Tag Archives: women’s history

New Exhibition: Taking Her Place

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Opening January 28 until June 2nd 2013

Class of 1912 Rare Book Room,
Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College

Exhibition hours daily 11 am – 4:30 pm

Open Wednesdays until 7.30pm during term time

Free

Taking Her Place is an exhibition dedicated to showcasing the history of women’s education through the treasures of Bryn Mawr’s collections of rare books, manuscript material, photographs, textiles, oral histories and art and artifacts. It opens on January 28th 2013 with a talk by renowned historian and biographer of M. Carey Thomas, Professor Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Professor Emerita at Smith College and a member of our Advisory Board. Her talk will be on ‘Reading, Writing, Arithmetic … and Power: Education as Entry to the World”. This will take place in Carpenter Library B21 at 5.30pm and all are welcome to attend. A reception at the Rare Book Room Gallery will follow.

Taking Her Place illuminates the story of women’s access to the public world of employment and civic engagement through education, the key way in which women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries expanded their sphere beyond the confines of their homes. We trace the early origins of educational debates, feature the histories of famous alums, and show how Bryn Mawr grew into the diverse environment for women’s education that it is today. This is an interactive exhibition and you will be able to link to further content online using smart phones or tablets.

There will be other events throughout the time the exhibition is showing, including a talk by Professor Elaine Showalter, Bryn Mawr College class of ’62 and Avalon Foundation Professor Emerita, Princeton University, on Thursday April 18th 2013 at 5.30pm, also in Carpenter Library B21.

We are offering three guided tours by the co-curators as part of Alumnae Reunion Weekend where we will tell you more about our choice of objects, the themes of the exhibition, and can answer any questions you have. Please see the official calendar of events for further details. Further updates will also be provided on our site.

‘Primary sources have the potential to help teachers in the classroom’: Temple student Adrian Wieszczyk on her experiences at Bryn Mawr

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This blog post has been written by Adrian Wieszczyk, a student at Temple University who is currently completing her training to become a high school teacher. Adrian is one of three students this year who used our collections as part of the National History Day Philly Cultural Collaboration Initiative. As with our other participants, we thank Adrian for her hard work and wish her all the best with completing her studies!

My name is Adrian Wieszczyk and I am a student at Temple University. I have had the pleasure to work with Bryn Mawr College this semester through a field work internship. Through my experience I have felt very welcomed and aware of the resources and tools that Bryn Mawr provides, due to the helpful staff. As a result, I have discovered primary documents within the special collections that have potential to help teachers use primary documents within their classroom. The intended outcome of this internship through Temple was to introduce me to working with museums or archives as a future teacher and become more aware of resources provided. As for Bryn Mawr, my project was to create a lesson plan for their website using documents within their special collections. I believe that this project is very helpful for teachers, considering many teachers are unable to look through the rich resources and documents that institutions carry.

My particular focus was the female culture and role in the Prohibition era. I chose this topic because I found a few interesting documents that were published in Bryn Mawr’s Lantern of 1922-24 that discussed different perspectives and beliefs about the Prohibition. Unfortunately, I was unable to discover all of the documents and resources on the prohibition because of the time restraint but I was still able to take advantage of the documents I did find. My finalized project is a lesson plan called women in the prohibition. This lesson teaches the different organizations and cultures of females during the prohibition. For instance, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Women’s Organization for Prohibition Reform, and the cultural perspective of a “Flapper“. I really enjoyed researching these organizations as well as creating a lesson plan to further student’s knowledge of the female role in the prohibition.

Overall this experience has furthered my knowledge and skills as a student and as a future teacher. I have enjoyed developing relationships with the staff at Bryn Mawr as they have been extremely welcoming and helpful. I have learned a great deal about Bryn Mawr and other institutions in regards to getting involved as a future teacher. This knowledge will help me as I create lesson plans for my classroom and use the resources and primary documents that institutions, like Bryn Mawr College, carry and provide. I look forward to keeping in contact with Bryn Mawr College and using their digital archives to improve my upcoming lessons.

 

 

Women, athletics, Constance Applebee and National History Day: An intern insiders view

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Marion Reid, Temple University Student

This blog post has been written by Marion Reid, a student teacher at Temple University who has used our collections as part of the National History Day Philly Cultural Collaboration Initiative. We wish Marion well with the rest of her studies!

