Date Thesis Awarded
5-2024
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Open Access
Degree Name
Bachelors of Arts (BA)
Department
Anthropology
Advisor
Neil Norman
Committee Members
Adela Amaral
Terry Meyers
Abstract
As women began enrolling in universities across the United States in the early twentieth century, traditionally masculine spheres became the site of an emerging femininity. Administrative rules and single-gendered spaces organized the lives of women and men to fit socially acceptable gender roles. One such space was the college dormitory. The Digges House, most notably studied as the site of Williamsburg’s Bray School, served as an off-campus dormitory for women at William & Mary between 1926 and 1944 under the name Brown Hall. This project will employ artifact analysis of the small finds, glass, and ceramics found in a well dating to the women’s occupation of the site in the 1930s and 40s as well as documentary analysis of records illuminating the social life at William & Mary during the time. Grounded in anthropological theories in discipline, gender, agency, and household archaeology, this project will offer an engendered interpretation of a brief moment in the site’s past. This research finds that the Brown Hall women partook in self-disciplinary behavior through bodily manipulation, hygiene practices, and institutionalized socialization that reinforced feminine norms and a particular vision of a virtuous, white, female college student. However, the women also forged youthful identities outside of and subversive to institutional expectations through material consumption.
Recommended Citation
Russell, Charlotte, "A Look Down the Well: Exploring Co-educational Femininity through a Twentieth-century Dormitory Feature at William & Mary, 1926-1944" (2024). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 2119.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/2119
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