The Reformative Power of Women's Leisure

The Reformative Power of Women's Leisure in Progressive-Era New York State, a session organized by Monica Mercado, a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago and myself has been accepted for the upcoming Conference on New York State History. The conference will be at Niagara University, near Buffalo, New York June 14-16, 2012.  We don't know when our session will be, yet, but here are our participants:

"Summer School for the Soul: Women at the Catholic Summer School of America"
Monica L. Mercado, Co-Organizer and Presenter
PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Chicago

"Girl Guests and The Spirit of God in Woman: Retreat and Reform at Wiawaka Holiday House, Lake George, New York"
Megan E. Springate, Co-Organizer and Presenter
PhD Student, Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland

"Appropriating Sherry's: Gotham, Space, and the Early Suffrage Movement"
Lauren Santangelo, Presenter
PhD Candidate, Department of History, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Nikki Mandell, Commenter
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

This session will explore places and spaces across New York State where women have spent time outside the bounds of their ordinary day-to-day lives. From rural summer getaways to fashionable urban amusements, what can re-examining these places of leisure offer historians of women?

Lauren Santangelo's paper, "Appropriating Sherry's," examines the early woman suffrage movement's approach to spaces of commercial leisure in New York City from 1870 through 1910. using sources ranging from literature to diaries to suffrage newsletters, she argues that by the early twentieth century, suffragists were strategically mobilizing Gotham's most prestigious venues -- including restaurants, theaters, and even amusement parks -- in an effort to gain support, attention, and respectability. In the process, she suggests, they made suffrage entertaining.

Monica Mercado's paper, "Summer School for the Soul," uncovers the experiences of women attending the Catholic Summer School of America at Cliff Haven, in Plattsburgh, NY. Modeled on the Chatauqua movement, the Catholic Summer School functioned, Mercado suggests, as a co-ed site that allowed women to temporarily participate in a new upper middle-class American Catholic intellectual and cultural life during the 1890s and early 1900s.

Megan Springate's paper, "Girl Guests and the Spirit of God in Woman," explores the experiences of woman at Wiawaka Holiday House in Lake George, NY during its early years, beginning with its founding in 1903. Springate explores the intersections and contradictions of leisure, reform, religion, and class at the oldest continuously operating women's retreat in the United States.

In each example -- be it rural summer getaways or fashionable urban amusement -- these scholars suggest that women transformed spaces of leisure into potential sites of political action and intellectual and cultural development.

Toolkit: GIS

GIS stands for Geographic Information System. GIS uses computer programs to view and analyze geographic data ranging from landforms to demographic information. You can use GIS to look at differences in population statistics (age, occupation, ethnicity, gender) across regions ranging from census tracts to nations; to create buffer zones in areas being developed that will protect endangered species, waterways, or archaeological sites; to take spot measurements and create a topographic map... there are an almost endless amount of possibilities.

In archaeology, GIS is often used to predict the locations of archaeological sites. Pre-contact and early historic sites, for example, are often found on relatively flat land associated with certain soil types and within a certain distance of fresh water. Using topographic, hydrologic, and soils data downloaded from the web, archaeologists can tell the program to identify these high-sensitivity areas. For historic sites, early maps can be pulled into GIS and overlaid on the modern geography to see where early buildings were located.

Thinking about Wiawaka using ArcGIS 10. The spidery lines on the map are railroads.

I'll be using GIS a few different ways at Wiawaka. These include: mapping site features (using location data taken by GPS or using a total station); overlaying historic maps and aerial photographs to look at how the character of the property changed over time; soils analysis for drainage and productivity for agriculture to think about the farming and location of buildings and utilities; and looking at who the visitors to Wiawaka were using the guestbooks and census data (where they lived, occupation, age, etc.). More on this last example in my next post!

One of the most commonly used commercial GIS programs is the ArcGIS suite by ESRI. It's expensive, though they do offer a free 60-day trial if you want to check it out (or use their tutorial to learn some of the GIS basics). There are open source (free) options, however, including GRASS which I will be checking out soon!

