Tag Archives: digital collections

Blogs, Exhibits and Tweets: Summer at The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education

Posted on by
ParkMarion6

Marion Park, President of Bryn Mawr directly after M. Carey Thomas. Park was a Bryn Mawr College alum and is the subject of a new exhibit to be developed over the summer for the website

The summer is here and we thought we’d share our plans for developing the Center’s site with you. We will be working hard over the next few months on developing new content, and continuing to reach out to you on social media (if you don’t follow us already, get to it @GreenfieldHWE or find our facebook updates on the Friends of Bryn Mawr College Library page).

Omeka

See http://omeka.org/ for further details on the platform we use to power our site

We are excited to be making two significant improvements to the site. The first of these is to make the site mobile compatible, so all of you who like to browse on your tablet or phone will be able to do so more easily once the changes come into effect around July. The second improvement is something that more directly affects our experience – we are in the process of upgrading to the new Omeka 2.0 platform, a huge improvement on the previous version from our initial poking around! If you are using the new platform and would like to share your experiences, be sure to get in touch (greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu). The biggest change on the user end will be the search functionality, which will be greatly enhanced from its present version. Aside from the search, users will not notice differences or disruptions (we hope!) but the streamlined back end is definitely an improvement and will help us in our mission to digitize and display in the best way the resources we hold in the history of women’s education.

Marian Edwards Park was President of Bryn Mawr from 1922 until 1942 when she retired. When she came to Bryn Mawr as a student she was among the early generations of women who enjoyed higher education for the first time. A member of the class of 1898, she won the European Fellowship upon graduation, the college’s highest honor at the time. She returned to complete her PhD in classics in 1918. She therefore experienced life at Bryn Mawr from all perspectives: undergraduate, graduate and administrator. She oversaw the school through some dramatic times, namely the Depression and the beginning of World War II, and she was also president during the period in which it first allowed African American students to attend as undergraduates and as members of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers. Park also led the celebration of the College’s 50th anniversary, a major milestone of achievement in the ‘experiment’ of education for women. Because she  followed in the rather intimidating shadow of M. Carey Thomas, her contributions have not loomed as large in the historical record. However, Park will be the subject of a new exhibition this summer, examining in particular her condemnation of the increasingly horrifying events in Europe that led up to World War II. The exhibit will include evidence on her efforts to host Jewish scholars fleeing the Nazi regime. Keep an eye on the site for the exhibit and make sure to let us know what you think.

We hope to continue work on digitizing primary sources, particularly the rich collection of oral histories that we have been engaged in translating from cassette tapes to digitized recordings for over a year. This is slow, meticulous work, but we hope to be able to share them with you eventually on the Tri-College digital collections site, Triptych. If you haven’t seen them already, there are a few examples from the collection that were digitized as part of the Taking Her Place exhibition, available on our site here. This is a fascinating collection, including narratives from student, staff, faculty and alumnae, with memories stretching back to the first decades of the college’s existence. Work will be ongoing for the next year and more, but we will be releasing recordings to celebrate special events or for use in digital exhibits as appropriate when we can do so. There have been a few reflections from students working on this collection over the past while which you may have seen already, the last of which was by our most recent student helper on the project, Lianna Reed ’14.

Special Collections is also hosting a number of interns for the summer, two of which have been awarded brand new internships through the Pensby Center to focus on tracing histories of diversity at Bryn Mawr College. Lauren Footman ’14 will be examining the experiences of the African diaspora on campus, including sourcing participants to create new oral histories to add to our collection, a most welcome addition to our work at the Center in trying to uncover stories from that past for which we have little or no documentary evidence. Her fellow intern, Alexis de la Rosa ’15, is looking at Latina histories and will be surveying current students and alums later in the summer. Alexis and Lauren’s work will be available as a digital exhibit on our site at the end of the summer, and they will also be writing blogs about their experiences doing this important research. Both Alexis and Lauren are also jointly engaged in cataloging the papers of Evelyn Rich, class of 1952. Evelyn Rich was one of the first African American students to live on campus, and her extraordinary achievements span education, the labor movement and politics. We are lucky to have acquired her papers.

WHDW home pageThe popularity of the Women’s History in the Digital World conference repository continues – there have been over 300 full-text downloads from the repository so far. We are so proud of our wonderful contributors for sharing their work and hope anyone who hasn’t done so already will be inspired to. Plans for the next conference will be going into gear in the fall, so keep an eye out for updates and think about submitting an individual paper or a panel if you have been working on a collective project. You can also follow the recording of the conference by visiting our blog post which detailed the Twitter archive, Storify and blog posts on the conference and you can listen to Professor Laura Mandell’s inspiring keynote here.

As some of you know, I will be going on maternity leave for this summer, so if you wish to get in touch with someone about the work, please contact the Center’s Research Assistant, Evan McGonagill, who will be managing communications throughout the summer (you can contact her through the general email address: greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu).  There will be more blog posts and updates so don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and to visit the Educating Women blog. You can comment on any blog post you see, and we always look forward to hearing your comments so stay in touch, and happy summer!

 

Thoughts on feminism, digital humanities and women’s history

Posted on by
No_So_Ladylike_Afterall

M. Carey Thomas, Bryn Mawr College’s first female president, is the subject of a new digital exhibit to be launched soon

I have been exploring my thoughts on women’s history, digital humanities, and feminism through two separate presentations in recent months, the first at the conference organized by The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education, Women’s History in the Digital World (March 2013), and the second at the Five Colleges Mediating Public Spheres: Genealogies of Feminist Knowledge in the Digital Age conference (April 2013). In a presentation at the latter conference, titled Open Source Technology and Feminist Perspectives: Translating Sources on the History of Women’s Education to the Digital Age I explained my feminist approach to my work at the Digital Center, focusing on a digital exhibit on M. Carey Thomas that is underway and will be launched soon. This blog post represents a synthesis of the two papers, based on work and thoughts in progress… all comments and feedback welcome as I work through some of the concepts I’ve been grappling with.

My thoughts on the trifecta of feminism, digital humanities and women’s history are largely drawn from my experiences using the open source software platform, Omeka, and our institutional enterprise version of Word Press to populate different areas of the Digital Center’s site, in addition to my training as a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow. While I assume that neither of these tools were designed with feminist notions in mind, I’ve come to believe that they have large potential to be utilized for feminist outcomes, particularly Omeka, as I will explain further in this post. Primarily, the Center’s site aims to tell stories in the history of women’s education that emanate from different perspectives. As Hermione Lee has said in her collection Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography, “We all want stories”, and the demand for such stories in the digital age is no less (possibly more, in fact) than ever before.[1]

The digital age and the tools it provides allow for a different mediation of knowledge than standard forms of scholarly communications. As noted by Abby Smith Rumsey these new methods have brought “fundamental operational changes and epistemological challenges [that] generate new possibilities for analysis, presentation, and reach into new audiences”.[2] The exhibit format in Omeka is designed to allow for the easy presentation of original historical material, such as images, transcriptions and audio files. This allows for the greater sharing of primary source materials, itself a way to decolonize and break down barriers to research and access to rare materials. We have created a number of exhibitions on our site, some of which have been generated as a result of student work from a class I teach on the history of women’s education, some of which come from collaborations with other colleges, and some drawn from our own collections and created by me and my team (see here for the full range of exhibits we have developed so far).

Our endeavor to produce digital source material comes from a desire to transmit knowledge and awareness of women’s history to the broadest audience possible: fellow researchers, students, teachers, alumnae, digital humanists and those simply with a desire to learn more about the topic–in essence, the public sphere has expanded in the digital age, although there are still challenges to be faced in greater online access morphing into another form of the ‘digital divide’.

