We Are a Strong, Articulate Voice: A History of Women at Penn State

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WE ARE A STRONG,ARTICULATE VOICE


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Carol Sonenklar

WE ARE A STRONG, ARTICULATE

VOICE A History of Women at Penn State published for the penn state commission for women the pennsylvania state university press university park, pennsylvania


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Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. Photographs used in this book are reproduced courtesy of Naomi Fischer (page 105), The Daily Collegian (pages 145, 170, 173, 179, 202, 206, 209, 213), Greg Grieco and the Penn State Department of Public Information (pages 149, 185, 192, 194), Penn State Athletic Communications (page 156), Bonnie Marshall (page 159), the Penn State Commission for Women (pages 196, 197), Amanda Wetzel (page 200), and Devon Zahn (page 205). All other photographs are reproduced courtesy of the Penn State University Archives.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Sonenklar, Carol. We are a strong, articulate voice : a history of women at Penn State / Carol Sonenklar. p. cm. Includes index. isbn 0-271-02857-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Pennsylvania State University—Faculty— History. 2. Women in higher education—United States— History. I. Title. ld4481.p82S66 2006 378.748’53—dc22 2005028080

Copyright © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.


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CONTENTS

Foreword by Graham B. Spanier vii Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

1

xiii

Gaining the Privileges of Education

1

Few in Number but Strong in Influence

2

3 4

Making Strides

33

Improving the Learning Experience Standing In for the Men

67

6

The Home Economists

85

7

Yours for Happy Living

97

5

8 9

A Time of Unrest

119

Feminism and Fair Play

139

10

Leveling the Field

163

11

Redefining Roles

181

12

The Future Is Ours

199

Afterword by Janis E. Jacobs Index

217

9

215

55


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FOREWORD

The rich history of Penn State is replete with accounts of accomplishment and success. Woven into that heritage is the story of the remarkable women of Penn State and the legacy of achievement they have created. Over the decades, women at Penn State have made significant and lasting contributions to our University, paving the way for new generations. As pioneers in the areas of science, medicine, education, business, the arts, student affairs, administration, and more, the women of Penn State have played a key role in our University’s advancement and have greatly shaped its destiny. We Are a Strong, Articulate Voice recounts those vital details of our heritage and celebrates the many accomplishments of the talented women who have called Penn State home. Within the pages of this book, more than two hundred women are portrayed. Each of these women has accomplished great things and left her mark on Penn State as leaders, innovators, and scholars. This is an important volume in chronicling Penn State’s extraordinary success as one of the nation’s leading universities. The women of Penn State are a tremendous source of inspiration, innovation, and ingenuity. Graham B. Spanier President The Pennsylvania State University


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PREFACE

It was a brisk Sunday afternoon in January of 1930. Eighteen-year-old Grace Baer, just finished with her first semester at the Pennsylvania State College, sat in her dorm room with her two roommates. Grace was living on her own for the first time in the freshman dorm McAllister Hall—“Mac Hall” to everyone on campus. Studying in her room on “fourth floor north,” Grace was interrupted by the girl on phone duty. She had a call. Grace had just come back from spending the Christmas break with her family in Reading. The fourth of six children, Grace was the first in her family to go to college. Graduating in 1929 at the top of her Reading High School class, she was awarded a scholarship from the Women’s College Club of Reading—three hundred dollars a year for each of the first two years of college. However, by the fall of 1929, Grace could see that even with the scholarship she would still not have enough money to go away to college. “The stock market had just crashed and everything was in great upheaval. Not that it affected my family much,” she laughs. “We never owned any stock.” She decided to take some postgraduate classes at her high school, where she met the new principal, John P. Lozo. “I’ll never forget his name because the man changed my life,” she recalls. “He told me to go to the Pennsylvania State College. He’d taken courses there and said it was a great place and very affordable.” “All right,” Grace remembers thinking. “I’ll go to Penn State then.” And she did, arriving in State College in the fall of 1930. At that time there was no tuition per se, but students were responsible for an “incidental fee” of $67.50 in addition to room, board, and books. Grace could not have attended the Pennsylvania State College and lived in Mac Hall without the scholarship from the Women’s College Club. Although enrolled in the School of Education, Grace Baer had always been a performer, well known around Reading. When she arrived at the College, many students knew of her talents and frequently asked her to perform. She performed solely for female


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Three men in costume for a 1901 production staged by the Penn State Thespians. Although the group allowed women to appear on stage a handful of times in its early years, female members weren’t officially recognized until Grace Baer Holderman’s breakthrough appearance in 1930.

audiences, because women were not permitted to join the Thespian Club. When there was a woman’s role in a play or revue, a man would play it. Then came that afternoon in January. Grace picked up the phone in the hallway. She was surprised by who it was: Sock Kennedy, director of the Thespians and another individual who would change her life. “Sock said that he’d heard about a freshman girl from Reading who was singing and dancing for the coeds’ parties,” recalls Grace. “He was over in Schwab auditorium rehearsing for the first revue of the year, and would I come over to Schwab to talk?” With her pink satin tap shoes tucked under her arm, Grace walked the short distance to Schwab Auditorium and entered one of the side doors. Sock was waiting for her. She


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looked up at the stage and saw a couple of guys rehearsing a skit. A good-looking fellow onstage caught her eye. Sock wanted to see how much Grace knew about performing, so they went to one of the practice rooms. “Sock asked if I could do the time step, which is a hoofer’s basic dance step,” she says. “Of course I could. Any experienced hoofer could do a time step.” She put on her tap shoes and demonstrated. “Sock got so excited he jumped up and down and practically fell on me,” Grace recounts. “We’ve got to dance together!” Sock exclaimed. Five days later they performed in the revue. The rest is history. Grace broke new ground for girls in the previously all-male Thespian Club at Penn State and, not incidentally, went on to marry Ken Holderman, the good-looking fellow who was rehearsing on stage that first Sunday. By the time Grace broadened women’s opportunities in the performing arts at the College, women were making inroads in all aspects of University life. The women you will meet in the following pages represent all those aspects of change. On every front of college life—academic, administrative, social, and athletic—women slowly but persistently made their presence known. In some cases that meant joining the men (as with the Thespians); in other cases, it meant creating an organization just for women. Some struggles were obvious, as in the attempts to get more housing for women on campus. Other struggles were not so overt but were more difficult to overcome: the fight to enroll in the all-male classes, the fight to be taken seriously in the intellectual arena and in the student publications. Women had to prove over and over again that they were up to the task—whatever the task might be. We will also look at the many “hidden” women who had serious impacts on the lives of other women at Penn State. Wives and daughters of faculty and administrators rewrote their roles in university life, influencing all aspects of “town and gown.” By establishing off-campus clubs and organizations, these women not only helped the community at large but eased the isolation of many students and faculty who missed their homes and families. This book will also examine the historical context within which women existed at the University and in the small town of State College. As the twentieth century progressed, coeds became less segregated and more a part of the overall student body. But, as important as this progress is, we must recognize that not all Penn State history is the history of men. Men and women made Penn State what it is today, a place where enrollment—and virtually everything else— is equal for men and women. But when young Grace Baer made her entrance into the Thespians, she didn’t view it as a triumph or a victory. No one excluded women out of hostility or contempt, she


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points out. “That’s just the way things were.” What changed to prompt that Sunday afternoon phone call? Grace tilts her head and gazes off into the distance. “Well, I think it was just about time it happened.” We couldn’t agree more.


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About six years ago, during the annual breakfast meeting between the Commission for Women’s executive committee and female members of the board of trustees, a board member planted the seed that grew into this book. She urged the Commission to make an effort to share the accomplishments of Penn State women with the University community and beyond. A small group of dedicated volunteers took up the challenge, with the goal of publishing a book on the history of women at Penn State as part of the Commission’s 25th anniversary celebration in 2006. The pages you are about to read, representing women’s history from the beginning of Penn State through its 150th anniversary, illustrate how the Commission met that challenge—with a lot of help. It is impossible to mention everyone who supported this project, but the Commission would like to acknowledge a number of University offices and individuals who played an integral role in this effort. We thank the Office of the Vice Provost for Educational Equity; the University Archives, with special thanks to Jackie Esposito; the Office of University Development, with special thanks to David Lieb; Carol Gay, who led the initial fund-raising efforts ensuring that plans for the book could move forward; Penn State Press, with heartfelt thanks to Peter Potter for his patience and sound advice; female members of the board of trustees, without whose encouragement this book would have remained “something to do in the future when we have time”; President Graham Spanier and Vice Provost, the late Janis Jacobs, who took time from their incredibly busy schedules to contribute sections to this book; donors—both those who contributed financially to make this book a reality and those who contributed their time and memories; and the committee members who persevered because of their belief in the significance of chronicling Penn State women’s achievements and impact, including Jeanie Andrews, Betty Bechtel, Renee Diehl, Carol Gay, the late Diane Greenfield, Karen Hackett, Sandy Harpster, Susan Lucas (chair), Amy Milgrub Marshall (co-chair), and Rachel Miller.


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acknowledgments

This book highlights many notable women in Penn State’s history, but there are so many more. Selecting the women to be included was a daunting task that required some difficult decisions. Although we could not mention all the significant accomplishments of women at Penn State, we hope this book serves as a tribute to each female student, faculty member, staff member, and technical-service worker who has left her mark on the University in her own unique way. This book is the result of the sharing of ideas and of women encouraging other women to make their accomplishments known. Most of the people highlighted in this book did not have recognition in mind as they set about their jobs or their studies at Penn State, and that is what’s important. Women at the University have accomplished and will continue to accomplish great things. In the process, they are laying foundations for future generations of women at Penn State. We have been, and will continue to be, “a strong, articulate voice.” The Commission for Women

In conducting research for this book I drew upon a wide variety of resources including interviews with many people who (in person and by phone) generously and patiently answered my questions and recounted stories from their past. I can’t name all of them here but my sincere thanks go out to each and every one of them for their time and attention. I also spent considerable time in the Penn State Special Collections Library, where I benefited from the knowledgeable staff. I would like to single out a few works that were particularly invaluable in my research, especially Michael Bezilla’s Penn State: An Illustrated History. I also made use of Wayland F. Dunaway’s History of the Pennsylvania State College and Kristen D. Turner’s A Guide to Materials on Women in the Pennsylvania State University Archives, as well as back issues of Town & Gown, The Penn Stater, and The Daily Collegian (now available online through the University Libraries’ Historical Digital Collegian Archive). For anyone interested in learning more about the status of women at Penn State since the 1980s, the place to start is the website of the Penn State Commission, where key reports may be found, beginning with the Final Report of the Strategic Study Group on the Status of Women (1988). Carol Sonenklar

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1 Gaining the Privileges of Education

In the late 1800s, life for the vast majority of women in America was the same as it had been for a very long time. In a word: hard. Virginia Dale Ricker (Class of 1929), who was born in a farmhouse on the banks of the Branch River in central Pennsylvania, remembers a typical day for her mother: The first chore was taking the charcoal off the fire and opening the draft to get the house warm. By 5:30 am, a farm wife was cooking a big breakfast of ham and eggs for six or seven men, depending on the season. During harvest time, that number would increase to ten or twelve people. After cleanup, she’d start lunch. All the men worked hard and expected a big meal—some kind of meat, two vegetables, homemade bread, potatoes. On washday, she’d start at the crack of dawn, building a fire under two iron kettles. When the water was hot she’d add the clothes, melt some of her homemade soap—made of lye and lard—and stir with a long stick. Then she’d take out each piece of clothing, scrub it hard on a board and rinse it in several kettles of clean water to make sure all the soap was out. Ironing day was separate because it was too much work to do all in one day. Our irons were just that—irons. They weighed about six or seven pounds and you had to be real careful you didn’t get burned. They’d get scalding hot. But Mrs. Dale wanted more for her daughter. This sentiment—shared by thousands of women—propelled a new movement that would forever change the fabric of American life.


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we are a strong, articulate voice

At this monumental moment at the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania, the name Ellen A. Cross appeared unassuming on the list of new students for the 1871 fall semester. But Cross was no mere student: she was the first woman to enroll in the College as a degree student. By doing so, Ellen Cross embodied a challenge to the traditional roles of wife, mother, and daughter that women had always played. What would happen if women were educated along with men? The notion of education for women provoked much controversy in the nineteenth century. The number of normal schools, developed to train teachers (many of them women), was increasing. But the well-established men’s colleges and the state universities would not accept women. In the years leading up to the Civil War, the abolitionist movement, which was championed by women, encouraged greater participation for women in society. All-women colleges grew in number. Mount Holyoke was established in 1837,and others such as Vassar, Wellesley, and Bryn Mawr quickly followed. But coeducation lagged behind in 1833. Oberlin College in Ohio was the first to enroll both men and women, and by 1870 the University of Michigan and others began admitting women as well. This reluctance was due in part to the dire “scientific” warnings of the time. Dr. Edward Clark, a retired Harvard professor of medicine, reluctantly acknowledged that women did indeed have the capacity to study and learn in his 1873 book Sex in Education. He believed, however, that if they embarked on their studies with the same vigor as boys, girls would strain their “vital organs.” While some debated (and refuted) his findings, Dr. Clark’s book was reprinted twelve times within a year of its publication. Meanwhile, the question of the value of higher education—and whom it should serve—was being raised. At the time, many considered attending college to be superfluous, an activity undertaken only by the nation’s elite. For most colleges in New England, a typical four-year course of study meant a “classical education,” learning subjects such as mathematics, Latin, and rhetoric. The average American family saw going to college as not only out of reach but largely irrelevant for the types of work required in daily life. Demand was growing for education that was broader in scope and more practical in application. In terms of higher education, this demand resulted in the establishment of “people’s colleges” or “industrial colleges.” In the 1850s, agricultural colleges were chartered in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Maryland, and Ohio. The Pennsylvania State Agricultural Society was formed in 1852 to address the educational needs of farmers. In Centre County, General James Irvin and Moses Thompson donated two hundred acres of their Centre Furnace land in 1855 to a new school with a mandate to train students in the science and practice of agriculture. To avoid an association with “collegiate” classical education, the school was named Farmers’ High School. (In those days “high” meant exactly that: a school that was higher than primary.) The goal was to apply scientific principles to the


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study of agriculture, a concept that was radically different from traditional notions of higher learning. Then, in 1862, President Lincoln signed into law the Morrill Land-Grant Act. Congressman Justin Morrill (R-Vermont) envisioned an opportunity for everyone—even those in the industrial classes—to get an education. He wanted to ensure, however, that the courses of study would be practical, so that students could go back home and apply what they had learned. The act gave each state thirty thousand acres of public land to sell. The money from the sale would be put into an endowment fund that would provide support for colleges in each of the states. Each school’s curriculum had to include liberal arts and sciences appropriate to agriculture, engineering, mining, and forestry. In Pennsylvania, the trustees of the Farmers’ High School believed that their school was the logical choice for the funds, but they faced competition from Pennsylvania colleges. So the trustees, anticipating the new law, changed the name of the school to the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania in the spring of 1862. On April 1, 1863, Governor Andrew Curtin signed Pennsylvania’s Act of Acceptance, authorizing payment of landgrant funds to the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania. It wasn’t until 1867, though, that the Legislature formally named the Agricultural College the sole beneficiary of the funds.

Becoming Coeducational A few women were affiliated with the Farmers’ High School when it officially opened in 1859. Mrs. Elisabeth Hunter and her two daughters were the superintendents of the college parlors and the culinary department. Miss Minerva Whitman, daughter of J. S. Whitman, professor of natural sciences at the school, was actually the first woman to study at the High School, though unofficially. As Erwin Runkle put it, “The records seem to indicate that her draughts at the springs of learning were limited to the private tutelage and chaperonage of her father’s botanical quarters.” The main college building, or “Old Main,” was only partially built upon the school’s opening. One hundred students were enrolled, though just sixty-nine were in attendance. Tuition, board, laundry, fuel, and lights for a session, which began in mid-February and ended in mid-December, cost students one hundred dollars. Each student was required to do three hours of work on the school’s farm each weekday. The first president of the Farmers’ High School was Evan Pugh (1859–64). An internationally acclaimed chemist with a special interest in scientific agricultural education, Pugh overcame the confusion and uncertainties of the Civil War. He changed the fledging Farmers’ High School from a single-purpose state agricultural institution to a college with a scientifically based curriculum in accordance with the broad objectives of the Morrill


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Old Main was still under construction in 1859, four years after Farmers’ High School officially opened. Students worked for several hours every day alongside Penn State’s first unofficial mascot, a mule named Old Coaly, helping to finish the building effort. Although the student population was exclusively male in these early years, female staff members, along with the wives and daughters of faculty, played a key role in ensuring the school’s early success.

Act. It was at Pugh’s urging that the name of the school was changed to the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania. Pugh’s death in 1864, at the young age of thirty-six, was a major blow to the College. Mounting debt and declining enrollments plagued the College over the following years, as three presidents came and went between 1864 and 1871. By the end of the 1860s, only thirty undergraduate students were enrolled, forcing the trustees to reduce the number of faculty members from seven to four.


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5

In 1871, the board of trustees elected James Calder as the College’s fifth president. A Harrisburg native who had spent the previous two years as president of Hillsdale College in Michigan, Calder did not solve all the problems he inherited, but he successfully eased some of the College’s financial burden and increased enrollments. During his term, the number of students in attendance rose to around 150—the highest enrollment had been since Pugh’s administration. One reason for the increased enrollment was the decision to admit women. In June 1871, shortly after Calder arrived on campus, he brought a proposal before the faculty and the board of trustees recommending that women be admitted. After some contentious discussions, the faculty gave its approval, and on September 5 the trustees made it official. The Agricultural College now had the distinction of being the first college in the state to admit women. It would be six more years before women were admitted to the University of Pennsylvania (and twenty-two for the University of Pittsburgh). The college catalog for 1871 explains the trustees’ reasoning: It was felt that the important trust committed to the Board would not be fully administered while one half of the youth of our State were denied its advantages; and the experience of other institutions, several of them Agricultural, justified the expectation of good results from the co-education of the sexes. Therefore, ladies are now admitted to the same courses of study as the gentlemen, are subject to the same general rules, and on the completion of their studies, will receive the same certificates and degrees. Such separation of the sexes, and variation of labor for instruction and exercise, as prudence dictates, will be carefully secured; but the privileges enjoyed will be equal, and the advantages derived from a residence at the College will be as great in one case as in the other. The decision to admit women was something of a risk, because “coeds” were often regarded as hazardous to a college, distracting the boys from their studies and lowering the standards of scholarship. Evidently Calder did not agree, as Hillsdale College had become coeducational during his presidency. Calder was also a Methodist minister who had served several years as a missionary in China, and, like many Methodists, he supported equal educational rights. Two of the first women to attend Hillsdale had been Ellen Cross of Omro, Wisconsin, and Rebecca Ewing of Angola, Indiana. After the College had made the decision to admit women, Calder invited Cross and Ewing to join him in Pennsylvania to launch the “women’s department.” In the fall of 1871, then, Ellen Cross and Rebecca Ewing became Penn State’s first female undergraduates. Four more women enrolled that same year. One was Sarah E. Robinson, daughter of F. A. Robinson, a mathematics and civil engineering professor at


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the College. According to Cross, the Robinsons made a positive impression: “I can gratefully declare that the professors were very kind and considerate. The male students, however, did not at first favor the innovation, but when Prof. Robinson came in the Fall, bringing his charming daughter of 17 (I think), the attitude of the boys changed, and the women’s department became very popular.” Not everyone was so positive about the decision to admit women. A Centre County newspaper protested that a college intended for future farmers, miners, and engineers was becoming a “ladies finishing school.” As late as 1889, an editorial in the student newspaper, The Free Lance, argued strongly against the very principle of “coeducation”: It is not a question as to whether women are as strong minded as men, nor is it a question whether they should have the same advantages for an education as men. But it is questioned whether women should be educated in the classes and take the same courses of instruction as men in college. . . . There is in the normal man a physical and mental robustness not normal to the gentler sex, and there is in woman a grace, a delicacy, a fineness of sensibility, a tenderness and quickness of insight not natural to the stronger sex. . . . When the sexes are educated together, the man has a great advantage over the woman and he gets more out of his education, because their line of study was selected especially for his mental qualities. A woman needs what will make her a queen of the household and of society while man needs what will fit him for the harder, sterner duties of life, to which ladies should never be driven except in cases of exigency. . . . She cannot afford to risk her health in acquiring a knowledge of the advanced sciences, mathematics or philosophy, for which she has no use. We cannot disregard the continual cries of warning from physicians on this subject. Too many women have already made themselves permanent invalids by an overstrain of study at schools and colleges. Women had to be at least seventeen years old to be admitted to the College. They were permitted to take the same classes as men, although some new courses were offered that had not been in the catalog before 1871. Calder and the trustees had reorganized the curriculum (the third such reorganization in four years), establishing three four-year courses of study: the Agricultural Course, the Scientific Course, and the Classical Course. All students, regardless of their chosen course, had mandatory classes in English composition, literature, and U.S. history. Women could enroll in any of the three courses, but they were exempted from certain requirements due to their supposedly fragile nature. One of these requirements was the Labor Rule, which meant working an average of ten hours a week on the college farm or in the gardens, barns, workshop, or laundry.


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New courses included a Ladies Course in Literature, Piano Music, and Domestic Economy. Domestic Economy, according to the 1878 catalog, was intended to give women “knowledge of the application of science to the work of the kitchen and laundry . . . and some familiarity with the principles and practice of house decoration.” The course was taught in the basement of Old Main by Miss Anna Cooper until 1882. It reappeared in 1897 as a correspondence course offered by the College’s School of Agriculture. By the 1870s, it was easy to see progress toward equality in education at Penn State. Even if widespread public acceptance was still some years away, President Calder was able to report that women had entered and proven themselves “diligent, orderly, and as successful as the men in the same classes.” In 1873, Rebecca Ewing graduated—the first woman to do so at the College. Ellen Cross stayed at the College for two years before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania. In 1919, at the age of seventy, she was honored by the University of Wisconsin as one of the first women in the United States to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree and to be ordained into the ministry.


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2 Few in Number but Strong in Influence

Women were quick to take advantage of the opportunity to study at Penn State. By 1878, forty-nine female students were enrolled, representing 30 percent of the total student population. This, of course, changed the dynamics of the student body, creating certain challenges for college administrators. Mrs. Ann Condill had been hired as the College nurse in 1865. When the first female students began arriving, her role expanded to include that of matron. As more women enrolled, however, it became apparent that more supervision was needed, and in 1876 the position of preceptress—later known as Lady Principal—was created. Mary E. Butterfield, who had been a German instructor at Penn State since 1871, was the first to hold the position of preceptress. The most challenging task Butterfield faced was keeping men and women segregated. At the time, all classrooms and offices were in Old Main and the students were housed on the top floors of its west wing. Contact between the sexes, therefore, had to be strictly watched. In 1883, the rules read: “All requests on the part of young ladies to receive or accompany gentlemen must be presented to the Lady Principal in the Ladies’ Parlor between 6:45 and 7 pm daily except Sundays. Requests will not be received or granted at a later hour.” Beginning in 1872, men were no longer required to board on campus, which meant that some moved into the homes of local residents, known as “eating clubs,” the precursors to today’s fraternity houses. Women, however, were still required to board in Old Main. They were also excluded from social clubs and physical education, and they had to sit across the aisle from men at the campus chapel. Women were not allowed to attend dances, so men danced with other men. The situation vastly improved in 1883 when Harriet McElwain became the new Lady Principal. A graduate of Mount Holyoke Seminary, McElwain worked hard to improve


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the conditions for women at the college. Believing that living conditions in Old Main were primitive, she lobbied for separate quarters for women students. Her efforts came to fruition with the opening of the Ladies’ Cottage in 1889. Later called the Women’s Building, it was located where Oswald Tower currently stands. In addition to students’ rooms, there was a reception area, a parlor, a dining room, and a gym.

harriet aurelia mcelwain Harriet McElwain, born in 1859, graduated from Mount Holyoke Seminary, the first American college dedicated to higher education for women. After serving two years as a Lady Principal at a grammar school in Springfield, Massachusetts, McElwain took a position at the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania in 1883. Although her title was the same as the one at the grammar school, her position as Lady Principal at the College was quite different. Her first priority upon arrival at Penn State was to create more appropriate living quarters for the women students. After supervising the renovation of the west wing of Old Main—the female quarters at that time—she began a push for the first on-campus women’s dormitory. Thanks to her efforts, the “Ladies Cottage” was built in 1889. Besides her responsibilities as Lady Principal, McElwain also taught history, Latin, and mathematics and served as secretary to President Atherton, taking on his duties when he was away. At the dedication of McElwain Hall in 1948, Helen Atherton Govier, President Atherton’s daughter, recalled her father’s trust in his secretary: “She learned to know so well the operations of all the departments of the college, the personnel involved, and the problems my father was constantly facing, that he could be away from his desk for days at a time, particularly during legislative sessions, feeling perfectly confident in her administering of all affairs during his absence.” McElwain was also a prominent member of the State College Women’s Literary Club, an organization devoted to promoting higher education for The admission of women students led the Lady Principal to an almost obsessive concern with segregation of the sexes, and in 1889 construction began on a separate residence for the undergraduate women. Seen here in 1913, the Ladies’ Cottage helped alleviate the immediate concerns about allowing men and women to live together in Old Main, but strict rules were still applied to every aspect of social contact.


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Harriet McElwain became Penn State’s Lady Principal in 1883. In addition to her duties overseeing the female students, McElwain also taught history and served as President George Atherton’s secretary. She became so trusted and so familiar within College affairs that she often acted as the de facto president in Atherton’s absence.

women, public education, civil service reform, and the antislavery movement. Another member of her family, sister Carrie McElwain, is also part of Penn State lore. Carrie was one of the College’s first female graduates, earning her civil engineering degree in 1893. With the new Ladies’ Cottage came new rules for socializing with the opposite sex. Men and women could visit together only in the parlor and only for one hour. If a male student wanted to accompany a female student outside of the building (only short walks around campus and study dates were allowed), he had to get written permission from the president of the College; women needed permission from the Lady Principal.


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As Farmers’ High School flourished, the town of State College, seen here in 1905, slowly began to develop around the campus. As far back as the 1870s, male students began moving off campus to live with local families and, over time, these “eating clubs” evolved into the fraternities of modern Penn State. Early women students, however, were required to take their meals on campus, remaining largely isolated from the liberal atmosphere of College Avenue.

As one can imagine, opportunities for women to socialize were extremely limited in these early years. The town—what would become State College—barely existed. Some of the male students resented the presence of women on campus and even ostracized them. The only dances on campus were organized by the State College 400 Club. Wayland Dunaway, a historian on campus and author of the 1946 A History of the Pennsylvania State College, explains the origins of the club: At that time (1890–91) there were but six or eight girls residing in the Ladies’ Cottage, and only a handful of boys were sufficiently in favor to be invited into the Cottage. Those who felt themselves discriminated against organized the “Four Hundred,” no


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In its early days, nearly all of Penn State fit into a single building. The original Old Main building held offices, classrooms, the dining hall, and the residences of both students and staff. Here, Dr. Fred Lewis Pattee teaches a class in bibliography (the precursor to library science) in the library of Old Main in 1894.

member of which was permitted to enter the Cottage on any pretext whatever. In order further to punish the young ladies for the crime of having a few favored callers, the Four Hundred arranged for a mask ball to which no girls were invited. In 1890, after the building of the Armory, a petition to lift the ban was circulated by the students. It succeeded, but just barely. Each dance had to be authorized by the faculty and board of trustees, and dancing in any other building besides the Armory was strictly forbidden. All students and faculty were expected to attend compulsory chapel exercises, and this continued to be the case until 1930. In the four-hundred-seat chapel, men and women remained segregated. And although students had to exit the chapel in an orderly fashion,


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George Atherton (bottom row, right) was Penn State’s longest-serving president, holding office from 1882 to 1906, and also one of its most influential. Atherton stabilized the floundering college by advocating a curriculum focused on science and mechanic arts. Also present in this faculty photo from 1887 is Harriet McElwain (middle row, second from right), Lady Principal and Atherton’s trusted secretary.

one row at a time, George Meek (Class of 1890) remembers that “the boys would scramble to the side door—the ladies’ exit—to wait for the girls to come out to make a date to take them to the next Literary Society meeting.”

Expanding Opportunities Meeting the needs of women students was a major challenge for Penn State in these years. In the decades following the initial surge of enrollment after the College’s decision to go coed in 1871, the percentage of women in the student body actually declined. By 1885, women’s share of the enrollments had dropped below 20 percent. A decade later it had dropped below 5 percent. Attracting more women to Penn State would take a combination of curricular and extracurricular innovations. These would begin to happen under the leadership of President George Washington Atherton.


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In 1882, the board of trustees chose George Atherton to be the seventh president of Penn State. Atherton, who had previously headed the Political Science Department at Rutgers College (New Jersey’s land-grant institution), held the presidency until 1906 and would leave a major mark on Penn State. In his inaugural address he called for a broad interpretation of the Morrill Act, insisting that the College should be “an industrial and scientific rather than a classical and literary institution.” He said, “Classical studies were not to be abolished,” but they could not be the “leading object.” Atherton implemented sweeping curricular reforms with important implications for both men and women students. He merged the Classical Course with a general scientific and a Latin scientific course for the bachelor of science degree, expanded the technical offerings into eight courses for technical degrees, and eventually offered a Classical Course for a bachelor of arts degree. He then reorganized the departments into seven schools: Agriculture; Natural Science; Engineering; Mines; Language and Literature; Mathematics and Physics; and History, Political Science, and Philosophy.

frances washburn atherton and the state college woman’s club Fanny, as she was known to her friends and family, was born in Plympton, Massachusetts, in 1836. She had been a teacher at the Bridgewater Normal School before moving to New Haven and meeting her future husband, Yale student George Washington Atherton. The Athertons moved often as George moved up the ranks of higher education administration. In the fall of 1882, they settled in a tiny central Pennsylvania community. George was about to begin what would be the longest tenure of a president in Penn State’s history. And Fanny was left with the job of educating her five children (one later died in infancy) in what she considered a primitive village and home. Her daughter, Helen Atherton Govier, recounts iceskating on the kitchen floor after a water pipe broke during the night. When Frances Atherton came to Penn State with her husband, George, in 1882, she set about educating faculty members’ children (including her own) by turning the Old Main library into a classroom. Two years later, she expanded her educational outreach by establishing the Women’s Literary Club, which offered local women the opportunity to present papers, hear guest speakers, and discuss a wide range of literary topics.


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Fanny was also responsible for coordinating a host of College-related activities and receptions. Committee meetings were all held at the president’s home and meals were expected. She made her own soap and did all the family’s laundry. The role of wife and mother was extremely important to her, and she carried out her chores with pride. Fanny educated her own and other faculty children at her home, turning the library into a classroom. One of her daughters remembers doing a lesson while sitting on the backstairs of the kitchen so that her mother could continue her work around the house. In 1894, Fanny Atherton established the Women’s Literary Club. She wanted to provide a forum to encourage local women to read, learn, and express themselves. Club members presented papers and hosted guest speakers on a range of literary and historical subjects. Topics included the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, Mary and Martha Washington, letters of Colonial women, and the Amendments of the Constitution. There was an annual fee of one dollar for active members; nonactive members were charged five dollars. The group met for two hours on the first and third Tuesday of each month, and there was a five-cent penalty charged for tardiness. If a member missed more than two consecutive meetings, she would be suspended. Readings were assigned and each active member was expected to make a presentation on a topic outside the required reading at least once a year. Fanny Atherton served as president of the club until 1906, when she became ill. The group changed its name to the State College Woman’s Club in 1910. Mrs. Atherton died in 1913. In 1938, Atherton Hall, a women’s dorm, was dedicated to Fanny Atherton. The State College Woman’s Club, which provided the basis for the eventual establishment of the Home Economics Department at the College in 1906, has had a long and distinguished history and continues to be active.

Women were eligible for admission to any curriculum, but the College had its own ideas about what women wanted from a college education. In 1884, a two-year ladies’ course was introduced which, according to the catalog, contained “more of the branches of study that are thought likely to be especially serviceable to [women], with less extended


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Carrie McElwain, daughter of Harriet, earned a civil engineering degree in 1893 and became one of Penn State’s first alumnae.

requirements in mathematical and scientific studies than in the existing courses.” College administrators thought they were offering an attractive course of study for women, but the fact was that most women (like men) wanted to pursue a baccalaureate degree. The Ladies’ Course was dropped in 1892. A year later, in 1893, Carrie McElwain and Emma Camp became the first women graduates of the civil engineering program. In 1898, Elizabeth Beckenridge Meek was the first woman to receive a graduate degree. Working with Dr. Henry T. Fernald, professor of zoology in the School of Natural Science, Meek wrote her thesis on the development of Palaemonetes (grass shrimp).


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With supervision from George and Frances Atherton, students enjoy a warm spring day in 1898 on the porch of the University House. Tennis, badminton, and cycling on the bone-jarring velocipedes of the day were among the chaperoned activities the women students could enjoy.


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A Practical Department An important curricular innovation that did interest women at Penn State was the study of home economics. Perhaps not surprisingly, the impetus for the department came from a group of women dedicated to advancing women’s rights. In 1906, the Pennsylvania Federation of Women’s Clubs met in State College. Mira Lloyd Dock, a botanist who was active in the organization, had visited the household economics department of the University of Minnesota in 1900. When she and other members discovered how few practical courses were being offered for women at Penn State, they passed a resolution demanding that the Pennsylvania legislature appropriate funds for a department of home economics. About twenty other institutions around the country were then awarding degrees in home economics, and the Federation felt it was time that Penn State followed suit. To show that they were serious, the members also endowed two scholarships for female undergraduates and promised to contribute to the enlargement of the Women’s Building for the teaching of the new discipline.

mira lloyd dock: a pioneering activist Defying all the social norms of the day, Mira Lloyd Dock was determined to make a difference—and we still reap the benefits of her work. After finishing her private schooling near Philadelphia, Mira Dock (1853 –1945) returned to her home on Front Street in Harrisburg. Her mother had recently died and for the next twenty years Dock helped raise her four sisters and one brother. In 1896, at the age of forty-three, she entered the University of Michigan to study botany, chemistry, and geology. After graduation, she returned to Pennsylvania, where she committed herself to improving the community and urban environment of Harrisburg. With allies such as Horace J. McFarland and Vance McCormick, Mira set about transforming Pennsylvania’s state capital from a dingy, filthy, railroad/ industrial town into a model city. Thanks to their relentless campaign, the Harrisburg Telegraph ran a front-page article in April 1901 on beautifying the city, calling for parks, pure water, paved streets, a city hall, a covered sewer interceptor, and park land along the river. Within fifteen years all of these improvements and more were completed.


