Browse Exhibits (9 total)

...the Hampshire Bookshop has always been more even than a great bookshop. Here books are not only sold but published as well. Here hospitality and entertainment go hand and hand with learning ... Here have come sailors, explorers, publishers, scholars; and through these doors have passed the living presences of the great writers of our time--appearing in the flesh for a few hours, and remaining forever thereafter in the spirit to become part of the very atmosphere of the place. Here is an institution which has had a profound effect on the cultural life of an entire region.

Richard Warren Hatch in the Smith Alumnae Quarterly, May 1941

This was high praise on the 25th anniversary of The Hampshire Bookshop, founded in Northampton, Massachusetts on April 7, 1916, by two Smith College alumnae: Marion E. Dodd and Mary Byers Smith. Dodd said that a casual remark by her fellow alum who wanted a College bookstore led to The Hampshire Bookshop. It was one of the first bookselling firms in the U.S. to be founded, owned, and managed by women. From its start, it had strong ties to Smith College. Its managers and many of its employees and Board members were alumnae, as were the vast majority of its stockholders, but is was not a college-run business. It served as a bookstore both for the College and for the wider community, offering trade and University Press books, textbooks, children's stories and toys, gifts, stationery, author readings and book-signings, and a welcoming and intelligent atmosphere. The Bookshop was a vital part of Northampton and New England for fifty-five years. This exhibition marking the centennial of its founding offers a glimpse into this extraordinary enterprise.

This exhibit highlights a few of the hundreds of Zines (9 linear feet) housed in the Sophia Smith Collection.  Zines are self-published small magazines.  The Girl Zines  in our collection were created primarily by young women and girls, created circa 1980s to the present.  The numerous topics include politics, "third wave" feminism, fat liberation, sexuality, relationships, art, music, and much more.

The collection is comprised primarily of individual issues, mostly dating from the 1990s, some of which were used in the book, A Girl's Guide to Taking Over the World, edited by Karen Green & Tristan Taormino (NY: St. Martin's, 1997).

This exhibit provides just a taste of the riches to be found in the physical collection.  For the complete list of our zine titles, view the finding aid for the Girl Zines Collection.

The legacy of the Black Student Alliance at Smith College begins in the late 1890s, when Smith's first African-American students, Otelia Cromwell, Class of 1900, and Ethel and Helen Chestnutt, Class of 1901, attended. Seventy years later the Black Students Alliance (BSA) was officially chartered to "establish for its members a sense of unity and identity within the smaller community of Smith College while at the same time emphasizing their common interest in, and relationship to, the larger black community of the nation." Learn more about the BSA's history through this exhibition.

Joining Neilson Library in its centennial celebration, the branch libraries are hosting their own historical exhibitions. Each of Smith College’s branch libraries has its own unique history and place within the scholarly community. The exhibitions give some background of the events and people behind their founding, and the physical spaces they have occupied over the years.