Upon learning the new software platform and becoming familiar with its characteristics, possibilities and constraints, I realized that the Omeka exhibit format allows for the subject matter to be presented in a deconstructed narrative, due to the free form it provides for creating the digital exhibit. This struck me as having strong feminist potential: while the structure allowed by the Omeka format is cohesive in terms of form and flow, the sectioning of a biographical narrative allows for the fragmentation of the story, and in my efforts, for the development of a kaleidoscopic view, or, to paraphrase Henry James, to let the “swarm of possibilities” that nebulously make up a person’s biography to emerge, rather than a “few estimated and cherished things”.[3] This is, in my view, one of the pivotal means by which to incorporate digital media in feminist scholarship and practice.

Image by klmontgomery licensed under a Creative Commons license and available here http://www.flickr.com/photos/klm_digital_snaps/1444968874/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Image by klmontgomery licensed under a Creative Commons license and available here http://www.flickr.com/photos/klm_digital_snaps/1444968874/sizes/m/in/photostream/

In a feminist postmodern tradition, this approach posits that there is no ONE person for us to study, no One Truth we can ascribe to a person or their life history.  In this case, M. Carey Thomas, born in Baltimore, Maryland on January 2, 1857 to a prominent Quaker family. Thomas was the first Dean and later the first female President of Bryn Mawr College and a national leader in women’s struggle for access to higher education and the suffrage movement.  My feminist approach to her biography aims to be cognizant of the privilege in stories such as hers: the history of women’s entry into higher education is an elite history, and recognition of this is necessary so that the histories we tell are not merely celebratory without being interrogative.
Here I am focusing on Thomas as she was seen from different perspectives: her own (for example, her ambitious articulations for her education and career in the letters and diaries that span her time at Quaker boarding school, on to Cornell, Johns Hopkins and eventually a summa cum laude PhD from the University of Zurich), those of her contemporaries, lovers, friends and family, the public and the way in which she was memorialized after her death in 1935. I am focused here, however, not on the details of her biography (although this will be in the exhibit) but rather on examining the potential of an open source software tool to present critical historical analysis of this fascinating person. The ability to juxtapose different opinions by placing them on the same page is more visually and comprehensively impactful in a digital exhibition format than would be the effect of a written paragraph: in traditional biographical accounts such as an article or monograph, editorial and stylistic conventions would view such jumping around as incoherent, and yet it can be seamless in an online presentation.

Making sure our metadata is harvested by the major search engines and databases and using social media to reach both scholarly and public audiences will both be crucial in building up a new body of feminist genealogies and for tracing feminist work in the digital era. The metadata itself also needs to be cognizant of feminist principles in describing women’s identities in digital databases, as was mentioned by Professor Laura Mandell in her keynote speech at the Women’s History in the Digital World conference. 

It is also imperative that as we do work that mediates the public sphere in the digital age we think about its long term preservation. This requires that choices be made, funding be sourced and policies be formulated now – it would be the greatest tragedy of all if we found ourselves unable to trace back the exciting developments in feminist work that have been produced in online public spaces. The familiar academic mantra of ‘publish or perish’ might be usefully adapted in this context to be ‘archive or perish’. And, as I remarked at the Women’s History in the Digital World conference that was held at Bryn Mawr College, I believe fundamentally in the idea that the ‘add women and stir model’ for any kind of initiative, social, political education or anything else, rarely works.