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Mira was appointed to the State Forest Reservation Commission in 1901, making her the first woman to be appointed to a government post in the Commonwealth. She and Joseph Trimble Rothrock, the chairman of the commission, traveled all over the state inspecting parcels of land offered for sale and deciding what should be included in the system of Commonwealth forestry reserves. More than 175,000 acres of land were added during her first year in office. By the time she retired from the commission, forest reserves totaled almost one million acres. Mira was also keenly aware of the future. She lobbied in the halls of the state Capitol for an institution to train young men to become foresters. And in 1903 Governor Pennypacker approved the Pennsylvania State Forest Academy at Mont Alto. Dock taught botany during the school’s first year and continued until the Academy moved to the Pennsylvania State College in 1929. It wasn’t long before Mont Alto graduates were moving to other states to become heads of forestry or fish and game departments. Dock was also an accomplished photographer. She combined this skill with her love of botany to make glass lantern slides of numerous tree and plant specimens. Most likely, she used these slides in her lectures at Mont Alto and in her public lectures promoting the City Beautiful movement. Today more than four hundred of Dock’s slides are housed in the Penn State Mont Alto Campus Library Archives. One can take a virtual tour of these slides by visiting the Mira Lloyd Dock Collection at the University Libraries Web site: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/preservation/MLD/index.htm

The College responded by creating the Department of Home Economics in 1907. The department and its faculty would have an enormous impact on women at all levels of the College, spurring many into uncharted academic territories and fields of research. Miss Louise Waugh served as the first director—and only instructor—in the department. Course offerings listed in the catalog included Sewing, Millinery, Fancy Needlework, Textiles, Foods, Housekeeping, Household Management, and the Teaching of Home Economics. Ten students—all women—officially enrolled as home economics majors, though women in other curriculums were encouraged to take courses as well. The new department’s curriculum included sessions in a laboratory in the Women’s Building with electric stoves, refrigerators, and sewing machines, all donated by their manufacturers. In the first year, the department gave a series of lectures and demonstrations


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The 1906 residents of the Ladies’ Cottage. Rules for visiting the Ladies’ Cottage were so stringent that many men preferred to stay away entirely. A man needed the endorsement of the president of the College and was required to bow to the Lady Principal in the Cottage parlor before he could leave with a woman—dates were never allowed in the women’s rooms. Strict regulations and the relatively low number of coeds made finding a date difficult, so men sometimes imported women for the end-of-year parties. Dubbed “House Party Queens,” these women arrived accompanied by their mothers and were often even more closely chaperoned than the coeds.

on cooking during “Farmer’s Week” designed to “furnish housekeepers instruction in the problem of food, clothing, and shelter and an opportunity for discussion of some of the fundamental problems of home life and management.” These were so successful that they became an annual event during “Farmer’s Week,” a weeklong series of talks, demonstrations, and displays held at the College. Expecting an increase in female enrollments, the College expanded the Ladies’ Cottage to include more living and classroom space. At the same time, the decision was made to create a new position—the dean of women. Sara Cutts Lovejoy, an 1898 graduate of Mount Holyoke College, was the first to hold the post. From the beginning it was expected that the dean would have specific responsibilities within home economics, so when Waugh resigned as the Director of Home Economics in 1910, Lovejoy assumed both


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Kitchen technology made rapid leaps in the early twentieth century, as gas ranges replaced woodstoves and spigots usurped the once-vital function of water pumps. Soon after the Department of Home Economics was established in 1907, the practice kitchen in the Women’s Building was offering undergraduates a laboratory for practical technology.

posts. Lovejoy’s leadership in these early years was critical for getting the fledgling department off the ground. The curriculum proved to be popular with women, leading to new course offerings. By 1912, the vocational home economics curriculum option was added, and the following year two new courses were offered: Institutional Management and General Home Economics. Students could major in education, specializing in foods or clothing, or in institution management, specializing in hospital dietetics or management. A 1916 article in The Penn State Alumni Quarterly indicates just how popular the program was becoming: In 1907 the suitable questions were: “Will anyone take this work?” and “Is it a suitable course for college women?” In 1915 the demand from outside positions for the students who have taken it answers those questions and the query now is: “How shall we take care of all who come?”


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Despite the success, not all male students on campus took the Home Economics Department seriously. Undaunted by the skepticism, the women of the class of 1915 responded with their perspective in the 1917 La Vie: Some of our male farmers and engineers consider Home Economics to be a little light practicum in making fudge and dusting. Some day, when the laws regulating the working hours for women and children go into effect in Pennsylvania, and the students of Home Economics thereby acquire a small portion of the day for rest, they may utilize some of the time gained to enter into debate with the ignorant participants in such a belief. In reality, the four-year home economics program required the same core courses that were required of all other liberal arts students. This meant that home economics majors took courses in English, foreign language, psychology, education, history, literature, and political science before receiving their bachelor of science degree. Another important role for home economics came with the emergence of extension education at Penn State. When Edwin Sparks became president in 1908, he was determined to expand the College’s role in educating Pennsylvanians beyond the traditional classroom. His opportunity came in 1914 when the U.S. Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act. This act, supported by land-grant educators nationwide, gave each state ten thousand dollars annually for agricultural and home economics extension work and guaranteed larger amounts provided the state itself supplied matching funds. At the time, Pennsylvania did not support extension courses of any kind, so Smith-Lever provided the impetus the Commonwealth needed to start regular appropriations for extension education—education that is “extended” to the public. Agricultural extension agents fanned out into surrounding communities to give information to farmers on topics such as pest control, dairy marketing, and soil fertilization. Under agricultural extension, home economists—called home demonstration agents—were sent out to dispense information on meal planning, food preservation, and sewing, among other topics. They also worked with children and girls’ clubs teaching canning and sewing. Penn State’s first home demonstration agent was Pearl MacDonald. Fresh from graduate studies at Columbia University, she began her work in 1914, traveling throughout the state to speak to women’s clubs and high school groups about nutrition, food preservation, and clothing construction. She was joined by a second agent in 1915 and a third in 1916. By November 1918, the College had nine agents-at-large working in home economics. For the earliest, pioneering field agents, the job took courage. The women would often be traveling alone, by horse and buggy, staying in rough hotels or, if they were lucky, with other extension people. Often they were not immediately welcomed. The


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whole notion of home economics extension was more novel than agricultural extension, which meant that home economics agents were sometimes treated with suspicion and even antagonism. Over time, however, they won popular acceptance and became a permanent fixture of the land-grant extension program. When Madge T. Bogart succeeded Pearl MacDonald as head of home economics extension in 1923, twenty-two agents were on the College’s staff.

Tennis Matches and Senior Proms Over time, college officials discovered that women students needed opportunities for organized physical and social activity. There had been no physical education or recreational sports for women at Penn State in the early years. Blanche P. Miller, an 1885 Penn State graduate, started a women’s basketball team in 1898 and was charged with looking after the “leisure and recreational needs of female students.” The main emphasis was on gymnastics, but tennis, horseback riding, sleigh riding, sledding, and dancing were also included. Women had to wear special outfits made of “heavy, blue, wool serge bloomers, middy blouses, black stockings and white tennis shoes.” Classes were held in the Armory. In 1903, the College finally created the Program for Physical Activities for Women, and in 1906 women’s physical education was made a regular part of the curriculum. Lula B. Smith was hired as Director of Gymnastics, and she conducted classes in the basement of the new addition to the Women’s Building. Counting as one credit toward graduation, the classes included activities such as “graded mass drills, folk dancing, and movements of a more advanced nature making greater demands on speed, strength, coordination, bodily control, efficiency, erect carriage, organic vigor, and symmetrical development.” From 1913 to 1917, William E. Lewis, Director of the Gymnasium and Minor Sports, took over the gymnasium classes for women. A letter from student Adelaide Mitchell suggests that the new instructor didn’t accord women’s classes the highest priority: Since Mr. Lewis was very busy with the men’s program of Physical Culture, the women “usually reported for class, were marked for attendance and were allowed to leave the Armory—getting an A for the semester in gym. Sometimes a group would play basketball, but with no organization of any kind.” By 1917, the Department of Physical Education was suffering from a lack of facilities, space, and organization. Miss Millicent Pond, the chair of this committee, presented a written statement setting forth the needs of the women students for physical training to the board of trustees:


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[We] . . . have studied the question of athletics and physical training for women at the Pennsylvania State College, with a view of finding out: 1. Why the women students are not playing any organized games requiring more than four players, although there are one hundred and ninety women in the college. 2. Why there is no regularly required exercise at all for senior and junior women. . . . 3. Why nothing is being done to better the posture and carriage of individual women. The following year, Miss Marjorie Sime was appointed to teach physical education. For the first time, the women’s basketball team played games against other schools’ teams, such as Bellefonte and Williamsport, but she found problems with the inadequate facilities for women. Inadequate housing also became a persistent problem for Penn State during these years—a sure sign that the declining enrollments of earlier years were now a thing of the past. The expansion of the Ladies’ Cottage (renamed Women’s Building in 1908) had helped, but college officials found themselves regularly scrambling to add living quarters for women. In 1912, the College turned two vacant houses on campus into dormitories, and in 1915 McAllister Hall, which had housed 138 male students, was converted into a women’s dorm. Not everyone was happy with this move, as evidenced by an article that appeared in a 1916 issue of The Penn State Alumni Quarterly: “The women of the College have never aspired to replace the men or to rob them of their rightful strongholds, so the transformation of McAllister Hall into a dormitory for women in September, 1915, was the natural outgrowth of circumstances, rather than the result of aggressive spirit so commonly attributed to the women of today.” The next move came in 1919, when the faculty cottages on campus were taken over by women students. That year also marked the first time admission had to be denied because of insufficient housing—the “space quota” as the problem was then called. With no apparent recourse, college officials finally granted permission for about fifty women to live in town with “specially selected families.” To ease the transition, students formed the Town Girls’ Club. The mission of the Club was to help these women find “fellowship” and “entertainment” to compensate for the dormitory life they were forced to miss. But not all of the women found it easy adjusting to living off campus. Virginia Dale Ricker remembers how she felt: Most “country girls” like me did not attend college; that privilege was reserved primarily for the “town girls” (those who lived in the tiny town of State College). So I felt very self-conscious around those town girls, especially when I had to walk to school every day instead of living on-campus in the women’s dorm.


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Physical education classes became a standard part of women’s curriculum in 1906. Held briefly in the basement of the Women’s Building, these classes soon moved to the Armory (as seen in this photo from 1912), and included such activities as movement drills, folk dancing, and the always-popular basketball.

But whether country girls or town girls, they all enjoyed busy social lives. In a scrapbook belonging to student Elizabeth White, among the many photos of the “Girls of Penn State,” are several dance cards. At the Pennsylvania Day Dance of 1913, Miss White’s card was filled. Virginia Ricker also remembers the dances: If there was something going on, I’d stay with a friend in Mac Hall for the weekend. I liked the fraternity dances the best; they were more social and friendly. There was a


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freshman dance, a sophomore hop, a junior prom, and a senior ball. Those were big dances, held in the Armory, that beautiful building that Mr. Walker tore down. We also had a military ball, where men dressed in uniform. That ball was the most glamorous of all. Not only were Penn State women enjoying new social opportunities, they were gaining some control over matters of student conduct and discipline. All-male student government groups had existed since 1912, and in 1915 women created their own Student Government Association. The wsga took part in decisions regarding certain academic matters, such as suspension from the college due to negligent misbehavior. They also designated how women should behave in public (on campus and in town), in residence halls, and at social functions. Students were nominated by their peers for the wsga. In a letter dated November 15, 1915, freshman Emma Carey wrote to her parents from room 251 in McAllister Hall, “I was nominated as a representative to the Student Council meeting at Gettysburg but a sophomore got it. I missed the election by but three votes.” With more women enrolled, student behavior was carefully monitored. Everyone was expected to follow the “Class Customs,” as explained in the Student Handbook of 1912–13: Pennsylvania State has her characteristic Customs. Just now, some of them may seem unreasonable; but learn them and make them a part of yourself. In a little while you will learn to value them. Freshmen had an additional set of customs. First, they had to carry the Student Handbook with them at all times. They had to memorize all songs and cheers, bow or curtsy when passing the Old Willow on the east side of the Mall, and much more: • • • • • • •

Freshmen must wear small, green skull caps except on Sundays, or holidays, or when leaving the College on trips . . . Freshmen must not smoke in public, but most confine such practice to the privacy of their rooms . . . Freshmen must not wear College colors during their first semester . . . Freshmen must keep off the grass at all times . . . Freshmen shall keep their hands out of their pockets . . . Freshmen are forbidden to call upon or converse with young ladies . . . Freshmen shall not answer back to upper classmen when being introduced to them . . .


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A turning point in life at Penn State, 1919 marked the first time in the College’s history that enrollment exceeded available on-campus housing, forcing the administration to allow roughly fifty women to live with special host families off campus. Just one year later, women across the country would experience a great leap toward equality with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, granting them the right to vote.

Although these guidelines appear to address only male freshmen, women were in fact included. It wasn’t until the 1930s that freshmen women had their own set of rules. Penn State’s early coeds—almost certainly the first women in their families to attend an institution of higher learning—were learning much more than the skills to attain a decent paying job and help their poor families. They were beginning to realize that they, like men, were also entitled to enrich their lives through education. They were also discovering the richness of freedom and independence that had never been offered to them before.


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In another letter to her parents, Miss Carey recounts one of these experiences—a picnic at Shingletown Gap—in which perhaps she begins to realize that indeed the world might be her oyster: I wore Gerty’s white sweater and J. Wilberhaus’s white knit cap and my grey furs and if I must say it myself looked real spiffy! We had three fires, one for meat, one for potatoes, and one for coffee. It was moonlight and we sat by the fire and sang and told stories till it was time to start for home. I arrived at Mac Hall at about 9:30 tired but happy. What a glorious day.


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3 Making Strides

In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson announced that the United States would end its neutrality and enter the war that had been raging in Europe for three years. The vast majority of Americans wanted to help their allies, and college students were no exception. Over two thousand Penn State male undergraduates voted to send telegrams to both President Wilson and Pennsylvania Governor Brumbaugh, volunteering their services. The following year, the nation was formally at war. The School of Agriculture was one of the busiest places on campus during the mobilization for war. County extension offices were called upon to help increase the Commonwealth’s food production. The school hired more personnel to expedite the additional planting of corn, wheat, and other staples. To export the amounts of food that our troops and allies needed overseas, agents had to keep detailed records on production and storage. As part of the School of Agriculture, home economists were also involved in the war effort. Agents were dispatched all over Pennsylvania to help people can and preserve foods, plan nutritious meals using substitutes (due to wartime shortages), and get the most out of their gardens. Jan Scholl, who teaches today in the Department of Agriculture and Extension Education at Penn State, recalls seeing a usda film about a group of home demonstration agents who went to Grignon, France, after the war to demonstrate canning techniques. Sacrifices abounded on campus. In a valiant demonstration of the adage “the show must go on,” the all-male Penn State Thespians permitted a woman to substitute in a role in order to put on their spring 1918 musical, It Pays to Advertise. Eight years later, young Grace Baer would be the first woman formally accepted into the theater group.


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Margaret MacDonald, an 1895 graduate of Penn State’s two-year chemistry program, returned to the school twelve years later as only the second female ever recruited to the agricultural faculty. MacDonald became an important early figure for women at Penn State, serving until 1921 as the head of the Chemistry Department and helping to create one of the University’s first student loan programs for women.


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The annual He-She Dance was very popular among the female students in the 1920s, giving them an opportunity to escape temporarily from the strict social rules of the time. As an article in the December 3, 1926, Penn State Collegian explained, “On this occasion half of the girls will step forth in borrowed masculine finery. Some will be able to acquire suits and other articles that fit, but the greater number will seem to have been supplied by the R.O.T.C. outfitter, who remarked, ‘We have two sizes—too large and too small!’”

All the girls took their meals together at McAllister Hall, where male students waited on them. Girls were expected to dress for dinner. As it was wartime, Miss Lucretia Van Tuyl Simmons, head of the German Department, who served as dean of women in 1918, noted that her girls were “taking up a variety of outside work.” Sewing was very popular with the girls—sewing bags and service stars on uniforms, making layettes for Belgian babies, and practicing surgical dressings. Julia Gregg Brill (Class of 1921), who went on to become Penn State’s first female professor of English, lived for a short time in the formerly all-male University Club. Enrollment of male students dropped dramatically during the war, so administrators decided to lease the club and fill it with female students. In a 1976 interview with Jo Hays and C. O. Williams, Brill recounted what it felt like to be a freshman on campus during wartime: dodging fraternity lawns filled with men doing early-morning sit-ups; lurching out of the way of groups of marchers ordered to drill to and from class. She also remembered what meals were like:


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The special servicemen housed on the top floor of Old Main were fed in a mess hall built where the HUB now stands and connected by ramp with the kitchen of Mac Hall, where we girls were fed. Our meals and theirs were prepared separately, but shortcuts had to be used. Baked potatoes were never scrubbed and flakes of mud fell off as they were opened. One particularly bad day Miss Simmons took the dish of potatoes from the faculty table to Mr. Hostetter’s office to show him how we were served. He put the dish in a desk drawer, promising to “take care of that.” Weeks later when she had another occasion to visit his office, she opened the drawer inadvertently and there sat the baked potato. Being Miss Simmons, she gave no sign that she had noticed it, but oh how she loved telling the story! Katherine Sparks, wife of President Edwin Sparks, lodged the local Red Cross in the President’s House. She was a member of the Women’s Literary Club, which made sure that convalescing soldiers had magazines and other amenities. She also campaigned hard for donations to a campus hospital. Dr. Joseph Ritenour, from Fayette County, arrived in 1917 to oversee the health service. It turned out he was just in time. On the heels of the Great War came the devastating 1918 flu epidemic. Although the campus and the surrounding community were not hit hard (only twelve people died, according to Michael Bezilla in his history of Penn State), they were certainly not immune to the tragedy around them.

helen atherton govier: the president’s daughter In 1882, when four-year-old Helen Atherton Govier arrived in State College from New Brunswick, New Jersey, there were no sidewalks, sewers, churches, schools, or physicians. She and her four older siblings had to dodge the hogs that ran free through the streets, which turned into pools of mud when it rained. Her father, George W. Atherton, was beginning his presidency. His would be the longest tenure in Penn State’s history—twenty-four years. Teachers would come to their house to educate the children; a seamstress from Shingletown was employed to make clothes because ready-made clothes were difficult to come by. As a little girl, Helen Atherton recalled climbing on the roof of the house—the President’s House. “Someone would see us and get scared to death that we’d fall off,” she said in a 1974 interview. “We didn’t know to take our shoes off on the slate roof.”


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Helen Atherton (left) was active in the State College community for her entire life, from marching for women's suffrage as a young woman to establishing the Penn State Atherton Memorial Music Award.

A musical family, the four children would sing around the dinner table (although they weren’t supposed to) with each one taking a different part. Helen was an alto. She also learned from her mother, Frances Washburn Atherton, how to play the piano when she was very young. She continued to study music, earning a BA from Mount Holyoke College/Smith College. She returned to State College to be a music teacher and married electrical engineering professor Charles Govier in 1911. Frances Washburn Atherton and thirty-five other faculty wives had started the State College Woman’s Club in the Atherton parlor in 1894. Although Helen was a lifelong member, her interests lay more in preserving local history. The club had given the town a gift—an iron drinking fountain—that the Borough had agreed to erect on the campus side of College Avenue in 1907. Discarded in 1902 when College Avenue was paved with bricks, Helen rescued the fountain and moved it to her home at 518 South Atherton Street. Helen Govier was an early suffragette and is pictured in the State College Centennial history book, Story of the Century, with a drum in hand, preparing for a parade led by women with a “Votes for Women” banner. “We figured we


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needed uniforms for our parades,” she recalled. “The hats we borrowed from soldiers on campus. I’m not sure where we dug up the rest.” In the 1950s, Helen organized her father’s business and personal correspondence for the University Archives, which had been in storage since his death. After her husband died in 1962, Helen moved to an apartment in town. With the money from the sale of her house, she was able to endow the Atherton Memorial Music Award at Penn State. “I have always wanted to establish a scholarship fund in memory of my father, but I never had the money,” she said at the time. Helen died in 1976, a month before her ninety-eighth birthday, leaving a rich legacy of stories, music, and history. And the little bit of history she personally reclaimed—the iron fountain she rescued so long ago—is still standing at the Fraser Street entrance to Central Parklet.

Residence Halls Needed Dr. John Thomas became Penn State’s ninth president in 1921, and he brought with him a new vision. Under his leadership the College would be renamed The Pennsylvania State University, in keeping with Thomas’s goal of expanding Penn State’s educational role within the Commonwealth. In his inaugural address he proclaimed an enrollment goal of 10,000 students. About 2,000 students were enrolled that year. Of these, roughly 260 were women, including ninety-three freshmen, but one hundred had been denied admission due to lack of space. Two hundred and twenty of them were living on campus, while the remaining women, known as town girls, lived with families in State College. From a 1922 brochure created by the Woman’s Club to raise funds for new dormitories comes this plea: We cannot over-estimate the power of light and air, quiet and cleanliness, space and beauty, in determining the physical stamina, the temper and the temperament, the mental alertness, the character and ideals of our young folks. Thus for health, for standards of living and study, and for college influences and associations, we feel that dormitories for women are a necessity. residence halls for women are needed! The housing shortage was increasingly affecting the number of women students the college could admit. For four years running, over half of the qualified women who


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applied to the College were turned down because of the lack of housing and adequate classroom and laboratory space. In 1921, with 324 women students (eighty of whom were freshmen), 159 women were refused admittance “for lack of room, although their credentials were of the best. Is it fair to the daughters of the State?” It didn’t take President Thomas long to attack the housing problem. In 1922, he initiated an Emergency Building Fund campaign. At the time, there were two dormitories and five cottages for female students. The campaign target was two million dollars in private support. Serving with President Thomas on the seven-member executive committee, which provided leadership for the campaign, was Lucretia Van Tuyl Simmons. The campaign was a success, thanks in large part to the Grange, an organization that represented rural communities throughout the state. Because the vast majority of students came from rural areas, the Grange organization had strong connections with the College and created “The Pennsylvania State Grange Fund for a Dormitory for Girls.” More than a hundred women found living space when Grange Memorial Dormitory opened in 1930.

grange building: the best room at penn state “I caught nine mice and picked up many more splinters on my feet from the rough floor in McAllister Hall,” wrote Margaret Griffin Aschman in 1931. But she wasn’t complaining. At the rate women were enrolling in the Pennsylvania State College, finding dormitory rooms for them all was a major challenge. During the 1920s, women comprised about 10 percent of the student body, but housing was in short supply. McAllister Hall had been converted into a women’s dorm in 1915, but many women were living in the Women’s Building and in various houses on campus that at one time had been faculty residences. The College did not have the necessary funds to build a new dorm. Fortunately, there was another organization willing to help. The Pennsylvania State Grange, part of the national organization dedicated to improving farmers’ situations and enriching the lives of the rural population, took on the task. The Grange’s purpose in raising the money was to show its appreciation for the agricultural services the College provided, and to demonstrate that its members “think more of their boys and girls than they do of their horses and cattle.” Through the sale of 42,000 newly created Pennsylvania State Grange cookbooks and membership gifts, the Grange announced that it had $100,000 to


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contribute to a new women’s dormitory. It would be heralded as the most outstanding fund-raising achievement of any state Grange of its time. On June 15, 1928, ground was broken on a field that was being used by Pennsylvania farmers as a vegetable gardening experiment. The architect for the new building was Charles Z. Klauder, who designed other Penn State buildings, including Irvin Hall, Recreation Hall, and Ritenour Health Center. In 1930, 102 women moved into the Grange Memorial Dormitory. Compared to the other women’s housing on campus, it was luxurious. Each floor had a kitchenette, where dormmates would prepare supper. To Elizabeth Walter Otis, who lived there from 1933 to 1934, it was her “good fortune” to live in the new hall: After my freshman year on the fourth floor of Grange seemed very elegant. The mahogany furniture was most impressive. The double desk was spacious and more conducive to studying — certainly an improvement over the small desks we had used in Mac Hall. The lobby was beautifully furnished and an attractive spot to entertain a guest or for your guest to wait until you appeared. Like many residents before her, Elizabeth Bergstein, who lived in Grange from 1946 to 1948, believed that she had the best dorm room at Penn State: We had the top-floor room on the far left . . . Surely there could not have been a better room on campus. It was large with a partial wall across the middle; it divided the two twin beds from an area toward the door that had two desks that faced each other. There were two other rooms on the top. And one nice big bathroom. We had it made. During the 1950s, Grange residents, like most young women everywhere, found ways to get around restrictive rules for activities of highest priority. Daisy Reiter, who lived in the dorm from 1954 to 1957, recalls that time: Facing the outside front of the building on the third floor was a small roof ledge where the sun shone most of the afternoon. We would sunbathe there. Thank heavens we were never discovered or reported. We were not allowed in public in shorts, let alone to sunbathe in public. That would be the last decade that Grange Dormitory would be used exclusively for women. When several more women’s residence halls were built during


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Despite having moved into the formerly all-male MacAllister Hall, and various cottages and off-campus boarding houses, the number of women undergraduates in the 1920s continued to exceed available lodging. When it opened in 1930, the Grange Memorial Dormitory was the pinnacle of luxury on campus. The one hundred women who lived there had access to a kitchenette on each floor and enjoyed dorm rooms furnished with mahogany furniture.

the postwar boom, Grange Hall was converted into graduate housing and then office space. But for many women, including Ms. Reiter, living in Grange Memorial Dormitory was a treasured experience and created such memories as this one from the 1950s: When boys and girls became pinned (engaged), it was customary for the fraternity to present the girl with a dozen roses and a candlelight serenade. I remember the fraternity brothers standing on the large porch in the back, singing to an open window.


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But even with this additional help, more than a hundred women were still living in approved boarding houses and other homes in town. Building new dormitories was the only option, especially since the town was reaching its limits of residential offerings. Grace Baer Holderman was one of those who had to live off campus: I couldn’t live in the dorm much because I didn’t have enough money so I lived in private homes. I always had a friend who asked her parents if I could live with them— and my friend and I would share her room. I was always considered one of the family. Ken [Grace’s future husband] knew people in many of various homes I was living in. He’d come over in the evenings and sit down at the family piano and we’d all stand around and sing songs.

The First Social Organizations The 1920s were a giddy time. Perhaps as a reaction to the grimness of war, people needed more than ever to feel alive. Young people were suddenly questioning authority and flaunting rules. Yes, there was Prohibition, but by all accounts the law seemed to have the exact opposite effects of its intentions. Drinking and smoking were on the rise, as were girls’ hemlines. During these years, women at Penn State were seeking outlets for organized social activity. Fraternities and fraternity houses had existed on campus since the late 1880s, but sororities were not allowed. When freshmen and sophomore women formed a secret Greek-letter society in 1911, they kept it a secret from the administration for an entire year. When their secret was finally discovered, the administration banned the society. But this did not stop coeds from repeatedly petitioning to form social clubs in hopes of becoming affiliated with national sororities. They were quick to point out the potential benefits of social clubs. For instance, if sororities were permitted to acquire houses as fraternities did, they could help relieve the College’s persistent housing shortage. Not surprisingly, college administrators did not look favorably upon the coeds’ petitions, but over time their persistence paid off. In 1921, the College Senate’s committee on student welfare reluctantly gave in, approving the formation of a trial club. The ruling came with two conditions: Greek letters could not be used in the club’s name, and freshmen were not allowed to join. The dean of women at the time, Margaret A. Knight, objected to the decision. Knight, a Vassar graduate who had most recently been assistant dean of women at Northwestern, opposed sororities, believing that they were elitist and contrary


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The lack of a formal social program for women led to creative, offbeat entertainment like this Renaissance-themed Christmas party in 1923.

to democratic and academic ideals for women. Nevertheless, the ruling was official, and the first women’s club on campus was formed: the Nita-Nee Campus Club, named after the legendary Indian Princess Nita-Nee. Other clubs soon followed. Charlotte E. Ray, the next dean of women, took a more positive view of sororities. She felt that Nita-Nee and the other clubs were “doing good service in the promotion of scholarship and improved conduct.” Miss Ray finally persuaded the Senate committee on student affairs to permit clubs to seek national affiliation, and in 1926 the Nu Gamma Chapter of Chi Omega (which had been the Alfost Club) became Penn State’s first national sorority. By 1930, ten women’s clubs had formed on campus, and four of them were affiliated with national sororities. Furthermore, the five national clubs were assigned to campus cottages.


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Despite vocal opposition from Dean of Women Margaret A. Knight, the Nita-Nee Club became Penn State’s first official women’s organization in 1921. Knight argued that sororities and similar groups were elitist and antidemocratic, but the relief that the Nita-Nee Club could bring to the extreme shortage of on-campus housing eventually convinced the administration to give its approval. Despite the initial injunction against any emulation of Greek societies, the Nita-Nee Club became affiliated with Kappa Alpha Theta in 1930.

Charlotte Ray was the first dean of women to hold the position on a full-time basis. Born in Titusville, Pennsylvania, on February 17, 1880, she received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh and taught in the public grammar schools of Allegheny County before arriving at Penn State in 1923. With a staff of advisers, she oversaw the women’s living arrangements, social activities, and financial aid situations and helped to enforce rules and regulations. Working with the Women’s Student Government Association (wsga), the dean of women decided upon class customs, dormitory rules, and other regulations. The same year Ray was appointed, women were permitted to go off campus by themselves during the week. Dormitory doors were locked at 10 pm sharp, the curfew on weeknights. In 1923, it was decided that after “special dances” women could go to an approved restaurant downtown. But because they had to be back in the dorm half an hour after the dance, they had to eat fast.


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The Dean of Women’s room in 1905. Penn State’s administration believed it should act in loco parentis for the women who studied on campus. President Edwin Earl Sparks (1908–20) gained the respect of students by attempting to strike a balance between giving supervision and allowing self-sufficiency. He fostered expansion of student self-government, persuaded the faculty to develop a student advisory system, and appointed the first deans of men and women. The dean of women’s role was similar to that of the Lady Principal, but some who held the post placed more emphasis on managing behavior than on encouraging academics.


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In 1923, Charlotte Ray became the first dean of women to hold the position full-time. Popular among the students during her twentythree-year tenure, Ray worked to slowly loosen the strict social regulations undergraduate women faced. Unlike her predecessor, Margaret A. Knight, she actively supported women’s organizations and helped to establish the first Penn State chapter of a national sorority, the Nu Gamma chapter of Chi Omega.

Dean Ray was beloved by thousands of coeds during her long tenure at Penn State. The Class of 1933 dedicated its La Vie yearbook to her “self-sacrificing spirit of understanding and helpfulness.” Upon her retirement in 1946, the Penn State chapter of Mortar Board, the honor society for women, established a scholarship fund in her name. The Charlotte E. Ray Scholarship fund is still administered by Mortar Board.

Pioneering Faculty Several of Penn State’s female professors made notable impacts on Penn State during the 1920s. Not only did they have long and fruitful academic careers, but they also served as much-needed role models to untold numbers of young women.


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Mary Willard, the daughter of mathematician Joseph Moody Willard, was born in Moffat Cottage on the Penn State campus in 1898. After earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Penn State, she left central Pennsylvania to pursue her PhD at Cornell before returning as a professor of chemistry. Besides being one of the very few women to win every type of award and recognition possible at the time in her field, microchemistry and crystallography, Dr. Willard became nationally known for using her academic techniques to help the police solve crimes. After her work helped convict a criminal in 1931, Willard was regularly called upon to research cases for the Pennsylvania State Police and was contacted by many different states, as well as investigators at Scotland Yard, Interpol, and La Sûreté. A professor for forty years with a total of approximately 4,400 students, Dr. Willard also found time to write and lecture around the country. By the time she was honored with a Woman of the Year Award in 1965, she had inspired countless students—especially young women—to pursue a career in science.

lucretia van tuyl simmons: first faculty Lucretia Van Tuyl Simmons stands out as one of the most academically celebrated women in Penn State’s early history. Arriving at Penn State from New York to teach German in 1903, Simmons continued her education, earning her master’s degree from Penn State and then going on to the University of Wisconsin, where she received her PhD in 1913. She then traveled abroad and taught at several European institutions. At Penn State, she was a professor of German. In 1918, while heading the German Department, she agreed to take on the position of dean of women, which had been created in 1907. However, Simmons resigned after only one year, feeling that the job was too demanding on top of her teaching schedule. Simmons was a dedicated member of the Red Cross and the State College Woman’s Club. During Penn State’s Emergency Building Campaign in 1923, she helped to raise two thousand dollars. She also helped to establish several community organizations such as the Cosmopolitan Club, the Dickens Club, the Deutscher Verein, the local chapter of the American Association of University


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Active in both academic and social circles, Lucretia Van Tuyl Simmons served as head of the German Department, an adviser to women students, and, briefly, as the dean of women. She also helped establish a number of community organizations, including a chapter of the American Association of University Professors and the Penn State Alumnae Club.

Professors, and the Penn State Alumnae Club. Upon her retirement in 1936, Simmons was named Professor Emerita. Many young women students were inspired by Miss Simmons and considered her their mentor. The Penn State Alumni News deemed her life “an inspiration and a pattern for all aspiring teachers.” In 1948, Penn State honored her when it named Simmons Hall, one of two new women’s dormitories that opened that year.

Another role model for many coeds was Teresa Cohen. One of the few women in America to have an academic career in mathematics, Dr. Cohen arrived on the Penn State campus from Baltimore after earning her doctorate at Johns Hopkins. With her superior credentials, research would have been her logical choice, but Dr. Cohen, without a single


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formal course in teacher training, discovered that she loved the classroom. For the next sixty-six years, she taught and helped students learn to appreciate what she loved— mathematics. Even after her retirement, Dr. Cohen continued to teach as an unpaid volunteer five days a week, until the age of ninety-four. Cohen was still a young seventy-four (she would live to be one hundred) when she began documenting her memories of Penn State on a series of index cards. She even remembered some of her first impressions after stepping off the train in 1920: Getting here: Arrived Sept 1920 after hasty summons. Prof Willard had heard I was available and telegraphed me that day. Had hardly heard of Penn State; about all was that it had a good football team. Wasn’t the only one; railroad did not know much about how to get here. Willards arranged for me to stay at Mac Hall. Women: Nine-days wonder as first woman in math. Proportion of women on campus much smaller then. Student body about 1 out of 10. Customs: Hazing rather rough, though mostly confined to one night. Landladies prepared hot water-molasses and sawdust. Rule that freshmen men could not speak to girls rather strictly enforced. Penalty was a hair cut, entirely shaved or in some fancy design like Cupid. Much more intended to humiliate, not hurt. Teacher training became the focus of much attention at Penn State in the years after Dr. Cohen’s arrival. In 1921, Pennsylvania’s General Assembly passed the Edmonds Act, which established standards for teacher salaries, raised the qualifications for teacher certification, and increased state aid to further education. In 1923, the School of Education was formed. Under the direction of its first dean, Will Chambers, teacher-training extension offices opened in Pittsburgh and Harrisburg. For teachers who could not leave to continue their education, extension offices opened the following year in Altoona and Erie. Also in 1923, the college decided to move the Department of Home Economics into the new School of Education. By mid-decade, 450 undergraduates were enrolled in the school. Of those, 320 were women, many of them home economics majors. Home economics flourished under the leadership of Edith Pitt Chace. Appointed head of the department in 1918, Chace oversaw the transition to the School of Education. During her tenure the department grew not only in size but, more importantly, in stature. Miss Chace brought leadership and vision to her position by offering a new academic major, Institutional Management. She established the Vocational Home Economics curriculum, oversaw the building of a new Home Economics Building, tripling the number of faculty, and developed a graduate course of study. In 1920, the department offered


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Edith Pitt Chace, director of home economics from 1918 to 1937, brought the major to prominence by establishing the Department of Hygiene and Physical Education for Women, the Home Management House, and a variety of new courses in institutional management.


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its first course for nonmajors: Cooking for Men. In 1924, the first Master of Science in Home Economics Education was awarded to Carrie Bowes Hibshman. Miss Chace undertook an experiment with her students in 1928 that resulted in national attention. Articles about it appeared in many newspapers, notably the New York Times and the Albany Evening News, quoted here: Forty-five cents provides Pennsylvania State College practice housekeeping co-eds with three good meals a day, according to figures released today by Miss Edith Chace. . . . Some of the girls have complained latterly of putting on weight. Budgeted to fifty cents a day, or $3.50 a week, for board, the girls, week after week, have come under that figure. Here is a sample menu: Breakfast—Grapes, hot cereal, top milk, cinnamon toast, coffee Luncheon—Vegetable soup, apple, date and cabbage salad, bread, butter, milk Dinner—Veal cutlets, creamed cabbage, mince pie The study of child care was introduced into the curriculum in 1918 with the course Child Welfare and Home Nursing. Seven years later a playschool was organized, which lasted until 1929, when a regular nursery school was established. Fourteen children, ranging in age from eighteen months to three, were enrolled that first year. From that time forward, demand considerably exceeded the program’s accommodations. But by far, the most famous home economics teaching tool was the “Practice House,” also known as a Home Management House. This was a separate building on campus that was outfitted as a teaching home for seniors. The first such practice house, known as Hillcrest (near present-day Weaver Building), opened for seniors in 1919. Students worked there in groups of eight, applying the theories and instruction they had learned in the classroom. Miss Chace took pains to make the house as realistic as possible, but soon she realized that caring for a house with no one living there was less than ideal. So in 1923 the first real, live infant came to live at Hillcrest. Over the years, two more Home Management Houses were built, and eighty babies would, for a period in their lives, live at one of the three houses. Many of these infants were from orphanages or other types of foster homes; local mothers would occasionally volunteer their child for a temporary time. Over the years, thousands of home economics alumnae have identified this experience as one of the most gratifying and valuable aspects of their educations. Miss Chace helped most of her students in securing positions after graduation and corresponded regularly with them. In the Penn State archives, there are many letters such as the one below:


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To Miss Katherine Williams: I have just had an inquiry from the Carson College for Orphan Girls in Flourtown [Pennsylvania] asking for someone to fill a vacancy as cottage dietician and teacher of Domestic Science. Another important innovation came with the opening of the new Department of Hygiene and Physical Education for Women in 1919. In 1920, it offered the first full athletic program for women. All four classes (freshmen through seniors) had teams competing in hockey, volleyball, basketball, and track. Tennis and golf had individual competitions, and there were “rewards” for skill in hiking and winter sports. M. Elizabeth Cates, the first full-time Director of Physical Education for Women, helped to form the Women’s Athletic Association (waa), an extracurricular sports program that promoted competition within classes (freshmen through seniors). The Association was funded by a tax of one dollar and twenty-five cents paid by undergraduate students. The most significant person in the early history of women’s sports appeared on the scene in 1924 and would stay for more than thirty years. From his book on the history of Mary Beaver White Recreation Hall, John Lucas writes of Marie Haidt: A slightly built young woman . . . she breathed new life and commitment into the program. She also brought with her a kind of militancy not common at that time, and certainly not on a college campus with a minority of women. She demanded of Mr. Bezdek (the football coach at the time) better facilities, informing him that trying to teach 140 women in the basement of the Armory at 4 pm was most unacceptable. Miss Haidt was frustrated by the lack of physical education facilities for women. Both men and women shared the Armory, but hours for women were limited and there were no showers or lockers set aside for them. Still, Haidt was able to make one welcomed change not long after her arrival. She got rid of the traditional sports uniform consisting of heavy blue serge bloomers, “middy” blouses, and black stockings and replaced them with a two-piece outfit: blue shorts, blouses, and gym shoes. And with Dean Charlotte Ray’s approval, she increased the physical education and hygiene requirement to five credits. A group of women with a baby on the porch of the Home Management House, 1940. In 1923, students in the Practice House began taking care of a real child, giving them a more complete understanding of the dynamics of motherhood. In 1929, the first regular nursery school was established in the Sparks House. By the late 1930s, there were three Home Management Houses on campus: Hillcrest, Beecher, and Benedict Houses.


