Browse Items (90 total)

This item is a collection of letters to the editor published in the Los Angeles Times reacting to Brando’s refusal of the Oscar and Littlefeather’s statement. The letters are authored by Robert S. Birchard, Thomas L. Gillette, Mrs. John E. Grauman, and Suzanne Lego. The statements written by Birchard and Grauman express distaste for Brando's unwillingness to give his statement in person, instead sending "a woman to do a man's job," as well as his use of the Oscars as a political platform. On the other side of the debate, Gillette compares the audience's "puny response" to the "greatness" of Brando, and Lego calls out the "small-mindedness and bigotry in America" displayed by presenters Raquel Welch and Clint Eastwood in their responses to Brando and Littlefeather.

The cover of Contact Quarterly Spring/Summer 83 vol. VIII no. 3/4. This issue focused on Contact Improvisation in college, and featured student and instructor perspectives on what it meant to practice CI in a college setting.

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.

Short story by Katherine Anne Porter set during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Miranda, the protagonist, falls ill, and her emotions and sensations related to her illness are explored in the text. In the end, she recovers, but her lover Adam, who persumably caught the flu while caring for her, does not. The story is said to have been inspired by Porter's own experience catching the flu in 1918.

This is a photograph of a performance of Antigone in Little Nourse Theater at Carleton College in December of 1947. In this image, pictured are Antigone, Creon, Messenger, and the Guards.

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.

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.

Bly investigated an asylum in the 19th century by feigning insanity. The included excepts display Bly's attempt and ultimate success in being declared insane by the courts. Most of the book explores what the asylum was like; however, this particular section enlightens what female insanity "looked like" in the 19th century, even to other women. Although Bly's work was inevitably a positive force for institutionalized women, she also plays into stereotypes of the "insane woman," which inadvertently legitimizes the harmful stereotypes that led to these systems of abuse.

This item is a newspaper article by Michael Kilian commenting on Marlon Brando’s refusal of the Oscar. The piece criticizes Littlefeather for “exploiting herself” by the roles she has taken and mocks Brando for succumbing to "self righteous self importance," in addition to calling out the alleged hypocrisy of the Indigenous activists occupying Wounded Knee, SD. Overall, the article does not appear to take Littlefeather, Brando, or the American Indian Movement seriously, nor does it view Hollywood as an appropriate venue for political action.