Browse Items (31 total)

This photograph, taken by Lewis Hine for the National Child Labor Committee in 1909, shows a young girl standing between two long rows of spinning machinery in the Globe Cotton Mill in Augusta, Georgia. She is wearing a work apron and boots, her clothes are dusty with cotton lint, and her posture is still as she faces the camera. The mill floor is littered with fibers, and the narrow aisle shows the confinement of the workspace. The original caption records the overseer's remark that she was "regularly employed," which presents her labor as routine within the operations of the mill.

Interpretation Note
Hine's photograph serves as both image and argument. At first glance, it simply shows a young girl at work in a factory, while the caption that says "regularly employed" uses institutional language to make child labor exploitation look routine and even respectable. By quoting the overseer's own words, Hine lets the justification speak for itself, exposing how employers normalize the practice of child labor, even as the photograph itself contradicts every syllable of that claim. This tension fits with Marlene Manoff's point that archival labels and descriptions affect how evidence is read, so the wording attached to the photograph carries as much weight as the photograph itself. It also echoes Saidiya Hartman's observation on the archive of marginalized people, as the girl's experiences and circumstances are absent, replaced by the overseer's authoritative framing. By placing the photograph and the caption together, Hine's photograph invites us to ask who gets to define labor, whose narratives are preserved (and whose are excluded), and how those decisions that were made long ago still influence the way future viewers understand women's and children's industrial labor in industrial settings.

This 1943 photograph by Marjory Collins shows women factory workers attending morning mass in Buffalo, New York, immediately after completing the overnight third shift. They sit and stand in the dim interior of a church, their coats are still on, and their scarves are tied tightly around their heads. These suggest exhaustion and the cold of early morning. This photograph shows a moment of transition between industrial labor and religious service, making clear how wartime work schedules shaped daily life for women employed in defense industries.

Interpretation Note
Collins' photograph offers a counter-narrative to the polished images of wartime labor circulated by the Office of War Information. Instead of depicting heroic productivity, this photograph shows fatigue, ordinariness, and the effort to maintain community and spiritual continuity amid punishing hours. The women's quiet postures echo Kate Eichhorn's point that some of the most revealing traces of women's history appear in the ordinary moments and materials that official narratives tend to ignore. In that sense, the photograph functions much like the feminist archives Eichhorn describes, because it shifts attention to lives usually kept at the margins and shows that even everyday acts can speak volumes about the pressures women faced. Ultimately, Collins' photograph reminds us that women's work in defense plants was a patriotic duty, but it was also a grueling cycle that reshaped home life, religious practice, and whatever small pockets of rest remained.

This source is a section of a New York Times article titled "Mrs. Raushenbush Emerges Unscarred in Sarah Lawrence Confrontation" published on March 23rd, 1969. It details the stance of Sarah Lawrence College President, Mrs. Raushenbush, on student sexuality, emotions, and sex in regard to co-ed dormitories.

This source is a page printed in the April, 1969 edition of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly. The section is titled "Alumnae Comments on Coeducation for Smith" and includes quotes from alumnae regarding their stances on Smith as a potentially coeducational school in the future. The quotes are taken from answers to a questionnaire that was sent to 1,500 alumnae by the College Planning Committee.

This is a section of a LIFE magazine article titled "An intimate revolution in campus life", it focuses on the issues of campus relationships in co-ed dorms, specifically at Oberlin College. It also includes photographs of Oberlin students in relationships spending time together in campus spaces and dorms.

The 1943 Office of War Information poster features a woman in a bright red uniform working on what appears to be an aircraft canopy. Her calm and focused expression suggests confidence and skill. The bold title declares, "The more WOMEN at work the sooner we WIN!" Below, a list of occupations (such as farm worker, typist, bus driver, laundress, and others) encourages women to join many sectors of the wartime economy. The poster presents women's labor, whether in factories or service roles, as a patriotic act essential to victory.

Interpretation Note
This poster is a clear example of how state institutions actively shaped public memory of women's wartime roles by promoting certain stories about women's wartime labor while leaving out others. As Kenneth Foote argued, collective memory is built through selective emphasis, since societies often highlight specific events or meanings and downplay the aspects that do not fit the message they want to project. In this case, the Office of War Information presents women's work as a unified patriotic effort that is essential to national victory. The poster's clear slogan and orderly list of occupations support a motivating narrative. What falls outside that frame, such as the exhaustion, unequal pay, racial segregation, childcare struggles, or the abrupt layoffs women faced after the war, simply does not appear. Foote reminds us that this kind of selective emphasis is common in the formation of cultural memory, where representations produced by institutions determine which versions of the past circulate widely and which are allowed to fade. In choosing to emphasize patriotism, duty, and contribution over the difficulties and inequalities that shaped women's actual working lives, the poster helped define how an entire era would later be remembered.

Art piece titled "Brushstrokes #6" by Hannah Wilke, included in her 1992 exhibit Intra-Venus. Wilke's hair is arranged on a sheet of paper to resemble brushstrokes.

Two Carleton students engaged in conversation in Musser Hall, commissioned by the college for use in the 2008 calendar and to enrich the art collection.

Pre-production photograph of Al Tinnin as Azdak in the Caucasian Chalk Circle. Al Tinnin was the first African-American student to graduate from Carleton College, and the first African American student to act on stage at Carleton. This was the premiere of the Bertolt Brecht play: The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and it was a student-led production at Little Nourse Theater from May 4th-8th in 1947.