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A believer in the then-uncommon notion that women were capable of more than leisure activities, Marie Haidt (top row, center) took over the women’s athletic program in 1924 and remained for more than thirty years. Haidt was famous among students for both her harsh demeanor and her tireless devotion to improving conditions and facilities for women’s athletics. A Penn State scholarship in kinesiology recognizes Haidt’s contributions to the field.

It was also during the 1920s that The Lion’s Tale became the first publication by female students and alumnae. Dean Ray took sincere pride in the new publication, penning the following congratulatory greeting on the front page of the inaugural issue: Do you know that the Alumnae Club of this town was influential in bringing to realization our hopes for this little paper? We hope that thru these pages you will renew acquaintance with your friends of college days and will also give to those of us who remain any advice that may be helpful to the girls of your Alma Mater.


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4 Improving the Learning Experience

By every measure, the 1930s began with promise for Penn State. Even after the stock market crash of 1929, undergraduate enrollment continued to increase throughout most of the Depression. Enrollment reached a record high of just under six thousand by 1938, making Penn State the largest school in Pennsylvania. New president Ralph Dorn Hetzel (1927–47) improved and enlarged the campus with a major building campaign that included a new engineering building, Recreation Hall, the Nittany Lion Inn, and renovations to Old Main. But the Depression hit Pennsylvania particularly hard, both in the cities and in rural communities, making it increasingly difficult for students and their families to afford the cost of higher education. Even in the best of economic times, rural families could barely afford to send their children away to school; now it was nearly impossible without the public assistance made possible by the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal programs. Even before the crash, Penn State was facing the prospect of expanding its network of engineering branch schools and teacher training centers throughout the state. Permanent schools were needed in communities where young men and women with few prospects for gainful employment could further their education while still living at home. In 1933, Penn State opened four experimental “freshman centers” in rural communities along the northern tier of Pennsylvania. With the early success of these centers, President Hetzel agreed to go a step further and open four branch campuses—known as undergraduate centers—at Hazleton, Pottsville, Sayre-Towanda, and Uniontown. These centers, staffed with unemployed teachers, were the precursors to the commonwealth campus system, and proved successful enough (except for Sayre-Towanda, which was


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replaced with a center at DuBois in 1935) to continue with the branch campus experiment, at least for the short term. Meanwhile, women’s enrollment at the University Park campus actually doubled during the Depression, with women enrolled in every school on campus except Mining. In 1930, women composed approximately 16 percent of the total undergraduate population, compared to 10 percent in 1924. By the middle of the decade, women would compose 20–25 percent of the total student body. One student who was determined to attend college despite the crushing poverty of her environment was Mildred Seller Bunton. The first African American woman to graduate from Penn State, Bunton worked for the faculty in exchange for room and board, borrowed money for tuition, and won scholarships from the State Federation of Pennsylvania Women. After graduating in 1932 with a degree in health and human development, Bunton went on to earn a master’s degree in nutrition at Cornell. Her distinguished career included stints as Director of Dietetics at Freedman’s Hospital and Associate Professor at Howard University. She took part in the 1969 White House Conference on Nutrition, Food, and Health and served as Subcommittee Chairman on the District of Columbia’s Mayor’s Commission on Food, Nutrition, and Health. Today a scholarship fund named for Bunton and Calvin Hoffman Waller (Class of 1904; believed to be Penn State’s first African American graduate) enhances the diversity of undergraduate representation at Penn State. Another student who was fully aware of the sacrifices her family made to send her to school was Evelyn Saubel, of Bedford County. She remembers the sense of responsibility she felt as she arrived at Penn State in 1931: I was living with a family I knew in town. And I met a nice young man at the boarding house where I took my meals. As a freshman, I wasn’t supposed to date, but I did anyway. When he started getting serious, I dropped him. I had a plan and having a husband would ruin my plan. Active in the 4-H club as a teenager, Saubel was impressed by the home economics field extension agents, attending every lecture and demonstration she could. At the age of thirteen, she knew she wanted to go to college and become a home economics teacher. Her mother had always wanted her only child to attend college. She accompanied Evelyn to State College, taking a job as a cook in a fraternity house to help pay her daughter’s tuition. Saubel soon learned the rituals of her new school. Freshmen women had to wear green hair ribbons instead of the green dickies that men wore, open doors for upperclass women and faculty, attend home football games (but never with a date), and keep off the grass in


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By the 1930s, women had solidified their place on campus. While it was still rare for women to venture into the male-dominated fields of science and engineering, they were finding careers in the practical application of research—in home economics, teaching, business, physical education, agriculture, and journalism.


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front of Old Main. One custom during orientation was “Good Form Week,” during which upperclass students explained to freshman the appropriate dress and manners for the dining room and campus. A fashion show by upperclass women of what not to wear—for example, heavy walking shoes with evening gowns—was part of the week, as were helpful guidelines for table manners such as “talking or drinking when the mouth is free from food and chewing when the lips are closed.” These guidelines also warned against some social faux pas such as using pet phrases in conversation or powdering your nose on the street. By the mid-1930s, to the coeds’ joy, Dean Ray had relaxed the dating rules. Women were permitted to date at functions approved by college officials and on weekends. Upperclass women were even permitted to remain out until 1am on weekends. A push to allow females to attend fraternity parties without chaperones failed in 1931 because the privilege was “often abused.” Women were only allowed to visit fraternities for two hours at mealtimes and a minimum of three couples had to be present. They were absolutely forbidden to go beyond the first floor in a fraternity house or to men’s rooms in houses and dorms. The student handbook of 1931–32 stated, “No woman shall occupy a room in a house where men students are located unless it is her own house or unless she has the special permission of the dean of women.”

Expanding Opportunities During the 1930s, home economics continued to be the most popular major for women. For many senior coeds, the on-campus Home Management Houses provided an ideal way to earn temporary room and board. In addition to Hillcrest House, there were now two new houses: Beecher House and Benedict House. These fully furnished and wellequipped houses were set up to give home economics students practical experience in the “household arts” of cooking, nutrition, and child care and development. Emily P. Evans (Class of 1938) lived at the Hillcrest Home Management House, assisting the teacher, Nellie M. Vedder, who lived there full-time: At that time, Home Ec students spent six or eight weeks at one of the houses during their junior or senior years. Students were assigned responsibilities of maintaining the household. Tasks were rotated each week. For example, each student took a turn being a hostess, which included planning appealing and nutritious meals as well as guest meals on a limited budget. Evelyn Saubel, who lived in Sparks House her junior and senior years, remembers these tasks in detail:


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One of us would cook, one of us would figure out what to spend on groceries, one of us would plan menus, etc. But it was not easy or trivial work by any means. We scrubbed and waxed the floors. We got spots out of carpeting and cleaned rugs. We cleaned the silver every week. When we were on laundry, we had to wash and dry and then iron. We ironed sheets, towels, napkins—because they were linen. And of course, diapers. Lots and lots of dirty diapers. One of the professors taught us little tricks like you throw a shawl over the sofa if there’s a spot that doesn’t come out and things like that. These tasks also included baby care, such as preparing bottles, washing, feeding, dressing, bathing, and waking up in the middle of the night to care for the infant. The coeds helped make and maintain the baby’s clothing. It seems as though virtually every woman who went through the Home Management Houses—taking care of the baby and learning how to run a household—cannot speak highly enough of the experience. Evelyn Saubel also remembers a sewing class that she and her classmates simply called “Patches,” which consisted of making fifty or so samples of every type of technique—such as a placket, a hem, and so on. The girls would emerge with a thick book of samples, with written procedures for each one, that they could show to prospective employers. Saubel, who said she repeatedly drew on what she learned from this course after graduation, recalled that graduates from other home economics programs didn’t have this type of class. Evelyn Saubel successfully completed her education at Penn State. After graduation, she moved to York County, where she took a job in a high school and established a new course of home economics. Besides the cooking, sewing, and cleaning, she taught her students how to finish and paint tables and chairs. Because she had to buy new unfinished furniture for her classroom, she took the opportunity to learn how to finish it herself and then taught these skills to her students. Several years later, she and her husband moved back to State College, where she joined the home economics faculty. During the 1930s, the Home Economics Department began to offer majors in child development and family relationships. “Courtship and Marriage” was the most popular course at the time, but the foundational courses in the department remained focused on foods and nutrition, as well as textiles and clothing. Fortunately, Professor Chace and her faculty received a much-needed boost with the opening of a new home economics building in 1932. With more space, new equipment, and modern laboratories came the development of a serious research program. In 1933, Dr. Pauline Beery Mack of the chemistry department was appointed to be the new research director for home economics. Mack had earned her master’s degree at Columbia in 1919 and joined the Penn State faculty the same year. She completed her PhD at the College in 1932. She began her career as a chemistry instructor in home economics,


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Appointed research director for home economics in 1933, Dr. Pauline Beery Mack applied her chemistry training to the study of foods and textiles. Internationally recognized for her work in fibers and fabrics, she also conducted research on nutrition and the effects of calcium on bone density. Her students praised her ability to bring chemistry to life through practical application.

applying her laboratory techniques to foods and textiles. Her experiments on the chemical reactions produced by the dyeing, finishing, and aging of fibers and fabrics earned her an international reputation in the field. At the College, she had graduate students from the Departments of Home Economics, Physics, and Chemistry. In her role as research director (she still maintained a position in the Chemistry Department), Dr. Mack developed the Pennsylvania Mass Studies in Human Nutrition and directed several joint studies on children’s growth with the University of Pennsylvania


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and the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania. During World War II, she did research for the military on the effects of calcium on bone density and was subsequently awarded the Garven Medal of the American Chemistry Society for her efforts. During the Home Economics Reunion held on campus in 2002, graduates were asked to recall their favorite professors and most memorable moments. Several women recounted their experiences with Dr. Mack. Shirley H. Cameron (Class of 1942) recalled: [Dr. Mack] made chemistry a fascinating subject with practical applications. She had a wonderful sense of humor and was really concerned about the progress of her students. On a cold morning in her chemistry class, the room started to warm and Dr. Mack started to take off her mittens, hat, scarf, and fur coat. Quick change! She’d forgotten to put on a dress! We all loved her.

More Housing Needed With the dramatic rise in the number of women students during the Depression, Penn State desperately needed more housing. By 1936, as Michael Bezilla notes in his history of Penn State, McAllister Hall, the Women’s Building, Grange Memorial Dormitory, and the sorority cottages could accommodate less than one-half of the one thousand coeds in residence. This forced hundreds of women to live off campus in boarding houses in State College. Relief came in 1938 in the form of Frances Atherton Hall. Helen Atherton Govier, the former president’s daughter, was on hand to dedicate the new dormitory in memory of her mother. The new building provided more than two hundred furnished, double-occupancy rooms with private phones, a true luxury (although the switchboard would not take calls after 10 pm). Still, Atherton Hall was filled to capacity immediately, leaving more than one hundred students to find off-campus housing. A new building for women’s athletics opened behind Atherton Hall that same year. On June 4, 1938, Dean Carl Schott presided over the dedication of the Mary Beaver White Recreation Hall, praising Marie Haidt, head of women’s physical education, for her tireless devotion and splendid program. A former student, Janet Brownback Gross, called White Hall “a modern club house where women can always be free to come whenever they want.” Physical education for coeds had entered a new era with the building of White Hall. It was named in honor of the daughter of James A. Beaver, a past president of the board of trustees. (She was also the mother of James G. White, another member of the board of trustees.) According to Eleanor Wray, who wrote a 1945 Penn State thesis on the history


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of women’s physical education: “Mrs. White’s name was selected because of her devoted interest in, and assistance to, the women on the Campus. Through her, scholarships, loan funds, and other means of help and encouragement were extended to the women and their activities on the Campus.” Coeds were required to take two years of “gymnasium drill.” Here is a description of Gym Drill 1, from the papers of Mildred Lucey, one of the instructors: Elementary mass drills, folk dancing and gymnastic games are used in which only the fundamental and larger accessory movements are utilized in order to develop obedience, quick response, endurance, co-ordination, bodily control and erect carriage. Exercises affecting chiefly the larger muscle groups and organs of circulation and respiration. Miss Lucey expanded the Women’s Recreational Association (founded in 1918), offering courses in skiing, skating, swimming, badminton, lifesaving, basketball, and hockey. In the evenings, she continued her own education, taking courses in zoology and physiology (in which she remembers dissecting a human cadaver). With encouragement from the administration, she studied for and received her doctorate in physical education in 1952. She continued to teach and conduct research until her retirement in 1969, and she remains physically active to this day. With the space White Hall afforded, there was now a host of new activities for women: archery, dance, fencing, golf, outing, riding, riflery, swimming, tennis, badminton, bowling, basketball, baseball, and bridge. Haidt was determined to maintain a strict policy of “women only” for the new recreation hall, arguing that men had their own places for “sequestered gathering” and that White Hall would be, according to Eleanor Wray, “every woman’s club house.” Wray describes her understanding of Haidt’s philosophy, based on her writings and impressions, as follows: “Once you got to know Miss Haidt, her philosophy became a permeating influence . . . a philosophy of democratic principles with tinges of idealism, with an emphasis on social training, polish and social living.” There was another development in women’s athletics in 1930. The Department of Physical Education was reorganized into the School of Physical Education and Athletics, and a four-year course in physical education leading to a bachelor of science degree was established. Female students who wanted to major in “Phys Ed” had to enroll in the School of Education for three years before they could enroll in the School of Physical Education and Athletics. The 1930s also saw the evolution of the Campus Clubs into full-fledged sororities. By 1933, there were nine sororities on campus, each with a chapter house provided by the


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Marie Haidt and Women’s Athletic Association President Rachel Bechdel at the dedication of the Mary Beaver White Recreation Hall. Designed as a women-only facility, White Building provided modern facilities, including a pool, which was the envy of male athletes, who had to go off campus to the Glennland Building to swim.

College. Mortar Board, Scrolls, Chimes, and Cwens—also called “hat societies”—were the academic and leadership societies for women. Each served a different purpose and was addressed to a different class. Julia Gregg Brill explains more in one of her regular columns for The Penn Stater, “Here and There with the Girls:” Cwens, began in 1927, seeks to develop leadership among sophomores. . . . Archousai is composed of seniors who have demonstrated their capacities and strives to direct and encourage the younger girls in the development of their individual powers of leadership. Archousai, be it whispered, hopes some day to be Mortar Board.


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Other sororities, such as service-oriented organizations and those centered on common interests, were gaining footholds as well. Omicron Nu, an honorary home economics sorority, was installed in 1924, and Beta Chi Phi, a scientific honor society, was formed two years later. Considering the low percentage of women students on campus for many decades, women have managed to receive a proportionate (or sometimes higher-thanproportionate) share of awards. In 1931, 28 percent of class members elected to Phi Kappa Phi, the honor society for outstanding scholarship for men and women, were women; and 14 percent of the Honor Society Council medals went to women. The Lion’s Paw, the highest honor society for men, would not accept women as members until 1972. Women were also making strides in other extracurricular activities. A Women’s Debating Club started in the 1920s, and a forensics club formed in the 1930s. A single “Women’s Correspondent” for The Daily Collegian expanded into a women’s staff. Women also held positions on Froth, Penn State Farmer, and Old Main Bell. In 1930, La Vie, first published as a yearbook of the junior class, became the senior class’s yearbook. As long as the number of women students remained small, La Vie printed the coeds’ names individually and included pictures or a short profile. Later, the women and their activities were mentioned in a separate section in the back of the book. Similarly, in the annual Student Handbook, the dean of men and the dean of women welcomed the freshmen in two different messages. Not until the 1960s would women be included with men as part of the student body in both La Vie and the Student Handbook. The Women’s Student Government Association (wsga) made an attempt at a women’s student newspaper in 1937, with the publication of The Co-Edition, “dedicated to the interests of Penn State women.” The Co-Edition would stay in print until the war, when women had to fill in for men at the Daily Collegian. The Co-Edition contained a variety of pieces for women, such as “Frosh Personalities (‘Beanie’ Siebert, from Camp Hill . . . majoring in Art Ed . . . good dancer and swimmer . . . very vivacious . . . For further details, look for all the girls in the green ribbons— they’re all swell!)” and “Home Economics Club Plans Treasure Hunt.” One issue listed the rules for freshman girls eating in Mac Hall for the first time: The hostess, and the hostess only, should speak to the waiters. The waiters may be your friends outside of the dining room, but they have a job to do, a job which can be lost merely for talking to the girls on duty. . . . If any girl desires anything which has not been put on the table (relish, catsup, or jelly, etc.) she should ask the hostess to obtain it for her. . . . The time which has been set for the exodus from the dining room is 6:20. There is no sense in rushing to get through because the hostess will not leave before that.


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The waiters who served food to the girls were male students earning extra money. This practice continued through the 1950s. Of course the men were there to work, but that didn’t always stop them from seizing an opportunity. According to Nancy Saylor Gamble, who graduated in 1952, “My most memorable Penn State event was meeting my husband! He was the headwaiter and I was a meal-ticket checker—and I had been dating the other headwaiter. Something clicked and after a few dates it was just Glenn.” Grace Baer Holderman remembers mealtimes during her stay in Mac Hall as a part of a bygone era: One dressed for dinner and dressed neatly every day. Some profs insisted that guys wear a tie—or a v-necked sweater or a sports jacket. Grooming was pleasing and neat. There was an ironing room, and you were expected to take care of your wardrobe. We washed things out and hung them to dry in the bathroom. But lest anyone think that elegance ruled the day, the end of the 1930s saw the reemergence of campus customs, a sure sign that the gloom of the previous decade had come to an end. The “pajama parade” was introduced in 1941. This consisted of the sophomore men rousing freshmen from sleep and marching them to the women’s residence halls, where the women would be serenaded with “tunes of varying quality and taste,” according to Michael Bezilla in his history of Penn State. After the singing, the freshmen were sent back to their rooms, with only a slight detour—one that invariably included an ambush by a water-bucket brigade.


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5 Standing In for the Men

In the months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, patriotic fervor swept over many college campuses, including Penn State. Eager to take part and help in some way, students formed new organizations, groups, and clubs in the hope of furthering the war effort. Dean Charlotte Ray published a brochure directed to the women of Penn State entitled “How Can I Help?”: This message is addressed to young women who are conscious that our country is at war, that this is different from any other in all history, that we need to think and to act if we expect to survive, and that our obligation for individual effort transcends any old-fashioned obligation to follow the crowd. . . . “Do tell me what to do right now; I must do something for democracy. How can I help?” After 1943 the need for manpower caused the government to lower the draft age to eighteen with no educational deferments, and women stepped in to fill men’s places all over the country. This mass “stand in” was perhaps the most significant occurrence of the wartime years at Penn State: for the first time, women were given a chance to be dominant on campus by filling the vacancies left by men. The Department of Public Information reported in December 1946, “The second World War secured the rights of women at Penn State. The coeds not only dominated all student activities but carried on where the men left off in many cases.” In May 1944, the Pittsburgh Press published a series of five newspaper articles profiling Penn State during the war years. Entitled “A College at War,” the articles described how


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life had changed on campus. The changes for women drew special attention: “Women have bounced into politics (there are now two women class presidents for the first time), have taken over the campus newspaper and yearbook, and have made their way into a domain once solely man’s—the famed Blue Band, professional fraternities.” Not surprisingly, the number of women enrolled in the College increased dramatically during the war years. One of the few male students who remained on campus during this time was not exactly unhappy about the situation. “One of the most pleasant situations imaginable: too many women.” Academic opportunities abounded. The administration actively encouraged women to pursue careers in disciplines that had been predominately under male domain: biological sciences, psychology, engineering, earth sciences, chemical engineering, and government services. In another college bulletin message, Dean Charlotte E. Ray urged women to exploit the situation: You are aware that World War II has opened to women many jobs formerly reserved for men, thus duplicating the history of the Civil War. At the close of that war two historic results had been accomplished: a wider opportunity for women in industry and an urge for better education. Now the task of women is to accept their responsibility for making civilization endure. . . . The women of today have greater possibilities for setting things right than ever before in the history of the world. The women of Penn State responded. The number of coeds studying chemistry, physics, and engineering—notably in industrial aircraft and other war-related areas— increased dramatically. By the fall of 1943, women outnumbered men for the first time in the history of the College: 1,764 women to 1,150 men. The famous ratio of one coed to four male students was no longer; it now had become about equal. The war, of course, affected all aspects of life on campus, even for the infants and toddlers at the Home Management Houses. Still as popular as ever, the Houses, like virtually all American households, had to cope with shortages and other changes. A nice description comes from this open letter to The Daily Collegian in 1944: First you hear them and then you see the “Racket,” the little red express wagon, used by home eccers as a war-time mode of conveying supplies to Hillcrest House. People scatter when they hear that unusual clatter, rattle, and squeal and turn in amazement to find the assistant cook riding—trying to guide the “Racket” over bumps and through squadrons of aviation students. They are headed for the market to bring home the oleomargarine (butter is 16 points—“c’est la guerre.”) to feed the hungry family of nine and one-half.


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The Penn State Extension Service played a critical role in two new governmentsponsored wartime programs: one to give technical training to men and women needed in industrial plants and another to recruit men, women, and children to help relieve labor shortages on Pennsylvania farms. The first program, known as esmwt (Engineering, Science and Management War Training), was part of a national effort to restore the dwindling supply of trained workers for war plants. Men and women all over the state took nighttime courses given by Penn State–trained extension agents (and others from University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Tech) in drafting, die design, electric power control, accounting, radio communication, heat treatment of steel, ordnance inspection, and tool design, among others. More than 123,000 men and women from sixty counties participated in this program. The second wartime program, an effort not only to only harvest food on those farms low in manpower but also to increase food production, had a goal of one hundred thousand workers from around the state. One hundred workers from Newfoundland arrived at the campus for ten days of orientation before being sent to dairy farms. Agricultural extension promoted gardening, helped farmers keep machinery running, taught nutrition and health, and organized almost three hundred 4-H clubs. A number of nonstudents were training at the Penn State campus as well. Besides sponsoring research projects to aid the national defense, the government had requested that land-grant schools offer technical training for men and women already in uniform. That brought 107 Curtiss-Wright Cadettes to the campus; they temporarily took over the men’s residence halls. The Curtiss-Wright Corporation, a manufacturer of aviation equipment, contracted with eight institutions around the country, including Penn State, to train women in engineering basics. The company paid for twenty-two weeks of room and board, plus an additional ten dollars per week for spending money. The Cadettes were then put to work in one of the Curtiss-Wright defense plants. An article from “A College Goes to War” describes the “lady engineers:” Sent by the Curtiss-Wright Co. as “guinea pigs” in an emergency training program, the girls were in a spot. Recruited from high schools and small liberal arts colleges, most of them never had seen a slide-rule and couldn’t tell a T-square from a plumb bob. Yet they were expected, after 44 weeks of study and practice, to work as engineering aides in an industry producing war goods. What happened is surprising history. The girls worked hard at aircraft drawing, engineering mathematics, aerodynamics and other complex studies. They smudged themselves at foundry and forge. They bent over turning machines, sweated at welding, suffered through sheetmetal work. But they learned—and with honors.


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During World War II, Penn State women moved into fields previously dominated by men, such as automotive maintenance and drafting. Despite this, men continue to vastly outnumber women in technical disciplines.


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Suzy Fenton was one of the Curtiss-Wright Cadettes. Attending a teacher’s college in Jersey City, New Jersey, Fenton, a sophomore at the time, first heard about the CurtissWright program from her math professor, who encouraged her to try for the yearlong program: I put in an application and was accepted; Curtiss-Wright paid for tuition, room and board, books, and transportation. We lived in Watts Hall, and went to school eight


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Gertrude Louise Hellmers, the first female rotc sponsor at Penn State. A physical education major, Hellmers came to her rotc position with an impressive list of credentials, including memberships in the Women’s Recreation Association and Kappa Alpha Theta, the nation’s oldest Greek-letter fraternity for women. In her time at Penn State, she was also a member of the softball, hockey, basketball, and swimming teams.


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In 1942, women at Penn State and seven other institutions around the country were given the opportunity to study engineering free of change. Unable to recruit enough men in the midst of the war, the CurtissWright Corporation, an aviation manufacturer, offered to pay for women’s technical training, with the understanding that these so-called Curtiss-Wright Cadettes would then take jobs in Curtiss-Wright defense plants.

hours a day, plus four hours on Saturdays. The campus was quite lively because of all the military trainees. We all adopted the “uniform” of rolled-up blue jeans and men’s shirt. I loved learning engineering mechanics—and really enjoyed my time in the machine and metal shops, and the foundry. I remember one of my professors, obviously not used to teaching women in these classes, blushing with embarrassment when he described using hermaphrodite calipers and bastard files. Other companies were looking to hire “lady engineers” as well. Hamilton Standard Propellers sent ninety girls to Penn State in June 1944. After their course of study (like the one described above), they would go to the Hamilton Standard plant to work in drafting, blade design, testing, installation, and aerodynamics, among other areas. Through the College’s extension services, seventy-five girls were trained to help draftsmen at ConsolidatedVultee in Allentown, and Glenn L. Martin of Pittsburgh recruited another eighty-seven.


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Professors were pleasantly surprised by the consistently high grades the coeds achieved; more than one-third made the dean’s list. According to an article in The Pittsburgh PostGazette: They earned the respect of skeptical faculty members, and even President Ralph Dorn Hetzel, at the closing exercises, confessed the girls had achieved what had been thought improbable and had upset educational tradition . . . [Curtiss-Wright] had discovered, in the words of Prof. G. M. Gerhardt, Penn State’s assistant dean of engineering, “that these girls could absorb and apply much more engineering training than anyone had anticipated.” Besides the Cadettes, there were also the “Codets.” Julia Gregg Brill, a professor of English by that time, reported that “an officer in the Army Air Corps discussed with his Penn State sister the uses the Air Corps might be able to make of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, which had been nothing more tangible than a bill in Congress.” After the sister returned to campus, she broached the subject to Colonel Ardery, who enthusiastically gave his support. A committee was barely formed before word got out, and three hundred women eagerly signed up. (With so many volunteers, the committee decided to select only one hundred.) The function of this group was still unclear until the committee came upon a name, “Co-eds Organized for Drill and Emergency Training,” or “codet.” The idea was to give college girls basic training to make them “efficient auxiliaries.” The ten-hour, noncredit codet course in military drill and military courtesy consisted of the following training: Codet 1. Codet 2. Codet 3. Codet 4. Codet 5. Codet 6. Codet 7. Codet 8. Codet 9. Codet 10.

Preparation for Emergencies Conduct of Calisthenics Information Techniques Company Administration Operation and Maintenance of Motor Vehicles Mess Food Control and Record Keeping Advanced Baking and Cooking Mess Administration and Management Functional Swimming and Water Safety Photographic Techniques

One of Penn State’s initial seventy-five Hamilton Standard trainees learns to forge steel in 1943. The Hamilton Standard Propeller Division of the United Aircraft Corporation offered women a tuition-forwork deal similar to Curtiss-Wright’s.


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By 1944, as the war effort had begun to wind down, the government had reduced the amount of money it would pay for training on campuses. The end of the war was in sight, and manpower requirements had leveled off. The Curtiss-Wright Cadette class scheduled to arrive early in the year was cancelled. On a warm Tuesday afternoon in August 1945, sophomore Mary Lou Markley Hendrix (Home Ec, 1948) learned of Japan’s surrender while in the stacks of Pattee Library: I had several part-time jobs at that time. One of them was to read to a blind student. I’d read fiction and textbooks, whatever he needed. Suddenly there was an announcement over the PA system. Emperor Hirohito had surrendered to American forces. We just stopped what we were doing and immediately headed down to the Corner Room, where it seemed the entire campus had congregated. People were cheering and yelling; it was a terrific time. All the classrooms on campus immediately emptied, meetings were abruptly adjourned, and even stores closed when the long-awaited news finally came. A spontaneous parade formed around the campus, lasting until well after sunset. Just to make it official, President Hetzel declared the next two days college holidays—as if anyone was really going to study or work. After the war, women naturally wondered what would happen to their newfound authority on campus. They relished the opportunity to be a full-fledged part of campus life, and many, including Dean Ray, believed that the situation would continue after the war. Unfortunately, they were mistaken. In 1945, the women’s share of the workforce had reached 36 percent, but by 1947 it had dropped to 28 percent. Education, the liberal arts, and home economics once again became the fields for women at Penn State. After the war, the G.I. Bill was established and enrollment for men increased dramatically. By 1946, the ratio of male to female students had returned to the customary six to one. The quote of the day among coeds regarding this ratio was “two men are married, two engaged, the fifth wouldn’t date you, and you wouldn’t date the sixth.” A record ten thousand students enrolled at the College that year, with veterans comprising 55 percent. Nola Nike recalls her arrival on the campus in 1949, during this onrush of veterans: There were lots of GIs, loads of men for dates. You could date three guys in one night if you timed it right. But we had a strict curfew and a housemother—and we were terrified of getting punished. When I arrived at Penn State, it was the first time I was ever away from home. It was my first time on campus too. Standing in line to register, I met other women who would become my closest friends. We’re still close friends.


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Dorothy Snyder Elgin remembered the problems that arose when “the fellows returned”: By my second year in college, the fellows were returning to resume their war-interrupted schooling, and that posed a problem. A two-fold problem: one good, one bad. It was really good to have the guys on campus! That was no serious problem except that some of the coeds now neglected studies. But the bad problem was that there was no room for them. During the war years, women were assigned living quarters in all of the dormitories. Thus, no room for men! That’s when Penn State’s Pollock Circle— men’s temporary housing in trailers—was built. Anticipating the influx of veterans, Penn State scrambled to find enough housing to accommodate them all. Beginning in late 1945, some one hundred government surplus trailers were moved to campus from New Castle, Pennsylvania. Used during the war to house defense industry workers, they became temporary housing for incoming married veterans. By the spring of 1946, 250 of the trailers dotted the hillside above East College Avenue and east of Shortlidge Road in what came to be known as Windcrest. The College laid down dirt roads, arranged for utilities, and rented the trailers at twenty-five dollars a month. In addition, the College created a residential area for unmarried veterans just north of Windcrest. Known as Pollock Circle, it consisted of fourteen prefabricated structures that could house approximately 850 students. But even this was not enough. The College was forced to take another drastic measure to address the housing shortage: incoming freshmen (men and women) were not permitted to attend the University Park campus. Freshmen were admitted to Penn State, but they had to live and receive instruction at state-owned teachers’ colleges, private colleges, or other undergraduate centers across the Commonwealth. After a student’s successful first year, he or she could attend the University Park campus as a sophomore. A student-welfare committee report to the board of trustees in 1944 stated that Penn State “has never been able to admit the proportion of women accepted by other landgrant colleges, and as a public institution it has lost support because of the many disappointed parents who are also taxpayers of Pennsylvania.” Plans were drawn for new residence halls to house one thousand men and one thousand women. Simmons Hall, named for Lucretia Van Tuyl Simmons, longtime head of the German department and adviser to women students, opened in the fall of 1948. A year later, McElwain Hall opened, honoring Penn State’s second Lady Principal, Harriet McElwain. Another by-product of the G.I. Bill was the flourishing of undergraduate centers throughout the Commonwealth. The four existing centers—Altoona, DuBois, Hazleton, and Pottsville—plus Mont Alto became permanent parts of Penn State. In 1950, the College


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added a new center on the facilities of the defunct Ogontz School and Junior College in Philadelphia, the first in an urban environment. And Mary P. Behrend, widow of the founder of Hammermill Paper Company and a philanthropist to local projects, donated the family’s four hundred-acre tract estate near Wesleyville, in Erie, for a center the following year. In 1948 a center opened in Bradford. Tuition increased during the 1940s. The charge for board, or meals, went from one hundred and eighty-seven dollars to two hundred dollars per semester, while room charges rose about ten dollars and varied between sixty and one hundred and ten dollars per semester. Students who lived in dorms and took their meals in campus halls paid about nine hundred a year, which included tuition and other expenses. Men and women ate in separate dining halls. With the addition of so many men to the campus, rules of conduct had to be updated. In the summer of 1948, the College tightened dating restrictions by decreeing that there would be absolutely no unchaperoned dating in fraternity houses. The new dean of women, Pearl Weston, who took over for Dean Ray in 1946, applauded the restriction, saying that fraternities ignored the rule forbidding the serving of alcoholic beverages to coeds. Coeds were also forbidden to drink in off-campus apartments or downtown bars such as the Tavern, the Rathskeller, and Meyers. A 1948 Daily Collegian editorial called the rule undemocratic because “the University functions to instill concepts of self-respect and adulthood in its students.” It also pointed out that in Pennsylvania anyone could drink when he or she reached twenty-one. Nevertheless, it would be ten years before wsga managed to get the drinking ban for women removed. Dress codes were another difficult issue. Dean Weston wrote an open letter to women explaining that, in her opinion, dress had become entirely too casual during the war years: The war period brought with it many innovations for women, some of which continued in the post war era. This period has about passed and women are now gradually assuming the gracious roles of the charming, intelligent, poised persons they really are. . . . We are asking your cooperation in the following: 1. Make neatness and cleanliness the keynote of your appearance at all times. 2. Never appear in the dining room in raincoats, jeans, shirts hanging out, kerchiefs on head, bedroom slippers, pajamas, bathrobes, any nightclothes, shorts, or halterstyle dresses. 3. Always appear in dresses appropriate for the occasion. Frequently faculty and staff members are called upon to fill in application blanks for students. One item generally includes “appearance.” Naturally the rating checked will be in the lower half of the scale if you are in the habit of dressing carelessly for class . . . but in the upper if you always appear neat, clean and properly dressed. . . . You are good looking; you do have nice clothes. By wearing them to fit the occasion, you will be putting your best foot forward.


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Students at a gathering with Dean of Women Pearl O. Weston (seated in corner). Weston continued the strict social policies of her predecessors, insisting that women avoid fraternity houses, abstain from alcohol, and dress “appropriately.”

