The Open Collections Program
Harvard established the Open Collections Program in 2002.
With the generous support of the
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and
The Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund,
the Open Collections Program enables the University to make research
materials from libraries and museums across Harvard freely available
over the Internet.
The goal of the Harvard Libraries Open Collections Program is to increase the availability and use of textual and visual historical resources for teaching, learning, and research by selecting resources from the Harvard Libraries in broad topic areas, putting them in digital format, and providing access to them through the web and the Harvard library catalogs.
The program's mandate is two-fold:
- To create comprehensive, subject-based digital collections that will benefit teaching, learning, and research
- To create high-quality digital resources which can be shared with other institutions
The First Open Collection: Women Working, 1870-1930
In the years following the Civil War, the United States underwent a tremendous transformation. As new industries like
ready-to-wear clothing, meat-packing, and consumer manufacturing developed, new cities were born and old ones expanded, fueled
by immigration from overseas and internal migration. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw markedly increased
participation of women in paid work.
Unskilled women could find employment as domestic servants, waitresses, or factory workers in the food-processing, cigar-making,
garment, and textile industries. Women with more education found increased opportunities in positions that emphasized
traditionally female roles, like teaching and nursing. Between the industrial and professional jobs, new positions were formed by
the changing economy; stenographers, typists, and telephone operators were most often women. The sixty years surrounding the
turn of the century saw increased opportunities for women. In 1870 women were just entering the formal workforce in large
numbers; by 1930 the modern woman could vote, had role models in high governmental positions, and had an increasing array of
choices in her working life.
The Louise Bosworth Collection
In addition to digitizing books, pamphlets and images, we are selecting some of Harvard's manuscript resources for inclusion in Women Working. Selections from the Louise Bosworth Collection represent the first group of manuscripts to be digitized in the Open Collections Program.
In the first years of the twentieth century, Boston was a city with growing opportunities for women. It was at the center of industrial New England, where women often found employment in textile and other factories in cities like Lowell and Lawrence. In Boston proper, women found work as teachers, nurses, domestics, saleswomen, office workers, and in other industries. As the self-described "Hub" of American intellectual life, Boston provided opportunities for the educated and wealthy women to pursue careers in the arts and letters. The documentation of working women in Boston is aided by the presence of local institutions like Radcliffe College, Wellesley College, and the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, where intellectuals and social scientists were developing new methods of analyzing and describing society and trying what they thought of as scientific ways of remedying its ills.
One of the women at the WEIU's research department was Louise Bosworth (1881-1982), a
Wellesley alumna whose work focused on a survey of the income and expenses of Boston's working women.
Bosworth's papers, housed at the
Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, provide details of the economic conditions of
Boston women, and her personal records provide insight into what was at the turn of the century a new type of professional
woman.