Monthly Archives: February 2020

Post 1: Exploring Bedtime Stories – Lucy Verweij

With WTF Week having ended last week, I could not stop thinking about the tradition of Bedtime Stories. Every year, students gather around seniors in each dorm to listen to them read children’s storybooks out loud. This can get emotional, especially with stories such as Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes, A House for Hermit Crab by Eric Carle, or Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans. Sometimes it’s not a storybook, but a final chapter of a novel (such as the end of the Chronicles of Narnia), an excerpt (The Little Prince), or a story that someone loves (Arthurian legends).

In some cases, including this year, seniors write original works for the specific purpose of reading at this event. Some people have rewritten songs to be about Bryn Mawr, and my friend this year wrote and illustrated his own story about furbies (cursed) saying goodbye to Bryn Mawr (sad). But because it is not a published work, these original stories are essentially lost forever without a way to save them.

I have a lot of questions I want to explore. How long have we done Bedtime Stories? Where did this tradition come from? What causes people to create original works rather than read something already available to them? Is there a way to save these works?

Having been part of the Children’s Literature 360 last semester, and doing research on our own Ellery Yale Wood children’s literature collection, I have a pretty extensive pool of knowledge around storybooks, and what goes into writing and illustrating them. But I think what will go into this project is how that knowledge and understanding fits into the Bryn Mawr traditions. I am also still figuring out what I want my end goal to be, or at least what I’m hoping to end up with at the end of the semester.

Lucy Verweij ’21

Telling Bryn Mawr Histories: Choosing My Path — Maria Mitiuriev

At the end of last semester, I heard that there was going to be a history class geared towards uncovering the history of the College, with special emphasis placed on the individualized nature of the class, as is essential for a Praxis course. I have always had a special fondness for studying Bryn Mawr’s history and exploring the grounds; over the course of my nigh four years here, I have spent many hours coordinating with my fellow Traditions Representatives in preparation for beloved events such as Lantern Night and Welcome The First Years Week. Last semester, I delved into the archival history of Bryn Mawr College through the Children’s Books 360 course cluster, centered on the Ellery Yale Wood ’52 Collection of Children’s and Young Adult Literature. As such, the opportunity to research the history of the College in a Praxis course ignited my enthusiasm for discovering more about the changes and continuities over the course of Bryn Mawr’s 135-year history. As I would come to understand, however, choosing a path for my independent research project would not come as easily as I had thought it would.

Choosing a particular facet of history to research seemed like a daunting task. As I searched the reference section in Canaday Library for inspiration, I found myself drawn to Offerings to Athena, a reference book which highlights important events and trends in the College from its founding days to 2010. As I poured over the book’s glossy, colorful pages, I came across a short entry describing Neo-Pagan/Wiccan life on campus in the 1980s. It was within that page that the embers of my curiosity burst into a wildfire of inspiration and the drive to acquire more knowledge about the life experiences among Bryn Mawr’s Pagan students. As a Pagan student myself, I have a special interest in learning about what life was like for others like me. Elements of Pagan tradition are present all over the College, from the honoring of May Day celebrations every year to mark the end of the academic year to the presence of Athena statues in the Great Hall and Rhys Carpenter Library. Let us not forget the bust of Juno that also resides in Carpenter or the face of the Green Man in the fountain of Taft Garden. But the Pagan imprint of Bryn Mawr College goes beyond architecture and symbols.

For my research project, I aim to explore the ways in which Pagan life and traditions on campus have been sustained or undergone change over time, with special attention dedicated to incidents where Pagan students and traditions have been misunderstood. It is to my belief that building a timeline of student life among Pagan students is important in the effort to organize and acknowledge the lesser-known histories of Bryn Mawr College. I know that I am far from the first Pagan student to walk through its welcoming archways and I know in my heart that I will not be the last to find home within these walls. Creating such a project will ultimately help other students who are interested in learning about the campus’ religious and spiritual diversity, particularly as it concerns its changes and continuities through the ages. In particular, this project could prove to be a valuable resource for other Pagan/Wiccan students who are searching for community and for a place to start learning about Bryn Mawr’s lesser-known Pagan histories.

— Maria Mitiuriev, Class of 2020

Emma Ruth Burns — Blog Post 1

Topic: Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) at Bryn Mawr College.

Methods: I worry that I will have to trace the students back through individual connections. This is okay for more recent graduates — I know a number of them myself — but I’m particularly interested in the students who were at Bryn Mawr during or before the 70’s (if there were any).

The main questions I want to answer are:

— What has been the experience of LDS students at Bryn Mawr? how has their experience changed their faith, or their faith changed their experience?

I might get into some of a:

— How did spirituality and rational inquiry become separate? why? what were the processes that went into this?

 

Side note:

This is the Mormon Hoop, a grassroots archive of LDS students from the class of 1999 to the present.

Post #2: Reading M. Carey Thomas’s 1916 Address at the Opening of the College -Catherine Lin

This week I chose my research topic: the Chinese Scholarship at Bryn Mawr, which awarded a full scholarship to one foreign Chinese student per year. When I first found out about the existence of the Chinese Scholarship from Offerings to Athena, I was surprised because I was aware that she had made a speech to the student body articulating her eugenicist and white supremacist beliefs. I wondered at the contradiction between her white supremacist beliefs and her support for foreign Chinese, inviting them to learn here in stark contrast with her hostility toward African-American and Jewish students. Upon actually reading the speech in full, I was struck by how much racism pervaded every aspect of her beliefs. Even Quaker pacifism had a racial justification: War kills off a generation’s best people, causing the degeneration of the gene pool. 

However, she also mentioned positive views about China, showing disdain toward Chinese culture but not Chinese people. Saying that “an unchanging tradition of inconceivably difficult and preposterous learning has kept an extraordinarily intellectually gifted people shackled and stationary while the world of intellect has passed it by,” she seemed to imply optimism that Chinese people were capable of equalling Westerners if they were exposed to the right education. 

Later in the speech, she decries the “headlong intermixture of races” and the wave of southern European immigration to the U.S. At this point in time, the Chinese Exclusion Act had already been in place for many years, so it makes sense that she would not have mentioned Chinese immigration or felt threatened by it. Still, I would be curious about her views on Chinese immigration and whether she would have deemed Chinese an appropriate race to settle in America, much like the “singularly gifted even if politically unsuccessful Irish and Welsh.” 

Post #1: Embodied Ideology in Physical Spaces -Catherine Lin

While brainstorming research project ideas, I took a look at the student projects featured on the Alfred M. Greenfield Digital Center website. One of these was We Are/We Have Always Been: A Multi-Linear History of LGBT Experiences at Bryn Mawr College, 1970-2000, which included a section on a 1988 bathroom graffiti incident describing how students had covered the Campus Center bathroom walls with pro-lesbian graffiti. The administration responded by painting over the graffiti. This reminded me of a small mention in one primary source printed in Offerings to Athena about feminist bathroom graffiti. I found these traces of how students took control of and altered physical spaces interesting because of how the architecture of Bryn Mawr is so infused with ideology. The idea of physical interventions made me think of the art in the servant tunnels I had seen during the Black at Bryn Mawr tour, and of how M. Carey Thomas had played a major role in influencing the Jacobean Gothic style that predominates at BMC. I thought it would be interesting to explore how community members, whether administrators or students, transformed physical space as a means of ideological expression, and when these transformations were contested.