College as Collage: Women’s Scrapbooks and Higher Education
By Abigail Droge, SUNY Cortland
How is a college like a scrapbook? The question might at first seem absurd; colleges connote an institutional heft incommensurate with the transitory, haphazard nature of pasted news clippings and collected memorabilia. An archival example from the University of Manchester, however, suggests that such a comparison might be meaningful, not only for our understanding of scrapbooks, but also for our understanding of colleges. In 1883, Owens College—the originally all-male predecessor institution to the University of Manchester and the founding member of Victoria University, the first civic university in England—annexed the Manchester and Salford College for Women to create a nascent “Department for Women,” eventually deciding, after a five-year trial period, to make the arrangement permanent. Miss Edith Wilson, the first tutor for female students at Owens College, and an instrumental leader in higher education for women, documented these institutional changes in a scrapbook spanning from 1883 to 1904, thus marking the period from the start of the annex until just after Owens College received its own charter to become the Victoria University of Manchester.[1] Miss Wilson’s scrapbook not only offers us an intimate look at the stories that accompanied the pivotal years of Owens’ transition to co-education in the late nineteenth century; it also prompts us to see how a growing educational institution can be constituted by the storytelling practices of those who participate in it.
Miss Wilson’s scrapbook resonates with those compiled by activist women in an American context, as detailed by Ellen Gruber Garvey.[2] It seems clear that Miss Wilson saw herself as documenting the Department for Women as a whole, rather than placing the focus only on her individual life experiences. Victoria University offered degrees to women well before Oxford and Cambridge, and there is an inspiring poignancy in the way that Miss Wilson carefully lays out exam results and accounts of early “Degree Day” celebrations for female Owens students in the 1880s and 90s. As such, Miss Wilson’s scrapbook, compiled from the point of view of an administrator, differs from those made by nineteenth-century college students, such as the scrapbook of Eleanor Stabler at Radcliffe College, described by Sara Cooper as providing “a counternarrative about the material experience of a female college student and athlete” within “an institution at once restricting and liberating.”[3] Whereas students might see themselves as running against the grain of the institution to assert their own identities, it was precisely with building and fostering a new kind of institutional identity that Miss Wilson was concerned. As Alexis Easley writes, scrapbooks can “constitute a form of self-fashioning: a portrait of the scrapbook creator as a woman and artist.”[4] In Miss Wilson’s scrapbook, we might instead see a form of community-fashioning as we watch the narrative of a fledgling college unfold.
As an artifact, Miss Wilson’s scrapbook is a large, worn volume, consisting of 187 pages of carefully documented records pertaining to the Department for Women. The title page identifies the volume that Miss Wilson chose as one meant for “Newspaper Cuttings”: “A Ready Reference Receptacle for Scraps of Print, from our chief sources of knowledge, the Newspapers: with Patent Alphabetical Index, and spaces for Marginal Notes” (Figure 1). This was a popular form of scrapbook making, which, as Jillian M. Hess explains, helped to structure the user’s experience of skyrocketing print culture and followed closely from the practice of commonplacing to encourage readers to snip out and save news items for future reference, rather than, or in addition to, copying them out by hand.[5] The “Patent Alphabetical Index,” in this context, is meant to organize the topics covered by such news clippings. Upon first encountering this scrapbook in the archive, we might expect to see topics listed out, such as course development, athletics, social events, or housing for women students, especially given the library catalogue note that “the volume contains a handwritten index to its contents.”[6]
Fig. 1: The scrapbook’s title page, identifying the volume as one intended for collecting news clippings. Image provided by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester.
This description, however, belies a poignant slippage. Turning to the letter “A” in the tabbed pages, a reader realizes that the index is filled, not with topics gleaned from the press, but rather, with the names of students and alumnae from the Owens College Department for Women. The “contents” of this scrapbook are thus the students themselves. But this is no grade book or simple class transcript. Remarkably, beside each name are carefully recorded notes of what the student went on to do, seemingly documented and updated by Miss Wilson for over twenty years (1883-1904). Exam results, awards, job placements, marriages, and, sadly, even deaths are all neatly entered onto the alphabetized pages, creating a moving roster of student biographies (Figures 2 and 3).
