By Megan Reynolds

With just 1:20 remaining in the third period at the Tsongas Center, Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) Boston has a chance to break the 3-3 tie and clinch their spot in the playoffs with a win over PWHL Montreal. Going into the third, Boston was up 3-0, with goals from the captain, Hilary Knight, the third draft pick overall, Alina Müller, and associate captain, Megan Keller. Montreal nearly overcame Boston with three unanswered goals in the third with two from Mikyla Grant-Mentis on the power-play and one from Montreal’s captain, Marie-Philip Poulin.

At 18:40, with just over a minute until the end of regulation, Kaleigh Fratkin for Boston finds the back of the net after the puck deflected off a Montreal player, pushing Boston to a 4-3 lead. With Fratkin’s goal, Boston secured their spot in the PWHL inaugural season playoffs.

The team would go on to beat Montreal again in the semifinals, in a best-of-five series, and face PWHL Minnesota in the finals. Boston unfortunately fell to Minnesota in the championship game, in a 3-0 loss. While Minnesota was crowned the PWHL’s Inaugural Season Walter Cup Champions, Boston still fought hard in their inaugural season and represented the women who came before. The legacy of earlier teams, Massport Jets (1971-1998), Boston/Worcester Blades (2010-2019), and the Boston Pride (2015-2023) helped pave the way for the now Boston Fleet.[1]

With the formation of the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) in Summer 2023, the Mark Walter Group and Billie Jean King Enterprises secured hope for the future of women’s professional hockey. Prior to the PWHL, there hadn’t been one unified professional league for women’s hockey. Instead, there were a handful of small leagues playing throughout North America beginning in the early 2000s but none on the same scale as, say, the men’s National Hockey League (NHL). Unlike the NHL, which was founded in 1917, these women’s leagues were messy, struggled financially, and had to fight for ice time. The Massport Jets, the first recognized professional and successful women’s hockey team in the United States, had few other women’s teams to play against; in the 1970s, the Jets primarily played against men. After the Jets disbanded in 1982, women’s hockey at the professional level nearly ceased to exist until the US Women’s Ice Hockey Team won Gold at the 1998 Winter Olympics. These Games saw the first-time women’s ice hockey played at the Olympic level.

In the following decades, various women’s hockey leagues formed across North America, each with its own struggles; in Boston, these included the Boston Blades, Boston Pride, and Boston Fleet. Despite this history, these leagues and teams are still underrepresented within public spaces. Even in Boston, a city that is well-known for its hockey teams and fans, this important sports history has no presence in monuments or museums. 

Much of this reluctance to fully embrace women’s professional hockey connects to the beginnings of the modern sports era in the late 19th century. The idea of Muscular Christianity – the masculine practice of Christianity that prioritized health, masculinity, and building a strong, muscular body – shaped the development of sports and play (Putney 5). In ascribing such characteristics to men, Muscular Christianity helped define athletics and sports as masculine– physically and mentally demanding; building muscle and staying active were for men. Associating sports with the masculine made them inappropriate for women, and women who engaged with sporting activities were seen as unladylike. 

Historically, women’s hockey has been measured against Muscular Christianity’s masculine/feminine dichotomy and is thus judged as being too masculine for women. This historical setback has led to the struggle of legitimizing women’s hockey as a professional sport. I envision revealing this struggle and giving space and visibility to the history of women’s ice hockey through a public exhibition.

***

An internship with Interpreting Sports has provided me with the tools and methods to recognize when and how women’s sports are constrained from recognition in the public sphere. Through workshops and their book, Interpreting Sports at Museums and Historic Sites (2023), Interpreting Sports educates museum professionals in reinterpreting sports history; they seek to help museums move away from primarily celebratory/commemorative interpretation of sports history, to incorporate socially relevant history.

Celebratory and commemorative interpretations can offer a bridge to exploring the social history of sports; it is important not to eliminate these celebratory narratives entirely. To support this, I have focused on creating workshop slides for Interpreting Sports that introduce social history into the narrative. This work has helped shape my ideas around planning an exhibit to interpret Boston’s four professional women’s hockey teams. Looking ahead, I hope that my capstone project will call out the lack of celebration and commemoration for these four teams. I imagine an exhibition that engages a wide audience, one that offers a balanced interpretation that includes celebration, commemoration, and the socially responsive and culturally relevant stories that humanize players and teams. The exhibit will explore the impact of Title IX – a federal civil rights law passed in 1972 – provided women a more equal opportunity to play sports at federally funded institutes. It will also focus on team histories, players’ introductions to hockey and the obstacles faced along their journeys to professional leagues. This strategy will allow visitors to connect with individual players’ stories, while also offering a narrative that considers broader social context. The final exhibition will be located at The Sports Museum, inside TD Garden. Integrating this exhibit into the already existing stories The Sports Museum tells will increase potential audiences and accessibility. The exhibit’s key audience will be women’s hockey fans – whether women, men, or children – with their enthusiasm and increased interest since the founding of the PWHL.

