The Phebe Anna Thorne Model School on the Bryn Mawr College Campus: A Laboratory School for Girls

Description

The Phebe Anna Thorne Model School, which opened in 1913, and the Graduate Department of Education at Bryn Mawr College were both funded by an endowment from the estate of the late Phebe Anna Thorne (1828-1908), a Quaker, from a wealthy New York family. M.Carey Thomas (1857-1935), principal of Bryn Mawr College initiated the Phebe Anna Thorne School specifically to serve as a laboratory school for the graduate programme in education in the college. The head of the Phebe Anna Thorne School, Matilda Castro, was also employed as associate professor of education in the college. The first part of the presentation discusses how the open-air education in Japanese-style classrooms offered at the Phebe Anna Thorne School emerged in the way that it did. The second part of the presentation uses documents, images and newspaper cuttings from the Bryn Mawr College archive to explore the fashioning of what the newspaper cuttings refer to as “Bryn Mawr’s superwomanhood” and as the “supergirl” who took the Bryn Mawr College entrance examination two years in advance of her peers. It does so by thinking with Karen Barad’s notion of ‘spacetimematter’ and Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis.

Period	24 Feb 2022
Degree of Recognition	International