Category: gender

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Women’s History Class Projects, continued

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So, a semester’s work of work comes down to tomorrow.  As I’ve discussed before, my Women’s History since 1870 course has spent the semester researching and creating a classroom from the mid-20th Century.


The students in the class spent the first half of the semester working on research in the primary sources of the school, especially those resources in our Special Collections department.  They created the following sites for each decade

Site: 1930s
Site: 1940s
Site: 1950s
Site: 1960s
We then voted on which decade would be the focus of our class re-creation and the 1950s was chosen.  We split into new groups to plan the class session itself.  
Based on all that research and the work done by the students, we came up with the following schedule for tomorrow’s class, re-creating a 1952 History class: April 17 schedule.


I’m looking forward to it.  Wish us luck.
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Vote now on the UMW decade sites

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The research sites on the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s that my US Women’s History students have created as part of our project to re-create the Mary Washington college classroom experience are now up on the course site.

Please check the sites out, and vote for the site that you think provides the best set of resources for our class to actually re-create the classroom experience.

Thanks!

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The Assignment for Recreating the historical MWC Classroom

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As I discussed in this post, my US Women’s History since 1870 class will be working on a project in which the ultimate goal is to be able to recreate a class session or two from the middle of the 20th Century.

Here is the assignment that I developed for the course, in three stages.  Note the use of individual and group work, online and IRL activities, and deep research in the archives of the school.

As always, I’d appreciate any comments or suggestions.  [The full course syllabus is here.]

MARY WASHINGTON CLASSROOM EXPERIENCE RESEARCH PROJECT
This project will be based around researching Mary Washington College classes in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, & 1960s (including course topics, pedagogical approaches, majors, gender stereotypes, technology, and clothing).  As our class lectures and readings look at the experiences of women in the United States in the late 19th and 20th Centuries, our parallel goal will be to understand what college meant to women who came to Mary Washington in the four decades in the middle of the 20th Century.
Each group of 6-7 of you will have a decade to research, using a variety of online and archival sources, as well as interviews with alums from these decades.  Rather than writing a traditional individual research paper, you’ll keep a research blog and work with your group to create a research site collecting together the information that you’ve found.
Primary source resources (many available in UMW Special Collections)
  • The Bullet
  • Course Catalogs
  • Academic Department and Faculty Files
  • Student Handbooks
  • Photographs (Centennial Collection online plus those digitized, but not online yet)
  • Alumni/Faculty Interviews (talk to me about interview waivers)
  • Resources from Historic Preservation (?)
  • Scrapbooks/Aubade/Alumni Magazine/President’s files
Secondary Sources
  • Crawley, William B. University of Mary Washington: A Centennial History, 1908-2008. Fredericksburg, VA: University of Mary Washington, 2008.
  • Key UMW faculty and staff (Parsons, McClusky, Thaden, Snyder)
Decade-based Research Groups
I will assign each of you to a group of 5-7 each with a different decade at MWC to research, using a variety of online and archival sources, as well as interviews with alums from these decades.  Each person will keep their own research log/blog and work with their group to create a research site collecting together the information that you’ve found.
Part I — Individual Research Logs
Each student will take a particular set of primary sources (or will interview alumni) and research classroom experiences for their group’s decade.  Each student will share her/his work in progress in the form of four individual research log-style blog posts posted before class starts on four consecutive Tuesdays (1/31, 2/7, 2/14, 2/21).
Part II — Group Research Project
Building on the research done by each of the group members, each group will construct a site for their decade in UMWBlogs.  The design, format, and presentation of these sites will be determined by the group, with a broad audience in mind.  These sites are due by 11:59 PM on Monday, March 12.
Grading for Parts I and II – 30% overall, with an individual grade for research logs and group grade for the research project.
Part III – Class re-creation
Based on those group research sites, we will collectively decide (with the help of some alums), which decade we will then use for the final project, a re-creation of a course session or two from that decade.  The form these class sessions will take is still yet to be determined (depending in part on the decade picked), but they will involve everyone in some way in preparation and presentation.  Specific tasks will be determined after the decade is chosen.  This recreation will take place during the week of April 17.
Grading for Part III – 10%, with individual grades defined by student’s participation in the re-creation process.
PLEASE NOTE: Throughout these projects, all ideas, phrases, and quotes must be cited using footnote-style citations and bibliographies done using the Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition) or Turabian’s newest Guide (7th Edition).   
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Re-Creating the College Classroom of the Past

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I just sent the following email to one of my classes for the Spring.

Hello all,

Thanks for signing up for History 328: US Women’s History since 1870.  I wanted to give you a little preview of my plans for our class next semester because the research projects in the class are going to be a little different than that of other history classes (even for those of you who took HIST 327 this fall).

