Does the archives represent Mount Holyoke College as a community?

Jessica K. Gordon

The archives do not represent the Mount Holyoke community; however they do provide the cornerstone from which the community is built. The archives are the skeleton of the Mount Holyoke community. Without the material made available through the archives, we would not have any basis to define who we are today. At the same time, the archives do not define the Mount Holyoke community either.

The archives provide valuable information on the subject of student population, activities, dances, dorms, popular hangouts, friendships, class requirements, college history, as well as other fascinating subject matter. This information is the backbone of Mount Holyoke College; its beginnings and its growth. For this reason, the archives are crucial to the community. Although this is true, what also seems to be is the sensation that while the archives serve as a type of orientation to the college, it also serves as disorientation. There is so much information that once described the life here but now is totally against what the student body represents (such as picture-perfect wives with 26”waists). There are also bonds formed within the Mount Holyoke community on and off campus due to the similarities which surface as a result of research done in the archives. The connections current students make with alum are many times a result of recovered information about certain interests, movements, or ideas. This also may cause the reverse. Bonds may be broken between current students and alum. For example, current students may have an image of Mount Holyoke women in history as being dynamite innovative thinkers; leaders in their industries and all over the world, but reading about body image gym classes and etiquette/posture lectures might burst this bubble. The question might linger, were women’s colleges finishing schools are a real place for women to push the envelope and make their voices heard in the world? The archives serves as a cornerstone for all that Mount Holyoke represents, however the community is definitively represented by the current student body, staff, and alumni.