For 100+ years, students have been discussing the history and role of women in this exact seminar room. Imagine writing on the chalkboard. Feel the history in the dark wood chairs, revel in the gaze of the figures lining the ceiling. Each frieze highlights the ways women have participated in various types of education. Today, every honors thesis from the Gender and Sexuality Program is safely housed in these cabinets.
Pembroke Hall was the first physical building erected for the Women’s College at Brown University and became the social and educational hub for its students. In his inaugural address in 1899, Brown University President H.P. Faunce celebrated the value of the “separate but equal” educational experience for women:
“When the collegiate life of women is left free to organize itself, neither excluded from the privileges of men, nor forced into their social tradition -- and the latter is now our danger -- it will create its own ideal, and around it will crystallize all educational activity. In this realm imitation is suicide, and freedom to be womanly is the only safety.”
However, this “freedom to be womanly” was full of double standards and narrow expectations -- there was a forced separation between men and women but also the opportunity to create a separate culture. While women were offered the same courses as their male counterparts, it was expected that the needs of men always came first. Local women and alumnae had to raise money to support the inadequate funding given to the Women’s College. And even though the classes were the same, women had to take them in a separate location, at Pembroke Hall. Some electives could be taken with men upon instructor permission, but according to Nettie Goodale, Class of 1895, a dean told the women to be “inconspicuous” and “dignified” when they took classes on the men’s campus. But despite their efforts to be invisible, the presence of women on an all-male campus nevertheless raised men’s attention:
Here she comes,
There she goes,
All dressed up
In her Sunday clothes.
Centuries of struggle, triumph, and trailblazing can be captured in the space where you are standing. However, while the seminar room has been preserved, the $9 million 2008 renovation has largely modernized the interior and left few traces of the building’s rich history. In contrast, the redesign of nearby Smith-Buonanno Hall by William Kite Architects, Inc. has won a historic preservation award for its sensitive renovation from Sayles Gym to current classrooms. If you take the time to look, traces of history can be found through the lines of the wood panel basketball court on the first floor. Pembroke Hall and Smith-Buonnano Hall are examples of adaptive reuse on Brown’s campus. Sheila Bonde, Professor of History of Art & Architecture, defines adaptive reuse as “the adaptation of buildings to new functions.” She taught in the seminar room before the remodel and knew Sayles Gym before the renovation.
While Pembroke College has folded into Brown University, the building itself is a site of continual learning. Today, Pembroke Hall continues the legacy of women’s studies through providing a home for the department of gender and sexuality studies, which continues to ask questions about various forms of inequality, oppression, and identity. Asking these questions is necessary for the critical examination of relevant issues including the #MeToo movement, new laws about family leave, and current leadership in the U.S. and globally. How does the gendered experience matter in the world in terms of policy, pay, and power?
Contemporary, cutting-edge research about women happens here. And, you don't have to be a woman to take a class, concentrate in gender and sexuality studies, or engage in a deep conversation about these issues. They impact you, no matter who you are. Click the video to hear Drew Walker, Director of the Program of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Assistant Director of the Pembroke Center, discuss the importance of diversity in the classroom when engaging with issues of difference, broadly defined.
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]]>Before discount department stores became popular, New Bedford had Mars Bargainland. In the 1960s and 70s, the enormous high-ceilinged space contained a treasure trove of cut-price clothes, toys, and household items. A bit further inside the massive building shoppers found Food Mart, where workers boxed their groceries and slid them down rollers to be collected outside at street level. For many New Bedford residents, the memory of Mars Bargainland is still vivid, but few people remember this building’s original purpose. Designed by architects Charles Makepeace of Providence and Benjamin Smith of New Bedford and built between 1896 and 1917, Whitman Mills contained the highest density of looms in the region. The endless floors were relieved by tall windows, and spire-like chimney stacks exhausted plumes of smoke from the coal-fired boilers that powered the mills’ steam engines. The complex included an engine house, pipe house, pump house, machine shed, and office building, visually unified by Romanesque Revival details. Behind the mills loading docks extended into the Acushnet River, and across Riverside Avenue stood a large weave shed. The 1917 issue of the Official American Textile Directory gave a sense of the output of the Whitman Mills at their peak. $2 million of cloth were produced per year. Adjusted for inflation, this would equal more than $48 million in 2016. Whitman’s primary products included “Plain and Fancy Cotton and Silk Goods and Cotton Yarns,” produced on 138,128 ring spindles, 36,960 mule spindles, and 4,932 looms powered by steam and electric power. William Whitman, who built the mill, was a leader in New England’s textile industry for more than four decades. Whitman headed one of the world’s largest cotton textile manufacturing organizations and served as president of the Association of Wool Manufacturers. He also developed tariff policy related to the textile industry and advised Congress on trade matters. Despite Whitman’s business expertise, the mills he developed were not immune to economic pressures, and this one was no exception. Although the mill closed in 1932, the complex housed a variety of businesses including a cannery, in addition to Mars Bargainland, but they filled a small fraction of the space and employed a total of only about 500 people, less than a third of the Whitman Mills’ peak of 1,750 employees. Today, where once thousands of machines created continuous deafening noise, more than one-hundred elderly residents live in cozy studios and apartments. Named Whaler Place with unintentional irony, the development references the city’s more illustrious past rather than the textile industry that sustained the city long after the end of whaling. The floors once covered with a layer of cotton fiber now gleam with refinished wood and plush carpeting. The 18-foot ceilings are perhaps the only reminder of the buildings’ former use.
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