interview if the interviewee is putting on a ‘persona’—but even then, the intuition developed in perception of sound gives the theatrics away.

In listening to interviews I am depending on the human memory—which does not have a reputation for accuracy or precision, especially with the wear and tear of time. Experiences are subjective and the ‘singed’ memories thereafter are much like the newspaper clippings I find attached to letters; they yellow and tear here and there, the paper thins out and sometimes the words that were once clipped for their current relevancy in that time are now relevant in another upon being re-read—sometimes completely transformed by new perception that has been changed much in the same way as the physical clipping. We know that each person will recreate scenarios and memories according to the way they perceive and process—these interviews are unique in that memories are sewn together—memories most times compared and sometimes even confirmed. The exchange of sound waves seems to solidify the person that in letters appears just as a shadow; we are able to build a more three dimensional personality in our heads, we sense their stories in sound, the tone and expression being audible and creating a clearer picture.

Most of the interviews, if not all, are based on a standardized interview format—meaning that each of the interviewers are asking the same questions. Some interviewers ask the interviewee to expand, or they turn the interview into more of a dialogue where one relates to the other, prompting a more enthusiastically responsive and detailed answer. I guess interviews also depend on commonalities and relationship—what the interviewer can draw from the interviewee depends very much on what they have in common in regards to their experience at Bryn Mawr which would allow for the best and most informative dialogue—this also limits the interview in a situation where there is no familiarity. The most intriguing interviews I’ve heard thus far are those that have evolved into conversation due to the binding induced by commonality—such as one between two alums who were both raised by alums. In this exchange they share not only their own experiences (as one time students at BMC as well as what it was like being raised by BMC alums) but also the BMC memories transmitted to them by their mothers. At certain times throughout the recording, I caught the presence of four, each alum and her mother’s memory.

Through these tapes I have also confirmed my own faith in the long standing reputation of exceptional characters that proceeds Mawrters, women that  exceed expectation and burst out of the restrictions imposed on them by the social codes of their time. This was clear to me in most of the interviews, but particularly in two, the interview of Katharine Fowler Billings (class of 1925) who became an accomplished and renowned Geologist in the 1920’s when it was practically unheard of for a woman to take up such a profession.

An article on her pioneering work appears here on the GeoScience World site.

Isabel Benham

The second was of Isabel Benham who scraped and clawed her way as an independent woman on Wall Street starting in the 1930’s and I could not help but tear up a bit when she remarked, “Bryn Mawr taught you you were the best that there was and you can do anything you want.” Isabel was even dubbed the ‘Mother Superior’ of Wall Street (go to Link to Isabel Benham’s College Yearbook). In both of their interviews, their voices resounded with enthusiasm despite the distance of years from their time at the college and good humor.

Aside from what I have learned from the nature of the medium of audio, I am assured by the content of these interviews that Bryn Mawr women grow to be ‘defy-ers’ of their time.

 

Narrative, Visual Autobiography and Digital Storytelling – New ways to tell Mawter stories

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We have been strongly considering the importance of recording experiences of education as part of our work at The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education. As part of this, we’ve been digitizing oral histories completed with alums of the past, some who attended the college a century ago. We’ve also recently received some audio interviews of women who featured in the Women of Summer film (about the Summer School for Women Workers, which will also feature as an exhibit on the site soon). So we have been thinking deeply about the ways in which people tell their stories, shape their narratives, and for women especially, how they fit the story of their education into the wider narrative of their lives.

How do people memorialize important experiences such as higher education? Have there been changes over time? What is remembered and what is forgotten? What new forms of scrap-booking, such a popular past-time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (with a recent revival in the context of renewed interest in crafts) now exist or can exist in the digital world?

Excerpt from Photo Album of Eva Levin Milbouer, Class of 1933. See this at http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/BMC_scrpbks&CISOPTR=6030&REC=6

As Jessy Brody’s posts in this blog on her work on the Bryn Mawr collection of scrapbooks indicates, they are rich source of material for researching past lives at Bryn Mawr College. They do not, as she has found, always tell you what you would wish to find out, being as they are, silent testimonies to the lives of Mawters in the past, communicating visually but not aurally or orally the myriad of academic and leisure experiences they had during their time here. Jessica Helfand, author of Scrapbooks: An American History has argued that scrapbooks are a form of visual autobiography to record and commemorate things that could not, for whatever reason, be expressed in words:

‘The scrapbook was the original open -source technology, a unique form of self-expression that celebrated visual sampling, culture mixing, and the appropriation and redistribution of existing media” (page xvii)

We are hoping to extend our knowledge about past experiences at Bryn Mawr College by collaborating with alums in creating digital stories, a new form of visual autobiography which melds aspects of scrapbooks with oral history to create unique personal stories. Traditional elements of scrapbooks – photographs, letters, notes, invitations, ephemera and other reminders of past experiences – are scanned and combined with an audio narrative to create an audio-visual file that looks somewhat like a mini-movie. Having been inspired by the pedagogical work in bringing digital storytelling into the classroom at the University of Richmond we have adjusted their principles of creating digital stories to reflect the needs, interests and experiences of Bryn Mawr alums (for some great examples of digital story telling from the Richmond site click here).

