Bryn Mawr College was founded in 1885 and grew rapidly in its first few years of existence. With an increased student population came unruliness, and M. Carey Thomas (then Dean, later President of the College) decided the student body needed greater regulation. In response to Thomas, Susan Walker Fitzgerald (1893) and other students proposed that that this regulation come from within the student body, with the formation of the Self-Government Association. SGA was the first institution of its kind in the country and it retains a powerful influence at Bryn Mawr today, as both an outlet for change and a way of enforcing order. Bryn Mawr students are all bound to the Honor Code, which governs appropriate student behavior in social and academic spheres. However, SGA also gives students the tools to enact the change that they desire. Among these tools are weekly SGA meetings where any student is invited to share their opinion with the Representative Council and Plenary, a biannual meeting of at least a third of the student body to discuss student-written resolutions that address everything from the health center to the need for a 24-hour study space.
The physical records of SGA– copies of the constitution, meeting minutes, plenary resolutions, etc.– are housed in Special Collections, Canaday Library. In the spring of 2015, Nora Dell (2019) introduced a Plenary resolution that hoped to make “the preservation and presentation of institutional memory… a permanent, intergenerational feature of the Self-Government Association.” Every year since 2015, a student archivist has been elected by the student body. The SGA Archivist, assisted by the Committee on Institutional Memory, provides a link between the SGA archives and the Bryn Mawr community. The SGA Archivist is responsible for providing a historical perspective at Representative Council Meetings, conducting interviews with current members of SGA, and for taking actions to make the archives available and usable to the general student body.
This website is part of the SGA Archivist’s initiative to increase the accessibility of the archives. Nora Dell and the first Committee members, working with student workers at Special Collections, began the process of digitizing important documents from the SGA archives and uploading them to the website. This ongoing process will make it simpler for those interested in the history of SGA to find relevant documents. This website is also a resource for transcripts of interviews with past and current members of SGA.