Looking at the first entry for Florence Acton (Figure 2), for example, we see that Miss Wilson has recorded details such as her time as a student, her achievement of a B.A. degree, the memo that she “presented large framed photo of Arch of Constantine to Dept for Women after visit to Rome,” her scholarship at Somerville Hall (one of the first women’s halls at Oxford), her receipt of an M.A. degree, and her position as the Vice Principal of Morley Memorial College [for Working Men and Women] in London. In this single entry then, we not only see Miss Wilson celebrating the accomplishments of one student, but we also see how Owens College took part in a wider educational ecosystem. Since a large number of Owens College women went on to be students, teachers, and administrators elsewhere, this index effectively tells the stories not just of one educational institution but of many.
Fig. 2: The “A” index page of the scrapbook, detailing student accomplishments. Image provided by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester.
Fig. 3: The “J” index page. Note the commemoration of one student’s death through the use of a black box outlining her name. Image provided by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester.
In some cases, Miss Wilson also layers public accounts alongside her personal handwritten entries by including a scrap of newspaper pasted next to a name, in order to record the published notice of an event, such as a marriage announcement (Figures 4 and 5). Interestingly, the inclusion of such clippings also calls attention to the impoverished understanding of women’s lives that might come from a sole reliance on news sources. Rather than define each woman only by her wedding, often a major life event documented in the press, Miss Wilson’s detailed notes make marriage just one aspect of a vibrant biography by giving equal weight to degrees received and careers begun. Miss Wilson’s scrapbook index thus revises a conventional marriage-plot narrative through a careful inventory of the educational and professional accomplishments of her students.[7]
Figure 4: The “C” index page. Note the marriage announcement clipping included alongside handwritten entries. Image provided by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester.
Figure 5: A two-page spread of the “M” and “N” index pages, including a newspaper marriage announcement. Image provided by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester.
Reading this index is an overwhelming emotional experience. It conveys the intense personal pride that Miss Wilson has in her students and the care with which she follows their lives long after they leave Owens College. Putting this index in conversation with the extended instructions of the title page (Figure 1, above), and the didactic epigraph—“When found make a note of”—reveals that “our chief sources of knowledge” about the college are not just the public-facing depictions we find in the Manchester Guardian, Courier, or Examiner. Rather, the college is a collective tapestry of the stories of students who have intersected with the institution at some point in its history. Miss Wilson’s scrapbook takes up Hess’s framework of “organizing people,” particularly in the sense of “commonplace books as sites of community formation.”[8] Here, the people themselves become the organization in a double sense, both methodologically and institutionally. Tracing the lives of individual students is a means of indexing a large amount of information, which in turn helps us to see the growing college as synonymous with the people who take part in it.
Three photographs in the scrapbook help to exemplify this connection. Miss Wilson includes two proofs of photographs of the campus buildings, originally taken for presentation to the Principal’s wife, Mrs. Greenwood (Figure 6). Forty-two past and present students contributed monetary donations towards the photographs, making these images a record not just of the college’s physical infrastructure, but also of its community infrastructure. A third photograph shows members of the Department for Women, circa 1894, with Miss Wilson seated in the very center of the picture (Figure 7). We could view all three images as photographs of the college in important ways. In Miss Wilson’s scrapbook, the college emerges as a collection of people just as much as a collection of buildings.
Figure 6: Proofs of photographs taken of the Owens College campus buildings, 1890. Image provided by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester.
Figure 7: Photograph of members of the Owens College Department for Women, circa 1894. Miss Wilson is sitting in the center of the middle row. Image provided by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester.
Throughout, the contents of the scrapbook are a medley of juxtaposed genres. The reader encounters everything from programs of student activities (Figure 8), to news clippings (Figure 9), to handwritten notes (Figure 10).
Figure 8: Programs for student activities, placed loose inside a page of the scrapbook. Image provided by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester.
Figure 9: Scrapbook page with collected news clippings from the Manchester Examiner, the Manchester Guardian, and the Manchester Courier, detailing the beginnings of the Owens College Department for Women. Image provided by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester.
Figure 10: Scrapbook page including handwritten notes for a planned fieldtrip to Chester. Image provided by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester.
To zoom in on one two-page spread, for example, we might see multiple registers side-by-side (Figure 11). In the top left corner, Miss Wilson includes part of a prize and scholarship list for the 1892-3 session. A female student’s name is carefully marked as the winner of the Samuel Robinson Modern Languages Prize, indicating Miss Wilson’s documentation of women’s achievements amongst their male peers. Flyers advertising two series of lectures—one on “Monastic England” (1894) and one on “The Viking Age” (1895)—not only showcase course offerings available to women but also detail the accomplishments of an alumna. Miss Alice M. Cooke, M.A., is a former student who went on to become an Assistant Lecturer in History at Owens College. Her name is one of the lengthier entries on the “C” index page (see Figure 4, above), and the flyers here continue her story. A clipped newspaper column titled “Address from Owens College” recounts a speech made in honor of Queen Victoria’s visit to Manchester in 1894 and gives particular recognition to the Queen’s financial contribution for new Women’s Department buildings.