I will be working with alums through city and regional Alumnae Club chapters to assist interested Mawters in creating their own reflective pieces on their time at Bryn Mawr. The story you wish to tell is completely up to you: perhaps you would like to represent why you chose Bryn Mawr College above others? Or your experiences at a single-sex institution? Or what you think being educated at Bryn Mawr gave to you throughout your life/career? Was it a special time, a challenging time, or a mix of both? What role does a single sex educational institution have to play in the landscape of higher education today? These are merely suggestions; the digital story is truly yours.  For more information on our approach to creating digital stories, click below to see a poster on the topic.

Bryn Mawr Digital Stories for The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education

If you are interested in creating your own digital story, think about doing so as part of your local alumnae chapter and feel free to contact me any time (jredmond@brynmawr.edu)

Collecting Bryn Mawr stories is a supplement to our other work of digitizing the oral history interviews conducted in past decades which are currently on cassette tape (for more on this see blog post by student worker Isabella Barnstein on her work on creating a catalog and digitizing the collection).

Capturing the varied narratives and preserving them for future generations is an important aspect of our work and one that we hope will interest alums and the wider community of those who research, teach and simply like to hear about women’s past experiences in education.

As a reminder, you can view the scrapbooks we have currently digitized in Triptych by clicking this link (there are currently 22 albums in the collection with ongoing digitization as part of the Greenfield Digital Center initiatives in digitizing important Bryn Mawr College material).

Happy browsing!

The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education participates in second year of award winning Cultural Collaboration Fieldwork Initiative

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The National Archives at Philadelphia Education Program, as part of its leadership of National History Day Philly, partnered in 2011 with Temple University’s Secondary Social Studies Certification Program. The idea behind the collaboration is to inspire pre-service teachers to work with primary sources and thus encourage their students to create projects for National History Day.

Student participants in National History Day Philly at a reception at City Hall with Mayor Michael Nutter

Bryn Mawr College Special Collections became involved in this through The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education. The Director, Dr. Jennifer Redmond, mentored three Temple University students, Lisa MacMurray, Sam Perry and Teddy Knauss. The students were given the chance to collaborate in designing a lesson plan on the history of women’s education aimed to encourage high school students to research this important topic. Based on the archival material held at Bryn Mawr, the fieldwork experience collaboration allowed the student to create their own lesson plans based on letters, speeches, photographs and pamphlets from the nineteenth and twentieth century, all of which illuminate the lives of women educated at Bryn Mawr. The lesson plans will appear on The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women and Higher Education’s new website which is due to launch soon and will constitute one of the key resources developed to publicize the project and reach out to teachers and students alike.

We were among a range of institutions involved in the collaboration, which developed different ways to engage the students to think about the use of primary sources in their classrooms. The 2011 Participating Partners included the following:

  • American Swedish Historical Museum
  • Athenaeum of Philadelphia
  • Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries
  • Bryn Mawr Special Collections Department, Mariam Coffin Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College
  • Cliveden of the National Trust
  • The Drexel University Archives and Special Collections
  • Legacy Center for Archives and Special Collections at Drexel University College of Medicine
  • Fairmount Waterworks Interpretive Center
  • Free Library of Philadelphia
  • Historic St. George’s UMC
  • Historical Society of Pennsylvania
  • Independence Seaport Museum – J. Welles Henderson Archives and Library
  • National Archives at Philadelphia
  • National Constitution Center
  • Pennsbury Manor
  • Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL)
  • Pennsylvania Hospital
  • Philadelphia City Archives
  • Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent
  • Philadelphia Museum of Art
  • Special Collections Research Center at Temple University Libraries
  • Dorrance H. Hamilton Public Media Commons at WHYY

Pre-service history teacher Teddy Knauss worked on a lesson plan designed for AP students, focusing on issued of diversity. As part of this he examined materials relating to the Bryn Mawr Summer School of Women Workers and critically analyzed issues of race and diversity in the history of women’s education. The Summer School, and those held at other college campuses across the USA, is the focus of an exhibit on our site which will be live soon.

Samantha Perry worked with fellow student Lisa MacMurray in producing a lesson plan on women’s struggle for access to higher education in the US. They looked at the entrance exams for the Seven Sisters colleges and compared them also with those of some of the men’s Ivy League colleges.

The Cultural Fieldwork Initiative recently won two awards for its work on this program: the Innovative Teaching Award from Temple University College of Education and an Outstanding Program of Excellence Award from the Pennsylvania Council for the Social Studies. Members of the initiative will be contributing an article, “Textbooks and Teaching” to the March 2013 special edition of the Journal of American History.

