A Brochure Connecting Our Past and Their Future

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I had the opportunity to explore the school archives from an activist organization, the Womensnet, and came across a tri-fold brochure. The cover of this brochure highlights the event’s name and theme: Women’s Retreat. Upon opening it, you can see that each panel of the tri-fold brochure presents different content in a neat and well-organized manner. What stood out to me the most was the center section—also the most eye-catching part—which was filled with numerous "What if" questions. These questions were clearly designed to prompt reflection on how the campus and our lives could improve if their goals were achieved. I believe these rhetorical questions also set the tone for the discussion planned for the weekend. Also, much like the brochure itself, the retreat seemed designed to feel friendly and even relaxing. According to the brochure, the event was held in Apple Valley and was open to the entire school. Attendees were even encouraged to bring sleeping bags if convenient, so they could spend a delightful night at Apple Valley. The brochure was clearly thoughtfully designed, including details about the organizers, an introduction to the event, and a detailed timeline of scheduled activities. I found the brochure more refined than any flyer I had previously seen at school. I could sense that the event—and perhaps Womensnet as an organization—reflected the same dual nature as the brochure itself: it approached the serious topic of women's empowerment with rigor, yet it did so in a friendly and inclusive manner, conveying its ideas in a relaxed and accessible way.

In "The Past in the Present versus the Present in the Past," Michael Schudson (2011) explores how collective memory is shaped and constrained by the structure of available pasts and the rhetorical structure of social organization. Schudson (2011) argues that individuals and groups cannot freely reconstruct history but are limited by pre-existing materials, cultural narratives, and societal institutions that emphasize certain aspects of the past while diminishing others. Schudson also highlights how certain memories gain rhetorical power through repetition and institutionalization, shaping identity, social values, and collective action in the present.

Analyzing the Womensnet brochure through Schudson’s framework also revealed an unexpected alignment between the real history of Kenyon College and how I had imagined its past. Despite the constraints on reconstructing the past—such as the limited availability of historical materials and the selective nature of collective memory—the values reflected in the brochure resonated with the present-day vision of activism and community at Kenyon College. The emphasis on inclusivity, empowerment, and open dialogue in the brochure reflected not only a historical commitment to these ideals but also their ongoing relevance in today’s campus culture. This continuity suggests that the past remembered and promoted by the college is not just a selective reconstruction but a genuine reflection of enduring values. It somehow challenged my initial assumption that the history of women’s activism might have been marginalized or forgotten, instead revealing a meaningful consistency between the college’s historical narrative and its current social vision.



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