Bryn Mawr Canaday Library – Special Collections has a wealth of information on Women’s History from the late 19th century to the present. As an intern at Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections, Canaday Library, I am awed by the vast amount of valuable information available on Women’s History to the public and the school community.  Such information is on women who have been at Bryn Mawr as students, staff member or otherwise. There is a team of staff members who will provide assistance to researchers or those who need to use the facilities. My mentor/supervisor, Dr. Jennifer Redmond – who is part of this team – has been extremely helpful in helping my colleagues and me in accessing primary and secondary resources online and at the library. Being at Bryn Mawr has taught me how to handle pictures, clippings and many other documents, as my namesake Marianne Hansen is always there to give us invaluable insight on how to handle these resources.

Constance Applebee, courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Archives

My aim is to evaluate the political and cultural contributions of Constance Applebee as part of the History curriculum for Grade 12 which requires an examination of  individuals and/or groups in Pennsylvania’s History from 1890 until now. My main interest is in the area of sports and Constance Applebee’s role therein.  She has influenced and shaped the development of sports – field hockey at Bryn Mawr College, Harvard University and many other institutions as well as the United States in general. I have also looked at two other women; Margaret Ayer Barnes, a novelist and a former student of Bryn Mawr College who wrote many novels during the early 1900s such as “Bridal Wreath” which  I have read and which is one of her many romantic novels. I think these novels could and should be used to encourage teenagers to read.  Additionally, I have done some research on Hope Emily Allen who was a feminist who spoke on values and identity. I was unable to delve further into the information on Hope Emily Allen as time does not permit.

However, I am impressed with the work of Constance Applebee who is my main research interest. She was able to introduce field hockey in the USA and make it a success, having taught along the east coast USA and the rest of the country. She was not only a sport enthusiast but also a volunteer. She encouraged and enrolled her team members in the ambulance service where they took care of orphans in homes. These children were not only provided with food, shelter, and clothing. They were entertained, taken to the beach and also tucked into bed.

Presently, I am pursuing my studies in Social Studies Education, at the secondary level at Temple University. I started at the beginning of Fall Semester on August 27, 2012; and expect to graduate next Fall November, 2013. My passion is teaching. I taught for more than 20 years in Jamaica.

Call for Papers, Berkshire Conference on Women’s History

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Histories on the Edge/Histoires sur la brèche

Toronto: May 22-25, 2014

Proposals due: January 15, 2013

The sixteenth Berkshire Conference on Women’s History will be held in Toronto on May 22-25, 2014. The University of Toronto will host the first Canadian “Big Berks” in collaboration with co-sponsoring units and universities in Toronto and across Canada.

Our major theme of Histories on the Edge/Histoires sur la brèche reflects the growing internationalization of the Berkshire conference. It recognizes the precariousness of a world in which the edged-out millions demand transformation, as well as the intellectual edges scholars have crossed and worked to bridge in the academy and outside of it. The conference in Canada prompts engagement with critical edges – sharpening, de-centring, decolonizing histories. Edges are spatial: impenetrable borders, stifling or protective boundaries, and spaces of smooth entry. Edges are temporal; they also evoke the creative and the avant-garde. Entangled in the idea of edges are rough encounters, jagged conflicts as well as intimate exchanges. It speaks to the alternative spaces the “edged-out” have carved for themselves and to efforts made to create a common ground, or commons, on which to make oppositional histories.

As a nation-state shaped by imperialist histories and its own colonial dynamics, Canada itself sits on the edge of a powerful if, perhaps, waning American empire. Like other white settler societies, it is a colonial state that has operated through dispossessing First Nations peoples, guarding the edges of white citizenship, and endorsing patriarchal models of assimilation; yet, this history unfolds and is resisted in myriad ways. Its historical trajectory, on the edges of empire, includes colonization first by the French with the resulting ongoing Francophone presence, and later the British. Its distinctive features include socialized medicine, same-sex marriage, and official but contested multiculturalism. On Anishinabe land, Toronto, a creative, cosmopolitan, and contested city, is both “home” and “elsewhere” for many of its diasporic residents. What better place to consider edges as sites of hope, excitement, and possibility but also of danger, displacement, struggle, and exile?

Because change so often emerges from edges, however slowly, painfully or partially, we invite “on the edge”
histories of all locales and time periods. We invite in particular histories of the Caribbean and Latin America, Asia and the Pacific, Africa and the Middle East, and Indigenous, francophone and diasporic cultures around the world. We welcome papers that focus on bodies and objects on edges of all kinds. The theme also invites work that queers gender and sexual binaries. How can we historicize emergent, residual, and ongoing gender constructs such as ‘masculine’
and ‘feminine’ as well as gender performances, sexual practices, and social identifications that challenge binary modes of gender and sexuality?

