4 New Archives Courses during Interterm

Mini Archives Courses

ARX 100 Each of these courses meets for a week and earns 1 credit.

Graded S/U. Enrollment limited to 25. 1 credit (S/U only)
Offered Interterm

ARX 102j: From Subjects of Reform to Agents for Social Change: Working Women in the Industrial Program of the YWCA
Through hands-on research with primary sources from records of the YWCA, we will consider how working women in the first three decades from of the 20th century used the Industrial department to transform the national organization and their own lives and working conditions. How the YWCA's strategies—education of single working girls at risk in low-wage factory jobs, cross-class organizations, and summer camps— provided the tools for working women to become leaders, labor-organizers, and educators of the middle-class professional staff of the YW to embrace labor activism as central to their mission. Enrollment limited to 25.
Susan Van Dyne
January 14-18, 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Meets in the Alumnae Gymnasium
and an additional two hours a day of independent research in the Sophia Smith Collection.

ARX 103j: Editing Sylvia Plath's Correspondence
This course will teach students how to edit correspondence. Focusing on the Sylvia Plath Collection in the Mortimer Rare Book Room, students will read and edit Plath's unpublished letters to her Smith College friends. Technical aspects related to the editing of a text will be discussed, including transcription and emendation. Plath's poetry and prose manuscripts, journals, annotated library and other biographical material will also be considered during the course, as well as her papers in the Smith College Archives. Each student will be required to transcribe and edit one letter from the Sylvia Plath Collection. Whenever possible, footnotes will be based upon primary sources. Graded S/U only. Enrollment limited to 15. 1 credit
Karen Kukil
January 7-11, 1:00-5:00p.m.
Mortimer Rare Book Room, Neilson Library

ARX 104j: Becoming a College Woman:Re-seeing Gender at Smith, 1879-1901
By researching diaries, memorabilia books, and students’ letters home during 2 decades of Smith’s early history, we’ll consider how students constructed themselves as “college women,” a new social category at the end of the Victorian era. How did their experiences—in the classroom and in their social life --test the boundaries of conventional femininity? How did sports, drama, female friendships, clubs and chemistry, for instance, transform gender conventions? How did the homosocial world of the women’s college intersect, complement, and contradict at times the heterosocial world of life beyond the college? How do the ephemeral artifacts (bulging scrapbooks, scribbled letters) of ordinary women help us write a social history of the evolution of the “new woman”? Graded S/U only {H/S} 1 credit. Enrollment limited to 25.
Susan Van Dyne
January 7-11, 10:00 a.m-12:00 .m. and two hours of independent research in the College Archives
Meets in Alumnae Gymnasium

ARX 105j Class Matters: Organizing for Social Justice
This course will introduce students to several SSC collections of individual papers and organization records that shed light on the fight for economic justice, especially for American women, both white and of color.  In addition to some short secondary source readings, students will then choose pre-selected documents from 14 designated collections and in conversation with each other, both in class and in five written responses on Moodle, discuss the ways in which a particular individual or organization has addressed issues of economic injustice, what worked, what did not, what needs to happen next.  Enrollment limited to 20. Kathleen Nutter
January 14-18, 1-4pm

Archives Fair this Thursday, Sept. 27 11:30-1:30
Chapin Lawn

Learn hoop-rolling and get a taste of why archives are exciting by dropping by and talking with archivists and students