The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education will again be participating in the program when it launches in September. We hope to find more exciting areas of research to work with Temple students in producing lesson plans. In the meantime, if you are a teacher and would like to use our collections to create your own lesson plan, be sure to get in touch (jredmond@brynmawr.edu).

Below, Director of the Center Dr. Jennifer Redmond (third from right) at a ceremony at City Hall to mark the achievements of students at the National History Day Philadelphia competition at City Hall. With thanks to the Mayor, Michael Nutter, and to Ang Reidell and V. Chapman Smith (right and left of the mayor respectively) for their hard work on the Cultural Collaboration Initiative and their continued work on the program.

For more information on the initiative contact:

Andrea (Ang) Reidell,
Education Specialist
National Archives at Philadelphia
215-606-0103
andrea.reidell@nara.gov

Gender, Education and Embodiment

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Embodiment, or in this context, examining the physiological arguments made about women’s education in the past is the subject of this blog post, which relates to a previous post by Michelle Smith on the philosophical and theoretical writings expounding the detrimental physical effects education would have on women’s health. This is a theme we are continuously interested in as many of the early entrants to Bryn Mawr and other colleges that permitted women to attend had to battle notions of their physical and mental inferiority to be taken seriously as students and scholars. This topic is also related to project assistant Jessy Brody’s work on physical culture and sports at Bryn Mawr College which will appear as an exhibit on our site in the coming months.

Physical education at women’s colleges became a focus of attention at the end of the nineteenth century. As the Recent HerStory site posting on Senda Berenson Abbott of Smith College by Frances Davey, womanly grace and athleticism were ideas that were trying to be combined when Berenson introduced basketball at the college. As Davey argues, the emphasis on activity – both in a physical sense and a public one – became characteristic of what was termed ‘the New Woman’ at the turn of the twentieth century. Physical education and a more public identity for women were intertwined ideas in society and thus physicality for women was incredibly important in re-imagining roles for women through their acquisition of higher education.

Gender, education and embodiment is a subject of interest not only because the statements made about the physically detrimental effects of higher learning on women’s bodies seem absurd in today’s culture of thriving women in universities, but also because notions of gender appropriate educational behavior changed over time.

Some of this material will form the basis of an exhibit next year which will be shown in the Rare Book Room at Canaday Library. Although I am currently sketching out the exhibit narrative, I’m interested in portraying the debates for and against women’s higher education and in telling the story of women’s progress at third level from past exclusion to present domination. The exhibit will trace the narrative arc of women’s progression from gaining access to being taken seriously as academics and scholars.

Mary Kelley (an advisory committee member to our project and a Professor at the University of Michigan) has completed ground breaking work on women and reading which has shed light on the importance of literacy, education and the cultivation of the mind for women’s ability to enter the public sphere in their own right (in the excellent Learning to Stand and Speak). Yet the struggle of women in the past was not merely literacy but overcoming the embedded social prejudices which posited education outside the home for women as immoral, subversive and socially stigmatizing. As detailed in M. Carey Thomas’ own words, her mother’s friends would have been less shocked had she run away to marry the coach man than over her desire to pursue higher education in Germany.

Serious application of women’s minds to the study of academic works, as opposed to ‘appropriate’ forms of feminine literature, led some to argue that women’s physical health would be severely compromised, as if exercising their brain would diminish their physical capacity. Notions of this kind emanated from gendered ideas of women’s corporeality and greater susceptibility to physical ailments in convergence with beliefs of the diminished intellectual capacity of women. Therefore, following this logic, any ‘over straining’ of a woman’s limited mental capacities would result in irreversible physical damage, or certainly physical incapacities while the woman persisted with such ‘mental strain’.

Dr. Edward Hammond Clarke’s 1873 treatise, Sex and Education (available free online here) made a direct connection between women’s fertility and their modes of study. Clarke argued that the body could not cope with two physical processes at the same time, and applied this to both boys and girls”

 “The physiological principle of doing only one thing at a time, if you would do it well, holds as truly as the growth of the organization as it does of the performance of any of its special functions. If excessive labor, either mental or physical, is imposed upon children, male or female, their development will be in some way checked.” (Pg. 40-41)

Extending this argument to girls at the age of puberty, Clarke argued that the development of women’s fertility organs (referred to by Clarke euphemistically as her ‘organization’) was incompatible with intense scholarly study and he stated numerous cases where women’s fecundity was put at risk or negated entirely by study:

“There have been instances, and I have seen such, of females, in whom the special mechanism we are speaking of remained germinal, — undeveloped. It seemed to have been aborted. They graduated from school or college excellent scholars, but with undeveloped ovaries. Later they married, and were sterile.” (Pg. 39)

There are a number of ideas and assumptions contained within this short quotation that illuminate medical thinking on women’s health and education: firstly, that a person’s intellect and education could affect the physical development of the body to such an extent as to eliminate the growth of sex organs; secondly, that because the brain and the body could not both operate at optimum level simultaneously, girls should abandon their academic studies while going through critical physical development periods; that girls risked their health and future fertility by persisting on studying at the same time and at the same level as boys; and that the natural path for women was as mothers, not scholars.