Monitors were to be stationed at the entrances of dining room halls to make sure that the new regulations were followed. If an improperly dressed coed attempted to enter, her matriculation card would be confiscated and she would later be sent to the Judicial Board for reprimanding. But finding monitors proved to be much more difficult than Dean Weston thought. Her letter and directive did not sit well with the women students. The wsga called an emergency session to criticize Dean Weston’s “dictatorial methods.” When the dean


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asked women members of Mortar Board, the senior women’s honor society, to serve as monitors, they all refused. Women in town and at Windcrest were not interested either. Finally Dean Weston had to offer one dollar and fifty cents a day to find five undergraduate women to do the job. The dean and the wsga did reach a compromise before the monitors began enforcing the new regulations: Dean Weston would cancel her directive if the organization promised to persuade its members to dress more appropriately. Dean Weston had another situation on her hands the following year. The Interfraternity Council’s code of conduct prohibited female guests from going beyond the first floor of fraternity houses. The code also banned the consumption of alcohol by members of either sex regardless of age whenever women were in the house. The ifc could not—or would not—enforce this code. In response, Dean Weston announced that no sophomore women would be allowed inside fraternity houses (sophomores being the youngest students on campus), and if the fraternities did not adhere to the regulations the ban would extend to junior and senior coeds as well. The fraternities made a serious effort to abide by the code of conduct, and Dean Weston repealed her ban four weeks later. The codes of conduct for sororities were never problematic because there were no offcampus sorority houses. The College administration was against the idea, and in 1949 the last of the sororities left the on-campus cottages they had occupied for nearly twenty years and moved into suites in the new McElwain and Simmons dorms. Sports were more plentiful for women in the 1940s. Eleven women’s athletic clubs (not varsity-level) were organized, including archery, bowling, badminton, dancing, fencing, golf, swimming, tennis, and riding clubs. One of the most significant replacements of men by women during the war was on the cheerleading squads. Until the 1940s, all cheerleaders were men. In 1943, however, coeds were admitted to the team, as a war measure to alleviate the “manpower shortage,” according to the 1949 edition of La Vie. Susan Bissey Keller, one of the “replacement” cheerleaders of that time, recalls the makeshift uniforms: We were handed a blue-and-white heavy 100% wool pullover sweater and told to find a white shirt, blue skirt, and saddle shoes (and blue-dyed bloomers!). The sweaters were handed down, and plain except for graduation numerals, mine read “1946.” But the real problem with the uniform was an occasional 3rd quarter downpour. When the heavy wool sweaters lengthened, it was taxing to complete any overhead motion. (Town & Gown, September 1984) After the war, the Athletic Association committee on cheerleading decided to revert to the traditional men-only policy. This was not the most popular stance; many students were sorry to see the coeds leave the squad. The Daily Collegian shared this view: “There is


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Because interaction with men was so closely regulated, many women students filled their leisure time with activities like bridge. The Campus Bridge Club, seen here in 1948, still survives today as the State College Bridge Club—and is now open to men.

a tremendous difference in the response the student body gives to pleas from male cheerleaders. After all, there are four times as many men as women and it is to be expected that the male would respond more readily to the female.” With the exception of three senior cheerleaders, no women were allowed on the squads after the war, and these three were not allowed to travel to road games. Although this rule was abolished in 1957, women cheerleaders still had to notify the Dean of Women’s Office about their accommodations away from campus and provide their own transportation. Relations between town and gown became strained during these years. The GI’s had been through the war and did not expect to be treated like aging adolescents. Townspeople had been growing increasingly unhappy with the alcohol-induced bad behavior of


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A meeting of the officers of the Penn State chapter of Mortar Board in 1949. The society honors college seniors for excellence in scholarship, leadership, and service.

students even before the war; now it was worse. Also, because so many students had to live in town, there was increasing resentment over rental costs, which seemed to escalate more than usual after the war. Other issues, such as the high cost of movie tickets and the ban on Sunday movie showings, exacerbated the situation. The 1940s ended with good news for coeds. Enough GI’s graduated in June 1949 to allow freshmen women back at the main campus. The following September, freshmen women were back with their green hair ribbons, very much enjoying the return to normalcy. Margaret Erb McRae, who began school in 1949, remembers that time:


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An international student checks her mail in the commons.

I think it was Sunday night on the weekend of registration week. We had orientation at Schwab Auditorium. Of course, this was a novelty to have all these new girls after the war, and when we came out of the auditorium, it was like running the gauntlet. There were fellas just lined up and down the steps and around the sidewalks around Schwab to get a look at the new girls. We thought that was great.


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6 The Home Economists

The postwar years brought changes to home economics departments across the country. Academic requirements were becoming more rigorous, and curriculums were expanding to reflect societal changes. The experience of Mildred McCowan Butler (Class of 1955) was increasingly typical of women studying home economics during these years: The general Home Economics education [at Penn State] gave me numerous career paths to follow. Upon graduation, I worked with DuPont in the Textile Fibers Department, determining the best blends of natural fibers with Dacron, Orlon, Nylon, and rayon for the new wash-and-wear fabrics. We also developed a new elastomer now called Lycra, used everywhere today. At Penn State, new courses in family and child studies were added to the Home Economics Department, which now offered eight majors: home economics education; institution administration; child development and family relationships; home economics, journalism, and radio; commercial consumer services; home economics extension and adult leadership; home economics and food chemistry; and general home economics. One controversial home economics program at the time was hotel administration, which was established in 1937 as an outgrowth of institution administration. Faculty in other departments—especially liberal arts—were not pleased with this development. They believed that the subject was not appropriate to be studied on the college level and that it should be taught at a vocational school. But hotel administration was an up-and-coming profession, with a growing body of Penn State graduates already working in the field. As


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Courses like Mary Allgood Brown’s Commercial Consumer Services class helped debunk stereotypes that home economics was just a glorified term for cooking and laundry. Business and economic theory, chemistry, and physics all played a vital role in the curriculum of the program.

alumni, they lobbied President Hetzel to create a degree program, believing that Penn State could fill a genuine need that was currently being met by only two other schools in the region—Cornell and Michigan State. Hetzel was sympathetic to their argument, seeing the “hospitality industry” as an entirely appropriate field for a land-grant college. However, it was not until the Pennsylvania Hotels Association came forward and endorsed the


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idea that Hetzel formally approved hotel administration as a course of study. Phyllis Sprague, a member of the home economics faculty, who had been a key proponent of a hotel program on campus, was appointed to be the first head, a position she held until 1943. The Penn State Alumni News from December 1940 described the program: The Hotel Administration course at Penn state is the most varied curriculum in the [Pennsylvania State] College. In addition to several strictly hotel courses involving front office procedures taught by hotelmen, the hotel administration students take courses in nearly every school on campus. The students get complete business and accounting training, several courses in quantity cooking and quantity buying, courses in meat judging and cutting, four chemistry courses including on the deals with textiles, physics, speech [and] several others. The future hotelmen get an insight into the practical side of their profession through frequent field trips and compulsory summer work in hotels and restaurants. One of the pioneer students, David S. Boozer, earned his BS in hotel administration in 1948 and went on to become the first man to receive a master’s degree in the new major. During one of his stays at Penn State, he worked in the student union, cooking private meals for President Milton Eisenhower. He recounts what the early curriculum included: My food science teacher, Gilma Olsen, always said she liked having the men in her classes because we had big, warm hands to knead the bread dough. We had to take a wide range of classes—in textiles and fabric, animal husbandry, tearoom management and preparation, meat cutting, and poultry preparation. I remember I had to learn how to kill and dress a chicken. After one of those classes, I reached in my pocket for car keys only to find a chicken head put there by a fellow class member. Home economics was also becoming an important outlet for research at Penn State during these years. In 1941, the Ellen H. Richards Institute of Textile Research was established within the department. Named after Ellen Richards, the first woman admitted to MIT and the woman considered to be the founder of home economics, the Institute was the result of a partnership between the Schools of Agriculture and Chemistry and Physics. Faculty in the Institute conducted research on the nutritional value of school lunches, the efficiency of commercial laundering techniques, and the durability of textile fabrics and dyes. The Institute’s first director was Dr. Pauline Beery Mack, who in 1950 would receive the prestigious Francis P. Garvan Gold Medal from the American Chemistry Society for her invention of an x-ray device to measure the calcium density of bones in living subjects.


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Dr. Ruth Pike (center, with glasses) began the first national laboratory for animal nutrition research. Among the most important discoveries to come from the research was the effect of sodium intake on health.

Another faculty member who helped to expand scientific research in home economics at Penn State was Dr. Ruth Pike. Pike grew up during the Depression in New York City, attended Hunter College, and went on to earn her master’s degree in nutrition from Columbia University in 1937. Pike, like many others at the time, could not find work in her chosen field: There were no jobs when I graduated. I finally found a job with the Heinz Company for the World’s Fair. Then I worked for a publisher as a home economist, although I was not a home economist and knew nothing about the field. I worked there as an assistant advertising manager for three years before I got completely fed up with that. Then Pike received a phone call from the placement office at Columbia. Dr. Laura Drummond, head of the Home Economics Department at Penn State from 1938 to 1945, wanted to interview her for a temporary position filling in for a faculty member who had become ill. Pike readily consented and took the job, although she’d never taught before. All of the students in her first class were seniors, which Pike found daunting at first but adjusted to quickly.


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At the end of eight months, Dr. Drummond called Pike into her office and told her that Penn State wanted to hire her on a permanent basis, but that she would have to get her PhD. She did so at the University of Chicago, and upon her return in 1949 she started an animal nutrition research laboratory, the first in the country. Her major research, which lasted for many years, was on sodium metabolism in animals and humans: At that time, physicians were limiting salt in pregnant women—they believed that it increased blood pressure and toxemia. Our research demonstrated the opposite, that salt restriction in pregnant women was detrimental to their health. That caused a turnaround in the medical literature of the time. Now physicians don’t restrict sodium intake for pregnant women. Even with these efforts, Penn State was grappling with how to keep up with national home economics trends. Although Penn State was successfully placing its graduates in fields such as food science, nutrition, dietetics, and textiles, the department at Penn State had not changed its focus significantly since its inception in 1907, when it existed primarily to prepare teachers for secondary schools. It would soon acquire a dynamically modern overhaul with the arrival of a new department head, the forceful Grace Henderson.

A New Type of Home Economist Born on a farm in Nebraska, Grace Henderson worked as a home economics extension agent before earning her MS at the University of Chicago and her doctorate at Ohio State. She came to Penn State in 1946 from the University of Arkansas, where she had been head of the Home Economics Department. She also had taught adult homemaking education at Cornell and had been an assistant state supervisor of home economics in West Virginia and New York. Henderson passionately believed that the study of home economics directly contributed to the strength of the nation’s family life. Furthermore, she saw the field as a way for women to truly find their place at the center of a constellation of social, community, and familial relations. With its studies of food science and nutrition, textiles and clothing, and raising and caring for children, the field of home economics touched every aspect in people’s lives and would, as time and research continued, occupy an even greater central role. From a speech given at Purdue University for the fifty-year anniversary of “learning and service” in 1963, Henderson draws on the historic mission of higher education: to provide direct leadership service to the nation and its people. She recounts her own beginnings in fulfilling this mission:


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I can remember being a 4-H club member in 1913 in Nebraska, “learning” to grow a garden, learning to “cold pack” corn and peas and chicken and carrots, and giving “service” as a 4-H club member through public “team” demonstrations locally and at the State Fair. The demonstrations were given so everyone could understand what research had only recently revealed: that non-acid vegetables and meats could be conserved at home, through packing them cold in jars and bringing them to a boil in the family wash boiler, then keeping them boiling for four hours! We 4-H’ers went further in “service.” (Purdue University, June 12, 1963, Home Demonstration Association, Grace Henderson papers, Pattee Library) Henderson was a visionary. She saw the vast potential for home economics, and she was determined to be a leader in advancing the field both locally and nationally. Soon after she arrived at Penn State in 1946, she began implementing her agenda. First she had to make basic structural changes. Of the forty-four land-grant institutions with degrees in home economics, only Penn State made the curriculum a lesser department within a school of education or a corresponding administrative unit. Henderson understood that home economics needed to be elevated to the status of a school in order to compete nationally for faculty and students and to attract research dollars. Henderson was nothing if not persuasive. The new School of Home Economics opened on January 1, 1949. Dr. Henderson was appointed dean of the school, becoming the first woman in Penn State history to receive an academic deanship. The school consisted of six departments: home economics education, child development and family relationships, clothing and textiles, foods and nutrition, home management, and hotel administration. Over the next two decades, the School of Home Economics continued to expand in enrollment, faculty, research projects, and graduate students. In 1953, when the Pennsylvania State College became the Pennsylvania State University, the School of Home Economics was elevated to a college. Dr. Ruth F. Honey was appointed as the director of research. A new graduate and undergraduate program in infant development was established in 1957. Each of the fourteen majors in the college offered an advanced degree, including seven doctoral programs. The number of faculty was almost double what it had been ten years earlier. The Ellen H. Richards Institute, still under Dr. Mack’s tenure, received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Corporation to undertake three research projects. Four new Home Management Houses opened in 1956.


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This photo from February 1949 captures nearly fifty years of home economics leadership. Edith Chace (left) established many of the pillars of the department, including the Home Management House. Laura Drummond (right) oversaw the growth of the department through the late 1930s and early 1940s, until Grace Henderson (center) came to Penn State in 1946. The flourishing department officially became the School of Home Economics in 1949, with Henderson as its dean.


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home economics extension agents: helen bell The 4-H home economists that traveled throughout the countryside influenced thousands of young girls who never missed a demonstration or activity. One of those girls was Helen Bell from Indiana, Pennsylvania, who always admired the home economists that visited her town, bringing new projects for the girls to work on. After graduating from the College in home economics, Bell worked for her local gas company as a home service representative. With the war over, people were buying appliances for the first time in many years. Bell would call on customers (housewives) who needed some help with their new gas ranges and hold cooking demonstrations in stores. Eventually Bell realized that her job didn’t offer much growth, so she decided to pursue an advanced degree. In 1956, after successfully earning her MA at Penn State, she was offered a job as a home economics extension agent through the College of Agriculture: Teaching took place in the field, never in the classroom, and it was primarily to prepare women who were county extension home economists. We’d meet with these economists from different regions in the state and do workshops with them. I was a home management specialist so I would talk about how to manage a family’s resources, how to budget money, time, and energy. There were also nutrition specialists, clothing and textile specialists, the 4-H staff and others. The information acquired through extension was conveyed through a system that relied heavily upon local and community participation: We had a program to train leaders in the local communities. The county home economists would teach a lesson to the local leaders and then the leaders would go back to clubs and teach women in the community. I remember I was once asked about knife sharpening. Now, I didn’t know much about knife sharpening but I could read and I could practice. So I got myself a stone and I practiced on my own knives until I felt proficient and then I went out and taught other women how to do it.


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As time went on, home economics extension continued to evolve, mirroring the concerns and issues of the day. At the end of the 1960s, the federal government created a program to help alleviate hunger in America, after CBS aired a newscast on the problem that stunned and galvanized the country. Bell recalled how the program worked: With money we received, we trained and hired women and turned them loose. These were not extension agents or even local leaders necessarily. They were indigenous women in the community who, in turn, educated their peers. We taught them about nutrition and took them to grocery stores and then helped them prepare and serve the food. The Penn State Cooperative Extension continues to fulfill its mission to educate and instruct people from communities across the state. The 4-H Club, a program of the federal Department of Agriculture, exists in every state and county and continues to provide inspiration and leadership skills to thousands of young people across the United States.

Never one to accept the status quo, Henderson upgraded the curriculum in the late 1950s to address changes she saw in American society. Increased automation, the use of psychology in sales, shorter hours and higher salaries, and greater marriage and birth rates all had to be accounted for in the study of home economics. In response to new challenges facing families in the postwar world, Henderson added more courses in human relationships and family and community interactions. More men were enrolled in the college as well, shifting influences and student demands. That trend reflected a larger one: more boys were taking home economics classes in elementary and secondary schools, resulting in the need for more teachers with a wider range of expertise. In a speech right before her retirement in 1965, Henderson talked about the future of home economics: So long as life changes from year to year, home economics should not be confined to a mold. It is obviously not simply one subject as are mathematics, English, and psychology. Home economics is inter-disciplinary and multi-subject. I suspect that as time goes on, there will be much more collaboration between colleges and universities


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to the end that the whole of home economics, while perhaps not dealt with in many single institutions, will be dealt with by a consortium of institutions, among which students and/or faculty move back and forth. (Grace Henderson papers, Pattee Library) Louise Gentry, who became assistant dean of the college in 1964, was deeply impressed by what Henderson did in building a School of Home Economics at Penn State. Gentry was one of several faculty members that Henderson recruited to Penn State: Grace could be difficult, but she was a forward-thinking person with great ideas about where home economics was going. The faculty were excellent: great teachers and open-minded people who were interested in trying new things. Grace was constantly on alert for finding good people who she thought could be an asset to the college. She had a real talent for identifying others who could help carry out her vision. Marty Starling was someone who benefited from the newly recruited faculty. Growing up on a farm in Kansas, and always involved in 4-H clubs, she arrived at Penn State in 1963 to earn her MS and PhD in clothing and textiles. Not having a place to live when she reached State College, she went to the chamber of commerce and was told there was one room for rent in the town. She took the room. At that time, the Clothing and Textiles Department was nationally known thanks to the efforts of its dean. Starling recounts: “Everyone in the field said Penn State was the place to get an advanced degree because there were faculty from many different disciplines teaching in home economics. Grace Henderson was responsible for that.” Starling went on to teach classes on clothing and textiles at Penn State. Her textile chemistry courses were famous for their intellectual rigor. Students took theory and lab courses to learn the generic classes of fibers and how they react to dyes and other processes, and the differences between fibers, yarns, woven fabrics, and knit fabrics. Besides advanced chemistry courses, the women had to take finance, accounting, and economics in the business college. By the mid-1960s, a shift in the field of home economics was under way all over the country. Responding to this shift, the Penn State Board of Trustees voted in 1966 to redesignate the College of Home Economics the College of Human Development. Dr. Donald H. Ford was named the first dean, taking over for the retiring Grace Henderson. In July of that year, the Department of Nursing transferred from the newly designated College of Health and Physical Education into the new College of Human Development. Two years later, the board would again reconfigure the college into four divisions: Biological Health, Community Development, Individual and Family Studies, and Man-Environment


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Two posters for the Home Economics Department.


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Relations. Grace Henderson was instrumental in implementing these changes. According to Louise Gentry: Grace advocated the name change to the “College of Human Development” because she said home economics did not convey the breadth of program and integrated nature of the program. Grace saw the name as one that should include all the aspects that affect how people live—within families, communities, the social sciences, a college of human service professionals. But many people were unhappy—especially the home economics alums. Other home economics departments around the country felt that they were losing stature. Grace laid the groundwork for it all, hiring faculty who were open to the change, especially men. The Home Management Houses closed at the end of the 1960s, having become too expensive to run. When Grace Henderson died in 1971, the Home Economics and Home Economics South buildings were renamed Henderson and Henderson South buildings in her memory.


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7 Yours for Happy Living

Hello! . . . and another big Penn State Hello to You! Welcome to your campus. We hope that you will soon find yourself a part of a big happy family of students. This campus is democratic and it’s friendly. It’s all yours if you can make the best of it. We hope, too, that this handbook will help you to become more familiar with your future home. This should serve to answer some of those questions that arise those first few days in your new abode. Yours for happy living . . . Habitat Hints Staff All new coeds were greeted with this friendly regulations book upon their arrival in the dorms in the 1950s. In addition to rules on dating, proper attire for dinner, and food in the dorm rooms, the “Freshman Customs” that had been around since the 1920s still existed for both sexes. Among its General Regulations were: Freshmen shall know the name of the dean of their particular College, and shall know the name of the President of the University”; Freshmen women are required to curtsy when the call “Curtsy, Frosh” is directed to them by an upperclasswoman”; “The east side of the Mall and the diagonal walks from the front of Old Main shall be considered ‘hello walks.’ Freshmen shall say ‘hello’ to all persons they pass while using these walks.” The way you knew if a freshman had committed an infraction (not saying hello on the “hello walk,” for instance), is because he or she would be wearing their


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blue dinks and five-by-eight-inch cards—which included name, home town, and curriculum in printed letters at least one and one-half inches high—on their chests. But times were changing on campus. Both upperclass and first-year students were feeling increasingly embarrassed by these customs and did not abide by them. Gradually, rules were not as rigorously enforced and edicts such as carrying the freshman handbook at all times and dating restrictions were loosened or ignored. Nonetheless, Pearl Weston, who had been dean of women since 1946, still took her job very seriously. She felt that parents should be assured that their daughters’ overall behavior on campus was scrutinized and supervised as thoroughly as their academic records. Housemothers still lived in the dorms. Men were not allowed past the lobby, and even there hours were limited. Strict curfews were enforced—10 pm on weeknights and 1 am on weekends, with no exceptions. Signing in and out was mandatory; on weekends, women had to record their destinations and time of return. If a woman wanted to stay off campus overnight or for a few days, she had to sign a card informing the dean where she was going, how she was getting there, the name of the driver of the car, and the expected hour of return. If she was not back by that time, her parents were called within the hour. When she did return, she signed the card again, and the housemother—or hostess, as she was called—mailed it to her parents. Minor offenses, such as a four-minute tardiness on curfews, resulted in a “black mark.” Three black marks during a semester resulted in a “lenient campus,” which meant that the woman was not allowed to date from 5:45 pm on Friday until 8 am on Monday (the weekday hours stayed the same). More significant infractions, such as not signing out for out-of-town visits or visiting some place other than home, resulted in a “strict campus,” which meant having to be back in the dorm by 5:45 pm every day, no dating, no leaving the campus, and no phone calls. The most serious offenses, such as drinking, resulted in an “indefinite campus,” which meant the student was on probation until her case was reviewed by the dean of women. Donna Clemson, who graduated in 1956, had an unenviable job during that time: I went to school on scholarship so I needed a job. One of my jobs was as a “checker” in McElwain Hall. I think I earned thirty-four dollars a semester. I had to sit in that little room where girls signed in and out, and if someone signed out and didn’t sign back in I had to blow the whistle. One night the housemother told me to smell the girls’ Despite increasingly lax enforcement of social rules, many of the early customs governing freshmen survived into the 1950s, including the custom of wearing beanies called “dinks.”


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Dean of Women Pearl Weston believed that social behavior was as important as academic performance. Housemothers, such as the one pictured here in 1949, lived in dormitories and ensured that the women obeyed their curfews and that men didn’t venture beyond the dorm lobby.


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breath when they came in to see who’d been drinking. That was too much, I thought, and I said I wouldn’t do it. We all knew to eat parsley, which got rid of the smell anyway. I told her that if someone was falling down drunk, you certainly didn’t need to smell anyone’s breath. I’d just come back from visiting my mother who discovered that I knew how to drink beer when I tipped the glass as I poured some milk. Edna Peterson Pierce, who graduated in 1953, remembered another method of masking the smell of alcohol: We didn’t overindulge, but there were times when someone had a mug of beer at a party. Some of the girls would go down and have Mexi-hots, a hot dog that had all kinds of Mexican seasonings on the top. It masked everything, so the housemothers couldn’t smell the alcohol on your breath. Sen-Sen was big then—little tiny breath mints that taste like licorice. When punishment was needed, the Judicial Committee of the wsga determined the penalty. For major offenses, women were brought to trial before the Committee, which was comprised of eight upperclasswomen. Students could present their case. The Committee’s goal was to give women students a chance to “handle their own disciplinary problems and practice self-government.” But Jo Chesworth, who graduated in 1960, recalled that, although the Committee determined her punishment, her housemother delivered the news when she committed an infraction: There was a very cute waiter at McElwain, where I lived. He asked me if I’d like to see a movie one night during the week. When I realized the movie was The Bridge on the River Kwai, I knew there would be trouble since that movie was long. So I went down to see a girl that lived near one of the entrances. She’d often let us in after hours if we rapped on her window. She wasn’t there but a book was open on her desk with the light on, so I wrote a note and went off to the movie. After the movie, my date and I went to the Diner. And since it was after hours, I was the only woman there—and that caused a flurry of attention since they all knew I was out past curfew. So my date dropped me off and I went around to the window and rapped on it and saw my note sitting on the desk where I left it. The girl had been out the whole time. Eventually the cops caught us and the Judicial Board “campused” me for three weeks. “Campused” meant that the coed could not leave the campus at all—not even to get a cup of coffee across the street at the Corner Room. This included weekends as well and it


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was upheld by the honor system. Chesworth assumes that few breached the ban because the risk was so high. The dean of women and the Senate of the wsga, however, had the final say in all cases. But the situation wasn’t entirely bleak. The 3.5 males to 1 female ratio gave women quite the advantage in choosing a date. Not surprisingly, men were not at all happy about the situation. “By Monday, every self-respecting coed on the campus had dates lined up for the next weekend,” recalled a 1957 graduate. “If she didn’t, she wasn’t about to admit it to some clod who had the brass to call her as late as Tuesday evening. She’d rather stay in on Saturday night. By Wednesday, she wouldn’t even answer the phone!” The only break the boys got was on the occasional big-event weekend, such as Homecoming, when girls from other schools were “imported” to the campus by the busload. Again Dean Weston felt compelled to remind women of what was appropriate dress on campus. She prohibited the wearing of Bermuda shorts and jeans, both of which were gaining popularity at the beginning of the decade, saying they were “improper” in academic surroundings. And again the wsga stepped in, managing to get Bermudas and jeans permitted at events such as games, picnics, and hayrides. But women still had to wear skirts or dresses in classrooms, in dining halls, and even when hanging around in the dorm lobbies. Joanne Connor McIlhattan, who graduated in 1953, remembers that the assumptions about Dean Weston’s strictness were not entirely fair: Sometimes we were invited to Pearl Weston’s suite at the upper end of McElwain Hall for tea or punch and cookies. She was typically old-fashioned but very friendly, all smiles. Her hair was pulled back a bit, just a little wavy at her face, gray with some streaks of dark in it, glasses with no rims. Dean Weston is often blamed for the strict hours, but it is said she inherited them from the previous dean of women, Charlotte Ray. There was another housemother who walked the halls at night. We called her “Gumshoes,” because she wore shoes with big rubber soles that were very quiet. She could sneak up on you. Not that the girls didn’t do a fair amount of sneaking around themselves. From Ora L. Seigworth, who graduated in 1955, comes this memory: My roommate and I lived on the first floor of the dorm. Our window overlooked the entrance where the waiters came in to serve the evening meal. The dietician was rather grumpy and wouldn’t allow the waiters to have any leftovers. We used to collect all the extra desserts from the dining room. I would hold onto my roommate’s legs while she


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The Women’s Student Government Association, seen here in 1957, was one of the most powerful groups for and of women students at Penn State. Often they worked with the administration; the wsga Judicial Committee made decisions regarding punishment for serious infractions of the rules. But the wsga also fought policies it felt were unjust, including the total ban on alcohol for women, which was finally struck down in 1958.

hung out the window dropping all the food to the waiters below. We made a lot of friends during the year! But all the rules were a lead-up to the most scandalous infraction of all, the panty raid. On April 8, 1952, Penn State’s first and largest panty raid took place. More than two thousand men marched on McAllister, Simmons, and McElwain halls, demanding the women’s undergarments. To the dean’s horror, many women were only too happy to comply, throwing all sorts of underwear out the windows and encouraging the men to storm the dorms. Frantic housemothers rushed around shutting and locking windows, but usually to no avail. Only with the threat of severe punishment was the raid finally put down. At many schools across the country, police had to be called to establish order after


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Women launch snowballs from a balcony of McAllister Hall in 1950.

a panty raid. In some instances, the men made off not just with the panties but with the wearer herself. Donna Clemson was a not-so-unwilling participant in these early panty raids. She remembers them with fondness: They were great fun. All the girls would stand at windows, waiting. It was always nighttime. The guys would storm the dorm, running up and down the halls, in and


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Amusing students and enraging administrators, the panty raid was a notorious feature of female dorm life in the middle of the century. This article from the April 23, 1958, issue of The Daily Collegian details a raid that was particularly scandalous.


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out of rooms, and, of course, stealing panties. If you were caught encouraging the guys, you’d be in big trouble. The housemothers were all beside themselves.

Growing by Leaps and Bounds The decision to change Penn State’s name to the Pennsylvania State University in 1953 made it possible to expand the school’s academic mission and create a distinctive and distinguished image for Penn State. Besides a new College of Business Administration, there were now new Departments of Fine Arts, Music, Theatre Arts, Art Education, and Music Education. New degree curriculums were proliferating as well; the 1956–57 catalog listed fifty-eight separate majors and options. The College of Home Economics doubled its research faculty, enlarged the breadth of its degree programs, and added three new laboratories for the study of food research, human nutrition, and textiles. The University’s overall research budget was becoming competitive with other institutions with help from the Navy and Dr. Eric Walker’s push to build a nuclear reactor. Students who had long wanted their own permanent student union got their wish. With a fee of seven dollars and fifty cents charged for each semester in 1950–51, the building was approved and construction was soon under way.

putting psu on the cultural map: nina brown She drove Martin Luther King to the airport, found fresh strawberries and cream for Arthur Rubinstein, and gave assurances to Marcel Marceau. These represent just a small fraction of the luminaries Nina Brown helped to bring to Penn State as the first director of the Performing Arts Series. In this position, she created one of the top ten artists’ series in the country. Born in England, Brown was driving an ambulance at the end of World War II when she met Raymond Brown, an American, who was in the service. They got married and moved to the United States so that Raymond could finish his schooling at Julliard, where he was studying conducting. But the school was in the middle of its semester and, rather than wait for a new semester to begin, the couple decided to move to Baltimore, where Raymond would finish his work at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins. Nina worked as the music librarian at the institute during the six years they lived there.


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In 1955, Raymond accepted a professorship at Penn State. The next year, Albert Christ-Janer became the first dean of the School of the Arts, and, in 1957, began the Artists Series. He offered Nina the chance to manage the series that year. For many years, admission to series events was free, as Nina managed to run it on a shoestring with a mix of established and not-yet-established artists. To bring in more revenue, she initiated special events, the first of which was somewhat notorious. “‘Hair’ was performed in Rec Hall,” she recalls. “At that time there were no reserved seats; everyone sat where they could. When the doors opened, there was a thunder of feet, the sound of hordes of men trying to get to the front seats.” In 1961, the series—which featured artists from the worlds of music, theater, literature, and dance — grew to include lectures from politicians and educators. Performances were held in various places on campus, including Rec Hall, Schwab Auditorium, and Pine Cottage. Then Eisenhower Auditorium opened in 1974. The occasion was marked by a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Penn State choir conducted by its director, Raymond Brown. His wife continued the relationship between the University and the Pittsburgh Symphony, which grew beyond performances to include residencies and workshops with such artists as James Levine, Sarah Caldwell, and Michael Tilson-Thomas. With a real auditorium for her artists, Brown expanded programming to include more Broadway musicals, theater, music, and dance and, in 1978, a performing arts series expressly for children entitled The Lively Arts for Young Audiences. Some of the artists that Brown brought to the University Park campus included Beverly Sills, e.e. cummings, Isaac Stern, Joan Baez, Martha Graham, Leontyne Price, John Gielgud, Marianne Moore, Van Cliburn, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and many, many more. Brown has many stories of her interactions with her performers, but one experience stands out for her. Poet Robert Frost, who visited for two days in 1959, was an “absolute delight,” said Brown, until young English faculty members stood up to tell him the meaning of his own poems, which made him quite furious. When Frost was ready to leave, the Browns drove him to Lewistown to board the train. While waiting, Frost, who had a bad cold, wrote them a couplet:


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A crackling cough and a cruel sinus has lowered me from plus to minus It was signed “Robert Frost.” “It’s not going down in any collections,” Brown cracks dryly. “But we enjoyed it immensely.”

The 1950s also saw a dramatic increase in the number of residence halls. South and North Halls, each housing a thousand students, came first, followed by Pollock Halls and East Halls. With more living space for female students, the old Women’s Building was converted into graduate student housing. White Building continued to be an important center of activity for women on campus. Marie Haidt kept strict control over activities there. Smoking was not allowed and neither were Coke machines or telephones. Coeds remember how she doled out pencils one by one. Men, of course, were forbidden from entering the building. Over the doors of each entryway hung a sign that read, in big, black letters, “Men Do Not Enter.” “Even workmen were frightened to enter,” recalls Della Durant, who arrived on campus in 1955 to finish her master’s degree in physical education. Although she could be harsh, Haidt was extraordinarily dedicated to her profession. At her instigation, the core faculty of the Physical Education Department—about five women—built a cabin specifically for the Women’s Recreational Association on Tussey Mountain, about four and a half miles from State College. Used for picnics, hiking, and other sports, the cabin could sleep about twenty-five people. Della Durant, who would join the Physical Education Department in the late 1950s, remembered having Thanksgiving dinner there. In those days, the faculty had only Thanksgiving Day off. In addition to her other skills, Durant says, Marie Haidt was an excellent woodworker: Marie Haidt felt very strongly that women should stand on their own two feet and never ask a man for any help. She designed and built rolling carts for teaching archery that were wonderful. She put the roof on the wra cabin. She and the students built the outhouse—and it was a very nice outhouse.


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The 1959 National Pershing Rifle Queen was a Penn State undergraduate. According to former General of the Armies John J. Pershing, the purpose of the National Society of Pershing Rifles is to “develop, to the highest degree possible, outstanding traits of leadership, military science, military bearing, and discipline within the framework of a military oriented, honorary fraternity.”


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Reaching Communities Approximately one million Pennsylvanians took advantage of the University’s extension programs during the 1950s. Three-fourths of those were reached by the agricultural extension, which included home economics. Field agents were continuing their mission of providing homemakers and teachers with the latest information on nutritious lunch menus and food-preservation techniques. Freezing food, a new method, was rapidly gaining popularity over canning. Women played important roles during these years in the establishment of several of the undergraduate centers. Ernst Behrend founded the Hammermill Paper Company in Erie in 1898. He and his wife, Mary, lived on the grounds of the paper mill along Lake Erie until 1928, when they moved two miles south to the four-hundred-acre Glenhill Farm. In 1940, Ernst died, but Mary kept the farm until 1948, when a small committee of businessmen met with her to discuss the possibility of buying the land as a site for a Penn State undergraduate center in Erie. Mary Behrend thought this would be a wonderful memorial to her husband and decided to donate Glenhill Farm property to the College in 1948, when it became the Behrend Center of the Pennsylvania State College. Another new undergraduate center established in Philadelphia in 1950 had an unusual history. The Chestnut Street Female Seminary, an all-girls school, had been founded in 1850. Thirty years later, the school had moved to the lavish country estate of financier Jay Cooke. A banker who helped finance the Union during the Civil War, Cooke had suffered financial losses and decided to lease his mansion to the school. His estate, called “Ogontz,” was named after an Indian chief whose stories Cooke had heard as a boy. “Chief Ogontz” became the school’s emblem in its new location. In 1902, a graduate of Radcliffe College arrived at “Jay Cooke’s Ogontz” to teach English. Abby A. Sutherland would eventually become the school’s headmistress, president, and owner of the Ogontz School for Young Ladies from 1913 until its closing in 1950. By 1916, the school’s enrollment had increased so dramatically, due to its reputation among “families of good lineage and culture,” that it had outgrown its facilities. Sutherland bought fifty-four acres of land in the “beautiful park section in the hills of Rydal.” When the school moved, some architectural features of the old Ogontz estate were kept, such as the palm court, which became the solarium. Here, tea was served daily. Famous literati, such as William Butler Yeats, Carl Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsay, came to give guest lectures. Generations of illustrious families, such as Heinz, Campbell, Dupont, and Gillette, attended the school. Students enjoying the outdoors in the 1950s.


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In the 1950s, Marie Haidt enlisted the Women’s Recreational Association (seen above) for her campaign to build a cabin on Tussey Mountain for Penn State students. Haidt was grateful for their help, but remained intimately involved in the project, going so far as to build the cabin’s roof herself.

In 1932, Ogontz was chartered as a junior college. This meant that a girl could attend school there from kindergarten through her first two years of college. Traditionally, the school emphasized the classics, arts, and foreign languages; domestic sciences and applicable skills were added during the 1940s. By the 1950s, however, enrollment was declining as fewer families saw the need for a private girls’ school. After a court decision held that


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Ogontz did not qualify for nonprofit status and had to pay taxes, Sutherland decided to close both schools. She donated the property to Penn State. Since Ogontz was in the Philadelphia area, Penn State decided to curtail the lease it had for an undergraduate center in Swarthmore. Ogontz, on forty-three acres with dorm space for two hundred women, opened in September 1950.

