"Less Stockings More Radios"

Samantha Thies, Winnie Opoku, and Peter Yecco with Dr. Vanessa Rouillon

In the spring of 1941, the women of Madison College organized a strike that led to the lifting of some of the rules of conduct governing campus life. The dignity of higher education and the imagined visibility for women mandated the wearing of formal clothing and stockings for evening meals. Yet, the women resisted these and other rules.

The "Less Stockings" exhibit documents, discursively and representationally, a war period; a time of interrogating their locations, and crafting identities as students, women, and citizens. At once progressive and conventional, the women engaged their historical contexts and, most notably, the administration. The exhibit offers a nuanced narrative of student life and culture during war times as reported in the pages of The Breeze and in other student venues. It reveals what it meant to be a young woman whose studies might not have been used beyond the duties of motherhood and wifehood.  

Dr. Vanessa Rouillon and her three WRTC 328 students, Winifred Opoku, Samantha Thies, and Peter Yecco, researched, designed and curated the exhibition, which is on view until April 1 in Roop 208.