As with other arguments, much of this rhetoric overtly or covertly referred to women’s fertility and its potential to be impaired by academic study or even engaging in thought or reading deemed to be too taxing. This was Mary Garrett’s experience; Garrett, although wealthy and from a prominent family, was not allowed to study as M. Carey Thomas had, and yet her physical ailments (such as headaches, piles and an irregular menstrual cycle) were blamed on her wide ranging reading material. Her hopes to recover by following doctor’s orders are revealed in the following poignant passage in a letter to Thomas in December 1880 which Garrett wrote while on a trip to Cannes:

“From my general condition the history of the past few years, my loss of memory, +c., he [the doctor] should have thought that there was some internal trouble, (displacement of the womb or something of the sort) and wants me when we go back <to the U.S.> to be examined again + assure my self that this is not the case_ (Of course I told him of my having been examined by Dr. Jacobs + the little that I c’d remember of what she said was the matter)—He thinks I sh’d simply go on leading as healthy a life as I can + attempt no study or work for certainly one or two years, perhaps longer but thinks that the chances are that I will eventually, although it may not be for ten years, get recover what mental power I ever had + that I need not be hopeless as to having by that time lost the power of using it _ not a brilliant prospect you see but something to look forward to _ You have never known the horror of not being able to think or to follow an argument or even remember one for a half hour_ Some bright Sport there are, however for what w’d I be if in this condition without the knowledge of the glorious things + thoughts there are + with out having gotten into the right path, although following it so feebly + haltingly. With such friend as I have + having their full sympathy and knowing a good deal of the true + the right, and with some appreciation at least of beauty, I ought not to kick too much against the pricks and <think> that the Fates are altogether cruel to me _ So you see you will have but a very stupid friend for perhaps ten years, and possibly to the end of my days, I wonder whther yr. patience will stand such a test!”*

The ‘prescription’ for Garrett’s health troubles are to exclude all level of study and reading of the materials she liked so much (they were a very literary circle of friends) for a period of one to two years or perhaps longer, which again points to the connection made by those such as Clarke that mental strain caused physical strain, particularly in women it seems. Garrett’s last words in this excerpt are poignant – she fears that her intellectual and memory capacities will be affected for many years ahead and possibly for the rest of her life and refers to herself as ‘stupid’, a designation none who knew her or have assessed her since would ever assign to her.

The fusing of the physical and mental was of course a gendered construct – no such fears existed about men damaging their virility because of their educational attainment. This was, in the logic of such arguments, because education at a higher level was a natural part of a man’s life and indeed would elevate him socially, spiritually and mentally. Embracing the ‘unnatural’ role of an educated woman was therefore met with resistance as well as courage by those women, M. Carey Thomas included, who pursued their desire for higher learning in the late nineteenth century.

What we can learn from this history is that women have overcome many obstacles in achieving access to education, surmounting real and philosophical challenges to their intellectual capacity and their physical health. Without these pioneering women it is doubtful that the bountiful array of opportunities for women in society would exist today and for that legacy we are truly thankful.

*With thanks to Amanda Fernandez, Special Collections student worker, for her work on transcribing the Garrett-Thomas letter quoted above.

Digitizing Bryn Mawr’s Voices: A glimpse into the lives of students past…

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Previous blog posts have mentioned the exciting work we have been doing on the oral history tape collection of materials. Lucy Fisher West, College Archivist, described early the aims of the project as offering those interested in women’s history and the history of the college another source to draw on in addition to the written records the college possesses. From 1981 onwards the oral history project was managed by Caroline Rittenhouse.

The following observations are by Isabella Barnstein, BMC ’14, who has worked on digitizing the collection over the last semester, finalizing an electronic version of the catalog and digitizing the related letters, release forms and transcripts…. important work to preserve this fantastic collection into the future….

Millicent Carey McIntosh, with President Harris Wofford and BMC alum Katharine Hepburn on a visit to campus in the 1970s

Over the past few weeks I’ve been privileged to survey Bryn Mawr’s Oral History Project, a collection of interviews bringing the former college to life.  Recorded in the 1970’s and 80’s, the tapes are remarkable for their candor, depth, and humor:  thorough descriptions of professors and classes, visits by famous personages including President Taft and the Queen of Belgium, exploits of first-president M. Carey Thomas, a first-person account by Katharine Hepburn.A voice bringing M. Carey Thomas to life is that of Millicent Carey McIntosh’20, not only Thomas’s niece but also Barnard College president, distinguished in her own right. McIntosh recalls early memories of her aunt with laughter followed by a vivid account of life as a student under Thomas’s command.We learn that M. Carey Thomas was famous for chapel talks held in Taylor, favorite topics of which were frequent foreign adventures.