Our theme encourages critical reflection on how gender works. Gender has its many ragged edges: where private and public spheres, and masculinity and femininity, have been defined and redefined; where class, gender, race, ethnicity, nation, kinship, sexuality, and ability/disability have interacted. So, too, is gender on the edge of debate: a term in need of scrutiny to expose its uses, contradictions, strengths, and weaknesses.

The theme respects feminist theory and praxis as a critical stance in need of constant interrogation. We invite work on western and non-western feminisms and scrutiny of feminisms within the context of historically shifting power relations and international alignmentare positioned, seek to destabilize the centre and authorize the margin? Or sharpen our critique in a world that, now, as so often in the past, stands seemingly on the brink?

We encourage comparative or transnational panels organized along thematic lines, even in the case of the more regionally-based subthemes. We especially invite conversations across centuries, cultures, locales, and generations.
Proposals will be vetted by transnational subcommittees of scholars with expertise in particular thematic fields. All proposals must be directed to ONE of the subthemes and be submitted electronically.  In formulating your proposal for one of the subcommittees, you are NOT required to address every topic in the thematic thread. Please list a second choice of subtheme, but do not submit to more than one subcommittee.

Preference will be given to discussions of any topic across national boundaries, including for the regional subthemes, with special consideration for pre-modern (ancient, medieval, early modern) periods. However, single papers and proposals that fall within any single nation/region will also be given full consideration. As a forum dedicated to encouraging innovative, cross-disciplinary scholarship, and transnational conversation, we invite submissions from graduate students, international scholars, independent scholars, filmmakers, educators, curators, artists, activists, and welcome a variety of perspectives.

The organizer of the paper, panel, roundtable or workshop is responsible for submitting all of the material.

Types of Sessions: (to submit a proposal, you will be an “author” on the submission site)

Individual Papers: The submission file should include your name, paper title, and a 250-word abstract.  Please also submit a short bio.

Panels: Three papers (20 minutes each), a chair, and a separate commentator. (We will also consider 2 or 4 papers). The submission file should include the author, title, and a 250-word abstract for each paper as well as a panel title, the organizer’s name, and a 500-word summary abstract.  Please also submit a short bio for each participant.

Roundtables: Four to six presenters and a chair who may also act a facilitator.  The focus is on collegial discussion within the group and between the group and audience. The submission file should include the roundtable’s title, the organizer’s name, a 500-word summary abstract, and a list of the participants with a brief description of their contribution to the roundtable. Please submit a short bio for each participant.

Workshops: Six to nine pre-circulated papers, with a chair and a separate discussant. (We will consider up to 10 papers.) Papers will be due April 30, 2014 and will be pre-circulated by posting on a website accessible to all the conference registrants.  The submission file should include the author, title, and a 250 word abstract for each paper as well as a workshop title, the organizer’s name, and a 500-word summary abstract. Please submit a short bio for each participant.
Both participants and audience will engage in a focused conversation.

Submit to ONE of the Subthemes (on the
submission site, these themes are called tracks)

*Borders, Encounters, Borderlands, Conflict Zones, and Memory

*Empires, Nations, and the Commons

*Law, Family Entanglements, Courts, Criminality, and Prisons

*Bodies, Health, Medical Technologies, and Science

*Indigenous Histories and Indigenous Worlds

*Caribbean, Latin America, and Afro/Francophone Worlds

*Asia, Transnational Circuits, and Global Diasporas

*Economies, Environments, Labour, and Consumption

*Sexualities, Genders/LGBTIQ2, and Intimacies

*Politics, Religions/Beliefs, and Feminisms

*Visual, Material, Media Cultures: Print, Image, Object, Sound, Performance

Access the Submission Site on the
Berkshire Conference website:

http://berksconference.org

“The Seed of the World that is to Be”: the Activism of Emily Greene Balch

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Balch, n.d. Soon after she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946

On November 14, 1946, Emily Greene Balch became the third woman to be awarded the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize.1 In commemoration of that event, The Albert M. Greenfield Center for the History of Women’s Education has compiled the following biographical overview of Balch’s remarkable life and achievements.

“Differences as well as likenesses are inevitable, essential, and desirable. An unchallenged belief or idea is on the way to death and meaninglessness.”
–Emily Greene Balch, Nobel Lecture

 

One of Bryn Mawr College’s most distinguished alumnae is Emily Greene Balch, who, in 1889, became a member of the the school’s first graduating class. In an era in which bachelor’s degrees for women were still a novelty and post-college careers were even more rare, Balch set herself apart by effecting real change on both the local and global scale. Her history stands in direct opposition to the dissenting voices of her time that asserted that women were not worth educating, and her achievements appear no less remarkable today.

