[In the 1920s and ’30s, a summer school for industrial working
women built an economics curriculum around the perspective of labor
rather than capital. It offers a visionary example of worker ed that
emphasizes class struggle and worker empowerment.]
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THE BRYN MAWR SUMMER SCHOOL PREPARED WORKERS FOR THE CLASS STRUGGLE
 
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Jackie Brown, Leanna Katz
March 28, 2021
Jacobin
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_ In the 1920s and ’30s, a summer school for industrial working
women built an economics curriculum around the perspective of labor
rather than capital. It offers a visionary example of worker ed that
emphasizes class struggle and worker empowerment. _

Faculty and students from the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women
Workers in Industry. , Courtesy Bryn Mawr College Special Collections

 

In the summer of 1921, the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers
in Industry welcomed its first cohort of students to participate in a
radical educational experiment: an immersive, eight-week program for
industrial working women to study economics at a liberal arts
institution. Participants came from all over the United States and
from countries as far away as Italy, Poland, and Russia. They worked
in factories that ran the gamut of twentieth-century industry:
garment, millinery, printing, tobacco, soap (the list went on — the
summer program’s director, Hilda Worthington Smith, catalogued
nearly fifty trades in her 1929 account of the school
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Though many students did not have a high school education, at Bryn
Mawr, they wrote poetry and studied history and science, performed in
plays and took swimming lessons. They were treated to guest lectures
by well-known figures, including W. E. B. Du Bois
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Eleanor Roosevelt. They learned astronomy, using the college’s
telescopes to marvel at the stars that urban pollution typically
obscured from view.

Emerging from the workers’ education movement and created following
the passage of the 19th Amendment, Bryn Mawr was the first in a wave
of summer schools designed to train effective labor advocates. The
goal was to engage workers in the study of capital, labor, and power
— and enrich their lives beyond the workplace. A century later, the
Bryn Mawr Summer School still offers a model for democratic worker
education that can build the capacities of working-class people.

Economics — the Bryn Mawr Way

The education at Bryn Mawr was grounded in the realities of
working-class life. The curriculum analyzed the position of landlords
and business owners over renters and workers, as well as exploring the
role of trade unions and legislation in redistributing power.
A sampling of topics
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a public speaking course included “Housing Problems in New York
City,” “Life of a Night Telephone Operator,” and “Prison Made
Goods.” The women-only program allowed students to more candidly
interrogate experiences of gender inequity in the workforce and even
in the labor movement.

Bryn Mawr looked beyond the immediately economic, too. It deliberately
fostered creative pursuits, such as music, theater, and writing (some
of which was published in a volume entitled “The Workers Look at the
Stars”). As one participant put it in _The Women of Summer_
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featuring alumni interviews: “It was a time to learn how to relax. I
know I needed it, and I know damn well some of the others needed
it.” Students understood that there was a political dimension to
leisure, and that a shorter workday would give them time to imagine
different futures.

The flow of learning went two ways. As Professor Elizabeth Lyle
Huberman observed
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students “were overflowing with knowledge of a world I didn’t know
but felt I should have because my grandfather was a fisherman and my
grandmother was a factory worker.”

Bryn Mawr also pioneered an early form of occupational therapy,
recognizing the importance of worker health to a higher quality of
life. The program hired a medical professional who analyzed the
motions each student used in her daily work, offering advice on how
they could be performed to reduce strain on the body.

The curriculum itself was contentious. M. Carey Thomas, then president
of Bryn Mawr College, had seized on the sympathies of well-off women
to secure support for the program. However, Thomas’s desire to
provide an “apolitical” liberal arts education did not sit easily
among left-wingers keen to mobilize participants in the class
struggle. In particular, union leader Rose Schneiderman, who helped
found the summer school, pressed for a curriculum that emphasized
class and organized labor. This tension between liberal academics and
labor activists endured throughout the summer school’s existence.

The women insisted on playing an active role in their education and
pushed for representation on the school’s decision-making body. Some
members of the governing committee balked at the suggestion, worried
that letting workers shape the curriculum would weaken its academic
rigor. But these voices were in the minority, and the committee
overwhelmingly agreed to have student representatives as half of its
members.

Students channeled their experiences of low wages, long hours, and
hazardous conditions into solidarity work. They fought for shorter
working days and improved living quarters for Bryn Mawr housekeeping
staff, participated in local strikes, and spoke about the effects of
unemployment at the Women’s Trade Union League conference. “I
thought economics was something up in the clouds,” one
participant remarked
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“But now I see I’ve been living economics every day and didn’t
know it.”

