History 2813F Making Waves: A History of Women’s Activism
Students in History 2813F Making Waves: A History of Women’s Activism 2022 used feminist texts from Western University’s Archives and Research Collections Centre (ARCC) to uncover the relationship between women’s activism and print. Studying transatlantic print networks, the role of print in creating a feminist consciousness, the connections between place and printing revealed by the material objects housed within the library, and our engagement with these texts as a class all brought to light the hidden legacy of women’s activism in an academic research library.
We also learned about women’s activism by working in the Letterpress Studio to create our own texts about women and print Our team of web designers, story mappers, copyeditors, bibliographers, CURL presenters, social media experts, letterpress typesetters, designers and ornament creators worked together to make this project possible. In thinking about history through creating and analyzing print, our class discovered that Western’s collections hold a rich materials on women’s activism that do not always show up in the library catalogue. In sharing our findings on this site, we hope to amplify women’s voices, deconstruct gendered structures of knowledge, and draw attention to the role of the past in shaping our present moment.
