The Women’s History Program is proud to introduce the winner of the 2009-2010 Gerda Lerner Scholarship, Christine Frieman. We asked Christine to share her reflections on women’s history, her thesis, and why she chose Sarah Lawrence College:

Why are you interested in women’s history?
I’ve always loved women’s history, even before I knew it was its own branch of study. When I was little, reading about young women from other times made me feel more connected to the past.

When I went to college and began studying women’s history in an academic setting, I really came to love the discipline. The best part about women’s history, as opposed to more traditional history, is the variety of sources we get to use. It’s amazing the way you can look at diaries, letters, advertisements, shopping lists, marriage licenses, birth certificates, and everything in between to glean information about women’s lives.

What do you hope to write your thesis about?
I am going to explore leisure culture at the turn of the century in New York, focusing specifically on differences in the ways various ethnic and immigrant groups experienced leisure. In the last few decades, much attention has been paid to workers in this era: historians have researched factory workers, union strikes, and urban labor. In these accounts of labor in the early twentieth century, women play a key role. They worked in the factories with their children, walked the picket lines, and took in piecework to support their families. But these women were not sheltered from urban life, nor did they confine themselves solely to their work. Like the men in their families, they enjoyed vibrant social lives at the end of the workday and were full participants in leisure activities.

What do you hope to do with your degree?
When I leave Sarah Lawrence, I plan to work in student affairs. I’ve had a lot of opportunities to get involved with the Sarah Lawrence community this year—I’m currently on Graduate Student Senate, I was a part of The Vagina Monologues, and I helped with the Women’s History Conference in March—and these experiences made me realize that I would like to pursue a career in organizing these types of events.

Why did you choose the Women’s History Program at Sarah Lawrence College in particular?
When I began looking at graduate programs, Sarah Lawrence seemed like a haven for women’s historians. It boasted the first graduate degree in women’s history, the opportunity to discuss history as a malleable discourse, and an individualized program that would allow me to pursue study in any direction I chose. The courses also presented women’s history as a multifaceted subject, one that lay both in conjunction with and opposed to previous histories: professors incorporated studies of class, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation into their readings and discussions. This was the kind of history I wanted to study: the messy, chaotic history that needs to be untangled, analyzed, and woven through a larger framework of thought.