In Memory Milton S. Eisenhower, Penn State’s eleventh president, served from 1950 until 1956. Among his many accomplishments, he oversaw the building of a new all-faith chapel, named in memory of his wife, Helen Eakin Eisenhower, who died in 1954. Because Mrs. Eisenhower had worked to build the chapel, it seemed a particularly appropriate memorial. According to Lee Stout of Penn State’s Special Collections Library, Helen Eisenhower was the first president’s wife to receive significant press coverage. In the evolving social and cultural atmosphere of the 1950s, she would discuss her multiple roles as a university president’s wife, a mother, and a homemaker. She hosted many famous visitors, including the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was her brother-in-law. She also accompanied her husband on many of his travels. As his brother’s closest adviser, Milton was often in Washington or traveling on a foreign assignment. Even though she played a prestigious role, Mrs. Eisenhower was also a devoted mother. She loved to cook and shop for her own groceries. During her first fall in State College, she canned more than one hundred quarts of vegetables. She always made time for her daughter’s Girl Scout activities and school functions. Active on campus and in community affairs, Mrs. Eisenhower helped start a chapter of her sorority, Pi Beta Phi. The 1950s, often considered a docile period in the nation’s history, had one very large exception: Senator Joseph McCarthy. The University was not immune to what was happening nationally. With McCarthy issuing daily charges against people suspected of being unpatriotic or Communist, academia was one of his main targets because of its long tradition of freedom of expression. The Pennsylvania American Legion in the 23rd District—which included Centre County—enacted a motion in 1951 at the statewide Legion convention demanding that state-aided colleges and universities be investigated for evidence of communist infiltration. It also stated that Penn State tolerated un-American activities. This eventually resulted in Milton Eisenhower testifying before the Pennsylvania General Assembly on the loyalty of the faculty and staff at Penn State, the only college president


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Since 1956, the Helen Eakin Eisenhower Chapel has been the premier location for Penn State weddings. According to Sharon Mortenson, director of the Center for Ethics and Religious Affairs, the chapel has hosted more than 3,500 weddings since its construction nearly fifty years ago. The chapel is open to people of all faiths, but there are some restrictions: to be married in the chapel, either the bride or groom must be a full-time Penn State student, an alumnus, a full-time Penn State employee, or an immediate family member of a faculty or staff member.


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A group in the dean of women’s office, about 1950.

ever to do so. His testimony helped weaken the newly created Pennsylvania Loyalty Act, which compelled all employees of the Commonwealth and its political subdivisions to take an oath of allegiance to the state and federal governments or risk dismissal. Eisenhower helped to convince the General Assembly that the presidents of the four stateassisted institutions of higher education could attest to the governor each year that no subversives were on the payroll. By the end of the decade, there were subtle signs that the placid 1950s were giving way to something else—an awareness of larger issues, a questioning of values that had not been seen before. Books such as J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, George Orwell’s 1984, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which challenged parental and administrative


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Ubiquitous on campus in the mid-1950s, the McCloskey triplets, Julie, Joyce, and Jeanne, pose here in a photo taken for Penn State’s centennial.

authority, the rigid conventions of the day, and the emphasis on material acquisitions, were gaining a vast readership across college campuses. American culture was beginning to reflect these changes, especially through young artists and musicians. Soon there would be a new U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, who would resonate with young people and challenge them to improve society, the plight of the downtrodden in particular. For many women (and men) at Penn State, the retirement of Pearl Weston and the installation of Dorothy Lipp as the new dean of women in 1959 signified the external changes quite well. The new dean was much more modern in her views, believing that women needed to learn how to live in the world the same way as men. To that end, Dean Lipp eased curfew hours and dress codes, and allowed men into the dorm lounges and sorority suites. The fact that rules and regulations regarding socializing seemed of utmost importance was due mainly to the economic and political prosperity of the country in the 1950s. In


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recalling that time, Donna Clemson says that young people were more aware than we might imagine: When I lived in McElwain Hall, I had the time of my life. I dated lots of boys, went to lots of dances, and just forgot that the rest of the world existed. The war was over, there were loads of men and loads of opportunities. Yes, we were the silent generation because we were perfectly content—and we knew it. The 50s were an idyllic time, like a fairy tale.


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8 A Time of Unrest

If the 1950s were about the status quo, then the 1960s were about change. Current events—John F. Kennedy’s assassination, civil rights, the Vietnam War and the draft— led to a growing unrest, especially among young people. University campuses were the perfect breeding ground for this unrest. There had been protests on college campuses before, but this time it was different. The feeling of powerlessness against an authoritarian bureaucracy was the overarching theme, though the specific situation varied from school to school. In the past, school officials knew what they were dealing with when students protested against dress codes or curfews; now the dissatisfaction was deeper, more pervasive, and more far-reaching. There was no single issue that University officials could identify or address, and this dissatisfaction seemed to affect everyone. At Penn State, the dissatisfaction was slow to take root (the first protests occurred in 1966), and most students were not rebellious, but 1960s student activism ultimately left a lasting mark on Penn State. At the heart of the unrest was a general sense of dehumanization, a popular concept in the 1960s. Students increasingly felt that the University was too large and too much like a factory, churning out graduates with the efficiency of a production line. All signs of individualism were being snuffed out by an uncaring, bureaucratic machine. Because classes were bigger than ever, students felt remote from professors or, in many cases, the graduate students who were teaching the classes. Eric Walker, who had succeeded Milton Eisenhower as president on October 1, 1956, was not popular with students, and neither was the general university administration. But, then again, challenging authority of all types—parents, teachers, and administrators—was important to students in the 1960s.


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The women’s liberation movement also took root at Penn State during these years. With the publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963, activist Betty Friedan helped to articulate a whole generation’s perception of the world in which they lived—and would no longer tolerate. Women wanted to be treated equally to men—in their social and sex lives, in their opportunities for professional success, in their jobs, and in their paychecks. At Penn State, women students felt especially aggrieved by how many rules and regulations were enforced upon them but not upon male students. Faced with frequent student rallies, administrators soon realized that they had to pick their battles in this new environment. Dress-code restrictions requiring men to wear jackets and ties and women to wear skirts or dresses to evening meals were soon abolished. Curfews for women were next to go; first they were lengthened and then they were dropped altogether. The University conceded these issues, but it was extremely reluctant to budge on what was seen as the biggest one: permitting women to visit men in off-campus housing and permitting men and women to visit each other’s dorm rooms. It wasn’t until 1966 that the University finally agreed to consider revising the visitation policy.

A Strong, Articulate Voice Life for women on campus had already begun to change as early as 1960 with the arrival of Dorothy J. Lipp, Pearl O. Weston’s replacement as dean of women. Lipp brought a more open and progressive view to the position. Perhaps most radical was Lipp’s belief that coeds should take an active role in their own supervision. Soon after her arrival at Penn State, she told a Daily Collegian reporter: “We are forcing the present generation to grow up very fast. We must make them responsible and free people, not protect them. The day is passed when we have to protect, with a capital P, women students.” Linda Hartsock arrived at Penn State in 1963 to earn a master’s degree. Needing a job to pay her tuition, she found work in McKee Hall as a senior resident, a new position created by Lipp. In the past, older women known as housemothers had monitored the comings and goings of female students in the dorms. Lipp did away with housemothers, replacing them with hostesses, who worked only in the daytime when students were in classes. In the evenings, graduate students called senior residents took over those responsibilities (enforcing the curfew, for example), standing guard until 6 am. Another of Lipp’s innovations was to establish student coordinators in the dorms to act like deans within their community. Under the coordinator was the senior resident. Both were paid positions, and beneath them were unpaid volunteers called junior residents. The goal was to provide each student with a clear line of contact to the dean of


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From “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” to this 1966 dance in the HUB, go-go dancers (on platforms at rear) were an unmistakable feature of 1960s pop culture.

women. Hartsock, a senior resident responsible for about twelve women, recalls the level to which Dean Lipp would help her students: There was one girl from India who had a problem with her passport. She’d gone home to visit her family and now the authorities wouldn’t let her back into the country.


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Dean Lipp flew to India and brought her back into the country herself. . . . She always, always, always drummed into us that our first responsibility was to the students. And, of course, all of this was happening in a highly charged atmosphere on campus. Dean Lipp, with her office in Old Main, was frequently interrupted by outside activities. She was skillful at diffusing the tension. Hartsock recalls, “The Dean would open the door, give the protesters a beaming smile, and invite them inside, saying ‘We have cookies.’ Then we’d all be sitting around, with the latest scruffy sds [Students for a Democratic Society] student or angry marcher munching on cookies.” On the very sensitive topic of absences from residence halls, Dean Lipp mailed offcampus permission forms to the parents of all undergraduate women. Parents were asked to indicate how often their daughters could leave their halls. The dean also restructured the Women’s Student Government Association into a new entity—the Association of Women Students. The idea behind aws was to create a sense of community among women, both those living in the residence halls and those living off campus. Each dorm was formed into five communities with specific agendas (such as government, recreation, or cultural activities) and their own judicial boards to handle violations of regulations. Women living off campus were represented by Town Senators. A central body, the aws Senate, had authority over all the individual councils. There were also representatives from the Panhellenic Council and the Women’s Recreational Association as well. The aws Senate sponsored special events such as “Women’s Week” and established programs, rules, and regulations pertaining only to women students. In a 1971 promotional brochure for freshmen, aws President Janis Somerville explained the function of the organization: “aws is the voice of the women students. We are a strong, articulate voice. Through your efforts we will continue to be a dynamic force—without you we will degenerate into a few voices crying in the wilderness.”

The Turbulence Begins Against the backdrop of serious national issues, many students found their voice on more local issues. At Penn State, the catalyst was housing. And the way in which the students expressed their unhappiness with the housing situation had never before been seen on the campus. Staged by students on the Old Main lawn in 1968, the Walkertown campaign began as a demonstration against Penn State president Eric Walker’s handling of a housing shortage, but it became a two-week encampment to protest a wide range of University policies.


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With the 1966 Women in Heels protest (also known as the Heel and Hose demonstration), women students drew attention to University social restrictions that seemed increasingly outmoded and puritanical.

The University had accepted one thousand more students in 1962 than in the previous year, and there was no place to house them. Moreover, school officials announced in 1966 that no new residence halls would be built, even though enrollment was expected to increase well into the next decade. More than eight hundred students were living in study lounges, recreation rooms, and other places not designed to be living quarters, while four hundred more were reportedly searching for places to live in town at the beginning of fall term. Out of frustration and general anger, a group of students pitched some tents on the lawn in front of Old Main and christened it “Walkertown,” after President Eric Walker. Next to the tents was a platform, and for the next two weeks students used it to voice their anger about a host of issues, not just the housing problem. There were antiwar protests, notably a “lie-in” in the driveway of the president’s house when Army Chief of Staff General William C. Westmoreland came to watch a football game.


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In addition to the housing shortage, another issue that stirred up unrest among Penn State students was the University’s continued commitment to the notion of in loco parentis—the idea that the University has the responsibility to protect students while they are living away from their parents. A major target of student frustration was the University’s visitation policy. For two years a coalition of activists, mainly representing the Undergraduate Student Government (usg), the Association of Women Students (aws), and the Town Independent Men (tim), demanded unrestricted visitation between men and women. Finally, in 1966, the Administrative Committee on Student Affairs, headed by Vice President for Student Affairs Robert Bernreuter, agreed to review the visitation policy. According to Michael Bezilla in his history of Penn State, the committee could not come up with a unified recommendation: The Committee presented a preliminary report in April. Although it had voted 11-1 to approve unrestricted visitation, Bernreuter considered the vote a tie, insisting that Dean of Men Frank Simes had good reasons for his lone dissent. The committee then recommended that women be permitted to visit men’s apartments without chaperones, provided that at least three couples were present and the visits had been previously registered with a board of control composed of students from aws and tim. Members of this board were also to have the right to make unannounced inspections of apartments to make certain that no sexual misconduct or violations of drinking laws occurred. Not surprisingly, students were unimpressed by the outcome of the committee’s deliberations. To show their displeasure, more than two thousand undergraduates—the largest protest gathering ever at Penn State—rallied on Old Main lawn. Because of the large number of women protesters, the event was dubbed the “Heel and Hose” demonstration. Feeling the pressure, the University Senate took up the issue at its July meeting and approved a more liberal visitation policy. The only restriction involved women students visiting men in off-campus apartments—the University required written parental consent at the start of each academic year. More concessions were to follow. First, in 1968 women over twenty-one were permitted to move off campus. (In the same year, the offices of dean of men and dean of women were eliminated, combined into a centralized student affairs department.) Then, in 1970, the University finally agreed to make housing rules uniform for men and women. Freshmen were still required to live in dormitories, but after that they were allowed to live off campus if they wished. Taken as a whole, these policy changes made it quite clear that the days of in loco parentis had passed at Penn State—much to the satisfaction of the student body.


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Students made other demands as well. Most notably, they wanted student representation in the University Senate and on the board of trustees. The University was slow in responding to these demands. In December 1969, after Eric Walker announced that he would retire as president, the University Senate agreed to expand its representation to include up to thirty-six students. And it was not until 1971 that a student was appointed to the board of trustees. The national movement for civil rights was also felt on the campus. When the Civil Rights Act was finally signed into law in 1964, it was Title VII of the Act that had the most impact on the University. Title VII pertains to the hiring practices regarding women, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin as well as gender. In 1967, the Act was extended to cover sex discrimination in hiring practices and also called for an Equal Opportunity Commission and an Equal Pay Act. All of these developments affected people working in higher education, because many of these institutions are publicly funded. African American students voiced their demands at this time as well. In January 1969, five students from the Douglass Association—the black students’ organization, which later in the year changed its name to the Black Student Union—handed a list of demands to Eric Walker. At the top of that list was an increase in the number of African American students and faculty. The University had in fact been trying to attract more minority students in recent years but had not had much success. (According to Michael Bezilla, the number of black undergraduates at University Park probably never exceeded two hundred in any term in the 1960s.) In March, President Walker announced a number of concessions aimed at attracting more African American students to Penn State. For instance, he agreed to appoint a black recruiter who would visit secondary schools in largely African American communities, encouraging black students to enroll at Penn State. He also agreed to seek a special appropriation from Harrisburg to help cover tuition and room and board for economically disadvantaged African American high school graduates.

Serious Playing The 1960s was an important time of transition for women’s athletics at Penn State. A major milestone came when Marie Haidt, the longtime head of women’s physical education, With roots dating back to 1887, Penn State’s Daily Collegian is one of the oldest student newspapers in the country. The paper was founded as the Free Lance and subsequently became the State Collegian, the Penn State Collegian, and, finally, in 1940, The Daily Collegian. Former Collegian staff members have gone on to internships and jobs at prestigious national newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.


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retired in 1959—after more than thirty years at Penn State. Her replacement, Martha (Marty) Adams, was formerly the head of the aquatics department. Adams’s job was made much easier thanks to a general spirit of cooperation between men and women at Penn State. In particular, she was helped by the unwavering support of the dean of the College of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation (hper) Ernie McCoy, and his successor, Bob Scannell. Both men were strong believers in the value of sports for men and for women. Lucille “Lu” Magnusson, who joined the faculty during those years, remembers how impressed she was with Penn State’s physical education program: Penn State was very far ahead of the midwestern universities in one important regard: There was a good bit of interaction between the men and women’s department. All of the theory classes—classes such as biomechanics or tests and measurements, for example—were coed. In the early 1960s at the University of Iowa, where I’d just come from, the men’s department was on one side of the river and the women’s department was on the other and they did nothing together. . . . The most important result being that the men and women [at Penn State] got along. That was, generally speaking, not true at many other schools. At Penn State, the male faculty and the female faculty would help each other and have meaningful communication. That was truly unusual for that time. But significant challenges lay ahead. Women had long participated in intramural and club sports through the Women’s Recreational Association (founded in 1918), but they could not officially compete with other schools—though the men had been doing so since the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, women wanted to learn more about their sports and become better players. In short, they wanted what the men had: the chance to compete. Change came in 1964, when Della Durant was named the first administrator for the women’s athletics program. Durant and her successor, Ellen Perry, are the two people most responsible for the growth of modern women’s sports programs at Penn State. In that same year, the first officially sanctioned intercollegiate sports contests for women were held in basketball, fencing, field hockey, golf, and gymnastics. Although it seems natural today, not everyone at the time thought it was such a good idea. Lu Magnusson recalls that when the dates of the first national tournaments were announced, many people at the University objected, believing that such competitions were degrading to women. “Really,” she says, “the notion of competition for women was traumatic.” With the growth in women’s sports came the issue of coaching. The small women’s faculty was already overloaded, teaching courses, leading activities, and serving as academic advisers. Initially, many of the professors were tapped to coach sports they didn’t


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know much about. The head of a club sport automatically became the first coach of that sport team. Durant recalls a conversation she had with Lu Magnusson. “Lu said to me, ‘I guess I can do the uneven parallel bars.’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess I can do dance and the balance beam.’ That’s how we became the first gymnastics coaches.” Ellen Perry was initially tapped to coach lacrosse and to teach physical education courses, while at the same time trying to earn her own degree. During her second year, she began coaching a women’s swimming club, which later attained varsity status. She guided the swimming program for eleven years and was so successful that the Eastern Women’s Swimming League eventually christened its team championship trophy the “Ellen Perry Cup.” The surest sign that times had changed at Penn State came in 1959, when the decision was made to permit men inside White Hall.

ellen perry: breaking boundaries “Oh, there were many angry people,” recalls Ellen Perry on the momentous decision forty years ago to make athletics coeducational. “Angry men and the same amount of angry women. But the rest of us thought, ‘Hey, if we can’t get along in coed undergraduate education, we’ll all be up the creek.’ And we were right.” Perry arrived at Penn State in the thick of the 1960s, when the feminist movement and calls for equality were first beginning. Perry, born and raised in Massachusetts and playing a wide range of varsity sports in high school, taught swimming at her local ymca as a teen and knew that she liked it and wanted to teach. There weren’t many other options at that time for women keenly interested in sports. Perry graduated from Tufts University and landed a job at Bucknell. She realized that she would need a master’s degree to continue in academia and was offered a graduate assistantship in the College of Human Development at Penn State. When she arrived, things seemed pretty good. “Women’s athletics was an exclusively women’s department, so we governed ourselves,” she recalls. “We had plenty of great role models around us all the time. I never felt as though I had to fight the battle.” By the early 1970s, Penn State had become one of the first universities in the country to offer an impressive array of varsity sports for students. So when the bomb that was Title IX exploded, it seemed . . . well, about time.


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Perry went on to coach lacrosse and both synchronized and competitive swimming for many years. She says that when she arrived at Penn State, the older women in her department—the professors of exercise science, physiology, and psychology—taught her a great deal. “People think of physical education as throwing the ball out on a field,” she says. “But it’s so much more than that. It’s a vehicle through which to express yourself, a real part of education.” Like Della Durant, Perry went on to become Associate Athletic Director and eventually Senior Woman Administrator, overseeing fourteen women’s sports. In 1995 she won the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s (wbca) Administrator of the Year Award.

Breaching the Divide Although women had made some inroads throughout academia—such as Grace Henderson in home economics and numerous women in physical education—the powerful administrative arm of the University was still very much an enclave of men. The first woman to seriously challenge that notion and breach the divide was Rosemary Schmidt. A native of upstate New York, Schmidt graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Syracuse University in 1946 with a degree in chemistry. When her young husband suddenly died in an industrial accident, leaving her alone to raise her infant son, she returned to Syracuse to earn a master’s degree in zoology and a doctorate in biochemistry. There she met Harold Schraer, another graduate student in zoology, and moved with him to State College when he received an appointment in biophysics. Rosemary began her career at Penn State as Harold’s lab assistant; eventually she was serving as professor of biochemistry and biophysics, one of the few women on the science faculty at the time. Before long, Schraer (Rosemary took her husband’s name) proved herself a highly skilled administrator. Rising through the ranks of the University, she served as associate dean for research in the College of Science and acting dean for undergraduate programs. By the 1970s, Schraer had ascended to the post of Associate Provost, the first woman to hold the position. Jean Landa Pytel, who had known Schraer slightly when she was a graduate student, got to know her well when she returned to join the College of Engineering faculty in 1979:


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The [College of Engineering] faculty at that time was desolate in terms of women. I was one of two women on the faculty and I saw right away that I needed to get out and associate with other women. So I joined this Women’s Alliance, which was a sort of town-and-gown group. We were using intercampus mail to communicate with other women in the group who were on campus and paid for any postage for women off campus. Suddenly the University decided they were going to cut us off and we couldn’t use campus mail. Well, that was a blow—especially since we were trying to promote good communication between faculty and staff and the town. I wanted to do something about this. So Rosemary walked me through the appeals process, something I would have never been able to do on my own. She taught me a lot about keeping and presenting records to the administration and how to challenge them. Eventually the university stopped responding and we resumed using the mail. Susan Hunter became a close friend of Schraer’s while working on her master’s degree in exercise science in 1974. Hunter even lived at the Schraers’ house for a time. Schraer routinely invited students and others who needed shelter to stay with her family for periods of time. In an article written about her in 1987, Edward D. Eddy remarked that “Rosemary had tremendous compassion, patience, and understanding of different opinions and the differences in people . . . essential qualities in a successful administrator.” Now chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Maine, Susan Hunter says that Rosemary Schraer was not only a role model for her and other women but probably the most influential person in her life: Rosemary was an associate dean when I met her, but that took nothing away from her scientific prowess. I remember being awed when she would spend her day being associate provost, then attend a lecture on biochemistry, and ask the best question out of the entire audience. She was an excellent scientist, and very much a people person. During the lunches Jean [Pytel] and I would share with her, I received a one-on-one tutorial in the politics of higher education. She was my hero. Soon after, Rosemary was appointed associate dean in the College of Science, and she was careful never to lose touch with her past. Susan Hunter explains: She started women’s focus groups that took place during lunchtime. Approximately 30 women from all over campus would get together once a month. Then she would arrange a program—asking one of us to talk. So it formed a collection of women who were now linked together. I feel that this, more than anything else, is what the


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women’s commission grew out of. And when she went to the Provost’s office, it was her pushing that got the Commission for Women started. Schraer also pushed through significant changes regarding standard protocol of grant proposals. Tenured professors had always been the first name on a grant proposal— known as the principal investigator— whether or not they personally conducted the research. Yet, more often than not, it was the graduate student or postdoctoral student who was actually doing the research. Schraer was able to change this, making it possible for post-doc students to put their name first on a proposal, so the money would come directly to them regardless of tenure status—a significant step in a young researcher’s career. Schraer took initial steps to enter the race for president of Penn State but decided against it. Instead, she pursued, and was offered, the vice-chancellorship at the University of California at Riverside. Two years later, she would make history as the first woman to become chancellor in the University of California system of higher education at Riverside. It was, according to Susan Hunter, “the job she was meant to do.” As a mentor and inspiration to younger faculty and staff women, Schraer’s importance cannot be overstated. She always had time for everybody. According to Carol Gay, who began her career in Schraer’s lab, “Even after she became chancellor at Riverside, one of us would call up, tell her secretary who we were, and instantly she’d be on the phone.” After Schraer’s untimely death in 1992, a memorial service was held in her honor at Eisenhower Chapel. It was there that the Rosemary Schraer Mentoring Award was announced, created to honor those individuals who exemplify “Rosemary’s giving and sharing of herself.” The award is presented annually by the Commission for Women to a member of the community who has excelled in helping others to recognize and achieve their potential.

The Last Barrier: The Board of Trustees Another woman who was a critically important “first” during this time was Helen Wise. Born and raised in State College, Helen came of age when the general public assumed that girls had three career options (until they got married, of course): teaching, nursing, and secretarial. Taking classes in social studies at Penn State in the 1950s, she recalls that there were six guys to every girl. In 1958, she and her husband, Howard, began teaching at State High. Never politically minded as a college student, Wise became active in the teachers’ union and eventually would be elected president of the National Education Association.


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As the country became more politically polarized, Wise decided to run for the Penn State Board of Trustees. Although occasionally there were women who served out a deceased husband’s term, no woman had ever been elected on her own. It was a bold move: At that time, I didn’t really know very much about the board. When I was in school, no one paid much attention to them; we knew who the president was and that was about it. A group of local people came to Jesse Arnelle (a former Penn State football player, who is African American) and me and told us that we should run, that it was important to get some other people on the board. Jesse and I both ran and won. The board operated strictly in a male domain and it was a fiat. They called us “the kids.” Of course, Wise’s victory was only the beginning. Old attitudes and prejudices ran deep, but that didn’t stop Wise from her usual mode of expression—outspoken and forthright: There were thirteen committees, and to have any power you had to get on one. The men all looked at each other and said, “What are we going to do with her?” Jesse was a man, at least, so they could accept him more easily. They kept shuffling me off to do flower arranging with the wives. But not for long. At that time, the board was comprised of businessmen who had worked hard to get the campus up and running again after the war. Their contributions were invaluable, but times were changing and there was a need for more diverse perspectives. Wise made her position known: I was vocal. At that time, the rules were such that you could stay chairman forever. . . . There were about ten trustees who really wanted to make some meaningful changes. One of our first new rules was to make trustees more involved in policy setting, and that meant meeting more than three times a year—we upped it to six. We also passed an unwritten but sacred rule that no chairman would serve more than three years. I stayed away from faculty issues because of my double role (as teacher). A board member said to me, “I guess I’m glad you’re here because if you weren’t you’d probably be organizing the faculty, right?” He was right. Wise put her stamp firmly on the group. She was chairman of the education committee and the affirmative action committee, which she and Arnelle began. She ran for vice president, knowing she wasn’t going to make it, but she felt it was important “to say a


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woman could do this.” She also made a point of meeting with students and, more important, listening to them: I became a symbol to the kids of somebody they could talk to. Jesse and I would sit in the HUB and listen to kids; we were the first members to ever stay overnight in the dorm during that time. We’ve always said that we didn’t have nearly the problems of Kent State because who’s going to sit on the wall and protest in January? But there were some close calls. And Helen Wise was there during one of the University’s most serious crises in 1968, when students angrily demanded a more responsive University administration: I didn’t realize how liberal I was becoming until the students attempted to take over Old Main. When the National Guard came, I left, because the kids promised that they were not going to do anything further. What did the kids want? More access to the faculty senate, to the president’s office. Eric Walker would go to Old Main through the tunnel from his house to avoid students—that was an indication of how he felt about really communicating with them. The students felt a pervasive sense of isolation, and I always felt that Jesse and I stepped into that void. Wise strongly supported the decision in 1971 to appoint the first student to the board. This practice, which was almost unheard of at the time, is now firmly established on the board of trustees of virtually every American university. Once Helen Wise opened the door to including women on Penn State’s board of trustees, it was only a matter of time before a woman would serve as president of the board. Mimi Ungar Barash Coppersmith Fredman first arrived in State College in the 1950s, as an undergraduate majoring in journalism. She met her future husband, Sy Barash, and stayed in State College, helping him with his fledgling advertising business. Eric Walker retired as president in 1969. His successor was John Oswald, who took office on July 1, 1970. Around this time, tensions began to arise between the businesses in town and the University, resulting in Oswald’s threatening to withdraw from the chamber of commerce. Penn State was the biggest dues-paying member of the chamber, so to lose it would be devastating. The chamber wanted Sy Barash, who’d been the president, to try to persuade Oswald not to leave. But Barash, gravely ill with cancer, resigned his post. David Schuckers, Director of University Relations, came to Mimi Fredman and asked her to take her husband’s seat as president. Fredman was struggling to keep the advertising agency going and raise two children, but she reluctantly agreed. After Barash’s death in 1975, Fredman was determined “not to be Sy’s widow,” and tried to figure out how to best make a difference to the community:


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I decided I needed a public service that was mine—not Sy’s and mine. And I loved Penn State. I was grateful for my education. But there were some issues that made me think, “Well, my input might help the University.” So I decided to try to become a trustee at Penn State. Fredman ran and won, despite much conflicting advice on timing and feasibility. In 1977, she and another woman, Barbara Franklin, unseated two men from the board. Several years later, Fredman, with the encouragement of several male trustees, decided to run for president. She won by one vote, making history as the first woman to be president of the Board of Trustees. In this position, Fredman was instrumental in the development of the Commission for Women, the Women’s Studies Department, and the Administrative Fellows Program.

Education for Social Services As the 1960s ended, the University was experiencing its greatest growth, thanks largely to the first wave of baby boomers, now of college age. Between 1964 and 1970, the total undergraduate population at Penn State grew from 19,300 to 34,900. At University Park alone the numbers had risen from 16,200 to 22,500. On this basis, Penn State was among the fifteen largest institutions of higher learning in the country. For women students, there was still much to be gained. By 1970, women represented only about 30 percent of the student population. The most popular areas of study were still in the College of Education and the College of Home Economics. Home economics continued to evolve and expand at Penn State during these years. In 1966, the board of trustees voted to change the name of the College of Home Economics to the College of Human Development. Nursing and many social and human service programs were now part of the college, reflecting national trends toward greater emphasis on education for social services. In 1968, the old departments were dissolved and reorganized into four divisions: biological health, community development, individual and family studies, and man-environment relations. By 1970, the College of Human Development was fifth among Penn State’s ten colleges in terms of undergraduate enrollment. It was also during these years that Penn State decided to open a medical center on the outskirts of Hershey. At first reluctant to try to convince Harrisburg to invest the huge amount of capital that would be needed to build a medical school, President Walker was won over to the idea by Sam Hinkle, Penn State alumnus and head of the Hershey Foundation. Hinkle approached Walker in 1963 with an offer of fifty million dollars to start a medical center. The Hershey Medical Center officially opened in 1970, featuring a medical school, a 350-bed teaching hospital, and facilities for medically related research and graduate programs.


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In 1963, Penn State and the Hershey Foundation began discussions that would eventually lead to the construction of the $50 million Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. When the Center opened in 1970, its inaugural class of forty students included only three women. By the fall of 2004, more than 50 percent of the 748 enrollees were female.

Three women were admitted to the first class of forty students at Hershey. Teri English was one of those women. As a young girl growing up in California, English had always wanted to be a doctor. Most of her relatives were in Pennsylvania, and she remembers her parents talking excitedly about the new medical school in Hershey. When she was accepted to the school, her mother worried that her only child was doing something socially inappropriate and that she would never get married and have children. English shared a house with the two other female students; the male students lived in farmhouses from the Hershey Boys School. She recalls only one incident, early on, when her presence at the school was called into question: We were received very graciously by everyone. Some boys came over to welcome us and offered to paint the house. Since I was from California, they expected me to be a blonde and have a surfboard in tow. One day before school started, a group of six boys


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came in and chatted with us. They made it very clear they didn’t know why we were there, taking the place of a rightful male. At the time, the medical school was not fully built. As English recalls, there were two classrooms, a gross anatomy lab, and that was all. English also remembers that all the boys hoped one of the girls would be in their cadaver group, because the girls were more meticulous and “neater” in their dissections. Another important way in which Penn State’s impact on the lives of women increased during the 1960s was through continuing education. In 1959, General Extension was renamed Continuing Education and reorganized so that it no longer had responsibility for administering the Commonwealth Campuses. Courses were offered in the evening (at designated locations around the state) as well as by mail, making it possible to reach a larger range of nontraditional students. For example, students included stay-at-home mothers and primary and secondary school teachers looking to increase their academic experience. Demand grew for entire courses of study through this system, allowing people to earn a degree, certificate, or license to help them get ahead. By the end of the 1960s, more than one hundred thousand people were enrolled in some type of continuing education program—twice what the number had been at the start of the decade. Continuing Education at Penn State continues to grow by leaps and bounds and is currently taught at all Commonwealth Campuses, extending University education and training to all corners of the state. Continuing Education programs and services provide a wealth of resources by advancing personal and professional development and promoting community and economic development.


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9 Feminism and Fair Play

The Equal Rights Amendment, Roe v. Wade, Ms. Magazine, and the Billie Jean King–Bobby Riggs tennis match: one could say that the 1970s was the decade of the woman. And nowhere was feminism more alive and more vibrant than on America’s college campuses. Penn State was no different. The 1970s saw several important advances for women at Penn State, including Title IX and the launching of the Women’s Studies Program. Student activism continued into the 1970s. As before, many students felt that Penn State was too big and that their professors had too many students to know them all individually. They had a point. The University was just emerging from the greatest period of physical and academic growth in its history. By the early 1970s, Penn State was the eleventh largest university in the country. And yet students had little say in the decisions that were shaping their university. True, they had managed to gain a few important concessions from the administration. One student now sat on the board of trustees (but was nonvoting), and fourteen seats out of 144 belonged to students on the University Senate. The visitation policy had been completely revamped, and the University had taken concrete steps toward attracting more minority students. But for many students this was not enough.

Making Penn State More Diverse The ratio of male to female students was a growing issue at Penn State during these years. Some people inside and outside academia were beginning to champion the idea that an


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Penn State’s Greek community is nationally respected for its commitment to philanthropy, thanks largely to the multimillion-dollar success of the Penn State Dance Marathon. But interest in community service extends even further, as seen in this photo of the first joint fraternity-sorority food drive, held in 1972.


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institution that relies heavily on public funds should admit equal numbers of both sexes. But Penn State, like many colleges and universities, used an unofficial quota system that capped the number of women students it admitted—citing mainly the shortage of adequate housing as the reason. With the percentage of women students not rising much above 30 percent at the University Park campus, President Oswald announced in the spring of 1971 that the University would begin to accept students at all campuses without consideration of sex by the next fall. He also directed colleges and departments to make special efforts to recruit more women. In 1974, Penn State went a step farther, adopting an affirmative-action policy. The policy stated that the University would not discriminate on the basis of gender and ethnicity with respect to education or employment. The results were almost immediate. By 1975, women already accounted for about 40 percent of the student body. This was due partly to revised admissions policies, but also to more women enrolling in traditionally male fields such as science and engineering. As faculty and researchers, however, women lagged far behind. Nearly every other college or university in the country was trying to hire more women and African Americans (and other minorities). By this time, there were not enough of these students to meet the demand.

anne riley: a family legacy It seems that everyone connected with Penn State or State College knows Anne Riley: through her father or mother; through her years of teaching at State College High School; through her years on the board of trustees; through her years of service to the Penn State Alumni Association around the country and around the world; through her tireless devotion to her community. Anne is one of those remarkable people who embody Penn State history. She is the third of four generations to serve the University. It began with Anne’s grandfather, F. J. “Doc” Tschan, who came to State College in 1925 as Penn State’s first medievalist in the History Department. His daughter, Margaret “Peg” Tschan, graduated from State College High School and later Penn State. As a Collegian staffer, she met Collegian editor Ridge Riley. Both were part of the Class of 1932 (Arts and Letters). They married in 1935. In 1938, Ridge launched The Penn State Football Letter, a commentary and analysis of each Penn State football game mailed to alumni. He continued producing the Football Letter even during the years he was editor of The Penn


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State Alumni News (now The Penn Stater), then executive director of the Penn State Alumni Association (1947–70), and finally as a Penn State trustee (1971–76) until his death after the Sugar Bowl in January 1976. Ridge’s wife, Peg, always his chief editor, was also a historian, writer, editor, and versatile community volunteer. She was a charter member of the Boalsburg Village Conservancy and served as president of the State College Area School District’s Board of Directors. From her parents Anne learned about service to the community, school, and University. In particular she has inherited her parents’ dedication to Penn State’s mission of teaching, research, and service and their passion for its people: students, faculty, alumni, administration, and staff. For the past eighty years, someone in her family has been a part of one or more of these groups. Currently the fourth generation, David R. Riley (Class of ’91 and ’94 g) teaches architectural engineering at University Park. Anne studied English at Penn State, earning her BA in 1964 and her MA in 1975. As a longtime teacher of English at State College High School, she spent her career sharing Penn State cultural and academic resources with her students, taking them to plays and lectures on campus, and encouraging educational opportunities. Many of her students went on to become undergraduates at Penn State. Anne’s service to Penn State continues to this day. She has served on Penn State’s board of trustees since 1997. She was president of the Alumni Association from 1997 to 1999 and served on the building committee for the Hintz Alumni Center. She helped to establish the University’s Distinguished Teaching Fellows Program and to expand international alumni programs, specifically Penn State/UK/Cambridge. She also serves on the board of the Renaissance Fund, a scholarship endowment that was begun by a group of trustees in 1969 and supports academically talented students from all Penn State campuses. Anne received the Lion’s Paw Medal for service to Penn State in 2004 and the Alumni Volunteer Service Award in the College of Liberal Arts in 1999. Although Anne maintains that she is simply following her family’s Penn State traditions, she has become, through her dedication, commitment, and unwavering Penn State support, as loved and honored a figure as her famous father and mother.


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Thanks largely to increased female enrollment in fields like science and engineering, women made up 40 percent of the total undergraduate population by 1975. In 1973, Patricia Anne Remy became the first woman to graduate from Penn State with a bachelor’s of science degree in forestry science.


