Digital project | Princeton University | SEPTEMBER 2019 - Present
Collaborator: Sara Howard, Librarian for Gender & Sexuality Studies and Student Engagement, Princeton Unviersity
Launched in January of 2019, the Varied Activities of Women Project at Princeton University is a librarian-led student-driven initiative aimed at researching and writing about early 20th century women’s history from new perspectives.
The project uses the one-to-two sentence news items featured in a bi-weekly column titled “Varied Activities of Women” that ran from 1913 until 1928 in the Chicago Tribune, participants explore one aspect of the deeper history behind a news item of their choosing.
The information conveyed in these items ranges from the very broad (“Women working as laborers on farms other than those at home now number nearly 225,000” – Jul 12, 1925) to very specific (“Mrs. E. T. David of Douglas, Wyo. Has been elected president of the board of trustees of the University of Wyoming. She is the first woman to hold such office” – 14 Apr 1918), with each offering a peak into a larger story of women in America and across the world. These blurbs did not come with citations, nor was follow up reporting done.
The Varied Activities of Women Project invites students to dig and discover the larger stories behind these brief news items, writing and researching 20th century women’s narratives from new, untold perspectives.
A poster on this project was presented at the 2019 Women and Gender Studies Section Poster Session of the American Library Association Annual Conference in Washington DC. (“The Varied Activities of Women: Will Research be their Reward”).
At the time of COVID-19 in March 2020, there were plans to try and integrate the program into classroom curriculum. These discussions were put in hold.
