| Notes | The Barnard Film Collection consists of about 6,000 feet of motion picture film created between 1925 and 1966. This footage depicts women engaged in academic, social, athletic, and artistic activities on and off the Barnard campus in New York City. The collection is comprised of twelve edited documentaries (some with titles, some without), fourteen unedited documentaries, and four instructional films for female athletesa total of thirty distinct films in all. The instructional film on tennis (#4-5, ca. 1940) is by Dorothy Harrison of Randolph-Macon Womans College, Lynchburg, Virginia. The rest of these films were created by anonymous students and alumnae of Barnard College, except for one of the documentaries and one of the instructional films, which were made on contract for the College by United World Films (#3) and the T.W. Willard Motion Picture Company (#18).
The films depict women almost exclusively, the subjects ranging from scores of anonymous Barnard College students from the 1920s to the 1960s, to the following notable American women, none of whom (so far as we know) is depicted in any other surviving film:
Annie Nathan Meyer (1867-1951), writer, publicist, antisuffrage feminist, pioneering advocate of postsecondary education for women, early patron of the famed novelist, anthropologist, and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, and a founder of Barnard College, where she served on the Board of Trustees from 1889 to 1951.
Dean Virginia C. Gildersleeve (1877-1965), educator, memoirist, Dean of Barnard College (1911-1947), the only woman member of the United States delegation to the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco (1945), and the only American woman signer of the United Nations Charter.
Dr. Agnes R. Wayman (1880-1968), writer, civic leader, educator, pioneering promoter of physical education for women, member of the Hoover Administrations National Health for Children Commission, and Professor of Physical Education at Barnard College (1918-1945).
Apart from its depiction of these and other notable figures, the historical and sociological
importance of the Barnard Film Collection lies in the quality, variety, and chronological breadth of its depictions of young American women engaged in study, sport, artistic performance, and work. Many of the activities depicted in the footage vanished years ago from the culture of American college women, making these films an invaluable womens history resource. Some of the more significant of these:
Female students at work in a physics laboratory at Barnard, ca. 1925 (film #1).
Professor Florence Lowthers zoology class visiting the Bronx Zoological Park in the 1920s, where they feed snakes, bear cubs, seals, and rare birds by hand (film #1).
A sociology class of the Barnard Summer School for Women Workers in Industry visiting a silk underwear factory, also in the 1920s (film #1).
Contests in dance, hurdles, discus-throwing, hoop-rolling, and torch-bearing at the annual Barnard College Greek Games, between 1927 and 1966. The Greek Games were founded at Barnard in 1903 and held every year until 1968, when they were cancelled due to the student strikes at Barnard College (films #1 and 16-21).
The annual womens tennis tournament; college women playing tenpins, tenikoit, and rugby; and an archery demonstration; all ca. 1932 (film #22).
College women studying English speech using the newly-invented Dictaphone, 1938 (film #18).
Art students visiting the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1938 (film #18).
Government students visiting City Hall in Manhattan, 1938 (film #18).
As colorful as the early documentaries are, the four silent instructional films are probably the most significant items in this collection from an academic perspective, especially for historians of physical education in general and womens physical education in particular. Each of the four is explicitly intended for women athletes, featuring detailed demonstrations by female experts in each sport:
1) diving (film #2, ca. 1940, black and white): demonstrations.
2) archery (film #3, ca. 1940, black and white): includes instructional titles, repetitions, multiple closeups, and slow-motion shots; produced by United World Films, Inc.
3) tennis (films #4-5, ca. 1940, black and white): includes instructional titles, repetitions, multiple closeups, and slow-motion shots; demonstrations by Dorothy D. Randle and Florence Tenney (Barnard College Class of པ).
4) golf (film #7, December 1953, color): demonstrations by Dr. Agnes R. Wayman at Pinehurst, North Carolina. |
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