{"id":10878,"date":"2014-09-22T09:51:17","date_gmt":"2014-09-22T13:51:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news\/?page_id=10878"},"modified":"2014-09-29T08:15:04","modified_gmt":"2014-09-29T12:15:04","slug":"nobodys-girl-campus-panel-explores-a-1940s-labor-dispute-that-still-resonates-today","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/nobodys-girl-campus-panel-explores-a-1940s-labor-dispute-that-still-resonates-today\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Nobody’s Girl’: Campus Panel Explores a 1940s Labor Dispute that Still Resonates Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

One day back in 2012, a house manager at the Academy of Music in Northampton discovered a dusty cardboard box stuffed full of old letters and other documents hidden beneath a desk.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Academy\u2019s executive director, Debra J\u2019Anthony, took the box home. After many hours poring over its contents, J\u2019Anthony came to a realization: \u201cOh my gosh, we have a play!\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The documents told the story of a long-forgotten local labor dispute that erupted in the 1940s when longtime cashier Mildred E. Walker was appointed head of the Academy of Music after then manager Frank Shaughnessy was called up for military service in World War II.<\/p>\n

The episode\u2014which resulted in a headline-making court case after the company leasing the theater ousted Walker because they didn\u2019t want a woman in charge\u2014is now an original play with several links to Smith.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody\u2019s Girl,\u201d<\/a> a screwball comedy by local playwright Harley Erdman will play Friday and Saturday, Oct. 17 and 18, at 8 p.m. at the Academy. Sam Rush, production and publicity manager for Smith\u2019s theatre department, plays Shaughnessy. (His daughter, Molly Damon-Rush, 12, plays a Girl Scout in the show).<\/p>\n

In a special pre-production event, Smith\u2019s women and gender studies department<\/a> is hosting a panel discussion on \u201c1940s Women in Labor: Then and Now\u201d at 11 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 27, in the Neilson Library Browsing Room.<\/p>\n

Scholars, including Smith emeritus professor Daniel Horowitz, have been invited to shed light on the larger issues raised by the play\u2014including the persistence of what J\u2019Anthony called a \u201cglass ceiling for women\u201d in theater and other fields.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe panel is an opportunity for us to create dialogue around these issues,\u201d J\u2019Anthony said. \u201cIt will be interesting for us to examine how far we\u2019ve come since women went in full force to replace men at war\u2014and how far we still have to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Horowitz, who taught history and American studies at Smith from 1989 until his retirement in 2012, will draw connections between Walker and feminist author and icon Betty Friedan \u201942.<\/p>\n

Friedan (then Goldstein) \u201cbecame radicalized at Smith over women\u2019s issues, anti-fascism and labor issues,\u201d Horowitz said. She wrote about organizing attempts by college maids and buildings and grounds workers, arguing that their fight was central to the \u201cexpansion of democracy in America,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Horowitz noted that both Walker and Friedan experienced a time when war and labor organizing were reshaping the lives of American women. \u201cI hope people come away from the discussion understanding how dramatically the position of women was changing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Jacqueline Castledine, a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-director of the Valley Women\u2019s History Collaborative, will moderate the panel. In addition to Horowitz, other speakers are Dale Melcher of the Labor Extension Program at UMass and Ivette Hernandez, a board member of the Boston-based Institute for Women\u2019s Leadership Development.<\/p>\n

The dramatic story told in \u201cNobody\u2019s Girl\u201d has other connections to Smith: College president William A. Neilson was on the board of the Academy at the time members appointed Walker theater manager.<\/p>\n

The college also briefly had a woman at the helm in 1940\u2014though not because of the war. When Neilson retired in 1939, Elizabeth Cutter Morrow, an alumnae trustee and member of the Class of 1897, served as acting college president for one year. \u00a0(Smith appointed its first female president, Jill Ker Conway, in 1975.)<\/p>\n

The heroine of \u201cNobody\u2019s Girl\u201d is a complex character, J\u2019Anthony noted. Walker, a well known member of Northampton\u2019s arts community in the 1940s, was \u201clooked on askance by more conservative elements in town,\u201d J\u2019Anthony said\u2014not only because of her insistence on earning a salary equal to Shaughnessy\u2019s, but also because the two were reportedly having an affair. (Shaughnessy was married.)<\/p>\n

Although Walker\u2019s case became a local \u201ccause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre,\u201d Walker was not successful in court and was never allowed to work at the Academy again, J\u2019Anthony said. Walker died in the 1970s.<\/p>\n

Despite its serious subject, \u201cNobody\u2019s Girl\u201d is written as a comedy in the rapid-fire style that was popular in the 1940s, says playwright Erdman, who is graduate program director and professor of dramaturgy at UMass.<\/p>\n

In addition to enjoying the \u201czaniness,\u201d Erdman says he hopes audiences will learn something new about local history.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe play is a chance to learn about a forgotten person who did something important,\u201d Erdman said. \u201cI think people will see in Mildred\u2019s story the glass ceiling and the sex bias that still resonates today\u2014but also the heroism of everyday people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One day back in 2012, a house manager at the Academy of Music in Northampton discovered a dusty cardboard box stuffed full of old letters and other documents hidden beneath a desk. The Academy\u2019s executive director, Debra J\u2019Anthony, took the box home. After many hours poring over its contents, J\u2019Anthony came to a realization: \u201cOh […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-10878","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10878"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10932,"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10878\/revisions\/10932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}