Event Title
Collegewomen.org: Documenting the History of Women’s College Students
Panel
Spotlight on Large Projects
Abstract
This paper will report on the development of the Collegewomen.org project, a collaborative digital project among the American women’s colleges formerly known as the Seven Sisters: Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, and Radcliffe (now part of Harvard University) to create a searchable collection of diaries, letters, scrapbooks and photographs documenting students’ lives from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project has been funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2014 and 2016, and is currently live in a beta site at www.collegewomen.org. The letters and diaries written by the first generations of women to attend college in the United States tell compelling stories of their struggles and ambitions as they negotiated new roles for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through these writings, their writings, the students discussed political reform and women’s rights; career opportunities and discrimination; sexuality and body image; traditions and campus culture; religion, race and class; and the challenges of living through wars, civil strife, depressions and epidemics. Large number of these student writings are found in the archives of women’s colleges, and together they tell not only important individual stories, but also a critical, and largely understudied, part of the larger story of the transformation of American society and women’s place in that society during those critical years. In-depth research using these student writings has been impeded by their dispersal across multiple institutions and by the difficulty of locating comparable materials across institutions. By bringing digital versions of the these collections together in a single searchable database, the value of the collections will be greatly increased by the ability to see the writings in conversation with each other, as part of a larger phenomenon in the history of women in America, rather than as isolated fragments that document only the history of the individual colleges. The paper will examine not only the goals of the project, but also the technical and organizational work required to build and sustain a collaborative digital archive. It will also discuss the outreach and supplemental content that is needed to make the stories in the digital archive come alive for not only scholars and students, but also a broader audience of alumnae and high school students. Finally, the paper will discuss future development of the project, and the potential for including student writings from other women’s institutions in both the United State and internationally.
Collegewomen.org: Documenting the History of Women’s College Students
This paper will report on the development of the Collegewomen.org project, a collaborative digital project among the American women’s colleges formerly known as the Seven Sisters: Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, and Radcliffe (now part of Harvard University) to create a searchable collection of diaries, letters, scrapbooks and photographs documenting students’ lives from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project has been funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2014 and 2016, and is currently live in a beta site at www.collegewomen.org. The letters and diaries written by the first generations of women to attend college in the United States tell compelling stories of their struggles and ambitions as they negotiated new roles for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through these writings, their writings, the students discussed political reform and women’s rights; career opportunities and discrimination; sexuality and body image; traditions and campus culture; religion, race and class; and the challenges of living through wars, civil strife, depressions and epidemics. Large number of these student writings are found in the archives of women’s colleges, and together they tell not only important individual stories, but also a critical, and largely understudied, part of the larger story of the transformation of American society and women’s place in that society during those critical years. In-depth research using these student writings has been impeded by their dispersal across multiple institutions and by the difficulty of locating comparable materials across institutions. By bringing digital versions of the these collections together in a single searchable database, the value of the collections will be greatly increased by the ability to see the writings in conversation with each other, as part of a larger phenomenon in the history of women in America, rather than as isolated fragments that document only the history of the individual colleges. The paper will examine not only the goals of the project, but also the technical and organizational work required to build and sustain a collaborative digital archive. It will also discuss the outreach and supplemental content that is needed to make the stories in the digital archive come alive for not only scholars and students, but also a broader audience of alumnae and high school students. Finally, the paper will discuss future development of the project, and the potential for including student writings from other women’s institutions in both the United State and internationally.