Presentation at the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference

This past weekend, I presented a paper about the Wiawaka Project at the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. It was part of a session on the Archaeology of American Hotels. More about the conference, including a link to the full program with abstracts, is online here.

A copy of my paper, "Resorts and Reform: Archaeology at the Wiawaka Holiday House, Lake George, New York" is available online here, if you are interested in reading it. I look forward to any comments!

Noted Architect Linked to Wiawaka

In researching individuals associated with the Wiawaka Board of Directors, I found mention that Mr. Charles S. Peabody helped design the new boat house that was completed during the 1916-1917 season.(1) This boat house is still in use at Wiawaka; with it's bright red color and curved entryways, it serves as a recognizable landmark both from the lake and overlooking Lake George from high up on Prospect Mountain.

Wiawaka boat house, designed by Charles S. Peabody. Photo by Megan E. Springate.

Charles S. Peabody was an American Architect born April 8, 1880 in Brooklyn. He graduated from Harvard University in 1903 and enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, graduating in 1908 the second highest in his class of three hundred. Peabody worked for the architectural firm of Ludlow & Peabody of New York, well known for public buildings including churches, hospitals, and college buildings as well as skyscrapers. Charles S. Peabody was decorated by the Greek Government for his work designing a Temple of Youth in Athens, Greece commissioned by the Greek Government, the Greek Church, and a group of American philanthropists.(2)

Other buildings designed by Charles S. Peabody (several of which are on the National Register of Historic Places) include:
The Lake George Club
The Royal C. Peabody Estate (Wikiosco), Lake George
A "daring" plan for Brooklyn's Civic Center
Sheldon Jackson College in Sitka, Alaska

I don't have a full run of Wiawaka Annual Reports, but the ones I do have show Charles S. Peabody serving on the Advisory Board between 1923 and 1933. His wife served on Wiawaka's Board from at least 1913 through 1940.(3)

Charles S. Peabody died on September 10, 1935 at his summer home on Lake George.(4)


Sources:
(1) Wiawaka Holiday House (1917) Wiawaka Holiday House Annual Report 1916-1917. Wiawaka Papers, Box 2, Rensselaer County Historical Society, Troy, New York.
(2)  archINFORM (2011) Charles S. Peabody.
(3) Wiawaka Holiday House (various) Wiawaka Holiday House Annual Reports 1913-1940. Wiawaka Papers, Boxes 1 and 2, Rensselaer County Historical Society, Troy, New York.
(4)  archINFORM (2011) Charles S. Peabody.

1923 Archaeology Lecture at Wiawaka

During 1923, visitors to Wiawaka were treated to two lectures by Dr. Jenkins who formerly taught at the Skidmore School of the Arts (later Skidmore College):

We always took advantage of any especial opportunity such as having with us Dr. Jenkins, formerly of the Skidmore School, Saratoga. She gave us a most interesting talk on the life of Turkish women, of which she could speak with knowledge from her own experience in Turkey; and on another evening she talked on Archaeology, which surprised the girls as being exceedingly interesting. -- House Mother's Report,Wiawaka Annual Report 1923-24 (emphasis mine!)

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday; we're back to regular weekly posts.

Conference on NYS History 2012 Call for Papers: Retreat Spaces for Women

We seek a third paper on women’s spaces of leisure and/or retreat in New York State for a panel session at the 2012 Conference on New York State History, being held at Niagara University on June 14-16, 2012. We are also seeking a chair/commentator.

This session will explore places and spaces in New York State where women have spent time outside the bounds of their ordinary day-to-days lives, and what these places of retreat offer historians of women. Monica Mercado’s paper examines the experiences of women attending the Catholic Summer School of America at Cliff Haven, in Plattsburgh NY. Modeled on the Chautauqua movement, the Catholic Summer School functioned as a co-ed site that allowed women to participate--albeit temporarily--in a new upper middle-class intellectual and cultural life during the 1890s. Megan Springate’s paper explores the history of Wiawaka Holiday House, the oldest continuously operating women's retreat in the United States. Founded in 1903 as a place where women working in nearby textile mills could escape the city for a vacation at discounted prices, Wiawaka is currently the subject of an archaeology project Springate is conducting at Lake George, NY.

