A Rosy Future Awaits: Claiming Memory for Temporal Effect

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 Image taken from Kenyon's photo bank of the 50th Anniversary of Women at Kenyon Events

This past week in the archives, as we added photographs of Dean Crozier and Harlene Marley (the first woman to be a tenure-track professor at Kenyon) to our folder, I was thinking about the first few years of the Coordinate College, and all the commemorative events that celebrate the first time women were admitted into Kenyon. For example, there are folders in the archives filled with programs, postcards, and advertisements for the 25th and 50th anniversary of women at Kenyon. Programs run by Crozier Center, like women's week in the 1980s, also highlight that moment of change. How can we understand why it is important to keep referring back to this moment? What are the implications for what Kenyon's future should look like?

Hajar Yazdiha argues in "The Struggle for the People's King" that there are relational, temporal, and perceptual aspects to the use of memory in contentious politics. In this post I will focus on the first two. By relational, she means that various groups and movements using memory claims to advance their cause do so within a certain context (Yazdiha 2023). They react not only to the 'top' source of power, such as the state, but also to other movements operating in the same field, whether they have similar goals or are completely opposed. The strategies that one group uses informs how other groups make memory claims -- for example, both family values and gay rights activists draw connections between their causes and the ideas and desires of Martin Luther King Jr. to try to legitimize themselves and gain followers. Temporality refers to the way that social movements make claims about the past and present in order to argue what the future will or should look like (Yazdiha 2023). 

We can use these concepts to think about Kenyon's history of women's activism. I think that there is a relational aspect on several fronts. For example, Kenyon's move to admit women was not decided in a vacuum. It seems to have primarily been spurred by financial issues, but arguments for and against it also mentioned other schools that had started admitting women (Hoekstra 2025). Much of the outcry surrounding the decision was about how women would ruin the heart or community of the college -- itself a memory claim about Kenyon's past, its identity, and its projected future. As the first classes of women students faced discrimination and backlash among some students and faculty, they formed groups (women's sports teams, the Hannah Moore society) and asserted that their presence was rightful and deserved. In doing so, they were responding not only to top-down discrimination by the college (women were prohibited from signing the Matriculation book) but also to their peers. Events that commemorate the anniversary of women at Kenyon are important because they recognize the hardships those students went through and celebrate how Kenyon is better for it. They could also be said to serve as moments of memory claims-making in a temporal sense. First, there is the forming of a link between the students currently at Kenyon and that first class in 1969. Then, as many anniversaries do, it places the event being commemorated squarely in the past, as a closed chapter. And in a sense that is true. For me, and I imagine many of my peers, it's hard to imagine a Kenyon without women. Finally, a path is laid for the future and for identity: Kenyon is a place for everyone now, and we celebrate increased equality. This claims-making, I think, succeeds in obscuring much of the strife of those early years, and paints a rather rosy view of Kenyon's arc towards progress. 

References

Yazdiha, Hajar. 2023. The Struggle for the People's King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.  

Hoekstra, Joel. 2025. "How Women Came to Kenyon." Alumni Bulletin Winter 2025. https://bulletin.kenyon.edu/feature/how-women-came-to-kenyon/

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