Spring 2006 Alumnae Quarterly Web Extra

This Place We Know:
Mount Holyoke’s Architecture Reveals the Changing Roles of Women

› Gender, Space, and Power (32MB mp3)

This thirty-minute podcast, entitled “Gender, Space, and Power: A Historical Tour through the Architecture of Mount Holyoke College,” is a talk given at Mount Holyoke College to the alumnae, faculty, and staff of the College in September 2005 by Jen Gieseking ’99 at the invitation of the Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College.

Gieseking is a Ph.D. candidate at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York studying environmental psychology. Her research focuses on elite college campuses, and student and alumnae identity development in relation to the campus. In the past year, she has focused her research solely on Mount Holyoke College.

Her studies of the College, its campus, and its members have transpired in two parallel streams. She performed the first inventory of the College’s architectural records and will be writing feminist architectural critiques of various buildings and spaces in the near future. Simultaneously, she interviewed alumnae who graduated in the years spanning 1937 to 2006 about their gender and sexual-identity development in relation to the campus.

This talk is just a slice of Gieseking’s work that shows how the changes in and on campus reflect and affect its residents. Specifically, Gieseking starts with the beginnings of the College in the Seminary Building in 1837, and moves through the construction of Safford Hall in 1897, and then responds to the design critiques of Torrey Hall in the 1950s and MacGregor Hall in the 1960s to show how these social and physical accounts of the campus have culminated in the cultural, material, and historical campus we experience today.

For Further Reading

If you found this podcast of interest, Gieseking also recommends the following books:

Conway, Jill Ker. 2002. A Woman’s Education. NY: Vintage.
Hayden, Dolores. 2004. A Field Guide to Sprawl. NY: Norton.
Hayden, Dolores. 2002. Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life. NY: Norton.
Hayden, Dolores. 1995. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. 1993. Alma Mater: Design and Experience in Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts.
Katz, Cindi. 2004. Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Solomon, Barbara. 1986. In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education. New Haven, CT: Yale.