Reflection: From 1921 to 2021
I started my research while remote due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and most of my initial readings during those early days consisted of institutional publications and meeting notes from presidential papers. Here, the administration of the Summer School framed the program as a matter of logistics, a fight always in progress between the summer students, the College, and any number of third parties such as alumni groups or wealthy donors. I was able to get my hands on a physical copy of the 1927 school literary magazine The Workers Look at the Stars, edited by Hilda Worthington Smith, one of the first chances I had to hear summer student voices contemporary to their time at Bryn Mawr. Again and again, in-between discussions of protests and factory conditions, the students discuss their love for campus, their appreciation for the grounds and the buildings that housed them for the summer months. This struck a chord with me—all the way out in Dallas, Texas, I missed Bryn Mawr’s campus desperately. It’d been the longest I’d been away from campus since I first moved in during my freshman year, and I keenly missed the sense of awe from walking through the grand Pembroke Arch and through the lush greens that the students described in their poetry and prose. In some ways, these things barely change at Bryn Mawr—there will always be someone who misses the shimmering wissahickon schist that makes up the walls of our campus, and there will always be someone eager to arrive back there again.
When I was able to return to campus in the fall, during my quarantine and before I was able to return to the archives to complete more of my research, I wanted to explore the spaces that both I and hundreds of summer school students had remembered so fondly. I’ve always appreciated the physicality of being on campus; I’d taken multiple courses on both the college’s history and its architecture, mindful of the ways that they intersect. Bryn Mawr’s campus is one closely tied to its history no matter how you look at it—we model our buildings after those of other great institutions that have come before us and seek to name them after figures that defined our history. (And the removal of these names from buildings is just as significant to our agency in our communal history.) When one wants to remember Marion Edwards Park—the president under whose administration the Summer School exited campus—one can look toward the science building named in her honor, or to the Great Hall where her portrait hangs. Even at the most literal level, students have left their mark in the campus’s register of historical identity, with dorm rooms decked in tiny plaques of the names of those who have lived here long before its current resident, while other students have etched or sharpied their names into the walls of rarely-used tunnels tucked away from view. Undeniably, the college impresses onto its landscape a perspective of its history, incorporating our past into its present through the buildings and outdoor spaces that we interact with every day.
When I was walking around campus for the first time in several months, I wondered: where is the physical presence of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry? The program takes up a very specific niche in campus history, treated at various points in its history as a charitable endeavor by socially minded academics, a grand-if-short-lived experiment conducted by the college, or a contentious guest in the college’s buildings and grounds. While the Summer School’s existence owed much to its ability to work as a part of the Bryn Mawr community, it was a program that was in many ways treated as an “other” from the traditional day-to-day endeavors of the suburban campus. Countless Summer School professors and college-age teaching assistants discussed the ways in which they felt they learned from the workers that attended classes, that their worldviews were irrevocably altered by their interactions with the powerful force of the program and its participants’ drive for education. But that change and tangible perspectival shift in the community still remains outside of the campus register. The story of the Summer School is one we find in the archives and libraries, rather than encoded onto our buildings and landscape. The students of the Summer School poured heart and soul into their love of this campus, in the ways in which they admired the towering trees rich with new wildlife or the castle-like spires that rise from the buildings.
I posit that it is not that the Summer School has been forgotten by the landscape that its residents so deeply adored in the slightest. The campus remembers and honors, but it does so in ways that we may not recognize were we to try and find evidence of it as we might for President Park.
It is hard to quantify the tangible effects of momentous social and cultural change on campus. How will the physical space of our campus remember the student strike held in the fall of 2020? Students who were able to attend in-person (or call in remotely) will forever see Old Library Green as a site of the first sit-in to happen as part of student protests, enlivened with signs and calls to action as the community rallied for justice and equity. Are powerful moments like that encoded in the tangible landscape of our college? Will the semesters of careful mask-wearing and mindful social distance that have changed how students interact with each other be a visible marker in our buildings and campus organization?
The short answer is that these things likely will never be as prevalently encoded onto our campus as, say the towering heights of Taylor Hall or the hallowed plaques that line the cloisters, but they work their way into the tapestry that we together weave to form both our present perspective of life on campus and the ways in which we as a community will enact change and build our communal identity together. The Summer School, while it existed as a transient fixture on campus, irrevocably shaped how Bryn Mawr College developed as an institution, even if its influence may not be as evident to community members today. The Summer School was undeniably a moment of a serious paradigm shift, and its value to our community should not be understated.
The Summer School’s tenure on Bryn Mawr’s campus was a crossroads in our institutional history, a time when a narrow conceptualization of our academic community was being addressed by voices that otherwise had been marginalized. Here, BIPOC, Jewish, working class, and immigrant students fought alongside the Summer School’s faculty and administration to argue for their right to an education, and to prove the power that a Bryn Mawr education could provide. Their efforts definitively changed the trajectory of our institution during the traditional academic year and beyond, beginning conversations that we continue in our community to this day.
This exhibit, while based on an extensive amount of material from the Bryn Mawr Summer School, is by no means exhaustive; there’s no way to capture the depth and extent of this program’s meaning to both those that participated and for the Bryn Mawr community as a whole. Even the archival collections that I drew from in assembling this exhibit struggled to capture the scale of the program and its emotional impact on those that participated in it. With For Roses, Too, I hoped to draw attention to the elements that we could connect to across the century that has passed. My goal was to highlight the ways in which the Summer School’s lasting legacy is one that does not wholly reside in the past, but instead continues on in our everyday, even if we may not notice it.
-Beck Morawski, Class of 2021