Cigarettes, Sailors, and Sororities: Student Scrapbooks and the Female Experience at National Park Seminary, 1900–1942

Abstract

This paper examines the scrapbook collection in three separate chronological periods of cultural history—Victorian and World War I era, the 1920s, and the 1930s—in order to find trends of change and continuity in the women’s experiences across the four decades the content covers. Specifically, this paper examines a set of twenty scrapbooks in the archival collection of National Park Seminary (NPS), a former women’s secondary school and junior college in Silver Spring, Maryland. These scrapbooks provide unique insight into the students’ lives since the NPS students created them at or close to the time that they attended school. As sources, they provide a much needed additional set of information to round out historical understanding of student life at the seminary. Contrasting the image of the student experienced presented in the scrapbooks with that of more traditional archival sources, such as school-issued catalogs and rulebooks reveals a discrepancy between the two types of source material. The escapades of their daily life as documented in their scrapbooks seems contrary to the strict rules put forth by the college administration in more traditional archival sources. This finding demonstrates that the women at the school were creating their own spheres of independence in a controlled environment through small rebellions against school rules.