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Louise Sandmeyer knows from firsthand experience what it was like for women in higher education during these years. Sandmeyer earned her BA in English from Penn State and went on to receive an MA in Higher Education Administration from the University of Denver. Taking graduate courses in higher education counseling psychology, she learned how women were marginalized at universities: It was during the 1960s that universities did away with separate deans for men and women. The deans of men all became vice presidents for student affairs; the women fell to a much lower status. It was never overt discrimination, it was a combination of little acts of sabotage: the lack of acknowledgment when I spoke in meetings, never being given the opportunity to travel and cultivate professional contacts, getting a paper back from a professor that read, “Pretty good thoughts for a woman.” When she returned to Penn State in 1974 as a counselor in career development placement, she became involved with several of the campus and town women’s groups emerging at the time. These groups would eventually become the Commission for Women, the Women’s Studies Department, the Women’s Center (which started as a rape crisis center hotline), and the Women’s Resource Center. There was much overlap among the groups in these formative years, as faculty, staff, students, and community leaders strove to define needs and take action. Sandmeyer recalls the atmosphere of that time: When it was determined, by many surveys, that a women’s center on campus was needed, other issues became visible—the need for a child-care facility and a center for returning adults. Between these needs (which were not being met by the university), the climate of the country at that time, and the fact that many comparable universities had established women’s centers years before, the first commission came together. The women in that group—Kay Moore, Rosemary Schraer, Carol Cartwright, myself, and others—were not afraid to be political. With a shared sense of values and a strong social conscience, we were solidified in our responses to issues, and really made things happen. The University’s efforts to attract more African American students to Penn State began to yield results in these years. In the fall of 1970, approximately 3 percent (or 1,300) African American students were enrolled, more than ever before. One person who was instrumental in achieving that 3 percent was Thelma Price. Thelma initially came to Penn State New Kensington in the late 1950s as a secretary. After leaving to work for Westinghouse, she was contacted by Penn State in 1964 with an offer to work as an assistant dean of students. The change in job status, she says, was due to the changing cultural climate in general and to Pennsylvania’s Act 101 in particular.


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Thelma Price began her Penn State career as a secretary at the New Kensington campus in the late 1950s and later moved up to serve as an assistant dean of students and to work in the Office of Educational Programs. Price officially retired from Penn State in the mid-1980s, but she has remained active in the State College community, working with the Diversity and Respect Committees of State College Area High School and the local chapter of Stand for Children. In 2002, Price joined with the Centre House Emergency Shelter to open “Mom’s Kitchen” in the basement of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church.

Signed into law in 1971, the Act 101 Program is a state-funded program designed to serve students who meet certain economic and academic criteria. A large component of this Act includes offering students personal support services, such as counseling, tutoring, and the opportunity to “explore, in a caring and non-judgmental environment, all the situations they may encounter as young adults.” Price remembers the late 1960s and early 1970s as a time when African American students began to ask for more: Black students wanted increased enrollment of students and more black faculty. Vietnam veterans were returning and beginning to enroll at Penn State. They had things that


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they wanted. Even though [President] Jack Oswald was well versed in equal-opportunity programs, the students protested. At New Kensington, they wanted a black student union, for example. That’s when I started getting those late-night phone calls. Thanks to her work and success in Penn State’s Office of Educational Programs, Price was eventually asked to move to the Harrisburg campus, where she could work more directly with legislators. As a recognized and respected agent of change, she was routinely contacted by students who needed her help even after her retirement in the mid-1980s. Price continues to work as a community organizer; in 2002 she created “Mom’s Kitchen,” a soup kitchen in State College.

Other Voices Another group that spoke out in the early 1970s—appealing for recognition and respect— was the gay and lesbian population. On campus, this took the form of a student organization called “Homophiles of Penn State”—also known as hops. “Homophile” referred to anyone, homosexual or heterosexual, who advocated the end of discrimination against homosexuals. The aim of hops was to change attitudes on homosexuality by working toward legal reform, public education, and individual counseling. Organizers wanted to address job discrimination, the lack of available information in the library and classroom, negative attitudes of the psychiatric clinic, and discriminatory administration policies. In April 1971, the Undergraduate Student Government granted hops a charter. Under Senate Rules and Policies, this should have enabled hops members to use university facilities for meetings and advertising. A month later, though, the Office of Student Affairs suspended the group’s privileges until the University Legal Counsel could review the legality of hops and determine if it complied with university educational policy. The hops members and other supporters picketed Old Main, demanding that their privileges to use university facilities be reinstated. Failing to receive an adequate response, hops filed suit against the University in February 1972, with the support of a number of organizations, including the Undergraduate Student Government, the Graduate Student Association, and the State College Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. On January 24, 1973, hops was reissued its charter from Penn State, with the University settling the lawsuit out of court. Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation continued to be an issue at Penn State throughout the 1970s and 1980s, eventually leading to the creation in 1991 of the Commission on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Equity, an advisory group to the president. The purpose of the Commission was to improve the climate of diversity within


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Penn State and, specifically, to address issues affecting the welfare of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (lgbt) members of the University community.

keep on dancin’ Jumpin’ Jack Flash was the first song. Even back in 1973, THON exceeded all expectations, raising more than $2,000 for the Butler County Association for Retarded Children (bcarc). Bill Lear, president of the Interfraternity Council in 1973, first conceived of the THON idea to help improve the council’s image. Thirty-nine couples signed up to participate in the contest, held in the HUB Ballroom, for a cash prize of $300. Thirty hours later, seventeen were still standing, and they had raised many times more than Lear’s initial estimate. One year later, Kappa Delta Rho and Delta Delta Delta joined forces to contribute an additional $1,633 to the dance’s total of an amazing $10,000. Over the years, THON has grown with the times. To accommodate the ever-increasing number of participants, the event moved to the Mary Beaver White Building in 1979 and then to Rec Hall in 1998. Today, more than ten thousand students and supporters come together on THON weekend in the hope of one day finding a cure for pediatric cancer. THON has been supporting the Four Diamonds Fund in Hershey since 1977. Established in 1972, Four Diamonds helps families of children with cancer offset the costs of treatment that insurance does not cover, such as rent, car repairs, or household utilities. The Fund currently includes a team of professionals, such as child life specialists, music therapists, and nutritionists, to help families as well as providing a host of programs for parents, siblings, and children throughout the year. Altogether, THON has raised over $30 million for the Four Diamonds Fund. Some THON milestones: •

The tenth annual event, in 1982, featured five hundred couples who raised over $95,000 and was marked by the appearance of 1972 Heisman Trophy winner John Cappelletti, who spoke about his younger brother’s death to leukemia ten years earlier.


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THON dancers broke the $100,000 mark in 1983 and the $1 million mark in 1992. In 1995, Stacy Bingler became the first female chair of THON. That year’s event raised a grand total of $1,169,697. In 2004, THON organizers agreed to contribute $10 million over the next six years to create a Pediatric Cancer Pavilion at the Hershey Medical Center.

The Penn State ifc/Panhellenic Dance Marathon has become one of Penn State’s greatest and most unifying traditions. Whether standing for forty-eight hours as a dancer, entertaining the crowd, taking care of the facility, or even sitting in the THON stands, every person at THON plays a small part in creating an atmosphere of love, compassion, and understanding. In 2005, Carrie Steele-King, mother of a seven-year-old with leukemia, summed it up well when she told the dancers at Rec Hall, “What you are doing is living with a purpose. I hope when you leave here you never forget that, and never stop doing that.”

Title IX In 1972, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment (era) and sent it to the states for ratification. The amendment read, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Although the era failed to be ratified by the requisite majority of thirty-eight states, other legislation passed in 1972 had a major impact on Penn State: the Federal Aid to Education Amendment, also known as Title IX. Passed as part of the educational amendments of 1972, Title IX states, “No person in the U.S. shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal aid.” The impact of Title IX was akin to dropping a bombshell in schools across the country, for it prohibited sex discrimination at all educational institutions that received federal THON 2005 raised a total of more than $4.1 million.


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funds—from elementary schools to colleges. One major impact of the law was to increase women’s enrollment numbers at colleges and universities. For schools such as Penn State that were struggling to expand women’s enrollment, Title IX helped enormously in their efforts. Below are some statistical contrasts within a thirty-year time frame: • • •

In 1994, women received 38 percent of medical degrees, compared with 9 percent in 1972. In 1994, women earned 43 percent of law degrees, compared with 7 percent in 1972. In 1994, 44 percent of all doctoral degrees to U.S. citizens went to women, up from 25 percent in 1977.

It was, however, in the area of sports that the new law was most dramatically and immediately felt. Although Penn State was more progressive than many other schools in combining physical education classes for men and women, when it came to sports teams, inequality still reigned. In 1972, Penn State representatives founded the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (aiaw). The women’s counterpart of the ncaa, the aiaw believed strongly that athletics should be part of the total educational experience. In that belief, the aiaw passed a policy that prohibited women with athletic scholarships from competition. The idea was to discourage the active recruitment of athletes prevalent in men’s sports programs. Many Penn State administrators—like their counterparts around the country—traveled to Washington to testify on behalf of Title IX. But the aiaw policy was challenged almost immediately in federal court, and the prohibition of scholarships was deemed discriminatory and discontinued. Title IX affected the lives of many, and not just athletes and coaches. When it came to publicizing women’s sports, college and university athletics departments across the country were caught off guard and scrambled to make amends. Mary Jo (MJ) Haverbeck, a young journalism graduate student at Penn State, was offered a part-time job in 1972 writing press releases for the women’s varsity games. Eventually she was hired to cover women’s sports full time for the Sports Information Office. Women such as Haverbeck were true trailblazers, overcoming many obstacles: The community was dominated by one newspaper, whose editor didn’t see any reason why he should carry coverage of women’s teams at Penn State. The same was true on campus. I called with every score of every game, details of every athlete in the game, background information. They could never say it wasn’t because they didn’t have the material. I had pictures taken; I had guides printed up. Basic problems, such as the lack of numbers and school names on uniforms, made it a challenge for Haverbeck to do her job. To make her point, she took a picture during one


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Jen Bednarik dodges an opponent in a 1977 Lady Lions basketball game. Between 1977 and 1980, Bednarik scored 1,428 points for the Lady Lions, including the single-game record for Penn State women’s basketball, 42 points against Syracuse in 1979. The record stood until Kelly Mazzante’s 49-point performance against Minnesota in 2001.

of the women’s basketball games and showed it to Bob Scannell, the Director of Sports Information: I went into Bob Scannell’s office and I said, “You tell me which girl is from Penn State.” He couldn’t tell because Penn State was nowhere on the uniform. Although Bob was very supportive, he and others just didn’t realize we needed things like this to get recognition from the public and the media. Haverbeck was not above knocking on doors and visiting newspapers and television and radio stations to sell advertising for women’s programs. When told that there wasn’t room or time to cover women’s sports, she persisted, trying yet another approach. In


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1978, she developed the first national computerized statistical rankings for collegiate women’s basketball, and later she launched “Through the Hoop,” the first national newsletter covering women’s Division I. Haverbeck would soon see women’s basketball at Penn State enter a new era when Rene Portland was hired as head coach of the Lady Lions in 1980. Portland, who had played for the national championship teams at Immaculata College in the early 1970s, had spent the years 1976–80 coaching at St. Joseph’s and the University of Colorado. When Patricia Meiser stepped down as Penn State’s head coach in 1980, athletic director Joe Paterno recruited Portland to come to Penn State. According to Portland, she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to make the move: First of all, I didn’t think I’d even sign on to Penn State. At the University of Colorado, even though the athletic department at that time was going through some shaky things, they were very progressive about how they treated women’s basketball. And I was very fortunate even at St. Joe’s—practice times weren’t a fight, and our uniforms weren’t a fight, and games weren’t a fight. At Penn State, though, the women played in White Building, they practiced someplace else, they didn’t have practice clothes. And it wasn’t until Coach Paterno, who was the athletic director at the time, made it known that he knew what had to be done that I decided to come. Just recently I brought out the letter that Coach Paterno wrote to me, and six times in that letter he writes “equal to the men,” which was really an incredible phrase for him to write twenty-five years ago in a place that was nowhere near that.

sue paterno: a giant in her own right Although famous for being a coach’s wife and dedicated mother, Sue Paterno (Class of 1962) has never been content with that simple mantle. By all family reports, her famous determination has been a predominant trait since her early years growing up in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. According to her mother, Alma Pohland, “If anything was presented to Susie, she’d take it.” That included chores, cooking, and babysitting. In fact, young Sue Pohland was the most popular babysitter in the neighborhood because she actually paid attention and even played with the kids she watched. When Sue arrived at Penn State in 1958, she lived in McAllister Hall and had a part-time job at Pattee Library. One day, an older assistant football


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coach came in while she was tutoring one of the players. She reported, in a 1998 Daily Collegian article, that she called him “Mister.” She went on to say, “and to be perfectly honest, I really didn’t know what a coach was.” Because Sue, a freshman, was dating another student at the time, she and the coach became good friends. She eventually broke up with that boy and began dating someone else. In time, her friend, the coach, convinced her that she wasn’t in love with that boyfriend, and the two started dating. They were married in 1962, the year she graduated from Penn State. Sue Paterno says that she never imagined, when she met Joe in Pattee, that he would one day be her husband and the father of her five children. She probably also didn’t imagine that he would go on to become Penn State’s head football coach, an incredibly demanding job that required a lot of time away from home. From early on, Sue has said that her ability to understand that Joe couldn’t always put his family first has been key in the Paternos’ lasting marriage. But just in case anyone thinks that after raising those five kids Sue Paterno wants a quiet, retiring life . . . think again. She is recognized as a deeply committed and tireless advocate for the Penn State community and has served over the years as: chair of the Libraries Development Advisory Board; a founding member of the Liberal Arts Alumni Society; honorary chair of the Penn State Alumni Association’s National Service Week; honorary chair of the Centre County United Way; and board member of the Pennsylvania Special Olympics. For all of this and more she received the Lion’s Paw Medal, an honor reserved for those who have given the highest level of service to the University, in 1995 and, one year later, Renaissance Woman of the Year. Sue Paterno’s generosity hasn’t just been with her time and energy. The Paternos have given millions of dollars back to the University, endowing faculty positions and scholarships in the College of Liberal Arts, the Schools of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and the University Libraries. Together, Sue and Joe led the campaign to fund the building of Paterno Library, which opened in 2000.

Another major figure in women’s sports on campus during these years was Gillian Rattray. Rattray had come to Penn State from Liverpool in 1972 to pursue her master’s degree in physical education. As a student, she played field hockey and lacrosse, and in


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1974 she was named head coach in both sports. She soon learned that coaching philosophies could vary greatly from country to country: At the first field hockey game, one of the other coaches asked me if I was nervous. I couldn’t imagine why I should be nervous. In England, coaches never even came to our games. We were expected to know what to do. So during the first game, I watched all the coaches running up and down the sidelines while I just calmly sat on the team bench. Field hockey and lacrosse are situationally specific, and I was trying to teach them concepts. It wasn’t my place to interfere at the game—they were being tested on what I taught them. One of the girls asked me if I had a tissue and I replied, “Why? Is my nose running?” She said, “No, my nose is running.” The notion that we should provide everything for the players was completely foreign to me. None of the other coaches or players thought I was coaching. They changed their minds after Rattray’s team won its first national title in lacrosse, in 1978. Her teams went on to win two more national titles in lacrosse as well as two in field hockey. Title IX entitled women to the same opportunities as men but not necessarily the same amount of money. She points out that after the new law there was more money for women’s sports, but not much more: Even with scholarship money we shared our old, old, old uniforms. They were delft blue with Peter Pan little short-sleeve shirts and long-sleeved shirts that buttoned up and long knee socks. Players in field hockey, lacrosse, basketball, and bowling all shared the same shorts. So you had to be careful when you made your schedule that nothing overlapped. We had no rain gear. The girls had to buy their own cleats and their own sticks. Like Haverbeck, Rattray was exasperated when people came to the games and had no idea who they were watching. The players’ jerseys had no identifying logo or school name on them, let alone numbers. “So one day,” she says, “I went out and bought some linen handkerchiefs, safety pins, and magic markers and we wore numbers. We also had no scoreboards or programs. I drove around one day and found an unused scoreboard and carried it to our next game.” Rattray was one of the women who didn’t welcome Title IX scholarship money, believing that it would lead to unnecessary recruitment pressures. She never used her full allotment of eleven available scholarships. Haverbeck explains the differences in outlook: Before Title IX, the coaches were physical education teachers who were not all consumed with winning at any cost. After the law passed, they had to take the money to


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comply with the law. But many of them—those who didn’t want to have to conform to the male model of coaching—left coaching and just remained teachers.

dorothy harris: taking women’s sports seriously With the passage of Title IX legislation in the 1970s, women’s sports were finally taken seriously—and not just on the playing field. Dorothy Harris, long considered a pioneer and advocate in the burgeoning field of sport psychology, did postdoctoral work in the 1980s in the College of Health and Human Development on the subject of women and sports. In 1989, she was the first recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in psychology for designated research in sport psychology. That year she also became the first woman chosen to be a fellow in the International Society of Sport Psychology. The Women’s Sports Foundation cited her as making the greatest contribution to women in sport and she was the first resident sport psychologist at the United States Olympic Training Center in 1980. Dr. Harris’s area of interest was the positive influence of sports participation on women athletes, a subject rarely studied at the time. Believing that sports were as important and beneficial to females as males, Harris spent her life fighting for the rights of young girls and women to play sports. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation: Dr. Harris had courage and tenacity and a willingness to help others see and accept the truth about themselves. Of the philosophy by which she lived her life, Dr. Harris said it centered on “trying to treat others as I would want to be treated. And being comfortable within my own hide . . . avoiding internal conflict . . . and having any action consistent therewith.”

Haverbeck’s enormous efforts on behalf of women’s sports soon paid off. By 1975, eighteen women athletes were supported by Penn State on 75 percent tuition grants. The following year, Sports Illustrated published an article on how Title IX had affected women’s sports; the focus of the story was Penn State. Later there would be a segment on ABC


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Char Morett’s outstanding field hockey career began at Penn State in the late 1970s. After leading the Nittany Lions’ undefeated 1978 season and being named All-American three times (still a Penn State record), Morett was selected for the 1980 U.S. Olympic field hockey team. A presidential boycott of the games kept the U.S. teams home that year, but in 1984 Morett and the U.S. Olympic team won the bronze medal in Los Angeles. Morett returned to Penn State in 1987 to replace retiring coach Gillian Rattray, and has since become one of only three coaches with more than three hundred career wins.

sports and a photo of a Lady Lion lacrosse player (displaying the psu logo on her uniform, Haverbeck adds) on the cover of TIME—a real breakthrough for women’s athletics. Another breakthrough came when three Penn State women’s field hockey players were chosen to represent the United States in the Olympic games. Char Morett, Christine Larson, and Brenda Lee Stauffer were first selected for the 1980 games in Moscow, but they were denied the opportunity when President Jimmy Carter boycotted the games to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Four years later, however, Morett and Larson made it to the Olympic games in Los Angeles and were both part of an American field hockey team that won a bronze medal. Char Morett, who played for Rattray from 1976 to 1979, has followed in the footsteps of her former coach. After serving as head coach of the Boston College field hockey team for three seasons, Morett returned to Penn State in 1987 to take the reins from her departing


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mentor. Rattray left after sporting a .782 winning percentage during her time with the Lions. Morett has continued the winning tradition at Penn State, and both she and Rattray are members of the Field Hockey Coaches Association Hall of Fame.

bonnie marshall: the times they were a-changin’ “In high school I helped organize cookie drives for our soldiers in Vietnam,” says Bonnie Marshall. “We supported the war and assumed everyone else did too.” Echoing the sentiments of millions of Americans, Bonnie Marshall was a young liberal arts student on the Penn State campus when the tide of American life began a seismic shift. Brought up in West Chester, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, she arrived at Penn State in 1967 as a transfer student in her sophomore year. She soon rushed Pi Beta Phi, known in Marshall’s words as the “cute blond sorority, where we all looked the same.” Always a joiner, Marshall played field hockey, became a senator to the Undergraduate Student Government (usg), and became sorority president, among other activities. Although it was the middle of the 1960s, the campus was not much different than the previous decade, with in loco parentis rules still very much intact. Marshall’s father had to fill out a form designating how often she was allowed to stay out after curfew and if she could ride on the back of a motorcycle. Needless to say, Marshall and her sorority sisters continued the historic tradition of breaking those rules as often as possible. On Saturday nights, when the sorority had to socialize with a particular fraternity—in Marshall’s words, “so they could corral us for dates”—the girls would go to the bathroom and climb out the window. With a huge ratio of men to women, Marshall says that “if you didn’t have a date by Wednesday night, you said you did.” For Marshall, it was the following year, 1968, when attitudes and assumptions started to be questioned. Boys were returning home from the war and talking about what was really going on there, and students like Marshall began to “wake up.” The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were a turning point for her. “I remember wondering, ‘What the heck is happening in this country?’” she recalls. “Then things started ramping up—protests around the country, people speaking out against the war. I remember hearing Huey Newton, then the head of the Black Panthers, speak at the HUB.”


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But 1970 brought the most dramatic development for the students: the end of student deferments. More and more men were needed to fight in Vietnam, and the government initiated a new lottery system for induction into the draft. The first lottery was conceived to determine the order of call during the calendar year of 1970. The drawing—366 plastic capsules containing birth dates placed in a large glass container and drawn by hand— continued until all days of the year had been paired with sequence numbers. The first date drawn was assigned a draft number of “one,” the next date drawn received draft number “two,” and so on. The lower the number assigned to one’s birthday, the greater the chance of being called up. The lottery system, which did away with student deferments, was a traumatic development on campuses across the country. “I remember standing in a fraternity with my sorority sisters and watching the numbers being drawn on television,” says Marshall. “Some of the girls were engaged by then. A husband of one of my friends got a low number, so he—like anyone with a low number—was scrambling to find a way to get out of it. He did some research and then immediately had braces put on his teeth. They didn’t take guys with braces.” In 1969, Marshall took part in a sit-in in the middle of Atherton Street to protest undersea warfare research funded by the U.S. Navy at the Ordnance Research Laboratory. She was also part of the large group of students that took over Old Main, demanding that President Eric Walker let women live off campus, stop defense research, and prevent students from receiving credit for rotc. One of the more memorable activities, which lasted over a decade, was Gentle Thursday. Created by a speech communications class in 1970, Gentle Thursday was an attempt to counter the increasingly violent confrontations taking place on college campuses. “Each April there would be one designated Thursday that was devoted to peace,” says Marshall. “We cut classes, threw Frisbees, played hacky-sack, sang songs, and sat around the Old Main and HUB lawns. Free flowers were passed out, everyone hugged and kissed—sometimes there were bands.” Thousands of students would turn out for the day that, according to Tom Benson, professor of rhetoric in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences, was “an alternative to anger.” The ritual was discontinued in 1981 because of repeated problems with drugs and alcohol. There was a small movement to reinstate Gentle Thursday in the early 1980s, but it did not succeed.


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Bonnie Marshall (center, in white sweater) graduated from Penn State in 1970, her college life shaped by events such as the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. After working briefly for the community hospital, Marshall became Director of Development for the College of Liberal Arts; she now serves as the College’s Coordinator of Volunteer Engagement.

Marshall graduated in 1970 and stayed in State College. After a stint at the hospital, Marshall took a job in the College of Liberal Arts, where she worked as Director of Development for eight years. She continues to work in that office as Coordinator of Volunteer Engagement.


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What began as a speech communications project to protest the Vietnam War quickly grew into a Penn State phenomenon that lasted for a decade. From 1970 to 1980, thousands of students gathered on the HUB lawn in the third week of April to celebrate Gentle Thursday, a sort of miniature Woodstock that promoted music, community, and peace. But like its spiritual antecedents, Gentle Thursday saw its share of substance abuse, and while authorities grudgingly tolerated the ubiquitous alcohol and hallucinogens in the early years, concerns over drug use led to the cancellation of Gentle Thursday in 1981. Despite several attempts in the early 1980s to revive the festival, organizers never found a way to counter the changing sociopolitical climate.


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Launching a Women’s Studies Program Penn State officially established a Women’s Studies Program in 1979. At the time, there were more than 250 such programs nationally, so there were plenty of models to follow in constructing a program. At Penn State, women’s studies was created as a cross-disciplinary program for undergraduates within the College of Liberal Arts. Courses explored perspectives in all areas of academic scholarship, and students majoring in other fields could receive a minor in women’s studies. (It wasn’t until 1991 that an undergraduate major and a graduate minor were approved.) Major areas of study included feminist analyses of women’s lives; women’s social, cultural, and scientific contributions; and the structure of sex/gender systems. Students were encouraged to learn about the diversity of women’s experiences and study women’s lives through history and across cultures. Lynne Goodstein was a young faculty member at Penn State in 1979, when the Women’s Studies Program was created. Her main appointment was in the Administration of Justice Department, and she recalls the isolation she felt as the department’s only woman faculty member. A few years later, Goodstein would bring her baby son to her office in the Amy Gardner House—a former Home Management House—so she could nurse him. And although someone protested at her tenure review that “she can’t get tenure, she has babies,” Goodstein did manage to get tenure, the first woman to do so in the department. An increasing need to find female colleagues led to Goodstein’s involvement in the Commission for Women in the 1980s. When the University began a national search for a director of the Women’s Studies Program in 1985, she threw her hat into the ring and was hired. The University allocated four faculty salaries, with each professor holding a joint appointment in women’s studies and another department (for example, sociology or English): My job was to establish principles for defining who the Women’s Studies faculty should be. The goal was to create a center for feminist studies that would be viewed as valid by other departments, which I feel has been achieved. There have been great scholars in Women’s Studies who have had major impacts on their other departments. Today more than twenty-five faculty members are active in Women’s Studies teaching and research at University Park. Nearly fifty faculty members are active in women’s studies at Commonwealth Education System campuses, the Behrend College, and Harrisburg Capital Campus. Behrend and Harrisburg both offer a women’s studies minor. As director of women’s studies at University Park for nine years, Goodstein witnessed firsthand the progress and growth of the program. Now at the University of Hartford, she wonders when the discipline will no longer need to be separate:


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In twenty-five years, will women’s studies be obsolete? It will be needed as long as there is a bias that does not include experiences of women as valid ones. Scholarship is political; decisions about what is important and worth studying is political. The question is always: What are men interested in teaching? Why do we study war instead of child rearing?


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10 Leveling the Field

As the 1980s began, the women’s movement was reverberating across the country. The fact that the Equal Rights Amendment would die in 1982, when it could not muster ratification by a minimum of thirty-eight states, seemed, if anything, to galvanize the movement. At Penn State, women were increasingly aware of the special kinds of discrimination they faced in the world of higher education. Although the University had adopted an affirmative action policy in 1974, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender and ethnicity, the lack of progress was painfully evident. To its credit, the board of trustees acknowledged the slow pace of change. In 1980, the board took an important step forward, adopting a long-term planning policy aimed at correcting persistent problems at Penn State, including the absence of women in leadership positions, the low representation of women on the faculty, and the chilly climate for women students. Among other things, the board’s “Agenda for Action” stated the following: A vital academic climate draws strength from a pluralistic faculty and staff which includes a mix of ranks, ethnic groups, sexes. . . . At present the University faculty and professional staff do not reflect adequately the diversity present in the society at large. The relatively small number of women on the faculty and the administration after six years of affirmative action indicates the university must devote even more energy to this effort. Taking the board of trustees at its word, a group of faculty and administrative women joined together and proposed creating a commission that would be a forum and advocate


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for improving women’s opportunities on campus. Among the key members of this group were Rosemary Schraer and Kathryn (Kay) Moore. Having risen higher in the administrative ranks than any other woman, Schraer understood that change was necessary, but she was convinced that she was on far shakier ground than a man would have been in her position. Moore, who had come to Penn State in 1977 as the first woman faculty member in the Center for the Study of Higher Education, faced a slightly different situation: I had tenure at the time, so I could be more outspoken, but there were some junior women that I was worried about. They were definitely at risk being involved in this effort. We discussed strategy over and over again, and it always came down to the same question: Do you go down in flames for a good cause or do you try to get tenure first? Another important part of the group’s strategy was to enlist broad support across the University. As Moore remembers: We weren’t going to be covert, but we sure weren’t going to be welcomed by the Oswald administration in the beginning, so we were careful. We wanted to include all women associated with Penn State—students, faculty, and staff—so we needed a broad representation. Toward this end, the group gained the support of Mimi Coppersmith (Fredman), the only woman on the board of trustees at the time, and Rosenel Oswald, the wife of President John Oswald. With pressure mounting, President Oswald agreed in 1981 to create the Penn State Commission for Women. Its charge was to serve as an advisory group to the president on the status of women at the University, to serve as an advocate for women’s concerns, and to recommend solutions. The first Commission consisted of eighteen faculty, staff, administrators, students, and community women. Jane McCormick Lewis was appointed as chair and served in that capacity for the period of 1981–84. According to Carol Cartwright, a founding member of the Commission, “The formation of the Commission for Women really sent a dramatic message to the University community that women mattered and that the institution was really stepping out and saying, ‘This is a group that is going to advise the president on women’s issues,’ and implicit in that message was the sense that changes would happen.” Louise Sandmeyer, another founding member of the Commission, was a counselor in Career Development and Placement Services at the time, which made her acutely aware of the need for more services for women. There was no returning adult center, limited childcare, no women’s resource center, and few women in positions of influence who could


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In 1980, after the board of trustees adopted a policy aimed at improving the environment for women at Penn State, a group of female faculty and administrators proposed establishing a commission that would be a forum and an advocacy group for women at the University. One year later, President Oswald officially created this group, the Penn State Commission for Women. Today, Penn State remains a leader among the Committee on Institutional Cooperation’s members for its efforts to improve the campus climate for women. The first members of the Commission for Women were (seated, from left) Louise Sandmeyer, Patricia Farrell, Carol Cartwright, Rosanel Oswald, Jane McCormick, Rosemary Schraer, Joan Thompson, and Audrey Rogers; (standing, from left) Melanie Miller, Kathryn Johnson, Kathryn Moore, Nancy Tischler, Wendy Oakes, Nancy Lyday, Barbara Kautz, Maureen Carr, Jaqueline Schoch, and June Gamble.

take action on these issues. “There was a strong community of women who were not satisfied with the status quo,” says Sandmeyer. From this dissatisfaction sprouted several initiatives: the 1983 establishment of the Center for Returning Adult Students; the 1985 creation of the Center for Women Students; a raised awareness of sexual harassment issues; an expansion of child-care options; and the formation in 1986 of the Administrative Fellows program to help women and minorities gain a toehold in the administrative ranks.

pat farrell: woman of “firsts” Her first “first” came in 1973, when she was appointed to be Penn State’s first Affirmative Action officer, a position newly created in response to federal


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legislation. Her second “first” followed in 1981, when she was one of the eighteen founding members of the Commission for Women, created by President Oswald to serve as an advocate for women’s concerns at the University. For Pat Farrell, however, there would be more firsts in a career that often broke new ground at Penn State. Born and raised in State College, Farrell graduated from Penn State in 1956 with a degree in recreation education. In 1967, after working for the city of Harrisburg, Northern Illinois University, and the University of New Hampshire, she returned to Penn State to teach. Five years later, Farrell earned her doctorate in recreation and parks and stayed on as a faculty member in the department. She was the third generation in her family to serve on the Penn State faculty. Yet another “first” for Farrell came in 1984 when she became the first elected chair of the Commission for Women. Jane McCormick had been serving as chair since the creation of the Commission in 1981. When it became apparent that McCormick was carrying too much of the workload, the Commission devised a more representative system of governance that included election of officers. While on sabbatical, Farrell allowed her name to be placed on the ballot for the position of chair. “I thought there was to be an election among candidates,” she says. “Silly me.” She was the clear choice and was elected easily: So, upon my return I assumed the role of the chair and the two-drawer file cabinet from Jane. We had no staff, and I had no clerical support other than a department secretary. So this was a year of trying to institutionalize a working-type office arrangement for the Commission, find out how the new president, [Bryce] Jordan, wanted to have us work for him, and set in motion a study on the status of women at Penn State. Farrell stepped down as chair in 1985 and was succeeded by Cynthia King. The following year, King and the Commission worked with the president’s office to create the Administrative Fellows Program. The idea behind this innovative program was to place chosen faculty or staff members — especially women and minorities —within different academic units, where they could develop their leadership skills by mentoring under senior administrators. It wasn’t entirely clear at first how the program would unfold, but Farrell decided to take the plunge and apply: “I knew how the faculty side of the University worked but not the administrative side. This appointment was with


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the treasurer’s and operations office. I got into the Office of Physical Plant, athletics, investments committee . . . it was absolutely fascinating.” Farrell retired from the faculty of Health and Human Development in the 1990s and today devotes herself to numerous philanthropic activities. In 1998, she was named Renaissance Woman of the Year in honor of her efforts to promote the Renaissance Scholarship fund at Penn State.

The Strategic Study Group The Commission for Women met on a monthly basis during these early years. One of its first major goals was to assess the status of women at the University so that it could make specific policy recommendations to the president’s office, but the group soon became discouraged by the slow pace of progress. Moore recalls the frustration: We felt as though we were always being sidelined. When we approached the administration, the response was increasingly “Where’s the data? Prove it.” The small studies we did weren’t being taken seriously, so we decided to do a comprehensive study. I think at the beginning, Bryce Jordan [who became Penn State’s fourteenth president in 1983] thought we’d just do this little report and go away. But we didn’t. The Commission recommended to the new administration that it should have an elected slate of officers, a constitution, and a set of bylaws. Patricia Farrell became the first elected chair of the Commission in 1984, and she took on the important task of institutionalizing the Commission in collaboration with President Jordan. Under her leadership, the Commission acquired staff support and a modest operating budget. All of this was important for laying the groundwork to launch a comprehensive study of the status of women at Penn State. Cynthia King succeeded Farrell as chair for the period of 1985–86, and it was during her tenure that President Jordan appointed the Strategic Study Group on the Status of Women. The group, which engaged over thirty faculty and staff drawn from across the University, was charged with gathering in-depth and sweeping data on all aspects of life at Penn State for women in every employment category and across all levels of women students—undergraduate, graduate, and professional. At that time, Penn State was one of three large public universities to undertake a study of this magnitude—the University of Virginia and the University of California were the other two.


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To lead the group, Kathryn Moore was appointed chair of the Strategic Study Group and Michael Johnson was named research director. Johnson, who had come to Penn State in 1972, had a joint appointment in women’s studies and sociology. In the early 1980s, he conducted a series of studies on sexual harassment at Penn State and sent the reports to Old Main. When the Strategic Study Group was forming, they were able to reference Johnson’s findings, which helped persuade the administration to grant unprecedented resources. According to Johnson: The Strategic Study Group was the only study group I’d ever heard of that was given a hired research staff to help them. My staff and I were given access to very sensitive information such as University-wide salary data, the tenure process differences between faculty men and women, and surveys of child-care needs, which were critically needed at Hershey. Other universities were doing similar types of studies, but I believe that Penn State was a groundbreaker especially in terms of resources. We tried to be completely comprehensive, covering every facet of the university. The group identified four areas of concern: institutional climate, quality of life, and image; academic programs and services; conditions of employment; and recruitment, retention, and advancement opportunities. The group also believed that the only way to effect meaningful change was to hear directly from the women themselves, not just at University Park but at all of the campuses. This was much easier said than done, says Moore: We devised the strategy of having hearings at every campus. We insisted that the University give all employees time to come if they wanted to, that they would not get penalized in any way, and most important, that there wouldn’t be anyone in there taking down names. At Hershey, we fought to get a hotline established for anonymous calls. The female physician residents were bringing their children and letting them sleep in wards because there was no child care. More than one thousand women from all the campuses came forth to detail their own experiences with discrimination. Johnson remembers the hearings vividly, “It was so smart of Kay to insist upon the hearings. As a group, we could generate a lot of ideas that would help women, but there was nothing like getting out to every campus and hearing individual stories and concerns.” After two years of investigation, the Study Group began issuing its findings. Following the example of other colleges and universities that had studied the status of women on their campuses, the group devised a strategy of issuing separate volumes of recommendations on


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particular topics. This, according to Kay Moore, ensured that the president and administrators would pay attention and not get distracted by tangential issues. Altogether, the group issued five volumes of recommendations during the 1987–88 academic year along with a “Final Report of the Strategic Study Group on the Status of Women.” Altogether, the group formulated 192 recommendations grouped into five “packages” covering the following issues: Package 1:

Package 2:

Package 3: Package 4:

Package 5:

Job Assessment and Evaluation, Recruiting of Women Faculty, Part-Time Benefits and Compensation, Recruitment of Women Administrators. Family Responsive and Flexible Employee Benefits, Clerical Advancement and Development, Retention and Advancement of Women Faculty, Sexual Harassment of Students. Chilly Classroom Climate, Dual-Career Recruitment and Retention, Employee Relations and Representation. Women of Color, Sexual Minorities, Returning Adult Students, Sexual Harassment in the Workplace, Sexual Violence Against Women, Women’s Athletics, and Health Services for Women Students. Family-Care Policy, Women’s Studies, Curriculum Integration, Center for Women Students, Non-Tenure-Track Faculty, Staff Exempt and Staff Non-Exempt Employees, Leadership Share and Advocacy for Women.

