Scrolling Through Our Past

BY TYNAN POWER

A digital record of the School’s history

Lauren Anderson spent six months going through the archives to organize 100 years of Smith SSW history into a Centennial website.

Shana Sureck Photography

Long before the summer’s Centennial Celebration, Lauren Anderson began combing through a century’s worth of archives in paper and digital form. The result of her long labor is the website 100 Years Empowering Change: A History of the Smith College School for Social Work, where Anderson has curated more than 350 photos, videos and documents. Those digitized records represent only around 20 percent of the materials Anderson considered, most of which are housed in the Social Work Archives of the Smith College Libraries Special Collections.

“The project description—create a website with historical information to accompany other centennial commemorations—gave me quite a bit of room to define the project as I saw it,” said Anderson. “This was both a joy and a challenge. My first step was to figure out the lay of the land. Who were the important people and what were the major debates? What had already been written on the history of the School for Social Work? What were the major categories I could organize information within?”

In addition to carefully reviewing the materials and selecting the most representative to digitize and add to the website, Anderson also curated materials on key themes and presented them with observations and prompts. For example, there are two explorations of changes in the curriculum and a collection that focuses on the School’s Anti-Racism Commitment.

“With my background as a professor teaching African-American history, I was immediately struck by SSW’s commitment to anti-racism,” said Anderson. “I wanted to see what the antecedents were to this commitment. How did it come about? How has the School changed since it was put in place?’’

Anderson found some answers in oral histories from Mary Hall, M.S.W. ’66, and a former SSW professor; and Joanne Frustaci, M.S.W. ’87.

“Hall succinctly and elegantly captures three different types of racism—blatant, color-blind and essentialist—while giving potent and powerful examples of each. Frustaci details student protest around recruitment of students of color in the mid-1980s and how the new dean, Ann Hartman, responded with empathy and collaboration.”

Anderson also found the perspectives of past deans to be revealing of the challenges they faced and the times in which they lived.

“Each generation writes their history to answer the questions they have,” said Anderson.

Recordings of an alumni gathering at the School’s 75th anniversary in 1993 proved to be a treasure trove, showing how graduates from the 1930s to the 1990s recalled their time at SSW and the highlights that remained with them years later.

“They shared challenging field-work internships, valuable and contentious interactions with faculty, and about almost getting arrested while teaching,” said Anderson. “Dean Ann Hartman even shared about what it was like as a child when her mother, also an alumna, went on her field internship.”

One of the most compelling stories that Anderson encountered was in the letters between Associate Director Bertha Capen Reynolds and Director Everett Kimball.

“Reading through almost 10 years worth of letters, you can see Reynolds struggle with her confidence and authority,” said Anderson. “At first she writes about not being a very good teacher, but within a couple years she writes about how hard it is to deal with voluminous correspondence from students and alumna. Her confidence in herself, her abilities and her ideas begins to grow by the end of the letters, leading to a dramatic conflict with Kimball.”

“Not only do these letters let us inside one of the most important social worker thinkers and practitioners in the U.S., they also reveal the struggles that women have as leaders— struggles that come from the society outside of them and their internalized socialization.”

Visit the centennial website at sophia.smith.edu/ssw100-history. ◆