{"id":373,"date":"2022-09-28T16:12:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-28T21:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/womenscenter\/?p=373"},"modified":"2023-03-08T16:15:48","modified_gmt":"2023-03-08T22:15:48","slug":"w-students-contribute-to-where-women-made-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/womenscenter\/news\/w-students-contribute-to-where-women-made-history\/","title":{"rendered":"W students contribute to Where Women Made History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Maggie Ellis needed a broader historical context.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Maggie Ellis<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Working to complete a bachelor\u2019s degree in History, Ellis opted to take Dr. Erin Kempker\u2019s Women in American History class because they felt it would help the research they were doing for their capstone project that was focused on 19th<\/sup>-century women\u2019s history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s when Ellis was introduced to the Where Women Made History project. Started by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the initiative is designed to tell the full history of women gaining the right to vote in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kempker\u2019s class gave Ellis and fellow classmates an opportunity to learn and educate others about the history of Mississippi University for Women. In all, Ellis and the class submitted two entries about The W that can be seen at https:\/\/savingplaces.org\/where-women-made-history#.Yw4MKX3MKUk<\/a>. The entries, which focused on the \u201cfounding mothers\u201d of Mississippi Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls and the desegregation of The W, were limited to 1,000 characters, so the students had to be succinct when detailing their research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe went back and forth for several weeks about the best verbiage to get the most impact with the least characters possible,\u201d said Ellis, who is from Forest and earned a degree from The W in May 2022. Currently, Ellis is working as a graduate assistant at the de Grummond Children\u2019s Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi. Audrey Littlejohn, a senior Interdisciplinary Studies student, agreed: \u201cWith so little space, we really had to narrow it down\u2014we had so much more to say, too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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Audrey Littlejohn<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Kempker, a professor of History in the Department of History, Political Science, and Geography, said her students had a lot of great essays and scholarship to draw on thanks to the work done by Drs. Bridget and Steve Pieschel and the students who researched desegregation in 2016. They then had to practice condensing their stories by focusing on the most essential elements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAny writer can tell you it is so much harder to write with fewer words than with many, so students really had to write, edit and then edit a whole lot more so that the narratives they created told the historical significance of the place but within the text limits of the project,\u201d Kempker said. \u201cIt was a task to be sure, and students debated every word in those narratives.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kempker said students voted on which destinations\/places to submit and there was a real consensus around doing the \u201cfounding mothers\u201d of The W and the civil rights pioneers, who desegregated The W. She said students worked in two teams to get the submission images and narratives completed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs a result, our historic campus is well represented in this project that aims to tell the story of American women across the nation and prove that women make history in their local communities and their contributions, though too often unnoticed, need to be celebrated,\u201d Kempker said. \u201cWe were proud to put W women on this map.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ellis said their group primarily utilized the book \u201cLoyal Daughters: One Hundred Years at Mississippi University for Women, 1884-1984\u201d by the Pieschels because everyone felt the research was substantiated and the book could lead them to other sources. She said she enjoyed working on the project and has plans to keep working on several research projects started as an undergraduate in 2021 and to seek publication for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe process was intriguing as we had to focus on how we were utilizing our words, but Audrey and I spent an afternoon early on in the project laughing and cracking jokes as we dug through historic campus photographs in the archives to try and find one that represented our work the best,\u201d Ellis said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maggie Ellis needed a broader historical context. Working to complete a bachelor\u2019s degree in History, Ellis opted to take Dr. Erin Kempker\u2019s Women in American History class because they felt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":374,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/womenscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/womenscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/womenscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/womenscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/womenscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/womenscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":375,"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/womenscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions\/375"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/womenscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/womenscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/womenscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/womenscenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}