- The historical question that I'm asking is
how did Victorian daughters turn into
the New Woman of the 20th century?
Victorian daughters were raised to be pious,
religious, modest, nurturing,
selfless wives and mothers.
In contrast to the New Woman
who claimed public space,
who entered the professions,
who exercised independence in defining her adult life
beyond the roles of wife and mother.
And it's the students who are undergoing this process
of inventing a new social identity,
of creating themselves as college women.
Let's look at a picture.
This is the class of 1883 posed in front of Hubbard House.
There's a lot going on in this picture.
You can see on the front row,
two women on either end holding baseball bats and baseballs,
there's a woman holding a little ladder,
we know that this is a sign that she's a science student,
that she's part of the colloquium club.
Some of them are holding books,
but with letters,
what does that mean?
These cups dangling,
does it mean they're drinking caffeine for the first time,
or maybe beer that appears in some of the letters.
What I'm interested in,
in the picture itself is how self-consciously posed it is
as a form of self-representation.
This is taken by a professional photographer.
He would've been paid to come on campus,
and each woman in this photograph would've bought a copy,
sent it to her friends,
posted it in her room,
these were elements of extreme pride and self-consciousness.
What I'm also interested in here is the varieties of dress.
This was the era of extreme bustles in public fashion,
but these women are sitting comfortably
with their legs crossed,
with their legs straight out in front of them.
These women with the baseball bats themselves
would be itself a provocation.
President Seelye was extremely worried about the enthusiasm
for sports exhibited on campus from the very first.
He didn't want that to get out,
that women were roughhousing with each other in contact sports.
But, what I see in this photograph is one of these forms
of self-memoralization,
a self-representation in which these women are signaling
to us in a language that we can't entirely understand,
but what they are saying is we are here,
look at us,
we're on the steps of something new.
These women inhabited a community of women
in which gender expectations could expand and morph.
A scene in which gender expansion,
what I'm calling gender expansion,
occurred quite a bit was athletics.
Basketball competitions were fierce scenes
of inter-class rivalry,
and the team members were incredibly popular.
Photographs of the basketball team
were in every woman's photograph album,
everyone aspired to be on the team,
they admired them for their vitality,
their strength, their skill, their assertiveness.
We can see in this picture of the varsity team of 1901
how easy they are in their muscularity,
their legs crossed,
and their camaraderie,
looking into each others eyes.
They've tied their hair back and braided it simply
to keep it out of their way in a fast moving game.
What begins initially as gender transgression,
wearing these gym suits across campus,
playing rough sports has become, by 1901,
a new set of expectations for women.
Those Victorian norms have literally been upended.
Another important scene for gender expansion
was house dramatics.
Here's a scene from 1901,
it's a play called Ralph Roister Doister,
and Margery Gain is the star role in this all female cast.
It's kind of an in-joke,
it's an English renaissance comedy where the playwrights,
students who are all men enacted all of the roles.
Here at Smith,
all women enacted all of these male roles.
We can see Margery Gain inhabiting this character
with incredible gusto.
In this close-up,
what we can see is how completely convincing she is.
Women inhabited these coveted male roles with bravado,
with certainty, with complete credibility.
What I've learned from studying the archives
is that these entertainments that college women
invented for themselves have profound consequences,
not only in how they learned to inhabit their bodies,
but after that how they learned to inhabit
a larger social world,
and it's the students who were undergoing this process
of inventing a new social identity,
of creating themselves as college women.
That process, I found,
had three elements.
One was multiple acts of self-representation
in letters that they wrote home,
in their photograph albums and memorabilias,
in their journal entries.
The second was that they were in a private space in college,
defined as a community of women,
but outside the realm of the family,
and the third important thing was that they were
enacting what felt like gender transgression
at the beginning,
but by the end of the 19th century had established new norms
for being a woman.
It's lucky for us,
me and my students and other scholars,
that the college archives at Smith has such a rich
documentation of student life.
In the letters they wrote home to their parents,
in their memorabilia books,
in the plays they wrote and starred in
we have an incredible record.
We see how they self-consciously memorialized themselves
in what appears playful,
but was actually profoundly serious work,
enlarging the category of woman itself.
We can see in this richly documented record
they have achieved for us,
and archived for us critical information
about where we as women have come from,
and I'm grateful for that.