{"id":23161,"date":"2018-07-18T09:13:57","date_gmt":"2018-07-18T17:13:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wpmu.library.oregonstate.edu\/osu_archives\/?p=23161"},"modified":"2018-07-18T09:13:57","modified_gmt":"2018-07-18T17:13:57","slug":"womens-words-womens-work-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/2018\/07\/18\/womens-words-womens-work-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Women’s Words, Women’s Work: Part One"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is part one of a two-part series discussing the recently installed exhibit, “Women’s Words, Women’s Work.”\u00a0 The exhibit will be on display through December 2018 and explores the social and cultural expectations that have framed women’s experiences on the Oregon State campus over 150 years.\u00a0 The exhibit makes extensive use of SCARC’s manuscript, photograph and oral history collections.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

\"Women_s_Exhibit_Kiosk_Slide\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Tell me a little bit about the exhibit and what provoked you to pick it as a theme?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rachel Lilley: The impetus\/catalyst for the exhibit was, I believe, OSU\u2019s celebration of its sesquicentennial, combined with the applicability of Tiah\u2019s and Chris\u2019s HC 407 content. I didn\u2019t play a role in picking the theme, but I suppose that I helped refine it (and how we would break it up).<\/p>\n

Chris Petersen: The exhibit emerged out of an honors colloquium class that Tiah and I taught during Winter 2018 called \u201cOSU, Women and Oral History: An Exploration of 150 Years.\u201d The class focused on oral history methods and theory, using women\u2019s history at OSU as its historical grounding. We uncovered and shared a lot of interesting themes over the course of the class and pretty quickly began thinking about repurposing and further exploring these themes in an exhibit. At some point we also made contact with the President\u2019s Commission on the Status of Women who agreed to fund a student position to support the exhibit.<\/p>\n

Tiah Edmunson-Morton: That\u2019s a hard question to answer succinctly.<\/p>\n

From a practical standpoint, Chris and I taught an Honors College class winter 2018 that focused on gathering OSU women\u2019s oral histories. The final product for the students was an indexed oral history and an online portal to their interviews as well as other interviews we\u2019d identified in the SCARC collections. The upshot is that both of us were thinking A LOT about women\u2019s experiences at OSU, and when it turned out that we needed a spring exhibit I said, \u201cthis will be easy, we\u2019ll just copy all the class content.\u201d Chris has worked with me for a while, and I think he knew that I wouldn\u2019t make it \u201ceasy.\u201d Concurrently, during winter term we had some good opportunities to share our class plans with others, including the leadership in the President\u2019s Commission on the Status of Women. They had plans to create an online gallery of women, so we piggybacked onto that idea and included an online component to the physical exhibit. PCOSW offered some money for a student intern position and the library expanded Rachel\u2019s position to full-time for two months. All of a sudden, we had an actual exhibit team!<\/p>\n

\"c5be2ab2e6bfd84481172c8efa7e55e9\"<\/a>The more complicated part of the answer is that I have long been interested in women and representation, especially as it pertains to archival collections and the historical record. It\u2019s unsurprising to many that women\u2019s work (academic research or otherwise) often isn\u2019t recorded in archives \u2013 for lots of reasons, but the main being that many of these women weren\u2019t doing work that was deemed \u201cappropriate\u201d or \u201cscholarly\u201d enough to be included in an archive. It\u2019s also the case that there is a disproportionate number of men in positions of leadership or power, so when archivists are making priority lists for \u201cdistinguished faculty\u201d women just aren\u2019t on that list. There are exceptions, but for the most part, other than in their role as students, the work that women have done at this university has been in clerical or staff support roles; often, that means they don\u2019t leave behind file cabinets full of memos or research reports.<\/p>\n

In 2013, I established the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives, an initiative that documents a VERY male dominated field. The women in these industries are called on pretty regularly to talk about \u201cbeing a woman in a male dominated field,\u201d but often not asked deeper questions about their lives or experiences. So\u2026 over the past several years, I have come to think of oral history as a powerful tool for recording the stories of these women, and I\u2019ve found that by continuing to focus on gathering their stories in addition to the stories of the men in the industry, I talk more about gender than I have since my time as an English Lit graduate student.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What was your role in curation of the exhibit?<\/strong><\/p>\n

CP: Many of the visuals and some of the themes used in the exhibit emerged from work that I did for the honors class. I also drafted the first iterations of four of the panels, created the videos that run on a loop in both cases, and built the companion web exhibit.<\/p>\n