M. Carey Thomas

Thomas bribed her way into then-male-only sanctuaries such as the Taj Mahal, and bathed thanks to an always carried rubberized bathtub. Through these tapes, we learn that M. Carey Thomas not only encouraged her young charges to break with tradition in terms of social acceptability, but also acquire passion for learning.  Thomas further believed that educational opportunity is accompanied by social responsibility and tried to instill these values into the students of Bryn Mawr.  Such stories of early women’s education are especially relevant today in light of recent discussion concerning the very existence of women’s colleges.

 

 

This work is currently being continued by Special Collections student worker Amanda Fernandez – check back on this blog for another update later in the summer.

 

“People today wonder whether a single-sex education is still a relevant institutional environment…” Wendy Chen, BMC ’14 reflects on single-sex education in the 21st century.

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In this post, guest blogger Wendy Chen, BMC ’14 reflects on the issue of single-sex education in the twenty-first century. Drawing on an essay she wrote for The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education Undergraduate Essay Competition, Wendy reveals why she thinks it’s important to keep reflecting on single-sex education and studying at a women’s college today.

As an undergraduate student majoring in the History of Art and minoring in Economics, I decided to enter this essay competition as a way to reflect on what I’ve learned from attending a single-sex institution. When I look back on the period prior to the emergence of radical feminist movements in the 1960’s, women today have attained more rights and liberties compared to women who lived through the historical period of patriarchal dominance. People today wonder whether a single-sex education is still a relevant institutional environment, as some may think that single-sex institutions merely exacerbate gender stereotypes and inflate sexist attitudes. But I believe that is a general misconception people have about single sex institutions, and that the option of being able to choose single sex schools should still be available for individuals interested in learning about existing gender norms and female empowerment.

A single sex institution is a unique environment where one is made aware of the heterosexual dichotomy between males and females, femininity and masculinity. This past semester I had an extremely rewarding experience in Professor Saltzman’s contemporary art history class where we talked about the body politic in relation to performativity. We had the privilege of reading Gender Trouble and listening to Judith Butler’s enlightening theories on the “gender performative”. It changed my notion of “gender” as an irreducibly, fixed truth and I began to view gender as of more of an expression, a social performance. Butler defines gender to be a “repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 45). I now understand “gender” to be socially constructed and linguistically reinforced. The societal practice of vicious regulating gender norms can sometimes lead to the victimization and discrimination of individuals who do not conform to the binary categories, and are in the end deprived of their rights. It is why women in many impoverished, developing countries are still oppressed by men and why homosexuals and transsexuals are deemed as secondary citizens. For example, in Afghanistan, women are still considered deeply inferior to males to the point where parents have to masquerade their girls as boys because sons are more highly valued in society. Obama’s recent announcement for his endorsement on gay-marriage is being criticized because society’s notion of gender is still heavily influenced by the regulatory systems of the heterosexual dichotomy.

In art history class, Butler’s readings break down these gender binaries by conveying the need for a permanent end to the policing and ordering of gender. Even in Professor Rock’s environmental economics class, I learned the importance of combating gender norms and promoting women’s empowerment and education. Countries such as Afghanistan have been shown to have a problem of overpopulation due to young marriage ages and high fertility rates which affects women’s chances for education. It is through being in an institutional environment that advocates female empowerment, and taking academically enriching courses that help me learn about the pervasive nature of gender ordering, that I realize at Bryn Mawr College we are not celebrating the differences between genders. I feel that we are unraveling the social construction of ‘gender’ and throwing it out the door completely.

 

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

 

Don’t Put Up My Thread and Needle: a few thoughts on archives, unbinding and digital books

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Of course, unbinding is about the process of breaking down– of designating what does and does not belong, what is kept in, what is left out; or what is left in, what is kept out.

This year, while working on The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education, I have been exploring the possibilities of unbinding material and digitally publishing archives that are nimble and can freely circulate.

I turn to  the work of translating notes on Lucy Martin Donnelly (1870-1948): a biographical research project which began with a small collection of citations and material in Special Collections, was then collated into a ten-page paper, and is being currently re-envisioned as an iBook.

Figure 1. Title Page of iBook (see notes below for further information)

Unbound
While researching Lucy Martin Donnelly, who was first an alumna of Bryn Mawr and then ended her tenure as head of the English Department, I began sleuthing through the files in Special Collections. I chose to work on constructing a small biography of Lucy Martin Donnelly, because it seemed that many of the history books and biographies I was reading on Bryn Mawr College’s history had glints of Donnelly’s influence though never more than a paragraph or two. The chosen epigraph for the title page  (shown in Figure 1) reads, “For many years hers [Donnelly’s] was the most influential voice in the planning for the English Department–and none the less influential because it was a quiet voice.” The words are in the “Memorial Introduction” honoring Donnelly’s career given by former Bryn Mawr President Katherine McBride. My foray into researching Donnelly’s life began with the question of how to highlight this powerful voice in a fashion that complements McBride’s description.

