Browse Items (31 total)

This is a scanned newspaper clipping addressed to President Nason and included in the archived folder of President's Office's materials on the "Co-ed Dorm Issue".

This is a section of a LIFE magazine article titled "Missouri vs. Smith, Girl Student at One and a Coed at Other Lead Different Lives." It focuses on the life of University of Missouri student Jane Stone. It also includes photographs of her curling her hair, spending time with her boyfriend, and working in class.

This is a section of a LIFE magazine article titled "Missouri vs. Smith, Girl Student at One and a Coed at Other Lead Different Lives." It focuses on the college schedule and opinions of Smith College student Janet Trowbridge. It includes a photograph of her sitting front row and taking notes in a government class.

This is a section of a LIFE magazine article titled "An intimate revolution in campus life", it focuses on the Oberlin president's decision making process in switching to co-ed dorms with 24 hour visitation. It also emphasizes the potential for platonic friendships and greater understanding between men and women as a result of co-ed housing, as opposed to purely sexual opportunities. It includes a picture of a female Oberlin students spending time wither her two male friends in their dorm room.

Series of paintings by Mamie Holst which began in 1997 and is potentially still ongoing. The paintings in this series are various shades of black, white, and gray, and they tend to incorporate circular designs alongside other striped geometric patterns. Holst's creation of the series is motivated by her experience living with Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS).

Artwork by Lynn Hershman Leeson depicting the white silhouette of a woman's head and torso against a black background. Colorful pictures such as a heart, a star, an airplane, and other geometric patterns are shown within the body in a manner that mimics a medical x-ray.

Self-portrait by Frida Kahlo depicting the artist's spine as a broken column. The rest of her body is constrained by an orthopedic corset and covered in nails, and there are tears painted on the artist's face.

This 1879 stereograph by R. Newell & Son depicts the interior of Francis M. Johnson's sewing-machine showroom at 111 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. Rows of Domestic and Grover & Baker sewing machines fill the space, surrounded by mannequins in finished dresses and children's clothes. Thread displays, patriotic bunting, and small signs reading "Please do not handle" all signal that this is a curated commercial stage rather than a site of actual labor. The showroom sells sewing machines as modern household technologies and emblems of national progress.

Interpretation Note
This stereograph does something sly, which is taking the back-breaking, poorly paid labor of sewing and turning it into something almost magical to look at. Every garment is draped perfectly, every machine is polished to a shine, and the patriotic bunting overhead is turning the room into a shrine of progress. The whole scene is arranged for middle-class shoppers to admire, not for anyone to imagine actually sitting down and working. Classification does heavy ideological work here. By ordering the space this way, the photograph sells a marketable story about women's work while leaving out the long hours, dim rooms, aching fingers, and low wages most seamstresses lived with. The mannequins drive the point home. They wear the finished dresses, but no tired, living woman is allowed in the picture. That absence is exactly the kind of archival silence where the lived conditions of working women are replaced by an illusion of effortless domestic modernity. In the end, commercial photography, like any genre, gets to choose whose labor counts as visible. Here, the machines and the pretty clothes stay on display, while the women who made them possible simply disappear.

This 1914 photograph by Lewis Hine shows workers leaving the Opelika Cotton Mill in Alabama at the noon whistle. Among them is Velma Smith, identified by Hine as "a tiny little spinner with a steady job all day." The image shows Velma running toward the camera while adult workers move past her. Hine's caption provides extensive detail. Velma's father refused to let her keep any of her own wages. Velma's mother had worked in mills before age 12, and multiple members of the family were employed at the mill. The caption also notes that Velma was seen starting work before dawn and suggests that her claimed age of 12 was likely falsified.

Interpretation Note
This photograph presents industrial labor as a family economy structured by dependency and necessity. At first glance, the scene appears almost ordinary, with workers leaving for a break and a child running. However, Hine's caption turns it into clear evidence of generational exploitation. His narrative draws attention to the economic pressures that bound entire families, even very young children (likely under 12), to mill work. Details in the caption about withheld wages, uncertain ages, and shifts that began before dawn show how mills and families together shaped a child's working life. Terry Cook suggests that archives grow out of the social pressures and assumptions of their time, shaping what gets saved and how people make sense of it. With that in mind, Hine's photograph feels like a product of its own system that turns the ordinary routines of mill work into proof of the social and economic conditions he wanted to expose. The photograph also hints at how child labor was viewed then, since Velma's job is shown as normal work rather than as a loss of childhood or schooling. Altogether, it shows how records created within a certain worldview can end up supporting the accepted ideas about labor in early 20th-century industrial settings.