Seat-at-the-table-300x171

Photo courtesy: www.hbdi.com

In the new era of digital humanities, women need a seat at the table while it’s still being set, not after the main course has been served. As I researched for this paper, I discovered that others in the digital humanities community have also used the “table” to describe the need to collaborate, critique and engage in new developments. Alan Liu has argued that digital humanists need to be equal partners at the table, not just a servant, when critical conversations are happening about the way forward for the humanities and cautions that digital humanists need to include more cultural critique in their work.[5] Moya Bailey extends Liu’s concerns into more explicitly feminist territory with her arguments that the “ways in which identities inform both theory and practice in digital humanities have been largely overlooked” and that moving from “the margin to the center” gives the opportunity to “engage new sets of theoretical questions that expose explicit structural limitations that are the inevitable result of an unexamined identity politics of whiteness, masculinity and ablebodiness”.[6] Alan Liu’s point was that the “digital humanities have a special role to play today in helping the humanities communicate in contemporary media networks”.[7] I would extend this argument to say that feminists have a special role in mediating the present and future public spheres, through their research, pedagogy and activism. Here the words of M. Carey Thomas are apt: reflecting on the success women had made of educational attainment in the first twenty-five years of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, she stated “The fearsome toads of those early prophecies are turning into pearls of purest radiance before our very eyes.”[8] Let’s hope it’s the same for us as we feminists navigate the new public spheres and create our own genealogies of knowledge.

[1][1] Hermione Lee,  Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2005: 1.

[2] Smith Rumsey , New-Model Scholarly Communication: Road Map for Change (2011: 2).

[3] As quoted in Hermione Lee,  Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2005: 1.

[4] Anne Balsamo, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work, Duke University Press: 2011: 51.

[5] Alan Liu, ‘Where is Cultural Criticsim in the Digital Humanities?’ available from http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/where-is-cultural-criticism-in-the-digital-humanities/

[6] Moya Z. Bailey, ‘All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave’, Journal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 1, No. 1 Winter 2011, available from http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/all-the-digital-humanists-are-white-all-the-nerds-are-men-but-some-of-us-are-brave-by-moya-z-bailey/

[7] Alan Liu, ‘Where is Cultural Criticsim’.

[8] Thomas, Women’s College and University Education:  Address delivered at Quarter-Centennial Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, Boston, November 6, 1907.
Available in digital form on the website of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education by clicking here. You can view the original by visiting Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College.

New Exhibit: The Woman’s Column

Posted on by

WC_headerAs part of our celebration of Women’s History Month in March, we published a series of four posts highlighting higher education articles in pro-suffrage newsletter the Woman’s Column, which was printed in Boston between 1887 and 1904. The Column was published by Alice Stone Blackwell, daughter of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, the team behind the better-known suffrage newspaper the Woman’s Journal (1870-1920). Together, the two publications were the printed voice of the AWSA (and the NAWSA, after the merge of the NWSA and the AWSA in 1890), an organization that had a tremendous influence on the suffrage movement.

ExhibitScreenshot2We have consolidated and added to our posts on the Column in a new digital exhibit that is now available to browse on our site. One of a host of digital exhibits that we have curated, this exhibit prefaces the text of the four posts with an expanded history of the two papers, the family who ran them, and the role of print in the fight for suffrage in the United States.

Head over to the The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Higher Education website now to view the exhibit and learn more about the Woman’s Column in the struggle to reform women’s rights!

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

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

We have previously referred to the maids and porters who worked at Bryn Mawr College in other posts and here we reflect more on their presence and significance at the college as part of our celebrations of Black History Month at Bryn Mawr College. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out the Tri-Co Chapter of the NAACP on Facebook and on Tumblr for details of their events throughout the month of February. We have been working with them to assist in their research and their exciting program should not be missed.

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

We are interested in the campus as a space, one that housed different groups across the years and one that is often remembered due to its distinctive architecture and beautifully kept grounds. In thinking more about campus communities and space, it seemed appropriate to examine what evidence we had on those who were integral to maintaining it: maids and porters, the majority of whom historically were African American.

One finding we have made from the research we have conducted at The Albert M. Greenfield Center for the History of Women’s Education on maids and porters at the college is that despite the fact that they were often incredibly close to the students, they rarely feature in the memorializing students did of their lives here. Why is this? Were they so fundamental to the experience of living in the dorms that it was almost too obvious to acknowledge their presence in their reminiscences? Were many maids and porters shy about getting their photos taken? How would they describe their experiences if we could speak with them today? Although we have many questions, we do know, however, through scrapbook evidence, that the maids and porters produced a theatrical show every year and the College Archives contain some photographs of the ways in which students and maids and porters interacted in the dorms.