Finally, tucked into the same page, is a program laying out events for the 1899-1900 session of The Owens College Women Students’ Debating Society, which met to debate such questions as “Women’s Suffrage. How long?” (December 4, 1899) and “Should Women enter the Medical Profession?” (February 13, 1900). (Miss Wilson served as the President of this Debating Society.) On this single spread then, we see evidence of both curricular and extracurricular student learning opportunities, the institutional infrastructure of the prize system, and the national framework of royal support. Such layered scales show us the wide range of components and collaborators that comprise a college, from student debaters to the reigning monarch.
Figure 11: A two-page spread of the scrapbook that includes a prize list (note a female student’s name marked in the top left corner), lecture series flyers, a news clipping, and a program of events for The Owens College Women Students’ Debating Society. Image provided by The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester.
To return to our opening question, then, how is a college like a scrapbook? Seen through the lens of Miss Wilson’s history-keeping, we might say that both are collages: both are compilations of documents, experiences, and stories.[9] When academics critique “the institution,” writ large, we tend to see the university as the entity being resisted, the enemy of creative, reorganizing thought. But it is worthwhile remembering that institutions, too, are made, scrabbled together from existing pieces of rearranged educational skeletons and compiled into living, breathing behemoths that only in afteryears appear always to have been fossilized. To recover the creation process of a college through the pages of Miss Wilson’s scrapbook is also to recover the ability to see our institutions as constructable. Perhaps most importantly, the idea of a college as collage thus offers us an invitation to imagine what we would like our own added scraps to be.
Notes
[1] Edith Wilson, Scrapbook, 1883-1904. Archive of the University of Manchester Adviser to Women Students. University of Manchester Library. GB 133 AWS/6/1. I accessed this scrapbook at the University of Manchester in Summer 2023. I am grateful to the archivists and to the library imaging services for their kindness and assistance.
[2] Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012). See especially Chapter 5, “Strategic Scrapbooks: Activist Women’s Clipping and Self-Creation.”
[3] Sara Cooper, “Radcliffe’s Strongest Woman: The Bricolaged Body in One Progressive Era Women’s College Scrapbook,” Rhetoric Review 41, no. 2 (2022): 95-115. 110, 98.
[4] Alexis Easley, “Scrapbooks and Women’s Leisure Reading Practices, 1825-60,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 15, no. 2 (Summer 2019). Par 17.
[5] Jillian M. Hess, How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information: Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2022). See in particular the “Books of Scraps” section of Chapter 1 (26-34).
[6] Description of 'Scrapbook, 1883-1904. Archive of the University of Manchester Adviser to Women Students. University of Manchester Library. GB 133 AWS/6/1' on the Archives Hub website, [http://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/gb133-aws/aws/6/1]. Accessed June 3, 2024.
[7] Miss Wilson’s focus on student achievements resonates in particular with Garvey’s discussion of “the ‘accomplishments’ strain” of “mining the newspaper for an alternative history” of women’s successes (196) and using scrapbooks to “fill in for the absence of information in books on women’s lives and situations” (197). Here, however, even the newspaper is often lacking in coverage, in comparison to Miss Wilson’s first-hand knowledge of her students (though we do see further news clippings on female graduates, prizes, etc, included in the scrapbook as well).
[8] Hess, How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information, 15.
[9] For more on collage as “the scrapbook’s art form,” see Katherine Ott, Susan Tucker, and Patricia P. Buckler, “An Introduction to the History of Scrapbooks,” in The Scrapbook in American Life, ed. Tucker, Ott, and Buckler (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2006), especially 16-18. As Ott, Tucker, and Buckler note, “The convergence of the dissimilar to produce meaningful association was of revolutionary significance” (17). We might see this as an apt description of the project of industrial colleges, as much as the project of scrapbooks.
About the Author
Abigail Droge is an Assistant Professor of British Literature in the SUNY Cortland English Department. Her research focuses on how nineteenth-century college students and adult learning communities interacted with literature, particularly in industrial environments. Her work has appeared in Victorian Studies, The Victorian Periodicals Review, and Daedalus.