Browse Items (90 total)

Chopin, another celebrated female writer from the late 19th century, writes in an unpublished poem about the "ecstacy of madness." She takes something used to oppress women, in this case: madness, and celebrates the freedom of it. Although this is not a well-known work, Chopin frequently used her status as a writer to speak about the oppression of women. This particular poem calls attention to the ways in which Chopin was celebrated for her acts of resistence to the dominant culture.

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.

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.

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.

Ruvtz-Rees writes about her experience in the insane asylum in the 19th century. Although she speaks positively about her time in the aslyum, she calls for more home treatments, as she believes "mental disease is infectious." This idea, along with the development of treatments such as the rest cure, begins to make the home a place of imprisonment rather than an outside institution. It is then the family, not the asylum workers and nurses, that imprison the female body.

Poem by Felicia Zamora that addresses topics of the body and its systems, language, and the archive. Includes an image of a mammogram as part of the poem.

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).

Poem by Sarah M. Sala which addresses invisible illness, physical pain, and coming to terms with being ill. The first section of the triptych comprises nine stanzas which are then repeated and altered in the second and third sections.