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

We also know that there was a night school, a Sunday School and a Maid’s Club which offered classes to interested maids. The Maid’s Club kept a library in their club room and it was reported in the College News of November 15, 1922 that the maids were ‘particularly enthusiastic about singing’ and often sewed while they met (see Offerings to Athena page 103 for more on maids at Bryn Mawr).

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

 

 

Jen Rajchel’s exhibit on our site examines dorm cultures at Bryn Mawr and Jessy Brody’s work on scrapbooks has revealed their virtual absence from the photograph albums and scrapbooks she reviewed – over one hundred in total – that span the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is despite the fact that students and the staff who looked after their domestic needs in dorms across campus had multiple daily interactions, either in person or through the transmission of goods or services. Seeking out their experiences has required a little more detective work and a stronger reliance on source material from oral histories, memoirs and personal letters, rather than traditional documentary sources that can be used in the construction of ‘important’ historical figures, or those who maintained personal archives.

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

One such example is a wonderful interview with Fleta Blocker, which you can listen to in its entirety here. Blocker began at the college as a bell maid, a position that revolved around answering the telephone in dormitories, but she progressed in her roles at the college, ending her four-decade career as a Hall Manager, a role previously only held by white women. Her life was rich and full: active in her church, she traveled the world, inspired by the Bryn Mawr environment to see places such as Oxford and Africa. We included a link to this interview in the new exhibition Taking Her Place at the Rare Book Room Gallery in Canaday Library (on view until June 2nd 2013) in the Broadening the World of Bryn Mawr section, as there was a connection between maids at the college and the women who attended the Summer School for Women Workers. (A digital exhibit on the latter group is coming to the site soon!) The women at the Summer School, many of whom worked in poor conditions in factories across America, were moved to complain about the living conditions they saw the maids had, living in the attics of dorms without proper ventilation in the heat of summer. This was an issue that resurfaced again and the ‘living in’ arrangement was eventually phased out.

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

We also learned from an interview with alum Jane Drucker (whose interview, along with many others, will be available later this year on the Tri-Co digital repository Triptych), that it was a student rather than a member of the staff who headed the Maids and Porters Association for their dorm. This was not a staff association as such, and Drucker recalls her main responsibility as being to organize end of year gifts for the staff who looked after her dorm. It was not, therefore, despite its name, an association to advocate for staff. Looking back, Drucker thought this was odd, but at the time it was the norm that women students would fulfill such a role.

From the Bryn Mawr College Archives

Photographs of the work that maids and porters did, however, are a feature of the college archive collections and many personal scrapbooks and photograph albums. The immaculately kept dorm rooms appear regularly in scrapbooks, catalogs and what appear to be college commissioned photographs so their importance in the life of the college cannot be underestimated. Many of the photographs show elaborately decorated rooms that imitate parlors in houses where ladies would sit; it is obvious that much effort has been put into creating environments that are comfortable and appropriate for college women. It’s worth considering, therefore, the people who worked to maintain such homely environments.

At The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education we are interested in representing the diversity of experiences in education and illuminating the world of women at Bryn Mawr and other colleges in the past. Examining the lives of those who helped them to focus more intently on the ‘life of the mind’ rather than domestic concerns is another angle of vision on past worlds. As we uncover more information through our research activities, we will be adding it so keep watching the site. In the meantime, this great timeline about the “Invisible Women” in domestic service in US history created by Mother Jones is well worth visiting.

Finally, if you have memories you would like to share or any comments, make sure to add them below!

Call for papers: Women’s History in the Digital World, the first conference of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education

Posted on by

Call for Papers: Women’s History in the Digital World

Keynote Speaker: Professor Laura Mandell

Director, Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture
Professor, Department of English, Texas A&M

Bryn Mawr College

March 22nd and March 23rd 2013

The first conference held by The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education will be held on Bryn Mawr College campus and will bring together experts and novices to share insights, lessons, and information on the landscape of women’s history in the world of twenty-first century technology.

