Clip from "Stuff You Missed in History Class": MIT had started holding classes in a building on Boylston Street in Boston's Back Bay in 1865. There was just one problem. The Institute had not admitted any women as students. And it wasn't sure that it wanted to. [ROCK MUSIC]
You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with-- and this is going to be a long one-- with LJB, CT, Alex McGee, Marlee Givens, and Fred Rascoe. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you tune in for, we hope you dig it.
Today's show is called "Representation and Recognition-- The Women@MIT Archival Initiative."
I think that's the first "at" symbol that we've had in a title.
I think so. I think it threw me off. March is recognized as Women's History Month. And funny enough, the timing has us here on the show on International Women's Day.
So it seems like maybe this was planned.
Guilty.
In that spirit, today we're going to talk with Thera Webb, the Women@MIT project archivist. And we should probably mention Thera's predecessor in this role of project archivist was our own Alex McGee.
Yes. And I'm so happy I got to use the show as a chance to check in with Thera about the Women@MIT Archival Initiative, answering all the big questions about what it is, what's been going on with the initiative, and the very cool women at MIT fellowship. Also just some ruminating on why women's history and women's collections matter in libraries and society as we are here on International Women's Day. CHARLIE BENNETT: Here and here for it.
And our songs today are about preserving the stories of women, archives and libraries as inspiring spaces, and rats.
Marlee, did something throw you off?
No. Rats.
Rats?
And rat brains.
What?
Yep. I'm looking forward to that, actually. Anyway, we start with a song about how sometimes things aren't as robust as we need them to be. Archivists are working to make the representation of women scientists in our collections more visible because historically, that representation has been paper thin. So let's start with "Paper Thin" by Betty and the Werewolves right here on Lost in the Stacks.
[BETTY AND THE WEREWOLVES, "PAPER THIN"]
That was "Paper Thin" by Betty and the Werewolves. Our show today is called Representation and Recognition. And our guest is Thera Webb. We started with an introduction to what the Women@MIT Archival Initiative is and all the cool stuff it covers.
So Tara, thanks for being with us today. Kind of just want to go through Women@MIT, talk about the background of the Women@MIT Archival Initiative, what the goals are, why does it exist.
Well, I feel like you might have a better grasp on that than me, Alex. You were in the position beforehand. But my understanding is that around 2018, the archivist who was working at MIT at the time had noted that there were quite a few important women faculty who were nearing retirement age and had also noted that there was a real lack of materials related to women faculty in our collections. We have collections of the research of faculty throughout MIT.
And a lot of them are men, which is both because we have more men faculty than more women faculty but also because women have tended to be less likely to donate their materials without there being some outreach from archivists to let them know that, in fact, their work is important and valuable and will be important for researchers who are interested in the historical record later.
So Liz, who was archivist at the time, put forward a proposal for a pilot program focusing on the history of women at MIT. And that pilot program has been running from about 2019 until now. Alex had the position first for a few years. And then when she left, I took it over. And as a pilot program, it is slated to wrap up next year, 2025, because it was funded by donors who understood the importance of preserving the history of women.
And this is a trial to see if it's something that MIT will continue to fund.
Were you around when it started? Did you see the beginning?
I was not. I was in library school. And I was working at Harvard at the time. But I actually saw the job posted in 2018 and applied.
And you did?
Yeah. I applied for it. But I was still in library school. I had no experience. But I was like, this is such a cool sounding job. And so when it became listed again, I was like, this is it. I'm going to get the job this time. And so I reapplied. And I had been working at MIT at that point, so I was an internal candidate. And I got the job, and I started in 2022.
Wait a minute. That job description in 2018, Alex, is that the one that you actually got?
That's the one that I got. Yeah. So I actually applied September 2018. And classic academia, long story short, I started in March of 2019, so seven months later. So--
So you scheduled this interview to check in on Thera's work.
Basically. Yeah.
Thera, are you in any way worried about having to get to the end of the pilot part of this project?