Binding
Donnelly’s archival material mostly consists of remnants from relationships through recollections of friends, saved dinner invitations, and letters that were sent to her. These documents were in most cases related to prominent figures in  Bryn Mawr’s history: Helen Thomas Flexner, Bertrand Russell, Edith Hamilton, Edith Finch, M. Carey Thomas, Marianne Moore, or the Bryn Mawr English department.

Instead of pulling apart these facets, I found myself following the desire to bind; to create a collation of these materials which could provide a composite portrait, to provide depth through the heft of compilation. My process began with collecting the materials, references, and citations to create a fuller portrait of Donnelly.

Figure 2. A screenshot from the iBook with a group photo including Donnelly

I began to think about how the work of unbinding requires us first to recognize the necessity of boundaries. Before I could imagine what digital possibilities were for the materials I was working with, I needed to understand them in the context of one another; I had to bind them together in a narrative.

What I found when constructing these pieces through an analogue biography, is that rather than following a chronological narrative, the materials seem apt to push against the boundaries of a linear chronology. The different references to Donnelly were specific to each person and privileging one account over another would only overshadow what I saw as a core facet to Donnelly’s history: her ability to reach out to many people and ideas and to connect them. Donnelly’s impact arose out of a desire to create ties between people long before social media 2.0. She was in a sense, the creator of a 19th century Facebook-type network. For example, Bertrand Russell was quoted in the July ’36 Alumnae Bulletin article “Miss Donnelly Retires” as saying: It is nearly forty-two years since I first met Lucy Donnelly and during those years we have discussed many topic literary and other. We disagreed about Matthew Arnold and the first sentence of The Golden Bowl but, passionate as the argument was on those two weighty subjects, it did not impair our friendship. It was from Lucy Donnelly that I first heard of [Joseph] Conrad, who afterwards became my friend and my son’s godfather.”  
This brief praise from Russell illustrates his affection for Donnelly’s friendship, her breadth of knowledge and intellect and also her ability to connect.

It was through the constraints of the page that I was able to better grasp why Donnelly’s biography seemed so intangible and resisted archiving on a traditional page. The kaleidoscopic narrative of Donnelly’s life, a life tangled with serendipitous meetings, threads of interwoven tête-à-têtes, and lasting influences, was one that required a networked representation.

Figure 3. A screenshot of the iBook side bar displaying multiple pages

Re:binding
I wanted to think about how to create a record of Donnelly’s life that echoed its vibrancy through many strands. Part of the benefit of the multi-vocal, sometimes conflicting accounts is that we see the multiple versioning of Donnelly as the archives of her life are constructed through the memories of others. Some, like Russell, may remember Donnelly’s passion for literature and philosophy, others might recall her work in an administrative capacity like founding the Chinese Scholarship committee but all accounts provide a rich rendering of her impact.

I turned to the iBook– a newly developed platform by Apple which would allow me to collage pictures, sound, and hyperlinks. As Figure 3 demonstrates, the iBook platform allows me to create a series of portraits that would recount Donnelly through the profiles of people she worked with and influenced. Through this dynamic text, it was possible to design a flexible path that would illustrate multiple accounts and perspectives for the reader to tie together–binding and unbinding her portrait of Donnelly as she read.

Yet, even with the new flexibility of these features and their platform, I created an area of boundedness:  one of hardware. Even while the interface became haptic and multimodal, it necessitated an iPad to circulate and MacBook to create.

While the kinds of binding may have changed, even with fluid, digital networks, we are creating ties and facing fixed boundaries. It is then our work to do the unbinding and rebinding so that we stretch wider towards the possibilities that are just beyond their margins.

Notes on this blog:

The images above are screenshots from the iBook in progress “Lucy Martin Donnelly and the Power of Female Networking.” All materials featured  are courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Special Collections.

These thoughts were inspired by a symposium recently held at MIT, Unbound: Speculations on the Future of the Book. It is the conversations and presentations resulting from this symposium that influenced my sense of boundedness and the productive processes which tether and unravel it. This blog is cross-posted on the Unbound blog.