‘Women’s History in the Digital World’ will bring together scholars, archivists, digital humanists, students, and all those interested in the development of women’s history in the new era of digital humanities research. The conference will begin with a keynote address by renowned digital humanist, Professor Laura Mandell on Friday March 22nd, followed by a reception. Panels will be held all day on Saturday March 23rd.

The Center seeks scholars working on women’s history projects with a digital component, investigating 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.  Key issues, new projects, theoretical approaches and new challenges in the digital realm of historical and cultural research on women. All thematic areas and time periods are included: this is a chance to share knowledge, network and promote stimulating conversations in women’s history in the context of digital humanities initiatives today.

We invite individual papers or panels on new projects, theoretical approaches, teaching, research and new challenges in the digital realm of historical and cultural research on women.

Please email abstracts (200 words max) and a bio (100 words max) to greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu by December 14th 2012.

Check the website for further updates or follow us on Twitter @GreenfieldHWE

A Deep But Unilateral Intimacy: Reading the Life of Another Mawrtyr

Posted on by

While the broader goal of the Greenfield Center is to create a space for dialogue on the history of women’s higher education, one area of focus has been to use our collections to highlight the lives and stories of specific individuals who have shaped that history.1 Some have been notable for their influence here at Bryn Mawr, while others are distinguished by accomplishments that reach far beyond the school. A rich grasp of the history of the rise of women in higher education must grow out of an intimate knowledge of the extraordinary individuals who appear as characters in that broader narrative.

Margaret Bailey Speer

For my first project as a member of the Greenfield team, I was introduced to the Speer Family Papers: an extensive collection of materials from the family of Margaret Bailey Speer, Bryn Mawr class of 1922. Since July I have been immersed in her letters and photographs, selecting items to feature and attempting to shape a narrative that will authentically illuminate her distinctive life and voice. This has been my first engagement with Bryn Mawr history and culture since I graduated in 2010, and it has been invigorating to jump back into a place in which I have a heavy personal investment with such a fascinating project.

Yearbook photo clipping with comment quoted from President Thomas

During her time at Bryn Mawr, Margaret Bailey Speer (or “MBS”, as she chose to be referred to in text) was a distinguished student and leader. In addition to serving as junior class president in 1920-21, much of her extracurricular activity on campus was focused around the Christian Association. Her religion had been deeply instilled in her throughout her childhood, as her father was one of the key figures in the Protestant missionary movement. Thus, she established involvement with the CA early on and rose to the post of president by the time she was a senior, when she graduated from Bryn Mawr with honors. However, the bulk of my work so far has been on MBS’s life after Bryn Mawr, which is characterized by the same aptitude for leadership that she had demonstrated during her student days: when she was only twenty-five, MBS left the US to teach English literature at a missionary-established women’s college in China, where she would (unsurprisingly) make her way to the deanship. After the Second World War she returned to the States and took an appointment as headmistress of the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, PA, where she remained until her retirement. The value of the Speer collection lies not only in the record of her accomplishments, but also in the portrait that it forms of a fascinating woman of integrity and wit. Through her letters one watches her develop an amazing ability to foster community and connections between disparate groups, and become a strong advocate for minority voices. These letters are an excellent read.

Archival work can be a thoroughly immersive undertaking: it is a strange thing, to cultivate a deep but uni-lateral intimacy with another person’s life and character. My first foray into this type of work came in my junior year as an undergraduate, when I took Elliott Shore’s class on the history of Bryn Mawr College2 and worked on the letters of Nathalie Gookin, BMC class of ’20, from her freshman year in 1916. As a Bryn Mawr student I was primarily reading Nathalie’s letters for similarities and differences between her life and my own, trying to grasp what it meant to be a Mawrtyr across the century-and-a-quarter that such a thing had existed. Though I was learning the story of Nathalie’s life, I was also turning my gaze inwards as I sought fragments of myself and my own experiences among hers.