Diverse theoretical perspectives and innovative methodological approaches to the topic are welcomed. We are also open to research from any time period in New York State history. Potential sites of interest include women's social clubs, artist's retreats, YWCA's, women's sports teams, and scouting.

If you wish to be a panelist, please submit an abstract of up to 300 words, your paper title, and a short biographical paragraph to meganspringate@gmail.com by Thursday, December 15. If you are interested in serving as a commentator, simply contact us. Our panel proposal is due to the conference organizers by the end of December.

Best, Monica and Megan

* * *

Monica Mercado
PhD Candidate, Department of History
Fellow, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality University of Chicago

Megan E. Springate, RPA
Doctoral Student, Department of Anthropology
University of Maryland

Girls' Friendly Society

Girls' Friendly Society (GFS) charm, donated to Wiawaka
in memory of Margaret S. Pattison.

Wiawaka was founded as a part of the Girls' Friendly Society or GFS, an international Episcopalian charitable organization. The GFS was originally founded in England in 1875 by Mary Elizabeth Townsend and was the first organization within the Church of England(1) with the purpose of serving women. Part of the mission of the Society in the early twentieth century was to protect single working girls – in Troy, often young Irish immigrant women – from what were perceived as the dangers of urban life. These dangers included idleness and pre-marital sexual activity. They also arranged educational programs for the working girls to teach them proper etiquette, various skills, and household management. GFS meetings and activities were held in the cities during much of the year, serving to both educate the young women and to literally keep them off the streets. Girl members of the GFS were required to be “virtuous” (code for virginal) and were expelled from the organization if they became “unvirtuous” by being sexually active outside of marriage. This standard was changed during the second quarter of the twentieth century.

Wiawaka was one of several Holiday Houses operated by the GFS across the country. The GFS found holiday houses particularly important, as many of the regular meetings and activities were curtailed during the summer months when the organizers went on holiday. The holiday houses were a means for working girls to experience the healthy benefits of consuming leisure and nature, while still being under the moral supervision and direction of the GFS. The working women who stayed at these holiday houses were referred to as “girl guests;" GFS organizers were known as associate members.

Certainly, many of the women working in the factories were very young. I don't (yet) have data for workers in the Troy factories, but women working in the Triangle factory in New York in the very early twentieth century were as young as 14. Single women at the time were also generally referred to as girls and not considered grown women until they married. Class status also played a role in the designation of women as girls – the founder of Wiawaka, Mary Wiltse Fuller, never married, but most certainly would not have been included in the category of unmarried women called “girls."

The Girls' Friendly Society in America Associates' Record, a publication documenting the activities and programs of the GFS from 1912 to 1914 (including descriptions of events and activities at Wiawaka -- search for "Wiawaka" and "Lake George") is available online via Google Books. You can read it online, or download it for free as a .pdf. It's a very interesting read, helping to put the early years of Wiawaka into a larger context.

The GFS remains a vital and active international organization serving girls and young women. There is only one surviving holiday house in the US operating under the auspices of the GFS; it is located in Cape May, New Jersey. There is very little academic research about the history of the GFS, and what has been written deals predominantly with the British arm. Some references include:

Cordery, Simon (1995) Friendly Societies and the Discourse of Respectability in Britain, 1825-1875. Journal of British Studies 34(1): 35-58.

Harrison, Brian (1973) For Church, Queen and Family: The Girls' Friendly Society 1874-1920. Past & Present 61: 107-138.

Richmond, Vivienne (2007) It Is Not a Society for Human Beings but for Virgins: The Girls' Friendly Society Membership Eligibility Dispute 1875-1936. Journal of Historical Sociology 20(3): 304-327.

If you don't have access to these through an academic library or online resources (most are available through JSTOR if you have a subscription), you can request them through your local library's reference/inter-library loan service (there may be a small cost for copies).


(1) The Church of England is also known as the Anglican Church and the Episcopal Church.