First of all, in many ways, the general structure of the class is going to be fairly standard.  We’ll have lectures on Tuesdays and part of Thursdays, and discuss readings on Thursdays.  There will be a mid-term and a final based on those lectures, discussions, and readings.

What’s different is that the rest of your grade, roughly 40%, will be based on a series of projects we’ll be working on in groups and as a class.  These projects will be based around researching Mary Washington College classes in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, & 1960s (including course topics, pedagogical approaches, majors, gender stereotypes, technology, and clothing).  As the class lectures and readings look at the experiences of women in the United States in the late 19th and 20thCenturies, our parallel goal will be to understand what college meant to women who came to Mary Washington in the four decades in the middle of the 20thCentury.

Each group of 6-7 of you will have a decade to research, using a variety of online and archival sources, as well as interviews with alums from these decades.  Rather than writing a traditional individual research paper, you’ll keep a research blog and  work with your group to create a research site collecting together the information that you’ve found.

Based on those sites, we will collectively decide (perhaps with the help of some alums), which decade we will then use for the final project, a re-creation of a course session or two from that decade.

Now, if this project is not the kind of thing you’ll be interested in working on, you may want to look for another class.  But I hope you’ll each at least be intrigued by the idea and perhaps even excited by doing something that is original, fun, and creative, while tying in to the themes we’ll be discussing more broadly for US women in the class.

Have a terrific break and I’ll see you in January.

Dr. McClurken

I’m very excited about this project, so any suggestions you have for the process, the approach, the research sites, or anything else will be greatly appreciated.

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Ada Lovelace Day Post–Women in the History of American Technology

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I’ve had trouble deciding who I was going to write about for my promised post on Ada Lovelace day. [Don’t know who she is? Look her up here and be sure to check out the references as well.] I’m glad to see that I’m far from alone in writing today. The task for Ada Lovelace Day is to blog about a woman in technology, but I’m going to write about my own impressions here on the subject of the history of women in American Technology before I get to discussing three specific women. This is not a scholarly exercise (hence no footnotes) or a complete history by any stretch (so don’t use this to study for a test, or crib from this post), but simply a few musings that come after teaching a particular history class (History of American Technology and Culture) in a particular way for a number of years.

As an historian of American technology (and other areas including the 19th Century US, as well as women and gender), I’ve often been frustrated (though perhaps not surprised) by the relative paucity of the presence of women as individuals in this sub-field’s historical literature. Of course, from before the arrival of Europeans American women have worked in agricultural fields, often beside men, and using various implements of technology while doing so. Women also appear prominently in accounts of Lowell’s textile mills, and in the form of laborers in a number of industries employing technology, especially at times of war (the women in Civil War munitions factories and so famously represented by Rosie the Riveter in WWII are merely the most well known).

Yet, since my class is organized around the inventions (and reinventions) of twenty or so key artifacts of American technology, I’ve all too often talked about women’s roles in technology as secondary or reactive, especially before 1900. The number of prominent inventions women had direct roles in creating before the 20th century is harder to highlight given the roles that women were expected to play, and the restrictions often placed on their educations and their actions.

Still, there are three women of the “long 19th Century” that I want to mention, women who were involved in some of the most significant acts of technological creation of their day and place.

  • Catherine Green was a widow and Georgia plantation owner who certainly encouraged Eli Whitney to work on the problem of removing seeds from cotton. What’s less clear historically speaking is how much of a role she played in helping Whitney discover what may have been the key aspect of that the cotton gin, the wire teeth that pulled the cotton fibers from those pesky seeds. [1793]
  • Emily Warren Roebling was the spouse of Brooklyn Bridge head engineer Washington Roebling. When he was struck down and crippled by “caissons disease” after spending too much time in the pressurized diggings below the surface of the East River it was Emily Roebling who took over as the main contact between Washington and the bridge effort. For years while Washington apparently watched from the window of a nearby building, Emily was his eyes and ears, learning a great deal of engineering on what was the largest bridge in the world at the time. When it was completed, it was Emily Roebling who made the first official crossing of the bridge in 1883. [1869-1883]
  • Finally, Amanda Jones is the least well known of the three, though I’d argue fairly important. Though women were often chiefly responsible for preserving food in their households in the 19th Century, most of the innovations in commercial preservation came from men like Gail Borden, H. J. Heinz, and John Torrence (of Campbell’s Soup). In 1872, however, Amanda Jones was the inventor of a vacuum-based process for canning foods that made them last longer and taste better.

As I close this post, it occurs to me that it might be time to think about teaching a new course focusing on the history of women, technology, and culture in the US. Reactions, suggestions, reading lists? They’re all appreciated.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!