Author Archives: Nicole Steck

My name is Betty Jo Braithwaite (an actual student’s name from the 1952 yearbook). I am a student from Salem, Virginia. I grew up on a farm and am the first in my family to attend college. While at Mary Washington College, I want to learn how to be a lady and (hopefully!) earn my […] Continue reading →

Class possibilities The class will be 30-45 minutes Not going to be entirely lecture-based. Debate (home ec class? education? history?)        – as 1950s college students – whether women should work outside the home?                    good because could be framed within multiple disciplines Upper vs. […] Continue reading →

POSSIBILITIES FOR CLASS CONTENT: Registration/introduction to college Combination of registration and Discovery Day-type events with professors & students advocating for particular classes/departments/majors. Discussion/leading a class Home ec class: “care and feeding of a husband”     [4/5/12 8:47 AM: ETA – Comments were being held for moderation before. I think/hope I have changed the settings […] Continue reading →

The group page for our decade, the 1950s, discusses several facets of the life of a Mary Washington woman throughout that decade. The website explores academic aspects of life at Mary Washington, including the role of technology in the classroom and notable faculty members; social aspects, including traditions and the all-important theatre experience. Please feel […] Continue reading →

The bonds forged at Mary Washington were without a doubt strong ones, as the alumni newsletters reflect. Class agents from certain classes wrote updates for each newsletter, referring to their fellow graduates as “girls” and “our gals.”[1. Alumnae Newsletter of Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia, Fall 1956, at the Internet Archive, http://archive.org […] Continue reading →

Faculty minutes have proven themselves to be an invaluable source of information, not only on the academic setting at the time, but also on the external pressures that informed the course of study for Mary Washington women. The most notable example of external pressures affecting the course of study of women in the 1950s is […] Continue reading →

The similarities, more than the differences,  were what struck me about the black and white women welfare reformers. The similarities in morality–or, indeed, in moralizing–of those women was perhaps the most striking to me. Despite what Gordon calls differences in orientation, and even despite differences in beliefs regarding married women’s working and other moral-political issues, […] Continue reading →

We had a group meeting on February 9th to discuss our blog! Layout/setup: Had a hard time deciding on URL; finally decided on a fairly dry URL (mwc1950s) Pages we want: What courses were available Popular courses. “Machine classes” & technology in the classroom. Popular majors Changes in majors—what majors have been integrated into others […] Continue reading →

This week I gave the Digital Archive a break and ventured into the Special Collections room for the first time, to take a look at the faculty files. At UMW, the faculty files include different things for different professors, depending on how significant a role they played in shaping the school, their tenure here, and […] Continue reading →

For my portion of our group project on UMW in the 1950s, I am going to be working mostly with the alumni magazine (the Mary Washington College Alumnae News) and “faculty files.” As of now, I am planning on working more with Alumnae News than I am with faculty files, although as the semester progresses […] Continue reading →