Browse Items (90 total)

Lucy Maynard Salmon's Domestic Service is a 1901 investigation of women's household labor as part of the broader American economy. The book draws on more than a thousand surveys collected in the late 1880s from employers and workers, and documents wages, skills, national origins, living arrangements, and working conditions. The author outlines three major historical phases of domestic labor. The colonial period is when most household work was performed by enslaved people, indentured servants, or the very poor. After the Revolution, when free labor became more common and households briefly imagined themselves as more egalitarian.  By the mid-19th century, new immigrants, especially Irish, German, and Swedish women, entered domestic service in large numbers, making the work more widespread but lowering its social status. Salmon's data shows that most workers lived in cities, worked long hours with limited freedom, and earned an average of about $3.23 per week, often supplemented with room and board rather than full wages. Employers often treated household labor as personal labor rather than paid work, and employers had little power to negotiate conditions. Salmon proposed reforms, including abandoning the term "servant," ending tipping, dividing household tasks into defined roles, and establishing training schools to recognize household management as a skilled profession.

Interpretation Note
Salmon's study plays an important role in understanding how written records define women's labor. By converting lived experiences into surveys, tables, averages, and typologies, Salmon exposes domestic labor as economic labor governed by the same principles as factory or farm employment, which opposes the widespread belief that household work was merely women's natural duty. Yet, her methodology also demonstrates the trade-offs of institutional documentation. The precision of her statistics gives domestic labor new legitimacy, but the process of abstraction can smooth over the emotional, interpersonal, and racial dynamics that shaped daily life inside employers' homes. In this sense, Salmon's work echoes Saidiya Hartman's point about how the archive can make people visible while still muting their voices, since the workers appear as data rather than as narrating subjects. Her historical timeline shows how race and class determined which workers' stories were preserved and which were sidelined. Enslaved Black women, indentured servants, and immigrant workers played a pivotal role in the development of domestic service, yet their voices appear only through employers' accounts or through Salmon's own categorizations. The book demonstrates how genre (in this case, a sociological survey) can validate women's work by recognizing its economic value in the broader national economy, while also repeating the same hierarchies and omissions that define the archive.

He starts this letter by talking about living in a cold apartment but how people are looking for a warmer place for him.

He writes about how his Russian is getting better. He can read Russian and English product labels, but he has a hard time reading the other languages that are on Turkish, Iranian, Chinese, and European products. He tells his family which countries his favorite products come from.

He talks about his work; the school now has textbooks so he can teach and plan lessons better, his students are getting better at English, and he is attempting to teach the secretary how to use the computer.

He writes about how he is trying to access the computer room, but the computer teacher doesn’t like sharing the key to the room. This leads into him talking about Soviet culture and the Russian word for sneaky.

Two pictures are included in this letter: 1) his friend Jeremy and him with their town’s statue of Lenin, and 2) the Green Bazaar in Almaty

This item shows Michelangelo's David, one of the most famous sculptures of the Renaissance period.

The picture can be accessed at Wikimedia Commons.

Attribution:"'David' by Michelangelo JBU0001.JPG" by Jörg Bittner Unna is licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0).

Artist's Statement:
"Contact Sheet includes photos of one of the first student-led contact improvisation jams at Carleton College; it is for Physical Education course #150, Contact Improvisation. The author intended to convey the feeling of the dance through photo editing, assembly, and the use of risograph printing techniques."
8 unnumbered pages: color illustrations; approx. 5x7 inches

A course description from the first time contact improvisation was offered at Carleton College in 1998/1999.

Contact improvisation was taught as its own class at St. Olaf from 2014 to 2016.

Student dancers from Base & Perch perform in St. Olaf's Fresh Space 2025 concert.

Student dancers from Base & Perch perform in St. Olaf's Fresh Space 2025 concert.

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 newspaper article in the Union Recorder (Milledgeville, GA), published in November of 1895, reports on Governor Atkinson's 1895 investigation into Georgia's chain gang system. The report describes 33 convict camps holding 795 people, including both Black and White prisoners and multiple women and girls, some under 14. The article lists daily labor assignments such as farming, sawmilling, brickmaking, turpentine work, and road construction. It notes that prisoners often worked ten hours per day and that racial and gender segregation was rarely enforced in work or sleeping quarters. Although the article frames these conditions as an administrative failure requiring legislative reform, it documents the routine exploitation of forced labor under the misdemeanor convict system.

Interpretation Note
The article presents the chain gang system as an administrative shortcoming rather than as a moral or racial catastrophe, one that can be tidied up with the right legislation. In doing so, it shows how institutional language can blunt the edges of violence and turn brutality into a mere "affair to remedy." The recitation of prisoners' ages, races, and daily tasks tacitly normalizes forced labor and sidesteps the systematic exploitation of Black men, women, and children. The casual mention that women and girls worked the same grueling jobs as men, such as ten hours of brickmaking or road building, while still being expected to cook and clean for the camp, reflects how deeply race and gender dictated the distribution and meaning of labor in these spaces. Following Marlene Manoff's thinking, the article is both a historical object and a product of an archival logic that prefers bureaucratic categories over lived human experience. When read alongside Tonia Sutherland and Zakiya Collier's work on Black archival practices, it becomes clear that records of Black labor were almost always shaped by the state's need to legitimize punishment and control. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman, the archive is shaped by the people who exercised violence, not by those who endured it. What remains are documents produced by captors and officials, which means the record is built from a perspective of power rather than from the lives of those who were exploited.