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The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry welcomed more than a thousand factory workers and manual laborers to the College between 1921 and 1938. The program provided a two-month retreat to study economic theory but also subjects, such as literature, astronomy, and music, to enrich life outside the workplace. While classroom lectures provided a liberal-arts context for the labor movement and the skills necessary for self-advocating in the workplace, alumnae remembered their first experience of life away from the smog and cramped confines of cities and mills.

With the centennial of the founding of the school coming up this spring, Special Collections has worked with the President’s Office and the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research to produce a new exhibition on the history of the school and the women who attended. Beck Morawski ’21, began working on the project last summer and will complete the online exhibition in time for the spring 2021 celebration. Her research was made more challenging by the need to do all of the summer work remotely, but fortunately important resources for the research are available online, including several hundred photographs; the memoirs of the school’s founding director, Hilda Worthington Smith; the Ph.D. dissertation on the school by Rita Rubinstein Heller ’59; and the documentary "The Women of Summer: the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1921–1938" that Heller co-produced in 1986.