Balch at 10 years old

Born in 1867, Balch grew up in the Jamaica Plain area of Boston. Though she would later convert to Quakerism in 1921, she was heavily influenced by her Unitarian upbringing. Late in her life she would recall a sermon by Unitarian minister Charles Fletcher Dole that inspired her to dedicate herself to the “service of goodness whatever its cost” when she was just ten years old. “In accepting this pledge,” she wrote, “I never abandoned in any degree my desire to live up to it.” 2

Balch was also a dedicated student: her excellent academic performance at Bryn Mawr, where she took her degree in Greek and Latin, culminated in her being awarded the prestigious European Fellowship to fund a year of further study abroad. After a year studying sociology in the US, she applied the funds from her fellowship to a year at the Sorbonne to study poverty alleviation policies, and returned to Boston determined to apply her education to the task of realizing her moral convictions. Her most notable achievement during her first years out of school was the 1892 founding of the Denison House College Settlement, an initiative to bring “social and educational services into a poor immigrant neighborhood” by integrating educated women and the urban poor in a living environment.3 From early in her career she acted on the belief that the most effective way to create change was by erasing divisions between groups of people, fostering contact and mutual understanding.

Balch at Bryn Mawr

Driven by a desire to instill her own compassion in others, she decided to become a teacher and joined the faculty of Wellesley College after several more years of preparatory study. Though she was successful as a professor, Balch continually prioritized hands-on work and research, taking leave (both paid and unpaid) to conduct research on Slavic immigrants. This effort produced the highly acclaimed work Our Slavic Fellow Citizens (1910). In 1913 she became the chair of the Department of Economics and Sociology at Wellesley.

Balch advocated unequivocally for peace in the years leading up to and during the First World War. Her active involvement in international politics began while she was still teaching at Wellesley: in 1915 she joined the International Congress of Women at The Hague, an organization that took the stance of promoting mediation rather than military action in response to the conflict in Europe. However, her outspoken avowal of peace during the war was controversial, eventually leading to her dismissal from Wellesley College.

U.S. delegation to the International Conference of Women for a Permanent Peace, held at The Hague, The Netherlands, 1915

After departing from Wellesley in 1918, Balch continued to champion peace both in her editorial work with The Nation and in her co-founding (with Jane Addams) of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1946, she became the third woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Balch’s life is notable not just for her international advocacy, but also for the way in which she wove together her global vision with her ability to foster connections between disciplines, groups, and individuals. She lived this vision fully as a student, an academic, a poet, a Quaker, and as a public voice for change. In her acceptance speech for the American Unitarian Association Award in 1955, she used words of connection, unity, and growth that were consistent with her lifelong commitment to global community: “The time has come to break down the dikes and let the healing waters flow over us. I see in us, young and old, the seed of the world that is to be.”4

 

Further reading on Emily Greene Balch:
Nobel Lecture (1946)
Emily Greene Balch: the Long Road to Internationalism  (2010)
Improper Bostonian: Emily Greene Balch, Nobel Peace Laureate, 1946 (1964)
Emily Greene Balch of New England: citizen of the world (1965)

1. The first was Bertha von Suttner in 1905; the second was Jane Addams (close friend and colleague of Emily Green Balch) in 1931.
2. Miller, Heather. “Emily Greene Balch: Nobel Peace Laureate 1967-1961.” Harvard Square Library. Web. 11 November. 2012. <http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/balch.html>
3. Buehrens, John A. Universalists and Unitarians in America: A People’s History. Boston: Skinner House Books, 2011. p. 130
4. Benjamin, Michelle; and Mooney, Maggie. Nobel’s Women of Peace. Toronto: Second Story Press, 2008. p. 35

 

Purchasing Privilege

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Pembroke Hall Interior

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

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

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

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

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

Research assistance by Jessy Brody.

 

Sources:

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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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.

The Coordinating Council on Women in History is seeking submissions for the Ida B. Wells Graduate Student Fellowship

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The Coordinating Council on Women in History is seeking submissions for the Ida B. Wells Graduate Student Fellowship.

Location: Illinois, United States
Fellowship Date: 2012-09-15
Date Submitted: 2012-08-14
Announcement ID: 196386
The CCWH Ida B. Wells Graduate Student Fellowship is a $1000 award to an A.B.D. graduate student working on a historical dissertation that interrogates gender and or race, not necessarily in a history department. All applications are due by 15 September 2012. Full details and application forms are available on the CCWH website: http://www.theccwh.org/awards.htm
Sandra Trudgen Dawson
Northern Illinois University
715 Zulauf Hall, DeKalb, IL 60115
815-895-2624
Email: execdir@theccwh.org
Visit the website at http://theccwh.org