Students Curate A Stellar Exhibit

Student Stories

by Michelle Simmons

January 2, 2010

Allyson Glazier ’11, Malinda Triller, Alli Schell ’11 and Cassidy Dermott ’11 spent months deep in Archives & Special Collections creating the women’s history exhibit.

Interns Allyson Glazier ’11, Cassidy Dermott ’11 and Alli Schell ’11 knew that curating an exhibit celebrating 125 years of women at Dickinson would be a monumental task. But given what their 19th-century forebears faced, they felt up to the challenge.

“We were told, ‘Do an exhibit on women at Dickinson—go!’ We had supervision and guidance, but we were on our own,” said Schell, a history major.

Luckily, they already had some idea of what they wanted to accomplish, having participated in another women’s history project earlier in the year. During the spring and early summer of 2009, they were part of a team of 15 student interns and volunteers who researched and created the Women’s Experiences at Dickinson College blog. After poring through newspapers, yearbooks, oral histories, student-organization records and boxes of photos, the team posted more than 900 entries during the spring and summer.

Glazier, Schell and Dermott then dived into planning the Archives & Special Collections exhibit. “When we came in during the summer we sifted through what was already on the blog,” said Dermott, a theatre & dance major. “It was kind of a daunting task to just read all that stuff and try to see themes develop naturally.”

Instead of adopting a strict chronological approach, they honed in on key issues that would capture the essence of women’s experiences at the college—academics, residential life, rules and regulations, organizations and societies, athletics and campus activism.

“We figured out what interested each of us the most, and that’s what we attacked first,” said Glazier, a double major in Italian studies and English. “Alli and I wanted to do the decision [allowing women to enroll]. Cassie started with buildings, the physical aspect of the campus.”

According to Malinda Triller, special collections librarian and the interns’ supervisor, “There was constant dialogue all summer. They selected all of the artifacts and did a lot of digging through boxes of photos. They discovered things we never knew we had.”

Hurrah for Coeducation! was officially unveiled on Sept. 25 in Archives & Special Collections. The exhibit’s title comes from a quote the students found in an 1884 Dickinsonian editorial praising the board of trustees’ decision to allow women to enroll: “Hurrah for Coeducation!”

The exhibit begins with the college career of Zatae Longsdorff Straw, class of 1887 and the first woman to graduate from Dickinson. Among the featured artifacts is the black moire and lace dress she wore when she gave her Pierson Oratorical Prize-winning speech “Hand Workers versus Head Workers,” in 1886.

Other display cases are packed with maps, photos, edicts, letters and memorabilia. Viewers learn about attempts to find appropriate housing and student reactions to the sometimes heavy-handed enforcement of curfews and dress codes. Social activism elements range from women’s suffrage to the 1960s civil-rights movement and culminate with the creation of a new Women’s Center in 2008, which replaced the student-run Zatae Longsdorff Women’s Center. Additional items—artifacts that the curators wanted to include but were tangential to the exhibit—are on display in the reading room outside Archives & Special Collections.

“I love it,” Susannah Bartlow, director of the new Women’s Center, said of the exhibit. “One of the especially exciting things is that it brings us to the present day. This is real, living history.”

Because all three interns are studying off campus this year and were unable to attend the September opening, Archives & Special Collections held a “Za-Tea” celebration in July as a preview and to congratulate them on their work. Dermott is with the Headlong Performance Institute in Philadelphia, Glazier is abroad at the University of Bologna, and Schell is studying at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

They’re all eager to hear the reaction from the college community back in Carlisle. The exhibit will be open through Alumni Weekend in June, and the blog will remain as an online resource for professional and amateur historians alike. Triller encourages everyone to contribute their own stories by e-mailing the archives or adding comments directly to the blog.

“We want to raise important questions,” she said. “The blog and exhibit should engage the community in a dialogue and provide opportunities for people to share their stories and experiences. We can add our own memories or correct the [existing] record. A lot of important things don’t get written down.”

To contribute to the Women’s Experiences at Dickinson blog, visit http://itech.dickinson.edu/coeducation or e-mail archives@dickinson.edu.