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Imagining Women's Work
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Professors Ann Pullen and Sarah Robbins are creating an interdisciplinary website exploring various types of "women's work" from 1780 to 1920. The website presents thematic clusters of images (e.g., from advertising cards and newspaper illustrations) depicting women at work in a wide range of social contexts. Short explanatory essays and interpretive questions accompany each set of images. Several of the visual elements which Robbins and Pullen have selected for the website came from research they began at Bancroft in the summer of 2001. Images Bancroft has provided for the project are drawn from several different sources, including the Honeyman Collection of Early Californian and Western American Pictorial Material.
"Four Ghirardelli factory workers," (BANC PIC 1992.036:10), D. Ghirardelli Company Photograph Album of Chocolate Manufacturing Process, ca. 1919. |
Pullen and Robbins are preparing the site with an audience of instructors and students in mind. For students, the website offers an accessible archive of primary visual documents presented with interpretative material to help viewers set the images in historical context. For instructors, the professors include copies of syllabi from their team-taught women's studies course. By integrating literary texts with primary and secondary historical material, the class provides students with multiple opportunities to undertake collaborative research and to prepare technology-infused projects on the social practices and ideologies that dominated women's work roles in the nineteenth century. A bibliography and PowerPoint presentations originally shown in class complement the image gallery and syllabi on the website.
During their most recent offering of the course in the Fall of 2001, Pullen and Robbins had students design and write presentation segments of images and interpretive material for the web. Teams of students first selected several images from the growing archive of photographs the professors have assembled by mining collections like those at The Bancroft Library and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Choosing images around which they could construct an argument about women's work, the student teams then researched their topics and wrote brief introductory essays and study/discussion questions to accompany the images. After evaluating and editing the teams' projects, Pullen and Robbins mounted some of the student presentations on the website.
"Drawing of a man mailing a box of women to California." (Banc Pic 1963.002:0458-B). |
Images acquired at Bancroft are featured in two of these student authored sections of the website. One set of materials tells a woman-centered story of the California Gold Rush. Another of the segments depicts women's work experiences at San Francisco's Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory. |
In the months ahead, Pullen and Robbins will be designing more themebased sections for their website, including one on women missionaries who worked in the Hawaii and in Africa. For that segment of the online gallery, the professors will be drawing on images from Bancroft's Nellie Jane Arnott Darling Papers and from the photo album associated with the Caroline M. and George Babb letters.
—William E. Brown, Jr.
Head, Public Services
The Bancroft Library
Volume 121
Fall 2002
Table of Contents
The Wasp: Stinging Editorials and Political Cartoons
From the Director: A Bancroft Library for the 21st Century
Imagining Women's Work Bancroft Collections Contribute to Web-based Visual Culture
Undergraduate Research: A Brave New World
Fifty-Five and Counting! The Friends Annual Meeting, April 27, 2002
Scholars in the Making Graduate Student Instructors and History 101
"Permission to Drink Anything" Mark Twain's Letters to Eduard Pötzl
From the Regional Oral History Office Berkeley Anthropologists Have Their Say
The Bancroft Library Study Awards
William Penn Mott, Jr. Papers A Celebration
Email Farewell from a Graduating Student Employee
Donors to The Bancroft Library July 1, 2001 through June 30, 2002
