History major and DH minor Maria Shimota mined historic newspapers to capture popular attitudes towards women workers in Oregon during and between the World Wars. Her spring 2023 capstone project, “Changing Attitudes Towards Women’s Labor: How Newspapers Reflect Popular Ideologies,” is published as a static website that Maria built using GitHub pages. The front page is a multimedia essay featuring visualizations of trends across roughly 100 newspaper articles that Maria painstakingly curated for analysis in VoyantTools.

As Maria shows, newspapers helped to reinforce narratives about the need for and value of women workers during periods when much of the labor force was deployed overseas. Yet in peacetime, she shows, women workers faded from public discourse. Another fascinating finding: women workers were frequently described in terms of their clothing, even in stories about the demanding, dangerous, and skilled jobs they were performing. As Maria says:

“Fun fact! It doesn’t matter what a woman wears while building munitions or whether she wore a skirt while digging mines!”

Beyond the front page, there’s more to explore on Maria’s site, including a detailed project log, data management plan, presentation slides, and bibliography. You can even download the dataset and use it to pursue your own research questions about this fascinating period in U.S. history!