For her part, Moore always met in advance with Bryce Jordan to talk about the issues that were going to be highlighted when each new volume was released. The group strove never to embarrass the administration, and Moore feels that this was an important factor in President Jordan’s subsequent support for pursuing parity between men and women at Penn State. Consequently, the President’s Office began working almost immediately with the Commission for Women to implement many of the Study Group’s recommendations. Susan Lucas worked on several of the research studies, particularly those assessing child-care needs. She remembers the impact throughout the University when the findings were released: It was a time when women’s voices needed to be heard and a time when the administration was ready to hear what we had to say. That’s not to say that there wasn’t resistance to the messages about women’s experiences on the campuses and resistance even to the data presented, but the Study Group persevered and was able to effect change that was unprecedented across higher education.


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Denise Hinds-Zaami became the University’s second Diversity Advocate in July 2004. A former professor of psychology and twotime president of the Association of Black Psychologists, Hinds-Zaami now oversees Penn State’s Report Hate Hotline and helps administer a variety of counseling services. She is responsible for working with all underrepresented groups, including ethnic and racial minorities, and the lbgt community.

Today Lucas is Assistant Dean for Equity and Diversity. She believes that the work of the Strategic Study Group was a “defining point” for Penn State in that it was the first truly ambitious effort to systematize diversity planning and assessment efforts: With the formation of the Commission for Women in 1981, with the other commissions soon to follow, and the creation of the Office of the Vice Provost for Educational Equity in 1990, Penn State became a leader in developing system-wide diversity initiatives that were measurement-based and that held academic and academic support units publicly accountable for their efforts.

New Resources for Women Students Sabrina Chapman arrived at Penn State in the 1960s to pursue an advanced degree in sociology. She stayed on at Penn State, teaching courses in the Sociology Department as well


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as the new Women’s Studies Program. Active in the national women’s movement, she held leadership positions in both the National Association for Women and the National Women’s Studies Association, and she served as chair and convener for the Committee of Institutional Cooperation Women’s Advocacy Network. Chapman offers her perspective on the role of the Strategic Study Group: I think the University undertook this study in sincere good faith. But fairly early on, we all began to realize how extensive the problems were. The detail and complexity of where the study took us was unexpected—for us and the University. It took two years, and we provided good, solid documentation. In the end the study group identified twenty-six issues affecting the status of women. But to the University’s credit, they rose to the challenge, putting a senior-level administrator in charge of addressing the issues and recommendations who was then monitored. Nevertheless, Chapman grew increasingly concerned by the presence of inherent structural problems in the organization of the University that prevented women from building the kind of community they needed to push forward their agenda. For one thing, there was no centralized office for the Women’s Studies Program at that time. All faculty members had appointments in other departments, which made it difficult for them to connect with their women’s studies colleagues in the same ways that they connected with their home departments. Chapman remembers that when they did talk, they often discovered that they were having similar experiences: We were all having students come to talk to us about other problems they were encountering, such as sexual harassment, sexual assaults, hostile classroom environments, stalking, health concerns. The list kept growing. It was very apparent that there wasn’t anywhere for these women to go and no one for them to talk to. Women’s studies faculty has historically been very student-oriented, and we took a tremendous amount of time helping these students. But we all needed a place where women felt secure and comfortable. Although Chapman had a large teaching load, she became a forceful and vocal advocate of the pressing need to create a gathering place for women students. And the administration was beginning to listen: At that time, women students had nowhere to go on campus if they’d been assaulted or harassed. The State College community resources were being stretched very thin. Penn State needed to do more for its students. Sexual assault cases on campuses were


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becoming very public, and universities were seeing liability issues. They had to have better lighting, good counseling, and serious educational prevention efforts. In 1985, the Center for Women Students opened in Boucke Building, with Chapman as director. Conceived as a place that provided women with information, educational programs, services, and referrals, the center coordinated with existing groups on campus and was committed to multicultural inclusion. An early brochure explained that the mission of the center was to address the situations of women “doubly discriminated against on the basis of race, ethnicity, chronological age, disability, or sexual orientation.” An essential part of achieving this goal was the creation of a women’s lounge within the center, where there could be formal and informal presentations and discussions on women’s issues, brown-bag lunches with resource persons and visiting speakers, film/discussion events, open houses, speaker receptions, conference meetings, and other special events. Achieving this goal was easier said than done. The center was allotted a small office that was shared with returning adult students and the parents’ program. Chapman recalls the inevitable awkwardness: The women students were so excited. They’d be making signs, staging protests, while three feet away the parents’ program administrator was trying to conduct an interview. So it was obviously not working to have us all in one office. The university then said the only available space was down the hall. It was, literally, a closet. The fire department came over to tell us that we couldn’t have more than six people in the closet. Then Channel 10 did a story on it. The students must have known about the cameras coming because, in the story, there must have been twenty-five students packed in there. Then Channel 10 went down to the old office and it was, of course, completely empty except for one desk. The women students kept up a steady protest—writing letters, doing editorial cartoons, the whole bit. My boss was not happy when one of those cartoons, which lampooned him, appeared on the closet door. I put it up there myself. The University managed to secure the old, formerly shared room and permanently assigned it to the center. Female students took full advantage of the center, with more than five hundred visits during 1987. One year later, the center had sponsored or co-sponsored eighty-three programs that drew almost ten thousand participants. After the Strategic Study Group published its findings, the Center for Women Students finally had more leverage and was able to hire another full-time counselor.


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Undergraduate Andrea Young leads a seminar on eating disorders at the Center for Women Students in 2001. Established in 1985 as a place for women to address issues such as assault, harassment, and health, the center has evolved into a comprehensive resource for women, providing counseling, referral services, and educational programming. Sabrina Chapman, who taught sociology and women’s studies, served as the center’s director from its opening until 2002; Peggy Lorah is the current director.

corrine caldwell: making a difference in rural pennsylvania The only person in her family to attend college, Corrine Caldwell soon discovered that higher education was her calling. She knew so for several reasons: I fell in love with data. When you spend your life around people who start every sentence with “I feel,” data gives you truth. I was always interested in people, too. Why do people change? What is their rate of change? For


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me, higher education combined my interest in data with my interest in people. When she was hired as CEO of Penn State Mont Alto in 1987, Caldwell was one of a very small percentage of women college presidents. The campus was, in Caldwell’s words, “a real fixer-upper.” Located in a small, poor, rural town in Franklin County, Mont Alto faced declining enrollment and needed an infusion of new ideas. “When I arrived at Mont Alto, I began to study the reasons why poor, rural, and working-class kids went to college. I developed programs to increase rural enrollment and diversified the curriculum.” In 1987 Franklin County was fifty-ninth among sixty-seven counties in Pennsylvania for sending high school graduates to college. Using her training as an ethnographer, Caldwell went out into the communities, helping families understand the profound economic benefits of higher education: I made a surprising discovery when I first arrived. Far from sharing my vision of higher education as the gateway to the American dream, many residents saw their present lives, without higher education, as the American dream. They worried that education would take their sons and daughters away from the community and create tensions in an otherwise stable, predictable multigeneration family. Caldwell was determined to change these attitudes—to create a vital partnership between the school and the community. She worked with her faculty and staff to build effective outreach programs. “The eventual confluence of resources, curricular approval, and community approbation occurred only after much relationship-building and not just a few false starts,” she says. During Caldwell’s tenure as CEO (from 1987 through 1996), enrollment at Mont Alto grew from 850 to 1,300 students. The increase in college attendance in Franklin County exceeded the state and national average, and by 1995 almost 50 percent of all high school graduates pursued higher education. Caldwell’s most satisfying accomplishment, in her opinion, was the community’s recognition of Mont Alto’s contribution and the explosive growth in awareness and attendance in higher education: Long before the days of 18-ounce laptops, I lugged a VCR and a tape telling our story to virtually all the major and minor business and community


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groups. Starting with a best-year base of $25,000, we raised almost $3 million for new buildings and scholarships. Mont Alto became a pioneer in virtual education and developed a comprehensive range of credit and noncredit programs, three allied health associate degrees, and two baccalaureates in nursing occupational therapy. Caldwell has since moved to Temple University, where, after several years as Acting Provost, she is currently a full-time faculty member in the University’s Department of Education.

Administrative Gains Another important advance came during the 1980s with the creation of the Administrative Fellows Program in 1986. This program, a joint effort of the Commission for Women and the President’s Office, was designed to identify faculty and staff with potential for effective leadership; to increase awareness of the complexity of issues facing higher education; to enhance understanding of the environment in which decisions are being made; and to provide opportunities for participation in a wide range of decision-making processes, learning activities, and program management that provide a better understanding of the challenges of higher education administration. Although participation in the program does not guarantee appointment to an advanced or administrative position at the University, the program has been valuable in the past in increasing the pool of qualified women and minorities interested in pursuing careers in University administration. In January 1987, the first Administrative Fellow was named. Pat Farrell, associate professor of leisure studies in the College of Health and Human Development, served for eight months with Steve Garban, the Senior Vice President for Finance and Operations/ Treasurer. As of 2005, forty-three women and five men have participated in the program, working with administrators such as the executive vice president and provost, vice president for student affairs, and the senior vice president for finance and business/treasurer. Many of the fellows have gone on in their careers to become deans, a bursar, a president of a college, vice provosts, and unit directors; the majority of them have stayed at Penn State. A hallmark of the program is the interest of participants in “giving back” to the University to help it become a better educational institution and a more humane place to work and learn.


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Susan Lucas’s career at Penn State demonstrates the power of the Administrative Fellows Program. While the Strategic Study Group was at work in 1986, Lucas was a research associate in the Division of Planning Studies, which became Marketing Research in Continuing and Distance Education. The Administrative Fellows Program gave her the opportunity to work in the provost’s office during the 1997–98 year. After this experience, she moved up through the administrative ranks to become an assistant dean. “The fellows program gave me the skills and experiences that made it possible for me to compete for jobs I never would have considered before the program.” Carol Herrmann, who helped promote the Study Group’s goals within the administration, made her own contribution to furthering the cause of women at the University. Herrmann first arrived at Penn State in 1966 as a graduate student in journalism. She met her future husband and spent the next ten years as a faculty wife, raising children and doing community work. When both her children reached school age, she took a job at the Centre Daily Times, which led to a job in the Continuing Education Office at the University. In 1982, she got a call from the Office of Public Information, asking if she would take a speechwriting job for the new president of the University, Bryce Jordan: I had to consider this new job offer carefully. Finally, after discussing it with my husband, I accepted it, but with the important condition that I would have direct access to the president. I knew that the only way I could write speeches for this man was to be allowed free access to him so I could learn his priorities and his speaking and writing styles. This was the beginning of Herrmann’s rise within the University’s administrative ranks. Always the only woman around the conference table, Herrmann felt her role was to listen and observe. But after a while, she was doing more than just listening and observing: During discussions, all twenty or twenty-five men would be talking and I would be quiet, still conscious of my position. Jordan would turn to me and say, “What do you think, Carol?” So not only was I allowed to sit at the table, I was allowed—even encouraged—to speak, which was very unusual and really amazing. He was a wonderful mentor. Two years later, she was promoted to Jordan’s executive assistant, and four years after that she was named vice president for administration, the first woman ever to hold such a position. When Joab Thomas became president, he added the word “senior” to her position, in an attempt to describe the ever-expanding responsibilities of her role, which


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included overseeing the Affirmative Action Office, the Board of Trustees Office, and a staff of about thirty-six people. As executive secretary to two presidential selection committees, she helped choose Graham Spanier, the third president under whom she would serve. By the time Herrmann retired in 1999, she was the highest-ranking woman at the University. Carol Cartwright came to Penn State in the early 1970s as a young professor in the College of Education. After a few years, she was offered an administrative position in the college, which she accepted. That position signaled the beginning of a trailblazing career in higher education administration. Cartwright was eventually asked to serve as acting associate dean for undergraduate programs for all of the Commonwealth Campuses. Then, finally, she was asked to stay on as dean in that position, becoming the first woman at Penn State to reach that rank. She recalls the announcement of her appointment very clearly: The newspaper read, “Woman Appointed Dean,” and a lot of people were offended and asked me if I was offended and I said, “No, the truth is that the appointment is news, and that’s why the headline gets played out that way.” Cartwright went on to become the first female vice-chancellor at the University of California, Davis. In 1991, she was named President of Kent State University, the first woman to hold the office of president in any public institution or college in Ohio.

brenda hameister: an advocate for the disabled When Brenda Hameister began working as Coordinator of the Office for Disability Services (ods) in 1979, she single-handedly ran the entire office and served about forty students. Seventeen years later, when she left the ods, the office had several other staff members and was serving more than seven hundred students with disabilities at University Park and about five hundred students at other Penn State campuses. “From the 1970s to the early 1990s, the laws regarding rights for people with disabilities changed a lot,” she says. “It was an exciting time to be working in the field.” What those changes meant was that many more students with disabilities were graduating from high school and applying to college. The legislation mandated that universities must offer equal access to educational


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programs for qualified students with disabilities, which caused a boom in student enrollment. The term “disability,” says Hameister, covers a wide range of conditions, including learning disabilities, deafness and hearing loss, mobility impairments, psychological disorders, and visual impairments. So whether it was getting a sign language interpreter, audiotape textbooks, extended time testing, or accessible housing, Hameister made it her mission to see that students received the services they needed. Many physical improvements around Penn State were made during her tenure. For example, lowered elevator controls, accessible entrances and restrooms, and curb cuts were made to University buildings and walkways. In addition, the office provided a great deal of programming for faculty and staff about how to include students with disabilities in classes and other activities such as internships, study-abroad programs, and student organizations. Hameister also helped to establish and administer seven scholarships that gave preference to students with disabilities. After seventeen years in the ods, Hameister felt she had reached her own personal goal of “creating an office with comprehensive services that was welcoming and enthusiastic about students with disabilities.” Her current position is Special Assistant to the Executive Vice President and Provost in Old Main.

Fighting for Rights In the 1980s, there were many new organizations for women formed by students, towngown clubs, and the University administration. Many of those, such as the Women’s Alliance and the Department of Women’s Concerns, have been absorbed into larger entities. Several of these groups were concerned with women’s health and safety, two areas the University had previously neglected. From these concerns, several initiatives began: the Student Escort Service and the annual “Take Back the Night” march. “Take Back the Night,” which originated in Germany in 1973, protests violence against women. It was first carried out in the United States in 1978 and now takes place on thousands of college campuses all over the world. The first “Take Back the Night” march at Penn State was held in 1986. A 2002 Daily Collegian article describes how the event was received in its early years:


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Every April, hundreds of students, employees, and local residents gather on the Penn State campus for the “Take Back the Night” march and rally. Begun in Germany in 1973, “Take Back the Night” is a demonstration of support for victims of sexual assault. Penn State first held the event in 1986, and over the past twenty years increasing numbers of men have joined the rally to support victims and denounce violence against women. Penn State’s march and rally are organized by Womyn’s Concerns, with support from groups including Men Against Violence and the Center for Women Students.

It has been a long road for the marchers who will rally against sexual assault tonight at the 17th annual “Take Back the Night.” For years, they have endured shouts of “We want rape,” “Men are number one,” and “Go home, bitch.” They have listened to yells of “Get back to your f—ing kitchens,” and “All you girls want is to get f—ed.” They have been called “dykes” and “whores.” By the end of the decade, women students, staff, and faculty had made significant strides in their status all over the campus. The Study Group’s recommendations would continue to be adopted for years to come and have remained an essential framework for future women’s initiatives.


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11 Redefining Roles

The 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century have been a time of focusing and refining the gains achieved in earlier decades for women at Penn State. The University continues to implement many of the recommendations of the Strategic Study Group. This has been a gradual process, but significant advances have been made. One of the most important objectives of the Commission for Women was to improve the state of women’s health services at the University. And that situation took a huge leap forward with the hiring of Dr. Margaret (Peg) Spear as Director of University Health Services in 1993. Spear, an internist who had previously worked in college health at Cornell and Berkeley, came to Penn State in 1990 and accepted the director’s position once she was convinced that the University was prepared to commit serious resources to improving health services—women’s health services in particular, in response to the recommendations of the Strategic Study Group. The building that housed the health service, Ritenour, was one of her primary concerns. Ritenour had been built in 1929, and although it had been updated in 1953 it had never been renovated. According to Spear: In 1953, there were about 12,000 students at the University. Forty years later, there were 40,000 students with essentially the same facility. In the women’s health department, there were little desks set out in the hallway, with barely any light, where they were interviewing students for intake with questions about their contraceptive needs, worries about STDs, and other very personal matters. I also learned that right before I


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arrived, the women’s health department used to share a hallway with the department of team athletics. So you had football players and women coming for contraceptives sitting across from each other in the same hallway. Spear presided over the renovation of Ritenour, which was no small feat, for it involved a complete overhaul of the air-conditioning, heating, and electrical systems. Spear also had to cope with resistance from the all-male physicians staff, which was not always receptive to a female superior. This attitude, Spears says, permeated the health service: In the basement there were two restrooms. One said “Men” and the other said “Physicians.” All the people who worked in the basement were women. I was down there and I had to find a bathroom, so I went into the “Physicians” and on the wall there was an old women’s labor law sign—so in other words, it had been a women’s bathroom. Within three months of when I got the job, all of the physicians retired. Spear’s next goal was to the get University Health Services nationally accredited, a process that mandated rigorous standards and the highest level of quality care. This process, Spear felt, was critically important on a variety of levels, especially to the staff members, who questioned whether the center could pass the tests. But in 1994, University Health Services was accredited and then re-accredited in 1997 and 2000. Another recommendation from the Study Group that has become a reality is the Office of the Vice Provost for Educational Equity, created in 1990. Charged with fostering diversity, the office serves as an advocate for underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, veterans, gay/lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, and women. This, in turn, led to the creation of the Commission on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Equity in 1991. The Office of the Vice Provost for Educational Equity has also expanded to support educational opportunities for low-income and potential firstgeneration college students at Penn State. All in all, these developments signaled a genuine step forward in fostering a climate of tolerance at Penn State.

laura maney: planting the seeds of change “I’ve noticed that people tend to gravitate toward flowers,” says Laura Maney. “If there’s a flower pot at a bus stop, everyone will be gathered around it. Bright colors attract attention.”


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In a typical season, Maney is responsible for planting more than thirty-six thousand of these bright-colored flowers in containers and in-ground beds (not counting perennials or special requests for campus events), so she does know what she’s talking about. As groundskeeper/horticulturist, a specialized job that she helped to create after perceiving a need for it, Maney is one of approximately fifty landscape-related jobs within the Office of Physical Plant at University Park campus. Her job includes planning, designing, ordering, and installing flower displays. Pesticide applications, shrub pruning, care of the nursery, heavy-equipment operation, and snow removal also fall under her purview. The size of the flower crew increases and decreases depending on the time of year. When annuals are being installed, about ten or twelve people do the planting. Once the flowers are planted, temporary seasonal employees work with the maintenance workers on the upkeep. Maney manages the installation process, which includes monitoring the annuals throughout the summer. Fall brings replacements in some areas to cold-tolerant plants, including mums and other semihardy flowers, and some small evergreen or berried shrubs for winter interest. About ten thousand bulbs are planted each fall. In the winter Maney works in the greenhouse, evaluating the past season with photos and notes and planning for the upcoming year. Not many women are currently working in the trade-type jobs at the university, but that’s slowly changing. “I learned how to utilize my unique qualities to carve a niche for myself within a male-dominated workforce,” says Maney. “Some days I have setbacks, but I try to stay focused on the bigger picture. I see a handful of women paving the way for others to follow.”

These years have also seen increased efforts at encouraging women to pursue nontraditional professions. A good example of this is the wise (Women in Science and Engineering) Institute. The Institute, which celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2004, works to increase the numbers of women in science, mathematics, and engineering and promotes interaction among engineers, humanists, scientists, and social scientists at Penn State, nationally and internationally. The Institute particularly works to interest elementary and secondary school girls in mentoring programs and outreach activities. One female scientist who is leaving a lasting mark on Penn State is Eva Pell. An accomplished professor of plant physiology, Pell was the only woman in her department


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when, in 2000, she was appointed Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School—the first woman to hold these key administrative posts. In 2003, Pell was named a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania by Governor Ed Rendell and lauded as “a distinguished scientist and noted researcher . . . who is internationally recognized for her work in agriculture and the life sciences.” Although she concedes that there are some women in senior research positions at other universities, there are still obstacles: I don’t think it’s disingenuous to say that I know what it’s like to feel part of an underrepresented group. I know what it’s like to walk into a room and be different than everybody else. A man stands up and says, “Well, you must be Eva,” and I can’t exactly say, “Well, you must be Bob.” Being the only woman has been my experience throughout my entire career in almost everything I’ve accomplished. If I’m in a room full of men and I have something to say, I have enough confidence to know that what I have to say is worth hearing, but gaining that confidence took time. Women do approach problems a little bit differently and it doesn’t mean that I’m always right and men are always wrong. Having diverse points of view—through gender or ethnicity—to address ongoing issues in higher education is critical. We need these points of view to come up with creative and interesting approaches to those issues. And even one of the most renowned female scientists at Penn State lived through years of financial and emotional difficulties that were due in part to her status as a single mother. Nina Federoff, a plant geneticist who was named Evan Pugh Professor of Biology in 2002, recounted some of her hardships in an article she wrote for The American Scholar in 1996. Pregnant and married at age seventeen, she talked her way into Syracuse University. When her husband, who was in the military and in another country, came home and discovered it, he beat her unconscious, took all the money in their joint accounts, and left town. Once she made the commitment to get her degree, life didn’t suddenly get easier: My life was a total mess. All I had was determination and ambition, which hardly looked like they were going to do me much good. Bit by bit, I started getting it back together. I decided to give up my second child for adoption, figured out how to get a divorce from my first husband, and supported myself, my daughter, and the lawyers by translating and teaching music. Although Federoff believes that academia is much more receptive to women than it once was, certain situations have not changed. A years-long waiting list for Penn State child care and scarce female representation in too many departments are just two examples she cites:


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Eva Pell left her career as a high school chemistry teacher in 1973 to become an assistant professor of plant pathology at Penn State. Her hard work in the department led to her 1995 appointment to the Nancy and John Steimer Professor of Agricultural Sciences endowed chair. In 2000, Pell was appointed Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School, making her the first woman to hold either position. She is also a past recipient of the Commission for Women’s Rosemary Schraer Mentoring Award.

Academia is a pretty inflexible system; some women are succeeding very well here, others are not. As someone who is on the college tenure committee, I’m surprised at how unforgiving the system is. You cannot succeed in many different ways because academia is a very focused track. Success is judged in one way, and I think that’s quite sad. The fact is that even today, if you have someone at home taking care of the house and kids, it’s much easier to succeed. The vast majority of the people at home are still women.

claudia limbert When Claudia Limbert, mother of four young children, went back to college to earn her undergraduate degree at thirty-five, she could never have imagined where she would end up—as the president of the Mississippi University for Women in Columbia, Mississippi.


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Growing up in the Ozark Mountains, Limbert’s family was so poor that, in her words, “to call us poverty-stricken would have been a distinctly upward social step.” Not only had no one in her family ever attended college, but she was the first one to graduate from high school. When she did graduate, she was her class valedictorian, but she couldn’t afford to go to college right away. She married and started a family before going on to Bethel College in Kansas, earning a bachelor’s degree in English, history, and education in 1978. From there she went on to Boston University, receiving a master’s degree in creative writing in 1980 and a doctorate in English literature in 1988. In 1988, Limbert began her career as an English and women’s studies teacher at Penn State Shenango. She was then selected to be an Administrative Fellow, spending the next year in leadership training under the direction of a senior vice president at University Park. Following that experience, she became the director of academic affairs at Penn State, DuBois. After then serving as acting campus executive officer for a short time, she was selected for the permanent position in 1998, a position she held until being appointed president of Mississippi University for Women in 2002. Limbert has received many awards, including the prestigious Athena Award for service to women and the community by the Greater DuBois Area Chamber of Commerce, the Outstanding College Administrator of Penn State’s Commonwealth College in 2001, the Rosemary Schraer Mentor Award from Penn State University’s Commission for Women in 2000, and the Teaching Award in 1994 from Penn State Shenango’s students. Most recently, she was selected as one of Mississippi’s twelve Leading Business Women for 2004. Active in mentoring other women, Limbert is particularly committed to creating more opportunities for adult learners. She feels that her time spent at Penn State was essential to her professional and personal development: I am truly grateful for what happened to me at Penn State. I had mentors who saw opportunities and encouraged me. They helped me to realize that I could do the job, be an Administrative Fellow and an academic officer and CEO. I would say that while my experience was terrific, there is a lot of talent at the branch campuses that goes unrecognized. The main campus needs to look at some of the excellent people who are working all over the state.


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While women have made inroads in virtually every arena of university life, the apprenticeship programs within the University’s technical services have remained almost exclusively male. A breakthrough came in 2003, when Lori Hoar became the first woman to be accepted into a four-year apprenticeship hvac (Heating, Ventilation, and AirConditioning) program in technical services. Hoar had previously worked in plumbing at the stadium (the first woman to work in that department as well). And although she had taken an outside training course in plumbing and refrigeration at her own expense, she still had to apply three times before being accepted into the apprenticeship program. Billie Willits, Associate Vice President for Human Resources, feels that the University is making inroads, but that there is always room for improvement: The policies are now in place; what is unknown are the practices. There are still more male tenure-track professors and administrators than female—and most of those women continue to grapple with the problem of career aspirations and raising a family. We have created some ways of dealing with these problems; we offer flextime and other measures. But the women look around and are anxious about actually participating in flextime, for example, since their male equivalents are not. They worry— with some justification—that they have to compete with men in every arena, regardless of what the policy states. Trying to make this more equal is a challenge. Willits herself is a model of service leadership at Penn State. A past recipient of the Rosemary Schraer Award, she has provided coaching and counseling to many Penn State constituencies (students, faculty, and staff) both informally and formally through structured mentoring programs. In addition, Billie has been instrumental in developing, implementing, and supporting a variety of University programs designed to encourage and recognize individual and group development. These programs include the Staff Advisory Committee, the Minority Professional Entry Program, the Staff Assistant Training Program, the Leadership and Management Development series, and the Opportunity Network for Employment. And yet, equality is still a goal to strive after. Lydia Abdullah came to Penn State as a student in 1972. Having graduated from an all-female, all-white prep school, she was used to being the only African American in her immediate environment. At Penn State she became active in the black student union and found ways to work through the University system to address discrimination in the classroom and the workplace. After graduating with a degree in accounting, Abdullah became an accounting trainee and was promoted to Internal Auditing, the first African American to hold either position in the Penn State Corporate Controller’s Division. In 1989, she won an administrative


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fellowship and was offered a position in the University Budget Office, another first for her race and gender. She cites that period as being the most rewarding of her career: I had the opportunity to make an impact through what would become the Office of Educational Equity. Perhaps dearest to my heart was the time I spent on the advisory board to the minority staff development center. My most significant work, I feel, was the chance to embrace new employees of color and help them understand and make the best of the University system. We provided a safe sounding board to vent concerns and frustrations and worked through perceived problems at work and in the community. Abdullah continues her work within the community, providing support groups for African American families and encouraging others to settle nearby. And for the first time ever, she maintains, there are three generations of African Americans in the University Park community, which was unheard of ten years ago. Another area of dramatic growth has been in the Penn State Women’s Studies Program. Carolyn Sachs, Director of the Women’s Studies Program from 1999 to 2004, has been a part of the program since its earliest days. When she arrived here from the University of Kentucky in the early 1980s as an assistant professor of Rural Sociology, she joined a group of people who were meeting regularly to discuss issues affecting women. That group went on to form the first classes in women’s studies, which featured, among others, Sachs’s course on “Women in Agriculture.” The program grew substantially each year. Faculty from different departments such as agricultural sciences, sociology, geography, art education, and curriculum and instruction taught courses in women’s studies. However, because women’s studies is a program, not a department, faculty are budgeted through their respective departments and need approval to teach in the program. Sachs, whose own research includes farm gender issues, women in agriculture, and rural development, says earning departmental status so that the faculty can teach women’s studies without having to secure such approval would be extremely beneficial. Sachs is particularly proud of the program’s dramatic growth, especially in the last five years. She maintains that this growth has been spurred on primarily by demand from students: Women’s Studies now offers an undergraduate major; we currently have fifty-five students. In 2001 we added a graduate dual-title degree and PhD program, which currently has eighteen students and has been enormously successful. At the undergraduate level we also have Troika, a women’s studies honor society that works to develop our alumnae.


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eliza pennypacker and veronica burns lucas: building sustainability Penn State’s Department of Landscape Architecture has grown in national prominence in recent years—thanks in no small part to the innovative work of Eliza Pennypacker and Veronica Burns Lucas. In 1989, Pennypacker and Burns Lucas, together with Don Alvaro Leon and John Lucas of the Architecture Department, entered and won the national competition to design a new Korean War Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, D.C. Their evocative tribute, which conveys the war through images of soldiers trooping through the mist, is one of the most emotionally haunting memorials on the national mall. Penn State honored all four designers in 1992 with the prestigious Faculty Scholars Medal. Since that time, Pennypacker has been head of the department and played a leading role in numerous campus planning and design activities. In 2000 – 2001 she was director of the Division of Campus Planning and Design, using her leadership position to promote the use of green or sustainable materials in the University’s building efforts. She presided over a number of major building projects that significantly altered the campus and affected town residents, including the west campus graduate student apartment complex, the Chemistry and Life Sciences buildings, and the School of Information Sciences and Technology building. Pennypacker played a major role in creating an interdisciplinary watershed center and a graduate-level program in watershed stewardship. She also collaborated with the Bike Coalition to develop the Penn State master plan for bike routes and was instrumental in reopening the East Broad Top railroad. Veronica Burns Lucas brought a unique sensibility to her work as a landscape architect. When she joined the Penn State faculty in 1988, after teaching at Auburn University, the Landscape Architecture Department was becoming more ecologically oriented, concerned with large-scale regional planning issues and site development. She initiated scholarship in the program that involved concerns for the environment, the connection between culture and nature, and extensive knowledge of Central and South American landscape traditions.


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“Veronica was vital in bringing to the landscape architecture program a strong commitment to design,” says her husband, John Lucas. “She influenced many students with her belief that design is as important a component to the landscape as it is to the building.” As one of the few women in her department, she set a strong example for female students through her balance of teaching, research, and service. Besides her innovative teaching and research, Burns Lucas had a thriving practice with her husband, was secretary of the Faculty Senate for two years, and was very involved with the board of trustees through her work in helping to develop a facilities master plan for the University Park Campus. In 1992, she received an American Society of Landscape Architects Award for the master plan design of the Pennsylvania Military Museum, Columbus Chapel, and Boal Mansion grounds. Burns Lucas died in 1998.

Another faculty member who represents an important milestone in the history of women at Penn State is Sandra Spanier, wife of President Graham Spanier. A tenured professor in the English department, Spanier is the first president’s wife to work as a faculty member at the University. Moreover, Spanier is a highly respected scholar who made national news in 2002, when the Ernest Hemingway Foundation chose her to be the general editor of a multivolume scholarly edition of Ernest Hemingway’s correspondence, including thousands of never-before-seen letters. Originally from Iowa, Spanier earned her PhD in Literature from Penn State in 1981 and returned in 1995, when Graham became president. Although she credits her husband and family as extremely supportive, Spanier says that dealing with the various aspects of her professional and personal life is more manageable these days: It’s been easier to balance my professional life and my role as spouse of the president. My husband wants me to do what I need and want to do as a professional. I rely on some very professional and capable people in Penn State’s food services, Old Main, and alumni relations. They help me tremendously in the various social arrangements that previous president’s wives had to undertake themselves. Also, I’ve been very fortunate in coming back to Penn State because it is like coming home. I went to graduate school here, I was an instructor in the English department, I taught in the school district, and I have many friends and connections.


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She also feels that she is emblematic of the freedom and choices contemporary women have. Even though Spanier has some very traditional roles to fulfill as the wife of the University president, she can have a successful and satisfying professional career.

cynthia baldwin: quiet determination Once she had made the decision, she would not waver. None of her friends from high school were going, and her parents were not happy about their only child living two hours away from home. But that characteristic of quiet determination has marked how Cynthia Baldwin led her life and how she would continue to lead—herself and others. “In high school, I went to my guidance counselor, whom I’d never met before in person. I told him I wanted to go to Penn State. He dismissed me: Oh, they only take the top 10 percent of students. I leaned forward and said, “I think I’ll be okay. I’m in the top five,” she recalls. “I started in the fall.” And with that, Baldwin’s long and illustrious connection with Penn State began. It was the early 1960s, and while Penn State was not a hotbed of student activism, Baldwin and others formed committees to raise consciousness, especially on the issue of diversity. Although she never let it stop or affect her, Baldwin acknowledges, “Of course there was racism; that goes without saying. We all knew there were certain restaurants and stores that didn’t want African Americans. We knew to avoid them.” An incident that stands out for her was a Panhellenic dance. Each sorority was to send a representative to this dance; fraternity boys were asked to be the girls’ escorts for the evening. Baldwin, a member of Delta Sigma Theta, was chosen to attend. When her date knocked at the front door, she eagerly opened it. “We were both stunned. It was very obvious that he had no idea that this was the black sorority,” she remembers. “We just stared at each other. I, too, was shocked because I just assumed any escort I’d have would be African American.” But to the boy’s everlasting credit, he offered his arm, she took it, and they went to the dance together. Baldwin, who majored in English and minored in education, always knew she would be a teacher and went on to teach in the


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McKeesport school district. She then returned to Penn State for a master’s degree in 1970 and taught English at Penn State McKeesport. After taking on some administrative tasks and serving as Assistant Dean of Student Affairs for two years, Baldwin decided to go to law school. After practicing for several years, she stepped up to a new challenge. “I ran for judge because an African American woman had just run and lost,” she says quietly. “It was 1989. It was time.” And with that, Baldwin became the first female African American judge in Allegheny County. But she never lost her connection with the University, and she continuously strove to generate opportunities for others, to pave the way. Baldwin credits this drive to her parents’ high values and correspondingly high expectations. Although neither of her parents went to college, there was never any doubt that Cynthia would attend. “My parents always taught me to give back,” she recalls. “I didn’t even think about it. It was just something one did.” In 1995, Judge Baldwin was appointed by the Governor to be on the Penn State Board of Trustees, where she firmly believes a broad array of perspectives must be represented. “The most anyone can ask for is to be able to have a discussion with all sides presented before a decision is made,” she says. “And that’s why you need to institutionalize diversity—all types of diversity—geographic, racial, and gender.” Baldwin rapidly ticks off some of the issues involved: “The cost of education, attaining a diverse student population in a global community, the challenges of long-distance education, maintaining a balance between quality teaching and research,” she pauses to take a breath and then laughs. “Let’s just say there’s always plenty for us to talk about.”

Another woman who continues to make a lasting impact is Dr. Kathleen Mastrian at Penn State Shenango. As a nursing student at Shenango in 1969, Mastrian transferred to In 2002, Penn State professor of English Sandra Spanier was selected by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation to act as general editor of a multivolume annotated edition of Hemingway’s correspondence. The search to collect the writer’s letters, which number nearly ten thousand, has taken Spanier everywhere from the John F. Kennedy Library in Bostonto Hemingway’s former residence in Cuba. Spanier is also the first wife of a University president to serve on Penn State’s faculty.


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Cynthia Baldwin has had a long association with Penn State. An undergraduate in the 1960s and a master’s student and English instructor in the 1970s, Baldwin took a break from the University in the 1980s to earn a law degree and become the first black judge in the history of Allegheny County. She returned to the University in 1995 after being appointed to the board of trustees by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge. That same year, Baldwin, a former president of the Penn State Alumni Association, received a Penn State Distinguished Alumni Award, the highest honor given by the University to alumni.

