When Fannie Tash was 11 years old, she started working as assistant in her father, John Tash’s, grocery store on Water Street. That was in 1922, and she ran the store for more than 50 years, its candy counter serving as a magnet for generations of Williamstown children.
And women in the family of Roxana Freeman Duncett were among the first African-American women to travel to Liberia as teachers in the 19th century, subsequently returning to Troy, N.Y., to work in the first school there for African-American children.
These and other women in the work force in Williamstown, through 1953, are the focus of a research project sponsored by the House of Local History and underwritten with a $2,500 grant from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. The collaborative grant program is in conjunction with the Bay State Historical Society.
Titled “Becoming Visible: Two Centuries of Women’s History in Williamstown,†the project will be presented at the HLH Sunday, March 26, at 2 p.m.
Scholar-in-residence Marla Miller, with the assistance of Jill Mudgett, collaborating scholar, examined the lives of women in Williamstown as revealed in records through 1953, focusing on women and work.
Miller is assistant professor of history at the UMass-Amherst; Mudgett is a graduate student in the history department.
Miller, whose specialties include U.S. women’s history and the social history of Colonial America, completed a comprehensive inventory of the historical assets in the village center, a project in 1997-98 initiated by the Historical Commission and funded by the Mass. Historical Commission.
In the course of that research, she noted that she found evidence of extensive entrepreneurial activity by women at the turn of the century — references to women who were shopkeepers, dressmakers, store managers, peddlers.
She worked on a similar project at Historic Deerfield, where she developed a guide to women’s history that had been hidden within the manuscript collection because it was overlooked by traditional finding aids.
Miller earned her Ph.D. in U.S. history in 1997 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where her dissertation was titled My Daily Bread Depends Upon my Labor: Craftswomen, Community and the Marketplace in Rural New England, 1740-1820.
Miller also received her M.A. from UNC, and her B.A. in the History of Culture from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1988.
Mudgett, a Ph.D. candidate at UMass, holds an M.S. in American and New England studies from the University of Southern Maine, and a B.A. in historic preservation and women’s studies from Goucher College.
In her scholar’s statement, Miller said that in her research, she “found colonial gentlewomen who managed the town’s most privileged households, freedwomen who migrated to Williamstown in the years following the Civil War, cotton (millworkers) who gambled on upward mobility by abandoning factory work to open their own dressmaking shops, and businesswomen who oversaw the day-to-day operations of stores owned — and so known in the historical records — by their husbands.â€
Miller wrote that the materials could potentially “continue dismantling longstanding myths about women’s participation in the public world of work.
Calling Williamstown “an extraordinarily well-documented small-town community,†Miller wrote that the town “affords an unusual opportunity to investigate not only the ways in which women in rural Massachusetts have entered the work force from the Colonial era to the mid-20th century, but also the means by which that activity has been obscured in the documentary record.â€
“Pulling together and investigating further the clues and fragments ... yield[s] a picture of women’s labor history that will unsettle longstanding beliefs about women, work and business in rural Massachusetts communities,†she wrote.
HLH curator Nancy Burstein, in the project description, wrote that the scholar-in-residence grant enables the organization “to begin the systematic documentation and interpretation of the role of minorities and other under-documented groups in the history of our community.
“Despite the commonly held belief that married women did not enter the work force until the second half of the 20th century, documentary records from Williamstown — including newspaper clippings, census records, business directories, organizational records, and oral histories — indicate women in the work force far earlier, unsettling longstanding beliefs about the roles of women in rural Massachusetts communities.â€
“One of the most significant changes in the current approach to history has been an attempt to make it more inclusive. In the past, the lives and contributions of minorities, whether African-American, Native American, immigrant groups or women, have been neglected, giving the appearance of a past inhabited solely by white, protestant males,†she wrote.
And while academic institutions and large museums have tried to shift their focus to include formerly excluded groups, and to alter the way history is taught, that shift is “harder for small, local historical societies without resources.
“In order to present an accurate picture of a town’s past, and to be meaningful and relevant to its entire audience, it is incumbent upon local historical societies to preserve and present history that is inclusive of all elements of the town.â€
This week, Burstein said the research is a matter of “finding them and pulling them out.â€
“I’m really excited by it. As a feminist myself, I’m delighted to learn what we have in the collection about the accomplishments of women in Williamstown at a time when we thought women were just sitting home.â€
If you would like to contribute information on this article, contact us at info@iberkshires.com.
Your Comments
iBerkshires.com welcomes critical, respectful dialogue. Name-calling, personal attacks, libel, slander or foul language is not allowed. All comments are reviewed before posting and will be deleted or edited as necessary.
No Comments
MCLA STEM Week Brings Hands-On Science to Berkshire Students
By Sabrina DammsiBerkshires Staff
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — From exploring the night sky in an inflatable planetarium to measuring the copper content of pennies in a college chemistry lab, students from across Berkshire County visited MCLA for a hands-on opportunity to explore science, technology, engineering and mathematics concepts
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts welcomed elementary, middle and high school students throughout the week of Oct. 19 through 23 as part of the state's STEM week.
The college serves as the regional center for the Berkshire STEM Network, a state-funded partnership that aims to broaden efforts to expand science education through partnerships with local schools, museums and community organizations, said Ann Billetz, Berkshire STEM network coordinator and MCLA biology teacher.
The week's activities benefited both local students and the college community by providing hands-on learning experiences for younger students while giving MCLA students opportunities to apply their classroom knowledge by interacting with them, Billetz said.
Throughout the week, MCLA welcomed students from Abbott Memorial Elementary School in the town of Florida and Clarksburg Elementary School, and from Hoosac Valley Middle School in Cheshire for hands-on activities exploring astronomy, biology, chemistry and marine science, along with opportunities to interact with college students.
The excitement among younger students was evident throughout the week, Billetz said, recalling a seventh-grade physics activity in which a student correctly identified Galileo during a discussion of Newton's work and later excitedly shared the moment with her teacher.
"To see them excited about what they're doing, to have them be able to go home and talk about the experience they had at MCLA is phenomenal," Billetz said.
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts welcomed elementary, middle and high school students throughout the week of Oct. 19 through 23 as part of the state's STEM week.
click for more
Louison House highlighted these challenges and successes at its annual meeting, held at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts' Murdock Hall on Tuesday.
click for more
U.S. Senate candidate John Deaton was in the Berkshires on Tuesday as part of a statewide listening tour to hear residents' concerns ahead of next week's election. click for more
A newly opened boutique general store on Holden Street offers local and regional products along with a curated selection of gifts, wines and artwork. click for more
