Woman in Academic Regalia, Ivy League Campus, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Woman in Academic Regalia, Ivy League Campus, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Woman in Academic Regalia, Ivy League Campus, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-53DD49

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A woman in a black academic gown and mortarboard stands alone on the lawn of a brick colonial building, the kind of institution that in the 1950s had recently begun admitting female graduates to ceremonies that had previously belonged only to men. The yellow hood and white bow at her neck mark her degree and her deliberate formality—this is not a casual snapshot but a posed moment on an actual campus, the kind of photograph a woman would commission to prove she had arrived at a place that had, until very recently, been designed to exclude her. Behind her the manicured lawn and ivy-covered dormitory suggest old money and older customs, the physical plant of American higher education at the precise moment when its all-male, all-white assumptions were beginning to crack. She faces the camera with the expression of someone who has cleared a hurdle that was never officially acknowledged as being there.

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