TEM: I was the exhibit lead\/project manager. This meant I had the 40,000 ft view of what was going on, but also knew the minutia. I was the point person for calling meetings, doing much of the initial selection, hiring and working with the intern, working with Clara on graphic design (colors, font, layout, etc), working with\/checking in with Rachel on her collections research, working with Chris on the web site, working with Natalia to coordinate printing, materials prep, and designing and installing the physical exhibit.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

How did “Women’s Words, Women’s Work” differ from other exhibits you have worked on in the past?<\/strong><\/p>\n

RL: The sheer scope of it. This was larger, by far, than any other exhibit I\u2019ve worked on in the past, both physically and intellectually. I also found myself very emotionally invested in this exhibit, to a degree that I\u2019ve never been in the past. It was both heart-breaking and disheartening at times \u2013 when we had to leave women out of the main display, or to read stories that made it clear that, though we’ve come a long way, there are so many things that remain the same.<\/p>\n

CP: There were a lot more people involved than is usually the case. Also, we created a companion web exhibit<\/a> and LibGuide<\/a>, which has not been done in the past either.<\/p>\n

\"Female<\/a>

Female students in an auto mechanics class, 1918<\/p><\/div>\n

TEM: We\u2019re living in a time when gender relations, harassment, rights, et al, are in the national and international news regularly. The #metoo and #timesup movements have given many of us a framework within which to discuss these issues and our own experiences. And I thought it was important that we (SCARC) brought these conversations into the OSU150 commemoration year.<\/p>\n

We had super interesting conversations as an exhibits team about issues of item selection, but also deeper conversations about things like the title and the colors (purple, yellow, white for Suffrage). \u201cWomen\u2019s Work\u201d carries multiple meanings for people, and I advocated for us embracing that ambiguity and pushing people to engage with what \u201cWomen\u2019s Work\u201d means on a symbolic and practical level. What is women\u2019s work, what work were women allowed\/banned from doing, what work just wasn\u2019t feasible for a single mom, etc.<\/p>\n

This exhibit felt deeply personal, both as a mid-career \/ mid-forties woman, but also as the mother of a teenaged daughter. I want us to have these hard conversations about intended\/unintended behaviors\/messages and to look deeply at how much gender inequality is STILL built into the very structures in which we exist. Not everyone who has a gender bias is a bad person, but I\u2019m ready for us to look critically (again) at gender expectations as it pertains to roles, behaviors, abilities, voice, opportunities, etc. What are the choices we didn\u2019t even know we had to make? What do we never think to even try?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’m sure there was a lot of material to choose from and sift through.\u00a0 How did you narrow items down to those displayed?<\/strong><\/p>\n

CP: Most of the visuals that we used for the honors class were mined from Larry\u2019s pictorial history of OSU or from Oregon Digital sets with which I was already familiar. Many of these images were repurposed for the exhibit, though Tiah, Rachel and Natalia did a lot of digging to find more. I was not really involved with that component of the work.<\/p>\n

\"Students<\/a>

Students working in the Secretarial Science lab, 1951<\/p><\/div>\n

RL: This was the most difficult part. For me, as classified staff, I had a natural bias and affinity to the \u201ceveryday\u201d women of OSU \u2013 the women who toiled away as \u201csecretaries\u201d for 50 years and then went unidentified in the photos taken at their retirement parties. If it were up to me, every concourse in the library would be covered in their photos and stories. But we tried to do our best to tell the stories of both the recognized agents of change, you could say, and the lesser known\/unrecognized women.<\/p>\n

TEM: I literally had a binder full of women, printouts of every picture anyone found and loved. I carried it around with me like some sort of talisman! I did part with the binder for a few days and left it up in a staff and student space for people to note which were their favorite images. I had my favorites, but it was cool to feel like others were chosen by the group.<\/p>\n

It also helped that I knew we could put all the images in the online gallery.<\/p>\n

I have dreams of making a more official binder(s) to put in the gallery in the fall. We\u2019ll be having some public events then, so I have some time to recover from the installation and start thinking about the exhibit again!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is part one of a two-part series discussing the recently installed exhibit, “Women’s Words, Women’s Work.”\u00a0 The exhibit will be on display through December 2018 and explores the social and cultural expectations that have framed women’s experiences on the Oregon State campus over 150 years.\u00a0 The exhibit makes extensive use of SCARC’s manuscript, photograph […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9435,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[233190],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-page"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paNHDP-61z","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9435"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}