University Park in her second year to continue her studies. After earning her master’s degree, Mastrian was hired to teach in a four-year pilot extended-degree Bachelor of Science in Nursing program at the Shenango, New Kensington, and McKeesport campuses. Thanks to her ties to local health-care institutions, she was able to recruit many practicing registered nurses to enroll in this program. Mastrian wanted to encourage RNs to attain their bachelor’s degrees so that they would have access to promotions in the workplace and the opportunity to seek an advanced degree. Determined that their experience not go unrecognized, she created a “credit by portfolio” process: This process recognized that RNs entering the program have a common level of previous knowledge that allowed them to earn the professional license. When we were


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able to recognize this previous learning via portfolio, it helped to demonstrate to potential students that we valued their previous education and that what we were teaching was different and promoted professional mobility. Mastrian, who received the Health and Human Development Commonwealth Faculty Achievement Award in 1998, is now associate professor and program coordinator of nursing at Shenango. Certainly a Penn State woman who has carved out a brilliant professional career and managed to raise her family is Coach Rene Portland. Over the years, Portland has coached many young women who, besides being superb athletes and teammates, have demonstrated the type of leadership skills that are characteristic of all successful students. One of those women is Lady Lion basketball player Helen Darling, who graduated from Penn State in 2000 and went on to play with the Cleveland Rockers in the Women’s National Basketball Association—one of a growing number of Lady Lion players who have gone on to play professionally in the wnba. In 1999, Darling, along with fellow Lady Lion Andrea Garner, helped the United States win a silver medal at the World University Games. One year later, Darling was named Big Ten Player of the Year and hit the gamewinning shot in the ncaa regional semifinal win over Iowa State. The team beat Louisiana Tech to reach the Final Four for the first time in the program’s history. Darling, who was considered the team’s leader, said of her Lady Lions team, “We started at rock bottom (when I was a freshman). But we believed in ourselves. We went through so much to get to the top.” In 2002, Darling gave birth to triplets and one year later (with her three children in tow) made thirty-five appearances at community schools in her home of Columbus, Ohio, promoting the value of reading and education. She held basketball clinics with girls aged five to eighteen, stressing skills and teamwork to teach the importance of bonding, working together, and having a common goal. Darling also served as a national spokesperson for the March of Dimes. Through that organization, Darling received tremendous support and education when her triplets arrived six weeks prematurely. In appreciation of her efforts, she was awarded the 2003 wnba Community Assist Award.

Progress and Challenges Ahead The year 2001 marked the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Commission for Women. To mark the occasion, the Commission chose to examine the progress that women have made at Penn State in the years since the Strategic Study Group released its findings in 1987. In a report prepared for the faculty senate, the Commission set forth both the achievements and the challenges that lay ahead. For instance, the Commission


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Since 1995, the Commission for Women has offered an annual workshop for full-time female technical service employees. This event is part of the University’s effort to increase the number of women in high-ranking technical service positions. At the 2004 workshop, Roberta Hardin (center), supervisor of student services in the Schreyer Honors College, spoke about the importance of integrity, innovation, and excellence.

found that in 2001, representation of women at senior staff ranks had greatly increased and was approaching parity. Out of fifteen college deans, five were women. Most important, the report stated, senior administration at Penn State is genuinely committed to improving the climate for women at all levels. And yet, in 2001 men continued to occupy the vast majority of faculty and administrative positions: 80 percent of tenured faculty positions, 81 percent of academic administrator positions, 95 percent of named professorships and chairs, and 75 percent of senior administrative and executive positions.


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Patricia Waite (right) receives the 2005 Achieving Women Technical-Service Award from the Commission for Women 2004–5 chair-elect Karen Schultz. According to Waite, a ten-year employee of Housing and Food Services, part of her job is to be a constant, calming presence to counteract the stress students so often feel. The Commission for Women recognized Waite’s dedication to these students with the award. The Achieving Women Awards annually recognize faculty, staff, administrators, and students across all Penn State locations for their leadership skills, accomplishments in their fields, and other contributions to the University community through public service activities and support of diversity efforts.

The Commission came up with a list of across-the-board recommendations to be implemented. These recommendations included: devising a consensus on the process of promotion and tenure, and advancement and expectations of scholarship and productivity in relation to the increasing number of working women with family responsibilities; developing realistic plans for child care when both parents (or one in single-parent families) have to travel for work purposes; offering more day-care centers with longer hours at all campus locations; and increasing representation of women at the associate dean and


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academic department head/chairperson level to 40 percent by the year 2010. The Commission recommended guidelines to ensure that women get an equitable share of named professorships and other high-level awards and a procedure for accountability from deans, department heads, and unit heads in enforcing the University’s goals to improve the climate for all women at Penn State. Instituting policies to ensure employment opportunities for women and minorities (in faculty, administrative, and managerial positions), and training unit heads and managers on procedures to recruit and retain women at all Penn State locations were also priorities within the report. Acknowledging changing populations and increasing global perspectives, the Commission recommended that all Penn State employees attend a workshop on race and changing demographics in the workplace and institute a similar one-credit seminar, which all students, both graduate and undergraduate, must pass. The final recommendation was to increase the representation of women on the Penn State Board of Trustees to “reflect equitably the number of women students enrolled at the University,” which in 2001 comprised 47 percent. The Commission continues to expand its mission with a host of initiatives, maintaining its role as a forum through which improved practices that support women can be applied, and as an umbrella group for women’s organizations throughout the Commonwealth Campuses. Its representatives continue to promote equality and fairness in all facets of University life.


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12 The Future Is Ours

Penn State female students are among the University’s most accomplished academic and organizational leaders, working within their own communities and on national and international levels. They are distinguished by their learning, the breadth and depth of their interests, and, perhaps most important, their passionate dedication to making a difference in the world. Here is a very small sampling of some of these recent exceptional young women:

Amanda Wetzel A Schreyers honors student who graduated in 2002, Amanda Wetzel wrote her senior honors thesis on the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition. The coalition comprised women with different religions and political ideologies who came together in an effort to promote peace. Wetzel focused on the collective identity, or sense of belonging, among members of the group. In an article in Research/Penn State, Wetzel explained that a new collective identity forms when personalities, religions, and nationalities unite. Group mentality often conjures up negative connotations such as extreme nationalism. Wetzel wanted to emphasize the positive aspects that can be achieved through the interaction between different cultures and ethnicities. Through this process of unification, she maintained, a new identity is created.


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Amanda Wetzel

To that end, Wetzel created a listserv called “One Nation” for young people around the world. Everyone was encouraged to participate in online discussions and all opinions and points of view were respected. Wetzel said that she talked to students about the September 11th attacks, listening to others’ ideas and sharing her own. The whole point was to initiate a dialogue, establishing a relationship. And her contention that the power of dialogue can promote peace, put forth in an essay, won her the chance to read it to foreign ministers, scholars, and world leaders at the finale of the weeklong United Nations program “Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations” in 2001. Wetzel was one of ten students around the world whose essay was chosen for the honor. During internships at the State Department, Wetzel continued her work, helping to coordinate a conference on giving women political training at the American Consulate in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In the Netherlands during 2002, she studied the rise of extreme right-wing parties in Europe. That year also marked Wetzel’s winning of the prestigious George J. Mitchell scholarship, which enabled her to continue her studies in Ireland. If that weren’t enough, she also became the first Penn State student to be named a Fellow of the Humanity in Action Foundation, an international organization committed to engaging student leaders in the study and work of human rights.


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Wetzel, who was also a Lion Ambassador, a member of the Penn State Oboe Studio, and was named to the All-USA College Academic 2nd Team, is studying for an advanced degree at Queens College in Belfast.

Sara Ryan Sara Ryan is not shy about saying that school is not her favorite activity. The Political Science/African American Studies junior freely admits that it’s hard for her to sit in class when “I want to be up and doing things. Even though I know school is important, I just can’t make myself enjoy studying when there’s so much more to do.” And for Sara Ryan that “much more” is a perpetual campaign to make people more understanding of each other’s differences. One of her first projects was to create a peereducation program for all Resident Assistants at the University Park campus to make dorms safe spaces for gay and lesbian students. The program is now mandatory training for all Resident Assistants. Her next project was to ensure the safety of the Penn State escort service for gay and lesbian students, conducting educational workshops and training sessions on issues such as transgender and transsexuality. Aware that gay men report the highest incidence of hate crimes, Ryan next took on the University’s Greek system. Seeking to bring some type of unity and community dialogue to a system that is homophobic and promotes negative stereotypes of gay people was a considerable challenge, says Ryan, and the first time she faced some serious resistance. Since so much of fraternity life involves socializing with female students, gay men in fraternities are frightened that, if they are exposed, they’ll lose friends and be alienated, or worse. Because of this, they don’t seek support from the existing resources on campus such as the lgbt office. Ryan was determined to change the status quo. She managed to build a coalition of students from the Panhellenic and Interfraternity Councils, and together they were able to establish peer-education programs on the treatment of gay men for new members. Ryan’s work did not go unnoticed. At the end of her junior year, President Spanier informed her that she had been chosen to receive a Truman Scholarship, becoming only the second person in Penn State’s history to do so. Truman scholarships are awarded by the Harry S. Truman Scholarship foundation to fund the education of students preparing for careers in government or public service. The award, which includes $30,000 to be used for an advanced degree, is specifically given to a student who is an “agent of change.” Ryan says that she will probably get a master’s degree in public policy, although she does not know where. And she’d still rather be out in the community promoting her


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agenda, which includes writing a proposal to creating a minor in gay and lesbian/gender identity studies and help the gay community achieve their goals of equality through civil rights legislation. Expect to hear much more from this young “agent of change.”

Faheema Mufasaa Faheema Mufasaa saw her opportunity to help others by joining the Women’s Leadership Initiative. The Initiative, which began in 2004, is for women students majoring in one of the disciplines of the College of Health and Human Development, and was conceived by the alumnae of that College and women leaders throughout the nation. With a goal of fostering the seeds of a leadership style and philosophy, the institution puts its members through a twelve-month interdisciplinary extracurricular program that includes weekend workshops, seminars to observe outstanding leaders, externships to participate with leaders in a work environment, mentoring, and an applied leadership project. Mufasaa heard about the wli in its infancy, when Dr. Lizabeth Mullens came to speak at a meeting she was attending. Realizing right away that the potential opportunities would be invaluable, she joined before it had even been publicly announced. With a major in biobehaviorial health and psychology, Mufasaa doesn’t know yet what she wants to do after she graduates in 2005, but she is working to formulate her own leadership philosophy: I believe that the word “leadership” itself carries with it a responsibility to humanity that only those who act righteously in their progression toward whatever goal or manifestation of an idea deserve to carry. If we are committed to helping others but have ulterior motives; if we persevere in our attempt to raise money for a charity through deception; if our goals are inflexible in light of the people and situations around us, we should not be called leaders. Mufasaa’s best leadership experience was one that taught her a revealing truth about herself. During her sophomore year, she was elected Fundraising Chair of the Penn State Crew team. Aware of the many women she knew who suffered from “Superwoman Syndrome,” the disorder that causes someone to think that she—and she alone—can do anything and everything in a twenty-four-hour period, Mufasaa ran herself ragged trying to come up with ways to raise money for her team. Sara Ryan


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The realization has been especially meaningful for Mufasaa. With honors and awards that include being nominated for the Golden Key International Honor Society, a member of the hhd Honor Society, a gold medal for the Penn State crew team’s Schuylkill Regatta, a bronze medal for the mid-Atlantic Collegiate Crew Championships, plus myriad student leadership activities, she has learned a valuable lesson about setting realistic goals and trusting the abilities of others. She credits this experience more than any other for teaching her the necessity of trusting the abilities of others, the importance of teamwork, and that “good leadership is governed by example.”

Kelly Mazzante Kelly Mazzante grew up in the working-class community of Montoursville, Pennsylvania. Kelly hardly remembers being inside her house; she and the neighborhood kids would play sports all day, chase lightning bugs and birds at night, hit tennis balls off sheds or shoot baskets with the spotlight on. She always enjoyed fishing in the stream that runs through land the family owns outside town. One of her most vivid memories is catching a big fish, forcing her father to hang on to her so she wouldn’t fall overboard. Her athletic gifts were apparent early on. At six, she began playing basketball, but baseball was clearly her first love. At first, being the only girl on the team who would arrive for practice on her bike, dressed in pink petal pushers and lace socks, Mazzante got the requisite smirks. But not for long: the starting pitcher with the frilly socks was a strikeout ace, who made district history as the first girl to be the starting pitcher in an all-star game—and win. When she was thirteen (the reason behind her number thirteen jersey), she began playing organized basketball and moved quickly through the ranks of junior high, landing a start on the varsity team as a freshman. By the end of that year, she totaled 501 points, setting a district scoring record for a freshman. By the end of high school, she’d scored 3,270 career points, the third highest girl’s total in Pennsylvania history. On the first day of recruiting for college basketball, Mazzante received letters from fifty-five schools around the country, including Penn State. Rene Portland and her staff pursued her as aggressively as other schools, but it didn’t take long to convince Mazzante. She knew she liked the Penn State campus and State College, having attended a Penn State basketball camp while in high school. And the rest is history. Mazzante stepped into the role as a freshman starter on an injury-ridden Lady Lions team early in the 2001 season. Remarkably, in just that first year, Mazzante was a three-time Big Ten player of the week—a feat never accomplished by any


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other freshman—and she captured the Big Ten scoring title with 18.8 points per game. She was also an All-Big Ten First Team selection and was named Big Ten Freshman of the Year and Co-National Freshman of the Year. And that was just the beginning of the list that would eventually land Mazzante in the record books as the all-time leading scorer in Big Ten history.

Connie Moore Another record-breaking senior graduated in the spring of 2004. Sprinter Connie Moore, who had said that her longtime goal was to hang the Big Ten Championship Banner in the Multi-Sports Indoor Facility, had the gratification of seeing that goal realized. Of course, winning the championship would not have been possible without Moore’s leadership as


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team captain and extraordinary performances on the track. With nine All-American titles and a recent race where she beat Olympic medalist Marion Jones’s record in the 200meter dash, Moore now boasts the third-best time in the 200-meters in the world and is the most decorated athlete in Penn State track and field history. In the spring of 2004, Moore was named the Big Ten Women’s Track and Field Athlete of the Year. Other awards include a five-time Big Ten champion, the 2002 Big Ten Women’s Outdoor Athlete of the Year, and many more. In July 2004, she went to the Olympic trials, where she competed against senior Olympian Marion Jones.

susan craig: better late than never If anyone gets discouraged at the thought of the time it takes to get a Penn State education and degree, they should consider Susan Craig. One of six thousand students graduating in the spring of 2004, Craig has been continuously enrolled at Penn State for twenty-nine years, setting a University record and earning a PhD, besides associate, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees, in administration of justice. In 1973, Craig was a stay-at-home mother who had attended Robert Morris College in suburban Pittsburgh, but when she left school to start a family, she enrolled in her first Penn State course. That course was online because Craig needed to help her husband run the hotel they owned in rural Centre County and could not attend classes. At that time, she had three children; she would eventually have five. Over the next several years, Craig would earn twenty-four credits through Penn State distance education. In 1981, after getting a divorce, Craig found a job in the University’s College of Health and Human Development and put her two youngest children in the college’s nursery school. The next year she earned her associate’s degree in arts, letters, and sciences—the same year her oldest son enrolled at Penn State. Craig earned her bachelor’s degree in individual and family studies in 1987. After attaining a master’s degree in counselor education in 1991, Craig discovered a new interest in administration of justice. Drawing on her training in counseling, Craig developed a therapeutic community in a women’s prison and volunteered her counseling services for men at a nearby prison.


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She focused her dissertation on creating rehabilitation programs in the structured environment of a prison. Alan Block, professor of crime, law, and justice, and the co-chair on Craig’s dissertation committee, spoke about her work: “Here she was doing this really path-breaking kind of study. It was a very, very difficult dissertation to do because there were so many problems setting up this type of community in the prison. It was a pioneering piece of work she did. Susan is a very determined person and I’m very proud of her.” Craig moved to Boca Raton, Florida, in 1998, after she finished her coursework. She is currently the chair of Kaplan College’s Online School of Criminal Justice. In April 2004, she returned to State College to defend her dissertation. Speaking of the extraordinary length of time she was a Penn State student, Craig offers a simple explanation. “I just really enjoyed moving from school to school. I truly thought that once I finished my bachelor’s I would never, never attend a class again. I just enjoy learning. It was the one thing I could do for myself that no one could take from me.”

Danielle Perry Danielle Perry is the oldest of ten siblings, one of which includes her twin sister. Raised in a very sheltered family in Reading, Perry and her siblings were all home-schooled until the age of seventeen by their mother. Besides fulfilling the requirements and requisite tests, Perry was given a lot of freedom to pursue what she wanted to learn. It had to be that way, she says, because “there were so many of us.” As she matured into a young woman, Perry began to realize that she had tremendous drive to learn and that she was capable of extraordinary academic heights. But with that realization came an almost insurmountable obstacle: “I had naturally aspired to earn a college degree, but my parents had different plans for me and my future and they chose another path: to marry young, have numerous children, and live the life of a devoted Baptist. I chose differently.” As a teenager, she knew she would have to beg her father to attend college, because he didn’t believe in higher education for women. He finally relented, allowing her to attend nursing school at the hospital where he worked. After a year and a half, Perry knew it wasn’t


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enough. She knew by that time that she wanted to pursue an education in the physical sciences. She left nursing school and enrolled in courses at Penn State Berks, and soon she was accepted as a Scholar in the Schreyers Honors College at the University Park campus. Perry had no trouble with the academics; it was the social aspect of college life that was more problematic. She’d never gone to a public school before and certainly had never lived away from home. Eventually she learned to fit in, finding other students with similar interests.


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A 2004 graduate, Perry was a physics major with a minor in mathematics. In the spring of that year, she became Penn State’s first student to earn a National Institutes of Health–University of Cambridge Graduate Partnerships Program fellowship with an award of $250,000. She was also the first Penn State student to win the Winston Churchill Scholarship, worth $30,000, which funds one year of research in the physics of hearing, also at Cambridge, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship for research at the Brain Dynamics Centre in Sydney, Australia. Perry’s work for the nih–Cambridge Fellowship, a collaborative project between the university and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (nih), the largest medical research facility in the world, involves five years of research on the human brain, with a focus on linguistic and speech processing. She began her work in England in October 2004. Besides other various national awards from the National Science Foundation and nih, Perry has garnered honors for her research in science and engineering at Penn State from the Eberly College of Science and the Society of Distinguished Alumni. The Commission for Women recently named her 2004’s Most Achieving Undergraduate Woman of the Year. Perry’s interests lie in determining which parts of the brain are responsible for language and how we learn to speak. She has also done research in two other areas that she enjoys: physical chemistry and comparative literature.

debbie korman: working hard and seizing opportunities When she found out she needed a degree to get a higher-level job, Debbie Korman didn’t hesitate, enrolling in a Penn State degree program in 1996. At the time, Korman was working forty hours a week, but that kind of work schedule was nothing new. After graduating from high school in 1976, Korman, like her parents, took a job in the technical service sector at Penn State. This decision was based on personal reasons. “I’d been accepted to Penn State in high school,” she says. “But I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I couldn’t see spending for tuition at that time. I didn’t want to waste time or money.” Korman’s first job was at Simmons Hall, but she quickly moved to a counter position in the dining room at McElwain Hall. From there, she worked in myriad positions in Penn State’s food service system, which she discovered she enjoyed. After McElwain, Korman moved to the University’s bakery, rising


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each morning around 4 am to bake brownies, cookies, and bread. Hating the hours, she went back to the dining halls, this time as a cook, and then moved to Penn State catering, where she stayed for twelve years. “As a catering attendant, you’re a jack of all trades,” Korman recalls. “You take the order, make the order, deliver the order. Working eighty hours a week wasn’t unusual, especially during football season, when we were responsible for the President’s tailgates.” Korman was one of three full-time catering employees, who, along with a manager, two assistants, and many student employees, made up the entire Penn State catering department. Any food that is ordered by any office on campus (for meetings, luncheons, and the like) is considered catering, except for the Nittany Lion Inn. Some of these events are not casual and require linen, china, and accompanying attendants. After more than fifteen years in food service at Penn State, Korman applied for an assistant manager job, but she could not attain it without a degree— and in 1999, she received her associate’s degree in business administration. She began work immediately on a bachelor’s degree in labor and industrial relations. In August 2004, Korman retired from Penn State after more than twenty-six years of service. She is now employed as a Food Service Manager at Temple University, working for Sodexho. In this position, she is in charge of food production in the University’s food court. Twelve credits away from completing her BS, Korman is planning to continue her education at Temple or another university in the Philadelphia area. She hopes eventually to work in the human resources department of an institutional food service company. Although it’s been a long haul, Korman appreciates what Penn State enabled her to accomplish. She feels strongly that women who want to further themselves should take advantage of the many opportunities at the University and especially from the Commission for Women (cfw). Korman served on the cfw from 2000 to 2004 as chair of the Tech Service Committee, was a member of the Executive Committee, and was a recipient of the Achieving Woman Award. “Women in tech service need to ask questions and discover what’s out there for them,” she says. “The cfw provides many opportunities in networking and career development. More people should be involved with the Commission. Many of the issues it takes on are of importance to more than just women.”


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Ashley Waddell Ashley Waddell came to Penn State and the Schreyers Honors College in 2000, not knowing what she wanted to do with her life. Her first lesson, however, was that she was not satisfied sitting in class; she knew by her sophomore year that she needed a more activist education, one where she could learn through experiences and a thoroughly different way of life. When she was told she could not study abroad until her junior year, she did not accept it. When told not to go to her country of choice, the Dominican Republic, because it was politically unstable, she did not falter. “I’ve always been insubordinate,” Waddell remarked cheerfully. “That’s just who I am.” Waddell arrived in Santo Domingo, the country’s largest city, and lived with a family in the city’s old colonial zone, staying as far away from the Study Abroad office and other college kids as possible. Growing up in predominantly white Johnstown and then outside Pittsburgh in a fundamentalist Christian family, she was instantly intrigued by the country and its people and kept a journal, writing voluminous daily entries. For her internship, she chose to work with Niño del Camino, an organization that works to help kids living on the streets of Santo Domingo. During her first day on the job, Waddell’s life changed: We went to a part of the city where kids were literally lying in the streets. If you were sitting in a restaurant, there would be three or four little kids—age six or seven— standing around the table, begging for money. Some were disabled. They had no shoes and wore rags or were half-dressed. Almost all of them had been abused in their families and run away. They have nowhere to live. On my first day, I and others from the office went to a prison where three of them had been picked up by the police, a typical occurrence. I had gotten three plates of food to take with me. When I walked in, the smell hit me first—like nothing I’d ever smelled before. They took us to a cell where at least fifteen kids were being held—not just three. It was filthy with no toilet facilities. The police would not open the cell door for us and as I stood there, all these small dirty hands were poking out of the bars, begging for the food. It was instantly gone. I had no idea what I’d gotten myself into. Carly Hughes being crowned Miss Penn State 2003. That same year, Hughes was honored by the Princess Grace Foundation, which annually awards the Grace LeVine Theatre Award and scholarship to aspiring artists in film, theater, and dance. A 2004 graduate of the musical theater program, Hughes has gone on to work in the professional theater, including appearing recently in Tazewell Thompson’s Constant Star, about the life of civil rights activist Ida B. Wells.


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Her experience in the Dominican Republic galvanized Waddell. When she returned to the United States, she began a group called Rescue Childhood to raise money to build a rehabilitation center for the Santo Domingo street kids. She started by recruiting her roommates and engaging professors and administrators to help teach her how to raise funds, how to establish a bona fide Penn State organization, how to be a leader, and how to motivate people to care as much as she did. She worked with the Department of Labor in Washington, D.C., learning how to write grant proposals and applying for a Fulbright as an organization. All in all, Waddell raised $11,000. Before returning to the Dominican Republic with some members of Rescue Childhood to present the money to Niño del Camino, she gave each person a sealed envelope with a thousand dollars in it for safekeeping. She reports that when she saw the piece of land that was bought for the rehabilitation center and actually saw the blueprints for the building, she cried. The building, which was designed to accommodate the range of ages and different educational services, became operational in 2004. Rescue Childhood is no longer Waddell’s organization. It doesn’t need to be. Now it has an office in the HUB, an executive board of eight officers to run it, and a membership of over a hundred people. These young women are emblematic of Penn State women. They are just the latest incarnation of all the women who have been connected with the University either as students, faculty, or staff. And what do they all have in common? A grand history of grabbing an opportunity and never letting go; of forging into untrammeled terrain and setting sight for the top; of demanding that the bar never be lowered; of not taking “no” for an answer; and of burnishing the good name of The Pennsylvania State University. The small class of the women of 1871 would be proud.

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AFTERWORD: BUILDING ON HISTORY TO SHAPE THE FUTURE

This book celebrates 150 years of women’s groundbreaking scholarship, curricular innovation, and institutional leadership. Penn State has made tremendous progress since Mary Butterfield became the first “Lady Principal” in 1876 and Elizabeth Breckenridge Meek received her graduate degree in the College of Science in 1898. Much of that progress has been due to women blazing the trails of academe in a variety of roles that have shaped the institution over time. We have come a long way from the first undergraduate class of six women to our current position of women comprising almost half of the student body and holding leadership roles within the faculty, staff, and administration. Progress has not always come easily, nor has it happened quickly. From the time women were admitted as students at Penn State in 1871, it took more than 100 years for the first woman to be elected Chair of the Faculty Senate, 120 years for a woman to become President of the Board of Trustees, and 130 years for the first woman to be chosen as an Evan Pugh Professor, the highest academic honor for a faculty member at Penn State. Although individuals who were the “first” in any category are the ones remembered in the history books, each of these milestones was achieved only because of the tenacity, boundary-pushing, and creativity of other women who led the way. Undergirding the efforts of those at the cutting edge also stands a large group of women in clerical, technical, and other staff positions, whose perspectives and day-to-day decisions have contributed to the overall climate that has allowed women to make great strides. The pages of this book chronicle the strong leadership roles that have been played by women in every arena at Penn State. However, there are still boundaries to break and contributions to make within every facet of the institution, ranging from student and faculty research innovations to executive positions. To build on the past and continue to realize the important contributions of all women at Penn State in the future, it will take a clear commitment from both men and women in the institution, risk-taking to push boundaries, and each person doing his or her part. I am proud to be part of this strong

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afterword

tradition of pioneering women and look forward to the challenge of helping the next generation of women as they build on the accomplishments of those who have come before them and lead the way for those who will follow. Janis E. Jacobs, PhD Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and International Programs The Pennsylvania State University

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abdullah, Lydia, 187–88 Adams, Martha (Marty), 128 Arnelle, Jesse, 133 Aschman, Margaret Griffin, 39 Atherton, Frances “Fanny” Washburn, 16, 17, 18, 37 Atherton, George Washington, 15–16, 15, 36 Atherton, Helen. See Govier, Helen Atherton Baldwin, Cynthia, 191–92, 194 Barash, Sy, 134 Beaver, James A., 61 Bechdel, Rachel, 63 Bednarik, Jen, 151 Behrend, Ernst, 111 Behrend, Mary P., 78, 111 Bell, Helen, 92–93 Benson, Tom, 158 Bergstein, Elizabeth, 40 Bernreuter, Robert, 125 Bezdek, Hugo, 53 Bezilla, Michael, 36, 61, 65, 125, 126 Bingler, Stacy, 148 Block, Alan, 208 Bogart, Madge T., 26 Boozer, David S., 87 Brill, Julia Gregg, 35, 63, 75 Brown, Mary Allgood, 86 Brown, Nina, 106–8 Brown, Raymond, 106, 107 Brumbaugh, Martin Grove, 33

Bunton, Mildred Seller, 56 Butler, Mildred McCowan, 85 Butterfield, Mary E., 9, 215 Calder, James, 5, 6, 7 Caldwell, Corrine, 173–75 Cameron, Shirley H., 61 Camp, Emma, 19 Cappelletti, John, 147 Carey, Emma, 29, 31 Carr, Maureen, 165 Carter, Jimmy, 156 Cartwright, Carol, 144, 164, 165, 177 Cates, M. Elizabeth, 53 Chace, Edith Pitt, 49, 50, 51, 59, 91 Chapman, Sabrina, 170–72, 173 Chesworth, Jo, 101 Clark, Edward, 2 Clemson, Donna, 98, 104, 117 Cohen, Teresa, 48–49 Condill, Ann, 9 Cooke, Jay, 111 Cooper, Anna, 7 Craig, Susan, 207–8 Cross, Ellen A., 2, 5, 6, 7 Curtin, James, 3 Darling, Helen, 195 Dock, Mira Lloyd, 21–22 Drummond, Laura, 88, 89, 91 Dunaway, Wayland, 13 Durant, Della, 108, 128, 129, 130


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Eddy, Edward D., 131 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 113 Eisenhower, Helen Eakin, 113 Eisenhower, Milton S., 87, 113, 115, 119 Elgin, Dorothy Snyder, 77 English, Teri, 136–37 Evans, Emily P., 58 Ewing, Rebecca, 5, 7 Farrell, Pat, 165–67, 165, 175 Federoff, Nina, 184 Fenton, Suzy, 71–72 Fernald, Henry T., 19 Ford, Donald H., 94 Franklin, Barbara, 135 Fredman, Mimi Ungar Barash Coppersmith, 134–35, 164 Friedan, Betty, 120 Frost, Robert, 107–8 Gamble, June, 165 Gamble, Nancy Saylor, 65 Garban, Steve, 175 Garner, Andrea, 195 Garvan, Francis P., 87 Gay, Carol, 132 Gentry, Louise, 94, 95 Gerhardt, G. M., 75 Goodstein, Lynne, 161 Govier, Helen Atherton, 10, 16, 36–38, 37, 61 Gross, Janet Brownback, 61 Haidt, Marie, 53, 54, 61, 62, 63, 108, 112, 126, 128 Hameister, Brenda, 177–78 Hardin, Roberta, 196 Harris, Dorothy, 155 Hartsock, Linda, 120, 121, 123 Haverbeck, Mary Jo (MJ), 150–52, 154, 155 Hays, Jo, 35 Hellmers, Gertrude Louise, 72 Henderson, Grace, 89–90, 91, 93–94, 95, 130 Hendrix, Mary Lou Markley, 76 Herrmann, Carol, 176–77 Hetzel, Ralph Dorn, 55, 75, 76, 86–87

index Hinds-Zaami, Denise, 170 Hinkle, Sam, 135 Hoar, Lori, 187 Holderman, Grace Baer, ix–xii, 33, 42, 65 Holderman, Ken, 42 Honey, Ruth F., 90 Hughes, Carly, 212, 213 Hunter, Elisabeth, 3 Hunter, Susan, 131 Irvin, General James, 2 Johnson, Kathryn, 165, 168 Jordan, Bryce, 167, 169, 176 Kautz, Barbara, 165 Keller, Susan Bissey, 80 Kennedy, John F., 116, 119 King, Cynthia, 166, 167 Klauder, Charles Z., 40 Knight, Margaret A., 42–43, 44, 46 Korman, Debbie, 210–11 Larson, Christine, 156 Lear, Bill, 147 Lewis, Jane McCormick, 164 Lewis, William E., 26 Limbert, Claudia, 185–86 Lincoln, Abraham, 3 Lipp, Dorothy J., 116, 120, 121, 123 Lorah, Peggy, 173 Lovejoy, Sara Cutts, 23–24 Lucas, John, 53, 189 Lucas, Susan, 169–70, 176 Lucas, Veronica Burns, 189–90 Lucey, Mildred, 62 Lyday, Nancy, 165 MacDonald, Margaret, 34 MacDonald, Pearl, 25, 26 Mack, Pauline Beery, 59–60, 61, 87, 90 Magnusson, Lucille “Lu,” 128, 129 Maney, Laura, 182–83 Marshall, Bonnie, 157–59, 159


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index Mastrian, Kathleen, 193–95 Mazzante, Kelly, 151, 204–5, 205 McCarthy, Joseph, 113 McCloskey, Julie, Joyce, and Jeanne, 116 McCormick, Jane, 165, 165 McCormick, Vance, 21 McCoy, Ernie, 128 McElwain, Carrie, 12, 19, 19 McElwain, Harriet, 9–10, 12, 12, 15, 77 McFarland, Horace J., 21 McIlhattan, Joanne Connor, 102 McRae, Margaret Erb, 82 Meek, Elizabeth Breckenridge, 19, 215 Meek, George, 15 Meiser, Patricia, 152 Miller, Blanche P., 26 Miller, Melanie, 165 Mitchell, Adelaide, 26 Moore, Connie, 205, 206, 207 Moore, Kathryn (Kay), 144, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169 Morett, Char, 156–57, 156 Morrill, Justin, 3 Mortenson, Sharon, 114 Mufasaa, Faheema, 203–4 Mullens, Lizabeth, 203 Nike, Nola, 76 Nita-Nee, Princess, 43 Oakes, Wendy, 165 Old Coaly, 4 Olsen, Gilma, 87 Oswald, John, 134, 141, 146, 164, 165, 166 Oswald, Rosenel, 164, 165 Otis, Elizabeth Walter, 40 Paterno, Joe, 152, 153 Paterno, Sue, 152–53 Pattee, Fred Lewis, 14 Pell, Eva, 183–84, 185 Pennypacker, Eliza, 189 Pennypacker, Samuel W., 22 Perry, Danielle, 208–10, 209 Perry, Ellen, 128, 129–30

219

Pierce, Edna Peterson, 101 Pike, Ruth, 88–89, 88 Pohland, Alma, 153 Pond, Millicent, 26–27 Portland, Rene, 152, 195, 204 Price, Thelma, 144, 145–46, 145 Pugh, Evan, 3–4, 5 Pytel, Jean L., 130–31 Rattray, Gillian, 153–54, 156, 157 Ray, Charlotte E., 43, 44, 46, 53, 54, 58, 67, 68, 76, 102 Reiter, Daisy, 40, 41 Remy, Patricia Anne, 143 Rendell, Ed, 184 Richards, Ellen H., 87 Ricker, Virginia Dale, 1, 9, 27, 28–29 Riley, Anne, 141–42 Riley, David R., 142 Riley, Ridge, 141–42 Ritenour, Joseph, 36 Robinson, F. A., 5–6 Robinson, Sarah, 5 Rogers, Audrey, 165 Rothrock, Joseph Trimble, 22 Runkle, Erwin, 3 Ryan, Sara, 201, 202, 203 Sachs, Carol, 188 Sandmeyer, Louise, 144, 164, 165 Saubel, Evelyn, 56, 58–59 Scannell, Bob, 151 Schoch, Jaqueline, 165 Scholl, Jan, 33 Schott, Carl, 61 Schraer, Harold, 130 Schraer, Rosemary Schmidt, 130, 131–32, 164, 165 Schuckers, David, 134 Schultz, Karen, 197 Seigworth, Ora L., 102 Siebert, “Beanie,” 64 Sime, Marjorie, 27 Simes, Frank, 125 Simmons, Lucretia Van Tuyl, 35, 36, 39, 47–48, 48, 77 Smith, Lula B., 26


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Somerville, Janis, 123 Spanier, Graham, 177, 190, 201 Spanier, Sandra, 190, 192, 193 Sparks, Edwin Earl, 25, 36, 45 Sparks, Katherine, 36 Spear, Margaret (Peg), 181–82 Sprague, Phyllis, 87 Starling, Marty, 94 Stauffer, Brenda Lee, 156 Steele-King, Carrie, 148 Stout, Lee, 113 Sutherland, Abby A., 111

index

Thomas, Joab, 176 Thomas, John, 38, 39 Thompson, Joan, 165 Thompson, Moses, 2 Tischler, Nancy, 165 Tschan, F. J. “Doc,” 141 Tschan, Margaret “Peg,” 141, 142

Waddell, Ashley, 212 Waite, Patricia, 197, xxx Walker, Eric, 106, 119, 123, 124, 126, 134, 135, 158 Waller, Calvin Hoffman, 56 Waugh, Louise, 22, 23 Westmoreland, William C., 124 Weston, Pearl O., 78–80, 79, 98, 100, 102, 116, 120 Wetzel, Amanda, 199–201, 200 White, Elizabeth, 28 White, James G., 61 Whitman, J. S., 3 Whitman, Minerva, 3 Willard, Joseph Moody, 47, 49 Willard, Mary, 47 Williams, C. O., 35 Willitts, Billie, 187 Wilson, Woodrow, 33 Wise, Helen, 132–34 Wise, Howard, 132 Wray, Eleanor, 61–62

Vedder, Nellie M., 58

Young, Andrea, 173

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