Participants also pressured the school to admit black women. M. Carey
Thomas resisted
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it was inadvisable to “mix reforms.” But in 1926, Hilda
Worthington Smith invited five black women to the summer school
(eighteen years before Bryn Mawr College did so), and African American
students continued to enroll in the program in the years that
followed.

It took even longer for domestic workers. They were finally admitted
on a trial basis starting in 1937. One domestic worker, Irene
Rhones, wrote
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the student magazine _Shop and School_ that she and others formed a
discussion group, meeting four afternoons a week to consider how
organizing, standards, and legislation could benefit them. Rhones felt
after that first year that they had built solidarity with the
industrial workers and earned a place at future Bryn Mawr summers.

The Education and the Professors

Until the late nineteenth century, economics was typically taught in
moral philosophy courses. Adam Smith had famously written on _The
Theory of Moral Sentiments_, and scholars worked to place economics in
social and historical context (the object of study was “political
economy”).

In time, economists sought to distance themselves from ethics,
politics, and social reform and portray themselves as objective,
politically neutral experts. They increasingly emphasized mathematics
and modeling, downplaying qualitative research and class conflict.

Things were different at Bryn Mawr. Many economics professors had
dedicated their careers to advancing the labor movement, and many were
women. (As of 2017, a mere 14 percent of full-time professors in the
top twenty US economics departments
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Ellickson was a labor economist who worked for the Congress of
Industrial Organizations and the National Labor Relations Board.
Theresa Wolfson researched barriers facing women in the workforce and
gender discrimination in trade unions. Amy Hewes helped pass the
United States’ first minimum wage law in Massachusetts in 1912. At
Bryn Mawr, she taught the advanced economics class, guiding students
in conducting statistical studies.

The pedagogy and professors had a concrete effect: many students went
on to become labor organizers. One was Rose Pesotta. Born in Ukraine
in 1896 to a family of grain merchants, she moved to the United States
in 1913. In New York, she worked in shirtwaist factories and joined
the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU).
Attending Bryn Mawr in 1922 deepened her belief that union members
could benefit from studying under the guidance of knowledgeable
instructors. In 1934, Pesotta was elected vice president of the ILGWU.
She drew on her ties to Bryn Mawr
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requesting Hilda Worthington Smith’s help to secure funding for
workers’ education in Puerto Rico.

The ongoing conflict between working-class interests and wealthy Bryn
Mawr donors and trustees came to a head in 1934, when several faculty
members participated in an agricultural workers’ strike. This time,
the protests garnered negative media attention, and funders pulled
support, leading to a fallout between the summer school and Bryn Mawr
College.

Four years later, the program ultimately closed its doors, less than
twenty years after it began.

Worker Education Lives On

The story of the Bryn Mawr Summer School invites us to reimagine what
an education to equip workers with knowledge and skills to advance
their interests could look like. Core to the program was the exchange
of ideas between students and educators, crossing class boundaries and
upsetting hierarchies of power. While it took time for some professors
to adapt, the emphasis on mutual learning modeled an approach to
egalitarian democratic engagement that the founders hoped to foster in
society at large.

In immersing participants in a world away from work and familial
responsibilities, the summer school enabled students — at least
temporarily — to experience time on new terms. Geared toward
nurturing the whole person, Bryn Mawr united participants over their
shared experiences as workers, but also as activists, as learners, as
writers, and as women. No longer isolated in their various workplaces,
they began to view themselves as part of a collective capable of
collective action.

Workers in the United States today, facing challenges such as solitary
gig work and fractured global supply chains, could benefit from a
similar institute. Courses might cover topics like systemic inequality
and structural racism, a just transition to a sustainable economy, the
devaluation of care work, and cooperative ownership structures.

And there are existing resources they could draw on. Rethinking
Economics [[link removed]], a network of students,
collaborates with professors to develop curricula, textbooks, and
workshops that feature heterodox economic ideas. Summer schools like
the Summer Academy for Pluralist Economics
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the Center for Popular Economics’ Summer Institute
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economics for social and environmental justice.

To make a Bryn Mawr for today would require time, job security for
participants, and money. Some might be unwilling to invest in a
program that could be viewed as a “nice-to-have” luxury. But the
women of Bryn Mawr showed that opportunities to create, think, and
grow as part of a community are, in fact, essential to workers. If we
want to create an economy where people are valued for more than their
labor, worker education has a vital role to play.

_JACKIE BROWN is a researcher, writer, and urban planner focused on
economic justice and community-led initiatives. LEANNA KATZ is a
lawyer interested in possibilities for work and welfare._

_If you liked this article from JACOBIN, please subscribe
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