Don’t put up my Thread and Needle is from an Emily Dickinson poem, 617, “Don’t put up my Thread and Needle –”

Of course, unbinding is about the process of breaking down: is a an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s opening line in his essay, The Crack-Up: “Of course all life is a process of breaking down”

From frustration to fascination

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Courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Archives

By: Amanda Fernandez, BMC 2014
Transcribing the letters of M. Carey Thomas has been, at least, an interesting experience. In the beginning of my work, which consisted and consists still of transcribing Thomas’ many personal letters to Mary Garrett, her good ‘friend’ and supposed lover, I found myself tangled in her Ramen-like script, frazzled by her tendency to close her letters or conclude post scripts by writing vertically over the already horizontally written text, and endlessly confused by her inconsistent punctuation. I was also simultaneously thrilled—to be holding these letters written by a figure well known to me as well as all Bryn Mawr students from the day we step on campus as prospective students. The letters that imply so much more than what is explicitly expressed, becoming to me through the process of transcription living documents.  I also wondered as to how these personal letters were relevant to the Greenfield project—one focusing on compiling a digitized collection of resources regarding the history of women’s education which I assumed would exclusively want more of Thomas’ academic papers and proceedings. As I transcribed, which requires reading the content closely especially in the case of these letters, I found that before there is contribution, there is character. That is to say that it is crucial to understand the driving ambition and persistence of M. Carey Thomas which was essential in leading up to her contributions to women’s education and particularly women’s place in the early history of their higher education. These letters, despite their personal tone, definitely capture Thomas’ personality and shine a lot of light on a character that I found, as a current student, has transcended time in this small space.

On campus there is a generic perception of M. Carey Thomas—her ghost lingers within the confines of the cloisters where her ashes are spread, she curls her ghostly toes in Taft fountain, which was once the exclusive Deanery garden.

The Deanery

She stares down sternly from her portrait in Thomas Great Hall, the lead image for this post. Everyone on campus knows about M. Carey Thomas. She’s a legend and someone that over time has been transformed into a fantastical concept. It isn’t difficult to see why M. Carey Thomas to me was just an idea, an elusive aura—and I never bothered to explore why and how Thomas had managed to leave such a lasting impression. I see now in my close readings that Thomas initially became an idealized figure for having been a woman who from a very young age fought tirelessly to no end for her right and the rights of all women to receive an education if not equal to then superior to that of men. Her letters reveal the details of Thomas happily struggling to attain her own education alongside her close group of friends, which included Mary Garrett. As much as she is a well-known figure on the campus where she became the first woman to be a college president—no one here really knows what she stood for and how her personality still impacts this community. This first struck me as I stared into the John Singer Sargent painting of Thomas in Canaday’s Gallery, noting her strong brow and unrelenting glare. In other portraits of famous ladies painted by Sargent, the women painted are surrounded by opulence and props that clearly allude to their wealth and status. Thomas’ portrait portrays her in the traditional academic robe with an indigo sash—all effective in conveying Thomas’ identity as a strong faced academic woman who meant business, something unheard of in her time. This is an identity that continues to live on this campus—the archetype for what constitutes the ‘Bryn Mawr Woman’ is founded on the character of Thomas, one who would not accept ‘no’ for an answer and who would almost always compromise, if it was to her convenience.

The Friday Night Club

I believe that even our sense of community working for the empowerment of each other, with each other, is one derived from Thomas’ own model of sorority with her group of friends with whom she met every Friday (and is referred to in her letters as “Friday Nights”) where politics and reform were discussed and a course of action was plotted.  The way that Thomas refers to these meetings and the serious and passionate tone she takes on when addressing this group of friends is still the tone that thrives in our everyday interactions with one another on this campus.

In reading Thomas’ letters there is a sense of her that is very different from the mysterious identity imposed on her by time and forgetfulness. She is more than a figurehead—more than a magical time-transcending aura that permeates anything and everything Bryn Mawr. Digitizing these letters is vital to reinstating Thomas’ personhood—bringing to life the reality of her personality in the light of her contributions. Coming in contact with these letters has made the distance that surrounds M.C. Thomas become a little bit shorter every pen mark I familiarize myself with—and I hope that by expanding accessibility this distance can be bridged for others.

Listening to Educated Women’s Voices

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Want to hear the voices of women from Bryn Mawr’s past? Interested in hearing personal stories about women’s education in the twentieth century?

I’m very excited to inform you about a new phase of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education…. thanks to the generous volunteer help of current Bryn Mawr undergrad Samantha Saludades and the work of Isabella Barnstein who works in Special Collections we are digitizing the oral history collection held here which includes interviews from many different kinds of people from students and alums to retired hall wardens and professors. We gave you a taste of this in an earlier post with an interview with M. Carey Thomas which you can listen to here mcareythomas1935

This collection includes some interviews relating their time as far back as the early 1900s. The project was shaped by the efforts of former Special Collections archivist, Caroline Rittenhouse, and her work will be treasured by many of you who are interested in hearing about life at the college in previous years.

Beginning with a sample of twelve interviews chosen for their diversity of topics and speakers, we have created digital copies of the conversations and an electronic catalog of all the interviews (there was up to this point only a card catalog with varying details about each of the files). Those interviews that have been legally released will be able to be listened to eventually when we are able to host them online, and a short summary of what was said in the interview has been created for each of the interviews. In some cases we have transcripts of the interviews, often typewritten, and these will also be digitized and released, according to the permissions on the individual interview. This is a lot of work but exciting stuff! I’ll be posting another entry on the blog this week from Bryn Mawr student worker Isabella Barnstein who has been working on this important collection of materials.

