Retired history professor and former Swarthmore resident Laurie Bernstein has been busying herself during the pandemic by cataloging the articles in back issues of the Swarthmorean. Starting with Volume I, Number 1 from 1929, when the Swarthmore News changed its name to the Swarthmorean, Bernstein is slowly working her way forward. From time to time, we will reprint an article she selects from our archives with her commentary.

Although I know that middle- and upper-middle class women were active in charitable, civic, and political organizations between the wars, I have still been surprised at the initiative and energy of Swarthmore women revealed in the Swarthmorean’s 1929 issues. These women kept busy! Although the married ones were almost always listed under their husbands’ names, they carved out visible public roles, and they took their recently secured voting rights seriously.

There is much to admire in their volunteer labor, but there is also much cause for modern amusement and, in certain cases, exasperation at their apparent comfort with the racial and economic status quo.

Take, for example, this article from the November 30, 1929 issue, where members of the Swarthmore League of Women Voters staged a pageant called “The Evolution of the American Woman.”

When they created a tableau on “the Indian forerunner of the American woman of today,” these white ladies put on costumes, “grouped about a teepee,” and sang an “Invocation to the Sun God.” When they turned to “women Reformers and women entering the profession,” several of them played the roles of (white) foremothers like Clara Barton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mary Lyon, the 18th-century educator who founded Mount Holyoke College and whom locals back then would recognize as the namesake of a Swarthmore boarding school for girls. We, of course, know it as the college dormitory on the south side of Harvard Avenue.

The article’s anonymous author — presumably Swarthmorean editor Robert E. Sharples (Swarthmore College class of 1925) — added some caustic remarks about the tableau representing the “Responsibility of the Ballot,” referring to the “militant suffragettes, now happily extinct.”

The pageant culminated in a paean to “Motherhood,” clearly positioned as the women’s ultimate contribution to society, and referred to in the article as “a fitting climax to the thrilling and enlightening episodes that had gone before.”

See for yourself.