Course Descriptions
Making a Self, Making a History
Susan Van Dyne, Professor, Study of Women and Gender
What was it like to be among the first girls to attend college more than a century ago? What if you could hear their voices through their letters and diaries and figure out their favorite music and books, and what they did for fun, by looking at their scrapbooks?
Through hands-on exploration of the treasures housed in the archives of Smith College, you can time travel to be with this remarkable group of 16- to 20-year-olds as they put together a sense of themselves as "college girls" and made history in the process. Then, by visiting the renowned Smith College Museum of Art, you'll discover how dramatically different lives coexisted in one valley in the late 1800s—the emerging culture of the college town and the changing agricultural villages only miles away.
Through field trips to local sites and a close study of selected paintings, you'll approach the making of the self in yet another way, looking at how landscape and portrait paintings helped New Englanders understand themselves in the context of their families and communities.
Hands-on History
Susan Van Dyne, Professor, Study of Women and Gender
What if history didn't come already digested in books, and you had a chance to create a historical narrative yourself from primary documents?
We'll explore history firsthand by "touching the stuff" in the college archives. You can read Sylvia Plath's journals and drafts for her poems in her own handwriting. Read the letters that some of the very first girls who went to college wrote home to their parents in the 1880s and turn the pages of their over-stuffed memorabilia books. Put yourself in the shoes of factory girls as they attended their first summer camp and learned about fair wages for their labor, their ties to other women workers in the U.S and abroad, and became agents for social change.
The archives provide a portal for exploring young women's experiences in times past and yet discovering new things about yourself—you'll meet girls who wrote plays, acted in pageants, invented clubs, organized protests, who wanted to have fun AND to make change. Their papers are precious, and they're yours to explore.