When you're working with an indefinite timeline, it's hard to plan projects. The thought is that hopefully it will be a project that continues, and then I can do some of these bigger plans. But I have to scope out shorter-term projects and longer-term projects. And it's a lot of planning. I would like to continue the work. I think it's important. And there's so much work. Archives are so large. We talk about collections in terms of linear feet or cubic feet.
And so one box, a moving box, is one linear foot. And that's hundreds of pages of paper. And so you're dealing with just mountains and mountains of paper and materials. And it takes quite a long time to work on a project of that kind of size.
Do you have anyone helping you?
I have had some interns from various library schools who will come and do a semester-long project, which is amazing. We also have student workers who are undergrads and grad students who are interested in working 10 hours a week at the library or the archives. And they're really great. Especially in terms of having a collection where people have very specialized research-- we have a collection from a biologist, and I'm not a biologist.
I don't know what a lot of this terminology means or her notes on her folders. And so we had a biology undergrad who was working on the collection and kind of interpreting things for us so that we could make her material more understandable and discoverable to researchers. So I think that's a really great thing about being at MIT is having these students with these areas of expertise that a humanities person just doesn't have.
Has there been interest that just bubbled up around campus in the project?
I've been talking to some student groups. We have a couple of-- there's the Women's Independent Living Group, which is off campus but MIT owns housing for women students. And knowing that there's an archivist who's really dedicated to preserving the history of women at MIT means that they reached out to me and were like, hey, we have all these photo albums. Would you like them?
And so that's a great way to build community and spread the word that archives are a place that students can think about putting materials related to their activities. CHARLIE BENNETT: I've heard so far three major areas of responsibility that you have would be processing the actual collections, supporting the larger purpose of the project, and then outreach or advertising. Is that everything? That should be. But is that everything you do?
I do also provide some reference assistance just because I have sort of a specialized depth of knowledge about some of our collections. So we had a researcher who was interested in this woman, Carolyn Parker, who was a Black physicist who worked on the Dayton Project, which was a nuclear bomb situation. And she attended MIT as a graduate student in the early '50s, and she died in 1966 from radiation poisoning. And we have very little on her.
She's kind of a complete mystery in terms of archival materials at any of the schools that she attended. I got to do a little research project and dig through other collections that I thought might have information that could be relevant for this researcher. So that's another aspect is sort of assisting with reference. MIT is lucky because we have people who do specialize specifically in reference and helping people who are researchers.
And then I'll just kind of swoop in if I see one that is directly related to women. CHARLIE BENNETT: In that example, when the person died in 1966, it's a long time ago, but it's still recent enough that there are people alive who would have known her and worked with her. Do you seek out oral histories or interviews or things like that? Not in that specific case. But we do actually have a couple of oral history collections.
The most active, I think, that's still currently collecting is the Margaret MacVicar AMITA Oral History Collection. AMITA is the Association of MIT Alumni, the women alums. And they have this program where every year undergrad students will sign up to do an interview with a woman who graduated from MIT earlier. So they're interviewing women who graduated in the '30s, the '40s, up through the 2000s, which is now a long time ago for our current students.
And it's just sort of like asking them questions about their experiences as a woman at MIT, as a woman scientist. They're really great. We have a ton of them.
The cool thing about those interviews too is they fill in a lot about what it was actually like to be a woman at MIT during all these periods, which that sometimes gets lost, especially the early women. They talk-- it was not a fun time to be at MIT necessarily. So those interviews, they share a lot. And I think it's a good perspective for the folks doing the interviews. That's a cool collection.
Speaking of women's experiences at MIT, AMITA also has a collection of 1906 and 1916 surveys from women grads. Because MIT's first woman student graduated in 1873. So we've had women at the school for a very long time.
And so we have women who graduated in 1900 either listing like the work they've done or stating that they got married as soon as they left school and have actually-- either feel like a failure because they haven't gone on to do anything or are like, my most important work in this time before we really understand sanitation is like making sure that my child doesn't get poisoned by food that has chemicals in it.