References:

Harris, Kathryn Leann with Douglas Stark. Interpreting Sports at Museums and Historic Sites. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.

Maurer, Elizabeth L. “Evening the Score: Interpreting the History of Women and Sports.” In Interpreting Sports at Museums and Historic Sites, edited by Kathryn Leann Harris with Douglas Stark, 36-39. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.

Putney, Clifford. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Reid, Patrick A. and Daniel S. Mason. “‘Women Can’t Skate That Fast and Shoot That Hard!’: The First Women’s World Ice Hockey Championship, 1990.” The International Journal of the History of Sport 32, no. 4 (2015): 1678-1696.

[1] As I was writing this, the Professional Women’s Hockey League announced official names and logos for their Original Six teams. PWHL Boston, as they were known during their inaugural season, is now the Boston Fleet. 

By Emsie Lovejoy

In the fall semester of 2023, I had the pleasure of undertaking an internship at the Gibson House Museum, a Gilded Age townhouse in Boston’s Back Bay.  Based upon my interest in working with their physical collection and learning about their collections management system, curator Meghan Holmes suggested that I might tackle the project of designing room guides for their internal use.  The room guides would act as a resource for Gibson House tour guides and staff, to quickly find answers to visitor questions about objects in the collection.  It was something that had been on the “want to do” list for a long time but hadn’t made it to the top of the list yet.  The Gibson House Museum staff is quite small, and there is no shortage of projects in the works on any given day.  One of the first big lessons for me was that things happen slowly at small museums like this, and they can’t be rushed. 

One of the most important aspects of the project was that it was always intended to be ongoing.  The expectation was never that I would come in and do all the room guides.  Rather, I was going to lay the foundation, but after my semester the GHM would still be adding to them.  So, it was crucial that whatever I came up with be both easy to update, and easy to replicate: the systems I designed would need to be straightforward enough for someone else to pick up where I left off, with a minimal learning curve.  

I made a few trial runs at formats that were ultimately too difficult to reorganize before I was forced to admit that what I was really trying to do was reinvent the spreadsheet.  So, I made a spreadsheet.  I moved the process to Google Sheets with the idea that the text could be finished and arranged there and then migrated to a polished document with the photographs once it was finalized.  However, since images can in fact be included in Sheets, and it offers endless opportunities to add, remove, and re-arrange without creating extra work, we ultimately decided to leave the final RG in spreadsheet format.  Aesthetically it might have been more satisfying to take that last step of copying things over to a different format, but realistically it would have added a lot more work for me, and whoever picks up the project next.

The other reason flexibility was so critical to this project is that we couldn’t know at the beginning how many things that seemed obvious would need to be rethought.  During the process of creating the final format, Meghan and I had many conversations about identifying the most important characteristics of an object for the purposes of a finding guide.  Yes, everything would have a photo, but would it be faster to find a specific object if it were organized by category? If so, what were the categories? Or should it be ordered by location in the room? If by location, was a list format actually the most useful, or should we find a way to map the space? Was there a way to organize objects according to how frequently visitors ask about them? As we tested out different classifications and configurations, it quickly became clear that the ease of using a program that would sort material for us was the only way to go.  If every time we had wanted to try a new method of categorization I had been reorganizing manually, we simply wouldn’t have tested out as many possibilities.  Trial and error gave us, I think, an excellent final product, but without that flexibility trial and error would have been out of reach.  Presumably, this will continue to be a factor for the next people working on this, since one of the major decisions we made was that the format should be approached on a case-by-case basis and adapted to the needs of a given space, rather than trying to impose a single structure on every room in the house.

