A Look Down the Well: Exploring Co-educational Femininity through a Twentieth-century Dormitory Feature

Summary

This is a poster submission presented at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

As women began enrolling in universities across the United States in the early twentieth century, traditionally masculine spheres became the site of an emerging femininity. Single-sexed spaces organized gendered behavior. One such space was the college dormitory. The Digges House, most notably studied as the site of Williamsburg’s Bray School, served as an off-campus dormitory for women at William & Mary between 1926 and 1944 under the name Brown Hall. This project employs artifact analysis of the small finds, glass, and ceramics found in a well dating to the women’s occupation of the site as well as documentary analysis of records illuminating the social world the women navigated. Grounded in anthropological theories in discipline, gender, agency, and household archaeology, this project will offer an engendered interpretation of a brief moment in the site’s past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• 2025 SHA Poster Submissions

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow