Women of Summer
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by Bauman, Suzanne; Filmakers Library, inc; Women of Summer, Inc; Bryn Mawr College. The Women of Summer SummaryReveals that from to , blue collar women participat./ia ma controversial and inspired educational experiment known as the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women. Directed by Suzanne Bauman, Rita Heller. With Ronnie Gilbert, Holly Near. A look at the controversial Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers of the.
The 90 faculty who taught at the school between and included trade union leaders as well as distinguished academics. In their overall approach, Thomas and Smith drew on the example of the WEA programs [4] and the educational philosophy of John Dewey , [15] with a strong emphasis on diversity and democratic process.
They intentionally brought together representatives of widely disparate constituencies: Another remarked that "to her the summer work, the mingling with the representatives of many industries, of many localities, of many points of view, had brought home the conviction that the problem of each working woman was the problem of all, the problem of all that of each. Initially the program of study was extensive, and workers with little formal education were overwhelmed. Over time, with input from the students, the curriculum evolved to become more focused on their practical needs.
By , they were using the "Unit Method": Classes were divided into units of around 20 students; each unit had two dedicated full-time professors, one in English and one in economics. A tutoring system making it possible for workers to gain much in two months.
There were no grades or exams; students received a certificate of attendance at the end of the summer. As working adults, students were encouraged to participate in decision-making, planning, and classroom discussions.
Project MUSE Mission Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Worldcat source edition Carey Thomas warned Smith in a letter not to "complicate" matters, and quoted her late friend Susan B. For political reasons, the program fell out of favor with the college board of trustees and was terminated in It reopened in , but the damage had been done; funding dwindled, and the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry closed for good in Coordinates on Wikidata CS1:
Instructors made a point of learning as much as they could about each student's background and individual needs. In addition to regular classes, students attended talks by an impressive array of guest lecturers, including John Dewey , [15] W.
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In , at the suggestion of the students, Hilda Worthington Smith admitted the first five African-American students to the summer school. The decision was a controversial one, given that the college had never admitted a black student. Carey Thomas warned Smith in a letter not to "complicate" matters, and quoted her late friend Susan B.
From the very first year, the working women who came to Bryn Mawr gave school administrators more than they bargained for. In they organized a student protest, demanding better working conditions for the college's black maids and groundskeepers. In the s, the Depression heightened class tensions between the politically active students and Bryn Mawr's wealthy donors and trustees.
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One trustee posed the telling question, "Why should we support your organizing workers to strike our husbands' plants? In , when students and faculty visited the nearby Seabrook Farms food-packing plant to observe a strike of agricultural workers, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Bryn Mawr was involved in the strike. Alarmed by the publicity, the trustees suspended the summer school for a year.
It reopened in , but the damage had been done; funding dwindled, and the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry closed for good in Historian Rita Heller , who conducted a survey of the students in , found that while some of the respondents were ambivalent about the program's usefulness, most credited it with improving their self-image and social skills and believed the school had helped them advance in their careers.
Summer school alumni and faculty gathered at Bryn Mawr for a three-day reunion in June Several women at the reunion were featured in a documentary, The Women of Summer , a collaboration of filmmaker Suzanne Bauman and historian Rita Heller. The following notable people were on the summer school faculty. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry
The film derives part of its rewarding complexity, and its historical validity, from the open juxtaposition of the past of its subject and the present of its frame. Visually, it highlights the juxtaposition through alternating sequences of color and black and white. No attempt is made to reenact the past, which is captured through photographs, clips of film black and white , and through the interviews with speakers color. If that contrast underscores the break between the past and the present, the use ofimages signs , music, and segments of text underscore the bonds that link them.
Visually and thematically, continuity frames the core of the historical narrative that derives from the convergence ofthe first-person accounts of those who had participated in the adventure.
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The film opens with a color close-up of a wheel that initially looks almost like a water-or even a spinning-wheel. That foregrounded wheel suggests recurrence: Gradually, the camera pulls back to identify the wheel, more specifically than the generic image, as a huge wheel in a textile factory. Thus 22 women's factory labor anchors what ensues.
Only a few minutes later, when the scene shifts to the gothic Pembroke gate of Bryn Mawr College, does the full significance of that choice emerge: The film is not framed by Bryn Mawr, the middle and upper-class women's college, but by workingclass women's work. The color signals that the work continues—like a wheel's turning. Thus the film never sanitizes women's work as a past horror, but reveals it as a persisting aspect of women's lives. In the same spirit, students speak of their experiences before many of the teachers.
And a contemporary student's singing of labor songs e.
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Bread and Roses at the reunion, which brought the remaining participants together, frames many of the flashbacks and thus links them to the continuing story. The central narrative of Women of Summer chronicles the backgrounds from which the students came—with brief but telling evocations of the tedium of their work, its smell that clung to them even after countless baths, and the unexpectedly positive attitudes of their parents, notably their fathers, toward the unexpected opportunity for an education.
This quiet emphasis on workingclass identification unobtrusively punctuates the film, as in the passing reference to Bryn Mawr's decision in to provide basic food for the members of the workingclass students' immediate families in the face of the discovery that the students were harboring siblings in their college dorms in order to feed them.