Does the archives represent Mount Holyoke College as a community?

Inge Schmidt

A community, I would suggest, is dependent upon shared experiences, “sameness”, and collective interests. I would further suggest that community does not exist independent of its members. For example, I experience community as a Mount Holyoke Dressage team through my interactions with other team members, and as the team members change, so does my experience of community. As such, the Mount Holyoke Archives collects artifacts from which we can develop an understanding of how various alumnae experienced community. However, this understanding is often influenced by our own experience of community.

From reading Mary’s letters, we get a sense of what her life was like, and how she interacted with the community at Mount Holyoke. For example, we know that on Hazing Day, Mary got to know a member of the senior class, and spent her day participating in activities with other first years and seniors. However, often times in our analysis of this situation, we considered the similarity of Hazing Day to Disorientation at Mount Holyoke. We looked for ways that we experience community during our time at Mount Holyoke in Mary’s experience of Mount Holyoke. That is to say, we read our own sense of communit into Mary’s experience.

Thus I would argue that the Archives collect a variety of artifacts—newspapers, various files, communications from students, pictures, yearbooks, etc. These artifacts individually reflect actual events and occurrences at Mount Holyoke. Their representation of community, however, emerges from researcher’s perspective, as well as the researcher’s ability to remove her own perspective, and consider another.