Summer 2020 marked the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, which has been noted in many ways this year. But it was also the centennial of the launch of another significant, although not well-known today, moment in women’s history in the United States: the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry.
It might have been completely forgotten, relegated to corner of the college’s archives, if not for a Ph.D. student, Rita Heller. Although she had been a history major at Bryn Mawr College in the 1950s, “We never knew this summer school had taken place at our alma mater,” she recalled. Nearly two decades later, as a graduate student at Rutgers University, she discovered papers about the summer school in the collections of other schools with specialties in labor education, but there had been no comprehensive study of it, so she took it on for her dissertation research.
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Also around that time, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) began encouraging scholars to work with filmmakers. Heller approached the college about applying to a film about the summer school, and the public relations director agreed. “In applying to the NEH, we specified that we would hold a reunion of summer school students and faculty,” she explained. “I was able to locate a number of graduates. Many responded and sent me memorabilia, like photos, letters and assignments.” Those contacts, and the reunion held on Bryn Mawr’s campus in June, 1984, resulted in the documentary film The Women of Summer, on which Heller collaborated with filmmaker Suzanne Bauman.
The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry was an idea of the college’s second president, M. Carey Thomas, the first woman to lead the institution. “She was a formidable woman in the history of women’s education,” explained Heller, who has been Associate Professor of History at the County College of Morris in New Jersey for over three decades. “Her tenure as Bryn Mawr’s president coincided with the suffrage movement.”
As a result of her involvement in suffragist organizations such as the National Woman’s Party, Thomas’s educational views became more progressive. In 2019, historian John Thomas McGuire wrote in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies that the ratification of the 19th Amendment prompted her to “think about the need for women’s cross-class solidarity.” However, in recent years, Bryn Mawr College removed Thomas’s name from a 1907 Cope and Stewardson building on their campus, the Old Library and Great Hall, owing to her racist and anti-Semitic views.
Source: Bryn Mawr College Marks Centennial of its Summer School for Working Women
