Browse Items (50 total)

Two art professors, Sheila McNally and Susan Mangam, and one student, Cheryl Edmonds ‘67, joined the civil rights protesters who marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. In this article from The Mount Holyoke News, they describe their experience…

This list shows the names of the 29 students from Mount Holyoke who went to the March on Washington in August of 1963. Over 250,000 people marched to protest the inequalities faced by African Americans. The march was influential in the passing of…

Many college students participated in the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, including 29 students from Mount Holyoke. This photo from the march shows signs with the variety of issues they were protesting for: voting rights,…

Jeannette Marks, English professor and life partner of Mount Holyoke President Mary Woolley, was a strong supporter of the women’s rights movement. Marks and Woolley had several collies which were popular with students; one is shown here wearing a…

Little is known about this object. It is possible that it was made as a napkin for a suffragist luncheon but was saved as a souvenir.

During the 1912 mock election at Mount Holyoke, presidential candidates Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs received the highest number of votes while almost no students voted for Wilson. The student who owned this particular ballot voted for Taft. An opponent…

Before Mount Holyoke’s mock national election, where the student representatives from each state would meet to vote, the students held a mock state convention. In a letter at the time, a student explains that at this mock convention, students were…

In a letter to her mother postmarked October 25, Susie ‘11 mentions attending a mock Republican Convention. She notes that “[a]ll the girls were dressed like men, and had wigs + beards” to impersonate various candidates. Students dressed as…

Representing the Prohibition candidate, Carolyn Sewall ‘10 is campaigning for a mock presidential election by making a speech on the back of a wagon to a crowd of enthralled listeners. Drawn by two horses, the wagon carries an oversized liquor…

Mock ballots were used by Mount Holyoke students to vote in campus-wide elections every four years. Just as in the real national election, Roosevelt won the mock election at Mount Holyoke. Unlike Taft and Wilson, Roosevelt was a long-time advocate of…

This photo shows Mount Holyoke students marching in support of the Prohibition Party which was nationally headed by Silas Swallow in the 1904 election. The main belief held by the Prohibition Party was temperance—opposition to the sale or…

These flyers are an example of propaganda distributed by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). In addition to pro-suffrage arguments, they addressed topics such as arguments of anti-suffrage organizations, benefits experienced in…

In these excerpts from Tiffany McClain’s ‘01 oral history project, Barbara Smith ‘69 discusses what it was like being a Black student at Mount Holyoke in the 1960s. Smith describes racist assumptions from professors about her academic ability…

This statement from the Mount Holyoke President in 1965 shows that the Civil Rights Conference caused some tension and controversy due to its radical speakers. President Gettell defended the Conference on the basis of “freedom of inquiry and…

During the spring of 1911, Mount Holyoke students established a chapter of the National College Equal Suffrage League on campus. Slava Balanbanoff x’13, the first secretary-treasurer, hand-copied and signed the group’s constitution, which set up…