Historical Portraits of Women Home Scientists: The University Of ...

Internal clues locate it in time (the 1930s) and in space (outside the main University of Otago buildings³). The forms of dress suggest the era. The male professors wear ties, single-breasted suits, turned-up trouser cuffs, and the high-buttoned waistcoats that were in common usage in the years before the 1940s. A range of dress shirt styles are represented, from the Gladstone stand-up collars from an earlier era to the turned-down collars worn by the younger men amongst the group. The sole woman professor in the photo wears a three-quarter-length coat dress tied by a sash and pinned at the neck by a brooch. Her hair is parted in the middle and appears to be tied behind her head. She wears a ring or rings on the third finger of her left hand. Given that women usually resigned after marriage, the viewer can speculate on her marital status—is she married, widowed, or divorced? The photo is one that a viewer would expect to encounter in a history of university life or in a museum display.

As a portrait of the past, this photograph offers both a physical and an historical reading. This is very much in line with Ian Grosvenor’s argument that the captured moment allows readers and viewers to become ‘eyewitnesses’ to an historical event and the individuals in the photograph to be transformed from distant historical subjects into intimate ‘human’ contemporaries.⁴ Alone, however, the photograph presents an incomplete picture of the past. So, how can the available historical sources add to what can be known about the woman in the photo? An institutional history of the university notes that all but five of the subjects were professors and deans of the various faculties at the University of Otago. This included arts and science as well as the special or professional schools—medicine (the largest school), dentistry, law, mines, and home science.⁵ The professor who is third from the left in the front row is W. J. Morrell, vice chancellor (1925–1933), and the man to his right is J. K. Inglis, professor of chemistry (1911–1935). The solitary woman in the photo is Ann Gilchrist Strong, professor of home science (1921–1941).⁶ Questions arise about her positioning as the only woman in the photo and her distracted gaze off camera. Can a knowledgeable reading enable a more complex historical portrait of Strong’s professional and academic life and the location of women in the academy to be produced and framed?