Check back on this site for updates on the project, or feel free to contact me if you would like to know more about what we are doing (jredmond@brynmawr.edu)

 

 

“Educate a man for manhood, a woman for womanhood, both for humanity. In this lies the hope of the race”

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As a student worker in Special Collections, I get the opportunity to do a lot of interesting research. Presently, I’m working on research that will contribute to an exhibition in 2013, and as part of this I have been reading about different topics from the late 19th century on women and education.

I’ve done some relevant coursework, Professor Elliott Shore’s History of Bryn Mawr being the most relevant, but also a sociology course entitled “Women, the Body, and Society”. But I never really delved as deep into the research as I have for this exhibition. For instance, did you know that many 19th century doctors were convinced that women were incapable of developing their brains and their reproductive organs simultaneously? Perhaps it’s a sort of hold-over from the more medieval concept of balancing humors.

There are two major contemporary texts on the issue that I have been reading side by side: Dr. Edward Hammond Clarke’s Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls, published in 1873 and the provocative reply by Julia Ward Howe entitled Sex and Education, published in 1874. (Special Collection owns copies of both- in excellent condition- but they can also be found online using Google Books and a digital archive of Julia Ward Howe’s works and letters can be found here http://www.juliawardhowe.org/writings.htm)

Dr. Clarke’s book came first and was a leading text used in the fight against women’s higher education. Clarke argues there are physiological reasons that boys and girls cannot be educated together, in the same way: “The physiological motto is: Educate a man for manhood, a woman for womanhood, both for humanity. In this lies the hope of the race.” (Clarke 19) A good portion of the argument revolves around reproduction – if women do not develop their sex organs properly, they cannot continue making babies.

But don’t men have sex organs that need developing too, Dr. Clarke? “The growth of [the uterus and ovaries] occurs during the first few years of a girl’s educational life. No such extraordinary task, calling for such rapid expenditure of force, building up such a  delicate and extensive mechanism within the organism, — a house within a house, an engine within an engine, — is imposed upon the male physique at the same epoch.” (Clarke 37-38) The modern day equivalent, I think, would be a mansplaining, backhanded compliment: women are too complicated, too delicate, and we should just let the men take care of difficult matters.

Howe’s book is a rather clever response to the seemingly simple argument posed by Dr. Clarke. For her book, Howe collected the views and opinions of male and female writers, doctors, and academics on the subject of women’s education, reasoning against every one of Clarke’s arguments. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, one of the contributors, systematically criticized Clarke’s lack factual evidence and faulty methodology, calling for “facts as to American-born women of different races” (p. 38), “the comparative physiology of different social positions” (p. 39), “an extensive record of individual instances” (p. 40), and an “account of the physiological benefits of education for women” (p. 41). He, and other authors included in the text, were sure that if studied without bias, no differences across gender lines would arise.

One of the most interesting moments for me in reading this text was Howe’s assessment of social causes for the physiological disorders that Clarke cites. “… By far the most frequent difficulty with our women arises from uterine displacement, and this in turn comes partly from the utter disuse of the muscles which should keep the uterus in place, but which are kept inactive by the corset, weighed upon by the heavy skirt, and drawn upon by the violent and unnatural motion of the dancing at present in vogue.” (Howe 29) She briefly discusses the idea of challenging the norms, but relents: “[the opinion that] ‘we are only women, and it does not matter,’ passes from mother to daughter. A very estimable young lady said to me the other day, in answer to a plea for dress-reform, ‘It is better to look handsome, even if it does shorten life a little.’ …” (Howe 28) I think what shocked me most about this was how little things seem to have changed: I suppose there always has been, and always will be, a desire for everyone (women in particular) to look a certain way as dictated by society, regardless of the health effects.

It has certainly been an interesting endeavor for me to think very critically about the position of women and women’s education, and how it has changed. At the time these texts were written, most women did not have access to higher education, and those who did often were criticized heavily for their pursuits. Now, women comprise the majority of college students, though are still underrepresented in many professional fields and graduate level education. But the feminist argument of the time was to support co-education of men and women to ensure that women received the same quality education that men did.

Yet here I sit: the product of four years of a women’s college, a female-dominated environment, and I don’t feel that I’ve been cheated out of any quality where my education is concerned. Could Clarke have been onto something when he counseled against co-education? In my opinion – Howe, Higginson, and any of the others in Howe’s text would have been more than happy to attend a women’s college as long as the quality of education could be guaranteed to meet the same standards as men’s education, (something of great importance to M. Carey Thomas). And besides, it helps to create a positive learning environment for everyone, regardless of gender, when there’s less mansplaining and more collaboration.

This post was created by Michelle Smith, soon to be a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and one of the students who regularly works in Special Collections.