Gender, History, Space, Artifacts, Use…Or “How I’m Attempting to Form a Cohesive Paper and Stop Collecting Data

This fall marks the beginning of my fourth year as a CAP researcher and I’m grateful and excited to be back on the team. However, this semester I am attempting to do something I’m incredibly poor at: arriving at a stopping point. This is the beauty of academia, right?! The endless pursuit of knowledge and the boundless research questions are what make us enthusiastic about our respective fields of study. However, I’m going to have to know when to say when. So, University Archives, I love visiting but “non”means “no.” You’re too tempting! I go to locate one or two documents and find myself down the wormhole of history, reading about Black Panther activity on campus or the diary of a woman detailing a stagecoach ride at the turn of the century or the accounts of students who had illustrious careers after their tenure at MSU To be sure, I’ve gathered so much information about energy, transportation, food practices, and gendered space in my time as a CAP researcher, but now it’s time to put it into some meaningful form so that others can read abut the colorful varied past of this great school.

It’s easy to get stuck into the Archives or into the artifacts that CAP pulls from the ground; these documents and materials are visually interesting, and their allure cannot be denied by anyone (read: me) fascinated by the past. But! I’m making my stand. The data collection will stop and the writing will start today! Or next week, Or maybe after one more final trip to the Archives this semester just to make sure I didn’t miss anything….

I’m sharing a portion of the draft I’ve started about gendered space on the historic campus. In past blogs, I’ve written about some female students (Irma Thompson and this one) who recorded their experiences on campus but building restrictions, classroom makeup, and women’s courses need to be examined further. Essentially, I am trying to determine if there were any spaces that were absolutely off limits for females in addition to how and why gender inclusion or neutrality began (or broke down) on campus (e.g. co-ed dorms, women’s lounges, etc…) Hopefully, we can then identify spaces on campus that may yield archaeological correlates of this gendered use of space.

Paper excerpt:

Perhaps the most obvious place to begin to look for gender division on the historic campus may currently be one of the most integrated zones: the university dormitory. Prior to co-ed dorms on campus, several dormitories were constructed specifically for women (Mayo Hall, Landon Hall, Gilchrist Sarah Williams Hall, Campbell Hall, and Morrill Hall). After the admittance of female students in 1896, Abbott Hall (formerly a male dormitory) became a space dedicated to classrooms for the women’s program and a female dormitory. Rather than the gender neutral or inclusive living atmosphere fostered on the modern campus, the historic college was clearly marked by gendered restriction in both academic pursuits (“women’s course”) and physical space (women’s dorms).

Author: Amy Michael