So it's a really interesting to watch the history of women's experiences told from these surveys and interviews.
This is Lost in the Stacks. We'll be back with more history and archives after a music set.
File this set under Z110.C7R57.
[VELOCITY GIRL, "LISA LIBRARIAN"]
That was "Lisa Librarian" by Velocity Girl. And before that, we heard "The Place Where I Like to Read" by The Snow Fairies, songs about collection curators and inspiring interactions with the collections.
[ROCK MUSIC]
This is Lost in the Stacks. And today's show is called "Representation and Recognition." We continue our interview with Women@MIT Project archivist Thera Webb. I do think it's the "at" symbol. It's throwing everybody off. I asked her to tell us more about what's in the collections and the new exhibit they just opened, Under the Lens-- Women Biologists and Chemists at MIT 1865 to 2024. I feel like a lot of the items you've talked about are documents. What else is in the collection?
Are there objects? Are there any really surprising things that were in those boxes?
I mean, archives are generally documents, traditionally, although I wouldn't say I've ever worked in an archive that was 100% documents. This is going to talk a little bit about the exhibit that I just curated. It highlights some of the more unusual materials we have, which include lab notebooks, recordings of experiments, and electrophoresis, which is some kind of biological something involving gels and growing cells.
And so we have a lot of these gel sheets that are very, very old and should not have remained in the collections and are traditionally removed, according to my biology student who was working on the collection with me. But we have these remnants of people's experiments that they were doing in the '70s. And we have a couple of neuroscientists who, in their collections they ended up donating a bunch of sections of rat brains in glass slides and a random lab coat here and there.
So those are really interesting and scientific. And then one of my absolute favorite things that I found-- oh, there are two other objects that I think are my favorites. And one are these teeny, tiny little valentines created by a 10-year-old in 1905 that are the size of a quarter. And they're just little hearts that were cut out that have little sayings on them. And they're so sweet.
And then we also have a collection from Lois Lilley Howe, who was the first woman to run an all-woman architecture firm in Massachusetts. And she has this beautiful album where she transcribed poetry quotes that she liked and pressed flowers. And so this was also from the early 1900s. And they have these beautiful tannin marks that make it look like this crazy artistic representation. But it's just a remnant of things that were important to her.
Given that variety, how do you choose what to put into an exhibit?
Great question. So for this exhibit, I really wanted to focus on the lineage from Ellen Swallow Richards, who was our first woman student who graduated in 1873. After she graduated, she worked at MIT. And she ran a laboratory for women because women weren't allowed in the chemistry and biology labs because they had to change clothes, and there wasn't a changing station for them.
It was a weird thing where they ended up having a woman's laboratory, where students and people who were school teachers would come to learn about chemistry or biology, which were subjects that were pretty new at the time. So they were probably going in to teach them to students without actually knowing anything about them. And so I wanted to, in this case, look at specifically women who worked in biology or chemistry.
And then from there, it was kind of whatever was visually engaging and sort of politically engaging. Also I wanted to make sure that I was marking the first of both faculty and students, which could be the first Black woman to graduate in biology, who was also one of the first Black woman to graduate from MIT, which was in 1968, or the first Asian woman to get tenure, which was in 1980.
And so it was kind of like a combo of figuring out who I thought had really compelling stories and who I thought had really "interesting to look at" stuff.
This doesn't have to be part of the interview, but are there rat brain sections in the exhibit?
There are. So we have 36 boxes of-- page boxes of tiny boxes of rat brain slides. Some are cat. Some are rat.
Cat?
And then there's one slide that's separate that's a human brain slice.
Which collection is this?
Hockfield.
Oh, OK. Yeah.
And a lot of those-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Wait, wait, wait. Alex, why is that an, oh, OK, when you hear the name of that collection?
First women president of MIT. So--
She was in neuroscience. She is a neuroscientist. Yeah.
It's not her brain, is it?
No. She's still with us.
OK.
Hopefully not, no.
[LAUGHTER]
But it's just a section.
Possibly her cat.
