Protecting Michigan State's Material Culture
In my last blog, I detailed the Broad Art Museum writing residency program that I will participate in this semester. We had our first meeting with the faculty members (from many different departments!) and fellows last week. Throughout the course of the meeting, we listened …
I am pleased to announce that I was accepted to the Spring 2015 Writing Residency program at the Broad Art Museum (support by the Department of English and the Graduate School as well). Five other graduate students from the departments of English, Film Studies, and …
As I’ve researched female students on the historical campus this past semester, I keep finding that humor and resiliency are recurring themes in their scrapbooks and journals. Interestingly, it seems that the mechanism of humor may have been used to deflect contentious attitudes about the female presence on a campus that had been historically male-oriented until the university began systematically admitting women in 1896 (female students were allowed on campus as early as 1870, but lack of academic programs and boarding quelled enrollment numbers).
Of course, it should come as no shock that female students have always been funny, creative, engaged, and productive in college life at MSU, but I think that sometimes we gloss over the past with a broad brush, believing that women only studied certain subjects, moved about in certain areas, and kept to certain codes. Not so!
The records kept by the Women’s Student Council from 1917-1934 show many infractions by women who must have been determined to buck some of the traditional standards that applied to them and not to male students. Interestingly, the first order of business called at the first Women’s Student Council meeting was a request by the female senior students to be afforded the same privileges as the male students on campus. It appears that these women understood the university process, and formed their council in response to growing enrollment numbers and desires to have more active voices on campus. Just one month after formation of the council, there is a record detailing a combined meeting of the women’s and men’s councils along with notes about the university president calling meetings to order.
Clearly the council was laying down roots and had the clout to be taken seriously on campus, approximately twenty years after women began enrolling en masse. Rules, proposed and accepted by the council in 1919 demonstrate that was a clear emphasis on honor, conduct, and morality that was directly tied to how women should behave around men; females were given rules regarding calling hours and were expressly not allowed to walk off campus with a male student.
It’s hard to conceptualize these rules today, but I believe that female students subverted some of this university and cultural authority by creating humorous takes on their situations. A females literary club, the Feronian Society, listed these tongue in cheek rules for women on campus in the 1905 Gluck Auf manuscript:
Author: Amy Michael
In my last blog, I shared a portion of the draft that I’m working on about gendered spaces on campus. The most challenging part of the project thus far has been isolating documents, folders, or ephemera in the University Archives that can inform the research …
I’m a physical anthropology student with a not-so-secret desire to be an archaeologist as well. There, I said it! While I’m happy existing in the space in between (bioarchaeology), I have always felt like I should know more about the archaeological theories that inform, or …
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
As part of CAP’s ongoing project of understanding gendered spaces on campus, I thought it would be interesting to look at a building that was built with gendered space in mind. The Human Ecology building, which today houses departments like Human Development and Family Studies, …
Michigan State University began admitting women in 1870, just 15 years after the inception of the college. For some twenty-odd years, female students participated in the same courses as men with few exceptions. However, because there was no womens’ dormitory on campus, students were tasked …
At Campus Archaeology, we are very passionate about what we do: archaeology. That passion inspires us to share our love of archaeology in all of its forms with you, our readers, and while we love sharing information, we also love engaging with all of you out there who read our blog posts, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook. In an effort to generate more active conversations with you, our readers, we at Campus Archaeology have decided to institute Theme Weeks. For periods of approximately one week, we will be discussing via our social media outlets various themes related to archaeology. Worry not! We will continue to bring you the latest developments and headlines in the world of archaeology outside of the weekly themes. These themes are simply our way of generating thougth-provoking and stimulating conversation with and among our readers. With that, our inaugural theme to kick off theme weeks is…
Women in Archaeology!
As many of you may, or perhaps may not know, March is Women’s History Month. According to the official website, Women’s History Month “…had its origins as a national celebration in 1981 when Congress passed Pub. L. 97-28 which authorized and requested the President to proclaim the week beginning March 7, 1982 as ‘Women’s History Week.’ Throughout the next five years, Congress continued to pass joint resolutions designating a week in March as ‘Women’s History Week.’ In 1987 after being petitioned by the National Women’s History Project, Congress passed Pub. L. 100-9 which designated the month of March 1987 as ‘Women’s History Month.’ Between 1988 and 1994, Congress passed additional resolutions requesting and authorizing the President to proclaim March of each year as Women’s History Month. Since 1995, Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama have issued a series of annual proclamations designating the month of March as ‘Women’s History Month.'” It is a time to highlight the outstanding accomplishments and contributions of women (though they should be recognized on a continual basis, not just for the month of March).
In my career, I have been lucky enough to have worked with some amazing women, both as fellow students and as exceptional faculty members, many of whom have made significant contributions to the field of archaeology, or will go on to do so, in my opinion. Looking back, my initial interest in anthropology was piqued by an amazing, if unconventional high school anthropology teacher. In her summers, she participated in archaeological field excavation and encouraged me to do so as well. My first archaeology professor as an undergraduate was a fantastic woman who pointed me toward my first field school, which was co-directed by one of her female colleagues. As I grew and learned while an undergraduate, it is no stretch to say that the most influential faculty on my career were all women.
As a masters student, my entire cohort (short of myself, obviously) was female. Where the professors who instructed me as an undergraduate student taught me specific aspects of archaeology, at the graduate level I learned something equally valuable: how to work with other researchers. We all bonded very quickly and learned that each of us brought unique qualifications to bear on the research we were all undertaking, and that by working together, we could strengthen our individual work. I would be hard put to find a better group of people to have worked with, and am thoroughly grateful to have had my first experience in grad school with them.
Here at MSU, I am still privileged to be working with some exceptional female archaeologists. I need not look any farther afield than CAP itself. I work with seven amazing and diverse archaeologists, all of whom are women. Each brings an individual perspective and background which is utterly unique unto themselves, making CAP an intellectually diverse and creative environment. Led by one of the most influential mortuary archaeologists in the field, Dr. Lynne Goldstein, our little group at CAP consists of a bioarchaeologist working in Belize, a forensic anthropologist-turned-mortuary-archaeologist who works in the Midwestern United States, two amazing Africanist archaeologists who work in Botswana and west-central Africa, respectively, a North Americanist archaeologist who focuses in Northern Michigan, and a mortuary/bioarchaeologist who works in Britain. Quite a group, right? Each and every one is an exceptional archaeologist in her own right, and collectively, they are a blast to work with.
As we move through our themes, we invite our readers to think about what these topics mean to you as an individual and to share that with us and our other readers via Twitter, Facebook, or right here in the comments section of our CAP blog. Have you had an especially significant female archaeology professor who changed your perspectives on archaeology? Are you a practicing female archaeologist, and how do you view the field? Are you a female student considering archaeology and curious about what professional life is like for women in the discipline? You could certainly get some great answers from our CAP staff on that front!
For me, I can say with absolute certainty that I would not be who I am today as an archaeologist without the influence of my female colleagues, teachers, and mentors.
Author: Andy LoPinto
Every week when I visit the Archives, I try to be conscious of why I am going through old receipts, ledgers, and clippings. History should not be recorded just for the sake of fact keeping, but rather so we can draw on the historical past …