Abstract

By utilizing unique source material preserved in the scrapbooks of Smith College women, this article examines the links between the emerging culture of consumption in the late nineteenth century, the carefully regulated beginnings of higher education for women, and the new social spaces that college women created for themselves. Scrapbooks such as these provide firsthand, unmediated accounts of personal experience and offer a myriad of evidence concerning historical social patterns. Examining one group of students who shared a boardinghouse at Smith College in the 1890s, this article asserts that their subversive navigation of personal and social space within their boardinghouse and the town of Northampton, Massachusetts, was part of a larger historical pattern. Consumption of goods and services in the company of others enabled these women to negotiate a balance between private institutional space and public consumer spaces, gaining a considerable amount of personal autonomy and independence.

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