Yeah. Possibly her cat.
Most likely we'll end up not keeping all of those since I think technically they're biohazard materials. But while I feel OK getting rid of most of the rat and cat brain slices since they're sort of reproducible projects that every scientist does, I think we'll probably end up holding on to the human brain because it feels weird to get rid of that.
I'm surprised.
That'd be quite a donor conversation that-- the first female president of MIT. "So when you pass on, just saying, if you're not doing anything else with your brain--"
Slice it up. Put it in its own glass.
There's a long-running joke on our radio show that Alex has not really participated in yet-- but I'm going to get her there-- that archivists are troublemakers. And where that joke comes from is that you have some control over the material that tells the history of a place or of a group or of whatever.
Can you talk a little bit about what sense of responsibility you feel or what sense of control or whatever sense you have over that idea that you're crafting a kind of rough draft of history through objects?
Yeah. That's really important to think about. One of the things I think is so great about the Women@MIT Archival Initiative is that we're acknowledging this history both of previous archivists deciding what's important to collect. At the time, it was mostly papers by white men or papers by faculty. And until more recently, we didn't collect a lot of things related to student organizations. We didn't collect a lot of things related to women.
If we did have a women's papers, they were usually in a box labeled as part of her husband's collection. And so one of the projects I'm doing is also going through-- we have 1,318 collections currently. And I've done an inventory of every single one to identify what collections have these hidden women's collections in them.
And one of my colleagues and I are pulling boxes and going through to see what in these collections was actually created by women and how we can add that to description so that researchers can have a better idea of the historical record. We also want to think about how women's work was devalued both in homes and workplaces. And so historically, there's been a lack not only of collections' focus on women but of materials that you can access.
If women weren't in physics until X year, then we're not going to have materials related to that. And that's an important thing to note and think about in our description. CHARLIE BENNETT: Do you ever feel like you're in an argument or debate with past archivists? Not in this particular position.
Just Alex.
[LAUGHTER]
Although--
I can leave. I can leave. It's OK.
I'm not thinking about Alex. I'm thinking more about 30, 40 years ago.
I would say there have been times where I really roll my eyes at the choices that people made in collections. Julius Stratton was one of the presidents of MIT. And we have some of his wife's papers in his collection. And she's literally not mentioned in the description about what's in the collection at all. And so in this page-long inventory that I have, I have a note that says, at least add her name to the finding aid for God's sake because these are things that, to us, are common sense, right?
You want to document the full information that you have about someone's family, like on Wikipedia lists, people's spouses and children. And it's mind-boggling that they're not doing that in these findings. But they were written in the '70s, and it just didn't seem important to them at that time.
You are listening to Lost in the Stacks. And we'll hear more from Thera Webb on the left side of the hour.
[ROCK MUSIC]
All right. Bring it on home, Jessica. All right. JESSICA MYERSON: Can you hear me? Hi, y'all. I'm Jessica Myerson, one of the co-directors of The Maintainers. And you are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta. Today's show is called "Representation and Recognition."
We are talking about the significance and impact of women's collections, specifically the Women@MIT Archival Initiative at MIT's Department of Distinctive Collections, which is one of my favorite titles of a department ever. There is meaning and power to women's representation in archives such as MIT's.
We turn to Karen Mason and Tanya Zanish-Belcher-- I hope I said that right-- in their piece, "Raising the Archival Consciousness-- How Women's Archives Challenge Traditional Approaches to Collecting and Use or What's in a Name?" They say so well why the work of archives matters. Archivists of women's collections understand that a lack of knowledge of one's history has implications for any group's identity.
Recalling the long-standing omission of women from the historical record, these archivists now actively seek to document groups that have been denied their history. As archivist Mark Green states, our work as archivists is about providing the building blocks and tools for assembling and interpreting the past, history, and/or memory. Women's collections archivists preserve the history of women and help women create, recreate, and own their memories.
Hey, Lila, you want to read the set class for me? Come here. Get on mic.
File this set under identifier MS320 box one.