To that end, rather than a rigid blueprint, what I finally produced for the GHM is more like a menu.  The plan is to place binders in each room, in out-of-the-way locations where they will not be especially noticeable.  Each of the binders will include:

1. A list of Top 5 Objects, those which prompt the most visitor questions
2. Full room guide organized by category

Depending on the room and the specific needs of the space, the binders may also contain:

3. Maps of object-dense areas, with the corresponding Map Keys
4. Lists divided by region of the room, to be determined on a case-by-case basis
5. Lists of types of objects (i.e. silver pieces in the Dining Room)

All of the paintings will be represented on a separate, visitor-accessible sheet, to cut down on the amount of material to sort through in the room guides.

Knowing that I would not be completing the room guides project, I created online templates for each of these ‘menu’ items, which I have handed over to the GHM.  I also produced a detailed instruction manual for their use and some context for thinking through the sorts of questions we confronted throughout the process.  A further consideration in making these materials is how they will be used going forward.  The room guides are likely to be something that gets worked on in fits and starts when they have the time between other projects, so we wanted these systems to be straightforward enough that one could come back to it without having to relearn anything significant.

At the end of my semester with the Gibson House, I felt entirely satisfied with the materials I handed off to them.  I finished one room guide that uses all of the elements listed above, so we all got to see the finished product and get a sense of how to use it, and the responses that I received from the museum staff were extremely positive. 

References:
“Room Guide,” Longfellow House – Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.  Accessed September 2023.

By Hawraa Chreim

As part of my internship at the Massachusetts State Archives, I have had the opportunity to curate an exhibit solely based on my research in the institution’s collection. I ultimately landed on my topic while shadowing my supervisor Caitlin Ramos on a research request of prison records from the 1940s. I got swept up in the intrigue of learning about the individual stories concerning prison inmates. My focus shifted directly to incarcerated women in the early 1900s. What were the charges against them? What were prison standards for women of the time? What were their stories? These were the main questions that shaped my initial research. Slowly analyzing case files from the boxes of the Framingham State’s Prison, I finally landed on a file that spoke to me.

Mary Shanks became the focus of my exhibit. A woman who had no significant meaning in history, who largely would’ve been forgotten, had now become the center of my research at the Massachusetts Archives. Looking through her file, I had to be very analytical in my research. The files consisted of hundreds of pages that included: indictments, medical records, family history, correspondence, and photographs. The physical fragility of the documentation was one of my greatest difficulties in working with this collection. Mary’s records covered mainly the years between 1920 and 1930. Assumed to never be reopened, the documents were on thin parchment and the letters were in barely torn envelopes, looking as if they had not been touched since they had been written. With every turn and page adjustment, I had to be very careful in order to retain the integrity of the documents and I felt inspired by holding history in my own hands.

Deciding how to tell Mary Shanks’ story, however, was the real challenge. Mary Shanks had one challenging life. Born in Fall River, she was raised by her parents, in poverty and neglect.  Like many women in her situation, Mary took up domestic work in her hometown. She married in 1919 but her life took a turbulent turn. Over the next decade, Mary and her husband were in and out of jail. Letters between the two, while Mary was incarcerated, reveal that their tumultuous relationship took an unfortunate toll on her mental state.

As a researcher, Mary was a tricky subject as the crime she was indicted for had no specific meaning. Poor women from lower classes were often defined as “guilty” of the crime of “Idle and disorderly”; this could mean disorderly conduct, begging, homelessness, or prostitution, for example. I felt inclined to be the narrator of her life and offer her a chance for the world to see her as a person who struggled with the harsh standards set for women in the early 20^th century, not just as a woman who was incarcerated. Information about her and her family’s mental histories and medical records could have voiced an entirely new perspective. Yet, due to the state laws and common ethics in archival practice, releasing any information about a person’s medical history is illegal. Thus, I put myself in Mary’s shoes and focused instead on her story through the years of her incarceration.  

The documentation in Mary’s files is extensive and illuminates the relationship between her, her husband and daughter, and her extended family. To create a dynamic exhibit, I worked with Caitlin to find material on her incarceration beyond the documents in Mary’s prison record. We discovered the blueprint map of the Framingham State Prison when it was first built, the marriage certificate and birth certificates, photographs of prisoners at the time of Mary’s incarceration, and prison visitation records, to name a few. The goal now had become how to tell Mary’s story within the framework of her incarceration using as many different forms of archival media and records as possible. I wanted to show the range of the collection that was held within the archives repository while simultaneously telling the story of Mary Shanks. I hope visitors to the exhibit will be able to connect to the story of Mary and her life, and that the letters, photos, and documents humanize her. Who is Mary and why is her story important?