Newspaper clipping on the visit of Madame Kai-shek to Yenching. MBS fourth from left in back

In contrast, I have found that the Speer papers continually refracts my gaze outwards. Because of the sheer volume of the Gookin letters (Nathalie wrote to her parents with astonishing frequency; often multiple times a day), I was completely absorbed in the quotidian details of her daily existence but only had time to cover a relatively brief period of her life. The Speer letters are far less dense in frequency, due in part to the month of lag-time in postal correspondence between China and the US, but cover a much greater span of time and space: we have nearly three decades of regular letters from MBS to her parents, as well as several audio interviews from the 1980s and various other photographs, pamphlets, and newspaper clippings. Together these materials tell a story that extends far beyond Bryn Mawr College and open up avenues into individual and collective histories that are personal, political, religious, and international. While the Gookin collection indulged my need to reflect on my own identity and experience as a Mawrtyr and a young woman, I find that the Speer collection continually sprouts connecting tendrils into other stories, challenging me to locate the place of the individual in a global history and thus to shape broader and more comprehensive narratives out of the words she left us.

The first phase of my work on MBS has been the construction of a digital exhibit that showcases many of the letters and photographs from her collection. This resource is meant to serve as an entry-point into the history of MBS for the researcher or casual browser, giving an overview of her life and career as well as establishing the personal characteristics that stand out in her letters. Next, I hope to publish a series of blog posts that tease out some of the topics that her letters bring to light, including relations between women’s colleges in different nations and the role of missionaries in education.

This work has been the start of what I know will be an exciting year, and I can’t wait to see what the archives will next present as I continue to work on the Greenfield Center.

1. This blog has published several posts in this vein, including several on M.Carey Thomas and Mary Garrett and one on Lucy Martin Donnelly. See “M. Carey Thomas, a Ouija Board, and a Moment of Reflection”, “Ever Wondered what M. Carey Thomas Sounded Like? If so, listen Up!”, “M. Carey Thomas and Mary Garrett – Lives in Letters”, and ” ‘“Don’t Put Up My Thread and Needle’: a few thoughts on archives, unbinding, and digital books“.
2. My reflections on the experience I had in that class were published in the 2009 issue of the library newsletter, Mirabile Dictu.

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

Posted on by

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 ….

**************************************************************

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.

 

Like the images we’ve been using in these posts? Now you can order prints

Posted on by

Commencement, 1903We are pleased to announce that The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center have begun a new collection of images that are available to order as prints from the Request-a-Print website. This is a new partnership between Special Collections and Request-a-Print to share the wonderful collections of Bryn Mawr College. The initiative has been developed by Marianne Weldon, Collections Manager, Art and Artifact Collections at Bryn Mawr College who worked with me and Cheryl Klimaszewski, Digital Collections Specialist on getting the new Greenfield themed images included in this service.

Commencement, 1974As you will see, we have collected them under the heading ‘History of Women’s Education’, but there are other historical images available in the ‘College Archives’ collection. There are also collections of prints and drawings that we hold in Special Collections that you can order, including work by Mary Cassatt  and John Rubens Smith to name just two artists.

Many of the older images from the early twentieth century have proved particularly fascinating for us as we have developed the visual identity of the site. What always strikes me is the fact that many of these photographs are candids, implying ownership of cameras at a time when they were not the common commodity they are today. I have a particular fondness for the commencement photographs, although the women in the early science labs are also fascinating, confounding as they do the notions of appropriate feminine educational boundaries that existed in earlier times.

There are four different options to choose from for each of the images, from a standard canvas print to a wood or metal frame. If there is an image you are familiar with in our collections that you’d like to see made available through this service be sure to let us know! We will be continuing to develop this service throughout the year so keep an eye out for new images coming soon….

Fisheye View of Thomas Hall, ca. 1975

 

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

Posted on by

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”