I think we're going to do rat brain songs. You up for that?
[MAGIC JAKE AND THE POWER CRYSTALS, "BRAINS OF RATS"]
[SYD BARRETT, "RATS"]
That was "Rats" by Syd Barrett. And before that, "The Rat" by Sean Nicholas Savage. And we started that set with "Brains of Rats" by Magic Jake and the Power Crystals. And as you can tell, those were songs about rats and rat brains. I don't know how we got here, Fred.
This is Lost in the Stacks. And our show today is an interview with Thera Webb, Women@MIT project archivist. And speaking of archives, we started this last segment asking about intersectionality and collections before discussing the Women@MIT fellowship. And I'm thinking about intersectionality. You mentioned in particular the first Black woman biology graduate, the first Asian-American professor with tenure.
How much overlap is there between items in this project and items that could belong to a Black history project?
There's a fair amount, I would say. MIT is a shockingly international school. So we have materials related to international students as well as American students of color. Our Black Student Union was founded in 1968 or 1969. And we have some of their materials. But it's sort of, as I was saying before, a situation with student groups where they're not always willing or interested in giving their material, historic materials to the university.
We have the first gay association at MIT in the 1950s, the Student Homophile League didn't give their papers to us. They gave them to the Boston History Project because that's a gay archive. And they didn't feel comfortable thinking that MIT administration had access to their records. So I think, in a way, working on records about students of color is more challenging because there hasn't always been a great history of trust built between students and administration.
And that's one of the things I am hoping to do some more outreach on, especially making sure that I do highlight not only firsts of minoritized populations, which is-- people always love to focus on the firsts, right? The woman student to graduate, the first South Asian student. But it's equally important to actually think about the ones who came after and the work they did.
And I want to really make that clear to students and faculty that what they're producing is possibly equally important to the people who really cleared the way for them.
One thing I do want to talk about that we haven't talked about yet is the Women@MIT Fellowship. Because that's something that we did the first round of that when I was there. It was a very cool thing. And you got to do another round. And you actually got to pick more people this round or more projects. We only did one project when I was there. So I do want to give you some time to talk about that.
Yeah. The Women@MIT Fellowship was your invention during COVID. And it was such a great idea as a way to have nontraditional researchers like artists or computer programmers or what have you come and do archival research and use it for a project. Because so frequently people are like, oh, only historians use archives. But there's so much material. And some of it's so weird and interesting that more people should be using it, as far as I'm concerned.
So the first winners created a very cool interactive video game using materials related to early women scientists called A Lab of One's Own, A Lab of Her Own. And then we took a breather for a couple of years during COVID. And we were lucky enough to be able to fund two fellowships this past year.
And the two projects were mapping migration at MIT, which is an interactive story map, which is a map where you can click on places and a story will pop up about-- the fellow who is doing that used the AMITA oral histories to-- and she chose 18 international women who had studied or worked at MIT.
And you can click around on the map to see what the woman was doing before MIT and at MIT and after her time at MIT in the various countries that she lived in, sort of like tracking the spread of knowledge around the globe, which is very cool. And then our other project, which I feel like is the most MIT project possible, is called Sisters in Making Prototyping and the Feminine Resilience.
And the two fellows who worked on that investigated the work done by women in the invention and manufacture of computer memory for the Apollo moon mission computer. And they used their archival research in contacting people who are still alive to uncover the identities of 534 women who worked on designing and fabrication of the computer memory at the factory and in an office doing research.
And then they took all that information, and they transferred it into zeros and ones and used it to make a working recreation of the Apollo guidance memory, computer memory. And I really don't know how they did that. But it's extremely cool. You can go to a little keyboard and punch in a code of numbers. And it will pull up information about a specific person. It's great.
It's so cool to see the way that archival materials can spur people's creativity in all these different ways, like a history map, very artistic computer game, and a working computer memory project.
Do you have a project in your mind? Even if you might never do it, do you have something that you've kind of thought of, oh, I would do this if I had a chance to just focus on a single project?
I do. So the women's laboratory at MIT, which started in 1876 and went to 1883-- we have lists of names of probably 100 out of the 200 women who attended. And we have a fair amount of information in these surveys about what they went on to do. And so a project that I'm doing in my outside-of-work life very slowly is trying to write a one-page biography of each of these 100-plus women and what work they did and what their lives were like.
So Thera, can you tell us about the exhibit that just opened at the library?
Yeah. Under the Lens-- Women Biologists and Chemists at MIT 1865 to 2024 is the name of the exhibit. It examines the work of women scientists in biology and chemistry at MIT beginning with Ellen Swallow Richards, MIT's first woman student who graduated in 1873, through to the present day, when many women scientists hold leadership positions at the Institute, including Sally Kornbluth, who is our current president, was the second woman president.
The exhibit has a lot of really interesting materials related to faculty and students. And there is a digital version of it, which I can provide you with a link to for people who are not in the Boston area and are interested in learning about some history about women in science.
And how long is the exhibit open for in the gallery there?
It's open through the end of June.
OK. Cool. So Thera, thank you so much for joining us today and talking with us. We are so glad you took the time to talk about Women@MIT with us.
Thank you so much for having me on. It's been a pleasure.
This is Lost in the Stacks. And you've been listening to our interview with Thera Webb, Women@MIT archivist at-- that's right-- MIT.
The university archivist snuck some of her own history into our show. Well done, Alex.
File this set under MIT Distinctive Collections identifier MC0659.
[THE TRINIKAS, "REMEMBER ME"]
[JEN CLOHER, "STRONG WOMAN"]
That was "Strong Woman" by Jen Cloher. Before that, "Remember Me" by The Trinikas, songs about remembering the stories of influential women.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today's show is called "Representation and Recognition." And our interview was with Women@MIT project archivist Thera Webb. So it's no secret in this studio that I'm a big supporter of women's history and women's collections. There's really nothing like getting to learn and explore the stories of women you admire. So let me ask everyone here in the studio, if you could explore one particular woman in history and culture's archival collection, who would it be? And Fred, you're up first.
OK. I'm up first. I think I'm going to go with Amelia Earhart. I kind of know the story. I think papers in the archives or other materials in the archives would be really fascinating to look at, maybe plane pieces or something like that. No, that's too gruesome. Marlee?
Julia Child, possibly because I'm hungry. How about you, Lila?
I would pick Marie Curie.
Oh, yeah. That's kind of a sad one, even though it's very cool. I have to go very contemporary. Tara Jane O'Neil is one of the most interesting Louisville musicians. And I very much want to see her papers. Hey, Cody, why don't you step in? You got an answer for us?
Yeah. I think my pick is Dolly Parton. I think I would just-- the music, the outfits, the charity. I feel like it'd be a good exhibit.
Nice. And Alex, you got to finish.
Yeah. So I think I'm going to turn left when you guys think I'm going to go right. I'm going to say Mariah Carey because what a career, guys. Let's spill the secrets about Tommy Mottola. I want an oral history about the making of Glitter. What a sick soundtrack that is. So that's--
I really appreciate the Mottola drop. Well done. Fred, roll those credits.
[ROCK MUSIC]
MARLEE GIVENS: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Alex McGee, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens.
Legal counsel and more rat brains on slides, provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. CHARLIE BENNETT: Special thanks to Thera for being on the show, to the donors that helped make the Women@MIT Archival Initiative possible. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.
Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks, where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us. Our episode next week features Victoria Lemos, creator and host of the Archive Atlanta podcast. And yes, it's another show about archives. CHARLIE BENNETT: Troublemakers, man. I'll tell you.
It's time for our last song today from Ellen Swallow and Marion Talbot on down to Shirley Ann Jackson and Annamaria Torriani-Gorini, MIT has been full of spectacular scientists. And we salute the Women@MIT effort to preserve their work and their stories. So let's close with "She's a Mad Scientist" by Attia Taylor right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody.