Educational Work of Women's Organizations, 1890-1960

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The Educational Work of Women’s Organizations, 1890–1960

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The Educational Work of Women’s Organizations, 1890–1960

Edited by Anne Meis Knupfer and Christine Woyshner

THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF WOMEN’S ORGANIZATIONS,

1890–1960 Copyright © Anne Meis Knupfer and Christine Woyshner, eds., 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-2306-0007-2 ISBN-10: 0-230-60007-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe First edition: January 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To Marcelinda Alesch Meis, grandmother, teacher, and musician To my parents, Leonard and Dorothy Woyshner


CONTENTS

Introduction Women, Volunteerism, and Education Christine Woyshner and Anne Meis Knupfer Part I

Advancing Higher Education and Professional Work for Women

Chapter 1

“Standing Up for High Standards”: The Southern Association of College Women Joan Marie Johnson

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

“Forwarding Our Great Purpose of Research in Education”: Women and Educational Research in Pi Lambda Theta, 1920–60 Laurie Moses Hines Cold War Women: Professional Guidance, National Defense, and the Society of Women Engineers, 1950–60 Laura Micheletti Puaca

Part II

Expanding Women’s Influence in Politics and Social Reform Institutions

Chapter 4

The National College Equal Suffrage League Jana Nidiffer

Chapter 5

Latter-Day Knights: College Women, Social Settlements, and Social Class in the Progressive-Era United States Emily Mieras

1

17

39

57

81

101

viii Chapter 6

C o n t e n ts

“The Worker Must Have Bread, but She Must Have Roses, Too”: The Education Programs of the Women’s Trade Union League, 1908–26 Liz Rohan

Part III

“Uplifting the Race”

Chapter 7

The Student YWCA: Intersections of Gender, Religion, and Race, 1915–25 Sharlene Voogd Cochrane

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

“I Think I’d Like to Have the Experience of Meeting a Negro”: New York City’s White Society Women Raise Funds for Black Colleges, 1944–60 Marybeth Gasman Linking Friendship and Service: Education and Philanthropy among the Black Elite, 1946–60 Kijua Sanders-McMurtry and Nia Woods Haydel

Part IV

Schooling Children

Chapter 10

“Politics Are Quite Perplexing”: Bessie Locke and the National Kindergarten Association Campaign, 1909–60 Barbara Beatty

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

“We Are from the City, and We Are Here to Educate You”: The Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs and Tallulah Falls School Andra Knecht The Suburban PTA and the Good Life, 1920–60 Claudia J. Keenan

121

143

163

179

195

215 235

Contributors

251

Index

255

4

Introduction

Women, Volunteer ism, and Education

Christine Woyshner and Anne Meis Knupfer

Although ubiquitous in America’s past, women’s organizations were virtually

invisible for a long time in the scholarship. In recent years, however, the history of women’s associations has become a more commonly researched topic, including explorations of study clubs, social service organizations, and political and social advocacy groups.1 While many studies examine women’s organized efforts on the social and political landscape, few do so in the arena of education in the United States.2 This book seeks to fill that gap in terms of the educational work of women’s organizations by drawing on this vast topic of study and placing it in the context of the history of education. In particular, we recognize the need to theorize women’s organized efforts. Such theorizing necessarily rests on gender as a central part of the analytical framework as the contributors explore how women created, led, and interacted within voluntary membership organizations.3 The study of gender in the history of education is not absent, for within the field, the history of women has been a major part of its growth.4 In general, the study of gender has resulted in three major lines of inquiry in the history of education. The first has to do with women’s roles as teachers and educational leaders, focusing on the professionalization of teaching.5 These works investigate how gender helped or hindered women’s entry into teaching and leadership positions in education. The second theme analyzes the ways females and

2

C h r i s t i n e W oy s h n e r a n d A n n e M e i s K n u p f e r

males have been educated in the past, from early learning to higher education. It explores differences in curricula, as well as experiments in and reasons for the coeducation of young men and women.6 A third area of scholarship that can be considered is the role of women in the professions in higher education and at universities and colleges.7 These works examine women in the academy and, for the most part, organize their analyses around access to the professions.8 The emphasis on professionalization, formal education, and the professions omits not only a wider view—one that looks more broadly at education and educative settings—but also a different perspective. This perspective views the layers of networks that make up civil society and investigates how organizations of women functioned in educational settings and on behalf of education. Thus, in looking at the intersection of two major social institutions in the United States—education and voluntary organizations—this book asks what functions women’s organizations performed in education; what were the consequences of their work; and how associational life affected women’s status. The study of the educational work of women’s organizations is not mutually exclusive of women in the education professions or higher education; instead, it operates on another axis, providing an additional dimension to the existing research, and hence reveals nuances of women’s lives and work in education. Therefore, in this collection, we address the ways that networks, or organizations of women, helped shape education, learning, and educational institutions and then, in turn, how women were shaped by their connections to others like and unlike them. Our book builds on the research of Linda Eisenmann who, in calling for a framework for interpreting women’s educational history in the United States, suggests four possibilities: institution building, networking, religion, and philanthropy.9 By networks, we mean the voluntary ties and organizations that united women around a particular cause or profession. Considered to be the heart of civil society, these networks might be local, regional, or national. Some of the contributions in this book explore local units of a larger network. Others consider federated organizations, those that were modeled on the U.S. government with local, state, and national levels of governance and participation. Other organizations in this collection did not span such distances. Nonetheless, through their many affiliations—and women did not limit their memberships to just one or two—women raised money, took part in institution building, learned a variety of skills, and helped themselves and others achieve goals.10 Of the twelve women’s organizations examined in this monograph, seven started during the Progressive era. This is not surprising, given the need for social reform, the increased numbers of female college graduates, and the rise of professional opportunities for women in social welfare. Overlapping with the women’s club movement (1890–1920), women’s volunteerism was the hallmark of the period, whether it was through women’s clubs, suffrage associations, federated associations, or participation in social settlements and child

W o m e n , V o l u n t e e r i s m , a n d E d u c at i o n

3

study groups.11 Central to these and other women’s organizations was education, broadly defined to include public schools and higher education institutions, as well as nonformal community associations. Scholars of women’s history have amply documented how associations such as women’s clubs educated themselves through study of subjects as various as literature, art, sociology, and politics. In turn, they used their newly gained knowledge to enact educational, social, and municipal reform.12 The Progressive era was a time of intense activism on behalf of diverse women who organized themselves to support their own interests and benefit others. They formed clubs and societies for self-education and to carry out charitable activities. But white, middle-class women were not the first to organize; they were merely following the lead of black women, who had created local-level organizations in the early nineteenth century in the interest of social and educational reform.13 The last several decades of the nineteenth century saw increased activity of women’s organizations, as they formed major national associations in order to carry out their work. As Theda Skocpol argues, women’s associations during this era became “nationally organized and civically assertive.”14 Among these major national organizations were the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA), and the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Other organizations with smaller memberships were founded during this era, such as the suffrage organizations and the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA), the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), and the Southern Association of College Women (SACW). Organized women knew they were in the midst of something unique, as the phenomenon was cataloged by Mary Ritter Beard, who was commissioned by the National Municipal League in 1914 to write about women’s organizations in civic reform.15 In conducting research for this project, we noticed that historians follow the timeline of the women’s club movement with most of the scholarship on women’s organizations ending with the 1920s, at the time women gained universal suffrage with the Nineteenth Amendment. The break point at 1920 makes sense, since the central finding is that women, prior to having the vote, used associational life to wield political power. Once women entered party politics, their activities in many and varied organizations is less explored by historians. In fact, some argue that women lost interest in gender-segregated activities by 1920.16 However, the strength of and membership in civic associations continued well into the twentieth century. Through the middle decades of the twentieth century, women continued to organize and link together, at the very least, toward educational ends. As this collection reveals, in the field of education, women’s networks had much to offer the professional and the volunteer, as well as the urbanite and the country woman, throughout the twentieth century, until the period of significant decline in voluntary memberships. We end

4


the book at 1960, when membership in civic associations dropped and face-toface meetings became much less common, as documented by political scientists and sociologists.17 For that reason, this book extends the periodization of women’s organizations to consider the kind of educational work that engaged networks of women. The collection of chapters reveals an active variety of organizations that sustained women professionally, socially, and politically through the mid-twentieth century. Much of the scholarship on women’s organizations at the turn of the twentieth century has emphasized their roles in a political arena, whether the arena is construed as public, private, or some combination thereof.18 Yet, what we understand of women’s political activism through voluntary organizations does not exclusively posit it as mimicking men’s organizations or even opposing their political activities. Indeed, some works have argued that women’s organizations during this period created a model of lobbying that was emulated by men’s groups, thereby framing women as innovators through their circumscribed roles. We maintain that women’s political work was not distinct and separate from their work in education. Indeed, women’s efforts on behalf of education and within educational institutions can be—and should be—construed as political.19 A look at women’s work and contributions from outside professional roles and within voluntary networks gives us a different perspective to their contributions. By taking the perspective from an organizational standpoint, we see women united across typical boundaries such as professional or volunteer, regional boundaries, and across race and class.20 As such, this collection integrates four perspectives on the educational work of women’s organizations. Each of the authors takes up one or more of these viewpoints. First, women’s associations are viewed in terms of their advocacy regarding the promotion of legislation, the establishment of educational institutions, and/or educational reform. These contributions consider how women’s organizations supported and promoted education and schooling among various populations. Second, some of the contributors examine the fund-raising efforts of women’s associations. In this regard, they explore women’s volunteer work on behalf of scholarships, endowments, and building campaigns, and/or academic or social programs. These chapters consider the role of women’s networks in fund-raising and philanthropy in education. Another viewpoint is that of the collaborations that occurred between and among various groups and/or institutions as a result of the efforts of women’s networks. For example, several of the chapters focus on kindergartens, suffrage leagues, college chapters of professional women, and settlement houses. These chapters look at how women’s networks spread ideas and skills to shape educational policy and enhance women’s professional lives. Often, women formed organizations to provide services for one another or to fulfill needs unmet in other arenas.21 Finally, contributions to this volume consider staffing and volunteering for community organizations, as in parent-teacher associations.


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Again, while not comprehensive, the contributions to this book as a group reveal the early sketchings of a landscape of connection and activism among women volunteers. Women’s activism through voluntary networks gave them a means of power and control that they did not typically have in educational institutions and society. For example, women engineers were on the margins of the profession, but their coming together in the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) gave them a means by which they could mentor newer professionals, share ideas and skills, and help one another advance in the profession. Consequently, a theory of mutual support through professional and/or voluntary linkages afforded twentieth-century women opportunities they would not have had otherwise.22 In examining any one or more of the above themes, the contributors consider how race, ethnicity, social class, religion, and gender influenced women’s groups and their educational endeavors, contributions, and outcomes. For organized women, working with others like and unlike themselves has proven fruitful in the history of schooling and education, while it has engendered potential areas of conflict among and between various groups. Of the twelve organizations represented in this book, three of them—the SACW, the College Settlement Association (CSA), and the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL)—drew their membership largely from female college students and graduates, especially from prestigious institutions such as Radcliffe, Wellesley, and Bryn Mawr colleges. In the case of the CSA and the CESL, female faculty played a large role in encouraging their students to become involved in social and political reform, respectively. On the other hand, the SACW was formed from the combined efforts of southern female students and graduates who had been educated at northern colleges and universities, then returned home to improve the standards of women’s colleges and secondary schools. Notably, none of these three organizations survived into the 1930s, in large part because they had achieved many, if not all, of their goals. The SACW had merged with the ACA in 1921 to form the American Association of University Women (AAUW). Suffrage was the final victory for many women’s associations, including the CESL. And, although women continued to volunteer at social settlements, by the late 1920s, women were increasingly hired as professionals there and in other social welfare agencies. Three other organizations during the Progressive era—the National Kindergarten Association (NKA), the Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA)—were distinctly “maternalist” in their approach to social reform. Here we refer to Molly LaddTaylor’s term to consider how women’s organizations drew political currency by circumscribing their activism around the social welfare of children, mothers, and other disenfranchised members of society.23 Most historians who have examined the maternalist practices of women’s organizations have focused on mother’s pensions, the establishment of juvenile courts, child labor laws, and

6


the like. However, most have not included women’s involvement in the passage of educational legislation, for example, compulsory attendance laws, and the establishment of kindergartens. Nor have scholars adequately considered how women’s advocacy of education—for children, youth, mothers, labor union members, immigrants, and the poor—was conjoined to social and political reforms.24 In this book, we broaden the very concept of social welfare, arguing that women reformers conceived of education as central to social welfare. This webbing of social issues was apparent in the extent to which women’s groups created networks with other women’s associations. For example, the SACW worked with the GFWC, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the NCJW, and the National Congress of Mothers (NCM). Likewise, the NKA collaborated with the GFWC and the National Congress of Women (NCW). Bessie Locke, founder of the NKA, also nurtured her professional affiliations with the NCW, the Association for Childhood Education, and the U.S. Bureau of Education. Women’s organizations networked through joint memberships as well.25 For example, Mary Ann Dimmick, charter member and president of the Montgomery, Alabama branch of the SACW, was president of the city federation of women’s clubs and the Alabama Federation Women’s Clubs, as well as active in the city’s YWCA chapter. The Links—a black women’s group formed in the late 1940s—drew momentum from their memberships in black sororities, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), and the NAACP. Through these alliances, they accomplished their primary goal of improving the educational opportunities of black children and youth. Some of the women’s organizations, by necessity or by choice, worked with organizations that were predominantly male or with prominent individual men. In some cases, women “courted” these connections for political influence and money. Often, influential men were invited to sit on the executive boards of women’s associations. Although this was not an unusual strategy for women’s groups during the early 1900s, it was also used during the 1940s and 1950s. For example, the women’s division of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF)—comprised of a wealthy group of women from New York City— worked in tandem with their influential husbands, philanthropists such as John D. Rockefeller, and black college presidents. Strategically, they invited women from other organizations to luncheons where presidents of historically black colleges and universities (HCBUs) spoke. In turn, the these women would talk to their husbands about donating to HBCUs. Mothers involved in the Bronxville PTA during the 1950s also worked through their husbands, many of whom were businessmen. By including men in their organized events, the women were able to draw them into the school, where they listened to prominent educators, learned about progressive education, and lent their financial support to various school projects. In other cases, the alliances between women’s and men’s organizations were uneasy ones. This was especially true of professional women’s groups. For


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example, the SWE, organized in 1950, promoted the education and professional advancement of female engineers. Toward these ends, the society offered scholarships, designed guidance materials for high school girls, conducted surveys, and published their own journal. Using the rhetoric of the cold war, the SWE was able to garner a limited degree of support from some male engineering deans and corporate executives. Yet, by the early 1960s, only two percent of engineers in the country were women. The example of Pi Lambda Theta, a national organization of women educators, points to how women inadvertently undermined their own professional status by relying on male, not female, researchers. Founded in the 1920s, the organization was initially comprised of female graduates of select universities, many of whom had advanced degrees. Although their original mission was to promote women as educational researchers, their goal shifted in the 1950s, along with their membership. As the organization became more inclusive in membership, its mission shifted to helping women become informed consumers of educational research. Here they invited mostly prominent male, not female, scholars to discuss their research. To be sure, the Pi Lambda Theta, like the SWE, was responding to a time period when the percentages of women graduate students were at their lowest level and when women were encouraged to eschew professional positions for motherhood. Nonetheless, these two professional women’s organizations did garner support from federal agencies, such as the U.S. Bureau of Home Economics and the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor. But this was not a new strategy. The NKA, too, had worked with the Kindergarten Bureau during the 1910s, whose focus on children paralleled the Children’s and Women’s divisions of the Department of Labor. Through these agencies, as well as the Bureau of Education, women made inroads as professionals, policymakers, and publishers of educational research.26 To be sure, the successes of these twelve organizations examined in this book were dependent upon their organizational structures, memberships, networking skills, and ability to adapt to changing social and political contexts. At least ten of the twelve women’s organizations were national or had links to national groups.27 In turn, many had regional, state, and local chapters, thereby encouraging grassroots activism at the local level, as well as a consolidated platform at the national level. The Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, for example, was comprised of many local women’s clubs and was affiliated with the GFWC. As such, the women focused on specific state needs, such as industrial schools, as well as the national agenda that included child labor laws and suffrage. Another strength of many of these organizations was that their membership included both professionals and volunteers. These groups relied upon the training of college educated women and students, as well as those who were self-educated through clubs and other organizations. This is not to suggest, however, that these women’s organizations were inclusive in their memberships. In fact,

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most members of the organizations represented in this book were middle- and upper-class native-born white women. There were exceptions, though, such as The Links, an all-black group; the YWCA, which became increasingly integrated; and the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), which was comprised of working-class union members. In the case of two southern women’s organizations—the SACW and the Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs—they not only did not have black members, they did not address the educational needs of blacks. One northern organization, the women’s division of the UNCF, did target black education, but did not include black women in its fund-raising efforts. The essays in the first section—Advancing Higher Education and Professional Work for Women—examine how women’s organizations promoted higher education and professional opportunities for women. Joan Marie Johnson’s essay focuses on members of the SACW, who sought to promote women’s higher education by raising the standards of education for southern women and developing better preparatory schools. Johnson argues that in pushing the boundaries of traditional female gender roles, members contributed to the development of a “New Woman” in the more conservative South. Laurie Moses Hines turns our attention to Pi Lambda Theta, which supported women researchers from 1920 to 1960. Specifically, the organization awarded research grants, as well as made women the subjects of their sponsored educational research. After 1950, however, this society shifted its focus from women as researchers to consumers of educational research. Laura Puaca examines another professional women’s organization: the Society of Women Engineers. Founded in 1950, the SWE was able to expand and improve engineering education for women by capitalizing on the country’s cold war anxieties about the need for “scientific brainpower.” By situating the SWE and its origins in the cold war era, this essay challenges the perception of the 1950s as a period of domestic complacency. Essays in the second section—Expanding Women’s Influence in Politics and Social Reform Institutions—discuss college women’s often-overlooked participation in political reform and social settlements, as well as female labor unionists’ educational programs for working-class women. Jana Nidiffer investigates the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL), whose membership included college students, alumnae, professors, and female presidents of women’s colleges. Nidiffer argues that the CESL represented one of the first efforts of an adult political movement to target college students specifically as members of a women’s group. Emily Mieras examines how the College Settlement Association (CSA) not only educated young college women to engage in volunteerism, but marketed women’s higher education to the public. Founded in 1890 by women collegians, professors, and alumnae, the CSA extended the education that young women received on the campuses of Smith, Goucher, Radcliffe, Bryn Mawr, and Wellesley colleges. Elizabeth Rohan discusses literacy programs developed by


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the WTUL from 1907 to 1922, which taught working-class immigrant women to speak, read, and write English. Rohan argues that these programs not only drew women into union activities, but helped to counter public prejudice about unions generally and women’s unions in particular. The essays in the third section—Uplifting the Race—focus on black women’s organizations, as well as interracial collaborations among white and black women. Sharlene Voogd Cochrane analyzes the contributions of the Student YWCA movement in the early twentieth century through the experiences of two young college women: Hazel Stockdale at Grinnell College, and Lucy Miller, a student at Talladega College, an historically black college in the South. She illustrates how the Student YWCA offered significant leadership preparation for young women through local, regional, and national conferences, many of which brought black and white students together. Marybeth Gasman turns her attention to a group of wealthy white women in New York City, who became the one of most stable fund-raising arms of the UNCF during the 1940s and 1950s. Despite, and perhaps because of, their elitism, the women transgressed racially prescribed etiquette, inviting black leaders into their homes and socializing with them. Not only did these wealthy women learn a great deal from these social occasions, they also raised significant mounts of money for the fund. In their essay, Kijua Sanders-McMurtry and Nia Woods Haydel highlight the educational sponsorship of The Links. Their essay investigates the cultural and social capital of the black elites who were Links members and how they used their status to ameliorate social problems in their communities. The last section of the book—Schooling Children—looks at those institutions most associated with education: schools for children. Barbara Beatty looks specifically at the leadership of the NKA. Founded by Bessie Locke in 1909, the NKA provides an example of a women’s organization that had a major impact on American education by establishing public school kindergartens. But the NKA’s progress did not come easily. Beatty argues that the relative conservatism of Locke may have helped the NKA overcome local fiscal resistance and, ironically, may have been one of the key forces behind the liberalism of public kindergartens as a public program. Andra Knecht’s essay focuses on how the Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs directed their energies in assisting rural communities in their state. Their work culminated in 1909 with the establishment of an independent school in Tallulah Falls, an impoverished village in the mountains of northern Georgia. This school taught industrial skills, promoted patriotism, and brought awareness of a wider, more modern world that the club women believed would be useful to the people of Tallulah Falls. In the last essay, Claudia Keenan discusses a PTA chapter established in the affluent suburban village of Bronxville, New York in 1921. Like most PTA chapters from the 1920s through the 1950s, the Bronxville organization intended to fulfill the national association’s mission to educate parents, teachers, and children; to

10


promote cooperation between families and schools; and to generally improve child welfare. The women leaders of the Bronxville PTA did so by establishing the school as the village’s centerpiece, thereby conferring on it a social stature matching that of the church, the country club, and the men’s and women’s clubs. In doing so, they laid the foundation for the community’s strong ongoing support of the school. Together, these chapters argue that a series of networks of women’s organizations—some of them interrelated, some with overlapping memberships— operated for most of the twentieth century to carry out expansive reform work in education and catalyzed women’s growth and development in education. As with any edited collection, gaps exist, and ours is no exception. As stated above, we see this work as a foundation that invites other scholars to uncover the myriad organizations that supported women’s work in education. We hope that others will explore more fully the regional diversity of this topic, as well as the cultural and racial diversity of women who took on such memberships. In particular, our own research has focused on black women’s rich associational life— Anne’s research centers on black women’s clubs and organizations in Chicago, and Christine has studied the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, or black PTA—and we believe there is much more to be mined on this topic in subsequent works. With our own investigations, as well as other works in this area, we continue to see large-scale and intentional organizing to improve schools and to coordinate this reform work through networks of women. We invite others to build on this foundation. By necessity, the essays in this book represent the activism of a limited set of women’s groups. To be sure, there were many women’s groups—far too numerous for this volume—that engaged in educational work. We hope that subsequent publications will continue to document the important contributions of immigrant, black, and American Indian community organizations; missionary societies and religious orders; working-class and poor women’s coalitions; and collegiate and professional associations. In conclusion, the twelve women’s organizations examined in this book, while often diverse in membership and goals, had one commonality: to improve the education of children, youth, and women. They accomplished this mission in multiple ways: by raising monies for schools and college funds, providing scholarships, volunteering at social settlements, conducting surveys of educational needs, publishing women’s research, forming professional societies, educating college women and alumnae about suffrage, teaching working-class women literacy and organizing skills, organizing events for interracial understanding, and lobbying for educational legislation. Furthermore, they connected these reforms to other social welfare issues. They realized that compulsory attendance laws were indelibly linked to truancy, delinquency, juvenile courts, and child labor. They understood that nurseries were essential


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for working mothers. In their advocacy of higher education for women, they intentionally created professional opportunities for women of their own and future generations. Linked arm in arm with other women, these organizations contributed significantly to the social welfare of many.

Notes 1. Karen Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980); Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Anne Meis Knupfer, Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood: African American Women’s Clubs in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New York: New York University Press, 1996); and Anne Ruggles Gere, Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U. S. Women’s Clubs, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). 2. Theodora Penny Martin, The Sound of Our Own Voices: Women’s Study Clubs, 1860–1910 (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987) and Jonathan Zimmerman, Distilling Democracy: Alcohol Education in America’s Public Schools, 1880–1925 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999). 3. We adapt this line of thinking from Anne Firor Scott, “Women’s Voluntary Associations: From Charity to Reform,” in Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy, and Power, ed. Kathleen D. McCarthy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 35–36, where she argues for “a conceptual framework that would help us see commonalities among various particular [women’s] associations.” 4. Rubén Donato and Marvin Lazerson, “New Directions in American Educational History: Problems and Prospects,” Educational Researcher 29, no. 8 (2000): 11. 5. Nancy Hoffman, Woman’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981); Richard Altenbaugh, ed., The Teacher’s Voice: A Social History of Teaching in Twentieth Century America (New York: Falmer Press, 1992); John Rury, Education and Women’s Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban America, 1870–1930 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); Jackie Blount, Destined to Rule the Schools: Women and the Superintendency, 1873–1995 (Albany: State University of New York, 1998); Kate Rousmaniere, City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in Historical Perspective (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997); and Kathleen Weiler, Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in Rural California, 1850–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 6. David B. Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Kim Tolley, The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective (New York: Routledge; London: Falmer, 2003); and Margaret A. Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, 1780–1840 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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7. Linda Eisenmann, Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945–1965 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Jana Nidiffer, Pioneering Deans of Women: More Than Wise and Pious Matrons (New York: Teachers College Press, 2000); Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); and Patricia Palmieri, In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 8. Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). See also Linda Eisenmann, “Reconsidering a Classic: Assessing the History of Women’s Higher Education a Dozen Years after Barbara Solomon,” Harvard Educational Review 67, no. 4 (1997): 689–717. 9. Linda Eisenmann, “Creating a Framework for Interpreting U.S. Women’s Educational History: Lessons from the Lexicography,” History of Education 30, no. 5 (2001): 453–70. While Eisenmann’s research investigates most fully the first framework, institution building, this volume is centered on the notion of networks in the history of women in education. 10. On the “considerable crossover in membership among organizations,” see Scott, Natural Allies, 38. 11. See, for one, Christine Woyshner, “Race, Gender, and the Early PTA: Civic Engagement and Public Education, 1897–1924,” Teachers College Record 105 (2005): 520–44. 12. In addition to those authors cited above, others have noted how club women largely supported educational initiatives in the early 1900s. See Michael W. Sedlak and Steven Schlossman, “The Public School and Social Services: Reassessing the Progressive Legacy,” Educational Theory 35 (Fall 1983): 371–83. 13. Scott, Natural Allies, 53; and Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women’s History: Theory and Practice (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1990). On black women’s organizations and social reform, see Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1984); and Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage Books, 1972). 14. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 328–29. 15. Mary Ritter Beard, Woman’s Work in the Municipalities (New York: D. Appleton, 1915). 16. Kathleen D. McCarthy, “Parallel Power Structures: Women and the Voluntary Sphere,” in Lady Bountiful Revisited, 6. 17. See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); and Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). 18. See Gere, Intimate Practices. See also Stephanie J. Shaw, who does not look at associations, but who troubles the public-private dichotomy in What a Woman Ought


19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

13

to Be and Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). See Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (1984): 620–47. Christine Woyshner examines the cross-racial alliances in the PTA in “‘Valuable and Legitimate Services’: Black and White Women’s Philanthropy through the PTA,” in The History of Women’s Philanthropy in Education, ed. Andrea Walton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 215–36. Karen Leroux, “‘Lady Teachers’ and the Genteel Roots of Teacher Organization in Gilded Age Cities,” History of Education Quarterly 46, no. 2 (2006): 164–91. In some instances, women’s organizations were used by men to control and manage them. William W. Cutler makes this argument in Parents and Schools: The 150Year Struggle for Control in American Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Also, Leroux reveals that “male supervisors used the guise of voluntary association to bring teachers to administrative meetings, often on Saturdays, without having to pay for their time,” in “‘Lady Teachers,’” 168. Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). See also Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Lynn Weiner’s essay, “International Trends: Maternalism as a Paradigm,” Journal of Women’s History (Fall 1993): 95–131. Virginia Shapiro, “The Gender Basis of American Social Policy, Political Science Quarterly 101 (Summer 1986): 221–38; Eileen Boris, “On the Importance of Naming: Gender, Race, and the Writing of Policy History,” Journal of Policy History 17 (2005): 72–91. However, Scott’s Natural Allies does include an appendix listing the educational accomplishments of women’s associations, which draws on Mary Ritter Beard’s book, Woman’s Work in the Municipalities. Elisabeth S. Clemens, “Securing Political Returns to Social Capital: Women’s Associations in the United States, 1880–1920s,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (Spring 1999): 613–38. The use of alliances and joint memberships was especially true for black women’s organizations. See Anne Meis Knupfer, The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women’s Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). For other work on women’s emerging professionalism during the early twentieth century, see Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Helen Silverberg, ed., Gender and American Social Science: The Formative Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). The various tiers of national federations were central to organizational success. See Theda Skocpol, Marshall Ganz, and Ziad Munson, “A Nation of Organizers: The Institutional Origins of Civic Volunteerism in the United States,” The American Political Science Review 94 (September 2000): 541; Kathleen D. McCarthy, “The Power of Women’s Networks,” Reviews in American History 21 (December 1993): 669.


4 Part I

Advancing Higher Education and Professional Work for Women


4

Chapter 1

“Standing Up for High Standards” The Souther n Association of College Women

Joan Marie Johnson

Although more than one thousand Southern students attended the best

Northern women’s colleges at the turn of the twentieth century, they were often frustrated with their lack of adequate preparation and felt insecure until they had established themselves academically. Virginian Orie Latham Hatcher, for one, believed her secondary schooling was inferior to that of her classmates at Vassar. She later claimed that “in practically every class which I entered, students from other sections [of the country] had whole tracts of information about the subject which I did not possess.” What made it worse was that “no one was surprised, because I was from the South.”1 Although Hatcher excelled at Vassar, earned a PhD and taught at Bryn Mawr, she did not forget what it was like to travel to the North as an inadequately prepared Southerner. She later returned home to Virginia, where she worked to improve educational opportunities for women. Historians have increased our knowledge of women’s roles in Progressive-era reform through studies of women’s clubs and other associations. However, there is another significant, if seldom acknowledged, factor in understanding the motivation and abilities of white Southern reformers: Southern women who had been educated at Northern colleges disproportionately led the movement for

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Joa n M a r i e Jo h n s o n

education reform in the South. This chapter explores the extraordinary efforts of college women like Orie Latham Hatcher, themselves transformed by their own experiences, to improve education for other women through the Southern Association of College Women (SACW), as well as through local college clubs and alumnae associations. At the turn of the century, there were very few colleges for women in the South that offered a classical curriculum and granted bachelor’s degrees. Instead, Southern women’s colleges typically had low entrance requirements, inadequate faculty, small endowments, limited libraries, and more students in their preparatory than in regular college departments. Furthermore, Southern educators, like John M. McBryde, Jr., of Sweet Briar College, Virginia, wanted women’s colleges to stress literature, music, and art, along with domestic science.2 Through these subjects, women would be taught to cultivate good taste, manners, and character; in short, they would be all the more womanly. Significantly, the interest in creating ladies first and scholars second invariably meant that the level of scholarship available at Southern schools was less rigorous than at their Northern counterparts, as these schools feared fostering “grinds.” Historian Amy McCandless has argued that in the twentieth century, parents saw schools as places to shelter their daughters before marriage, rather than as institutions designed to challenge them intellectually. Southern parents inordinately desired to continue to regulate the details of their daughters’ lives and so enrolled them in such schools. Southern schools, like Agnes Scott College, retained their social restrictions much longer than Northern women’s colleges. For example, Agnes Scott still had a rule of 10 PM lights out in 1913, which Vassar had abandoned in 1899.3 Given the lack of high-quality colleges for women in the South in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth century, nearly one thousand white Southern women traveled hundreds of miles to attend the nation’s most prestigious women’s colleges, including Wellesley, Smith, and Vassar. Driven to further their education by ambitious parents, economic necessity, or a fierce desire to better themselves, these women blossomed in an atmosphere of intellectual stimulation and women’s fellowship. Exposed to reform-minded professors who encouraged students to rethink gender roles, extracurricular leadership opportunities, and associations such as women’s clubs and settlement homes, many returned to the South where they helped send more Southern women to the North to experience the same benefits. Their sense of duty to other Southern women was a particular regional version of the social claim explicated by Jane Addams. Addams had argued that college graduates had been pulled by the “family claim” to return home and assume household duties. Yet they had been exposed to the needs of the larger community and so wanted to serve to fulfill the “social claim.” Turning down a position to teach at Wellesley, SACW cofounder Lilian Wyckoff Johnson had decided to return to Tennessee to full such a “social claim.” As she declared, “My heart was absolutely set on the

“Sta n d i n g U p f o r H i g h Sta n d a rd s”

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South.”4 College letters, autobiographies, and alumnae files provide insight into how other Southern women’s college education, like Johnson’s, informed the missionary zeal with which they approached education reform and the ways in which their education transformed their communities. Seeking the fellowship of other like-minded women of similar experiences, Northern-educated Southern women formed local alumnae association branches and intercollegiate clubs that promoted friendship and education reform. Quickly realizing that more Southern women could not attend their alma maters until secondary education improved, college-educated Southern women opened preparatory schools and led the effort to improve secondary schools in the South. Furthermore, aware that many families were reluctant or unable to send daughters so far away, they worked to standardize the curricula of Southern women’s colleges. In 1903, a group of these women met to organize themselves into the SACW, whose objectives were to unite college women to raise educational standards, and to make clear the difference between colleges and secondary schools in the South.5 Most importantly, the women worked through the SACW to provide scholarships, promote college education for women, and survey Southern colleges in order to promote higher standards. The organizational files of the SACW suggest just how enormous its impact was on education in the South. Significantly, the association’s white, middle-class members insisted that Southern women have access to a classical liberal arts education, even as educators in the South promoted vocational training, especially domestic science for women. Thus they helped “Southern Ladies” step off the pedestal and created opportunities for the “New Woman” of the twentieth-century South.

Northern Educated, Southern Still Traveling so far to the most rigorous coeducational and women’s colleges in the North required extraordinary support from students’ families, as well as from teachers at secondary schools. Students who made the difficult trip usually had parents or other relatives encouraging them, even if society questioned their choice. Orie Latham Hatcher’s parents and a wealthy sponsor urged her to attend Vassar in the early 1880s. According to legend, a family friend told William Hatcher that he would rather see his own daughter “in hell than send her to a Yankee college.” William reportedly replied, “Well, you see yours in Hell, mine’s going to Vassar.”6 Other students also credited fathers or mothers with supporting their education. Most Southern students at the later-named Seven Sisters colleges—Vassar, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard—prepared at a select group of schools including Science Hill in Shelbyville, Kentucky; Washington Seminary in Atlanta; and the Bryn Mawr School in

20


Baltimore. Others who were unable to find adequate preparation locally studied with a tutor or went to the North. In the latter case, they either attended the preparatory departments at Vassar, Mount Holyoke, or Wellesley in the 1870s and 1880s (before the schools closed those departments), or they enrolled in one of the growing number of feeder schools like the Miss Burnham School (later known as Capen School and Northampton School for Girls), located across the street from Smith College.7 While on their respective campuses, students sought out fellowship with other Southern students through their Southern clubs. Returning home they did the same, forming college clubs with other graduates who had had similar experiences. For example, Vassar alumnae Mary and Louisa Poppenheim founded the Intercollegiate Club of South Carolina, which often met at the Poppenheim home in Charleston. In addition to the Poppenheim sisters, club members included Helen Smith, Mary Vardrine McBee, and Mary F. Cathcart, Smith College alumnae; Mrs. John Murdock, Jr., Varina Brown, and Rosa Cooley, of Vassar; Dr. Mary Lean, a Bryn Mawr alumna; Sarah McLeod of Wellesley; and Lucile Finley and Mrs. Ernest Pringle, Jr., of Goucher College.8 The Poppenheim sisters remained close to Vassar throughout their lives. As former Student Association officers, Louisa and Mary visited Vassar to speak to current officers; Louisa even attended her fiftieth reunion. At home in Charleston, they hosted Vassar presidents James M. Taylor and Henry MacCracken. Additionally, they noted the accomplishments of Vassar graduates in the Keystone, their monthly magazine for Southern clubwomen.9 Other women formed specific college clubs as well. Mary Vardrine McBee, the founder of preparatory school Ashley Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, started and presided over the Smith College Club of Charleston. Similarly, Orie Latham Hatcher was president of the Vassar Club of Virginia and a member of the advisory council for Vassar Alumnae Quarterly.10 These women treasured their college days and continued to foster relationships with their colleges, and with other women who had shared in their experiences. However, Southern alumnae of Northern colleges sought more than fellowship with each other. They realized that if they wanted more Southern women to attend their alma maters they had to help them better prepare for entrance examinations and requirements. These women remembered the difficulty with which they had prepared for college and so were committed to expanding opportunities for other young Southern women. After graduation from Wellesley, North Carolina native Connie Guion taught at Sweet Briar College to earn enough money to pay for her younger sister to attend Wellesley. Moreover, she believed that her years teaching at Sweet Briar served a higher purpose: the education of Southern women. She had hoped that Sweet Briar would prepare them enough to go North to college.11 Jenny Nelson, a teacher who accompanied Wellesley’s first student, Anne Poe Harrison, from Virginia in 1875, decided to leave Wellesley after teaching French there for four years and return to the South to educate more women. She taught briefly in


21

Wytheville, Virginia before becoming headmistress of Chatham Hall, a preparatory school in Virginia, where she always kept of copy of the Wellesley catalog on her desk, hoping to inspire girls to head North.12 Like Nelson, many Northern-educated women opened schools throughout the South, where they stressed high academic standards. For example, Margaret Booth, a Mount Holyoke alumna, started her own preparatory school in Montgomery, Alabama, after putting an ad in the paper during World War I. She received over forty replies and decided to open a school to accommodate them all. Her obituary claimed that at one time she sent more of her graduates to eastern women’s colleges than any other Southern school.13 Teachers improved communities both through the benefits of the education they provided in their classrooms and through their community involvement. Remembering the difficult three days of entrance examinations she herself underwent at Smith College, Mary Vardrine McBee returned to Charleston, South Carolina to found Ashley Hall in 1909 as a secondary school for young women. She worked hard to earn accreditation for the school so that students would no longer have to take the dreaded entrance exams, and Ashley Hall sent its first graduate to Smith in 1912. She proudly told her Smith classmates that she established the first Examination Center of the College Board in South Carolina and was therefore able to send many of her graduates to college.14 McBee, who presided over the school for forty years, also found time to work with several education societies in addition to the Smith College Club. Moreover, through the Charleston Civic Club she lobbied the state legislature and helped found the Charleston Free Library. Orie Latham Hatcher gave up a promising career in academia at Bryn Mawr to return home to Virginia and improve educational opportunities there for Southern girls. After her graduation from Vassar in 1888, she taught for several years at Miss Belle Peers’s School, a secondary school in Louisville, and also at Richmond Female Institute (which became the Woman’s College of Richmond). She then received her PhD in English at the University of Chicago and became an associate professor of comparative and English literature at Bryn Mawr. Hatcher’s career changed direction in 1914 when she met with fellow Richmond activist Mary Cooke Branch Munford and others who sought to provide Southern women with “reliable information and sound counsel regarding education, occupational choices, and training.” The group organized the Virginia Bureau of Vocations for women, and Hatcher left Bryn Mawr to become its first president. She came to the work in part because of her earlier experience with the Virginia Association of Colleges and Schools for Girls, which she cofounded in 1906. This association surveyed women’s schools, evaluating their educational standards. Hatcher found that most schools prepared women for teaching and homemaking, and little else in terms of paid occupation. She wanted to serve Southern women by helping them prepare for employment.15

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The Founding of the SACW Despite the excellent preparation available at certain schools and the aid of reformers like Hatcher, most young women in the South had little access to adequate preparation. To address this problem, Celeste Parrish, Emilie Watts McVea, and Lilian Wyckoff Johnson founded the SACW at the University of Tennessee in 1903, with seventeen charter members. Celeste Parrish was a former professor at Randolph-Macon College, head of the department of pedagogy at Georgia State Normal School in Athens, and later the state supervisor of rural schools for northern Georgia. Parrish knew personally how important higher education was for Southern women. Suffering through grade school with teachers who barely knew more than she did, Parrish studied any book she could get her hands on, including grammar and astronomy texts. Orphaned as a child, Parrish described her guardian uncle as someone who believed “that girls had no use for education except a domestic one.” Two maiden aunts had demanded that she stop studying birds and plants, abandon her “tomboyish habits . . . and be a lady and learn embroidery.” Determined to obtain a formal education, Parrish studied at a local college for women while teaching and then at the University of Michigan and Cornell, where she finally earned a treasured PhB degree at the age of forty-two.16 Emilie McVea, born in Louisiana, attended Cornell and Harvard. She received her bachelor of arts degree from George Washington University and her master of arts at Columbia University. She became a member of the English faculty at the University of Tennessee before becoming dean of women at the University of Cincinnati, and also the second president of Sweet Briar College in Virginia. While in Cincinnati, she became president of the Cincinnati Women’s Club and was a pro-suffrage speaker and author on education and literature.17 Inspired by her older sisters who were the first Memphis students to attend Vassar, Lilian Johnson went to Wellesley and the University of Michigan. In 1903 she became an assistant history professor at the University of Tennessee, and later president of Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. She started teaching because her father wanted her to (just as she attended Wellesley for the same reason). He wanted to build a women’s college in Memphis and encouraged Lilian to teach at the Clara Conway Institute, to which her father had leased their old home. She turned down the opportunity to teach at Wellesley, instead teaching at Hope Night School in Tennessee. She later accepted an offer to teach at Vassar and earned a PhD at Cornell, this time returning to the North in preparation for founding a women’s college in Memphis. “My heart was absolutely set on the South,” she wrote later, “and I know I was much happier, in spite of all the isolation and hard work on the mountain, than I would have been teaching in a college.” While teaching at Memphis High School in 1906, she lobbied the state legislature to pass a bill for state normal schools for women, eventually establishing the West Tennessee Normal College. Johnson


23

later spent time in the mountains doing community work and was active in women’s clubs and woman suffrage. Johnson’s experience at Wellesley greatly influenced her life. She later wrote, “I think I did not realize until this past summer how very large an influence those years at Wellesley had had on my life.”18 Parrish, McVea, and Johnson all traveled to the North for their higher education, although Johnson was the only one to attend one of the Seven Sisters women’s colleges. While members of the SACW included Northern women who moved to the South and graduates of Southern institutions, many were Southerners that had attended Northern colleges. The SACW purposely contacted Southern alumnae of Vassar, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, and the University of Chicago, along with Goucher and Randolph-Macon, when it sought to enlarge its membership in 1906.19 By 1917, 384 of its 818 members had attended Northern colleges for their degrees, including 141 alumnae of the Seven Sisters colleges.20 Because there were so few college-educated women living in the South, members of the SACW debated whether they should lower standards for membership in order to allow more women to join. At the annual meeting in 1905, members spent a morning discussing standards and cooperation with women’s clubs composed of women without degrees. Lilian Johnson reminded the SACW that women’s clubs in Memphis had raised money for a college scholarship. Additionally, she argued, college women needed to work closely with these women; while they did not qualify for SACW membership, they nonetheless had many of the same goals for educational reform. Other members believed that only college women were uniquely qualified to work toward improving Southern women’s colleges. Furthermore, alumnae of interested colleges like Converse in South Carolina asked to be admitted, even though their academic standards were not high enough to meet the SACW requirements. Celeste Parrish warned against lowering standards to let in such members, and the SACW eventually decided to ask interested schools to apply first to the Southern Association of Preparatory Schools and Colleges, preventing them from joining the SACW until they met its requirements.21 As noted, the founders of the SACW had three objectives: “First, to unite college women in the South for the promotion of higher education of women; second, to raise the standard of education for women; third, to develop preparatory schools and to define the line of demarcation [between colleges and secondary schools] for women.” They believed that Southern women educated in the North or the South, and Northern women residing in the South, needed their own organization to meet the unique challenges of the South. Nationally, college women had already developed an organization, the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA), devoted to educational issues. SACW president Elizabeth Avery Colton declared that while Southern women appreciated the national ACA, they believed “an organization at closer range, devoting all its energies to Southern educational problems, would accomplish

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more in the South than the national organization with its wider field of interest and service.”22 Colton had strong Southern loyalty. She was born in 1872 in North Carolina to James Hooper Colton, a “Confederate soldier of Massachusetts ancestry,” and Eloise Avery, a North Carolinian. She attended Mount Holyoke for only two years because of the death of her father and then taught at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina. She eventually earned her bachelor of science and master’s degrees from Columbia Teachers College in 1903 and 1905, respectively, then spent the next three years teaching at Wellesley. However, Colton left her position there because she loved the South and wanted to aid Southern women’s education. She also felt that her influence would be greater at a smaller school. In 1908 she became head of the English department at Meredith College in Raleigh, where she stayed until she was incapacitated by cancer in 1921.23 Colton continually referred to the common belief among white Southerners that Southern educational opportunities had been limited because of the rural, agricultural, and (after the war) poor nature of the region, and the necessity (as they saw it) of building two separate systems: one for whites and a separate one for blacks. Because of the SACW’s regional identity, the 1905 biennial meeting, held jointly with the ACA in Atlanta, was extraordinarily important. It at once reinforced the uniqueness of the educational situation of Southern women while at the same time it included Southern women in the larger society of college women. After reports on membership, the education committee, and local branches, the convention turned its attention to Southern education. Lilian Wyckoff Johnson addressed the meeting with a speech, “The Relation of the College and the Community to the Public Schools.” In it, she complained that Southerners had never written their own educational history, allowing others to ignore their advancements. Johnson reminded her audience that before the Civil War, even though the North had a ten percent greater population than the South, it had one fewer college, with 205 in the North and 206 in the South. Furthermore, she reminded her audience that the South had been spending money on schools for both blacks and whites, and had established a public school system in a short time. In her estimation, the rest of the country did not give the South its proper due. Johnson declared that the educational system in the South seemed inadequate because it was an agricultural region and because it had the extra burden of educating undeveloped African Americans. Accordingly, she stressed the need for local communities to adapt their schools to local conditions and for the SACW to focus on “Southern facts and conditions.”24 But while Johnson defended the Southern educational system to Northerners, other SACW members, including Wellesley alumna and former Kentuckian Sophonisba Breckinridge, were eager to criticize Southern men for the lack of progress in women’s education in the region. Breckinridge had earned a PhD from the University of Chicago and had dedicated countless hours to a variety of reforms, especially issues of immigration and women


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workers. She was also head of the research department of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, which later became affiliated with the University of Chicago. Ever loyal to the South, despite her move to Chicago, she asserted that the ACA met in Atlanta not just to advertise college to young Southern women, but also to “plead with the [S]outhern people, and especially with [S]outhern men, at whose door the fault chiefly lies, to extend wider educational opportunities to their own daughters in the [S]outh itself.” Celeste Parrish, too, pointed out that a college girl in Georgia, if she chose to stay home at the University of Georgia, received no recognition for any work she was allowed to do, while she could travel to the North and graduate with a bachelor’s degree. Parrish’s speech followed remarks by the Georgia governor and the chancellor of the state university at Athens. Both had stressed Georgia’s commitment to women’s education, noting that the legislature had passed a charter for a degree-granting institution for women. Parrish reminded them that charter or not, at the present time Georgia girls had to leave the state to earn their college degrees.25 Members of the SACW understood that while women across the country struggled to obtain an education, women in the South were further limited by the cultural mores of the region. Mary Lynch Johnson, a graduate of Meredith College and English professor there (who later wrote a biography of Elizabeth Colton), claimed “the chivalry of the South took the perverted form of shielding its women from the rigors of a real college education, lest their health and feminine charm should suffer thereby.” As noted, many Southern women’s colleges were more concerned with protecting women’s “womanliness” than with challenging their intellect. Furthermore, Southern parents were overly concerned with monitoring their daughters’ behavior.26 The SACW recognized that there was a brain drain, that the South’s most talented women went North to college, and worse, sometimes remained there rather than returning home to uplift education in the South. Celeste Parrish worried particularly about the higher pay that Northern schools offered teachers because the South desperately needed its college alumnae to teach at home.27

Liberal Arts vs. Domestic Science The 1905 meeting also revealed the debate over the value of liberal arts education, a debate that would occupy the SACW for the next decade. Breckinridge tried to distance the SACW from the point of view of Sarah Platt Decker, president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, who was in favor of more practical education of women. Such an education emphasized domestic science, child psychology, and other courses useful to a woman’s vocation to motherhood and housewifery.28 A year earlier, Decker had argued in a speech that college training for girls was not practical enough. Breckinridge countered by defending

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the ACA and promotion of liberal arts education for women. Miss Abby Leach, a professor of Greek at Vassar, also spoke at that meeting on the “True Test of the Worth of Educating.” Leach added her support to Breckinridge’s views, mocking colleges for their “stampede toward the practical.”29 Both the SACW and the ACA debated the worth of liberal versus practical education. In 1905, the ACA Committee on Collegiate Administration discussed whether women’s college curriculums should include a course in home economics. The committee unanimously decided that home economics was a professional course that prepared women for a specific practical application (housekeeping) and was therefore inappropriate for a liberal arts education. The committee declared “our future homemakers should have the broadest liberal training on which to base their technical knowledge.” They resolved “that home economics as such has no place in a college course for women.”30 Within the SACW, Celeste Parrish was one of the strongest voices for practical education. Despite the lengths to which Parrish herself had gone to obtain a college education and her deep appreciation for intellectually rigorous studies, she insisted that education had to fit women for their lives as mothers and as women. While she appreciated the SACW’s insistence on improving college standards in the South, she wanted to “industrialize” schools.31 “We hope to do something for girls in schools and colleges which will touch more vitally all questions of practical living,” she wrote in 1904.32 Although domestic science reinscribed women’s role in the home, such courses would add legitimacy to that role by professionalizing it. Parrish and Orie Latham Hatcher were also particularly concerned with ensuring that Southern women had access to both liberal arts education and vocational training because they wanted to prepare women for careers, such as teaching, so that women could be financially independent.33 Parrish and Hatcher recognized that some women would not marry or would be widowed, and therefore would need to be able to teach or take up other wage work.34 Furthermore, Parrish and others within the SACW also debated how much attention the organization should devote to improving college education versus striving to reform education at all levels, starting with grade schools. The 1909 meeting echoed the debate in 1905, with Atlanta clubwoman Marian Woodward Ottley, who was not a college graduate, asking the SACW to work on all levels on women’s education rather than focusing solely on college. The meeting report summarized her argument as follows: “In our struggle for the highest, she fears we have not attained the most suitable. By woman’s curriculum was not meant the weakening of the course of study, but adapting it to the life of a woman.”35 By 1913, SACW presidents Mary Leal Harkness and Elizabeth Avery Colton helped shift the organization’s attention to protecting liberal arts education. That year Harkness, a native of Iowa who had taught Latin at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans for over thirty years, delivered an impassioned defense of liberal education to the SACW. She especially stressed the


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need to stem the tide of practical education then in vogue throughout the nation, but particularly in the South. In “The College Course for Women,” Harkness argued that any plan to reduce the intellectual rigor of women’s college education was not only disadvantageous for women but for society in general. Of those schools that claimed to prepare students for life, she sarcastically noted that “‘life,’ so it would appear, consists primarily in raising corn and making bread.” Harkness asserted that while the poor (rural or urban) need practical skills, they also needed the benefit of books and ideas to teach “clear reasoning and the power of lucid expression.” Extremely critical of those who wanted to educate women to be mothers and wives rather than humans, Harkness disagreed with parents whose goal for their daughters was marriage and who wanted them to earn a living only if necessary. She claimed, “There is no thought of the happiness which lies in the acquisition of knowledge itself; still less of the happiness and usefulness of the woman who fits herself and pursues some form of professional life, not because she is forced into it through failure to marry or necessity of self-support, but because she sees in it the truest means of serving mankind and developing her own character.” Harkness was particularly incensed by those who wanted to replace Latin with domestic science, which she ridiculed as a “course in making fudge.” “Fudge is good,” she admitted, but limiting in its application to life. Harkness believed that whether a woman worked within the home or outside the home, “she becomes fitted for life only in proportion as she develops her mind and soul.” She therefore concluded that it was better if a woman occasionally had a mishap while cooking but was able to feed her children’s intellectual growth and her husband’s need for an intelligent companion.36 The debate over what type of education was appropriate for women fueled the SACW’s efforts, led by Elizabeth Avery Colton, to set higher standards for Southern colleges. Like Harkness, Colton believed that liberal arts colleges were designed for “general intellectual training and moral enlightenment.” Therefore, students who wanted vocational training ought to choose a vocational school, not a college. She pushed for secondary, professional, and vocational schools to provide vocational training or fine arts, but for the standard colleges in the South to resist such offerings.37 Colton invited other speakers to the SACW annual meeting who supported liberal arts education for women as a defense against the growing trend toward industrial education. They included Edward Graham, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, University of North Carolina, and Eleanor Lord, dean of Goucher College, who pointed out that men and women “need trained minds and trained hearts more than they need trained hands.”38 Although Graham stressed housewifery as the ultimate vocation for college women, and Lord pointed out that many female graduates were choosing professional careers, they both agreed on the benefits of a liberal arts education for all women. Other professionals agreed. In 1914, Dr. Marian P. Whitney, a professor at Vassar, argued that intellectual training was appropriate

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for all of life’s situations. The following year Dr. William Webb, president of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, added his support for colleges that continued to offer Latin, English, mathematics, languages, and science without unlimited electives. “The standard colleges,” he claimed, “are striving, and not unsuccessfully, to give to the women of the land that education which finds the highest good in the perfection of the spiritual nature.”39 By 1922, Southern college women still had to defend women’s college curriculums. Emilie McVea stated in 1922 that Southern women’s colleges didn’t think “with reference to professional requirements. . . . In a day when utility has too often been the test of a college course, the devotion to culture as such is commendable.”40 Women in the SACW stressed their support for liberal arts education, insisting that Southern schools not offer watered-down courses or emphasize music or art too much. Instead Latin, science, and math, not “fudge making,” should remain the focus of the college curriculum. Southern women who attended Northern colleges believed that women were as capable of higher education as men, and they wanted women to be broadened by a liberal education, which would make them better mothers and professionals. They themselves had not attended college to take classes in home economics, although they did want to remain womanly. To be sure, most desired to improve their character, many wanting to become more conversant in literature and a few wanting to learn skills for teaching or other employment. In the process, they learned to think critically and independently. Members of the SACW also defended college women against charges that intellectual pursuits caused them to lose their femininity. Southern women hosting the ACA meeting in 1905 wanted to display a group of college graduates who were womanly, to prove, as Breckinridge put it, “that the college women are no longer freaks in appearance, manner, or point of view.” Instead, she described them as charming, gracious, well-dressed, attractive, and highbred. Quoting several male educators, Colton, too, made the point that rigorous intellectual training did not threaten women’s femininity. As she concluded: “And all of our champions of liberal education for women are at least implying that a well-trained mind is not necessarily incompatible with charm in a woman.”41

Setting Standards for Colleges The SACW’s most important function was investigating the conditions and standards of schools throughout the South, rating them on their admissions requirements, physical plants, and faculty, among other categories, and then classifying them. Such standardization meant that the SACW only considered a small number of schools as colleges, while they labeled the many other schools more accurately as finishing or secondary schools.42


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Elizabeth Colton led the drive to research and report on school standards. Even though she had received an AB from Statesville Female College, North Carolina, she was still required to prepare an additional year before entering Mount Holyoke in 1891. This experience had spurred her to work toward standardizing women’s schools in the South. She knew how hard it had been to get to college herself, and she saw “young women who went to standard educational institutions in other parts of the country ‘decorated with the highest degrees’ (according to the advertisement of one of the so-called Southern colleges for women), only to find that their degrees had been conferred by schools which were colleges in nothing except in name and that they themselves were not prepared even to enter a real college.” Colton was not shy about admitting her own educational background. She wrote, “In fact, I was myself a victim of one of these institutions. . . . Naturally, after graduation from this school, I had to spend a year in preparing for the freshman class of an eastern college.”43 Colton realized that not only were Southern women unprepared for Northern colleges; Southern women’s schools were stigmatized (even if rightly so) as inadequate, which reflected badly on Southern women. Colton began her efforts immediately upon returning to the South to teach. In her second year teaching at Meredith College, she worked to increase entrance requirements from eleven and a half units to fourteen units. She then set her sights on the rest of the women’s colleges in the state, surveying North Carolina women’s colleges from 1909–1910. As she reported, “The study revealed that students at only one institution (out of fifteen) completed by the end of the sophomore year as many as thirteen of the fourteen Carnegie standard units of subject matter required for entrance to the freshman class at Vassar, Wellesley, and Mount Holyoke.” Spurred by the North Carolina survey, the SACW appointed Colton chair of the new Committee on Standards of Colleges. In her 1912 investigation of Southern women’s colleges, she found that only Agnes Scott, Goucher, Randolph-Macon, and Sophie Newcomb belonged to the Association of Colleges of the Southern States, primarily because they were able to separate college from preparatory students.44 Colton blamed the poor preparation of Southern students for their poor performance in college. She asserted that many Southern schools had too many music students, whose presence detracted from the academic character of the school. Colton instead encouraged colleges to upgrade their standards.45 At the same time, she and her SACW colleagues were painfully aware of the tendency of many Southern schools to depend upon the extra fees charged for music and art classes, thereby encouraging the learning of ornamental skills, not academic subjects. Colton wanted those schools that were not legitimate colleges to change their names to secondary schools and offer diplomas, not degrees. Agreeing with Colton, Celeste Parrish was especially critical of students who had no talent and learned little of music or art fundamentals, but instead pleased only themselves and their parents with their studies. Parrish argued,

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“We have thought very little of making possible for them the self-realization which is their birthright, and much of producing external grace and charm of fitting them to entertain and amuse so-called society.”46 Four years later, Colton published an even more far-reaching report that investigated 124 institutions and classified them into six categories, based on the size of their endowments, their library holdings, and the number of special, preparatory, and college students. The report was especially damning because it was based on information in the catalogs and other materials printed by the colleges themselves. The lowest category, “imitation and nominal colleges,” was the largest, with eighty-four institutions, while only seven made the top classification as standard colleges (Agnes Scott, Converse, Florida State College for Women, Goucher, Sophie Newcomb, Randolph-Macon, and Westhampton).47 Interestingly, even Colton’s own Meredith College did not make the grade but was instead classed in the second “approximate colleges” category. Colton’s comments throughout her reports were harsh. She observed that one school stated its “requirements for graduation are similar to those of Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Smith, and Vassar,” even though its critics noted that it offered few college credits and was not even an accredited high school. Colton even found one college that claimed to offer a full college course with only three faculty, while a different school had 287 preparatory students but only three college students.48 Because of her harsh criticisms, Colton received numerous protests from the schools she ranked so low, including threats of libel suits.49 This was because she made sure her reports were widely disseminated, sending the first one to the deans of Northern colleges for women, the United States Commission of Education, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Southern States, and the General Education Board. In truth, she tried to shame institutions into changing.50 One legend even claimed that a school principal “threatened to shoot Colton, but when he thrust his hand into his pocket, ‘Colton looked calmly at him; he dropped his eyes and retired before her steady, honest gaze. Shortly afterward he closed his so-called college.’”51 Along with the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Southern States, the SACW drafted legislation that they presented to lawmakers in each Southern state, requiring that schools meet certain minimum standards to receive a state charter. Those requirements included one hundred thousand dollars in property, a one hundred thousand dollar endowment, a minimum of six faculty members who taught college courses only, and degrees granted only to those students who completed a four-year high school course and four years of college work. The bill did not pass easily, and when it did, legislators watered down even these minimal requirements.52


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The SACW and Other Social Reform Although the effort to create educational standards was its most known and important work, the SACW also formed local branches and committees that worked on compulsory education, scholarships, and programs to stimulate interest in colleges. College clubs and college days were used to interest Southern young women in college education. For example, the Central Kentucky Club hosted a college day that featured a talk by the vice principal of Science Hill Preparatory School, as well as lantern slides of Wellesley College. The Baton Rouge branch held a college day for high school girls, working with the dean at Louisiana State University to build a dormitory for women there. The Montgomery, Alabama, branch helped send ninety-eight girls to college with scholarships; in 1907 and 1908, the Atlanta branch wrote a column for the Atlanta Constitution on education.53 May Lansfield Keller, a Baltimore native who studied at Goucher College and was SACW president from 1910 to 1914, recalled that the SACW had a standing committee on college days for local high schools. “Talks were given on ‘Why a Girl Should Go to College,’ on the standings of various colleges, [and] entrance requirements,” she remembered. “The girls were instructed in the distinction between standard and imitation colleges, and were urged to select the best whenever possible.”54 Women in New Orleans, too, held a college day not only for high school students but also for seventh and eighth graders, to interest them in attending college.55 South Carolinian Mary Poppenheim likewise promoted scholarships through the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which had funds available for Southern women to attend Vassar (due to a twelve hundred dollar gift from Poppenheim to promote her alma mater) or one of more than fifty other colleges.56 The activities of these branches were also notable for their social welfare reform, then common to most women’s clubs. The Montgomery SACW branch, for example, collaborated with the Montgomery Federation of Women’s Clubs on various social reforms. In Birmingham, branch members invited President MacCracken of Vassar to speak to high school students; they also established a library for the local high school, organized a committee on health, worked to eliminate objectionable movies, and aided a mother’s club in the mill district. The Atlanta branch held programs on art, literature, and women in modern life, as well as assisted in hiring a female probation officer for the juvenile court. The Columbus, Mississippi, branch hosted Anna Howard Shaw, former president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, for a lecture on woman suffrage at Mississippi Industrial Institute and College.57 At the regional level, the SACW devoted itself to reform as well, including campaigns for compulsory school attendance laws, medical examinations for schoolchildren, and other child welfare reforms. For example, a talk on child

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labor at the SACW meeting in Nashville garnered attention in the local newspapers. A child labor law passed by Georgia in 1906 was in part due to the work of Emma Garrett Boyd, a Vassar graduate from Atlanta, who worked on the issue through the SACW, the Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the ACA.58 The SACW also participated in a special committee made up of representatives of the ACA, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the National Congress of Mothers, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Council of Jewish Women within the National Education Association dedicated to educational reform goals that included compulsory education and child labor reform, improved training and pay for teachers, and industrial education.59 The SACW recognized the unique role that college-educated women could play in social reform in the South, a theme that dominated the 1909 and 1910 annual meetings. At the 1910 meeting, Annie May Dimmick of Montgomery, Alabama, argued that conditions in the South compelled college women to community service. Indeed, she proposed that college women were particularly able to “investigate conditions, compile facts, and present the results in such a concrete way as to lead to action.” Dimmick exemplified such a college-educated woman. She was a Wellesley graduate who taught at Montgomery Girls High School in Alabama to 1911. Additionally, she was a charter member and president of the Montgomery branch of the SACW, president of both the city and the Alabama State Federation of Women’s Clubs, active in the YWCA and her Episcopal church, a trustee of the Alabama College for Women, and a director of the local Carnegie Library.60 “Surely no section of the country gives more a call of our services than our own beloved [S]outh,” she said, “where we combine our old traditions of learning and refinement with an actual pioneer condition—a service that the organization by its mere existence is the upholding of an ideal of genuineness in education.” Dimmick’s colleague, Emma Garrett Boyd, likewise contended that college women had to use their talents to serve their community. Boyd had worked through the SACW and other organizations to address child labor, compulsory education, and other legislative reforms centered on children and educational issues. Addressing the SACW in 1910, she reminded her colleagues, “Those of us who have been given a college education consider it a trust and an impetus for serving those less fortunate. I hope that you may carry from this meeting some inspiration for service.”61 Despite the SACW’s emphasis on Southern identity, its meetings featured speakers on education from both the South and the North, thereby promoting national unity. In 1921, the SACW was absorbed into the ACA, with the new organization changing its name to the American Association of University Women (AAUW). The ACA and the SACW worked well together but had been driven to merge when the International Federation of University Women decided that only one national organization in each country could join. Although the two associations discussed cooperation for several years before


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finally merging, Mary Leal Harkness of the SACW wanted to ensure that Southern college women would continue to work on the “peculiar educational situation” in the South. Because Southerners had such a deep but undiscriminating admiration for persons with educational degrees, she believed, they did not realize just how severely inadequate education was in the South, a problem women in the ACA did not encounter.62 Another potential problem delaying unification was that not all members of the SACW had graduated from colleges recognized by the ACA. The ACA decided to allow approximately one hundred and fifty out of eight hundred SACW members into the ACA based solely on their SACW membership (the rest were already eligible according to ACA standards). The new organization immediately placed former SACW members on AAUW standing committees to welcome the Southern group and its members. Aware of the potential for tension, Breckinridge assured the readers of her column in a Kentucky newspaper that the Northern women showed no condescension to Southern women. College women, especially those educated in the North, were leaders in all areas of social reform in the South. However, their most important contribution was their insistence that women’s colleges offer a rigorous liberal arts education. The high standards they demanded showed that they took Southern women and their intellectual abilities seriously. Attending college in the North had changed Southern women’s lives, and they were adamant that other women have the same opportunity. Fighting the trend of Southern schools to offer women ornamental, insufficient, and industrial education, they pushed to retain the standards of a classical education, without threatening the “womanliness” so prized in the South. As SACW officer May Keller recalled, “We did nothing spectacular, it was hard often unpleasant work this standing up for high standards against local prejudice and even pressure from unexpected places, but there was in the heart of every officer and every committee member of the SACW the determination to improve the secondary schools and to further in every way possible the higher education of women in the South.”63

Notes 1. Orie Latham Hatcher, quoted in Belinda Bundy Friedman, “Orie Latham Hatcher and the Southern Woman’s Educational Alliance” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1981), 45. 2. John M. McBryde, Jr., “Womanly Education for Woman,” The Sewanee Review 15 (October 1907): 467–84. 3. Amy Thompson McCandless, The Past in the Present: Women’s Higher Education in the Twentieth-Century American South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 12; Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 145, 171–75. 4. Alanna J. Mozzer, “Lilian W. Johnson—Wellesley Class of 1885,” Graduate Woman, the Magazine of the AAUW (November/December 1979): 30–31. 5. “Southern Association of College Women,” Chautauquan 59 (June 1910): 96.

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6. Friedman, “Orie Latham Hatcher,” 44. Mary and Louisa Poppenheim were later described as having “shocked Charleston in the 1880s by going up North to Vassar,” Life Magazine (April 14, 1947): 68–72. 7. Vassar, which opened in 1865, closed its preparatory department in 1888; Wellesley opened its doors in 1875 and closed the preparatory department during the 1879/80 school year; and Mount Holyoke received a charter for both seminary and college in 1888 and dropped the seminary curriculum in 1893. Mabel Louise Robinson, “The Curriculum of the Woman’s College,” U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education Bulletin 1918, no. 6 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), 15, 22, 51. At least ten Southern students attended Miss Burnham School before entering Smith College. See College Registers, College Archives, Smith College [hereafter SC], Northampton, MA. 8. Clipping, Poppenheim Papers, Women’s History and Research Center Library and Archives, General Federation of Women’s Clubs [hereafter GFWC], Washington, DC, n.d. 9. Keystone, November 1901, 3, and April 1905, 12; Margaret Armstrong to Louisa Poppenheim, September 25, 1911, and Isabel Tillinghart to Louisa Poppenheim, October 6, 1916, Poppenheim Papers, Special Collections, Perkins Library [hereafter PP], Duke University, Durham, NC. 10. Mary Vardrine McBee, Alumnae Biographical File, College Archives, SC and Class of 1888, Green Binder, Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries [hereafter VC], Poughkeepsie, NY. 11. Connie Guion, Alumnae Biographical File, Wellesley College Archives [hereafter WCA], Margaret Clapp Library, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA. 12. Edna V. Moffett, “Wellesley North and South,” Wellesley Magazine (April 1948). 13. Alumnae Biographical Files, Archives and Special Collections, Mount Holyoke College [hereafter MH], South Hadley, MA. 14. Clippings, Class of 1906 Individuals, Mary McBee, box 1689, SC; Ileana Strauch, Ashley Hall (Charleston: Arcadia, 2003), 7, 13. For more on college women and social reform, see Joan Marie Johnson, Southern Women at Northern Colleges, 1880–1915, forthcoming. 15. As the scope of the Virginia Bureau grew, it became known as the Southern Woman’s Educational Alliance and then the Alliance for Guidance of Rural Youth. The Alliance helped open the Medical College of Virginia to women, published many pamphlets and the book Occupations for Women, and was a clearinghouse through which schools and organizations worked with Hatcher to provide information to students and help them obtain the necessary funding for their education. In the mid-1920s, the Alliance shifted its focus to training educational and occupational guidance counselors for rural youth, including both boys and girls. Sarah McCulloh Lemmon, “Orie Latham Hatcher,” Notable American Women, 1607–1959: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1971), 2:152–53 [hereafter referred to as NAW]; “Scope and Content Note,” Alliance for the Guidance of Rural Youth Papers, Special Collections, Duke University [hereafter DU]. 16. Celeste Parrish, “My Experience in Self-Culture,” pamphlet, 1925, Special Collections, University of Georgia [hereafter UG], Athens, GA; Charles E. Strickland, “Celestia Parrish,” NAW, 3:18–20.


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17. John William Leonard, ed., Woman’s Who’s Who of America (New York: American Commonwealth Company, 1914–15). 18. Mozzer, “Lilian W. Johnson—Wellesley Class of 1885,” 31. 19. Southern Association of College Women [hereafter SACW], Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, 1906 (n.p.), 12, American Association of University Archives, Washington, DC, microfilm, reel I:6 [hereafter AAUW]. 20. “List of Branches with Date of Organization,” and “Calendar of Meetings,” typescripts, AAUW archives, reel I:4. The schools of the seventeen charter members were: Cornell, George Washington, Radcliffe, Randolph-Macon, Smith, University of Michigan, University of Tennessee, Vassar, Wellesley, and Wesleyan. Emily Dutton, “History of the Southern Association of College Women,” typescript, AAUW archives, reel I:4. 21. SACW, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, 1905, Atlanta, GA, AAUW archives, reel I:6. 22. Ibid. 23. Emily Helen Dutton, “Elizabeth Avery Colton,” 1930, typescript, folder, “Past Presidents . . . Biographies,” AAUW archives. 24. “Collegiate Alumnae Name New Officers,” November 23, 1905, and New York Evening Sun, December 17, 1905, AAUW archives, reel I:12. 25. Lexington Herald, December 17, 1905, AAUW archives, reel I:12. 26. Mary Lynch Johnson, Elizabeth Avery Colton: An Educational Pioneer in the South (South Atlantic Region of the American Association of University Women, n.d.), 7; McCandless, The Past in the Present. 27. New York Evening Sun, April 17, 1905, AAUW archives, reel I:12. 28. “The Collegiate Alumnae,” Lexington Herald, December 17, 1905, AAUW archives, reel I:12. 29. New York Evening Sun, December 17, 1905, AAUW archives. 30. Marion Talbot and Lois Kimball Mathews Rosenberry, The History of the American Association of University Women (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 198. 31. Celeste Parrish, “Shall the Higher Education of Women Be the Same as That of Men?” Educational Review 22 (November 1901): 383–96; quotation from Parrish, “The Purpose and Policy of the Southern Association of College Women,” SACW, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, 1904 (Cincinnati: University Press, 1904), 4, AAUW archives, reel I:6. See also Edith Rickert, “Where the College Has Failed with Girls,” Ladies Home Journal 29 (March 1912): 15–16. 32. SACW, Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Meeting, 1909, 12, AAUW archives, reel I:6. 33. Ibid. 34. For examples of this kind of article, see “The Education of Women,” Harpers New Monthly Magazine 67 (July 1883): 292–96. 35. SACW, Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Meeting, 1909, p. 12, AAUW archives, reel I:6. At this same meeting, Parrish said that the SACW needed to focus on all levels of education, that they needed industrial education, and that “schools for girls should shape for wifehood and motherhood, and college women should address themselves to home problems.” SACW, Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Meeting, 1909, pp. 12–13, AAUW archives, reel I:6.

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36. Mary Leal Harkness, “The College Course for Women,” SACW, Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting (Raleigh, NC: Commercial Printing Co., 1913), 25–39, AAUW archives, reel I:6. 37. Elizabeth Avery Colton, The Various Types of Southern Colleges for Women, Bulletin 2 of 1916 Publications of the Southern Association of College Women (Raleigh, NC: Edwards and Broughton, 1916). 38. SACW, Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting—Part I, Papers and Addresses (Richmond, 1913), 10–37, AAUW archives, reel I:6. 39. William A. Webb, “The Provision Made by Southern Standard Colleges for the Education of Women,” SACW, Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting, 1915 (n.p.), 25–31, quotation, 31; Marian P. Whitney, “The Separate College for Women,” SACW, Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting, 1914 (n.p.), 17–18, AAUW archives, reel I:6. 40. McCandless, The Past in the Present, 59–60. 41. Elizabeth Avery Colton, “The Changing Emphasis in the Education of Women in the South,” SACW, Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting, 1916 (n.p.), 14–15, AAUW archives, reel I:6. 42. Talbot and Rosenberry, The History of the American Association of University Women, chap. 5; “Southern Association of College Women,” Chautauquan 59 (June 1910): 96–98. 43. Emily Dutton, “Elizabeth Avery Colton,” typescript, 1930, AAUW archives, folder, “Past Presidents . . . Biographies.” 44. Dorothy D. DeMoss, “A ‘Fearless Stand’: The Southern Association of College Women, 1903–1921,” Southern Studies 26 (Winter 1987): 249–60. 45. Elizabeth Avery Colton, “Standards of Southern Colleges for Women,” School Review 20, no. 7 (September 1912): 458–75. 46. Parrish, “The Education of Women in the South,” 52, quoted in Rebecca Montgomery, “Southern Gender Reform and the Role of Women’s Education: Celeste Parrish and the Critique of ‘Hedonistic Ethics,’” paper presented at the History of Education Society, 1998, copy in my possession. 47. DeMoss, “A ‘Fearless Stand,’” 256–57. 48. Quoted in Johnson, Elizabeth Avery Colton, 11–12, see Colton, Various Types, 21. 49. Mary Black to Emily Dutton, July 28, 1928, SACW files, AAUW archives. 50. DeMoss, “A ‘Fearless Stand,’” 249–60, esp. 254. 51. Quoted in Karen L. Graves, “Elizabeth Avery Colton,” American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), vol. 5, from Ruth W. Tryon, comp., Names Remembered Through AAUW Fellowships (1958), 22. 52. Johnson, Elizabeth Avery Colton, 8; Talbot and Rosenberry, History of the AAUW, 54–55. 53. Talbot and Rosenberry, History of the AAUW, 50. 54. May Lansfield Keller was born in Baltimore in 1877, to Jennie Simonton and Wilmer Lansfield Keller. Wilmer was a native Baltimorian while her mother came from New England. May attended the Little Dames’ School, run by Miss Alice Davis, a relative of General Robert E. Lee, and then Girls’ Latin School from 1888 to 1894, before attending Goucher (Woman’s College of Baltimore) and graduating in 1898. She visited the University of Chicago but decided to pursue her PhD in Germanic philology in Germany after a professor at Chicago asked her why


55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63.

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should continue her studies if she did not have to earn a living on her own. She then taught German at Wells College in Aurora, New York (near Cornell), before returning home to teach English at the Woman’s College of Baltimore. Keller earned a PhD in Germany, taught at Wells College and the Woman’s College of Baltimore, and was dean of Westhampton College, Richmond, Virginia. In 1917, she was active in the merging of the ACA and the SACW and then was general director of the South Atlantic section of the AAUW for many years. At Goucher, Keller remained active in Pi Beta Phi, the national sorority she had joined as an undergraduate, in particular traveling to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, to organize a settlement school sponsored by the sorority. In 1914, she was asked to be dean of a new school, Westhampton College in Richmond, a position she retained for thirty-two years (and she lived there eighteen years more). Pauline Turnbull, May Lansfield Keller: Life and Letters, 1877–1964 (Verona, VA: McClure Press, 1975), 3–27, 42. Mary Leal Harkness, “The Southern Association of College Women,” typescript, AAUW archives, reel I:8. Nashville Banner, February 28, 1932. SACW, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, 1917 (n.p.), “Branch Reports,” AAUW archives, reel I:6. Talbot and Rosenberry, The History of the AAUW, 50, 219. Ibid., 298–99. Dimmick, Alumnae Biographical Files, Wellesley College. SACW, Proceedings of the Seventh Meeting, 1910 (n.p.), 11–14, AAUW archives, reel I:6, quotation Dimmick, 13, quotation Boyd, 11. On Boyd, see Virginia Shropshire Heath, “A Tribute to Emma Louise Garrett Boyd Morris,” pamphlet (Georgia Division of the American Association of University Women, 1953), AAUW archives, reel I:11. Talbot and Rosenberry, The History of the AAUW, 7–11, 58–60; Mary Leal Harkness, “The Southern Association of College Women,” typescript, AAUW archives, reel I:8. See also letters between Gertrude Martin of the ACA and Mary Leal Harkness of the SACW, discussing the possibility of cooperation. Martin reassured Harkness that the ACA did not want to interfere with SACW branches, but instead suggested that SACW sections become sections of the ACA so that members would belong to both organizations. The difficulty with this plan was that members would have to pay dues to both organizations. Gertrude Martin to Mary Leal Harkness, July 18, 1916, and Mary Leal Harkness to Gertrude Martin, August 2, 1916, AAUW Archives, reel I:8. May Keller to Emily Dutton, May 7, 1929, AAUW archives, reel I:5.


4

Chapter 2

“Forwarding Our Great Purpose of Research in Education” Women and Educational Research in Pi Lambda Theta, 1920–60

Laurie Moses Hines

In 1929, Maude McBroom—an associate professor of education at the

University of Iowa and then president of Pi Lambda Theta, an honorary and professional organization for women in education—reflected upon the research fellowship offered by the society for the previous six years. The yearly one thousand dollar scholarship supported women engaged in educational research, and it did much more. McBroom saw the Ella Victoria Dobbs Fellowship as one of the “most concrete” and “worthwhile” projects pursued by Pi Lambda Theta. It helped the women’s organization in “forwarding our great purpose of research in education,” but it also brought prestige, publicity, and accolades to the women from male administrators in higher education. One of the men even thought that the all-male Phi Delta Kappa “should take a hint from Pi Lambda Theta” in pursuing a professional program based on research.1 Considering that male deans of education initiated the founding of Pi Lambda Theta as a means to keep Phi Delta Kappa an exclusive domain for professional men in education, the recognition that women were engaged in supporting and actually completing research has been a little known secret, untold by historians of women’s education. Numerous studies in women’s history, most notably Margaret Rossiter’s Women Scientists in America, explore women as researchers, but none do so specifically in education.2 Ellen Condliffe Lagemann has documented educators’ pursuit of an “elusive science” of education in their efforts to professionalize the field and gain credibility. However, historians,

40

L au r i e M o s e s H i n e s

including Lagemann, typically characterize these educational researchers prior to 1980 as “white males.”3 However, as early as 1923, Pi Lambda Theta embarked on a decades-long program that interjected women into educational research. This women’s organization worked in two ways: by supporting women as educational researchers and by making women the subjects of educational research. Working within the scientific paradigm that educational historians have made the purview of men, Pi Lambda Theta engaged in research to advance the field and to advance women within it.

Women as Educational Researchers While most women in education taught in the public school systems, some did occupy other roles, such as administrator or researcher.4 Pi Lambda Theta, considered the “sister” organization to Phi Delta Kappa, was a select group of women in education, invited into the organization primarily because of their academic achievement. Concentrated mostly throughout the East and West coasts and the Midwest, chapters located on university campuses formed the basis of the organization, although numerous chapters in urban areas allowed alumnae to maintain active membership. Until the mid-1950s, Pi Lambda Theta promoted certain criteria for professional standards and for membership that all but ensured selectivity: graduation from selected universities and, preferably, advanced graduate training in education. The organization was proud of its selectivity, noting in 1937 that of the eighteen thousand women nationwide majoring in education who had graduated from a degree-granting institution, less than two percent were invited into membership.5 Many Pi Lambda Thetans had earned doctorates and were employed as university teachers, public school administrators, or researchers and government officials, although classroom teachers also were in the organization. For instance, Louise Stanley headed the U.S. Bureau of Home Economics in the late 1920s and was the highest-ranking female scientist in the county. Elizabeth Goodykoontz was the assistant commissioner for the U.S. Office of Education in the 1930s, while also president of Pi Lambda Theta.6 These were women who had engaged in research and therefore wished to advance women’s visibility as educational researchers and professionals. Education research was central to Pi Lambda Theta’s identity as a professional organization, at least until the late 1960s. Its mission statement, adopted upon the 1917 national formation of the society, listed “advancing research” as one of its purposes. Taking the statement beyond rhetoric, the national officers of the organization believed that members should engage in research. Asking members “What advanced study have you carried on? Have you written or published any books or articles? Have you carried on or assisted in any pieces of research?” took precedence over inquires about teaching. Pi Lambda Theta saw research as a

“ Forwarding Our Great Purpose of Research in Education”

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central duty of its members, even for classroom teachers who were told that “the modern superintendent . . . will welcome research on the part of teachers.”7 Completing educational research, however, required money. Accordingly, Pi Lambda Theta decided in 1923 to financially assist one woman a year “who wishes to devote herself to research in education” through the establishment of the Ella Victoria Dobbs Fellowship. Named after one of the organization’s founders who was a faculty member at the University of Missouri, the scholarship for one thousand dollars was open to any woman pursuing a doctorate who had already earned a master’s degree from “a graduate school of recognized worth.” Indeed, many of the first awardees attended some of the most prestigious higher education institutions in the country. In the first ten years of the Dobbs Fellowship, those funded were studying at Columbia University (three students), Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago (two students), Stanford University (two students), Harvard, and Ohio State.8 Pi Lambda Theta used the fellowship not only to assist women in their research, but also to bring attention and recognition to the organization and the awardees. Having nationally known researchers (often men) on the committee to award the scholarship was essential to garnering the prestige of the profession. The members of the committee who selected the awardees were some of the most distinguished and well-known educational researchers. Charles Judd, Frederick Knight, and Werrett Wallace Charters, director of the Bureau of Educational Research at Ohio State, were members, as was F. Louise Nardin, dean of women at the University of Wisconsin. By the early 1930s, the fellowship committee believed that the award caused “some important educators . . . to look around a bit and give more attention to the women students who are doing educational work.” The fellowship program itself garnered attention from educational researchers, such as Bird T. Baldwin, director of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, who noted in a U.S. Bureau of Education publication the contribution that the women’s organization and its scholarship had made.9 Throughout the 1930s, Pi Lambda Theta made changes to the fellowship that indicated a different strategy: to promote women as researchers and to steer educational research into specific areas of inquiry. By 1939, the committee decided to fund more research projects but at a lower dollar amount. Rather than funding one woman at one thousand dollars, the organization gave three scholarships for two hundred and fifty dollars each, and used another two hundred and fifty dollars to cover the costs of printing and disseminating the research reports of the scholarship winners. While this change decreased the level of funding for each woman, it increased the number of women supported and expanded the visibility and reach of their funded research. The other change in the fellowship illustrates the organization’s attempts to focus and direct the research it supported. Until 1933, the research funded by the Ella Victoria Dobbs Fellowship ran the gamut of educational inquiry: intelligence, teacher training, learning and pedagogy, and measurement, to name a few. By

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the early 1930s, Pi Lambda Theta’s national officers believed that the fellowship attracted enough prestige and visibility that the organization could begin to specify certain topics that it wanted to fund and promote. Rather than having an open competition for any educational topic, the fellowship committee suggested “problems should be chosen which Pi Lambda Theta would like to subsidize.” With its policy to fund projects on specific topics, the women’s organization further focused its priorities and funding on research on women. From 1938 to 1939, research on the federal and state legislation on women’s work, and on the time and financial expenditures of women teachers who supported dependents (a project under the direction of Ruth Strang and Helen Walker at Teachers College, Columbia University), won support. The following year, topics included women’s achievements and activities, women in labor organizations, and the status of married women in education (a project completed by the New York University chapter of Pi Lambda Theta). This steering of research continued in 1940–41, as the organization chose the professional problems of women, as well as issues in the education of girls and women, as research topics.10 While Pi Lambda Theta did address issues of women in education, it wanted to do so in an objective and scientific manner. Concern about the perspective of the researcher clouded the 1939–40 fellowship given for the chapter research on the status of married women. The award was granted conditionally “because of the treatment of the controversial subject in the introductory part of the study.” The committee chair urged that a “more objective point of view should be taken.” It must be noted that the organization was not using “objectivity” as a cover for a conservative perspective on women and education. Between 1934 and 1936, Pi Lambda Theta had diverted its fellowship monies to two studies not very conservative in nature. The first project explored the emergency in education during the Great Depression, with the intention to educate the public and persuade state legislatures to support and fund public education. The second was a commissioned study on the status of women in education that drew on the social scientific work of feminists like Margaret Mead to argue for women’s advancement in the field (to be addressed in the second half of this essay). The insistence, however, on objective approaches to studying the problems in education clearly marked these women and their organization as believing in the ability of science to solve educational problems and in their intention to advance educational research. They wished to address women’s issues, then, within the paradigm of science.11 Pi Lambda Theta’s emphasis on its female members to engage in educational research led the organization to pursue collective research projects. In the first place, to gain a charter in the organization, a women’s group at a university had to submit a completed research project as evidence of the scholarship, ability, and professionalism of the requesting members. Some of these projects became ongoing research studies, as did the investigation by the women of the Stanford


43

University chapter as to why women teachers left the profession. These women had access to the university registrar’s files on alumni and concluded that most women left teaching because of restrictions on marriage and not because of either their inefficiency or their teacher preparation; rather, it was a problem indicative of the profession.12 Second, Pi Lambda Theta wanted to have a cooperative national project in which all members participated. Beginning in 1927, the women’s organization engaged in a national research project with the U.S. Bureau of Home Economics whose head, Louise Stanley, was a Thetan. Amy Daniels, a research professor of nutrition at the University of Iowa, home to the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, served as adviser to the project. A survey of child-rearing methods, this research was undertaken at the height of the child-study movement, which reflected interest in child development, concerns about the child-rearing practices of poor and immigrant families, and educated women’s interest in parenting education beginning in the 1920s. Pi Lambda Theta’s study had all three elements, as it surveyed the parenting methods of Pi Lambda Thetans and intended to generate “results . . . which will furnish suggestions and methods for less skillful mothers everywhere.” This cooperative study, however, progressed slowly. Stanley and her assistant, Rowena Schmidt, who was collecting and tabulating the survey responses, had initial difficulty getting women to participate. After a plea to all members from the national officers, as well as repeated publicity in the organization’s newsletter, enough Pi Lambda Thetans responded to allow Stanley and Schmidt to process the data and publish a report through the Bureau of Home Economics in 1933. Another cooperative study, begun at the same time, did not get enough responses. The attempt to investigate “the problems which hinder the progress in teaching,” an analysis of the difficulties teachers faced, was scrapped.13 Aside from the inherent cultural bias of the child-rearing study, the project saw its nonemployed members—women who left paid work for home and motherhood—as research workers. When most professionals in education did not see women as researchers, this women’s organization was promoting homemakers as researchers—clearly a certain kind of homemaker, one with professional training and credentials, but homemakers nonetheless. And this women’s organization did much to promote women generally as educational researchers through its Ella Victoria Dobbs Fellowship, its requirements for chapter research projects, and its attempts at cooperative research projects undertaken at the national level.

Educational Research about Women Pi Lambda Theta interjected women into research in another way: as topics for educational investigation in its own national projects. Research was central to Pi

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Lambda Theta because these women believed that they could solve educational problems through science. Thus, as the women’s organization focused its research on women and education, it attempted to address and solve the problems of women in the discipline. As noted earlier, Pi Lambda Theta diverted its Ella Victoria Dobbs Fellowship monies to two projects during the 1930s: one on the emergency in education, the other on the status of women in education. As early as 1926, Pi Lambda Theta leaders thought that the organization and its chapters “should be giving serious thought to the really important problems which concern the whole body of women in education today and that affect future progress.” National officers considered issues such as the recognition of women in the field, women’s administrative opportunities, and the relationship between a career and the home, in hopes of formulating a research question around one of these issues. The following year, the child-rearing study and the study on teachers’ problems began. However, concerns about women’s professional opportunities in education simmered at the chapter level for the next few years. The chapter project at Stanford University on why women left teaching was only one example. Other chapters and other fellowship winners looked at a variety of women’s issues: the compensation of women in a variety of industries, women in science, women’s culture, women’s participation in social and cultural activities, and women teachers.14 In 1933, at a meeting of the fellowship committee, Maude McBroom, Elizabeth “Bess” Goodykoontz from the U.S. Office of Education, Helen Walker from Teachers College, Katharine Greene from the University of Michigan, and Genevieve Knight Bixler decided to utilize the Dobbs fellowship money to commission a study that would “map out research . . . of value to women and to education.” The study they commissioned was on the professional problems of women in education, to be completed by Helen E. Davis. The committee wanted Davis to outline the topic so that the women’s organization could “steer succeeding fellowships” and formulate a “long-range plan for a series of studies on the professional training, placement, and advancement of women in educational work.”15 In charting her map of the research on women and education, Davis surveyed 660 publications on subjects ranging from personnel studies and job descriptions to women’s problems and education. Although she cited a variety of reasons for women’s place in education, her perspective was clear: Social custom and pressures kept women from advancing professionally. Davis was influenced significantly by other women’s research and thinking, including Margaret Mead, whose study Sex and Temperament (1935) was published as Davis worked on the Pi Lambda Theta project; Chase Going Woodhouse, whose involvement with the U.S. Works Projects Administration and as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives focused on women and occupational and family issues; and novelist Virginia Woolf. Davis saw women as occupying


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socially conditioned places in the educational hierarchy, be it in the K–12 public system or higher education. Davis thought that the overspecialization and measurement craze in educational research was not leading to solutions for women’s problems in education and certainly not advancing women’s concerns. Additionally, the research, according to Davis, assumed that the “status quo is both more permanent and more ideal that it may very well turn out to be.” However, charged with charting a course for research and not just describing the current state of affairs, Davis saw immense possibilities for women researchers. Davis noted that the verdict was not in women’s professional performance and that women should take advantage of the opportunity to fill the breech with data, since “a good many social issues of vital significance will have to be cleared up” before women’s professional interests could be met. Davis perceived that the cultural, social, and professional ground was shifting under women, and that for women to address their problems, a clear, unified vision of women’s roles in society must emerge. Here, Davis thought, women researchers could make inroads. However, she warned, if women did not advance, then “there is grave danger that many of these issues will be settled by default” and that “shortsighted hysteria will imprison the products of cultural lag (i.e., discrimination against women and the social customs preventing women’s advancement) in rigid institutions.”16 Davis recognized, as historians did decades later, that educational institutions, both in the K-12 system and in higher education, could lend legitimacy to the division of labor within the profession. She therefore urged Pi Lambda Theta and women researchers to clarify these issues by asking, “What, then, may mere social expectance not have done to women’s professional advancement? And when we uncover sex differences . . . do we necessarily set the scene to perpetuate these, or might we not modify the environment?” She suggested that interviews, case studies, and statistics would help illuminate how women advanced to administrative positions and their career paths. Speculating that the exclusion of women from social opportunities limited their ability to be good administrators, Davis asked, “How much of women’s failure to get in on this sort of thing [professional advancement] is due to lack of initiative, a lack of opportunity, or to more or less rigid social customs?” In essence, Davis was formulating a social scientific question as to the influence of the boys’ network on women’s opportunities. Open for investigation, then, were procedures for hiring administrators, the professional implications of social relations, and the social and professional opportunities for female administrators. Davis urged the exploration of all these questions. Davis’s assumption throughout her research report was that women had the knowledge and ability to perform administrative and research tasks but that obstacles, such as discriminatory hiring practices or social customs, stood in their way. Even before Davis’s final report, Pi Lambda Theta’s national officers

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held conference sessions at their 1935 national meeting with keynote speakers from the U.S. Women’s Bureau who noted the difficulty for women in receiving training, jobs, and advancement in education.17 Women’s professional advancement was becoming the focus of this women’s honorary organization in the mid-1930s, and the leadership was bringing educational research to bear on the subject. Davis gave Pi Lambda Theta a critique of the field and a unified vision for investigating women and education, complete with topics for research that included both teacher and administrator issues but also targeted why women did not advance to the top of the education field. The women’s organization decided to pursue the suggested research agenda through both the Ella Victoria Dobbs Fellowship and the study programs that were made part of chapter activities. As noted previously, Pi Lambda Theta focused the topics for the Dobbs Fellowship more vigorously on women from the mid-1930s through the early 1940s. The women’s organization wanted a coherent program of research supported by the fellowship, especially given that Davis characterized the current state of scholarship on women and education as “depressingly unrelated.” The women did not want a research program that “fit into our larger scheme like patches into a quilt,” a negative assessment of unrelated research cobbled together. To further “coordinate the activities of Pi Lambda Theta as a national professional organization,” the Thetan leaders made the topics suggested by Davis the focus of conferences and chapter programs. At the 1937 national conference, the women’s organization held sessions on women’s occupations, professional standards, women’s efforts in politics, women as leaders, and the “problems of the college-trained woman” who often faced social and familial conflict because of her work outside the home. By the end of the 1930s, the women’s organization coordinated the topics for the fellowship with the national study program, which assisted the chapters and its members in exploring the issues by providing bibliographies, discussion questions, and summaries of the topics, along with the published results of the Dobbs Fellowship reports. Pi Lambda Theta began to use the study program and the fellowship to prod chapters to address women’s professionalization in education and the obstacles to women’s advancement.18 To direct the study programs and coordinate Pi Lambda Theta’s activities with those of other organizations, Thetan leaders tapped Helen Walker, a statistician and professor at Teachers College. While Pi Lambda Theta leaders believed that Walker brought the credentials of a “detached worker” and researcher to the project, Walker steered the members of the women’s organization to examine questions about women’s role in the profession and in society from a certain perspective. Readings suggested by Walker included Mary Beard’s A Changing Political Economy as It Affects Women, Winifred Holtby’s Women in a Changing Civilization, and Ida Lowther Peters’s Occupational


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Discrimination against Women, among others. Walker compiled the bibliographies and wrote most of the summaries for use by chapters.19 The study program, dovetailing with the Dobbs Fellowship, did “strike fire” with the members, “far beyond . . . hopes and expectations.” Two-thirds of the chapters used the materials, and chapters were “combining study [of the national program] with investigation of local affairs.” The officers, like Goodykoontz, had conceived of the combined study program and fellowship as both an educational tool and a cooperative research agenda. Most of the women in the organization were using it exactly for those purposes, although the recognition that some members were engaged passively with the materials and did not do research, but instead simply listened to speakers, concerned the national leadership. Overall, however, the leaders of Pi Lambda Theta believed there was real interest in and enthusiasm for the topics and for local studies on those same issues.20 With World War II, temperaments changed within the women’s organization and its national leadership. Although the association was still concerned with issues of women’s advancement, some members wondered if the focus was not misplaced, given the threats to democracy worldwide. “Merely that we are women,” one member of the committee planning the study program argued, “is not sufficient justification for mature women to spend time on such studies.” She noted, “Crucial Issues [in the education of girls and women, the planned theme for 1941] cease to be issues under totalitarian philosophy.” Pi Lambda Theta, however, did not abandon its focus on women but redirected it to ways in which professional women contributed to the war effort.21 The leaders of the organization knew that “women [were] in positions of leadership” and that the war might provide them with more opportunities for administrative responsibilities in schools and the defense industry. They wanted to cast women as the experts that they were, to show how women did and could serve in professional capacities. Therefore, Pi Lambda Theta conceived of a research project to do so.22 Undertaken cooperatively with the Research Division of the National Education Association, Pi Lambda Theta’s study of professional women and the war examined “the variety of jobs women of this kind do, their responsibilities and dependency loads, the effect of the war on their status, the impact during this period,” and general information about professional women’s activities. The study was actually a survey of Pi Lambda Theta members’ activities published in 1945, funded by the women’s organization. Many people collaborated on this project. Pi Lambda Theta jointly prepared the questionnaire with the NEA Research Division, which tabulated the results and wrote the summary report. Mary Anderson of the U.S. Women’s Bureau, Theresa Pyle of Columbia University, and Chase Going Woodhouse, among others, were actively involved.23

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The study showed women as participants in numerous home-front activities. Women sold war bonds, helped with rationing, took first aid courses, collected for the Red Cross, and “rendered self-effacing personal service in many ways.” It also showed that women gained entry into positions previously held by men and used their professional expertise for the war effort. Some women wrote articles or publicity materials for the war; others taught training courses to civilians and to members of the armed services; still others served as local leaders on city and county defense committees. The survey also addressed expanded duties in public schools and classrooms: extra responsibilities coupled with low wages, the shortage of teachers, the need for guidance of troubled youth, and the possibility of making more money by working outside of education.24 With the wartime research survey, Pi Lambda Theta continued its research efforts to examine and document women’s professionalization. However, unlike Davis’s research on the limitations to women’s advancement, this project challenged the field’s tradition of excluding women from positions of educational leadership by documenting the power, influence, and authority that women did have.

Consumers of Educational Research From the early 1920s until the end of World War II, Pi Lambda Theta developed a program that interjected women into educational research, both as researchers and as critical foci for educational research about women’s professional advancement. However, in the 1950s, changes in the nature and funding of educational research, in trends in women’s participation in higher education, and in the Pi Lambda Theta membership caused the women’s organization to perceive its members not as educational researchers but as consumers of such research. The 1950s witnessed changes in the nature and funding of educational research. In the postwar era, philanthropic giving to higher education mushroomed. This giving was part of efforts by the major philanthropic foundations, such as Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller, to steer educational policy and control higher education. Most funding went for the production of research, and as the 1960s approached, foundations tended to fund very large projects administered by universities rather than smaller projects in schools. Government funding also ballooned with the passage in 1954 of Public Law 351, which authorized the U.S. Office of Education to enter into contracts and jointly finance cooperative projects with universities and colleges to conduct educational research. Between 1957 and 1961, the U.S. Office of Education’s investment in educational research grew from $1 million to almost $3.4 million.25 By the 1960s, Pi Lambda Theta recognized that it could not compete with research universities for either philanthropic or governmental funding, even


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when a leader of the women’s organization approached “a personal friend” at the Ford Foundation to discuss a grant. Likewise, the association could not compete in producing research against large, well-funded projects and institutions. The dynamics of educational research had changed and small organizations only peripherally related to universities, like Pi Lambda Theta, were not included in the new nexus of educational research production.26 Postwar American society’s renewed emphasis on domesticity also had ramifications for women and research. The percentage of women enrolled in higher education institutions had climbed in the first decades of the twentieth century until women’s enrollment achieved relative parity with men’s; by the 1920s women were 47.3 percent of students. While the Great Depression had seen some decline in women’s enrollment, women’s percentage of college graduates still grew until 1939–40, when women were 41 percent of total graduates. However, the rate of women’s college attendance and graduation plummeted in the 1950s, with women comprising only 30 percent of the total student population and earning only 24 percent of the college degrees granted in 1950. Additionally, early marriage and large families were the norm for most women, college-educated or not, and many female college graduates deferred professional opportunities for homemaking.27 Pi Lambda Theta felt the effects of this trend on the Dobbs Fellowship, as the number of applicants for the award declined each year during the 1950s and into the 1960s. Frustrating to the women’s organization as well was that only half of the recipients of the award between 1956 and 1966 finished the research for which the award was granted.28 Whereas Pi Lambda Theta was willing to financially support women as educational researchers to the tune of two thousand dollars a year, the organization had few women available and willing to take up this work. Significant changes in the organization’s view of its members also affected its contribution to women and educational research. From 1947 until the mid1950s, Pi Lambda Theta debated extending the privilege of membership to include female students at institutions of lower rank. The previous institutional criterion for membership was enrollment at select universities, mainly those that pursued educational research and awarded the doctoral degree. This exclusionary practice kept the organization relatively small, with membership under six thousand in the period from 1947 to 1948. However, some Pi Lambda Thetans pressured the organization to include teachers colleges and their students, who primarily did not earn graduate degrees and were headed for the public school classroom. This debate was quite contentious, and it took a full ten years for this change to happen. When it did, however, the floodgates opened and many more teachers joined the organization whose traditional membership, while including teachers, emphasized women in higher positions in the educational bureaucracy (i.e., teacher educators, researchers, and administrators). By the late 1950s, membership nearly doubled to eleven thousand,

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with classroom teachers numerically dominating the ranks. The women’s organization adapted its research focus to reflect the interests of its new majority. Classroom practice and employment issues for teachers dominated the agenda in the 1950s.29 The result of this expanded membership was a growing divide between the association’s leadership, which was comprised of its traditional membership base, and the burgeoning teacher initiates. This change had dramatic effects on how Pi Lambda Theta viewed women and educational research. National officers, now headed by Virginia Biggy, a professor of reading at the University of Massachusetts, made only half-hearted attempts at formulating a national study program centered on teaching, which was clearly the interest of the majority of the members of the women’s organization, but not one that took a critical look at women in the field, as the earlier programs did. Additionally, the organization decentralized the study program and allowed local chapters to pursue projects of interest to them. More significantly, however, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pi Lambda Theta’s leadership began to question its (teacher) members’ professional abilities. Biggy was “both amazed and appalled at what remarkably little Pi Lambda Thetans know . . . [about] the way in which professional people meet critical educational problems and arrive at solutions to these problems which are wise and thoughtful.” “The lack of information” of rank-and-file Thetans “about what a profession is and what constitutes professional behavior” left Biggy and the national leadership with “no alternative” but to assume responsibility for “‘in-service education’ work” for the membership.30 Because the leadership viewed the mass of its membership in need of professional education, the organization did not think that the general member could be involved in research. Whereas Pi Lambda Theta had once assumed that its members were educational researchers at some level, by 1960, it clearly did not see them as such. These three realizations—that Pi Lambda Theta could not compete in the new educational research environment, that fewer women were applying for the Dobbs Fellowship and completing the research, and that the membership could not engage in research projects, according to people like Biggy—made the women’s group adopt a new niche related to educational research: disseminating research rather than producing it. Pi Lambda Theta decided to sponsor two research symposia, one on the “Body of Knowledge Unique to the Profession of Education” and another on “The Evaluation of Teaching,” as the catenas (the organization’s name for these events) were titled. These symposia aimed to develop formal principles for effective teaching that focused on the skills and behaviors demonstrators by teachers, as well as the means to evaluate effective teaching, not educational theory. For the catenas, the women’s organization invited established scholars— almost all of whom were men—to develop position papers that were circulated


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among participating scholars. A one-day symposium would then allow the scholars to interact and discuss their ideas, while Thetans listened to the conversation by way of audio transmission. The session was actually held behind closed doors and the general membership was not permitted to be present. Two Thetans had planned the catenas. Jane Hill, the organization’s executive secretary and a Biggy supporter, did most of the work; she chose participants, edited their papers, made the symposia arrangements, and oversaw the publication of the papers and discussion transcripts. Serving as consultant was Betty Humphry, head of the education department in the Test Development Division at Educational Testing Service (ETS).31 The women’s organization devised the catenas to disseminate educational research, not to advance women as researchers or to advance research on women in education. The leadership did not look to its members as producers of this body of knowledge but rather as consumers of it; they were viewed as listeners and readers but not participants in knowledge creation. Members, however, were less interested in the publications deriving from the catenas, and some of the national officers, such as Miriam Bryan, another ETS division head, wondered why—even as they planned a third catena. Their answer came from the women in local chapters. One woman, Jean Alberti, who was soon to rise to national leadership in Pi Lambda Theta, wrote to Hill, stating she “was struck with the emphasis . . . on publication of research.” Alberti informed Hill that “there are currently many discussions as to whether we are possibly placing too much stress on this facet of education while neglecting the all important . . . leadership aspect.” Like many other Pi Lambda Thetans in the late 1960s, Alberti, an outspoken advocate of women’s rights, began to question women’s ability to advance within the field and to urge Pi Lambda Theta to address women’s professional and leadership development.32 National leaders Biggy and Bryan halted plans for the third catena and ended the association’s research agenda and program. Prior to the 1950s, Pi Lambda Theta had studied and encouraged research on women and their professional activities and advancement, or the limitations to that advancement. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the women’s organization attempted to maintain a research agenda. However, the leadership abandoned its focus on women’s professional issues for a gender-neutral investigation of teaching, one that Pi Lambda Theta eventually would end because of lack of interest. Still, there was a more significant reason. By the late 1960s, Pi Lambda Theta had become embroiled in issues about women and their equal access to professional opportunities, the very ideas that had provided a purpose and focus to the organization’s research activities decades earlier. Pi Lambda Theta would soon face a new feminist movement and challenges to its status as an all-female organization, especially as Title IX, barring sex discrimination in educational institutions, made Thetans question the legality of their membership policy. As such, the organization grappled with

52


how to maintain a focus on women even as barriers to women’s advancement fell. By the mid-1980s, Pi Lambda Theta did not even consider a research agenda, as the organization had more pressing problems: a dwindling membership and financial insecurity, since women were now joining Phi Delta Kappa. Today, Pi Lambda Theta, whose membership is still predominantly female, does not engage in research, although it still gives research scholarships and awards. Instead, the organization has embarked on school-reform initiatives with the aim of influencing practice more than research.

Notes 1. Maude McBroom, “National President Reports,” Pi Lambda Theta Journal 9 (October 1929): 15; and “Research Scholarship Mentioned Favorably,” Pi Lambda Theta Journal 5 (January 1926): 1. McBroom was the only woman promoted to the rank of associate professor at the University of Iowa for the institution’s first one hundred years. See “A Tribute to Maude Mary McBroom, 1882–1947,” Midland Schools 62 (December 1947): 23. 2. Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Barbara Harris, Beyond Her Sphere: Women and the Professions in American History (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1978); and Susan Levine, Degrees of Equality: The American Association of University Women and the Challenge of Modern Feminism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). 3. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). See page 223 for characterizations of educational researchers. 4. Educational historians are late in recognizing the role that women have played in traditionally male domains within education. Jackie Blount’s Destined to Rule the Schools: Women and the Superintendency, 1875–1990 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) does explore women as administrators, but many other histories emphasize women’s subordination, possibly because of the growing literature on the history of teachers. However, I wish to argue that historians cannot create a false duality between male administrators or, in this case, researchers and female teachers. Female researchers also existed in education, and interestingly enough, after 1950, these women developed their own class bias against the classroom teacher, whom they saw as a consumer of research, not a producer of it. 5. Interestingly, Pi Lambda Theta did not consider race as an exclusionary criterion for admission into professional status and was an integrated organization from its founding. This distinguished it from Phi Delta Kappa, which did not admit African Americans into membership until the 1950s. See Laurie Moses Hines, “Creating Distinctions Among Educators: Separatism, Women’s Professionalization, and the Competition for Educational Authority; A History of Pi Lambda Theta, 1910–74” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2000). See also Bess Goodykoontz, “President’s


6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

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Report to the Biennial Council,” Pi Lambda Theta Journal 16 (October 1937): 4–6. The institutions at which Pi Lambda Theta had chapters, especially in the first two decades, were those identified by Geraldine Joncich Clifford and James W. Guthrie in Ed School: A Brief for Professional Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). On Louise Stanley’s status as the highest-ranking woman scientist, see Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, 229. Maude McBroom, “Our President’s Letter,” Pi Lambda Theta Journal 7 (May 1928): 3; and H. D. Vincent, “The Teacher as a Research Worker,” Pi Lambda Theta Journal 8 (May 1929): 7–10. One of the fellowship awardees was Helen Bragdon, the future general director of the American Association of University Women and president of Lake Erie College for women. Kathryn M. Williams, A Quarter Century of Pi Lambda Theta (n.p., 1935), 32–39, and “The Ella Victoria Dobbs Fellowship,” Elementary School Journal 30 (November 1929): 170–71. Minutes of the Eighth Biennial Council of Pi Lambda Theta, June 29–30 and July 1–2, 1933, International Headquarters of Pi Lambda Theta, Bloomington, IN [hereafter PLT]. See also “Fellowship to Be Used for Psychological Research,” Pi Lambda Theta Journal 3 (May 1924): 1, and U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Education Bulletin 1923, no. 42, Educational Research, prepared by Bird T. Baldwin (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1923), 1–2. Additional topics funded in 1938–39 included a study on Chinese children, and in 1940–41, the psychological and social development of children. Interestingly, as Pi Lambda Theta may have had privileged students at prestigious institutions applying for the fellowship, it did fund students who were members of ethnic minorities. For example, the study on Chinese children was undertaken by two Chinese students who had attended Northwestern University but had since returned to the all-female Ginling College founded by American female missionaries in western China. See Williams, A Quarter Century, 32–39; Minutes of the Eighth Biennial Council, 1933, Report of the Executive Secretary, July 1939–June 1941, PLT. Annual Report of the Committee on Studies and Awards, in file “Reports 1939–41,” PLT. “Why Teachers Leave the Profession,” Pi Lambda Theta Journal 6 (December 1926): 7–16. On the child study and parent education movement, see Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), esp. chaps. 2 and 3; Barbara Beatty, Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 150–60; Williams, A Quarter Century, 25; Pi Lambda Theta Journal 7 (October 1927): 10–11 and (December 1927): 6–7; “Study Goes Slowly,” Pi Lambda Theta Journal 8 (December 1928): 19; “Preschool Study Progresses,” Pi Lambda Theta Journal 8 (May 1929): 4; Louise Stanley, “Child Welfare Studies Important in Work of Home Economics Bureau,” in Yearbook of Agriculture,1931, ed. Milton Eisenhower (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1931), 143–44. The American Association of University Women also engaged in a child-study project at this same time, which

54

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

L au r i e M o s e s H i n e s was funded by a hefty grant of twenty-seven thousand dollars from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. Unfortunately for Pi Lambda Theta, it did not receive any such funding. See Levine, Degrees of Equality, 4, 39–41, 47–52. “Questions for Study Sought from Chapters,” Pi Lambda Theta Journal 6 (October 1926): 1. Report of the Committee on Fellowship Award, Minutes of the Ninth Biennial Council, 1935, PLT; Foreword to Helen R. Davis, Women’s Professional Problems in the Field of Education: A Map of Needed Research (n.p.: Pi Lambda Theta, 1936), i. Davis, Women’s Professional Problems, 10–13. Minutes of the Ninth Biennial Council, 1935, PLT. Davis, Women’s Professional Problems, 2; Minutes of the Tenth Biennial Council, 1937, PLT. Minutes of the National Executive Committee Meeting, 1936, PLT; “The Adaptation of Women to a Changing World,” in Pi Lambda Theta Journal 15 (October 1936): 1–15, and (December 1936): 23–30. Bess Goodykoontz, “President’s Report to the Biennial Council,” Pi Lambda Theta Journal 16 (October 1937): 4-6; Report of the Program Committee, 1939, and Report of the First Vice President, 1939, PLT. Frances Jones, Report of the Chairman of the Study Program, in file “Reports 1939–41,” PLT. May Seagoe, “National Defense: Its Meaning for Pi Lambda Theta,” Pi Lambda Theta Journal 19 (March 1941): 74; Minutes of the Executive Committee Meeting, August 19–22, 1942, and Report of the Council Program Planning Committee and Report of Conference on Programs for Campus Groups, in Report of the Thirteenth Biennial Council, 1943, PLT. Meeting of the National Board, June 22–25, 1944, in file “June 1944,” PLT; Women in the Professions: A Wartime Survey: A Survey Made Cooperatively by the Research Division of the National Education Association and the Committee on Studies and Awards of Pi Lambda Theta (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945), v. Women in the Professions: A Wartime Survey. Merle Curti and Roderick Nash, Philanthropy and the Shaping of American Higher Education (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965), 212–37; Clarence J. Karier, Paul C. Violas, and Joel Spring, Roots of Crisis: American Education in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973), 110–12, 135–37; Donald R. Warren, To Enforce Education: A History of the Founding Years of the United States Office of Education (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974), 181–84; and Harry Kursh, The United States Office of Education: A Century of Service (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965), 58–77. The figures on government funding further ballooned to $225 million in 1970. Minutes of the National Board Meeting, Thursday, August 25, 1966, in file “Minutes 1966–67,” PLT. Mabel Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education for American Women (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1959), 46, 210–20; Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 63–64. See


28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

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also Paula Fass, “The Female Paradox: Higher Education for Women, 1945–63,” chap. 5 in Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). In Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945–1965 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), Linda Eisenmann challenges the notion that the 1950s was a era of domestic retreat and instead argues that the postwar years were a “time of quiet activism” for American women. See also Eisenmann, “A Time of Quiet Activism: Research, Practice, and Policy in American Women’s Higher Education, 1945–65,” History of Education Quarterly 45 (Spring 2005). Report of the Fellowship Awards Committee, 1961–63, in folder “August 1964,” file “Minutes 1963–65”; Report of the Fellowship Awards Committee, 1965–66, in unmarked folder, PLT. Hines, “Creating Distinctions Among Educators,” esp. chap. 2, “Merit, Competition, and the Expansion of the Education Fraternities, 1922–57,” p. 213. M. Virginia Biggy, Report of the President, in folder “August 1961,” file “Minutes 1961–63,” PLT. The Body of Knowledge Unique to the Profession of Education: A Report of the Pi Lambda Theta Catena (Washington, DC: Pi Lambda Theta, 1965); The Evaluation of Teaching: A Report of the Second Pi Lambda Theta Catena (Washington, DC: Pi Lambda Theta, 1967); and Miriam Bryan, Report of the President, 1965–66, unmarked file, PLT. Summary of Reactions to the Twenty-Fourth Biennial Council Meeting, Reports for 1965–66, unmarked file, and Jean M. Alberti to Jane M. Hill, September 23, 1965, folder “March 1966,” file “Minutes 1965–67,” PLT. Quite familiar with educational and psychological research, Alberti had earned her doctoral degree but believed that Pi Lambda Theta should provide the leadership opportunities to women that they were often denied in male-dominated venues.


4

Chapter 3

Cold War Women Professional Guidance, National Defense, and the Society of Women Engineers, 1950–60

Laura Micheletti Puaca

I

n the spring of 1950, more than sixty women converged on Cooper Union’s Green Engineering Camp with suitcases in tow. After locating their sleeping quarters on the second floor of a converted barn, they gathered to discuss the business that had brought them to the woods of Ringwood, New Jersey: the creation of a national organization for women engineers. Among the “Camp Green” attendees were engineering students, fledgling professionals, and established engineers, many of whom represented one of the several separate women’s engineering societies that had sprung up in various parts of the United States during the late 1940s. Regardless of their individual status in the field or the local organization of which they were a part, each delegate came to the two-day conference with the goal of broadening support for women in engineering, a goal that resulted in the establishment of the national Society of Women Engineers (SWE).1 As stated in its certificate of incorporation, the SWE aimed “to foster a favorable attitude in industry toward women engineers,” “to contribute to their professional advancement,” “to encourage young women with suitable aptitudes and interests to enter the engineering profession,” and “to guide them in their educational programs.”2 Throughout the 1950s, the SWE carried out this mission by educating both female students and the general public about engineering as a career for women. Recognizing the cultural barriers to women’s engineering achievement, the SWE challenged the widespread misconception

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L au r a M i c h e l e t t i P ua c a

that “engineering is for men only” by offering scholarship programs, designing guidance pamphlets for college-bound “girls,” organizing vocational forums, and providing young women with established female role models in the profession. By 1960, the Society had redefined its mission as “exclusively educational” and considered professional guidance and education “the ‘raison d’etre’ of SWE.”3 Although galvanized by an overarching interest in the education and advancement of women, the SWE publicly justified its agenda through a strategic appeal to national defense. Much of the SWE’s early success stemmed from its ability to capitalize on cold war anxieties. Throughout this period, educators, industry representatives, and government officials alike projected a shortage of trained engineers and decried its possible consequences. Fearing that the United States could lose its competitive edge against the Soviet Union, these three groups recommended that the country drastically expand its pool of technically trained personnel. They also agreed—albeit reluctantly and when national emergencies seemed particularly acute—on the need to enlist all of America’s intellectual talents, regardless of gender. In this era of perceived crisis, government, industry, and education officials publicly praised female intellect and sought to utilize what they identified as the nation’s largest supply of untapped engineering talent. Although these affirmations of women’s academic abilities were often little more than insincere flattery designed to meet national security needs, they nevertheless lent support, legitimacy, and urgency to the work of the SWE. Relating its activities to the broader cause of national defense, the SWE aligned itself with high school guidance counselors, deans of engineering programs, industry recruiters, and government bureaucrats who agreed that neglecting half of the country’s “brainpower” was wasteful and unpatriotic. Despite their tenuousness, these alliances enabled the SWE to expand its audience of both listeners and supporters. By situating the SWE and its origins in the early cold war era, this essay contributes to the growing body of scholarship that challenges the perception of the 1950s as a period of domestic complacency. The early activities of the SWE also reveal a much longer record of feminist interest in engineering as a field for women, and one that did not spring full-blown from the so-called “second wave” of the late 1960s and 1970s. Uncovering and refocusing the story of the SWE illuminates a critical stage in both the history of women’s education and the history of feminist education reform.

Origins and Organization Although the 1950 meeting at Camp Green is now regarded as the organizational meeting of the SWE, it was, at the time, referred to as the Society of Women Engineers’ second annual convention.4 The “First Conference of

C o l d Wa r W o m e n

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Women Engineers,” whose designation is not wholly accurate either, was held eleven months earlier on April 2 and 3, 1949, at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia. Sponsored by Drexel’s own “Society of Women Engineers,” a student group that had formed in 1946, the Philadelphia meeting aimed “to more clearly define the problems of women in engineering,” “to search for their solutions,” and “to investigate the feasibility of joining forces” with other female students in the field.5 The Drexel society’s interest in arranging such a conference grew out of a project it had undertaken several years earlier, in which it surveyed universities across the country for information regarding women engineering students. The findings were “encouraging” and pointed to a need for organizing undergraduate women on a larger scale. One student member incorporated the survey results into her term paper on women engineers and that paper, in turn, became the impetus for the April 1949 conference. More than seventy undergraduates representing nineteen institutions attended the Philadelphia meeting, where they formed a regional student organization that they named the “Society of Women Engineers.” 6 One week before the Philadelphia gathering, a separate meeting was held at the Hotel Edison in New York City. On March 27, 1949, a group of metropolitan-area women engineers assembled to establish an organization for college graduates and professional women. Many of the attendees, who had come into contact with each other through various personal and professional networks, had been meeting informally for several years. As one member explained, “It might have been something as simple as having a cup of coffee, and seeing if we had something in common.” Others were recent graduates who had participated in women’s engineering societies while in college, where area students formed their own groups, such as the one at the City College of New York in March 1948. Both the newly minted professionals and the more established engineers believed that they could better facilitate women’s professional advancement by organizing themselves. At the Hotel Edison meeting, the attendees emphasized the importance of educating the public on the need for women engineers, encouraged women who demonstrated interest in the field, and disseminated information about job openings. They established an employment committee, set up a constitution committee, resolved to issue a publication, and elected temporary officers. Finally, they selected a name for their new association: the “Society of Women Engineers.”7 The emergence of women’s engineering societies in the immediate postwar period was neither uncommon nor coincidental. With varying degrees of formality, women engineers also banded together in Iowa, Indiana, Upstate New York, Massachusetts, and Washington, DC.8 Although many of these groups formed independently and without knowledge of each other, their decision to organize when they did reflected broader phenomena particular to that historical moment. World War II had produced an upsurge in the number of women in engineering, increasing from 730 women in 1940 to 6,475 in 1950.9 The wartime shortage of (male) engineering talent led industry, government, and

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education officials to target and recruit female engineers. American businesses engaged in defense production actively sought out women with engineering degrees or experience. Some even instituted intensive short-term programs on university campuses to train women as “engineering aides” or sub-professional personnel who assisted higher-ranking male engineers by tending to the more mundane aspects of engineering work (such as drafting and machine testing).10 The Curtiss-Wright Corporation, for example, paid tuition and housing for its engineering aides-in-training (or “Engineering Cadettes,” as they were popularly called), along with a small allowance for incidental expenses. After graduation, the corporation employed the women as junior engineers.11 The federal government established a similar initiative on a much larger scale. Approved by Congress in 1940, the Engineering, Science, and Management War Training Program offered short-term courses at 227 college and university campuses. In addition to providing professional instruction and practical experience, both the industry- and government-sponsored versions offered encouragement to women interested in engineering. The wartime shortage of male engineers also expanded opportunities for women seeking to pursue college degrees in the field. During the war, twenty-nine engineering schools—including Columbia’s School of Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Carnegie Institute of Technology—accepted women for the first time. Female graduates with newly minted engineering degrees generally obtained entry-level professional positions, which were plentiful during the war.12 Even when the war had ended and defense production declined, however, the number of women engineers graduating each year continued to rise. Many of the women who had entered engineering schools during the war did not graduate until after 1945. At the end of the war, they were joined by those female engineering aides who decided to continue their training and upgrade their status by earning engineering degrees, thereby swelling postwar enrollments.13 Lillian Murad, who earned her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1947 and who would become one of the founding members of SWE, recalled of her college years, “At this time, there were sufficient numbers of undergraduates in college (women) to dream up a society which would embrace all the engineering professions, and help the women in the engineering schools in their work and later on in their jobs.”14 The substantial increase in the number of women in engineering only partially accounts for their decision to organize in the postwar period. Also important is the climate to which they were reacting. Following the war, many of the women who had been courted by industry found their engineering training no longer in demand. Despite their wartime contributions to defense production, women found that the return of male veterans helped to revive conventional hiring practices that favored male engineers. On college and university campuses, the influx of men using the GI Bill overwhelmed enrollments, taxed school resources, and threatened the place of women students. Some schools,


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such as Cornell, even capped female enrollment in order to make room for the returning GIs. More broadly, educators debated the purpose of schooling women in the postwar era, and many advocated a curriculum that prepared women for their duties in the home. And, even though their participation in the field had increased significantly in recent years, women represented only slightly more than one percent of the profession.15 Given the postwar climate and the precarious position of women in engineering, one SWE member later reflected, “It is not surprising that both emerging women careerists and students started to band together.”16 These efforts culminated in the May 1950 meeting at Camp Green, where students, graduates, and professionals resolved to form a national organization. Members of the student organization formed at Drexel and the graduate organization formed at the Hotel Edison made up the nucleus of the Camp Green contingent. A handful of older women also attended, including Elsie Eaves and Hilda Counts Edgecomb, who had earned their engineering degrees more than thirty years earlier. As undergraduates at the University of Colorado, Eaves (class of 1920) and Edgecomb (class of 1919) had attempted to organize a women’s engineering society at their home institution. Although they could not locate enough women engineers to sustain such an organization at that time, Eaves and Edgecomb never completely abandoned the idea of a women’s engineering society. Remarking on the Camp Green meeting, Eaves observed of women such as herself and Edgecomb, “[T]here was a sprinkling of ‘old timers’ with careers well established.” However, “[t]he spark and drive came from the graduates with brand-new engineering degrees.” Regardless of age, the vast majority of the attendees had enjoyed expanded educational and professional opportunities during the war and found it expedient to support each other in the postwar period.17 The decision to form a national organization reflected attendees’ determination to coordinate and extend the work they had been doing at the local and regional levels. To forward this goal, they established three levels of membership (full, associate, and student) that would include, yet differentiate among, women engineers with varying levels of experience and education. They also instituted dues to sustain the new organization, adopted temporary rules to govern its operation, and approved an emblem to signify its presence (a gear with the initials SWE printed across the center). Additionally, they held on-site elections for temporary officers and chose thirty-one-year-old Beatrice Hicks as the first president of the national SWE.18 Hicks, a New Jersey native, had first encountered engineering through her father, a chemical engineer. She often told people that she decided to become an engineer at the age of thirteen, after admiring the Empire State Building and the George Washington Bridge with her father and learning that engineers designed those structures. Hicks attended high school during the early 1930s and found that her ambition met with resistance from both classmates and

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teachers who viewed engineering as an inappropriate field for women. Determined to succeed, she enrolled at the Newark College of Engineering (now the New Jersey Institute of Technology), where she would earn her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1939. Following graduation, Hicks worked at the college as a research assistant until wartime labor shortages facilitated her employment in industry. In 1942, she accepted a technician position at Western Electric, a subsidiary of Bell Telephone, and later became its first female engineer. In addition to working on long-distance telephone technology, she developed a crystal oscillator (a device used in aircraft communications to generate radio frequencies) and enrolled in several graduate engineering courses. At the end of the war, Hicks joined her father’s firm, the Newark Controls Company, and became chief engineer and vice president after her father’s death in 1946. (She would take over the company’s presidency in 1955.) In the meantime, she married fellow engineer Rodney Chipp in 1948 and earned her master’s degree in physics from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1949.19 After accepting the SWE presidency at the Camp Green meeting, Hicks outlined her plans for the new organization. She identified several logistical matters of immediate concern—such as drafting the group’s constitution, coordinating membership, directing publicity, and organizing forthcoming conventions— and recommended separate committees for each. She also advocated that the SWE pursue incorporation procedures as soon as possible and received authorization from the group to begin that process. Other highlights of the convention included member reports on fostering congenial relationships among women in engineering, helping undergraduates find their place in industry, and creating laws favorable to women engineers. Before adjourning, the group voted to confer honorary membership on the seventy-two-year-old engineer and scientific management expert, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, who had worked closely with her late husband, Frank, to pioneer the field of time-and-motion studies. Although Lillian Gilbreth was not present at the Camp Green meeting, and was initially wary of all-female professional organizations, she would become one of the Society’s staunchest supporters.20 By the end of the two-day gathering at Camp Green, a solid foundation for the new national organization had been established (although details could not be finalized until the Society penned its constitution). The national SWE now subsumed under its heading the original regional groups that had emerged in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and Boston. These groups, in turn, became the Society’s first chapters, or “sections.” The number of sections would increase steadily throughout the 1950s, as would the number of “members-at-large,” or members who did not live in close proximity to an established section. Most of the Society’s work would be carried out by the local sections and members-at-large, and would be overseen by the national board of directors, which consisted of five officers, three directors-at-large, and one director


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from each section. The committees recommended by Hicks would shortly be joined by others, such as the Professional Guidance and Education Committee, and would function on the national and local levels.21 Even with their new structure, both the local sections and the national organization of which they had become a part retained their original purpose: to improve conditions for women engineers by encouraging them in their studies, supporting them in their careers, and showcasing their accomplishments. In the summer of 1950, just weeks after the organizational meeting at Camp Green, Hicks announced, “I am convinced we are going to grow into a large and powerful organization.”22 At the outset, her optimism might seem premature, given the infancy of the national organization. But it is important to note that her proclamation coincided with a critical moment in cold war history: the beginning of the Korean War. Almost immediately after the United States entered the conflict, government, industry, and education officials once again began speculating about a possible engineering “manpower” shortage.23 By the fall, they had already begun recommending the use of women to alleviate the situation. In October, the academic vice president of the University of Minnesota, Malcolm Wiley, made a suggestion at a meeting of Midwestern college administrators. “If there are not enough males to provide us the necessary flow of trained engineers,” Wiley stated, “then the only solution is the utilization of womanpower in that profession.”24 Later in the month, the Smith College newspaper ran the cover story “Market for Science Majors Up, Demand Outruns the Supply,” which outlined job opportunities for women in the field. And in November, the aeronautical division of the General Electric Company ran in the Philadelphia Bulletin an oversized classified ad for “Women Engineers.”25 The call for women engineers grew even more pronounced after President Harry Truman declared a national emergency on December 16, 1950. Among the supporters of this idea was University of Illinois biophysicist, Manhattan Project veteran, and Bulletin of Atomic Scientists editor, Eugene Rabinowitch. Rabinowitch’s February 1951 editorial, aptly entitled “Scientific Womanpower,” urged his colleagues to encourage women’s participation in engineering and advocated government funding for the training of women engineers. The need to recruit women engineers received additional publicity at the end of the month when Newsweek published an article declaring, “Help Wanted: Women.”26 The day after the Newsweek article appeared, U.S. Civil Service Commissioner (and former Secretary of Labor) Frances Perkins elaborated on the engineering shortage and its implications for women in a letter to Hilda Edgecomb, one of the founding members of the SWE. After describing the available pool of engineering talent as “insufficient to meet the expanded defense needs,” Perkins noted that “the opportunities for women are now more attractive than ever inasmuch [as] many of the limited number of young men with specialized engineering training are needed in the various military services.”27

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Although they could not predict the extent of the Korean crisis, or the degree to which industry and government actually intended to recruit women engineers, the SWE publicly embraced the prospect of an engineering shortage. At its 1951 convention in March, the Society even held a panel on “The Effect of the Current Emergency on Women in Engineering.” Among the panelists was Hilda Edgecomb, who shared with the group her exchange with Frances Perkins. The other discussants echoed Edgecomb’s optimistic sentiments and forecasted the expansion of educational and vocational opportunities for women engineers.28 At the convention’s much smaller and more private business meeting, however, SWE officers and committee chairs seemed reluctant to forfeit their mission to the laws of supply and demand and discussed concrete ways for the Society to improve women’s engineering participation. To recognize and publicize women’s contributions to engineering, the newly formed Awards Committee announced that it would confer the first SWE award on an established woman engineer in 1952. At this point, other SWE members advocated presenting awards to outstanding high school and college women with demonstrated aptitude for engineering as a way to encourage their participation in the field. Additionally, SWE President Beatrice Hicks suggested that the board of directors establish a committee to study the feasibility of sending members to high schools, colleges, and universities to talk to women students about engineering.29 Hicks realized that the SWE could not rely on the predicted engineering shortage alone to carry out its aims. But in justifying SWE activities, such as the annual achievement award, Hicks often invoked the specter of emergency. In her convention address where she announced the award and its intention “to encourage women in their professional work and education,” Hicks related its importance to “the present desperate shortage of trained people” and the reality that “the needed personnel will be drawn from those having engineering aptitudes, whether men or women.”30 This connection between promoting women engineers and securing the national defense would become a prominent theme in SWE activities throughout the 1950s. Like Hicks, many early SWE members had benefited from engineering shortages caused by war almost a decade earlier and appreciated the possibilities generated by the contemporary situation. As one SWE member remarked in a statement encapsulating this strategy, “The present shortage of engineers affords us a wonderful opportunity to bring to the attention of the public the possibility of alleviating the shortage by encouraging girls to become engineers.”31

Promoting Professional Guidance By appropriating the language and the cause of national defense, the SWE broadened its base of support and extended its network of potential allies. This


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approach also brought new urgency to the SWE’s agenda, which required confronting and contesting deep-rooted social conventions and stereotypes. Engineering had traditionally been considered a field for men only, and the continued marginality of women engineers seemed to validate this claim. Women engineers, if not altogether invisible, conjured images of lonely, unattractive career women wearing thick spectacles and “sturdy brown shoes.”32 The perceived incompatibility of engineering and womanhood (particularly femininity, marriage, and motherhood) presented yet another challenge to the recruitment of female students. Thus, the SWE’s mission depended largely on its ability to recast the engineering field as a suitable one for women. In addition to advising female students, the SWE targeted those individuals who played a significant role in young women’s educational and vocational decisions. These were mainly parents, teachers, and guidance counselors, many of whom were either unaware or unaccepting of women entering engineering.33 The SWE recognized the cultural constraints facing women in the field and sought to dismantle them through a broad program of education and example. The Society believed that the depiction of women engineers in educational and vocational literature deserved particular attention. Distributed to counselors, teachers, students, and parents, guidance materials enjoyed widespread readership and potential influence. Often, however, these materials either ignored or discouraged engineering as a field for women. Such was the case with the 1942 booklet issued by the prominent Engineers’ Council for Professional Development (ECPD), the accrediting agency for engineering programs. As suggested by its title, Engineering as a Career: A Message to Young Men, Teachers, and Parents, the publication promulgated a very masculine image of engineers and engineering. It included, on page eighteen, just one paragraph on “Women in Engineering,” which explained that physical requirements excluded women from most engineering fields and that those women who did succeed in engineering generally possessed “unusual ability” and “extraordinary . . . skills.”34 Still in circulation nearly a decade after publication, the booklet was brought to the attention of SWE President Beatrice Hicks, who promptly contacted the ECPD regarding its inaccuracies and inadequacies. Hicks contested the ECPD’s assertion regarding the physical requirements of engineering, noting that few present-day engineers handle heavy objects. She also argued that the ECPD’s statement about women engineers’ exceptional qualifications bolstered separate standards of achievement for men and women in the field. The requirements of engineering work, she added, should not vary by sex.35 Hicks then elaborated on the broader implications and cultural obstacles presented by the kind of information contained in the publication. She explained, “Many women who have the basic aptitudes to become excellent engineers never enter the profession because they have not recognized engineering as a possible career or because they have been discouraged by teachers, parents, or by untutored professional counselors.” After pointing to the shortage of qualified

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engineers, Hicks identified women as “the richest unused source of engineering ability” and called on the Council to revise the booklet. “It is my belief,” Hicks wrote, “that the Engineers’ Council for Professional Development could make a worthwhile contribution through a special effort to encourage and help young women to analyze their aptitudes and obtain the necessary education to enter engineering.” She concluded her letter by offering to assist the ECPD with revisions and enclosed a copy of the Journal of the Society of Women Engineers.36 After several rounds of follow-up correspondence with Hicks, the ECPD issued a revised version of the publication in 1953. In addition to dropping the word “men” from the title, the booklet (now called Engineering: A Creative Profession) noted recent changes in the field that facilitated the employment of women, namely the move away from strenuous physical labor. The publication also excerpted from one of Hicks’s letters a list of subfields (such as electrical, mechanical, and chemical engineering) that frequently employed women engineers.37 This victory, however, was a limited one for SWE, insofar as references to women remained infrequent and problematic. Even though the ECPD had expanded its discussion of women engineers from one paragraph to three, the revised version took up only one third of one page. Moreover, the booklet featured no pictures of women engineers. While images of male engineers abounded, only three scenes even included women: one depicted a secretary taking notes for her boss, a male engineer; one showcased a hair-netted woman working at a food-processing facility while a male engineer tended to machinery in the background; and the third featured a woman wearing high heels and vacuuming her spotless, modern kitchen above the caption “Today— Engineers’ application of scientific principles have released many of us from daily drudgery.”38 In spite of the ECPD’s meager concessions to Hicks’s remarks, the revised publication reinforced traditional gender roles, upheld the image of engineering as a masculine enterprise, and provided little actual encouragement for women engineers. The scarcity of information on engineering as a career for women led the SWE to conduct a survey of women in the field. The results, SWE believed, would reveal a more nuanced picture of women engineers than could be found in publications such as the ECPD’s. In 1953, new SWE President Lillian Murad announced that the Society had secured the assistance of the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, which agreed to tabulate the survey results.39 Afterward, the Women’s Bureau publicized the findings in its 1954 bulletin, Employment Opportunities for Women in Professional Engineering. Because the survey canvassed women already involved with the SWE or on the Society’s mailing list, its sample set was small and, admittedly, not representative. Conceding these points, the bulletin’s authors nevertheless asserted that the SWE survey yielded important—and otherwise unavailable—information about women engineers. The majority of the respondents were in their late


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twenties and early thirties (the median age was twenty-nine), had attended college, and were employed in full-time jobs. Furthermore, almost half had married and a third of those who had married already had children.40 The survey presented a very different—and much more well-rounded—image of women engineers than the one projected by the ECPD. It provided an overview of successful women in the field, but did not cast women’s success as unusual or extraordinary. The SWE must have viewed the Women’s Bureau as a logical ally, given the Bureau’s historical concern with the employment of women. But the Bureau’s interest in this particular survey and in collaborating with the SWE generally also reflected the growing national anxiety over the possible shortage of engineering personnel. The Women’s Bureau bulletin carrying the survey results contained repeated references to the perceived emergency, including a statement on the cover page from President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Likewise, the first chapter, “Engineering Manpower and Women’s Prospects,” opened with a 1953 quotation from the director of the Office of Defense Mobilization, Arthur S. Flemming, advocating the use of women to ease the engineering shortage.41 The cold war relationship between engineering and national defense, as articulated by these prominent federal officials, supported the Women’s Bureau’s interest in the SWE and facilitated their collaboration. In 1955, the SWE released its own publication, Women in Engineering, which further recast the image of the profession. Intended as a resource for students, teachers, counselors, employers, and SWE members, the forty-page guidebook included a list of scholarships for women, a directory of accredited engineering curricula, prerequisites for engineering programs, statistics on women in the field, and suggestions for further reading. The bulk of the booklet, however, consisted of articles written (and previously presented as conference papers) by members of the Society. One of the five essays, written by mechanical engineer Margaret Ingels, chronicled the lives of thirty-six pioneering women engineers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The short biographies included information about the women’s education, careers, and marital status. This information, as well as the article’s title, “Petticoats and Slide Rules,” highlighted the compatibility of engineering and femininity.42 The other four articles focused more explicitly on the current demand for women engineers. In her essay on “Our Untapped Source of Engineering Talent,” SWE’s first president, Beatrice Hicks, once again invoked the cold war engineering shortage and denounced the “waste of graduating less than 100 women engineers per year in all of the United States.” After detailing contemporary workforce trends, she criticized those organizations (which presumably included the Engineers’ Council for Professional Development) that associated engineering with heavy manual tasks unfit for women. Hicks believed that such outdated and inaccurate advice, “composed ten years ago from the limited

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experiences of one individual,” posed a particular threat when disseminated by an organization “financially able to provide wide distribution for its printed material.” Overall, however, Hicks was optimistic and predicted that because of the shortage and because of the work of the Society, “[women’s] engineering talent will not long remain dormant.”43 Other SWE presidents, namely Katharine Stinson (1953–55) and Lois Graham McDowell (1955–56), called attention to the dire need for improved educational and vocational counseling of women. They also provided concrete suggestions for identifying, advising, and encouraging female students with engineering aptitudes. Like the editors of the Women’s Bureau bulletin, both Stinson and McDowell quoted the director of the Office of Defense Mobilization, Arthur S. Flemming, when relating their concerns to national defense. Stinson pointed to the same 1953 speech referenced by the Women’s Bureau in which Fleming asserted, “There is no question at all but that more women should be enrolled in our engineering schools. This is one of the ways of dealing adequately with the present and potential shortages in this area. Colleges and high schools have got to do a better job of counseling [young women].”44 McDowell cited a U.S. News and World Report interview when Flemming remarked, “[W]e haven’t got a chance in the world of taking care of that deficit of engineers . . . unless we get women headed in the direction of engineering schools.”45 By this point, Flemming had emerged as an outspoken promoter for women engineers and it is hardly surprising that individuals and organizations concerned with the place of women in the field would invoke his authority.46 By using the words of the Office of Defense Mobilization to justify their cause, however, the SWE ascribed to the guidance of female students a sense of urgency and national responsibility. The Society distributed Women in Engineering to colleges, industrial corporations, government committees, engineering societies, and 455 high schools throughout the country.47 The response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Letters poured in thanking the SWE for the booklet, proclaiming its usefulness and requesting additional copies. Among those lauding the publication were high school and college guidance counselors, deans of engineering, the Sperry Rand Corporation, Du Pont, General Motors, the United States Chief for Engineering Education, and the President’s Committee on Education Beyond the High School. Vida Grace Hildyard, the educational counseling chair (and the only female member) of the Wichita Council of Technical Societies, could hardly believe the positive response she received from the men on the council after sharing the booklet and recommending that they pay particular attention to counseling female students. She wrote, “This suggestion was received with enthusiasm far surpassing my wildest expectations. In fact, the men all thought every counselor in each of our members’ societies should have a supply of booklets, so that he might not only have them to pass on to our five high schools and the girls he might be counseling, but also for his own information.


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They requested me to ask if it would be possible to obtain 200 of the booklets at once, and I hope that is only a start!”48 Before long, the demand for the booklet had outrun the supply, and in February 1957 the SWE announced that it would release a revised edition in 1958.49 Most of the work behind Women in Engineering had been conducted by SWE’s Professional Guidance and Education Committee. Established during the 1951/52 year, the Professional Guidance and Education Committee would become one of the primary vehicles through which the SWE carried out its mission. As indicated in its title, the Committee concerned itself exclusively with encouraging female students, working with parents and schools, and educating the public about engineering as a career for women.50 On the national level, the Professional Guidance and Education Committee undertook projects, such as the Women in Engineering booklet, that were aimed at the broad dissemination of educational and vocational information. In 1953, for example, the Committee compiled and distributed a list of coeducational engineering colleges and technical schools. The Cleveland Board of Education’s director of guidance and placement, Mildred Hickman, was so thrilled about receiving the information that, over her spring vacation, she wrote to the SWE requesting additional copies for each of the district’s twelve high schools. The Professional Guidance and Education Committee also created a centralized Speaker’s Bureau, which schools, clubs, and event organizers could contact when looking for someone to speak about women engineers. Additionally, the Committee fielded and directed hundreds of inquiries from students, parents, advisors, educators, and the general public regarding women in engineering.51 The majority of the Committee’s activities, which involved making contact with female students, their parents, their teachers, and their guidance counselors, were carried out at the local level. Recognizing the importance of individual encouragement, a number of these activities sought to further women’s interest in engineering by celebrating and rewarding their academic accomplishments. After securing the necessary information from the University of Detroit Dean of Engineering, for example, members of the Detroit Section’s Professional Guidance and Education Committee wrote letters of commendation to female students with high engineering aptitude scores. The Detroit Section also presented corsages to those high school girls with the highest grades in science and mathematics and recognized them at its annual dinner.52 SWE members across the country regularly judged science fairs in their local communities and awarded female winners with special certificates or prize money.53 In addition to supporting individual women with demonstrated interest and ability, this strategy enabled the SWE to showcase “scientific womanpower.” Many Professional Guidance and Education Committee activities served the dual purpose of calling attention to the engineering shortage and projecting a positive image of women engineers. In April of 1952, the Professional

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Guidance and Education Committee of the SWE’s Pittsburgh Section sponsored a symposium for high school girls, their parents, and student counselors. The Committee mailed notices to about 150 schools within thirty miles of Pittsburgh. Held at the Mellon Institute, the symposium featured addresses by SWE members, as well as representatives from Westinghouse Electric Corporation and the University of Pittsburgh, and covered such topics as “The Engineering Shortage and the Place of Women in the Engineering Field,” “The Success of Prominent Women in Engineering,” and “Why I am Glad I Studied Engineering.” In addition to sharing their experiences and situating themselves as desirable role models, SWE members informed the audience about course requirements and the availability of scholarships. Afterward, the conveners learned with satisfaction that several of the women who attended enrolled in engineering colleges.54 In Detroit, members of the Professional Guidance and Education Committee met with high school counselors from the city’s board of education in March, 1953. At their meeting, SWE members reminded the group about the possible shortage situation and “outlined the role of women in engineering in the present demand for engineers.” After reiterating the purpose of the Society and the Committee, SWE members provided the counselors with a copy of the points covered at their meeting, as well as contact information for the Detroit Section chair. Later in the year, members of the SWE’s Detroit Section worked with one of the high school counselors in preparing a vocational guidance recording to be presented in the local high schools. The question-and-answer program would include several SWE members discussing their experiences in the profession and would further increase the visibility of women engineers.55 The SWE’s Detroit Section also participated regularly in the semi-annual Engineering and Science Vocational Meetings held for local high school students. Sponsored by the Engineering Society of Detroit, the meetings provided students with the opportunity to interact with professionals in the field. While the December meetings targeted seniors contemplating their college plans, the May meetings were geared toward sophomores and juniors “in the hope that it would be possible to reach the students before their high school studies were ended and there was still a chance that they could gain the necessary credits to enter engineering school.” In particular, the May meetings reflected one of SWE’s strongest concerns: the possibility that not enough women pursued engineering in college because they were poorly advised in high school or altogether discouraged from taking those science and math courses required for admission to engineering programs. These meetings provided an avenue for SWE members to provide high school girls with the guidance and encouragement that they might not have otherwise received. Through the 1956 meetings alone, the SWE advised almost fifty “interested girls” in the Detroit area.56 Margaret Eller, a member of SWE’s Detroit Section and chair of the Professional Guidance and Education Committee, later recalled of the gatherings, “That’s how we got girls to go into engineering.”57


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Similar outreach efforts took place across the country. Houston members regularly addressed audiences of high school girls on “Women in Engineering” and “Engineering as a Career for Women.”58 In Los Angeles, Professional Guidance and Education Committee member Marie Scully gave the keynote speech at a 1956 luncheon attended by seventy female students and professionals in the field. That same year, she took part in a half-hour NBC-TV panel show designed to interest high school and college students in technical careers. Additionally, almost all SWE sections participated in the panel discussions held for high school students as part of Engineers Week, which itself was a cold war creation. Established in 1951 by the National Society of Professional Engineers, Engineers Week typically included meetings, public addresses, and proclamations lauding engineers’ contributions to American society (and national defense), lamenting the engineering shortage, and urging the recruitment of bright students to the field. SWE members realized that they were often the first (and perhaps only) female engineers with whom teachers, counselors, parents, and students would come into contact. They also realized their unique, self-imposed responsibility to recast engineering as a suitable field for women. As one member recounted, “No male engineer can really do this job for us—we represent the living, breathing evidence when we go before a high school audience, a PTA meeting, or a counselors’ conference.”59 In addition to making themselves visible examples of successful women in the field, SWE members both understood and articulated the cultural deterrents to women’s engineering achievement. Whether judging science fairs or writing guidance literature, SWE members sought to dismantle these obstacles and encourage female students. Their agenda attracted the most interest and support, however, when couched in the language of national defense.

“Taking Stock of SWE” 60 The national Society of Women Engineers viewed its first decade as a successful one. By 1960, the small group that gathered at Camp Green had grown tenfold. The Society had expanded geographically as well: Its approximately 600 members could be found in sections across the country, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, New York, Washington, DC, Boston, and the Pacific Northwest. The budding organization quickly commanded the attention of other engineering and scientific societies, most of which were significantly older and male dominated. By invitation, the SWE took its place alongside these groups at such events as the 1952 “Centennial of Engineering” and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers that was held three years later. The SWE’s inclusion in these societies signified to its members a certain level of acceptance among their male colleagues. Another milestone occurred at the end of the decade when the SWE

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moved its headquarters to the new United Engineering Center in New York City, a glass and steel tower that housed the offices of the country’s most influential and prestigious engineering societies. “To be included in that group,” one SWE member reflected, “was of tremendous importance to us.”61 These examples of perceived progress existed alongside the reality that SWE members and other female engineers still comprised less than two percent of the profession.62 SWE President Patricia Brown (1961–63) would later remark of the 1952 “Centennial of Engineering” that “we were accepted and yet not quite accepted . . . [W]e were off in our own little group most of the time.”63 The Society’s new office in the United Engineering Center also illustrates the continued marginalization of women in the field. Although SWE shared the same address as the country’s preeminent engineering organizations, it occupied a tiny third-floor office measuring ten feet by twenty feet. Brown only halfjoked when she exclaimed, “Our offices were not as big as one of my bathrooms today!”64 The tenacity of gender conventions and stereotypes proved particularly troublesome for the SWE. From the outset, the SWE recognized that it would not only have to show that women could be engineers, but that engineers could be women (and womanly). While challenging and improving public perceptions of women engineers comprised a critical part of the SWE’s agenda, it also took up more time than the Society probably would have liked. This constant battle was fought on a number of fronts. Sometimes it involved visual cues, such as wearing lipstick, dainty pumps, and figure-flattering frocks. In other instances, it required written or spoken statements proclaiming engineering’s compatibility with womanhood. Several sections even distributed talking points and stock answers to which SWE members could easily refer when addressing anxious audiences. One Professional Guidance and Education Committee document, for example, reminded members to “Assure the girls, and particularly their parents, that engineering is a perfectly respectable occupation for a woman.” Not only is engineering “a nice clean office job,” but “a woman can be an engineer, take time out to raise her family, and return to engineering.” The SWE member who penned this document readily admitted, “Yes, some of these items were written with tongue-in-cheek.” “But,” she added, “take another look. Don’t you agree that these represent questions which need to be answered, parental fears which need to be allayed, self-evident (to us) truths which need to be iterated?”65 In order for the SWE to project a more positive— and more feminine—image of women engineers, it had little choice but to address and often invoke traditional gender conventions. The SWE’s necessary insistence on the compatibility of engineering and womanhood sometimes attracted too much attention. While the Society seemed generally pleased with the growing publicity given to the organization and to women in the field, public interest often focused more on members’ qualifications as women rather than as engineers. In 1952, SWE member Margaret


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Kearney wrote to Beatrice Hicks, “I have detected a note of flippancy in the attitude of the supervising principals who have phoned for program speakers. It is obvious to date that they are interested in knowing whether the engineer is blonde or brunette, rather than if her degree is Chemical or Electrical.”66 Hicks herself also faced similar challenges. Although her feminine qualities provided evidence of the compatibility of womanhood and engineering, they also drew disproportionate attention from the public and the press alike. One news reporter, for instance, even exclaimed, “Honestly, you’d never know it (that she was an engineer) to look at her. . . . She wears flowers and earrings and polkadot linen pumps.”67 Although comments such as these reinforced SWE’s conviction that engineers could be women and that women could be engineers, they also served to belittle women in the field and to cast them as curiosities. Despite these continued obstacles, the SWE felt positive about its accomplishments and hopeful for the future. It measured its success in small, yet significant steps, such as membership growth and increased requests for speakers. Although less tangible, the encouragement provided by members to girls and women in the field also represented an important achievement. As one member recounted, “I know from my own experience that our organization can be of great help to wavering girls who meet with discouragement at home as well as at school.”68 Another member remarked of the Society’s early activities that “We believe that we should be satisfied this year if we do nothing more than increase the knocking on the local college doors by women who indicate increased engineering interests.”69 These early victories, both small and large, were a source of pride for SWE members and set the groundwork for subsequent activities. The Society realized that the road ahead would be a long one, but approached new challenges with enthusiasm and determination. Throughout the 1950s, the SWE’s outlook was very much optimistic and for seemingly good reason. With public praise for female engineers coming from all corners of the country, prospects for women seemed promising and showed little evidence of subsiding, especially in the aftermath of the Soviet Sputniks. The perceived engineering shortage even became something of a rallying cry for women in the field. The SWE membership materials from the mid1950s reminded female engineers that “[t]he critical engineering manpower shortage places upon us a responsibility to see that all young women who are suitable are informed that engineering is open to them, and can be a satisfying and rewarding career. . . . Individually we can accomplish little along these lines, but in a united effort much can be done.”70 The cold war concern with trained personnel also helped the SWE to recruit less likely allies, such as educators, parents, industry representatives, and government bureaucrats. Despite its conservative elements, the cold war drew attention to the SWE’s agenda and ascribed urgency to its cause.71 Moreover, it expanded the Society’s sense of possibility and sustained its activities throughout the postwar period.

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Notes 1. Doris McNulty, “History of SWE” (notes for speech given at the Society of Women Engineers birthday celebration, [ca. 1960]), series 11, The Society of Women Engineers Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University [hereafter SWEC]; Society of Women Engineers, guest list for Second Annual Convention, held May 27 and 28, 1950, series 11, SWEC. 2. Society of Women Engineers, Certificate of Incorporation, February 13, 1952, folder 4, box 1, SWEC. The other primary aim of SWE, as stated in its charter, was “to foster a favorable attitude in industry toward women engineers and to contribute to their professional advancement.” 3. Society of Women Engineers, amendment to certificate of incorporation, June 9, 1960, folder 4, box 1, SWEC; Lydia I. Pickup to SWE Members at Large, [1960], series 8, SWEC. 4. Society of Women Engineers, guest list for “Second Annual Convention,” held May 27 and 28, 1950, series 11, SWEC. 5. Drexel Society of Women Engineers, registration form for “First Conference of Women Engineering Students,” held April 2 and 3, 1949, series 11, SWEC. 6. McNulty, “History of SWE”; Phyllis Evans Miller, “History of the Society of Women Engineers,” [1952], series 11, SWEC; “History of the Society of Women Engineers,” [1950], series 11, SWEC; “Women Engineers Unite,” New York Times, April 4, 1949, p. 21. 7. “Women Engineers Meet at Hotel Edison to Form a Society,” The Woman Engineer 1, no. 1 (May 1949): 1; Mildred Paret, quoted in Marta Navia Kindya, Four Decades of the Society of Women Engineers (New York: Society of Women Engineers, 1990), 11; “Women Engineers Organize,” New York Times, March 8, 1948; Mary Stokes, “Detailed Reply to the 8 Items of Letter 12-5-51,” series 11, SWEC. 8. Kindya, Four Decades, 11; Amy Spear, “The History and Organizational Structure of SWE,” March 1992, 2, series 11, SWEC; Amy Sue Bix, “Supporting Females in a Male Field: Philanthropy for Women’s Engineering Education,” in Women and Philanthropy in Education, ed. Andrea Walton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 320–45; Bix, “From ‘Engineeresses’ to ‘Girl Engineers’ to ‘Good Engineers’: A History of Women’s U.S. Engineering Education,” NWSA Journal 16, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 27–49. 9. Summer Chick Bergen, “Women in Engineering, 1940–1970: Struggle Against the American Gender System” (master’s thesis, University of Houston Clear Lake, 1997), 28. 10. Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 14. 11. Natalie Marie McIntire, “Curtiss-Wright Cadettes: A Case Study of the Effect of the World War II Labor Shortage on Women in Engineering” (master’s thesis, University of Minnesota, 1993), 36. 12. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, 14–15. 13. Ibid., 32; Edna May Turner, “Education of Women for Engineering in the United States, 1885–1952,” (PhD diss., New York University, 1954), 188. 14. Lillian Murad to Katharine Stinson, June 8, 1952, series 11, SWEC.


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15. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, 31–33; Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1982); “Doors Closing for Women Students,” Journal of the American Association of University Women 39 (Spring 1946): 167; Lynn White, Educating Our Daughters (New York: Harper, 1950); Bancroft Beatley, “Another Look at Women’s Education, Journal of Higher Education 22, no. 1 (1951): 9–10, 14–15; Bergen, “Women in Engineering,” 28. 16. Arminta J. Harness, “SWE’s Golden Era: A ‘Do It Ourselves’ Spirit,” U.S. Woman Engineer (January/February 1989): 9. 17. Elsie Eaves, “The Society of Women Engineers, USA, at 25,” May 1976, 1, series 11, SWEC; Miriam Gerla to Mary Stokes, January 3, 1952, series 11, SWEC; Kindya, Four Decades, 9–10; B. K. Krenzer, “Our Greatest Achievement,” U.S. Woman Engineer (January/February 1989): 5–7; Harness, “SWE’s Golden Era: A ‘Do It Ourselves’ Spirit,” 9–10. 18. Gerla to Stokes, January 3, 1952, series 11, SWEC; “Emblem Committee,” Journal of the Society of Women Engineers 2 (September 1951): 9; “Convention Notes,” The Woman Engineer (Summer 1950): 1; Phyllis Evans and Phyllis Diamond, notes from Society of Women Engineers Council Meeting, May 27, 1950, box 1, SWEC. The emblem had actually been designed and used by the Philadelphia group but was adopted as the national emblem at Camp Green. 19. “Hicks, Beatrice A[lice],” in Current Biography Yearbook, ed. Marjorie Dent Candel (New York: H. W. Wilson, Co., 1957), 255–57; Bix, “Hicks, Beatrice Alice,” in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary Completing the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Ware (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2004), 295–97; “Beatrice Hicks, Society’s first president, dies,” SWE Newsletter (November/December 1979): 5. 20. Evans and Diamond, notes from Society of Women Engineers Council Meeting, May 27, 1950, box 1, SWEC; “Second Annual Convention of the Society of Women Engineers,” The Woman Engineer 1 (May 1950): 2; Jane Lancaster, Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth—A Life Beyond “Cheaper by the Dozen” (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 334–35. 21. Kindya, Four Decades, 13. 22. Hicks quoted in “Spotlight,” The Woman Engineer (Summer 1950): 1. 23. Benjamin Fine, “Education in Review: Colleges Plan to Cooperate with Government and Among Themselves in an Emergency,” New York Times, July 30, 1950, p. E9. 24. Malcolm M. Wiley, quoted in “Women Engineers Urged,” The Christian Science Monitor, October 27, 1950, clipping in series 11, SWEC. 25. Nina Hodgson, “Market for Science Majors Up, Demand Outruns the Supply,” Smith College Associated News (October 31, 1950): 1, 6; Kindya, Four Decades, 47. 26. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, 51–52. 27. Frances Perkins to Hilda Edgecomb, February 27, 1951, series 3, SWEC. 28. “Convention Notes: The Effect of the Current Emergency on Women in Engineering,” Journal of the Society of Women Engineers 1 (Spring 1951): 9. 29. Kay Broughton, notes from SWE business meeting, March 10, 1951, series 2, SWEC.

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30. “Women Engineers See Field Widening,” New York Times, March 11, 1951; no title, Journal of the Society of Women Engineers 1 (Spring 1951): 13. 31. Stinson, “President’s Message,” Journal of the Society of Women Engineers 4 (September 1953): 2. 32. Patricia Brown, quoted in Lois Cress, “Women Engineers: We Need More,” Sunday Denver Post (June 16, 1963); Bix, “From ‘Engineeresses’ to ‘Girl Engineers’ to ‘Good Engineers,’” 27–32. 33. Lois G. McDowell, “Professional Guidance and Education,” Journal of the Society of Women Engineers 4 (September 1953): 2–5. 34. Engineers’ Council for Professional Development, Engineering as a Career: A Message to Young Men, Teachers, and Parents (New York: Engineers’ Council for Professional Development, 1942), 18. 35. Beatrice A. Hicks to Engineers’ Council for Professional Development, July 6, 1951, series 8, SWEC. 36. Ibid. 37. Engineers’ Council for Professional Development, Engineering: A Creative Profession (New York: Engineers’ Council for Professional Development, 1953), 27; Hicks to Willis F. Thompson, December 4, 1951, series 8, SWEC. 38. Engineers’ Council for Professional Development, Engineering: A Creative Profession, 3, 4, 22. 39. Murad to “Colleague,” June 17, 1953, series 8, SWEC. 40. United States Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, Professional Engineering: Employment Opportunities for Women (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954), 18–19. 41. Ibid., title page and 1. 42. Margaret Ingels, “Petticoats and Slide Rules,” in Women in Engineering, ed. Patricia L. Brown (New York: Society of Women Engineers, 1955), 11–20. Among those included in Ingels’s essay were Edith Julia Griswold, who, after studying both engineering and law, opened her own office in 1886 and specialized in patent office drawings; Betha Lamme, who earned her degree in engineering in 1893, marking an early first for women engineers; Nora Stanton Blatch, who in 1905 became the first woman to graduate from Cornell University with an engineering degree; Kate Gleason, who joined the American Society of Mechanical Engineers as its first female member in 1914; and Lillian Moller Gilbreth, the pioneering industrial management expert. 43. Hicks, “Our Untapped Source of Engineering Talent,” in Women in Engineering, 2–6. 44. Arthur S. Flemming, quoted in Katharine Stinson, “Some Facts About Engineering as a Career for Women,” in Women in Engineering, 22. 45. Flemming, quoted in McDowell, “Educating Women for Engineering,” in Women in Engineering, 7. 46. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 52–53. 47. Spreadsheet documenting distribution of Women in Engineering, 1956, series 8, SWEC. 48. Vida Grace Hildyard to Brown, October 30, 1955, series 8, SWEC. 49. Gerla, “President’s Report,” SWE Newsletter 3 (February 1957): 3. 50. Hicks, “Annual Report of the President of the Society of Women Engineers, July 1, 1950 to July 1, 1951,” Journal of the Society of Women Engineers 2 (September 1951): 7.


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51. Mildred M. Hickman to Hicks, March 31, 1953, series 4, SWEC; Emma C. Barth, “Report of the Board of Directors to the Membership of the Society of Women Engineers Covering the Period from March 1952 to March 1953,” (report delivered at Annual Convention, March 29, 1953), 2, series 2, SWEC; McDowell, “Professional Guidance and Education,” Journal of the Society of Women Engineers 4 (September 1953): 3; Catherine W. Eiden, “Replies to Questions Asked in U.S. Treasury Dept. Letter of June 16, 1959,” 4, series 3, SWEC. 52. E. Elise Hosten, “Annual Report of the Professional Guidance and Educational Committee for Year 1952–1953: Detroit Section Society of Women Engineers,” 1, folder 2-1, box 2, Society of Women Engineers-Detroit Section, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University. 53. Eiden, “Replies to Questions Asked in U.S. Treasury Dept. Letter of June 16, 1959,” 4, series 3, SWEC. 54. “Activities of the Sections: Pittsburgh Section,” Journal of the Society of Women Engineers 2 (June 1952): 10; McDowell, “Professional Guidance and Education,” Journal of the Society of Women Engineers 4 (September 1953): 2–5. 55. Hosten, “Annual Report of the Professional Guidance and Educational Committee for Year 1952–1953: Detroit Section Society of Women Engineers,” 1, folder 2-1, box 2, Society of Women Engineers-Detroit Section. 56. Maxine V. Janczarek, “Detroit Section PG&E Committee, 1956,” series 8, SWEC. 57. Margaret Eller, interview by Lauren Kata, transcript, June 11, 2003, box 1, Profiles of Women Engineers, SWEC. 58. Houston Section SWE, “Report,” February 1956, series 8, SWEC. 59. Letter from Lydia I. Pickup to SWE Members at Large, [1960], series 8, SWEC. 60. Gerla, “Taking Stock of SWE,” February 27, 1957, series 11, SWEC. 61. Patricia Brown, interview by Lauren Kata, transcript, April 16, 2003, box 1, Profiles of Women Engineers, SWEC; Kindya, Four Decades, 14–18. 62. William F. Ballhaus, “The Challenge of Our Untapped Resources,” (paper presented at the National Conference on Women in Engineering, October 15, 1963), series 12, SWEC. 63. Brown, interview by Kata. 64. Ibid.; Hicks, “SWE Space in the United Engineering Center,” recorded by Aileen Cavanaugh, minutes of membership meeting, June 11, 1960, series 2, SWEC. 65. Letter from Lydia I. Pickup to SWE Members at Large, [1960], series 8, SWEC. 66. Margaret A. Kearney to Hicks, December 10, 1952, series 8, SWEC. 67. Quoted in “Beatrice Hicks, Society’s first president, dies,” SWE Newsletter (November/December 1979): 5. 68. Virginia Tucker to Gerla, December 5, 1957, series 3, SWEC. 69. Kearney to Hicks, December 10, 1952, series 8, SWEC. 70. Dot Merrill, “Membership in the SWE,” [1954], series 6, SWEC. 71. For more on conflicting elements in cold war culture, see Susan M. Hartmann, “Women’s Employment and the Domestic Ideal in the Early Cold War Years,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 86–87.


4 Part II

Expanding Women’s Influence in Politics and Social Refor m Institutions


4

Chapter 4

The National College Equal Suffrage League

Jana Nidiffer

What [could be] more proper than for this body of young women to gather together and discuss woman suffrage with older women. I believed in putting the young to work. —Harriot Stanton Blatch1

Maud Wood Park and Inez Haynes (soon to be Gilmore), Radcliffe class of

1898, asked Alice Stone Blackwell to speak on campus toward the end of their college careers. Both young women became interested in the “woman question” as college students and were dismayed when woman’s suffrage was defeated in an 1895 mock vote in Massachusetts.2 Concerned that their classmates were apathetic or even antagonistic, the young women wondered about student reaction, but Blackwell’s talk was a resounding success. Convinced that college women should not only be educated about suffrage, but that they could and should become important members of the suffrage movement—adding youthful energy and enthusiasm to established suffrage organizations that were “in the doldrums”3—Park and Haynes decided to organize students and recent alumnae around the Boston area. The group they started in 1900 became the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL).4 This new organization was a vehicle through which women students and young alumnae became politically active for woman’s suffrage—which was

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ultimately achieved by the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Although a separate entity, the CESL formally affiliated with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and thus represented the first time that college students were explicitly recruited by an adult political organization, initiating a form of student activism heretofore unseen. Not only did the CESL create a new strategy of political activism for students, it linked alumnae with students and faculty from their alma mater in collective activity. For some, it spurred lifelong democratic participation, as several former, student CESL members continued their democratic commitment through the League of Women Voters as adults. In addition, CESL enabled a small number of female educational leaders to have a national voice on a contemporary issue, an opportunity many of their male counterparts had already experienced. Yet, perhaps because it was fairly short-lived—from 1900 to 1917—or because the number of members represented a relatively small percentage of women students, the CESL has received only scant attention in the history of women’s education, the history of woman’s suffrage, and the history of student activism.

The Suffrage Struggle The history of the women’s movement in the United States is widely told and need not be repeated here;5 however, a few key moments and personalities help

College women march in a suffrage parade as a distinct, recognizable group. Carrie Chapman Catt Collection, Bryn Mawr College Library.

T h e N at i o n a l C o l l e g e E q ua l S u f f r a g e L e a g u e

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place the National College Equal Suffrage League (NCESL) in its proper context. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are generally considered the principal pioneers of the movement because they orchestrated the first, major public demonstration with their famous convention in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York. At the convention, the conservative elements of society were no doubt scandalized by women giving public oratories and the presence of an African American man, Frederick Douglass, on the podium. The convention speakers called for women’s equal rights in voting privileges and education, among other things. Their written demands were laid out in a document modeled after the Declaration of Independence, which Stanton and Anthony called the “Declaration of Sentiments.” At this time in American history, reform-oriented individuals were likely to be both prowoman’s suffrage and antislavery. With the impending Civil War (1861–1865), most abolitionists encouraged suffrage supporters to put their demands on hold so that the country could attend to the larger injustice of slavery. However, ardent suffragists were angered and dismayed when, after the war, there was no real fight in Congress to grant the vote to women, even though the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution granted suffrage to African American males. Sadly, this course of events contributed to racial tensions between white and African American suffragists during the early twentieth century. Because women’s suffrage was not granted until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, the period between the 1870s and the 1910s is often thought of as a time of quiescence in the women’s movement. This depiction is not wholly accurate and a bit East Coast-centric because several states, primarily in the West, granted women full or partial suffrage before the 1910s as a result of the political efforts of suffragists.6 In addition, the two major suffrage parties agreed to put aside philosophical and strategic differences and form one party, the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), in 1890. NAWSA leaders believed that the way to suffrage was to work within individual states until enough states had granted suffrage that Congress would be forced to make it federal law. By 1912 and the election of Woodrow Wilson as president, the interest in suffrage was growing. Two younger, college-educated women, Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, emerged as leaders convinced that NAWSA’s state-by-state strategy was too slow. Paul and Burns wanted to increase pressure on the national government for a Constitutional Amendment. Such a change in strategy eventually caused Paul to separate from NAWSA and form the National Woman’s Party (NWP). NWP members’ determination, political tactics, and unwillingness to let America’s entry into World War I (1917) deter them, proved victorious. The era in which the NAWSA was facilitating political activity at the state level coincided with a growing number of women participating in higher education. By 1890, several women’s colleges were thriving, numerous public institutions were coeducational, (albeit quite reluctantly for many of them), and normal schools were offering aspiring teachers another, distinct educational option.7

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Between 1890 and 1920, women had an increasing presence in the professions, the marketplace, and the political arena, especially, but not exclusively, with respect to suffrage. The rising numbers of women with college degrees interested in suffrage had several consequences. One outcome was a surge of energy, political savvy, and the capacity for even more articulate expression and logical debate into the movement. Another consequence was white, educated, middleclass women resorting to racist tactics8 and appealing to the prejudices of white male voters by asking, “How could white men think that educated white women are less deserving than African American men?” A third consequence was that Maud Wood Park, herself a college-educated suffragist, had the significant, but heretofore untried, idea to bring college students into the movement. Park’s activism at her relatively young age and her desire to encourage activism among other college students was rare for 1900, and still not particularly common within the feminist movement throughout the twentieth century. Historian Leila Rupp found that, in the history of American feminism, it was typically middle-aged or older women who were at the forefront of the movement. She identified two exceptions to this pattern of “white-hot mobilization” moments: first in the late 1910s with Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party activism; and the second in the very early 1970s.9 Thus, the CESL was an important, pioneering women’s organization, politically and educationally, although it was relatively short-lived and involved only a small percentage of mostly elite white women.

Forming the College Equal Suffrage League In 1900, shortly before the upcoming NAWSA convention, a group of collegeeducated women met on Park Street in downtown Boston. They decided, at Maud Wood Park’s urging, that they should organize, not just as women in favor of suffrage but also as college women, per se. Park then attended the NAWSA conference as a delegate and returned to Boston to have a second meeting with twenty-five of her college-educated friends. There, they formed the CESL and drew up a constitution. Park was president; Sarah Cone Bryant was the first vice president; Wellesley professor (and Oberlin graduate) Ellen Hayes, was second vice president; Mabel Adams was treasurer; and Inez Haynes Gilmore, Park’s friend and cofounder, was elected as secretary.10 A Boston newspaper printed an article about this meeting and the new organization. “Regular” membership was limited to women who had studied at least one year in college, but anyone could become an “associate” member (man or woman, graduate or not). Not surprisingly, the article assured readers that these women, although suffragists, were not violating other gender norms: “A pleasant fact is that most of the officers of the new League are remarkable not only for brains but for beauty, and beauty of a distinctly feminine type. There is not a mannishlooking one among them.”11


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The stated purpose of the League was to “promote equal suffrage sentiment among college women, both before and after graduation, and to stimulate interest in the active movement for equal rights.”12 Throughout the seventeen-year history of the CESL, a significant distinction was made between the women who were college-educated alumnae and those who were college students. The term “college women” almost always meant alumnae, while undergraduates were often referred to as students, or occasionally, “college girls.” Thus, the original intent was to organize alumnae to educate students so that when the students graduated, they would be knowledgeable about suffrage and work with their local or state pro-suffrage organization. However, as time passed, the CESL also became an organization through which students became activists while still in college. Park’s reasoning for starting an organization of college women was multifaceted. While a student at Radcliffe, Park remembered that she often thought about suffrage, but that it never occurred to her that there was something to do.13 She wanted the students who came after her to understand that there was plenty to be done. In addition to preparing students to be suffrage workers after graduation, she wanted some societal acknowledgement that educated women were pro-suffrage. She also wanted to see educated women connect to the faculty of their alma maters and unite on- and off-campus women around the suffrage issue. It was important to Park that this connection was made obvious to the public and that in future suffrage parades the college women marched as a unit—much like groups of nurses or teachers did—under a banner with the alma mater’s name, wearing brightly colored sashes identifying each woman with her institution or a CESL ribbon (see Illustration 2). Perhaps Park’s most important reason for creating the CESL was her belief that college women owed something back to the larger society and working for suffrage was an important way to pay this debt. Park referred to this sentiment as the “obligation of opportunity.”14 Park was certainly not alone in her belief that those who benefited from the privilege of education had an obligation to serve. Inez Haynes Gilmore echoed similar thoughts, “Many girls go through college on borrowed money, and afterward honorably repay it. Every young woman now enjoying the advantages of collegiate education, should feel that she is working on borrowed capital—borrowed energy, borrowed courage, borrowed enthusiasm; it was the expenditure of all these by the pioneers that opened to her the possibilities of education, and she ought to feel herself under an honorable obligation to repay the debt by working for the suffrage cause.”15 This theme was reiterated frequently during the Progressive Era by both male and female educators. Harry Burns Hutchins, president of the University of Michigan, gave an address he titled, “The Individual Responsibility of College Women,” in which he stated, “And, first, I beg to suggest that the college woman will always, as a rule, be held by the public to a higher degree of general responsibility than will the woman of more limited training. . . . And all

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Delegate badge for CESL members. Carrie Chapman Catt Collection, Bryn Mawr College Library.

this is in accordance with the doctrine in which I firmly believe, that the college graduate, whether man or woman, owes a duty to the public which can be discharged only by voluntary and conscientious public service of some sort.”16 Vassar professor Lucy Salmon stated in an address at a NAWSA convention that not only did college women owe a debt in general, but a owed a specific debt to the pioneers of the suffrage movement who fought for women’s access to higher education: “College women gained a broader outlook on life because of the likes of Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward Howe.” She described the “natural stages in the development” of college girls and women toward suffrage, “opposition, due to ignorance; rejection, due to conscientious disapproval; indifference, due to preoccupation with their other lines of work; acceptance, due to appreciation of what the work for equal suffrage has accomplished.”17 Her goal was to bring college students to the acceptance stage. For any organization, fund-raising is a task that immediately follows the initial meeting. CESL’s first effort was a common suffrage educational and moneymaking tool—they put on a play. Both Park and Gilmore acted in the play and they raised one hundred and fifty dollars (equivalent to over four thousand 2006 dollars). They also held teas, membership drives, and mailed pledge cards to potential donors. A particularly clever idea was the creation of the Lucy Stone Fund. Stone was the first Massachusetts woman to earn a full college degree and an iconic figure in the early suffrage movement. The CESL solicitation cards


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told donors that their money would be used especially to organize chapters of CESL in colleges admitting women; publish suffrage articles, if possible in college publications; and finance lecturers on suffrage at colleges that admitted women.18 Another aspect of the CESL’s educational mission was refuting the arguments of those opposed to suffrage, colloquially referred to as the “Antis.” A particularly revealing example of the views of the “Antis” and the political tactics of CESL members was published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July, 1908. The article offered four common arguments against suffrage and then systematically refuted them. The assertions put forth by antagonists sound silly to the modern reader, but CESL was dedicated to crafting articulate responses and then educating young women so they could prevail in any debate. The “Antis” four arguments were: Women will not vote when they get the ballot because women do not wish to vote; once the poll habit is formed, the house and children will be neglected; if given the ballot, it will denigrate her character; and, described as “perhaps the truest and most to be dreaded,” when suffrage is granted to women, “the flood-gates of ignorance and folly are opened” in that the “vast majority of women are uninformed, and not informable, on the political subjects, that they cannot be taught to think both clearly and largely, that they will be the followers of the most successful intriguer and ward ‘heeler.’”19 During his tenure as the president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson voiced his anti-suffrage sentiments, arguing that women would not use the ballot even if they had it. In response, CESL members researched women’s participation rates in the West and made the following resolution: “Whereas, Dr. Woodrow Wilson is reported as saying that where women have the ballot very few of them vote; therefore, Resolved, That we call attention to the fact that the Colorado Secretary of State says 80 percent of Colorado women register about 72 per cent. vote, the Wyoming Secretary of State says 90 percent of the women in Wyoming vote, and the Chief Justice of Idaho and all the Justices of the State Supreme Court have signed a statement that the large vote cast by the women established the fact they take a lively interest.”20 Ironically, it would be Woodrow Wilson as President of the United States who signed woman’s suffrage into law. Armed with their educational materials, money for speakers and meetings, and tremendous energy, the CESL members—now calling themselves the CESL of Boston (or sometimes of Massachusetts)—went about getting their message to college students. They first focused on institutions in the immediate vicinity including Radcliffe, Wellesley, Boston University, and Jackson, the women’s college of Tufts University. They encouraged women students to form branches, some of which took names such as the College Equal Suffrage League of Boston University, for example, while other variants appeared as well, such as the Collegiate League, or simply, the Suffrage Club. However the students organized themselves, they could ask the CESL of Boston for assistance and resources.

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Going National After Maud Wood Park and the CESL members spent time helping students organize on campuses in Massachusetts, Park’s attention turned beyond the state. News of the League’s activities spread, especially in New York and then along the East Coast. It is not clear when Park and M. Carey Thomas, the president of Bryn Mawr College, became collaborators, but surviving correspondence between the two women from 1906 to 1908 reveals that they were in agreement about the advantages of establishing a National College Equal Suffrage League (NCESL) that would help organize local and regional leagues and campus chapters all across the country. Thomas organized the first “College Evening” at the NAWSA convention in Baltimore, Maryland in February 1906. Her purpose was to gather all the college women of NAWSA together to talk about their particular concerns, both as intellectual women and as educators of women students.21 In May of that year, Thomas convened an “Executive Committee” comprising herself, Park (who was appointed the secretary) and five other NAWSA members to discuss the issue of educating women students. Thomas also wanted an “advisory” committee comprised of representatives of six to eight women’s colleges. In the first year, however, only Thomas, Mary E. Woolley, president of Mount Holyoke College, and Ellen Pendleton, dean (and future president) of Wellesley, participated. In March of 1907, Park filed her report as secretary of the Executive Committee. She wrote that the first priority of the committee—securing Jane Addams as a speaker on several campuses—did not work out, although social activitist Florence Kelley spoke at Mount Holyoke College. Park conceded that their first-year plans had not gone as they had hoped, but “opportunity opened in unexpected quarters” as “several college meetings have been held and others are being arranged.”22 The “other” meetings were a result of Park’s long hours speaking and organizing. For example, Park spent ten days in November 1907 in Illinois, at the request of the Illinois Suffrage Association, which made the arrangements. Their plans were altered by heavy storms, train delays, and an epidemic of smallpox that closed one of the colleges where Park was scheduled to speak. In total, she visited Northwestern University, University of Chicago, Illinois Normal University, Wesleyan University (of Bloomington, Illinois), Eureka College, Knox College, and Lombard College. At Northwestern, a CESL for students, faculty, and their wives had been organized the previous spring. At the University of Chicago, Illinois Normal University, Wesleyan University, Eureka College, and Lombard College, CESLs were planned in response to Park’s talks.23 In December 1907, M. Carey Thomas wrote to Park, telling her that Thomas, the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw, and other leaders were working out the details of a national version of CESL to be affiliated officially with NAWSA. Park had been living in Seattle, but was in the process of moving


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to San Francisco to help with the state referendum on suffrage in California. Thomas’s letter reiterates that campus chapters were primarily educational, designed to prepare college students for active suffrage work upon graduation. She also wanted to institutionalize the idea of a “College Evening” at each annual NAWSA convention, “You [Park] could arrange to come on and we could regularly organize. Unless we do this, I foresee constant difficulty, because we cannot arrange difficult matters by correspondence, but at Buffalo [site of the 1908 convention] we would have time to talk it out. I really think this is very important.”24 Thomas was very concerned that there was “unity” among all the leagues and wanted to adopt a formal constitution at the convention. The adopted constitution again distinguished between groups for alumnae, which were referred to as Leagues, and campus organizations, which were called Chapters. However, the goal for both groups was the same: to educate college girls and women before and after graduation on the issue of suffrage. The new constitution also specified, in almost agonizing detail, precisely what a campus chapter should do: [H]old at least two public meetings, and if possible, a general address on the subject of women’s suffrage, and for one annual meeting of the Chapter to be held in April or May (the period between April 15th and May 15th is suggested), which a member of the Council of the National League shall be invited to attend. In addition to these two regular meetings, a third public meeting should, whenever possible, be arranged for, to be devoted to a debate on the topic of woman suffrage, a play on the subject, or another address. An important part of the work of College Chapters is to bring to the attention of every member of the student body accurate information and strong arguments on the subject of equal suffrage. . . . Statistical information, suffrage literature of all kinds, and traveling suffrage libraries may be obtained . . . 25

With the National College Equal Suffrage League established as part of NAWSA, Park and others returned to the work of organizing college alumnae in cities and regions, and helping those leagues assist college students with starting campus chapters. Park’s travel and speaking schedule was daunting. In her 1908 report she stated that during December alone, she gave thirty addresses, had two business meetings, thirteen conferences with workers, and seven “Social Functions,” all of which reached 7,764 people in her audiences.26 A subsequent 1912 report detailed her travel itinerary for one month: in Ohio, she went to Cleveland, Columbus, Oberlin, back to Cleveland, Cincinnati, Oxford, and back to Cincinnati. She next went to Kansas where she stopped in Lawrence, Topeka, Manhattan, and Wichita. Then, she journeyed on to Illinois to visit Emporia and Chicago before heading to Wisconsin where she spoke in Madison, Milwaukee, Ripon, Appleton, again in Milwaukee, and Milton. She then returned to Cleveland, followed by a visit to New York City, and then visited her native

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Boston before returning home. All of her traveling was by train and she endured many late or delayed trains because of inclement weather.27

There was Something to D O Maud Wood Park was troubled by how little talk of suffrage there had been during her own college experience and by the perceived indifference of her classmates. She lamented that even when she thought about suffrage, it never occurred to her that there was something she could do. The impetus behind NCESL was to remedy both those experiences for subsequent students. Evidence suggests that on college campuses with CESL chapters or other types of suffrage clubs, students made suffrage an issue difficult to ignore and provided an avenue for students to do something. The amount of suffrage activity on campus was related to a variety of factors. First, the presence of male students was often a deterrent. There is no evidence that all-male institutions had suffrage clubs, although a rather vague reference to an anti-suffrage club at Haverford College, near Bryn Mawr, was found. At institutions with coordinate colleges, such as Radcliffe at Harvard, Jackson at Tufts, Pembroke at Brown, and Barnard at Columbia, the suffrage activity was contained within the women’s colleges. CESL chapters did exist at coeducational institutions, and an early visit by Maud Wood Park to Ann Arbor was revealing. In 1908, Park visited the University of Michigan, often regarded as one of the more supportive coeducational universities for women, especially under president James Angell, who publicly supported women attending the university. Park met with the dean of women, Myra Jordan, who was personally supportive of suffrage,28 but Jordan indicated that, “self-consciousness of women students because of coeducational criticism, would make separate suffrage organization difficult.” Park talked with several others on campus, including President Angell, and summed up her visit in her 1908 NCESL report: “All felt that the situation is very difficult because of coeducational conditions, and of ridicule aroused by reports of suffragette movement in England; they say that it is necessary to have some well-known speaker present our subject before a Chapter can be formed. . . . They want Florence Kelly [sic] who is already known and well liked in Ann Arbor.”29 The level and prominence of suffrage activity was also influenced by institutional type. For example, a recent history of American normal schools revealed that the students believed in women’s capacity to earn a living and be accomplished, professional teachers. Further, the majority of students were “Bloomer women,” as they called the more outspoken or “radical” women who wore the bellowing costume introduced by Amelia Bloomer in lieu of conventional dress. Despite the large number of women students enrolled, and even the smattering of faculty who were vocally pro-suffrage, normal-school students were not feminists in the political sense of agitating for equal rights or suffrage.30 This general trend was corroborated by a 1917–18 annual report of the


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Boston CESL, where the secretary noted that it was difficult to establish chapters at normal schools in Massachusetts, ironically the birthplace of normal school education.31 In addition, there is no evidence to suggest that anyone reached out to any of the fledgling community colleges. Although women’s colleges were an obvious choice, the NCESL list of possible campus visits did not include the new Catholic women’s colleges and the young Spelman and Bethune Colleges that educated primarily African American women.32 In addition to the presence of male students and institutional type, the amount of suffrage activity on campus was influenced by local circumstances, including the local political climate and the level of administrative, especially presidential, support. A comparison of the suffrage activities at the “Seven Sisters” (Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Radcliffe, Vassar, and Wellesley colleges) provides a glimpse at the impact of local conditions. Alumnae of these institutions were quite overrepresented in East Coast suffrage activity, but what transpired on campus was shaped by the local situation and level of support. For example, Barnard (New York, New York) and Radcliffe (Cambridge, Massachusetts) both had male presidents who were rather indifferent to suffrage, but not openly hostile. However, they were located in urban settings rife with suffrage activity. At these colleges the women students were not limited to on-campus activities and participated in both campus and state suffrage organizations.33 Wellesley’s leaders, Caroline Hazard and later Ellen Pendleton, were active in NAWSA and served on the Advisory Committee of the NCESL. Smith College president Laurenus Clark Seelye was generally supportive of suffrage— he allowed an organization and visiting speakers such as Jane Addams—but refused to serve on the NCESL Advisory Committee.34 On both campuses, the student body was generally pro-suffrage, although not by large margins, and students were less likely than Radcliffe and Barnard students to be involved in state or regional organizations. However, both colleges sent representative students to march in the famous 1913 suffrage parade. Held in Washington, DC, on the day of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, the parade had been organized by Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party. The presidents of Mount Holyoke and Bryn Mawr Colleges, Mary E. Woolley and M. Carey Thomas, respectively, were active national leaders in NAWSA and the NCESL. The more conservative political leanings of Mount Holyoke students made the amount of activity on that campus pale in comparison to the swirl of events at Bryn Mawr.35 Students’ experience at Vassar under the presidency of James Monroe Taylor (1886–1914) demonstrated the constraints under which students worked when the administration was openly hostile to suffrage. Taylor refused to allow the students to form a suffrage club, was disdainful of M. Carey Thomas’s invitation to join the Advisory Board of the NCESL, and did not allow pro-suffrage speakers such as Jane Addams on campus.36 Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and 1877

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graduate of Vassar, recalled trying to “speak to the girls” on campus. Blatch had been invited in 1908 by Vassar student Inez Milholland who went on to become an important member of the National Woman’s Party and a “martyr for the movement” because her constant traveling and speaking so taxed her that she died of pernicious anemia in 1916.37 Milholland wanted Blatch’s talk to be on campus, but President Taylor refused permission, and Blatch ended up speaking at a cemetery near the campus. Blatch was very distressed by her experience at her alma mater: “ . . . and what indeed was more important. Here was an educational institution for young women of maturity, only a little under or just over the very age when citizens reach their majority, the age when the State regards its citizens as fit to exercise their right to vote. What [could be] more proper than for this body of young women to gather together and discuss woman suffrage with older women?”38 In 1914 Taylor was replaced as president by Henry Noble MacCracken and the situation on the Vassar campus reversed and welcomed considerable suffrage activity.39 On every campus, the primary activity of CESL members was to raise awareness among other students on the suffrage issue. They used numerous methods to accomplish this task. They made great use of college publications, especially in the women’s colleges, with essays, editorials, short stories, and poems dedicated to suffrage. The students brought in speakers, of national or local renown, they held public debates, and put on plays. Some of these speakers had a powerful impact on the students. Mary Worthington, Bryn Mawr class of 1910, wrote in her diary on May 23, 1907: “Mrs. Park is a very charming looking woman [and] she gave one of the best addresses on the subject that I have heard. She was perfectly sensible, very logical with a great many statistics, not at all violent, very witty, and perfectly charming. We couldn’t have had a better person to interest the college than she.”40 Another speaker in December of 1907 prompted this entry by Worthington, “Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson spoke on the 22nd under the auspices of the College Equal Suffrage League. She looked perfectly charming & spoke with great spirit. The greatest result her speech had on the college was the realization of the necessity for people to take more interest in politics.”41 In 1913 a Mount Holyoke freshman wrote to her mother about hearing a speaker: ”Wednesday night I went to a lecture on Woman’s Suffrage. It was just the kind you would have liked to have heard, no tearing of hair but plain discussion, able enough to almost move stone. We, taking history, were never required to go, therefore we had a cut in history on Thursday. You see some of the history faculty are rank women suffragists, the fighting kind, so that is why we had to go.42 Students also responded to what they heard in campus debates. At Mount Holyoke College Helen King, class of 1909, wrote her mother in April of her senior year, “At debating society last evening we had a debate informal on Woman Suffrage, and then took a vote as to those who favored it and who did


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not and it came out a tie until the president voted which gave it to the affirmative. Dinner bell . . . lots of love as ever, Helen.”43 Young Hortense Hubbard, who was listening to suffrage arguments, but not yet won over, wrote to her parents in April 1915: “Yesterday was “Suffrage Day,” and after chapel a girl dressed in white beat a drum and there was all sorts of signs around about suffrage. On the lawn between the Library and Mary Lyon Chapel they had a table where they distributed papers and tried to get people to join the society up here. Cornelia did, but I didn’t. Late in the afternoon Miss Marks, one of the faculty, went around campus with her dog, a collie, and around his neck was a basket with jonquils in it and they were selling them for the benefit of suffrage. But I wouldn’t buy one, because I am not ready to ally myself with the suffragettes, although I think they had some arguments.”44 The majority of the students’ activist efforts on campus were aimed primarily at their fellow students. Some students simultaneously belonged to their college CESL chapter and local or state suffrage associations, and participated in off-campus events sponsored by the adult group. The most obvious activity was marching in parades. This made their support of suffrage public, but it exposed the young women to ridicule, and upon several occasions, harassment and even attack. Marching could also lead to finding one’s name or photograph in the local newspaper and arousing parental disapproval. It is interesting to note that whatever encouragement women college students, faculty, or administrators received to participate in suffrage came from political organizations, not educational ones. Perhaps the oldest women’s educational organization, the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA, founded in 1881 and renamed the American Association of University Women, AAUW, after a merger with other organizations in 1921), said very little about suffrage in the pages of its journal. In retrospective articles, mostly written in the 1920s, it was mentioned that the ACA came out publicly in favor of suffrage only in 1917, hardly the vanguard. In 1931, cofounder of ACA, Marion Talbot, and her coauthor and fellow former dean of women, Lois Mathews Rosenberry, penned a detailed 450-page history of the ACA-cum-AAUW with a massive index. The book gives no indication that suffrage was discussed much, nor was the relationship of “college women” to suffrage a topic of discussion. In a recent dissertation, the meetings of deans of women between 1903 and 1920 were analyzed. Although there were different groups of women who met under various organizational names, eventually most of them affiliated with the National Association of Deans of Women (NADW), officially begun in 1916. Prior to the formation of the NADW, a 1914 survey was issued to over 100 deans of women, twenty-seven of whom expressed explicit, pro-suffrage leanings; none of the respondents expressed anti-suffrage sentiments. Several deans reported that they were members of some suffrage organization and four were members of CESL specifically.45 While several women worked for suffrage quite

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actively, it is not clear to what degree they did this work on campus, or encouraged their female students’ participation. From the surviving CESL records, it seems that on coeducational campuses—where having a dean of women became de rigueur—the adult CESL members who worked with students were either faculty or, more often, off-campus alumnae.

Having Run Its Course By 1917, the politics of suffrage had changed considerably. The primary strategy of NAWSA had been to win suffrage state-by-state until it was obvious to Congress that suffrage was needed for the entire country. A younger group of women led by Alice Paul—a brilliant, determined, and savvy Bryn Mawr graduate—believed that a more effective strategy was to pressure Congress for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Initially, Paul worked under the auspices of NAWSA in their Washington, DC, office as part of their Congressional Committee, but she grew fatigued by the “old fashion-ness” of the suffrage pioneers who remained a strong presence in the older organization. Concomitantly, NAWSA leaders were put off by Paul’s brashness and confrontational techniques, especially Paul’s flamboyant parade scheduled for early 1913 on the day of Wilson’s inauguration. NAWSA’s president, Carrie Chapman Catt, increasingly distanced herself from Paul’s group. Inevitably, Paul formed a separate suffrage organization later dubbed the National Woman’s Party (NWP). Paul’s strategy was to galvanize all the women voters in the nineteen states that had granted women full or at least presidential suffrage so that they would hold the party in power—the Democrats—responsible for the lack of a federal suffrage amendment and vote them out of office. It was a political strategy that had never been tried by an interest group, and like the march and parades on Washington, DC, set a precedent for subsequent political activists. Several of the younger, more recent alumnae working for suffrage were attracted to the perceived youth and vitality of the NWP, and were less interested in affiliation with NAWSA and therefore the NCESL.46 In late 1916, Paul initiated a long-term silent protest where women stood outside the White House and pressured President Wilson to support suffrage. Often the signs carried by the women used the President’s own words to make their point. With a war raging in Europe, Wilson began to talk about the need for the ideals of democracy to spread worldwide, so the suffrage protesters asked when the ideals of democracy might spread domestically and grant women the right to vote. To put even more pressure on Wilson, Paul organized several “deputations” to the president in March 1917, one of which was led by Elise Hill and represented the NCESL. This was one of the last actions of the League. When the United States entered the World War I in April of 1917,


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NWP members wrestled with whether they should continue their protests and decided to persevere, despite a growing antagonism to their actions. Much has been written about the hyper-patriotism and war hysteria that gripped the country during World War I47 and such attitudes turned the tide of public opinion against the women protesters for being “unpatriotic.” When one sign called the President “Kaiser Wilson,” violence broke out. Paul was determined not to let the war stop the suffrage movement—the way some felt that the Civil War had stopped the first wave—and ordered the protests to continue. Several of the NWP women were arrested and some were jailed. While in prison, Alice Paul led a hunger strike and was eventually force-fed by guards. News of the abusive treatment of these middle-class, white women eventually reached the newspapers and the tide turned again, but this time it turned against the “bullies” of the Washington, DC police. Generally, the press spoke admiringly of the women’s courage and principles and NAWSA members and other pro-suffrage groups aligned themselves behind the NWP strategy. At the 1917 convention, the NAWSA officially disbanded the NCESL so that all women could work in favor of the federal amendment, align with the NWP or state suffrage organizations, or attend to “war work.”48 Two years later, and just months before Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, Carrie Chapman Catt organized a new group, the League of Women Voters, and appointed Maud Wood Park as its first president. Park’s primary goal was to encourage women to stay active politically and to do so “responsibly,” in part a response to anti-suffrage complaints that women would not be “intelligent” voters. Although the NCESL officially closed in 1917, a few local leagues and campus chapters stayed active until suffrage was won. The Boston CESL, for example, encouraged the campus chapters at local colleges to continue with their original goals as well as perform “war work.” In 1919, they published a long list of song parodies to sing at rallies, encouraging states to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment; and in 1920 they voted to close. Their last activity was encouraging women to join the League of Women Voters, and they published a “Manual for Massachusetts Voters” that contained information on the rights and duties of citizenship, a glossary of political terms, and explanations of local, state, and federal government.49 The College Equal Suffrage League was significant in a variety of ways, albeit for a rather small group of mostly privileged, white women. For those women, the CESL proved to be the catalyst for college-educated women to seek political recognition as a discrete, identifiable group. Under the auspices of CESL, some college women were brought into the political fray and demonstrated their political and activist savvy. For the first time, adult political operators openly acknowledged college students as a potential resource and sought to enlist their energies. Through the CESL, students were linked with adult political activists, as well as alumnae and faculty of their colleges, and benefited from a type of role model not often available in the nineteenth century. Perhaps most

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importantly, the CESL made young women aware of an important political issue and encouraged their involvement in the democratic process, not only in college, but throughout their lifetimes. Encouraged by their college experience with suffrage to join the League of Women Voters as graduates, these women fulfilled one of higher education’s most enduring goals: to create students who are lifetime participants in a democratic society.

Notes 1. Harriot Stanton Blatch and Alma Lutz, Challenging Years: The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 108. 2. A recent dissertation by Patricia Marzzacco, “The Obligation of Opportunity: Maud Wood Park, The College Equal Suffrage League, and the Response of Women Students in Massachusetts Colleges, 1900–1920,” Harvard University, 2004, was helpful in some respects. In particular, I found the primary sources consulted for this dissertation quite valuable and used many of the same materials in my research. 3. Marzzacco, “The Obligation of Opportunity,” 7. 4. The author wishes to acknowledge and thank Karen Downing of the University of Michigan for her invaluable contributions to this research. 5. The literature on the American women’s suffrage movement is vast. I found four volumes that provided an overview of the entire movement especially helpful: Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisite, ed. Jean H. Baker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981); and Anne Firor Scott and Andrew MacKay Scott, One Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). 6. As the struggle for woman’s suffrage progressed, different states voted on various proposals granting women either full suffrage—meaning they had the exact same voting rights as men—or some form of partial suffrage—meaning there were some circumstances in which women could vote, but they could not vote in all circumstances. An obvious political compromise, partial suffrage was originally viewed as a victory of sorts, but came to be viewed by later suffragists, especially those in the National Woman’s Party, as troubling. A common example of partial suffrage legislation allowed women to vote in elections for school boards and other educationally related issues on the grounds that women, with their “natural” interests in children, should have a say in school matters. Other localities granted suffrage on taxation or bond issues. Another version of partial suffrage was the ability to vote in the presidential, but not local or state, elections. According to a pamphlet issued by NAWSA in 1918, twenty-two states had some form of school suffrage; six states had suffrage on taxation or bonds; six states granted municipal suffrage; and one state allowed women to vote in primary elections only. Of most concern to the NWP were the


7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

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twelve states that had granted full suffrage and the seven that had granted suffrage for the presidential elections because these nineteen states could vote against President Wilson. Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, Papers of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association [hereafter NAWSA], Library of Congress [hereafter LOC], Washington, DC. For an overview of patterns of enrollment and general issues for women in higher education, see Mabel Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education for American Women (Washington, DC: Zenger Publishing Co., 1959); Jana Nidiffer, “Crumbs from the Boy’s Table: The First Century of Coeducation,” in Women Administrators in Higher Education: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Jana Nidiffer and Carolyn Bashaw (Albany: State University New York Press, 2001), 13–36; and Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). In the national suffrage rhetoric, white women made the argument that if African American men were allowed to vote, then clearly white women should be allowed as well, implying they were socially, politically, and intellectually superior to African American men. In another example, although the African American intelligentsia, such as W. E. B. DuBois and members of the nascent NAACP, were in favor of suffrage, the organizers of the 1913 parade in Washington, DC, did not want African Americans to walk. Two books chronicle the history of African American women and suffrage: African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965, ed. Ann D. Gordon et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997) and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women and the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Students sometimes used the same rhetoric. For example, a Bryn Mawr student (and niece of President Thomas) wrote a play where a woman character states, “They [women] are surely not regarded as citizens of the state, they are classed with children and idiots and in America, placed lower than Negroes as far as making their voices heard in government goes.” Mary Whitall Worthington, “1910,” Private Diaries and Scrapbook, 12-H Small Collections [hereafter HSC], Bryn Mawr College [BMC] Archives, Bryn Mawr, PA. Leila J. Rupp, “Is Feminism the Province of Old (or Middle-Aged) Women?” Journal of Women’s History 12 (Winter 2001): 164–73. College Equal Suffrage League [CESL], untitled newspaper clipping, box 8, reel 32, NAWSA. Untitled newspaper clipping. Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA. Ibid. Emphasis added. Maud Wood Park address reprinted in “The College Evening” of the Thirty-Eighth Annual Convention of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association held in Baltimore, February 8, 1906. Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA. Marzzacco, “The Obligation of Opportunity.” Untitled newspaper clipping, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA. In 1914 Association of Collegiate Alumnae met in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where President Hutchins spoke before the entire group. Harry Burns Hutchins, “The Individual Responsibility of College Women,” Journal of Association of Collegiate Alumnae 7 (April 1914): 45, 48.

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17. Lucy Salmon address reprinted in “The College Evening” of the Thirty-Eighth Annual Convention of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, Baltimore, February 8, 1906, 9, Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA. 18. Untitled newspaper clipping, Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA. 19. Annie R. Ramsey, “Women Suffrage in America,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July 1908, Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA. 20. Ramsey, “Women Suffrage in America.” 21. Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA. 22. “First Report of Special Committee on Equal Suffrage Lectures for College Students,” Maud Wood Park Papers [hereafter MWP], Subject file, Container 7: Boston Equal Suffrage League, March 21, 1907, 2; Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA. 23. Ibid. 24. M. Carey Thomas to Maud Wood Park, December 11, 1907, Container 7, MWP; Boston Equal Suffrage League, Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA. 25. “Constitution of the NCESL.” Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA. 26. “Report, December 7–13, (Inclusive) 1908,” December 1908, Container 9, MWP; Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA. 27. Report of the Work for the NCESL, March 10 to April 10, 1912, Container 9, MWP; Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA. 28. Janice Joyce Gerda, “A History of the Conferences of Deans of Women, 1903–1922,” (Ph.D. diss., Bowling Green State University, 2004). 29. Report, December 7–13, (Inclusive) 1908, Container 9, MWP; Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA. 30. Christine A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: “An Instrument of Great Good” (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). 31. In a 1918 report for the Boston CESL, the secretary noted, “This past year they have tried to keep up with their main objective as well as take on War Work. They kept up with the NCESL chapters of Radcliffe, Wellesley, Jackson, and Boston University, but were not able to start chapters in Normal schools.” CESL of Boston, 1917–18, Report of the Secretary, Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA. 32. Appended to the official constitution of the NCESL was a list of approximately one hundred colleges and universities that were deemed eligible to house a chapter. No obvious normal, two-year, or historically African American colleges were on the list. “Constitution of the NCESL,” Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA. 33. At Radcliffe, for example, the class reunion notes and alumni survey data of members of the campus CESL were examined for comments on their suffrage activity during and after college. Several mentioned belonging to Massachusetts organizations, as well as the Radcliffe chapter. In her book, Harriot Stanton Blatch made occasional comments about Barnard women in the New York organizations. See Harriot Stanton Blatch and Alma Lutz, Challenging Years: The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940). 34. The desired membership and who actually agreed to serve on the advisory board was discussed in correspondence between Park and Thomas. See M. Carey Thomas to MWP, December 11, 1907, Container 7, MWP; Correspondence, box 8, reel 5, NAWSA.


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35. Student publications, Tipyn o’Bob, The Lantern, and the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Quarterly and the student newspaper gave evidence of numerous, sometimes almost weekly, events beginning as early as 1908. Located in Bryn Mawr College Library, Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA. 36. M. Carey Thomas to MWP, December 11, 1907, Container 7, MWP. 37. See Inez Haynes Gillmore, The Story of Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party (Fairfax, VA: Denlinger’s, 1977) and Linda J. Lumsden, Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 38. Blatch and Lutz, Challenging Years, 108. 39. For example, the campus suffrage club began in 1915, having been forbidden under President Taylor. In addition, various volumes of student publications, such as the yearbook and the campus magazine, the Vassar Miscellany Monthly, mention suffrage activity on campus after 1915 and note that earlier, students had to participate in local Poughkeepsie organizations because of the nonexistent on-campus options. 40. May 23, 1907, entry, Private Diaries and Scrapbook of Mary Worthington, Volume IX. HSC. 41. December 7, 1907, entry, Private Diaries and Scrapbook of Mary Worthington, Volume X. 42. Jennie L. Lebourveau “1916,” letter dated April 30, 1913, MS 0814, Series II, folder 5, Mount Holyoke College [MHC] Alumnae Files, MHC Archives, South Hadley, Massachusetts. 43. Helen W. King “1909,” letter dated April 18, 1909, MS 0068 box 1, folder 2. MHC Alumnae Files. 44. Letter dated April 25, 1915, LD 7096.6, folder 6, MHC Alumnae Files, Hortense Hubbard Papers [hereafter HHP], MHC Archives. 45. Gerda, “A History of the Conferences of Deans of Women.” 46. See Gillmore, The Story of Alice Paul; and Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom: The Story of the Militant American Suffragist Movement (New York: Schocken Books, 1976). 47. See, among others, David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Murray Levin, Political Hysteria in America (New York: Basic Books, 1971); Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); and Robert D. Ward, “The Origins and Activities of the National Security League, 1914–1919,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47, no. 1 (1960): 51–65. 48. CESL of Boston, 1917–18 Report of the Secretary and Misc. Maud Wood Park Papers, Subject file, Container 7, Boston Equal Suffrage League. NAWSA Papers. 49. Ibid.


4

Chapter 5

Lat ter-Day Knights College Women, Social Set tlements, and Social Cl ass in the Progressive-Era United States

Emily Mieras

S

peaking to a group of educators in the early 1890s, Wellesley professor, social reformer, and College Settlements Association (CSA) founder Vida Dutton Scudder described the CSA’s work in recruiting college women to social reform: I think it is almost a true generalization to say that no resident who has entered a settlement has ever left it in the same attitude as that in which she entered. The theorizing about problems that perplex us is one thing; but the active effort to help, and the actual presence of those dark problems—the knowing them face to face through personal experience—is quite another thing. . . . Our settlements, I am sure, give exactly the highest and best training that a woman could possibly have to enable her to be of the best service to her day and generation.1

Scudder’s intention was clearly to link social reform and higher education. Noting the potential conflict between “theory” and the “actual,” she identified service as a way of making higher education socially relevant. In so doing, she entered the debate about higher education’s purpose that dominated turn-ofthe-century America, especially for women.2 Indeed, college women continued to face skepticism or outright opposition from social critics, doctors, and even educators who felt a woman’s place was more rightly in the kitchen than the college classroom.3 Implicitly, Scudder addressed another dilemma of her times: the ever-increasing gap between the rich and poor. Because the CSA drew its membership from

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the educated middle-and upper-middle class, it promised to put relatively privileged young women in contact with poor people. College women, Scudder believed, were particularly qualified for such work because of their natural sympathy with the “workers,” their sense of “culture,” and their “willingness for personal service.”4 As such, CSA membership allowed female students to apply the tools of their college experience and culture to test and affirm ideas of class identity. Additionally, their volunteerism was a rite of passage that, as much as social teas, dramatic performances, or book-learning, was a significant part of their college life.

The “Flame of Social Passion”—CSA Origins, Mission, and Philosophy Scudder and her CSA cofounders, Jean Fine and Helen Rand, joined a host of settlement house workers, civic-minded college presidents and professors, and Young Men’s Christian Association leaders in promoting community service. During the Progressive Era, thousands of students participated in such initiatives through settlement house work, Bible studies, and extension classes.5 The CSA, however, was unique in directing its recruitment efforts toward women students, who responded enthusiastically. Students at elite women’s college— including Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Goucher, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley—joined their campus CSA branches and contributed their time and money to four CSA-sponsored settlements: the Rivington Street Settlement in New York City (1889), the College Settlement in Philadelphia (1892), the Denison House in Boston (1892), and Locust Point in Baltimore (1910).6 The CSA served as an umbrella organization for its settlement houses and college chapters, though each house ran independently under its own executive committee, elected by the CSA electoral board. The central organization’s electoral board consisted of representatives from member colleges, as well as two representatives of noncollege members. By 1892, the CSA’s annual report listed at least twenty-one colleges as institutional members and an individual membership of 765, of which 546 were college affiliated.7 College members paid dues of five dollars, revenue that the CSA distributed among its settlement houses.8 Still, the funds were not sufficient to maintain each house. These houses, like their counterparts nationally, had to rely on outside donors. Luckily for the Denison House, it had an avid patron in Cornelia Warren, inheritor of a Boston family’s paper mill fortune and a Wellesley trustee, who donated vast sums of money, as well as the occasional use of her country estate in Waltham.9 The CSA’s early history reveals much about the personal concerns that drove its founders to create the organization. As Scudder recalled, she had returned from a trip to Europe where she had been at once appalled by the poverty,

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inspired by art and culture, and invigorated by the pioneering efforts at social reform in London. A sojourn at Oxford had brought Scudder into contact with social philosopher John Ruskin and his teachings “kindled . . . the flame of social passion.” As she wrote, “Shame had wakened, and an uneasy sense of responsibility; privilege unshared was a fret that would not heal.”10 Ruskin had not only critiqued the materialism and emerging industrial order of nineteenthcentury Britain but emphasized “the organic unity of mankind,” that is, the interrelatedness of human values, the natural world, and economic systems. The measure of wealth, he argued, was human fulfillment.11 Scudder believed that following Ruskin’s calling would help her resolve her own sense of dislocation in the world, a problem that had beleaguered her since childhood. As she recalled, “She was unable to find reality anywhere. The most solid phenomena disappeared as she encountered them.”12 When she accepted a teaching position at Wellesley College two years after returning to the United States, she embarked on a task that seemed convincingly real.13 Soon after, settlement work anchored her even more firmly to a “reality” that she defined in terms of poverty and the societal challenges wrought by immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. Scudder was not alone in seeking “solid phenomena.” The quest for “reality” was an amorphous but deeply troubling problem that preoccupied educated Americans in the late nineteenth century. In these years, Jackson Lears observes, “For the educated bourgeoisie . . . reality itself began to seem problematic. . . . A dread of unreality, a yearning to experience intense ‘real life’ in all its forms—these emotions were difficult to chart but nonetheless pervasive and important.”14 Settlement house work offered one solution for this impulse, teaching another. Women like Scudder found in social service, and sometimes in higher education, productive outlets for their energies and a way to apply their education.15 Significantly, the CSA was born at a reunion of Smith College graduates who, in Scudder’s telling, found inspiration in a pastoral setting appropriate to an enterprise grounded in Ruskinian philosophy. As the women “strolled those wide Connecticut River meadows which are the glory of Northampton” and discussed the work of the British reformers, Scudder recalled, “Suddenly, a Thought flew among us, like a bird coming out of the air; flashing above and around, seen, vanished: Why could not we young women start something of the same kind in our own country?”16 The “thought” did not succeed immediately. Scudder described early despair when money and support seemed unforthcoming. But two years later, the first college settlement opened in New York City; in 1890, the CSA was officially founded.17 The CSA and its affiliate settlements drew from the ideas of the broader settlement house movement that swept the country, resulting in the establishment of over 400 social settlements, as well as a National Federation of Settlements, by 1910.18 One of the best known settlements was the Hull House, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889. Like Scudder, Addams and Starr

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were college graduates seeking to apply their education to societal problems.19 They, too, subscribed to the idea that reformers should adopt an insider’s perspective as “neighbors” so that they could better understand local problems and bridge social class differences.20 In truth, many settlement house workers’ assumptions about race, ethnicity, and class greatly influenced their views of their new neighborhoods.21 Although Scudder upheld Ruskin’s idea of a common humanity, she laid out a schema of racial-ethnic difference that shaped the experiences of her college students. Presaging the responses many students would have to their volunteer work, she emphasized how settlement work taught the diversity and complexity of society: “We no sooner go to live among the poor, or work among them from outside, than we discover that society is composed of an indefinite number of strata, just like the sky when we see it sometimes through layer after layer of clouds.” The actual composition of these strata, however, appeared less flattering when Scudder broke down the categories of race, class, and ethnic identity that characterized the cities where the CSA settlements operated: Our Philadelphia settlement is situated among the colored people, among whom the standard of morality is low; a mixed race, very indolent, out of work often because inefficient and lazy; the idle poor, who correspond with some exactness to the idle rich, at the top of the social scale, the people who have only too much leisure and too much amusement. On the other hand, our New York people have too little leisure and too much hard work. . . . Then here in Boston, we are among a third sort of people. Our settlement is located among the American Irish, the best order of our working population. The people all around us are thoroughly self-respecting, wage-earning people.22

Not surprisingly, student volunteerism at the Denison House in Boston revealed a balancing act between a belief in common humanity and an unconscious reaffirmation of the class-based privilege of higher education.23 Equally important, the college women’s gendered practices reflected a class bias and a contradictory vision of womanhood. Even though many settlement workers had adopted a forward-looking ideal of Progressive womanhood, the activities that the students performed reaffirmed more traditional ideals of femininity. Moreover, even as college students doubly transgressed the boundaries of societal convention—by becoming collegians and second by venturing into city slums—the lessons they taught the poorer women reflected Anglo-Saxon, middle-class domesticity.24 Denison House was typical of such a CSA agenda. It was also the settlement with which Vida Dutton Scudder retained the closest ties. In fact, her proximity at Wellesley made her a frequent participant in its activities and a long-term advisor there. In keeping with its CSA mandate, the Denison House particularly welcomed college graduates as residents, although it did not limit residencies to women with college degrees. Between 1893 and 1918, at least one- to


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three-fourths of its residents were college graduates, generally from nearby Radcliffe or Wellesley.25 At the same time, there were short-term residents from Smith. Its house records indicated persistent participation by female students, although organizers and CSA advocates pressed for even more students to become directly involved.26 In 1906, for example, 160 Radcliffe students belonged to their CSA campus chapter, but only twenty taught at Denison or other settlements. What one Radcliffe magazine characterized as “an unusual amount of interest” in the Denison House was, in fact, only ten students teaching classes weekly and “several others respond[ing] to the call for workers for whom no classes could be found.”27 Although the CSA hoped to attract student workers through their college publications and by sponsoring campus events, such as teas where the likes of Scudder or Denison House headworker Helena Dudley spoke, many students volunteered for only temporary roles, such as settlement entertainers. When they came to Boston’s South End, student volunteers at Denison House crossed class, ethnic, religious, and aesthetic boundaries, and so started their education in “reality.” The Denison House neighborhood was not as poor as some neighborhoods on New York’s Lower East Side or even St. Mary Street where the CSA had established its Philadelphia settlement. Nonetheless, it was a dramatic change for the college students. The Denison House was tucked into the northeast corner of Boston’s South End, which had changed over time from single-family houses to tenements. In the words of an early resident, Tyler Street had been “a rather quiet one, mainly brick dwelling houses, and much superior to the South Cove proper.”28 Crisscrossed by busy streets and train lines, the South End had become a polyglot neighborhood, comprised of tenements and lodging houses, industry, ethnic churches, social reform organizations, and “amusements.”29 Social reformers were especially concerned about the transient residents of lodging houses, usually native-born rural men who had moved to the city, as well as the common practice of families taking boarders into their homes, which they believed fostered immorality. For many immigrant families, however, this was a viable way to maintain ties to one’s homeland and to help newly arrived friends and relatives.30 In Denison House’s cozy rooms and on the South End streets, students encountered residents who were ethnically different from themselves. In the settlement’s early years, many of the residents there were Irish Catholic, a circumstance that may not have exempted them from perceptions of “otherness,” despite Scudder’s earlier tribute to their hard-working nature.31 By 1892, the neighborhood had rapidly diversified to include Jewish, Italian, German, Hungarian, Polish, and Armenian immigrants.32 Over the years, Italian, Greek, and Syrian immigration increased and further transformed the South End. Though Tyler Street had been quiet in the 1890s, residents noted that “not far away [were] very poor and even criminal districts.” In all likelihood, they were referring to the nearby Chinese neighborhood. In the settlement workers’ eyes,

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the neighborhood was now poor, dilapidated, and unsanitary; in fact, few tenements had bathrooms, and there were “no public baths except in the river.”33 The first group of settlement workers identified another problem as well. Many of saloons and “illegal kitchen bar-rooms” sold alcohol, considered the root of most of the “evils of the neighborhood.”34 The Denison House workers’ language suggested that they saw themselves as adventurers in an exotic land. The settlement’s first residents recorded their early neighborhood encounters in Dickensian terms, describing raucous children and drunken men, as well as denizens like the elderly and nearly incapacitated Collins sisters from Nova Scotia: “One is totally blind and can hardly walk. The other has lung trouble but can work a little when it is not too cold. Everything was neat and clean and a friendly visit now and then will cheer their lonely lives.”35 They met “Jennie Roseli, the invalid sister of Mary Roseli, the one-armed flower seller of the Boston and Albany station,” who “adds to the small income her sister earns, by making paper flower, dolls and other fancy articles of paper.”36 And they learned the nuances of the trade in illegal alcohol from Mr. Orr, their local policeman. One man, he told them, “kept a kitchen bar room, and kept liquor under his sink, with a big waste pipe and a false top.” This city world brimmed with new and potentially disturbing experiences. When middle-class, college-educated women entered this world, as Sarah Deutsch points out, they transgressed gendered spatial conventions. In an era when norms placed privileged women in the home or other sheltered environments, settlement volunteers accessed an environment deemed unfit for refined women.37 Students met the Denison House’s needs in several ways. Some supported reform efforts from a distance by becoming members of their CSA campus chapters and paying dues.38 During holidays, the campus group sent gifts to the settlement’s neighborhood children. For example, Smith women sent mittens at Christmas; Wellesley students annually gave “dressed dolls” to neighborhood children. As such, the students played Lady Bountiful to Boston’s poor. Other college women, however, challenged these divisions when they traveled to the city for the day, made longer vacation visits, or moved in for varied periods after graduation. Student workers at the Denison House most often served as cultural ambassadors. Expected to transform their own privileged background into tools for reform, they sought common understandings by sharing cultural practices. Encouraged by their mentors, the students used two forms of culture. Most directly, they brought literature, poetry, drama, and song to the poor. More broadly, their very participation in social reform broke cultural boundaries as they traveled—physically and metaphorically—between two very different worlds. Just as the settlement house itself served as a model of domesticity, students modeled culture and proper behavior for poor and working-class people. Ann Swidler’s view of culture as “a tool kit” of symbols, stories, rituals, and worldviews, which people use in varying configurations to solve different kinds


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of problems,” is useful for making sense of the cultural exchanges between students and city residents.39 The reformers’ rhetoric about bridging class boundaries aside, the content of these cultural exchanges suggested that its benefits were uneven; students reinforced their culture of origin just as the city dwellers with whom they interacted did not fully realize the promises of cultural capital they were offered.40 A student account of the purposes of university settlement work reflected this paradox: “In order to be of any practical use or help to the poor, it was discovered many years ago in England that the helper must go down to the same level with the object of his charity, and then if possible lift that object to his own level.”41 In their participation in Denison House’s clubs, classes, and entertainment, the students promoted the broad purpose of these activities: to teach the basics of keeping a moral, clean, American home; to offer alternative pastimes that would keep children off the streets; and to provide what they and their mentors saw as cultural uplift. When college students sang songs, taught classes, or shared their own experiences with local people, they believed that they were “shar[ing] the better part of life with the men and women of the poor,” as their compatriots in another city put it.42 At the same time, as Scudder stated, settlement workers believed that their own cohort would derive great benefits from learning about the lives of the poor. But students’ education was not only in the people they met, the dirt they encountered on the streets, or the lives of poverty, joblessness, and struggle. Volunteerism proved to be a reflexive act. When students journeyed to the settlement house, they became learners as well as teachers.

“A Very Clever Little Play”— The Tools of Student Reform When the Denison House entertained, South End residents turned out to watch. Whether to seek the settlement’s services, avail themselves of refreshments, or enjoy the settlement’s self-proclaimed wholesome entertainment, they came in large numbers to its comfortable rooms. Whether in a dramatic monologue, group crafts at a holiday party, or a spirited performance of a college alma mater, students presented and performed their collegiate selves for city residents. Metaphorically and literally, dramatics proved a most significant venue for this cultural work. By performing plays, students incorporated their college extracurricula into their social service. To the full-time settlement residents, they were quite the success, earning high praise with, for example, “a very clever little play . . . quite the best thing of the kind that we have had this year.”43 These performances also reinforced a dominant ideal for late-nineteenth-century women: to become refined, cultivated ladies who could enchant an audience. Like the heroines of Victorian novels, the women students could carry a tune, play a part, or strum a banjo. Significantly, within the settlement house, they put those skills to a new use.

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As they imported their college curriculum into the settlement house, students from Radcliffe and Wellesley stretched the boundaries of gender and class identity for their new “neighbors” as well as for themselves. In college dramatics, for example, young women tried on new identities that sometimes meant adopting masculine norms. Helen Horowitz argues that drama was one of many activities that taught women new roles: “In a society in which gender differences attributed aggression, strength, and directness to men, the ‘all-around girl’ of the women’s college learned how to act as a man.”44 At Denison House, women students took their dramatic impulse on the road, performing plays from Shakespeare’s works to Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer to Alcott’s Little Women, as well as music and poetry readings for forty-person audiences at weekly parties. As they led young South Enders in drama, they implicitly encouraged them to cross class boundaries by sharing “college life.” Drama and music were integral to extracurricular life at both Radcliffe and Wellesley, where students prided themselves on demonstrating well-rounded interests: “You may see the same girl playing basketball at an indoor meet who does honor work in history, who on Friday at the Idler Club will figure as an eighteenth-century belle.”45 In fact, a group that performed charades, plays, and other entertainments, the “Idler Club,” was one of Radcliffe’s most popular organizations.46 However, student performers at the settlement houses took this process of identity formation one step further, doubly reworking their roles. They played a part, and they played it on a new stage. In a time when divisions between highbrow and lowbrow culture were more pronounced, such performances had greater cultural implications than students may have realized.47 Certainly drama and theater were not unique to college or even to middleor upper-class society. Dramatics had proved equally popular to working-class Americans, although they preferred popular theatre that often took the form of vaudeville or what settlement workers saw as “trivial” or sensational dramas. Whether or not this was actually the case, settlement workers devoted themselves to installing more valuable entertainment.48 Accordingly, they promoted drama and music that would morally uplift the public and counter the myriad evils that they believed lurked in the saloons, gambling-halls, and even in inappropriate music.49 Student dramatists put the settlement’s artistic philosophy into practice. They embodied Progressive reformers’ belief that through shared experience of art and beauty, human beings of different life experiences would find common ground. Moreover, student plays expressed a specific set of values that modeled ideals of family life and gender roles for audiences but also reflexively reinforced these values for the students who performed them. In a revealing performance of scenes from Little Women, a group of Wellesley students played out the values that college women shared. In February 1894, the Denison House hosted a “large and enthusiastic party” at which “twelve Wellesley girls gave scenes from Little Women, with


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recitations and music.” The event was a great success, according to one settlement house resident who noted that it was “Hard to tell which more delighted—the neighbors or the girls.”50 The “scenes” were based on Louisa May Alcott’s novel (1869), a classic by the time these Wellesley students brought it to life on stage. In the context of a poor city neighborhood, the play became a tool for what Shannon Jackson terms “settlement mimesis,” a process through which settlements workers modeled their vision of ideal behaviors for local people.51 The scenes from Little Women were well suited for modeling domestic values. As a play performed within the broader space of settlement domesticity, it reinforced, writ small, the messages of settlement life itself. Scudder had observed that settlement work was “obviously woman’s work; it has for its very essence the power of home-making; which has always been supposed to be a feminine prerogative.”52 Little Women, no matter its potential subversiveness for gender roles in the rebellious character of Jo March, remained a domestic drama solidly grounded in strict notions of morality, goodness, refinement, and virtue. The March family lived in genteel poverty, clearly distinguished from the poverty of other characters in the book like the Hummels, whose baby had died of scarlet fever and transmitted it to Beth, or the begging Irish children who grabbed Amy’s contraband limes when her teacher made her hurl the fruit from the schoolhouse window. Descendants of a family with social status, the Marches lacked ready cash only because their good-hearted, socially conscious father “lost his property in trying to help an unfortunate friend.”53 The parents, particularly the mother, Marmee, strove to teach their daughters that true riches lay not in money, but in love and good character. In this, their values fell squarely in line with the emphases on sincerity and authenticity that pervaded middle-class life in the mid-nineteenth century.54 For understanding the significance of student settlement dramatics, several aspects of the March family’s values stand out. The domestic world itself was central to their happiness. The family’s life revolved around the home, where the girls worked hard at their tasks, whether schoolwork, sewing, or cleaning. Forays outside often tested their virtue and values. For example, when Meg spent two weeks with her wealthier friends, the experience tried her ability to preserve her own identity in a world full of “fuss and feathers” like pretty dresses and nice boots that her own family could not afford.55 The novel’s thematic focus on young women’s struggles to balance attachments to home and family, with a desire for new experiences, would have resounded with college women, who in their letters home expressed just this sort of conflict. “My life here is going to be very pleasant, I think, though I miss my dear Papa and Mamma more than I can tell,” Mary White Morton wrote.56 “My darling Mother,” wrote Floretta Elmore (1909) of Milwaukee on her mother’s birthday, “I am never so conscious of my limitations as when I try to write you a special letter . . . I didn’t have to leave home to be conscious of all

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it meant to me, but I am impressed more strongly, the more I meet other people intimately, with the marvelous character of the woman whose daughter I happily am.”57 The student thespians at Denison House shared cultural perspectives with Elmore and Morton. Many of the young women who attended Wellesley in this era came from relatively comfortable families; the Alcott story stood as a reminder not to take these comforts for granted.58 Settlement workers would have seen different lessons in Little Women for the South End audiences. The March family’s story presented a lesson in how to accept hardship with grace and humility. That the Marches were far better off than the families the college students met in Boston’s South End was one more disconnection as students sought to find the commonality between themselves and the settlement’s “neighbors.” The March girls enjoyed the very brand of entertainment that settlement workers hoped to promote. Jo, Beth, Meg, and Amy amused themselves as children by putting on plays, romping outdoors, visiting neighbors, or playing with dolls. The March parents, in turn, eschewed alcohol, excessive luxury, and sexual gossip. Middle-class moral exemplars, they modeled their philosophy for those above and below them in class status, transcending the immorality of both luxury and poverty.59 If the performance of the play was itself a moral entertainment, watching the characters at play provided a lesson within the lesson. Finally, the March family dwelling modeled the importance of domesticity, defined in middle-class, Anglo-American terms. In the female world portrayed on stage, the audience also saw a microcosm of the Denison House world. Writ large in the comfortable Denison House gathering room were the gendered values settlement workers hoped to encourage local people to respect.60 With this play, as with others, it reaffirmed drama as a means of self-expression, escape from everyday roles, and good clean fun. It was a lesson that settlement house reformers hoped their neighbors would internalize as they joined the settlement drama associations. Practicing for what would become a career for many women graduates, student volunteers also offered classes at CSA settlements. At Denison House, students taught such subjects as language, literature, travel, art, cooking, and sewing.61 One recent Radcliffe graduate headed the settlement’s evening classes division in 1901. That year, course offerings included Shakespeare, and “a travel class in which England and Scotland are the topics.”62 Students, graduates, and noncollege women often gave informal talks at the settlement about their forays abroad both to places their listeners might never have imagined traveling and to countries that might once have been home. In December 1900, when the settlement offered an evening course on “travel in Italy,” the speaker would have been discussing a place familiar to many of the neighborhood’s new immigrants. Italians had moved into Boston at such a rate that by 1904, the settlement established a “Circolo Italo-Americano” to accommodate


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them and embarked on what residents termed “the Italian work.”63 Student storytellers made a good-faith effort to show appreciation for immigrant South Enders’ countries of origin, a gesture that may have come across as welcoming. On the other hand, for recent immigrants, travel stories heightened the distinctions between speakers and listeners, who most likely had lacked both time and money to be tourists in their native countries. For many full-time settlement house workers travel also meant a break and respite from the emotionally and sometimes physically taxing routine of their work—a break that, of course, their near neighbors could not afford. Denison House headworker and Bryn Mawr graduate Helena Dudley, for one, received a three-month vacation each year during which she usually traveled to Europe (often Italy), sometimes accompanied by Euphemia Mackintosh, the settlement’s associate headworker.64 These trips were surely not funded by Dudley’s salary, no more than six hundred dollars annually during her first years. More than likely, her family’s money helped her support her travel and sustain her chosen career.65 Indeed, as Cindy Aron has noted, European vacation in this era was such a luxury that only people of great means could afford it.66 Students contributed their cultural forms and assumptions as entertainers and teachers, but also as traditional philanthropists. This role was never more public than at Christmas, when college women donated gifts that sustained house celebrations. When Wellesley students created upward of one hundred “dressed dolls” at Christmas time to be distributed to local children, they acted out a distinct ideology of womanhood.67 This gift was repeated by different constituencies over the years, and according to settlement accounts, proved quite popular. One year, a Denison House worker reported, “[Forty-one] present. Children delighted beyond words. All the girls had dolls. Miss Davenport’s boys [had] games and smaller boys books, and all an orange and a stocking of candy. [Vida Dutton Scudder] told them the meanings of the ornaments on the tree; they sang their carols. . . . The children were radiant, each one contented.”68 After such a reception, it made sense that dolls and Christmas parties became standard events at many settlements, as well as convenient ways for college students to participate in settlement work. If dolls were welcome gifts for local children, they were also fraught with middle-class mores and reformist sensibilities. In the late nineteenth century, women doll makers made dolls with the express purpose of creating a toy that would impart morality and middle-class conventions to poor city residents who, the Progressive and reformers believed, sorely needed instruction on hygiene and proper maternal behavior.69 Caring for dolls offered little girls training in self-care as well as motherhood—play that reinforced the lessons learned in settlements’ “Little Mothers” clubs. Dolls, then, marked both a traditional and a progressive gift. Reproducing ideals of beauty, female care, and conventional feminine duties, they bolstered separate spheres values for both the receivers and the givers. However, as Miriam Formanek-Brunell argues, there was

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another side to dolls in the late Victorian era. Women dollmakers, whom Formanek-Brunell terms “material feminists,” created successful businesses aimed at sharing their own reformist ideology.70 They used their craft to promote an assertive vision of a better society—in much the same way as women like Scudder, Dudley, and their student protégés became “municipal mothers”—seeking to better the urban landscape by blending gender conventions with gender upheavals. The dolls that Wellesley women distributed were part of this broader discourse. These playthings were mostly likely the rag dolls that became increasingly popular in this era.71 College students took the time to dress up these simple toys and make them special, combining the subtext of industrious morality with the conventions of style and taste that mattered in their own college culture. Furthermore, the students exhibited their one hundred dolls on the Wellesley campus, charging admission and holding a beauty contest to judge between them. “The vote resulted in a deadlock between a doll in a green empire dress, dressed by Miss Ruth Breenlay, and one dressed in black velvet, by some girl who was too modest to put her name on her exhibit,” a local paper observed. Proceeds from admissions and the accompanying fudge sale helped fund a children’s Christmas party at the House.72 This doll beauty contest, held nearly a decade before the first American national beauty contest for actual women, suggested the importance of women’s self-presentation. On the cusp of an era when outer presentation would displace inner reflection as a measure of selfevaluation, these college women created a gift that both expressed their own understanding of ideal femininity and promoted it for their young recipients.73 The well-dressed toys also modeled good, patient handiwork, refined dress, and proper female occupations for their young recipients. The dolls rounded out the domestic training the settlement offered to young neighborhood girls in classes on childcare, cooking, and housekeeping. How young girls played with these dolls is another story. Even as teaching tools, however, dolls emphasized another important facet of life: leisure time. Just as settlement workers extolled the importance of time for play and leisure, college students made much of recreational time as part of their own formative experience. Dolls, like travel tales, represented leisure time that poor city girls—often occupied with chores, caring for young siblings, or factory work—generally lacked.74 Equally important, by dressing dolls and competing for the finest fancywork, these educated young women asserted their own femininity to an outside world that often feared the masculinizing effects of women’s education.75 In one other way, student volunteers reinscribed the expectations of their feminine role, even as they expanded traditional boundaries by encountering the life of the “other half.” Some students played hostess to poor and working-class city visitors on their pastoral college campuses. At Wellesley, college students and faculty occasionally entertained visiting groups of South End mothers and


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children for day trips that included teas and a row on the campus lake. Bryn Mawr students echoed the practice with visitors from the Philadelphia settlement. CSA members reported: “Last spring some thirty children were invited to come pick flowers. . . . The sight of the children as they marched homeward through the woods, singing and contented, though rendered hardly able to drag one foot after the other by their active day, won many adherents.”76 By allowing the city to penetrate the rural campus, college women countered the image of seclusion and distance associated with higher education. They also joined a host of other reformers who lauded the benefits of the country and “fresh air” as both physically and morally uplifting.77 As college women made their own experiences into tools of social change, they made their school environment the site of reform as well. Settlement workers believed these excursions to Wellesley to be a great success. Certainly, for their guests such outings might have provided a welcome break from city dirt, smells, and heat, especially in the summer. After one outing, a Denison House resident reported, “Pictures, music, lunch, flowers, boating, and pond-lilies seemed to justify the enthusiastic remark of one of the children—‘why seems to me we have everything!’”78 For a few hours, perhaps, these children did have everything, but their possession of such delights was transient.

Legacies of Students’ “Definite Work” Just as the CSA helped teach the values of an educated, privileged life to immigrant, poor, and working-class Americans, the organization taught college women the value of their own education and helped market its importance to the outside world. For some college graduates, including several trained at CSA sites, settlement house work became an avocation. Helena Dudley, the Denison House headworker for more than eighteen years, was in the first class to graduate from Bryn Mawr College. After three years’ work in the sciences, she shifted her professional direction and became headworker of the College Settlement in Philadelphia, where as she put it, “I entered an unknown land, as I had neither practical nor academic training for work among the poor.”79 In 1893, Dudley came to Denison House and left her mark as a strong leader who helped maintain the “family” atmosphere of the house and advocated for labor rights for over twenty years.80 The vociferous opposition to Dudley’s attempts to resign in 1911 suggests the depth of her identification with the House. Dissuaded from leaving by board members and other supporters, Dudley said her decision to remain was financial.81 In 1912, Dudley offered her resignation once more and again, settlement supporters opposed her decision.82 When Dudley did finally resign, the Committee spoke of “fellowship, friendship,” “mutual love, and service,” terms that suggested the extent to which the settlement did indeed operate like a family, based on reciprocal emotional ties.83

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This fellowship was one benefit settlement life offered to sojourners. Women adrift after a college living experience might find at Denison House ties that replicated the close friendships formed in the women’s colleges, away from the competing claims of biological family or romantic attachments.84 Although the college women who had worked at the CSA settlements did not all become nationally prominent like Julia Lathrop and Florence Kelley, or regionally recognized like Dudley, their lives expressed similar tensions between old and new conceptions of female identity. Many of these graduates chose traditional, middle-class, and upper-middle-class paths. They married and became mothers, while maintaining their commitment to community activities. To illustrate, Jane Williams (Wellesley, 1894) taught for a few years, married, raised a son, and volunteered at the Public Heath Nursing Association and Free Kindergarten Board in her area. She also preserved other college interests through membership in “several literary clubs and a dramatic club.” Winifred Augsbury (Wellesley, 1895) married and was remembered as “a member of the active Women’s Club, the College Club, and the Drama Club,” and an “invaluable” member of the Episcopal Church. Elegists recalled her “rare capacity for making friends among the rich and the poor alike.”85 Certainly, Augsbury might have honed that “rare capacity” during her theatrical forays to Denison House, where she played Beth in that performance of Little Women.86 Later in life, she became a social worker at the Connecticut State Farm for Women.87 For college women, then, the CSA offered a chance at a career and volunteerism, and at contributing to what Robyn Muncy terms the “female dominion” in American reform.88 The CSA students and alumnae also helped spur an important shift in higher education: an orientation toward service that would remain part of colleges’ and universities’ missions into the twenty-first century. The spirit of common humanity, however simplified, characterized the learning students drew from this experience. Because it brought college students into contact with a different world, the CSA work required them to face broad philosophical questions. For the first two decades of its existence, the CSA remained extremely active on the campuses it served, drawing thousands of members each year. By 1918, it was reorganized into the Intercollegiate Community Service Association (ICSA). Although emphasizing principles similar to its predecessor, it also focused on “social education” that reflected the influence of sociological study and professionalized social work. The new association continued to offer fellowships for students, encourage student volunteerism, and help fund the CSA settlement houses.89 Vida Scudder’s vision of women student volunteers had been more than realized. Early in the CSA movement, she asserted that more than philanthropy motivated the group. “I think our impulse was quite as much that of the scholar seeking for new subjects of thought, and that of the young life seeking for moral adventure,” she mused. Tellingly applying a male trope to a cadre of


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female activists, she concluded, “The old impulse of knighthood shows itself, I think, in the new impulse to succor the oppressed, to battle against the monsters of crime, suffering, and industrial injustice.”90 Latter-day knights, women collegians, and alumnae had emerged to shape important trends in higher education. Combining a sense of social responsibility with their own purpose as scholars, they rearticulated a middle-class commitment to social reform. In the process, they made higher education the stage for personal and societal transformations as they tested, and sometimes reasserted, the conventions of class and gender identity that shaped their times.

Notes 1. Vida Dutton Scudder, “Speech to the Eastern Kindergarten Association,” box 2, folder 14, 1884–98, Vida Dutton Scudder Papers [hereafter VDS], Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA [hereafter SSC]. 2. On universities’ changing mission and debates over purpose, see Steven Diner, A City and Its Universities: Public Policy in Chicago, 1892–1919 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1980) and Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). 3. Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education; or a Fair Chance for the Girls (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1873); Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), xv–xvi; 3–12. 4. Scudder, “The Relation of College Women to Social Need” (1890), VDS. On related ideas concerning women, education, and service, see Mina Carson, Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement 1885–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 23–26. 5. On Progressive Era student service, see Emily Mieras, “‘A More Perfect Sympathy’: College Students and Social Service 1880–1919” (PhD diss., College of William and Mary, 1998). 6. On CSA early history, see the Annual Reports of the College Settlements Association [hereafter CSA], SSC. See also Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 113–18. 7. Third Annual Report of the CSA, 1892. 8. Information about composition and activities of CSA from College Settlements Association Constitution, VDS. 9. If the fee seemed too hefty, group memberships enabled each young woman to pay only one dollar. Martin A. Green, The Mount Vernon Street Warrens, A Boston Story, 1860–1910 (New York: Scribner’s, 1989); file on Cornelia Lyman Warren, Wellesley College Archives [hereafter WCA]; November 5, 1895, Executive Committee Minutes 1892–99, folder 15, Denison House Papers [hereafter DHP], Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. 10. Scudder, On Journey (New York: Dutton, 1937), 109. 11. John Ruskin, “Ad Valorem,” in The Genius of John Ruskin, Selections from His Writings, ed. John D. Rosenberg (London: Routledge, 1979). See Carson,

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12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

E m i ly M i e r a s Settlement Folk, 1–50, for a broad discussion the antecedents of the American settlement movement in British social thought. Scudder, On Journey, 91, 49. On Scudder’s background and influences, see also Carson, Settlement Folk, 38–41. Scudder, On Journey, 96. On the education of Scudder and her generation of Wellesley professors, see Patricia Palmieri, In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 77–99. T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization,” in The Culture of Consumption, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 6, 10. Works useful in synthesizing the dilemmas of educated women include Joyce Antler, “The Educated Woman and Professionalization: The Struggle for a New Feminine Identity 1890–1920” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1977); Elizabeth Palmer Hutcheson Carrell, “Reflections in a Mirror: The Progressive Woman and the Settlement Experience” (PhD diss., University of Texas-Austin, 1981); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002); and Palmieri, In Adamless Eden. Scudder, On Journey, 110. Ibid., 111–12, 135. On the history of American settlements, see Carson, Settlement Folk; Allen Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914 (New York: Oxford, 1967). Carson, Settlement Folk, 53–58. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 67–76; Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 155–58, 221–24; Carson, Settlement Folk, 1–9, 51–53, 65–68. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 156; Mieras, “A More Perfect Sympathy.” Scudder, “Speech to the Eastern Kindergarten Association,” VDS. Carson, Settlement Folk, 85. Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 11–13. Deutsch discusses women reformers more broadly, but I believe the same conclusion can be applied to student volunteers. Daybooks, Annual Reports. DHP. Denison House Daybooks frequently record the presence of Radcliffe or Wellesley students at House activities. Radcliffe Magazine (December 1905), Radcliffe College Archives [hereafter RCA], Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. CSA Annual Report Excerpts, October 1892, folder 57, DHP. Robert A. Woods, ed., The City Wilderness (Boston: Riverside Press, 1903; repr., Arno, 1970) is an excellent source of period information about the neighborhood, its history, and its problems—albeit from the settlement workers’ perspectives. Woods was head of South End House. See also Deutsch, Women and the City, 7–8, 51, 85–86, 97–98; Spain, How Women Saved the City, 189–91.


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30. Dominic Pacyga, Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880–1922 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 70. 31. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and The Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 48–56. 32. CSA Annual Report 1893, folder 57, DHP. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Denison House Diary, January 11, 1893, box 127, folder 73, DHP. 36. Denison House Daybook, January 20, 1893, box 11, folder 74, DHP. 37. Deutsch, Women and the City, 11–13. 38. College Settlements Association Constitution, box 2, folder 14, VDS. 39. Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies” American Sociological Review 51 (April 1986): 283. 40. My thanks to Richard Lowry for helping me crystallize this interpretation. 41. “The University Settlement Movement,” Haverfordian, January 1893, Haverford College Archives [hereafter HCA], Haverford, PA. 42. “New York Settlements,” Kappa Alpha Theta Journal 17: 4, 269, Kappa Alpha Theta Archives, Indianapolis, IN. 43. Denison House Diary November 1900–February 1908, May 19, 1904, D. H. folder 77, series III, DHP. 44. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 163. 45. “Editorial,” Radcliffe Magazine (June 1899), 2, RCA. 46. Horowitz, Alma Mater, 159, describes the development and increasing importance of the extracurricula in the 1890s. 47. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 48. Arthur C. Holden, The Settlement Idea (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 54; Cathy L. James, “‘Not Merely for the Sake of an Evening’s Entertainment’: The Educational Uses of Theater in Toronto’s Settlement Houses, 1910–1930,” History of Education Quarterly 38 (Fall 1998): 292–97. 49. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-theCentury New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 165–84. 50. Daybook 1893–94, February 8, 1894, folder 75, series III, DHP. 51. Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 53–54. 52. Scudder, “The Relation of College Women to Social Need” (1890), box 2, folder 14, VDS. 53. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (New York: Bantam, 1989), 35. 54. On these concepts, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women. A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). 55. Alcott, Little Women, 79–93. 56. Mary White (Morton) Ziegler to mother, October 5, 1893, Mary White (Morton) Ziegler papers, RCA. Many letters and diaries in the Radcliffe College Archives express these sentiments.

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57. Floretta Elmore to mother, November 21, 1906, Floretta (Elmore) Greeley Papers, RCA; emphasis original. 58. Indeed, for decades some women’s colleges regulated students’ dress, gifts from outside campus, and other such markers of status in order to preserve a focus on character and eschew excessive materialism. See, for example, Hollins College handbooks from this period. Hollins College Archives, Roanoke, VA. 59. Cindy Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 7–10, shows how for middle-class Americans in this period excessive luxury or leisure was as morally suspect as poverty. 60. This argument works for Denison House, a settlement staffed predominantly by women; settlements with male headworkers and residents gave a different message about gender roles. 61. “College Settlements,” Radcliffe Magazine (December 1899), 50, RCA; “CSA,” Radcliffe Magazine (February 1909), 94, RCA. 62. “College Settlements,” Radcliffe Magazine (December 1901), 49, RCA. 63. Handwritten insert, Denison House Diary, 1900–08, folder 77, series III, DHP. 64. Records of the Executive Committee 1892–99, folder 15, series II, DHP. 65. Information on Dudley from Record Group 12 H, Bryn Mawr College Archives [hereafter BMCA], Bryn Mawr, PA. 66. Aron, Working at Play, 10. 67. Denison House Daybook, folder 76, Christmas 1895; folder 76, December 21, 1894, DHP. Denison House records show this gift repeated frequently over the years between the settlement’s opening and the 1910s. Sometimes other collegians, such as Mount Holyoke students, gave dolls as well. 68. Day Book 1893–94, December 23, 1893, folder 75, DHP. 69. Miriam Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 70. Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House, 73. 71. Ibid., 83–84. 72. “Prize Dolls at Wellesley,” n.d., ca. 1913, folder 7, series One, DHP. 73. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997) describes how female conceptions of identity changed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 74. Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 21–37; David I. MacLeod, The Age of the Child: Childhood in America, 1890–1920 (New York: Twayne, 1998), 22–26. These historians document how, by the late nineteenth century, the notion that childhood was a protected time in which special forms of play and leisure time were important to proper development had begun to take hold as a dominant middle-class philosophy of childrearing. 75. These doll competitions were made public in local newspapers. 76. “College Settlements Association,” The Lantern (1897), BMCA. 77. LeRoy Ashby, Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent Children, 1890–1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 3; Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 236–42. 78. Denison House Daybook 1894–97, July 17, 1894, folder 76, DHP. 79. Helena Dudley, Twenty-Five-Year Report, Record Group 12 H, box 12C, BMCA.

L at t e r - D ay K n i g h t s 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

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Ibid., Deutsch, Women and the City, 168–70. Board of Directors Minutes, February 21, 1911, folder 18, DHP. Board of Directors Minutes, January 8, 1912, folder 19, DHP. Ibid. Addams, “The College Woman and The Family Claim,” documents these pressures and asserts the importance of a “social claim.” “Obituary for Winifred Augsbury,” Wellesley College Biographical Files, WCA. Denison House Daybook 1893–94, February 18, 1894, folder 75, DHP. “Augsbury 1942 Biographical Record Questionnaire,” Wellesley College Biographical Files. Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). “Letters from Smith Alumnae Chapter of CSA,” box One, folder 10, Settlements Collection, SSC; Annual Report of ICSA 1921, box One, folder 11, SSC. Scudder, “Speech to the Eastern Kindergarten Association,” SSC. For an insightful analysis of this speech, see Spain, How Women Saved the City, 117.


4

Chapter 6

“ The Worker Must Have Bread, but She Must Have Roses, Too” The Education Programs of the Women’s Trade Union League, 1908–26

Liz Rohan

I

n the summer of 1912, labor activist and Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) member Rose Schneiderman addressed an audience of middle-class women organizing for women’s suffrage in Ohio. “You have nothing that the humblest workers have not a right to have also,” she said. “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.”1 In this speech Schneiderman spoke of the mostly young women entering the formal economy by the thousands and then the millions, indeed, there were over eight million women in the economy by 1910. These women worked cheaply in the newly formed, white-collar professions and occupations as librarians, teachers, and secretaries, as well as as waitresses, hairdressers, servants, farm hands, and boarding house mistresses. However, the majority were unskilled laborers working in the manufacturing sector.2 In fact, Schneiderman, a Jewish immigrant who grew up in a singlemother household, had supported her family as a cap maker after entering the workforce at the age of thirteen.3 Many female workers like Schneiderman supported or helped their families make ends meet, such as the female workers who died in the 1911 New York City Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.4 However, female workers living at home with their parents presumably worked not for a “living wage” like their male counterparts, but for “pin money” before they married and left the labor force.5 Furthermore, newly immigrated, non-English speaking female workers were

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especially vulnerable to exploitation. Working in a Chicago shirtwaist factory in the early 1900s, young Hilda Polacheck overheard her boss say, “Give me the ‘greenhorns’—Italian girls, Polish girls, Jewish girls, who can’t speak English. Girls who have just come from the Old Country don’t know how much they can earn. I make them work hard like the devil. And they work for whatever wages they can get.”6 Not only were these female workers underpaid; they had little choice except to challenge the Victorian ideals of womanhood, which prescribed female labor as that of a wife and mother.7 American-born male craftsmen, who comprised the majority of union membership at the turn of the twentieth century, saw women workers—particularly immigrant, nonskilled women—as threats to their power and their identity.8 The WTUL, described by its members as advancing “the woman’s movement within the labor movement,”9 was an outgrowth of reform activities begun at the Hull House in Chicago. Existing from 1903 until 1950, the WTUL cooperated with the American Federation of Labor, although this relationship was often contentious. WTUL leaders like Schneiderman sought to improve female workers’ lives by constructing both an ideological and material “place” for them as workers through the organization’s programs and rhetoric. She and other leaders encouraged and modeled self-representation, a sense of power via education, and a cross-class, international women’s solidarity. In particular, literacy was a critical prerequisite for promoting women’s equality in the workplace and in American society. This essay examines the League’s educational initiatives during their most productive and influential years, from 1908 to 1926. League leaders developed inventive programs to educate elite reformers, politicians, legislators, employers, male union members, and working women about unions, labor legislation, and gender equity. The League’s earliest educational initiative was developed shortly after organizing an educational committee in 1908: a school for immigrant workers where the benefit of union organizing shaped the content of reading materials for participants. Over the years League leaders continued to sponsor similar English classes. They developed an ongoing lecture series to educate women workers about labor history, labor laws, and options for organizing, as well as designed literature to educate a range of audiences about labor issues. One illustrative strategy for educating workers on labor issues appeared early in the League’s history when organizers surreptitiously advertised a lecture on contemporary and exploitative workplaces as “The Latest Thing in Bargains: An Illustrated Lecture Given by the Misses of New York,” so that their members could attend the talk “under the radar” and not risk their jobs.10 In 1909, the League had four branches in Chicago, Boston, New York, and Saint Louis. By 1919, the League had sixteen branches located in metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles and Denver, as well as in the smaller cities of Springfield, Illinois, and Worcester, Massachusetts.11 League leaders encouraged educational initiatives within these branches via published leaflets, courses

“The Worker Must Have Bread, but She Must Have Roses,Too” 1 2 3

in parliamentary law and debate, public speaking, and a circulating library.12 The League also advocated compulsory schooling for children up to age sixteen, laid out initiatives for vocational training in schools, and fought for the improvement of women’s material lives via protective legislation, such as the eight-hour day and minimum wage standards. They fought for suffrage and later against war as part of their mission to unite women across nations.13 Overall, the League’s rhetoric encouraged solidarity among women across social class lines. Their rhetoric corresponded with its diverse leadership, such as its moneyed supporters or “allies” like Margaret Robins, the League’s national president from 1907 from 1922, as well as former factory workers like Schneiderman. The League’s most ambitious educational endeavor was its Training School for Women Workers in the Labor Movement, based in Chicago from 1914 to 1926. The school, supported by organized labor, enrolled women who might have had no more than a fifth-grade education and put them through a yearlong accelerated higher education program. Its faculty included college instructors from local junior colleges, as well as professors at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. Most of the students, female workers in the industrial trades, were recruited nationwide for their leadership potential by League or labor leaders in the students’ hometown unions. Others came of their own initiative.14 Regardless, they took courses in economics, sociology, English, public speaking, and labor history. For example, a student could take a course in Freshman English at Chicago’s Crane Junior College, a course in “Labor Problems” with Professor Paul Douglas at the University of Chicago, or one in public speaking at the University of Chicago with Professor Bertram Nelson. At the same time, they attended lectures about women in the workplace taught by League leaders.15 In their classes, they learned to write business letters, reports, and articles for the press. Participants also learned about union organizing, and bargaining and administration through a semester of field work. As with many experiments, the League’s training school produced anecdotal examples of success and failure, mostly due to the uneven preparation of their students. At least thirty-three of the forty-four women who trained at the school used their education to continue work in the labor movement.16 Unfortunately, financial and enrollment difficulties led to the school’s demise in 1926. Nonetheless, as the first residential college program in the country, the school became a model for other college and vocational education programs, such as the better-known Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, founded in 1921 in cooperation with the WTUL.17 However, like other female-run movements such as the settlement movement, the WTUL’s goals were absorbed by New Deal legislation in the 1930s.18 The League’s magazine, Life and Labor, published from 1911 until 1922, supplemented its educational programs by advertising and promoting the

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League’s activities via editorials, poems, articles, and short stories. Topics included working women’s lives, developments in the labor movement, and related women’s reform initiatives such as suffrage. Participants in the League’s training school were “ideal” contributors to the magazine, which promoted the League’s goals: that women workers themselves speak to and for women workers. Irish-American, WTUL leader Leonora O’Reilly had urged women workers to write about their experiences in order to educate the public and inspire others, “Write your own stories, girls; tell your own tale, even if you don’t do it in the best English.”19 Testimony by at least one female worker was considered successful for union organizers. Radicalized garment worker Clara Lemlich (Shavelson) made a speech to fellow workers that inspired the famous thirteenweek garment workers’ strike on New York’s Lower East side. Like Shavelson, the twenty thousand workers in this 1909–10 strike were mostly female, Jewish immigrants. Shavelson, like Schneiderman, had worked in factories since a teenager and had been groomed by WTUL leaders.20 Similarly, Swedish-born WTUL member, former factory worker, and union organizer Mary Anderson was able to avert conflict in a mining labor action in a small Illinois town. She, along with WTUL member Agnes Burns, a miner’s daughter, convinced the local sheriff that the miners’ choice to arbitrate for better wages was not only legitimate, but also compelling. After Anderson’s speech the sheriff commented, “If everyone talked like that, there wouldn’t be any trouble!”21

The Women’s Trade Union League Mission The WTUL grew alongside industrialization with increasingly unregulated work places, the influx of female immigrant workers, and the rise of Progressivism, whereby female reformers like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley became involved in labor inequities and the passage of laws to protect workers, particularly children. Kelley became radicalized when her field work in Illinois revealed young children working both in factories that lacked safety regulations and at home through the ubiquitous “home work” sweating system.22 Addams served as vice president of the League during its infancy, helped to launch its initiatives, and had personal relationships with workers turned labor activists like Mary Anderson. As a witness to the effects of industrialization on her Hull House clients, Addams inspired League leaders in a 1905 speech when she asserted, “When we begin to believe that it is quite as respectable for a girl to pack crackers or tend a machine in a mill, as it was for her grandmother to set up a loom in her own home, a beginning will have been made in the right direction.”23 Finally, as the labor movement gained momentum and strikes became commonplace, women were seen as sympathetic and, therefore, effective strikers and activists. As interpreters and leaders for women workers, League leaders also propagandized and modeled a way of life for women workers. In doing so, they acted as “sponsors” of literacy and of social mobility. According to scholar Deborah


Brandt, “Sponsors, who are “[u]sually richer, more knowledgeable and more entrenched than the sponsored . . . nevertheless enter a reciprocal relationship with those they underwrite. [Sponsors] lend their resources or credibility to the sponsored but also stand to gain benefits from their success, whether by direct repayment or, indirectly, by credit of association.”24 Addams and Kelley were examples of such sponsorship. On the whole, the League’s educational programs were integral to its mission and fostered sponsors, who at all levels helped to give voice to working women like Clara Lemlich Shavelson. The League also sponsored its own leaders, such as Schneiderman, who published editorials and articles in Life and Labor and later in its more utilitarian magazine, Life and Labor Bulletin. League leaders, who were mostly volunteers, benefited by “credit of association” as they sought to replicate the leadership of worker-turned-labor-activists like Schneiderman, O’Reilly, and Lemlich. League president Margaret Robins was one obvious sponsor of literacy for WTUL leaders, members, and contributors. Yet even though she financed the publication of Life and Labor, Robins contributed to tension among its leaders about the magazine’s purpose, scope, and audience. In one struggle that theoretically undermined the WTUL’s dedication to cross-class cooperation, the editors of Life and Labor, Alice Henry and Stella Franklin, ironically struggled themselves to make ends meet when putting together the magazine, working long hours for meager pay.25 For League leaders, then, literacy was both “bread and roses.” That is, literacy was not only a precursor to activism, but also indispensable for women and all workers who wanted beauty in their lives and better working conditions, such as shorter hours so they had time to learn. As Robins described the relationship between work and learning at a 1909 conference, “[F]or the public night schools with all the opportunities they offer the immigrant women are of small avail unless all overtime be abolished and the eight-hour day leave time and strength for study.”26 O’Reilly echoed Robins by asserting, “We want a chance to think; and we want leisure in order that we may learn, because we are not living.”27 To O’Reilly, living was learning. The growth of the League’s educational initiatives reflected Robins’s and O’Reilly’s ideal, which promoted a complementary relationship between labor and life, learning and activism, and required WTUL leaders and members to write and speak strategically and persuasively. Of course, time, money, and cooperation by and among the League’s members and clients stalled the full progression of League leaders’ vision as their ambitious projects unfolded over the years.

Earliest Education Programs of the WTUL Concerted attention to educational programs began among national WTUL leaders in 1908 when they organized night English classes for “foreign girls” on the East Side of New York City. In doing so, the WTUL ostensibly competed

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with other sponsors of literacy who shaped the night school culture in metropolitan areas with immigrant populations. Polacheck described one such literacy program at Hull House: “The class met once a week. I not only read the assigned books but every book I could borrow. Dickens, Scott, Thackary, Louisa May Alcott, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, and many others now became my friends. The daily monotony of making cuffs was eased by thinking of these books and looking forward to evenings at Hull House.”28 Ethnic groups themselves organized similar programs like the Educational Alliance, established by assimilated Jewish Americans to “Americanize” newly arrived Jewish immigrants in New York City.29 Jewish immigrant and New York City teenage factory worker Rose Cohen reflected on her experience with a night school English class in her autobiography, “When I came into the class, the lights, the warmth to which I was not used, and the girls reading in a slow monotonous tone, one after another, would soon put me to sleep. Before I dropped off the first night I learned one word, ‘Sometimes.’ It was the longest word on the page and stood out among the rest.”30 Cohen’s contemporary, Anzia Yezierska, who also worked in factories as a young teenager, narrated a similar opportunity in her short story, “How I Found America.” The narrator had been dissatisfied at an immigrant school organized by the board of education. The focus on the reading of English literature was not relevant to Yezierska: “I wanted to find some one that would look on me—myself.”31 The League’s English classes were designed for young factory workers like Cohen, Polacheck, and Yezierska’s fictional characters who worked in the factories and realized the practical and psychological benefit of learning. Materials developed by League leader Violet Pike were published in Life and Labor and distributed as pamphlets sold at the League’s offices in New York and Washington, DC. The materials, titled “New World Lessons for Old World Peoples,” were described in Life and Labor as “[a] series of interesting lessons in trade unionism for young foreign workers who are studying English.” Created to facilitate liaisons between the League and unorganized women, they included a series of essays and stories about the problems young women workers faced, such as making ends meet and dealing with exploitative work conditions.32 Again, the program emphasized the relationship between bread and roses, a quest for material comfort and beauty, but also a sense of power in the world through complicated and mutually informing means and ends that required foremost—literacy. Whether or not League leaders had the best intentions of female workers at heart, as sponsors of literacy they peddled an agenda. “The New World Lessons” constructed a life of bread and roses for women through one means: unionization. One of the “lessons” from the series, a short story, featured Katie, a widow with small children living in a tenement, working at home in conditions that had horrified Florence Kelley when she discovered them in Chicago decades earlier. In a hierarchy of adverse labor conditions, Katie was among the most exploited and isolated. One day, Katie happened upon a woman who told


her about the union. Katie was drawn to the speech of a union worker. Katie’s new friend urged her to be critical of her working conditions and to join the union. Katie thus got a new job and joined the union, and so no longer worked at home. This simple story, written presumably for uneducated readers like Katie, ended with these words: “Now [Katie’s shop] is one of the best shops in the city. There are no home workers. Katie goes home every day at five. Often she does not go to work till nine. She earns enough money to take good care of her children. They are well and happy. Katie is not lonely. All the workers are her friends.” In one of the series’ poems, the narrator represented a woman whose life was transformed by joining the union. Like Katie, the narrator met a friend who urged her to join the union. As with Katie’s story, the poem equated union membership and female solidarity with a better life. When the narrator attended union meetings, “the Union girls [we]re glad to see [her]. They call[ed] [her] sister.”33 Here, joining the union was linked to upward mobility and the acquisition of literacy via union membership. Joining the union also gave the narrator agency through language. As the narrator put it, ‘[The union] gives the girls a chance to say what they think about their trade.’”34 The poem above spoke to the ideals promoted by Anderson in an opening editorial of Life and Labor published a few months earlier: “But the best part of the union is that it makes us think! And we working women have to do something. Long hours, working for barely enough to live on, make it hard to do anything! And the boss knows it. That is why he wants us to work long hours.”35 Other rhetoric in Life and Labor reinforced a relationship between learning, literacy, and activism for working women. In a March 1912 issue of Life and Labor, the editors published a letter by a subscriber identified as “XYZ.” This worker requested a column about how to write business letters. She and her friends presumably understood the link between writing well and gaining power via telling stories about their lives. Yet they were unsure about how to format their letters: “You see most of us left school by the fourth and fifth grades and then we feel awkward and in not knowing exactly how to write.”36 XYZ and her cohorts wanted to write better so they might contact their political representatives, presumably to articulate their opinions about labor conditions in local workplaces. XYZ’s genuine authorship, however, was suspicious considering the swift response to her proposal. The following issue of Life and Labor featured a column by Prudence Goodfaith on how to write business letters. Even though real women like Katie were exploited in the workforce and real women like XYZ lacked education, League leaders learned that ultimately female workers were difficult to organize. Despite the fact that women like Schneiderman supported their own families, the workers themselves often bargained on the possibility that an eventual marriage would rescue them from the workforce. On the other hand, wealthy WTUL leaders like Violet Pike “romanticized” work and could not understand that many working women were

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threatened or uninterested with organized labor.37 A graduate of Vassar College, Violet Pike was a Girl Friday for the League during its formative years. Clearly her authority on women’s workers lived in print, but was not based on actual experience.38 Kate Rye, a Detroit Labor organizer, articulated the conflict between wealthy and independent allies of labor and the laborers themselves when it came to marriage, “Naturally the daughters of the rich, who are besieged by lovers (of their money), look upon the very natural instinct of the working girl to find a good husband as vulgar and silly. Let them change places with her in reality and not as a few days’ slumming experience, and I’ll guarantee that they’ll be as anxious to get out the factory by the marriage route. They would then know the importance of the lover question with the average worker girl.”39 Additionally, League leaders had a hard time selling the identity of the female worker who had autonomy over her choices as a laborer, particularly as a striker. Among Italian immigrants, for example, female workers typically contributed their time and money to a larger family unit. The family worked together to stay afloat financially through a collective effort to achieve financial stability and social mobility. It was somewhat inconceivable for these workers to ally themselves with union “sisters” and abandon family commitments during labor disputes.40 In short, a typical female worker, although vulnerable to exploitation in the workplace, leaned on imagined alliances with a future husband who might rescue her from the workforce altogether, or her nuclear and extended family with whom she had true loyalties and whom she helped support. The small percentage of those who lived alone or women “adrift” (the latter comprising less than 20 percent of the female workforce) were generally not interested in the political commitment of unionization. From necessity, they were more or less consumed with making ends meet.41 Their experiences inevitably represented a silence, a gap in knowledge about the lives of an important minority of working women during the era. Few young women, whether those adrift or in extended families, likely had the privilege of a patient and later radicalized beau like Jim, the boyfriend turned fiancé of the female heroine in Theresa Malkiel’s 1910 novel, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker, a fictional account of a striker during the aforementioned 1909–10 strike. At first, the striking “diarist” dramatically rejects Jim because he does not respect her union activities. Later Jim not only educates himself about unions, he becomes a type of feminist who realizes that his beloved “too [has] to be consulted about some things”42 and then participates in some labor activities himself. The book concludes with the heroine and Jim as romantic partners who are both radicalized labor activists. Malkiel was, in fact, a labor activist. While the fate of the heroine of her novel may have paralleled some aspects of the author’s life, as Sarah Eisenstein points out, organized women “were certainly not typical or representative of all working women.”43 Rose Cohen, for example, was exposed to union ideals, but her experience with unionization was mixed. For a short time she and other female


workers were in the union at one of their factory jobs. Cohen reported the heartening experience of leaving work with the men, as equals, when the whistle blew at 7 p.m. As League leaders imagined, a regular schedule allowed Cohen time to go to night school. But the power of the union did not fully take hold at Cohen’s shop, and she later experienced other labor problems with a tyrant boss and irregular pay at her next job. Later, she assumed better control of her working conditions when attending trade school and, in fact, formed a friendship with League leader O’Reilly. But the real and lasting benefit of Cohen’s affiliation with labor initiatives was the literacy she achieved, not just as a reader, but also as a writer when she used her new-found skills to communicate. Cohen discovered that her ability to write was an “unexpected joy” she credited to her night school studies, “It is to this correspondence that I owe a great deal of what I learned of writing in English.”44 Cohen was by no means a labor activist and was only in a union for a short time. However, her short affiliation with the union ideals of bread and roses—a shorter day and time for study after work—had a lasting, if not permanent, effect on her life as a reader and writer.

The WTUL Training School for Women Workers in the Labor Movement The founding of the WTUL Worker Training School in 1913 marked a shift in the League’s initiatives. Leaders sought change by working for the vote with suffragists, broader educational initiatives, and protective legislation that required cooperation with a range of individuals and groups, not just female workers. Despite their success in labor activities, such as the 1909 New York shirtwaist strike, influential League leaders questioned whether unionization should be the primary focus because women did not have their voting rights as citizens.45 The League’s evolving educational plans showed increased sophistication about the interrelationship between recruiting women to the unions and educating the public at large about labor issues. These plans also paralleled the diverse leadership of the League across class lines and their attempts to “construct” audiences like the fictional worker Katie. A vigilant study of multiple audiences was key to the League’s publicity, a goal described by the League’s educational committee: “So that a housewife doesn’t receive something she won’t read, and a professor is not told facts he has known for years.”46 Furthermore, Robins’s 1913 declaration that, “the best women organizers without question are trade union girls” suggested that allies like Robins themselves had become better educated. They had learned from worker-turnedlabor activists like Schneiderman, O’Reilly, and Anderson that labor leaders are more likely born than made. In effect, the training school was an infrastructure to educate self-made leaders on the job, at night school, and on the picket lines. They learned to give

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speeches, write for the press, and participate at labor meetings. Anderson, for example, had been working at a boot and shoe factory in the early 1900s where she “trained” on labor issues as she discovered the injustice of unregulated overtime. After this experience, she made contacts with Addams and Robins, became a union organizer, and then a League administrator. As with other League leaders, working was Anderson’s education, and this experience became fodder for persuasion as a publicist for labor issues. “In later years,” she wrote of her early exposure to the issue of overtime, “I was to spend much effort on demonstrating the fact that greater production does not always result from longer hours.”47 In turn, the leaders trained at the WTUL school communicated the knowledge they gained as workers in their own communities and in their Chicago field work. Female labor leaders obviously needed to be competent in more than basic literacy. They had to communicate to a range of audiences by employing a range of literate practices. As such, the women took courses in writing reports and bookkeeping, as well as in writing for the press, and in particular, for Life and Labor. Although the goals and structure of the school were unique, the school was inspired by labor initiatives of the Workers Education Association in the United Kingdom. This Association established similar programs with universities in England and Wales so that workers could gain field experience while taking college courses. By choosing workers as students and immersing these students in experiences as labor activists, League leaders emphasized the interrelationship between theory and practice, and between bread and roses. Leaders assumed that trained labor organizers would not use their education for mere selfimprovement and social mobility but would, like Anderson, use it for the greater good. As Robins put it, “make them sense their responsibility to their own group of fellow workers.”48 The students chosen for the school were, like Anderson, unmarried and in their twenties, past the age when the average female worker had left the workforce after getting married.49 Chosen by local labor leadership in their respective communities, like Malhiel’s diarist, these potential labor activists likely had the freedom to pursue ambitions beyond contributing to a family economy. The structure of the year-long accelerated program reflected other observations by League leaders about the relationship and competition between learning and working. The program was designed to fit with the reality that a working woman had little time and money for schooling. Alice Henry, a formative WTUL leader, editor of the League’s magazine and eventual director of the school, was critical of the inflexible higher education system with professors who “pass lightly over the provision made for short courses, summer schools, extension, or correspondence work.”50 Robins imagined ideal educational programs for workers as sabbaticals from the work-a-day world. In her estimation, night schools were invariably flawed because workers “were so often tired after


their day’s work.”51 When founding the school, League leaders distinguished their program from the standard American curricula. As they wrote in one of their publications, “In all other schools teachers do nothing but teach; students are young and easily graded into classes; and the curriculum can be taught out of a few textbooks or in a few laboratories. The Labor Movement imposes peculiar conditions.”52 One of the “peculiar conditions” was that labor leadership required experiential learning, especially since leadership from the “ally” or elite perspective was limited. As a result, League leaders plucked their students from a world in which a higher education was likely an abstract, if imagined, fantasy. As field workers, these women would be exposed in school to avenues of power, such as attending the fortnightly meetings of the Chicago Federation of Labor, sitting in on court when strikers were arrested, or when labor action necessitated litigation. Generally the classes of students at the training school were small. The WTUL not only had to secure scholarships for the students, but had to find them places to live in local boarding houses, extra rooms of allies and local settlement homes, and even the teachers’ own quarters.53 Despite the class size, students came from diverse backgrounds. Among the ten members of the “class of 1916” were Sabie Kosabuski, a Polish immigrant and pottery worker from Trenton, New Jersey; Florence Addesska, a candy worker from Boston; Leona Baker, a boot and shoe maker, also from Boston; Lily Brozstek, a glove worker from Chicago; Dora Lipshitz, a ladies waist and dress maker from Philadelphia; and Agnes Burns from Murphy, Illinois.54 Burns, the miner’s daughter, had been an instrumental partner with Anderson when interpreting labor issues for the small-town Illinois sheriff. A schoolteacher as well, she had learned about the school when reading the family’s Mine Workers’ Journal. Already possessing the literacy skills needed to publicize and interpret labor issues, Burns hit the ground running upon her arrival to the school. She published an article in Life and Labor about her experiences as a student at the University of Chicago. At the yearly WTUL national convention in New York City, she made a speech about women who worked in the semirural world of mining. Burns’s rhetoric represented an ideal WTUL vision as articulated by Robins. At the national convention, Burns acted as an “interpreter” of working-women’s conditions in semirural work places to urban labor leaders and allies who might not have known about these work experiences. Also espousing Robins’s vision that a worker trained at the school would use her education to uplift women in her home communities, Burns testified that her affiliation with WTUL “sent [her] back into [her] little world with a larger, a clearer, and richer vision.”55 However, the strength and uniqueness of the WTUL training school was also its weakness. By recruiting students for their leadership potential, regardless of their educational aptitude, students came to the school unevenly prepared. This was a problem because trained labor leaders needed to be

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particularly literate to communicate well. A lack of basic skills as readers, writers, and speakers held some of the students back from full participation in scholastics and field work during their tenure at the school. Some workers, like Burns, came prepared to be organizers. Others had little grammar or high school training. As a result, some students spent more time working on their literacy skills than on academic work and organizing. After several years of running the training school, WTUL leaders acknowledged these challenges. As sponsors of literacy, they asserted, “Girls have come from all over the East and the Middle West. Some have been of long-back American descent, and others of foreign birth and training. With these latter, helping them to acquire a thorough knowledge of English, spoken and written, makes one of the most immediate claims upon the staff, for is there anything more time-consuming than the acquirement of a language.”56 Consequently, this arm of the curriculum was individualized as instructors sought to meet students’ educational needs and, in effect, taught them how to learn.57 League leaders organized curriculum and content for the students based on their abilities. The economic and history coursework was individualized as well, even though students took many of the same courses. School leaders reportedly did not use textbooks as a rule because of the unevenness of their student groups.58 The uneven preparation of the school’s “class of 1916” was most obvious in their English classes. The better the women’s literacy skills, the more time they had for field work, and, most likely, for their coursework. To illustrate, Addesska, the candy worker from Boston, was assigned general field work at the Chicago Federation and Women’s Trade Union League meetings. As she took classes in economics, modern radicalism, and oral composition, she was also working with a private tutor to learn some basic writing skills such as spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure. She practiced writing an “account of her life,” while reading and summarizing short stories.59 For Baker, the boot and shoemaker from Boston, field work included assisting with a local Felt Workers’ strike. Like Addesska, Baker worked on basic writing skills with a tutor.60 Brozstek, the glove worker from Chicago, may have come to the school with more advanced skills and likely more experience in the labor movement. Perhaps as a local, she was able to take advantage of the school’s extension program. In Brozstek’s case, she took thirty-nine private lessons in English, including practice writing original articles. Brozstek’s field work was also more demanding as she worked with Anderson, organizing five different strikes and attending at least fifty-five union meetings.61 Lipshitz, the shirtwaist and dressmaker, was reasonably prepared academically and vocationally when she arrived at the school. She worked with a tutor to outline, summarize, and write original articles. Her field work was a veritable full-time job during a local shirtwaist and dressmakers’ strike. She organized women workers to strike and also served as chairman of the Information, Strike, and Strike Relief Committees.62 Burns, in contrast to all of her 1916 classmates, had only a few lessons in writing articles before her field work with WTUL executive duties intervened.


Likely Burns did not need much tutoring in English, evidence that those workers with literacy skills were more easily put to work as students and field workers.63 Burns was certainly an exceptional student, but her smooth mobility in the program was one more example of a WTUL goal: grooming leaders for whom speaking and writing well were integral to effective activism. Despite their uneven preparation, students reportedly flourished in the school. Students enrolled during the 1923/24 school year, for example, collectively excelled in their studies, particularly in their English class. Their first papers with grades of “D” turned to “B’s” and “A’s.” So, too, did Paul Douglas, a professor of Labor Relations at the University of Chicago, report similar progress among unprepared students. Of his two students, Kathleen Derr and Bella Casper, who had weak preparation compared to college students in his course, he wrote “[T]hey have, I believe, developed during the course, and are able to develop their points more cogently and efficiently than when they began.” Douglas also claimed that Derr’s and Caspar’s work and field experiences “enlivened the subject for the other students” because of their “first-hand knowledge.”64 Later, Douglas and Derr cowrote an article using Derr’s research on the minimum wage in Canada that was published in the Journal of Political Economy.65 Douglas, as an “ally” of women’s labor who rallied against the sexism of the “family wage,”66 claimed that Derr’s research was “an argument for workers’ education . . . done by a girl who left school early and had scant advantages afterwards.”67 Derr, a Canadian, was among the WTUL graduates who used her training as a labor organizer in her country.68 The successful recruitment of labor organizers like Burns and the remarkable progress of workers like Derr were reasons why the WTUL leaders decided to close the school in 1926. Additionally, with the League financially strained, its leaders ascertained that to some extent they had achieved their goals and had trained many successful labor activists who could interpret and promote labor issues to multiple audiences. Lastly, it had become harder to recruit students. In the end, the League’s goals for women’s rights in general and in the workplace specifically were ironically undermined by suffrage. By 1926, it had become more difficult to find women like Burns who would sacrifice their newly won freedoms for a rigorous education and the demanding life of a feminist activist.69 In a reflective 1929 article about the League’s twenty-five-year history, Schneiderman—by that time WTUL president—cited the influence of the WTUL school even three years after its closing. At least 78 percent of the school’s graduates were embedded in the labor movement as leaders. Moreover, the school inspired other worker education programs like the Bryn Mawr Summer School. This school, in turn, inspired the establishment of more labor school, such as the Southern Summer School for Women Workers in Industry and the Wisconsin University Summer School.70 The League sponsored literacy learning in the proliferating programs and groups inspired by the WTUL leadership. Schneiderman imagined an exponential expansion of the

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WTUL message through the rhetoric produced by those educated by the WTUL leaders and steeped in its principles. As she wrote: “And for every [WTUL] leaflet printed have been dozens, often hundreds of meetings—mass meetings, street corner meetings, women’s clubs, shop committees, women’s unions, unorganized girls, addressed on subjects dealt with in the pamphlets.”71 In this thoughtful assessment of the League’s purpose and scope, Schneiderman, like many WTUL leaders, emphasized the importance of literate endeavors among the labor leaders. The proliferation of literacy via the League’s initiatives demonstrated a crucial relationship between bread and roses. Clearly, the League’s emphasis on literacy benefited not only the leaders but the workers themselves. A pamphlet produced by the WTUL in 1929 about the problems of organizing reflected the maturity of the woman-run American labor movement described by Schneiderman in her speech that year. It outlined the complexities of organizing and educating workers and allies. The methods for organizing that the pamphlet highlighted paralleled those of the worker training school. Leaders recognized the need for women workers to be good speakers and writers in order to tailor their rhetoric to “particular audiences.” The workers also had to be sensitive to women’s reluctance, or even inability, to attend meetings with men, meetings that were “held in places women don’t want to go.” Labor activists needed to be good communicators and writers because they had to interpret labor conditions to workers who lacked a broad perspective about labor history and labor legislation. Labor activists had to write special columns in newspapers, as well as “human interest” stories. To do so, labor activists had to study their audiences in order to better reach them. The League’s rhetoric in this pamphlet also suggested a changing female audience. Labor leaders needed to “appeal to the flapper,” who presumably was more interested in partying than picketing. Overall, the goals of WTUL leadership remained to win “support with clear statements of aims and purposes which meet present day needs” and to show “consideration for the public good, including interests of workers.”72 For League leaders, literacy stimulated positive change and potentially transformed lives.

The End of the WTUL and also Contemporary Contexts The closing of its worker training school in 1926 foreshadowed the League’s weakened influence during the 1930s and 1940s, the fate of many women-run, Progressive-era organizations. There were at least two reasons for this. First, the work that women had performed in associations like the WTUL and the settlements was absorbed into government agencies and New Deal programs. Second, in the 1920s and 1930s, women who ran volunteer organizations were able to draw upon women’s status as citizens, not simply as women. Thus, the


League’s astute attention to a particular female audience would not have resonated with female workers—like the flappers perhaps—as it would have decades before. Leaders of volunteer associations, such as the League, could also count on a better-informed and educated populace as more Americans completed their high school and college education.73 Even though the League’s role in the labor movement and its power had generally been marginalized when it ceased all programming in 1950, thenPresident Elizabeth Christman emphasized the League’s accomplishments in bringing about needed change. Among the League’s accomplishments, she claimed, was its success in leading two long-standing initiatives: labor education for working women, and “interpreting” the problems of wage earning women to the general public.74 By 1950, other changes fought for by League leaders were taken-for-granted realities. The forty-hour week and the minimum wage had become standard. Workers had the right to organize and legislation had eliminated the sweatshop conditions and child labor that had so horrified allies and educated workers alike in early twentieth-century industrial America.75 Aside from this progress, developments in the labor movement today suggest a revised and ongoing need for better-educated citizens and workers about labor issues. Within the garment industry in recent years, working conditions in some factories actually resemble those of nineteenth-century sweatshops as garment manufacturers commonly violate minimum-wage, child-labor, and industrial-homework laws, among others.76 Immigrants are again vulnerable in today’s workforce. Child labor is common in the agricultural industry, where it is not atypical for children of illegal immigrants and migrant workers to work alongside their parents.77 Meanwhile, union membership has dipped dramatically in the past ten years, from 20.1 percent in 1983 to 12.8 percent in 2005.78 Some workers in the hotel industry, many of them recent immigrants and women, see unionization as the only way to gain the rights and respect they need for a better life.79 As a result of these and similar developments shaping the experiences of workers in America, leaders and scholars of the labor movement realize that troubling working conditions have to still be addressed and the needs of workers better articulated.80 The current labor movement arguably needs leaders like those trained by the WTUL—informed, articulate labor activists who lead through their words and through their example. They need leaders who can interpret the significant realities of workers’ lives to workers themselves and to the public. As history repeats itself in the world of labor, the WTUL’s programs might not be just more history, but rather a blueprint for an American labor movement in search of resurrection and inspiration.

Notes 1. Rose Schneiderman, Life and Labor 2 (September 1912): 288. The magazine started publication the winter of 1911.

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2. For example, Catherine Bose estimated that 10 percent of working women in 1910 held white-collar jobs as bookkeepers or secretaries, 35 percent worked in manufacturing jobs, and 24 percent in domestic service. Seventy-six to eighty-four percent reported participation in other work. This was a likely indication that these women took in boarders. Women in 1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 38–39. 3. Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 32–36. 4. Elizabeth Dutcher, “Budgets of the Triangle Fire Victims,” Life and Labor 2 (September 1913): 265–67. Dutcher figured that among the 146 people who died in the fire, most of them were women. At least fifteen of them gave practically all of their earnings to their families; nineteen provided more than half of the family’s income, including three who supported their husbands; twenty-one sent money home to their families overseas; and twenty-one supported themselves entirely, living on their own in New York City. 5. Martha May, “The Historical Problem of the Family Wage,” Feminist Studies 8 (Summer 1982): 399–423. May described this conflict as it related to the inauguration of the Ford family wage, or the five-dollar day, which in part “linked the needs of production with family structure.” Ford did not hire women workers unless they were heads of households. 6. Quoted in Hilda Satt Polacheck, I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1991), 63. 7. Sarah Eisenstein estimated that by 1910, nearly eight million women were in the workforce. Give Us Bread but Give Us Roses (New York: Routledge, 1983), 16. Jane Bernard Powers points out that not only were more women working, but their increased presence in the workforce was dramatic. Between 1890 and 1910, the percentage of women in clerical, mechanical, and manufacturing jobs had increased by 200 percent. The Girl Question in Education (London: Falmer Press, 1983), 10. Bose, too, argued that 1900 was a transformative year, marking an epoch shift in work patterns. However, some of women’s participation in the workforce was uncountable in the census since many women worked in the “informal economy” by, for example, taking in boarders and taking care of children. Women in 1900, 1–8. 8. Nancy Schrom Dye, As Equals and As Sisters (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980), 13. 9. 1924 WTUL Proceedings, reel 1, Papers of the Women’s Trade Union League and Its Principal Leaders [hereafter WTUL] (Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1981). 10. “Secretary’s Report to the [WTUL] Board September 25, 1912,” Minutes and Reports, 1905–12, Records of the New York WTUL, reel 1, WTUL. 11. Mary T. Waggaman, “National Women’s Trade Union League of America: Establishment and Growth,” Historical Files, reel 1, WTUL. 12. Fifth Biennial Convention of the Women’s Trade Union League [1915], reel 1, WTUL, 29–32. 13. The goals and initiatives of the WTUL were listed on each edition of the Life and Labor Bulletin from 1922 through 1932.

“The Worker Must Have Bread, but She Must Have Roses,Too” 1 3 7 14. Fifth Biennial Convention of The National Women’s Trade Union League of America, reel 1, WTUL, 59. 15. Ninth Biennial Convention: The National Women’s Trade Union League of America, reel 1, WTUL, 21. 16. Elizabeth Payne describes the school as such: “The first residential college program for workers in America, it became the prototype of other institutes organized in the 1920s by colleges and labor organizations.” Reform, Labor, and Feminism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 59. Among the advisory committee for the League school was Lillian Herstein, who also taught at the Bryn Mawr Summer School. League leader Agnes Nestor was assistant director for the 1922/23 school year. 1924 Proceedings: Ninth Annual Convention, reel 1, WTUL, 24–25. Alice Henry was also a lecturer for the Bryn Mawr school. Diane Kirkby, Alice Henry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 179. In a 1929 article, Rose Schneiderman cited League members as leaders who inspired the Bryn Mawr Summer School and cited the establishment of three other unnamed schools. ”Twenty-Five Years with the Women’s Trade Union League,” Life and Labor Bulletin 12, no. 7 (May 1929): 1–3. One of these schools discussed by Schneiderman was the Wisconsin University Summer School. As advertised in the Life and Labor Bulletin, working women who attended this school were offered scholarships and trained as labor leaders. “Wisconsin University Summer School,” Life and Labor Bulletin 5 (April 1927): 4. 17. Robin Miller Jacoby, “The Women’s Trade Union League,” The Women’s Trade Union League and Its Principal Leaders: Guide of the Microfilm Edition, ed. Edward James, Robin Miller Jacoby, and Nancy Schrom Dye (Woodbridge: Research Publications, 1981), 27. 18. Payne, Reform, Labor, and Feminism, 2–3. 19. Second Biennial Convention of the Women’s Trade Union League of America [1909], reel 1, WTUL, 33. 20. Orleck, Common Sense, 61–63. 21. Mary Winslow, Woman at Work: The Autobiography of Mary Anderson as Told by Mary Winslow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951), 57. 22. “I Arrived at Hull House, . . . [and] Discovered the Sweating System,” in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 4th ed., ed. Linda Kerber and Jane Serron De Hard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 49–78. Excerpted from “I Go to Work,” by Florence Kelley, in Survey 58, no. 5 (June 1, 1927): 271–74. 23. Quoted in Schneiderman, “Twenty-Five Years,” 1. 24. Deborah Brandt, Literacy in American Lives (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 16. 25. Diane Kirkby, “Class, Gender and the Perils of Philanthropy,” Journal of Women’s History 4 (Fall 1992): 36–51. 26. Second Biennial Convention, reel 1, WTUL, 6. 27. Ibid., 26. 28. Polacheck, I Came a Stranger, 67. 29. Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 87. 30. Rose Cohen, Out of the Shadow (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 127.

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31. Anzia Yezierska, “How I Found America,” in American Jewish Fiction, ed. Gerald Shapiro (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 1, 16–37. 32. The materials were advertised as such in the June 1912 issue of Life and Labor. 33. “Story—What Katie Did,” Life and Labor 2 (February 1912): 50. 34. Violet Pike, “New World Lessons for Old World Peoples,” Life and Labor 2 (February 1912): 48–49. 35. Life and Labor 1 (June 1911): 1. 36. Life and Labor 1 (March 1911): 160. 37. Dye, As Equals, 56. 38. David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 64. Von Drehle described Pike and her involvement with the League as such: “Pike was a familiar face at the magistrate’s court, keeping an eye on the proceedings and paying strikers’ fines with WTUL money. On other days she did other tasks, even toting sandwich boards up and down city blocks, advertising the grievances of the workers [at the Triangle shirt factory].” 39. Quoted in Eisenstein, Give Us Bread, 144. 40. Dye, As Equals, 110. 41. Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 42. Theresa Serber Malkiel, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker (New York: Socialists Literature Company, 1910), 37. 43. Eisenstein, Give Us Bread, 16. Nan Enstad argues furthermore that working women during this era had alterative resources for their identity formation other than that provided by labor leaders. They, for example, “used popular culture as a resource to lay claim to dignified identities as workers, sometimes from the very terms used by others to degrade them. In addition, when working women went on strike, they utilized the subjectivities and languages they developed through popular culture practices to claim formal political status.” Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 13. 44. Cohen, Out of the Shadow, 296. 45. Dye points out that this shift in priorities was not uncontested among WTUL leaders. The League’s secretary, Helen Marot, for example, resigned in part because of this shift in focus away from union organizing and toward broader activist programs. As Equals, 128. 46. National Women’s Trade Union League Department of Education, reel 1, WTUL, 5. These undated notes outline several educational initiatives and problems League leaders faced when enacting their plans. 47. Winslow, Women at Work, 26. 48. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift, 5. 49. Payne, Reform, Labor, and Feminism, 56. 50. Alice Henry, The Trade Union Woman (New York: Appleton, 1915). 51. Fifth Biennial Conference of the National Trade Union of America [1915], reel 1, WTUL, 60. 52. National Women’s Trade Union League Department of Education, reel 1, WTUL, 1. 53. Sixth Biennial Convention of the National Women’s Trade Union League [1917], reel 1, WTUL, 55–57.

“The Worker Must Have Bread, but She Must Have Roses,Too” 1 3 9 54. “To Miss Emma Steghagen,” reel 1, WTUL, 3. 55. “At the League’s Training School,” Life and Labor 5 (March 1916): 38–40. 56. Part of Robins’s speech at the third biennial convention was quoted and put in context in a report, “Educational Work of the National Women’s Trade Union League [1922],” reel 1, WTUL. 57. In an article, the author quoted students at the school, who said that the program was too short and wished for a second term: “It is so wonderful. We have learned now how to study.” “School for Grownups,” Life and Labor Bulletin 3 (April 1925): 3. 58. National Women’s Trade Union League Department of Education, reel 1, WTUL, 2. 59. “Florence Addesska,” reel 1, WTUL. 60. “Leona Baker,” reel 1, WTUL. 61. “Lilly Brozstek,” reel 1, WTUL. 62. “Dora Lipshitz,” reel 1, WTUL. 63. “Agnes Burns,” reel 1, WTUL. 64. “Extracts from Reports of Professor Douglas and Professor Nelson,” reel 1, WTUL. 65. Alice Henry, “Report of Educational Department [1922],” reel 1, WTUL, 5. Indeed, Derry is first author on this article, “The Minimum Wage in Canada,” Journal of Political Economy 30 (April 1922): 155–88. 66. “Family Allowances,” Life and Labor Bulletin 3 (February 1925): 3. 67. Henry, “Report,” 5. 68. Ibid. 69. Patricia Hill argues, for example, that in the 1920s the “popularization of Freudian theory” encouraged American women to be “wife-companions,” a role that had “no public dimensions attached to it.” She theorized that this ideological shift, along with an increasingly secular culture, accounted for a dramatic rejection of missionary work among American women post-suffrage. The World Their Household (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 174. Female-run mission work had previously been the most popular female-run service work at the turn of the twentieth century, according to Hill, Their World, 1. Arguably, some WTUL members were missionaries of sorts, if secular ones. A woman like Mary Anderson, for example, veritably gave up her private life for labor activism. 70. Schneiderman was not specific about which summer schools in particular were inspired by WTUL programs. However, I surmise that two of the schools were the Wisconsin Summer School and the Southern Summer School, as described in the Life and Labor Bulletin. Each school’s described aims were identical to those of the WTUL worker training school. Moreover, members of the League’s Richmond, Virginia branch were leaders of the Southern Summer School for Women Workers in Industry. “Southern Summer School,” Life and Labor Bulletin 7, no. 63 (June 1928), 2. 71. Schneiderman, “Twenty-Five Years,” 2. 72. How to Organize a Problem: Resume of Findings—One Day Institute on Trade Union Organizing. The National Women’s Trade Union League [1929], WTUL. 73. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 97.

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“Trade Union Group for Women Ends,” New York Times, June 15, 1950, p. A38. Dye, As Equals, 166. Marvin J. Levine, Children for Hire (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 139–49. Ibid., 147–49. “Union Members Summary,“ January 27, 2005. Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm. 79. Margaret Zamudio, “Alienation and Resistance: New Possibilities for WorkingClass Formation, Social Justice 31, no. 3 (2004): 72. 80. David Bacon, “Labor Needs Radical Vision,” Colorlines 8, no. 3 (2005): 6.

4

Part III

“Uplifting the Race”


4

Chapter 7

The Student Y WCA Intersections of Gender, Religion, and Race, 1915–25

Sharlene Voogd Cochrane

T

he Student Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), an organization that was present on numerous college campuses throughout the early twentieth century, made significant contributions to women’s education at both predominantly black and predominantly white institutions. Women who were active in the Student YWCA found familiar social guidelines and expectations while experiencing new opportunities for leadership and social action. In addition, the Student YWCA offered the possibility of interracial alliances between blacks and whites at a time when most organizations for women were strictly segregated. The intersections of gender, religion, and race that characterized the Student YWCA made this leadership development and interracial experience possible. The first and most obvious characteristic was gender because the Student YWCA was an organization for and administered by college women. Young women developed programming; learned about budgets, public speaking, and group dynamics; and promoted and reported on events. They undertook negotiations with National YWCA leaders and attended various regional and national conferences. The values emphasized in the practices and programs of the Student YWCA often supported traditional views of appropriate female behavior. At the same time, they provided for roles and visions that challenged these views. A second characteristic of the Student YWCA was its grounding in evangelical Protestantism. This tradition emphasized bringing people to Christ, converting peers, and going into mission fields to bring religion to the unchurched

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across the globe. As the emphasis on conversion was replaced by a more active social gospel, the women’s religious values compelled them to engage in their communities in new ways. The emphasis on personal responsibility, traditional social values, and missionary work meant the young women could focus much of their energy and idealism in YWCA work and community service as appropriate concerns. A third characteristic of the Student YWCA was a commitment by many members to confront the racial divides in their communities and schools. While the organization was not totally successful and took a gradualist approach, it nonetheless moved more intentionally to bridge the races than most other women’s organizations. There were possibilities for interracial experience and learning, and occasionally, true alliances. This study of the Student YWCA explores the experiences of women in two different college settings: Lucy Miller at Talladega College in Alabama, and Hazel Stockdale at Grinnell College in Iowa.1 These seemingly disconnected sites provide examples of how the structure and processes of the Student YWCA at very different campuses led to the development of women’s leadership, the strong influence of the social gospel, and interracial alliance building. Miller’s and Stockdale’s experiences suggest a rich weave of connections, specific instances that point to the contributions of this association and its place within the larger web of women’s organizations during the early twentieth century. I explore these relationships by first looking at the Student and National YWCA organizations, especially their attitudes toward race. I then turn to Miller and Stockdale and the Student YWCA on their campuses and provide some conclusions about the contributions the Student YWCA made to women’s education. I will consider the ways in which gender, race, and religion reinforced each other and provided avenues for women to explore and develop their leadership abilities, as well as how this exploration provided the means for the creation of interracial alliances.

The Young Women’s Christian Association Today the YWCA is a national organization with associations in cities, towns, and colleges across the United States, as well as an international organization with groups in numerous cities across the world. There is a national administrative structure, and a national convention is regularly held. Local association leadership comes most often directly from the local membership. Many local organizations, as well as the national group, are racially integrated, and one of the guiding principles of the association, since the National Convention in 1973, has been “the elimination of racism, wherever it exists and by any means necessary.”2 In the early twentieth century, however, the organization was quite different. Then it faced major questions about its structure, racial composition, and national identity, as it moved away from the administrative leadership and

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social goals of its founders. The earliest YWCAs were small, independent community efforts, gradually connecting into larger regional ventures and then a national entity. The first city associations began in New England, established by upper- and middle-class women who wanted to support the needs of young women who needed religious guidance and protection. In 1866, women in Boston established the first association to officially carry the name YWCA. Their goal was to promote the “physical, social, intellectual, moral, and spiritual welfare” of young women coming to the city.3 The new organization offered employment and housing assistance and training programs, accompanied by the expectation that the young women would practice Protestant worship, Bible-reading, and moral conservatism. Within a few years, similar chapters had developed in many cities and towns, which were mostly administered by and for white women. In communities such as Boston, with a small black population, black women were occasionally involved, although not particularly welcomed. Rather, these women were encouraged to find housing and job assistance within the black community. In communities with a large black population, especially in the South, black women sometimes formed their own separate associations, again to aid and support young women. The first reported “colored association on friendly terms with the white association but not part of it” was founded in Dayton, Ohio, in 1893, by black women in that community. Like the white YWCAs, the black groups offered a mix of religious and practical forms of outreach, such as boardinghouses for young working women, Bible study classes, cafeterias, job employment agencies, and domestic training programs.4 By the 1880s, young women on college campuses were also organizing YWCAs to support their religious and social life. As most colleges were racially segregated, most Student YWCAs were either all white or all black. The first Student YWCA was established at the Normal University in Normal, Illinois in 1873. Eleven years later the first black YWCA student association was organized at Spelman College, again with religiously based objectives. Like the predominantly white and religious-oriented home and mission societies, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), these various YWCA groups started by “saving souls” and later moved toward more social and organizational goals. As historian Anne Firor Scott suggests, the resistance women felt from men to taking on more responsibility and power in the home and mission societies and within their churches led them to embrace nondenominational women-only organizations, like the WTCU and the YWCA, “where there were no men to hamper them.”5 Other, predominantly black organizations, such as the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), organized around immediate goals of alleviating working conditions, establishing homes for the aged and orphans, and coordinating social service projects. Many of these women’s clubs and organizations also emphasized social uplift, meeting and confronting the negative images of black women within white society.

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As the local YWCA associations grew, regional connections were made, and in 1906 the two largest regional groups merged. The international YWCA, which represented primarily local, white city associations, and the American committee, representing Midwestern student associations, formed the National YWCA. Nearly all existing white local YWCAs joined this national effort, while the existing black organizations were not included. Within collegiate settings student associations were also separated by race and Northern, predominantly white colleges joined the national structure. Associations at black colleges were not included. Within a year after the National YWCA was formed, the directors responded to two kinds of requests from black women. In cities where there were black YWCAs, the women wanted to join the national organization. In schools with black Student YWCAs, the students also sought national membership. In both cases, black women sought the same kinds of benefits for their organizations that led to the formation of the national structure—the opportunity for shared resources, and the desire to make a larger impact and to be part of an organization that promised a more stable program and financial base. While the white leaders did not embrace black organizations, they did recognize a certain disjuncture and tension around these requests from women with whom they shared a common evangelical Protestant religion. White Christian women experienced a major contradiction if they ignored these black women who upheld the same Christian faith as they did. Their belief in the Christian principles of love for all and the oneness of all in Christ compelled them to consider that women of all races should be members and receive services, despite the cultural practices, in both the North and the South, of racial exclusion and segregation. This shared Christian base, they felt, required a unique response.6 The city associations and the student associations met this challenge somewhat differently. The National YWCA did not immediately open its doors to black associations. However, the leadership agreed to hire Addie Waites Hunton and Elizabeth Ross, the first blacks to be hired at the national level, to meet with black students and women in cities and assess the viability of their organizations. Hunton and Ross visited fourteen interested student associations, including those at Spelman Seminary in Atlanta and Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. They also supported the first four black city associations to affiliate: Washington, DC, New York, Baltimore, and Brooklyn. Within two years, thirty-six student associations were affiliated with the National YWCA and a fifth black city branch was established in St. Paul, Minnesota.7 By 1910, the National YWCA also determined that in cities with a central white association, work should be organized for black women as a branch of that association. Any decision about creating such a branch had to have the approval of the white association, so white women had the ultimate say as to whether black women in a community could establish a YWCA. If no central

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association existed and the black population was large enough to support its own work, a “colored YWCA” could be organized and accepted into membership in the National YWCA.8 Both Hunton and Ross were deeply troubled by this response. They wanted black associations to be added on the same basis, and with the same independence, as the white associations. They found it awkward to justify black support for an organization that was offering less than full membership; however, they continued to advocate for black women to be part of the association. They felt that the connection to the YWCA would ensure institutional stability for the new black groups and prevent them from failing. Such stability would also enhance the public image of black female activists. The black response to the YWCA also reflects their sense that the YWCA could be influenced to change in significant ways. As historian Judith Weisenfeld noted, “Black women’s attraction and commitment to the YWCA since the late nineteenth century represented a skillful balancing of their own history of organizing within African American communities and interpretations of the possibilities inherent in the YWCA’s evangelical Christian foundation and its institutional structure.”9 Hunton and Ross, like many black women, were involved in both race-specific social action organizations and interracial efforts. They saw the need for both and advocated for both. Hunton, in addition to being a strong advocate of black participation in YWCA work, was a national organizer for the NACW, leader of the Brooklyn Suffrage League, and organizer for the NAACP. Her colleague, Lugenia Burns Hope, was a social worker active in several Atlanta organizations, including the YWCA, NAACP, and Southeastern Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs.10 Ross sought the endorsement of the NACW for the work of the YWCA in the black communities. At the NACW conference of 1910, NACW members promised to withhold judgment on the YWCA and keep at bay negative judgments of the YWCA as an arena for black women’s work. At the same time, as Judith Weisenfeld has argued, the YWCA “represented merely one arena in which to work, and an affiliation that did not supersede other religious, social, or political affiliations. . . . African American YWCA workers saw possibilities in the organization’s structure that would allow them to create branches in their communities that could address particular needs while obtaining access to the material resources and international voice of the YWCA.”11 By 1916, many of the 1,500 affiliates of the NACW were active also in the YWCA. Indeed, the national organization did expand its commitment to black women by creating a position on its board of “Secretary of Colored Work in Cities.” This position funded a young woman to travel to various communities, helping to establish new associations and serving the needs of local students. Eva Bowles was hired to fill this new position. She traveled throughout the country, coordinated conferences of women working through the YWCA with the black community, and extended the training of secretaries and leaders for

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black branches. Under Bowles’s leadership, between 1913 and World War I, the branch system grew, increasing both the number of groups and the number of black women served. As these women became leaders within their branches, they began to participate in the national conferences and training sessions. The national and local boards faced increasing pressure from black women to run their own boards and have control of their own finances and programs. Even though black women still hesitated to fully engage with the YWCA, black women employees of the association and the growing number of black members found that the opportunity for professional training outweighed their concerns. Few white-collar jobs were available to any women, especially black women. A position in the YWCA was prestigious and offered the opportunity for managerial work and program development.12 Hunton had long stressed the need to train staff people and volunteers, either by admitting black women to regular training available to white workers, or by organizing special courses. Bowles supervised employees and organized nationally sponsored conferences for black volunteers and staff. She carefully and patiently supported these women. In fact, she commented that she “walked a tightrope” in urging black women to remain involved while she educated and “developed” YWCA white women to understand the disparity between their words and actions.13 As the Student YWCA associations grew in number and size and became “an important force on many campuses,” they moved more quickly than the city groups toward informed social action and fuller integration. Initially, the National YWCA responses to requests for affiliation were to accept, separately, white Student YWCAs and associations from black colleges. By 1912, there were sixteen black associations in cities and over fifty Student YWCAs at black colleges. A year later, the Student YWCA had eighty chapters at black colleges in twenty-eight states; the membership represented more than half the enrolled female population at black colleges.14 Soon race-specific and interracial leadership and training opportunities expanded. In 1915, at Louisville, Kentucky, the first integrated Student YWCA convention took place with twenty-eight delegates meeting together. Bowles said of their work, “The conference marks one of the greatest forward steps in the association’s history and has served as a clearinghouse for many preconceived notions and prejudices.”15 At the same time, separate conventions for black and white students were also organized. The first convention for black students was held at Atlanta’s Spelman College in 1916. Eva Bowles continued to recruit additional black students at white schools as well. The next year the association faced the question of integrating a college site in a different way. Fifteen black women, students at the University of Iowa, wanted to establish their own branch of the university association and met friction from white students, who wanted them to have full membership in the previously white-only association. As the report stated, “This is the first student association where there is such a large number of colored that it raises this issue.” Seemingly, if a

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few black women wanted to attend a Northern white association, that was acceptable, but a large group of black students wanting to meet on their own challenged the white students’ desire for one integrated association. The report also noted that the same issue was likely to arise at the University of Minnesota and the University of Illinois.16 Although the Student YWCA began as an evangelical group, by the early 1900s the young women who joined the college associations exhibited a more radical version of social action than many community-based associations. By the 1920s, the campus YWCA would become “a haven for student radicals, especially those who thought of themselves as Christian socialists.”17 Many student organizations, including one in Boston, undertook racially mixed meetings in the early 1920s, a step in race relations that at the time was considered extremely radical.18 Members in the Student YWCA were able to take these steps because of the way in which gender, religion, and race intersected, a process we can see in detail in the experiences of Lucy Miller and Hazel Stockdale.

Leadership in the College YWCAs: Lucy Miller and Hazel Stockdale In 1918, Lucy Miller arrived at Talladega College from her home in Florida, where her father had a small business. Born in 1899, she had attended kindergarten through high school at the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute, which was founded in 1904 by notable black activist Mary McLeod Bethune. Although her brothers attended Northeastern University and her family soon moved to Boston, Miller chose to attend college in the South. She had participated in the 1916 YWCA Colored Student Conference in Atlanta, where she met Juliet Derricotte, one of the national YWCA secretaries. Derricotte convinced Miller to attend her own alma mater, Talladega College. There, she would be educated in “the politics of respectability” and become a voice for racial self-help and against prejudice and negative images of black women.19 The American Missionary Association had established Talladega College in 1868, purchasing land and a building that had served as a school established by two formerly enslaved men, William Savery and Thomas Tarrant. Talladega’s first president, Reverend Henry Edwards Brown, was a black alumnus of Oberlin College, an abolitionist college. Located east of Birmingham, Alabama, Talladega included both a high school and a college program and enrolled three hundred black students as of 1918. Of the faculty, 70 percent of the teachers were white, 30 percent black.20 The following fall, in 1919, Hazel Stockdale arrived at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, eighty miles from her home in Aplington, a small farm town in north central Iowa. The second daughter of a successful cattle farmer, Stockdale was the first of her family to attend the school and would be the only

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one of seven siblings to graduate from college. She had chosen Grinnell because a close friend had gone there and recommended it. Grinnell College was established in 1846 by a group of Congregational ministers educated in New England. By 1861, ninety-nine students attended the college, including thirtyfive women who enrolled in the Ladies Course, which over time became more academically demanding. Eventually it was discontinued, and women were admitted to the same four-year college program as men. By 1915, women made up 50 percent or more of the student body; consequently, campus life included new dormitories for women and a carefully organized social life.21 The YWCA was established in Grinnell in 1884, the sixth such association in the state of Iowa. Within a short time the association was responsible for the social organization of the women on campus and for orientation and welcoming female students. By the time Stockdale graduated in 1924, there were three hundred and fifty Student YWCA members at Grinnell. With a total population of nearly seven hundred and fifty students, and with more than 50 percent of them women, nearly all the women appeared to be members of the association. The Student YWCA played an important role for both Miller and Stockdale as they began their college life. Miller was welcomed to Talladega College by young women in the Student YWCA with information and advice. She was encouraged to participate in the many activities the association conducted, including “mission and Bible study classes, wholesome social affairs, a community Sunday school, and frequent hikes to the wood.” The association sponsored social activities, such as a masquerade party and a violin recital. Lectures by a woman physician about physical development, and activities expected to lead young black women to “greater self-knowledge, self-reverence, and selfcontrol,” again suggest the importance of respectability as a theme in the education of young black women. As Evelyn Higginbotham has argued, “Respectability demanded that every individual in the black community assume responsibility for behavioral self-regulation and self-improvement along moral, education, and economic lines. The goal was to distance oneself as far as possible from images perpetuated by racist stereotypes.” Accordingly, the YWCA not only reflected the values of the community but also helped establish and strengthen those values.22 Regular Bible studies and missionary meetings “attempt to make the girls feel their responsibility for girls all over the world.” There was often special music for Sunday meetings, and the program committee provided subjects for discussion including table etiquette, the Negro in America, attitudes of courtesy and reverence, and prayer.23 Members of the Student YWCA who served as an orientation team and welcoming committee also greeted Stockdale. They provided each student with the official Grinnell College Hand Book, produced and distributed by the Student YWCA and YMCA. The Hand Book explained the social and academic standards needed for college success, as well as the purpose of the association:

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“to unite all the college women in an effort to originate and develop the finest things in college life, to foster true comradeship and hold aloft ideals of service, and to develop a deep religious life.”24 The Student YWCA at Grinnell encouraged particular social activities and behavioral expectations similar to those at Talladega. There was a freshman reception on Friday afternoon of opening week, and a general reception by the YMCA and YWCA the following Saturday evening. The YWCA maintained a weekly Thursday evening period after dinner for discussions and meetings. Once a month, evening time was set aside for a general meeting with speakers and music. Another Thursday evening was for committee meetings. The other two Thursday evenings were used for Bible study and small discussion groups about vocational work, community service, or campus problems.25 One tradition unique to Grinnell was linked to traditional attitudes toward women students. In 1915, a new dormitory for women was dedicated. It was a set of three connected buildings with an outdoor walkway, which was entirely enclosed and locked. The president held a “lighting of the home fires” as part of the dedication, reflecting his assumption “that girls may be and should be homemakers.” Each year the burned log was used to start another Yule log service, “symbolizing the ideals that have been held by the former girls of Grinnell.” The YWCA took over this Yule log service as its own, adding a musical program and community sing. These activities and messages reinforced the way women were housed and treated at the college.26 Stockdale decided early on that she wanted to be part of the YWCA, even though her first contact with the YWCA president was somewhat embarrassing. One of her early letters home suggested her image of proper YWCA behavior: Gee! But I did feel foolish the other day. Our room did just look like heck, with everything all around. I had just gotten back from lunch and was sitting down looking at a paper, when our YW[CA] president stuck her head in the door and asked for one of the girls. She’s so dignified, etc., and I bet she had the shock of her life, all right. I had planned all the time to clean things that P.M. so I couldn’t help it if she came too soon!27

Miller, too, eagerly joined in the life of the college, joining in many activities. She joined the Student YWCA and took part in a play, described as “a light comedy,” presented in the College Chapel. She was also on the debating team, participated in arts and scholastics clubs, and sang in the church choir. She sat on the editorial board of The Talladegan, a magazine published five times a year by the college.28 In fact, the March 1922 issue of The Talladegan featured a story on the YWCA, with a photograph of thirteen students who formed the leadership of the campus organization. An article about the association described the equal emphasis on “all angles of the triangle”—a reference to the physical, mental, and spiritual points of the YWCA logo. All of these aspects

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were emphasized at both colleges and reflected in both the curriculum and the specific YWCA activities. Physical activity was encouraged at each campus. At Talladega, the gymnasium was open for recreation on Wednesday and Friday afternoons, and the girls went for walks on “pleasant” Sunday afternoons. One day that month “the girls threw aside books, donned middies and bloomers, and tramped three miles to Rocky Hollow for an all day picnic.”29 At Grinnell, physical activity was also highly valued. Students were required to take a Physical Training course every semester. Stockdale wrote, “Distance walking is what I’m taking for my outside sport this spring. We go in squads of eight, two times a week, and it’s lots of fun.”30 Academically, women students were prepared to teach or do social service work, both of which were areas of acceptable employment for women. The Grinnell YWCA operated an Employment Bureau to find work in homes in the town for girls who wanted employment, either work by the hour or in exchange for room and board. Also, classes were available “for those who wanted [social service] training . . . for Camp Fire work and work among younger high school girls. Under the joint direction of the Women’s Athletic Association and the YWCA, playground work in the schools of the city is open to those interested.”31 Miller herself exemplified how the YWCA could lead to important work opportunities for black women. As Adrienne Lash Jones explained, the YWCA had a “reputation for hiring college graduates, and its many nationally sponsored conferences and conventions provided access to a very supportive national network of women with similar education and interests.”32 Miller was mentored by Derricotte, the YWCA national secretary; she then served as president of her campus YWCA during her senior year at Talladega, which presented her with many opportunities to develop leadership skills. For one, the organization was set up with various positions of authority and programming held by students. Second, Miller and others also enhanced their skills and prepared for greater leadership responsibilities through a series of conferences. Peers of Miller, in other black colleges, had similar experiences of leadership opportunities and support from YWCA secretaries who served as mentors. For example, Frankie V. Adams, a young woman active in the Student YWCA at Knoxville College, went on to become a YWCA industrial secretary in Chicago, where she helped to improve conditions for girls in industry. Adams saw the Student YWCA as an important factor in the leadership of black women, which she described as “developing Christian leadership for all girls, at the age where a mixed group of girls, whenever we met, had in general combined meetings. . . . These were the conferences that had training, and activities related to them, entirely focused on the idea of developing a basic leadership within these organizations.”33

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Religion and the Social Gospel Miller and Stockdale were in college at a time when the religious component of the YWCA was changing in significant ways. The YWCA had begun to shift its focus from personal morality to more fully explore the social structures and environmental factors contributing to unjust conditions in communities. The social gospel movement reflected a societal transformation in theological thinking, as liberal Protestants attempted to incorporate the new fields of science, sociology, and biblical criticism into their worldview and apply them to social and political issues. The social gospel accepted Darwinian theory, emphasized progress, and saw individuals as interdependent and bound by certain duties and responsibilities. As such, advocates deemphasized sin and salvation as individuals’ deeds and emphasized society’s and individuals’ progress together toward the Kingdom of God. The social gospel also became a guiding philosophy for the YWCA as it sought to bring in “the Kingdom of God among young women.” The shift led from overtly religious programs, such as Bible study, to a focus on activities with no obvious religious base that “s[ought] to regenerate the social order through the activist intervention of individuals and churches . . . [and] embraced the idea that humans could solve the problems of society.”34 The social gospel movement was also actively studied and preached on the Grinnell campus.35 In her first year, Stockdale enrolled in the standard religion course on “The English Bible.” In the course, the Bible was “studied as if it were a contemporaneous document, and religions and religious ideas are canvassed in behalf of immediate and pragmatic interests.”36 Furthermore, the values in the Hand Book described conservative religious practice and behavior: limits on dancing, regular vespers, and Bible studies as a part of every student’s weekly activities. At the same time, as noted, an awareness of larger social issues was encouraged. One of the most well known Grinnell professors while Stockdale was a student was Edward A. Steiner, who served as professor in Applied Christianity from 1903 until 1941. Steiner had emigrated from Hungary as a young man, in danger because of his interest in and willingness to speak about revolutionary literature. He eventually converted to Christianity and was ordained a Congregational minister. He held pastorates in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Springfield, Ohio, where he socialized with black neighbors, immigrants, and industrial laborers. He invited all of them to his church and wrote, “Underneath all the differences in races and classes, humanity is essentially one.” Steiner saw racial superiority as a result of historical conditioning and abolitionists as part of a “great cloud of witnesses.”37 In his role as chair of Applied Christianity, Steiner made “human brotherhood and unity the central theme of his teaching and writing.” Students at Grinnell learned about the expectations of a Christian life from this staunch proponent of the social gospel, whose “power to express spiritual values in forms that are intellectually and

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laude and gave the commencement address. In her talk, “Womanhood in Tennyson and Browning,” she discussed the values of her education, ending “with a general claim for the value and significance of womanhood in the life of the world.”43 Miller’s speech reflected the values the Student YWCA promoted at the college, which including a strong religious background, leadership preparation, a sense of ability and importance for women, and a strong sense of pride in race and social consciousness.

Moving Toward Interracial Alliances The ways in which religion and race intersected at Talladega and Grinnell colleges led to possibilities for Miller and Stockdale and their peers to meet and work together. As the Student YWCA linked the social gospel to leadership and race, it created a potential for new relationships and activities for women. As noted, in the early twentieth century, black and white women’s associations generally followed parallel but separate paths of development. The few exceptions where relationships across race took place with the potential for alliance building were typically among organizations with a strong religious orientation. The YWCA was one of them.44 For students, interracial experiences were often tied to conferences and missionary work. While some leadership conferences were race-specific, others began to make interracial connections possible. YWCA students at Grinnell were encouraged to attend an annual conference at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where they met “nationwide leaders of thought and representative college girls from all over the middle west.”45 Shortly after Miller enrolled at Talladega, the annual YWCA Colored Student Conference that she had attended in Atlanta was moved from Spelman to Talladega because of schedule changes related to the influenza epidemic. Secretaries from the national organization, field secretaries and leaders from local areas, and ninety-three students—including high school juniors and seniors and college students—all gathered for ten days at the campus. The students stayed in the dormitories, the leaders in a separate building, and the white women (the national secretaries) stayed in the rooms of the white faculty members.46 The conference schedule was an example of the objectives and qualities of the association. Each day was a full agenda of worship, Bible classes, lectures, and speeches. There were inspirational addresses by black ministers, such as Reverend G. L. Imes of Tuskegee, and Dr. William Henry Sheppard, a former missionary to the Congo. There was also a quiet hour each day and afternoon recreation, including walks, games, and stunts. Daily Council hours provided time when business could be conducted, including establishing a yearly calendar for the YWCA, finalizing a budget, and holding discussions on the relationship between the YWCA and other campus organizations, such as the World Student Christian Federation and the Student Volunteer Movement.47

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emotionally telling is unexcelled.” During 1923, Stockdale’s senior year, Professor Steiner presented a series of lectures on “Race Pride and Prejudice,” “The Social Message of Modern Prophets,” and “The Immigrant Problem.” Another lecture series brought the “leading interpreters of the social gospel” to campus, included Hugh Black, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Reinhold Niebuhr.38 So significant was the YWCA as part of Grinnell’s campus religious life that when a new chapel was built, the plans called for a new building to house the YWCA and YMCA right next door. Herrick Chapel and the Association Building were opened together in 1907, with the YWCA and YMCA considered companion organizations to the church. Still, the church building reflected the gender arrangements at the college. It was a large building on the central campus, with two mirror-image sections, the left unit for the men and the right one for the women. Each unit had its own front door and a large entryway with fireplace and elaborate mantle and built-in seats. A set of meeting rooms on the first and second floor provided space for regular activities throughout the year. These two organizations were the focal point of the social life on campus, as well as the religious life and activities.39 The key social gospel message was that the most important part of religion was how people lived their lives. Action for the good of others was the creed. The YWCA was both Christian and action-oriented; many women students wanted their lives to be that way, too. The social gospel, then, provided a justification for activism. Yet many early twentieth-century women felt the conflict between public activity and home responsibility. Women who were active socially in a variety of organizations were often defensive about the accusations that they were neglecting their home duties, which was “unwomanly.” Strategically, women’s organizations such as the YWCA operated within prevailing gender norms, even as they helped change them.40 Black women, who were additionally challenged by racism, refused to be silenced and so were also accused of unfeminine behavior.41 National black women’s groups—especially the NACW—strongly urged members to stay on the path of public respectability. They experienced the paradox that to accomplish their goals, they had to act in ways that others might consider unfeminine, although one of their goals was to be judged moral, chaste, and respectable, or in other words, feminine. The YWCA, in both encouraging a sense of independence and proper, traditional behavior, expressed the same tension. Members were expected to behave appropriately, while their experience was also liberating and suggestive of broader possibilities. This left many women with a difficult balancing act.42 The YWCA could both reassure parents—and the girls themselves—about proper social behavior and religious practices. At the same time, participation in the YWCA could open doors and ways of being that energized women and challenged many long-held notions, especially about leadership roles for women and interracial cooperation. To illustrate, Miller graduated magna cum

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In YWCA conferences like the one at Talladega, white women had an opportunity to raise their own consciousness about race and the implications of equity within the organization. There was also an opportunity for the young black women who attended to experience a setting where they traveled to other states and communities, took on leadership roles, and received further mentoring by black YWCA secretaries. The YWCA was linked in missionary work with the Student Volunteer Movement, which began with a Bible study conference at Mount Hermon, Massachusetts, in 1886. The movement brought together young people to “awaken and maintain intelligent and active interest in foreign missions,” and encouraged students to sign a pledge that read, in part, “It is my purpose, if God permits, to become a foreign missionary.”48 When Miller was a sophomore, she was one of four students from Talladega who traveled to Des Moines, Iowa, sixty miles from Grinnell, for a student conference held by the Student Volunteer Movement. Miller and other Southern students traveled by train from Atlanta to Des Moines via Chattanooga and Chicago. Delegates from forty nations, many of whom were also involved in the YWCA, came together. While missionary enthusiasm appeared to peak at the time of Word War I, dissent buffeted the Des Moines convention of 1919. American students were beginning to be more critical about their own society needing spiritual renewal and were less fervent about bringing the word to communities around the world.49 As the site for this conference, Des Moines undoubtedly held special interest for black students because the city was the only training site in the country for black military officers during World War I. While Des Moines had a small black community, numbering 1,000 in 1900, it had grown to 3,500 by 1915, and grew further with the establishment of the Colored Officers Training Camp. Many of the officers from Fort Des Moines and recruits from nearby Camp Dodge stayed and raised their families so that the black population reached 8,200 by 1950.50 The conference was also near Iowa City and the University of Iowa, where black women students had requested a Student YWCA branch of their own. They had also sought assistance from the Iowa State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs in providing housing for black women students at the university. In 1919, the year Miller attended the convention, the Iowa Federation Home opened. It was an example of the way various women’s clubs were similar in ideology and activities. The Student YWCA provided activities and support for these students, the State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs provided housing. The effort was led by the State Federation’s retiring president, Sue Brown, a lifetime trustee of the NACW and active in several Interracial Commissions.51 The specific racial experiences of Grinnell students were most often international rather than domestic opportunities, except for the YWCA. The 1923

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yearbook, from the year Stockdale graduated, introduced the Grinnell in China Program, with the claim that “Grinnell’s real greatness lies in the fact that she produces men and women who believe in ideals and who are able to do constructive work in the world.” Grinnell in China was the result of Grinnell alumni who maintained a preparatory school within the city of Techow and supervised several schools in surrounding communities. These efforts were supported through fund-raising at Grinnell and recruitment of graduates of the college who would volunteer to teach in the schools. The YWCA encouraged these efforts, including supporting fund-raising activities.52 As noted earlier, the University of Iowa, sixty miles east of Grinnell, had a group of active black students, although at Grinnell, there were very few students, especially women. A scholarship program supported a few black male students, all of whom participated in athletics and drama. The black students also joined with international students from the Philippines, China, West Africa, France, Jamaica, and Thailand in an organization called the Cosmopolitan Club that started the year after Stockdale came to Grinnell. Initially, male white students were members; after a year, white women students also joined this club.53 It was the YWCA at Grinnell, however, that offered women the greatest opportunities for domestic interracial connections. Its leadership training and national conferences brought black and white women students from the schools together and led to growing contacts between students of various regions and racial backgrounds. In fact, black women found the “discourse of respectability” could mediate relations between white and black women; furthermore, interracial cooperation was most successful among churchwomen when they focused on self-help strategies. Interracial alliances in the Student YWCA seemed most successful when they came out of shared training, traveling, and conference experiences.54 The contributions the Student YWCA made to women’s education in the early part of the twentieth century were similar across the country. The Student YWCA offered support for traditional gender values and messages, while also providing increased opportunities for leadership within other organizations and communities. It provided a rationale for a more activist role for Christian women. The Student YWCA encouraged leadership within racially mixed groups and moved the larger, national organization slowly toward racially integrated programs. The Student YWCA also served as a mediator of college culture for young women. It was aligned to the values, curriculum, and social organization of most colleges. Women identified with their place in that culture and their sense of themselves as educated women through the YWCA experience. For Stockdale and other white women, the Student YWCA was especially significant for opening avenues for racial understanding. For Miller and other black women, the YWCA was one of several organizations with this mediating role. It may seem that the integrationist goals of the Student YWCA were too limited, coming from what Ruth Frankenburg calls a “color and power evasive

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discourse.”55 The power relationships of institutions and the difficulties of challenging racism were seldom addressed in the work of the YWCA. However, the activities and structure of the Student YWCA was more racially progressive than most other organizations for women by 1920. Through the college experiences of Stockdale and Miller, we see the complexities of gender and race in their membership in the YWCA. The tension between social action and traditional gender roles continued for Stockdale. She graduated in 1923 and taught school in Iowa for a year. She then traveled to Sidney, Montana, and taught there for two years. During that time she lived farther away from the family than any of her siblings, and was active in the social life of Sidney. She attended holiday celebrations at the homes of the more influential citizens and appeared from letters to be flourishing in her new life.56 However, after three years away, with her brothers now working on farms of their own, she returned home to live with her mother and youngest brother and manage the affairs of the farm. She never married and was the primary caretaker for her mother. When her nephew became a medical missionary in Cameroon, she sent financial support and rejoiced at what she saw as the good work he and his family did. When she and her mother moved into town in 1936, she became active in ways her college YWCA experience had prepared her: establishing the Aplington Women’s Club and leading the effort to start the town library, a project she was intimately involved with throughout her life. After graduation in 1922, Miller taught for a year at the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute. Then she married Joseph S. Mitchell, who had graduated from Talladega in 1913. After Mitchell’s acceptance to Harvard Law School, the couple moved to Boston and raised two children, a son and a daughter. Lucy Miller Mitchell volunteered at her children’s schools and then earned a master’s degree at Boston University in 1935, in the new field of early childhood education. She became a respected educator, led efforts to improve and license day care providers, and consulted for the national Head Start programs in Massachusetts. In 1947, Miller became the first black board member of the city YWCA in Boston. She served for seven years, chairing the Public Affairs Committee. The leadership skills Miller claimed to have first learned within the Student YWCA at Talladega served her well in the roles she took on in Boston. Her experience in interracial leadership was especially important as she engaged the white leadership of the Boston YWCA. Miller recalled that even though policies in general had been agreed upon by the board of the YWCA to welcome blacks to all its programs, a huge job remained to encourage racial mixing of club groups, craft groups, and gym programs. The process of changing these practices involved constant work, which she described as “slow but steady, and the pressure never let up!” Miller often understated her own achievements, saying her activities were “not spectacular, and received no publicity, but were meaningful and had impact on community attitudes and practices.”57

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Notes 1. The stories of Miller and Stockdale have come from separate threads of my research interests. While exploring the archives of the Boston YWCA, I located information about Lucy Miller Mitchell, the first black board member of the Boston YWCA. I interviewed Miller and learned that she came to Boston after graduating from Talladega College. She was active in the Student YWCA during her college years, 1918–22, and felt that experience was important to her own leadership abilities. About the same time, I began a project with a collection of letters belonging to my grandmother, Neva Stockdale. I discovered that her sister, my great-aunt Hazel, attended Grinnell College in Iowa and was active in the Student YWCA there, between 1919 and 1923. As I have continued to learn about each woman, it is clear they could have known one another, although I have no concrete evidence that indicates they did. 2. YWCA mission statement, adopted in 1970. For a discussion of the background of this effort, see Adrienne Lash Jones, “Young Women’s Christian Association,” in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1993), 1299–303. 3. Boston YWCA Annual Report, 1869, 9. Boston YWCA Records, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA. 4. Mary S. Sims, The Natural History of a Social Institution: The YWCA (New York: Woman’s Press, 1936), 173. 5. Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 93. 6. This contradiction between Christian principles and cultural practice was also felt by the earliest founders, who talked of being “compelled to take action,” a point of view that resonated as well with those in the 1970s who were urging the National YWCA to take even clearer action to end racist practices. Glendora Putnam interview by Sharlene Voogd Cochrane, October 6, 1990, transcript, 28–29. Putnam was active in Boston in establishing a black branch of the YWCA, was elected to the National Board in 1973, and served as president for the National YWCA from 1985 until 1991. See Sharlene Voogd Cochrane, “Founding Aswalos House: Separate and Powerful; The YWCA in Roxbury, Massachusetts, 1968–1988,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 33 (Summer 2005): 159–85. 7. Jane Olcott Walters, ed., “Young Women’s Christian Association History of Colored Work: Chronological Excerpts from Reports of Secretaries and Workers and from Minutes Showing Development of the Work among Colored Women, 1907–1920,” September 1907, typescript, 1920, 2, 3, YWCA Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA. 8. A fuller analysis is found in Adrienne Lash Jones, “Struggle Among Saints: African American Women and the YWCA, 1870–1920,” in Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City, ed. Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 160–87. 9. Judith Weisenfeld, African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 11–14.

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10. Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 86, 66. 11. Weisenfeld, African American Women and Christian Activism, 35. 12. Jones, “Struggle among Saints,” 175. 13. Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, Lifting as They Climb (Washington, DC: National Association of Colored Women, 1933), reprinted as Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, Lifting as They Climb, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Macmillan, 1996); Jean Blackwell Hutson, “Eva del Vakia Bowles,” in Notable American Women 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 214–15. 14. Scott, Natural Allies, 108; Jones, “Struggle Among Saints,” 165. 15. Report by Eva Bowles, October 20, 1915, in Walters, “YWCA History,” 42. 16. Bertha Conde, Report, December 20, 1916, in Walters, “YWCA History,” 59. 17. Scott, Natural Allies, 108. 18. More on the Boston Student Interrace Committee is found in Sharlene Voogd Cochrane, “Compelled to Speak: Women Confronting Institutional Racism, 1910–1950,” New England Journal of Public Policy (Fall/Winter 1999): 53–54. 19. Lucy Miller Mitchell, The Black Women Oral History Project, vol. 8, ed. Ruth Edmunds Hill (Westport, CT: Meckler, 1991), 48–50; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 195. 20. The Talladega College Catalog, 2005/07 (Talladega, AL: Talladega College Library, Talladega College), 1–2; TeeCee: A Biennial, vol. II (Talladega, AL: Talladega College, 1919–20), 24. 21. Alan Jones, Pioneering: 1846–1996: A Photographic and Documentary History of Grinnell College (Grinnell, IA: Grinnell College, 1996), 77–79; Joan G. Zimmerman, “Daughters of Main Street: Culture and the Female Community at Grinnell, 1884–1917,” in Women’s Being, Woman’s Place: Female Identity and Vocation in American History, ed. Mary Kelley (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), 154–70. 22. TeeCee: A Biennial, 23, 24; Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 196. 23. Shamray Bryant, “The Young Women’s Christian Association Notes,” The Talladegan 40 (March 1922): 8. 24. “The Young Women’s Christian Association Notes,” The Grinnell College Hand Book 27 (1919–20): 20. 25. Ibid., 20–22. 26. Ibid., 21; Jones, Pioneering, 80. 27. Hazel Stockdale to Neva Stockdale, April 27, 1920, Stockdale-Voogd Papers, in author’s possession. 28. “The YWCA. Play,” The Talladegan 37 (March 1920): 7. 29. Bryant, “The Young Women’s Christian Association Notes,” The Talladegan 40 (March 1922): 5, 7–8. 30. Hazel Stockdale to Neva Stockdale, April 27, 1920, in author’s possession. 31. Grinnell College Hand Book, 28. 32. Jones, “Struggle among Saints,” 175.

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33. Frankie V. Adams, Black Women’s Oral History Project, vol. 1, ed. Ruth Edmunds Hill (Westport, CT: Meckler, 1991), 104, 109. 34. Weisenfeld, African American Women and Christian Activism, 32–33. 35. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 173. 36. Grinnell College Bulletin: Course of Instruction, 1923, 1920. 37. Ralph E. Luker, The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 83, 253–54. 38. John Scholte Nollen, Grinnell College (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1953), 106, 107, 113. 39. Grinnell College Hand Book, 28. 40. Scott, Natural Allies, 180. 41. White, Too Heavy a Load, 66. 42. Jane Addams wrote about this tension of what she called the “Social claim and the Family claim.” She described daughters who came back from college, wanting to live out a role in the world, while the family claim was often more clearly expressed and the woman’s presence needed directly at home. See Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), and Jean Bethke Elshtain, “A Return to Hull House: Reflections on Jane Addams,” Feminist Issues 15, nos. 1 and 2 (Spring 1997): 105. See also Joyce Antler, “‘After College, What?’: New Graduates and the Family Claim,” American Quarterly 32 (Fall 1980): 412–13. 43. “Commencement Day,” The Talladegan 40 (July 1922): 4. 44. Anne Firor Scott explains that while historians might “underestimate the reality of religious motivation . . . the effort to ‘bring people to Christ’ . . . [was] enormously energizing . . . for women in missionary, moral reform, temperance, and antislavery societies. It is important to remember that the earliest white efforts to cross the racial barrier came from women in religion-based associations.” Scott, Natural Allies, 182. 45. Grinnell College Hand Book, 18, 20–21. 46. Mabel T. Everett to Rev. F. A. Summer, March 21, 1919, Talladega College Archives [hereafter TCA], Talladega College, Talladega, AL. Proceedings of the Colored Student Conference, June 6–16, 1919, under the auspices of National Board of the Young Women’s Christian Association (Talladega, AL: Talladega College, 1919). 47. Proceedings of the Colored Student Conference, June 6–16, 1919, pp. 11–14. 48. Martha Lund Smalley, “Guide to the Archives of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions,” Yale University Library, Divinity Library Special Collections, http://webtext.library.yale.edu/xml2html/divinity.o42.con.html (accessed May 15, 2006). 49. “The Des Moines Student Volunteer Conference,” The Talladegan 37 (March 1920): 9–10. The Grinnell Hand Book also mentioned the Student Volunteer Movement and described its two-fold purpose: to cooperate with pastors of churches around Grinnell in “arousing the spirit of service,” and to cooperate with the YMCA and YWCA in bringing before the student body “movements for world democracy”; Grinnell College Hand Book, 25.

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50. Jack Lufkin. “Patten’s Neighborhood: The Center Street Community and the African American Printer Who Preserved It,” Iowa Heritage Illustrated 77 (Fall 1996): 123–24. 51. Davis, Lifting as They Climb, 154–55, 198. See also Richard M. Breaux, “‘Maintaining a Home for Girls’: The Iowa Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs at the University of Iowa, 1919–1950,” The Journal of African American History 87 (Spring 2002): 236–55. 52. Cyclone Yearbook, Grinnell College, 1923, p. 120. 53. Jones, Pioneering, 94, listed male black students as Collis Davis in 1923, Gordon Kitchen, 1925, and Clifton Lamb, 1931; Cyclone Yearbook, Grinnell College, 1922, p. 23. 54. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 197. 55. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 138–39. 56. Hazel Stockdale to Neva Stockdale, January 1, 1928. 57. Mitchell, personal interview, 1988. Sharlene Voogd Cochrane, “‘And the Pressure Never Let Up’: Black Women, White Women, and the Boston YWCA, 1918–1948,” in Black Women in United States History, ed. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1990), 16:259–69; Miller died in Boston in 2002, at age 102.

4

Chapter 8

“I Think I’d Like to Have the Exper ience of Meeting a Negro” New York City’s White Society Women Raise Funds for Bl ack Colleges, 1944–60

Marybeth Gasman

Philanthropy enabled women to exercise considerable power in the public sphere well before the franchise. —Andrea Walton, Women and Philanthropy in Education, 20041

B

eginning in 1944, under the direction of United Negro College Fund (UNCF) secretary Betty Stebman, several of New York City’s wealthy white society women began to raise funds for black colleges. These women hosted luncheons and teas, bringing together New York’s elite white women with black college presidents such as Benjamin Mays of Morehouse, Stephen Wright of Fisk, and Frederick D. Patterson of Tuskegee. Although these gatherings began with five or six ladies, they grew to include fifteen to twenty and became ever so exclusive. Soon thereafter, New York City’s society ladies were clamoring for an invitation to the luncheons. According to philanthropy scholars Kathleen McCarthy and David Hammack, this was precisely the type of situation in which women used their connections with other women and their social privilege to broaden public interest in various causes.2 This essay examines the activities of the National Women’s Committee of the United Negro College Fund, with a particular interest in race relations in New York City’s elite circles. Using the papers of the UNCF, the UNCF oral

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history collection, and the private papers of several of the white women who raised funds for the UNCF, I tell the story of these women and their efforts to shape black education. Moreover, I discuss the often taboo interaction between these white women and the black male leaders of the UNCF, with a particular emphasis on joint efforts to desegregate some of New York City’s most socially elite circles.

Women’s Philanthropy: Power, Policy, and Place Several historians have examined the fund-raising and volunteer efforts of white women on behalf of low-income and underrepresented groups, as well as their efforts to bolster cultural and artistic venues. Historian Dorothy Becker noted that in many elite social circles, volunteer work was described as “more lovely” than paid work and that these “professional volunteers” became part of organizational inner circles.3 Cameron Binkley, Barbara Lowney, Gregory Nosan, and Beverly Gordon have each discussed the role of elite and middle-class women in shaping the arts, conservation efforts, and antislavery legislation, alluding to the “Lady Bountiful” work done to help those less fortunate.4 Other authors, including Kathleen McCarthy, Sondra Shaw, Martha Taylor, and Andrea Walton, note the value of female-to-female connections in fund-raising and how women used their social privilege to broaden public interest in their causes.5 Lastly, Darlene Clark Hine, Linda Gordon, and Anita Goostein have examined race and class differences between donors and receivers.6 According to Kathleen McCarthy, “Giving and voluntarism have traditionally provided—and continue to provide—the means through which women have grasped, wielded, and maintained public power. . . . ”7 Through their work with children, health, education, and social work, women enhanced their role in the public sphere and over time obtained a “toehold” in public policymaking processes.8 In the words of Arlene Daniels, these women had “invisible careers.”9 Despite this influence, Walton argues that women were still relegated to “acting within culturally prescribed roles.”10 Among female volunteers, giving took place in multiple ways. First, many middle- to upper-class women donated money or time through regular voluntary action. Of great importance was their ability to form networks of women. Spreading the news about a particular cause from one group of women to another was integral to the success of women’s philanthropy. Among the wealthiest women, it was also common to open one’s home to cultural events, for such hospitality was held in high esteem by other women. Having an opportunity to socialize with the “right” women was part of the climb up the social ladder. Moreover, the atmosphere of the home made for pleasant conversation and relaxed introductions to giving and volunteerism.11 Bringing more women into the voluntary process was essential to their work, as most women’s philanthropic

“I Think I’d Like to Have the Experience of Meeting a Negr0” 1 6 5

organizations “tended to subsist on small amounts of cash backed by substantial contributions of personal labor.”12 The women’s division of the UNCF was one such example of an organization with a small operating budget. Yet the women made good use of their personal labor, well-crafted networks of friends, and access to wealth (their husbands) to promote black education and push societal taboos in New York City between 1944 and 1960.

The Formation of the United Negro College Fund In 1935, veterinary science professor Frederick D. Patterson became president of the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. Patterson quickly acknowledged that he lacked the fund-raising skills and personal ties of past Tuskegee presidents Booker T. Washington and Robert S. Moton. Typically, a new president would look to the trustees of an institution for assistance with fund-raising. However, Tuskegee’s trustees had become accustomed to a more passive role, due to the prominence of the institution’s past presidents. Patterson found it difficult to run Tuskegee in an efficient manner while also meeting the needs of low-income black college students. After much frustration, he began to correspond with a cadre of black college presidents about the challenges of fundraising and possible solutions to these problems. Patterson realized from his correspondence that black college presidents were competing against each other by soliciting the same organizations and donors for support.13 In response to this problem, Patterson proposed a united appeal for private black colleges in 1943, to be carried out by an organization specifically created for fund-raising. On April 25, 1944, Patterson established the United Negro College Fund with twenty-seven member colleges, which had a combined enrollment of 14,000 students.14 William J. Trent was selected to be the organization’s first executive director later that year. He was the son of William Trent, the president of Livingstone College in North Carolina. After graduating with business degrees from Livingstone, as well as the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Trent was unable to secure a job with a large company, due to the racist conditions in the South. Eventually, his father helped him secure a teaching job at Livingstone in 1932. After a few years, he went to Bennett College, a black women’s college in North Carolina, where he taught and served as acting dean for one year. In 1939, Trent became a race relations officer for the Federal Works Agency and worked with Harold Ickes. At this time, Patterson approached Trent about the position at the UNCF. Trent started at the UNCF in January of 1944 and stayed through 1964. Most prominent among the early foundation supporters of black colleges then was the Rockefeller-sponsored General Education Board (GEB). Founded in 1902 as an outgrowth of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s Negro Education Board, the GEB was a consortium of industrial philanthropies that had, for a variety of

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reasons, focused a portion of its giving on black education.15 As a result of his previous interactions with the GEB, Frederick D. Patterson was easily able to convince John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to publicly endorse the UNCF.16 This type of sponsorship, according to Patterson, was necessary to lend a sense of stability to the fund during the early years.17 With millions of dollars invested in areas ranging from medical research to international human welfare to black education, the Rockefeller family held enormous influence over many fields of public endeavor at that time. Committed to black education and determined to put a more human face on his family’s monopolistic reputation, Rockefeller was eager to lend his name and give financial support to the UNCF campaign. He recruited many of his white male business friends to help with the UNCF, in particular Walter Hoving, the president of Lord and Taylor, and Lindsley Kimball, one of his closest associates at the Rockefeller administrative offices.

Forming the National Women’s Committee When Walter Hoving and Lindsley Kimball began the business of organizing the fund in New York City, they had a difficult time recruiting people who were committed to working on the organization’s day-to-day activities. Because most of the men associated with the fund held full-time jobs, these daily responsibilities fell to their wives and their wives’ friends.18 In fact, the inclusion of women in the work of the fund was seen as essential, not only because they were the true “workers” of the organization, but also because they had the closest connections to the wealthy businessmen who would be its financial mainstay. Because he could not find any other women to help with the cause of black education, Hoving asked his wife.19 With her help and the staff support of Betty Stebman, the women’s division of the UNCF was born. Knowing that fundraising among society women required well-connected individuals at the center of the campaign, Mrs. Hoving recruited Catherine Hughes Waddell, who eventually took over the responsibilities of the women’s division in 1946. Catherine Waddell was the daughter of Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. She was married to Chauncey L. Waddell, the chairman of Waddell & Reed, principal underwriters of United Funds, Inc. Prior to joining the UNCF, Catherine Waddell served on the National Board of the YWCA and was a board member of the New York City Metropolitan Opera.20 When first approached by Mrs. Hoving, Waddell refused the invitation. However, “upon reflection, she decided that her strong feelings about equal opportunity for all were not sufficient—here she had a chance to act in support of those feelings.”21 Waddell became one of the most active volunteers for the UNCF. According to Betty Stebman, “Work for the Negro [did] not hold the glamour that comes from participation in the United Hospital Fund or the Red


Cross. The need must be dramatized for the women before they can be expected to enlist in any numbers. . . . ”22 Mrs. Waddell saw to it that the women associated with the fund were featured in newspaper society columns, thereby tying their names to the support of education for future black doctors, lawyers, and teachers.23 To Waddell and the other women associated with the fund, volunteerism was “more lovely” than being paid for their service. These attitudes, of course, were made possible by the women’s privileged position. And according to historian Dorothy Becker, these women “could exist only in a society in which status was fixed and the upper classes were not self-conscious about their superiority and their obligation to help the less fortunate.”24 Realizing that she needed additional help, Waddell asked Mrs. Marjorie Loengard, a college classmate from Wellesley, to join her at the UNCF. According to Betty Stebman, Waddell was the chief fund-raiser in the group (the “money person”), while Loengard “was the intellectual” who helped get the UNCF story out to the public.25 Through their connections with the Seven Sisters colleges, they were able to recruit an active and well-connected group of women.26 In addition to the black cause, most of these women also volunteered on behalf of white women’s education. Their involvement with the UNCF showed them that the two issues went hand in hand. They paid particular attention to Spelman and Bennett colleges, two historically black women’s colleges, seeing connections between their own advancement and that of other oppressed groups.27 Eventually more than one hundred of New York City’s wealthy women donated either money or time to the fund, contributing up to 15 percent of the yearly fund-raising totals for the UNCF.

Promoting the Cause of Negro Education In 1947, with money and volunteer power at its disposal, the women’s division planned its first formal fund-raising affair: a symposium at Hunter College featuring General George C. Marshall, former secretary of state and author of the Marshall Plan. At this time, with the exception of President Truman, Marshall was the most sought after public statesman. His presence drew large audiences across the country. In addition to discussing foreign affairs, the Hunter College symposium was carefully planned to educate its audience about the UNCF. The event started with dinners at the homes of the women involved in fund-raising. The strategy was to use these elegant affairs as an enticement to potential white donors and their wives to attend the Hunter College symposium.28 This strategy resulted in a “handpicked audience” of 2,300 people listening to General Marshall and, more importantly, hearing Morehouse College President Benjamin Mays tell the story of the UNCF.29 Although this event and those like it drew unprecedented interest in black education, the women’s division was careful not to upset the racial status quo in New York City. Racially mixed audiences listened

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to a formal address by a black college leader at the symposium, but the more intimate gatherings beforehand were strictly segregated. However, Catherine Waddell and the female leadership of the UNCF endeavored to make change. Although a product of privilege, Waddell was intent on pushing the envelope when it came to segregation, which she considered to be “obnoxious” and a “weak spot in the vision of democracy America presents.”30 An incident in 1947 illustrated her willingness to force Rockefeller’s hand on social equality. In November of that year, Waddell wrote to him about hosting an interracial reception and dinner to honor the presidents of the UNCF black colleges.31 She had rallied the support of William Trent, Jr. and Frederick D. Patterson for the dinner. She envisioned a reception followed by small, intimate dinners at the homes of prominent New Yorkers. Knowing that this type of gathering might cause a stir by its embrace of social equality, Waddell proposed a cautious, low-key plan. The dinners would appear to be unplanned and spontaneous, a mere outgrowth of the reception. She assured Rockefeller that the “right people” would be invited and that the event would present the UNCF in the most favorable light. Upon receipt of Waddell’s letter, Rockefeller met with his male associates at the UNCF in New York (Kimball and Hoving) to discuss the ramifications of an interracial reception and dinner. In the eyes of her male counterparts, even Waddell’s carefully planned strategy was viewed as too radical. After much thought, Rockefeller wrote back to Waddell: The dinners which you speak of would seem to me dangerous. You and I may hold such views as we see fit regarding social equality between the races. If you ask one of these college presidents to dine with you, or I do, when they happen to be in the city, as we would ask any other friend, and as I have done in the past with Booker Washington or Major [Robert] Moton, that is no one’s concern except our own and is made nothing of. If, on the other hand, by common agreement, three or four or half a dozen or, as is now planned, twelve different families invite various of these college presidents to dinners, it would seem to me utterly impossible for the fact not to become known to the newspapers, with the result that some thoughtless although well-meaning reporter would come out with some such headline as “the Negro College Fund is seeking to establish social equality of the races.”32

Rockefeller had concluded that such an emphasis on social equality would not bode well for the UNCF’s “fund-raising task.”33 So reluctant, in fact, was the UNCF to allow interracial dining among the men attending its staff and board meetings that it declined to serve food at these events. Thus, meetings and symposia were acceptable, but interracial dining and socializing in white homes and white establishments during the 1940s and early 1950s were out of the question. It would be years before Waddell would see any kind of social integration, especially over meals.


“Lunching” for Black Colleges In the 1950s, the women’s division began a series of lunches sponsored by Mrs. Hall Park McCullough, who had substantial experience in fund-raising among the elite. McCullough was married to an attorney with the Davis Polk Law Firm.34 At the time that she was recruited to help with the UNCF, Mrs. McCullough and her husband were doing very well financially, owning a home at 1035 Fifth Avenue. According to Betty Stebman, “She was absolutely fascinated with the whole idea of the United Negro College Fund.”35 Having dedicated years to the support of Bennington College, she approached the UNCF in 1950 and asked, “What can I do for you?” After some conversation, she decided that the best thing she could do was to place her elegant home at their disposal. According to Stebman, I said . . . if you would invite people to come to your home, we could tell you whom to invite and you could invite your own friends, too. If they could come to your home for lunch and we could have Mr. Trent, whom she had met and fallen in love with, speak to them and tell them about the College Fund. Let them ask questions.36

McCullough was “delighted” to oblige Stebman’s request and, as a result, Mrs. McCullough’s luncheons began. McCullough took the planning of the luncheons very seriously, as her reputation as a hostess was at stake. She was following in the tradition of eighteenthand nineteenth-century society women who, according to historian Cameron Binkley, “had long used their credentials as homemakers to convey the propriety of their opinions on social issues.”37 Betty Stebman spent much time on the telephone, debating with McCullough over who should be invited to the everso-elite engagements. For example, consider this recollection of Stebman’s: We’d have a luncheon. I’d say, “How about Mrs. So-and-So?” [And she’d say] “Well, I don’t think she’s ever met a Negro. I think it would be good to have her.” [I’d say] “Well, you think we ought to put her next to Mr. Trent?” [And she’d say] “Oh no, I wouldn’t do that. No, I think that’s going a little far. I’d put her . . . in the next room and then maybe we could ask her again some time later, and we’d see what her reaction is.”38

Inviting some of the most elite people in New York sometimes meant inviting some of the “most biased people, really biased people, who never knew a Negro except the woman who worked in the house or the . . . black elevator man.”39 However, these luncheons soon became the place to be seen in New York City, and supporting the United Negro College Fund became the thing to do among the society ladies.40 These women became the “inner circle” of professional volunteers in New York City.41 According to Betty Stebman,

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And they came to Mrs. McCullough’s luncheons. Elegant Mrs. McCullough. . . . She was a wonderful, tall, stately, beautiful woman. And they’d come to Mrs. McCullough’s lovely apartment and she’d have her two maids, all in their nice uniforms, and everything was done just right. We had as many as thirty or thirtytwo people at a time, because they [the luncheons] got to be very fashionable. I mean, it was a question of did you get invited to Mrs. McCullough’s luncheon?42

The centerpiece of the luncheons was an informal talk by William Trent (who, incidentally, did not eat while the women were eating but instead sat in the living room until lunch was over). In Stebman’s words, “He came to these luncheons . . . and he spoke beautifully.” After their lunch, all of the ladies would gather together in McCullough’s huge living room, “this beautiful living room overlooking [Central] Park, with the fire going in the wintertime . . . and people would just sit around this lovely room, and Bill would get up and just absolutely charm the pants off everyone. He would tell the story of the College Fund. He would answer questions.”43 Some of the women asked rather sophisticated questions. They were well informed about education in general, and because many of the women had gone to women’s colleges themselves, they were interested in Spelman and Bennett. However, others were sheltered from the nation’s race issues and would sometimes unwittingly make racist comments. According to Betty Stebman, they might say they “never in their lives had met a Negro, and it was a fantastic experience for them.” They would say, upon meeting Bill Trent, “isn’t it fascinating that a Negro could be that educated, a Negro! . . . And people would go away saying, oh-h-h, Mr. Trent is so marvelous.” Knowing Bill Trent became fashionable. “And before you knew it, Mr. Trent was invited to go on the board of this organization, on the board of that organization. Mr. Trent became the Negro.” According to Stebman, “You really had to know Bill Trent. Otherwise, you know, you didn’t know anybody. And, of course, [the women were saying] my friend Bill Trent. I know a Negro. His name’s Bill Trent. Well, that was all part of this whole thing.”44 Much like the women mentioned in historian Beverly Gordon’s Bazaars and Fair Ladies, who, although “always mindful of their domestic public image, often sought out the titillating and sensual,” the ladies at McCullough’s luncheons found it exciting to flirt with societal taboos, chief among which was fraternizing with a “Negro.”45 Of course, whites in New York City had a history of “craving” interaction with the “Negro.” This was the case during the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, when whites would go “uptown” to visit jazz clubs, finding it exotic and risky. There, as with McCullough’s luncheons, blacks were the entertainment.46 Although Betty Stebman found the exploitation of Trent distasteful, she believed that his presence at the luncheons moved the UNCF ahead and helped it gain access to the “right” circles. Moreover, because many of the ladies attending the lunches were connected to wealthy individuals in other cities, these events had nationwide ramifications for the fund. After the first few luncheons, the women’s division also solicited the help


of other black college presidents, including Benjamin Mays of Morehouse College and Rufus Clement of Atlanta University. Mays, much like Trent, would eventually become, in Lindsley Kimball’s words, “exhibit A” of the UNCF.47 Over the course of few years, McCullough gave more than a hundred luncheons for the UNCF, reaching almost three thousand women.48 Her luncheons were an “institution” that continued until old age prevented her from hosting them.49

More than Lady Bountiful? According to some contemporary critics, Mrs. McCullough, Catherine Waddell, and their friends could be easily characterized as “Ladies Bountiful,” women who used giving to the poor on occasion to enhance their own social standing and to build feelings of self-righteousness.50 These UNCF women’s division members denied the title, of course. In their minds, giving to the UNCF was no shallow, attention-getting act but an effort to change race relations throughout the country. To reinforce the women’s sense of earnestness about their activities, the organizers assigned serious-sounding topics to luncheon discussions, such as “The Role of the Negro College in American Education,” “The Problems of Negro Colleges,” “The Economics of the Negro College,” and “The Future of the Negro Colleges.”51 On many occasions, the women who attended the luncheons would communicate these issues to their husbands, with the goal of securing a donation for the fund. Above all, the challenging material presented at the luncheons gave everyone involved the sense that they were tackling the important issues of the day. The approach to fund-raising used by the women’s division was feminine in character.52 The leading women—including Waddell, Loengard, and McCullough—aimed to touch the heartstrings of potential donors. They pointed to the personal impact that their circle could have on black individuals, using phrases such as “Look what you can do for these people. Look at the career that you can make possible.”53 Their brochures pointed to the history of volunteerism among New York City’s women (with the USO, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Opera) and how these women had made a difference to various organizations. The division’s success came from the fact that these women saw each other socially all the time, playing bridge together and attending dinner parties. It became very hard to say no to a friend, regardless of whether you believed in the cause of black education.54 According to Hollis Price, president of the historically black college LeMoyne-Owen, “The whole idea of the organization of women’s groups had never caught on in the College Fund nationally to the same degree that it caught on in New York City, and I think that you’ve got to give Catherine Waddell credit for her great interest, great drive and the responsibility for getting that off

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the ground, because this was her whole life devotion.”55 In fact, Price noted that “the men in New York and the men’s committee never paid the women’s committee any attention . . . [T]hey just operated, they raised money and so forth, but so far as any type of cooperation activity or working with the women’s committee in New York, they apparently didn’t even deign to notice that the women’s committee existed.”56 The women’s division was what philanthropic scholars Kathleen McCarthy and David Hammack have referred to as a “parallel power structure,” promoting reform in subtle ways.57 While the white males involved with the UNCF were operating on one plane, the white women were operating on another by acquiring fund-raising clout. By and large, the events they organized presented the UNCF from a privileged white woman’s perspective. Aside from the occasional involvement of a member college president at one of McCullough’s luncheons, most of the fund-raising activities were events that were the norm for white society women, events that declined to move them out of their comfort zones. This would change in 1955 when, in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the women’s division planned an extravagant affair that aimed to tell the nation that black colleges were still needed and relevant, even after the end of legalized segregation.

Convincing the Nation of the Value of Black Colleges After hearing skepticism from multiple parties throughout the country as to the value of maintaining black colleges during the post Brown v. Board of Education period, the UNCF member colleges and the New York leadership decided to stage a spectacular public event to rally support to their cause. The most important place in the country to target, in the fund’s opinion, was New York City, because most of the money was raised there. According to Betty Stebman, the fund secretary: [We] need[ed] to do something that would make front page news in New York, that would really get across to the people in New York to make them understand that this was not an end but a beginning; that the colleges in the United Negro College Fund had never themselves discriminated but had been discriminated against and that the opportunity now was for them to open their doors, as their charters permitted them to, and to take white students without being afraid that they would lose their tax exemption . . . this was a moment in history when the private Negro colleges could fulfill their true mission as good institutions capable of educating the people in the community who came to them, black and white.58

Stebman took her idea to William Trent and C. D. Jackson, the chair of the men’s committee and publisher of Fortune magazine. Jackson was well connected, as he served as President Eisenhower’s special assistant in the White


House and as a delegate to the United Nations. Stebman wanted the women’s and men’s committees of the UNCF to work together in an effort to make a “stir in the city,” and she asked Jackson if he would consider being the chair of this initiative. He gladly agreed. The hardworking UNCF secretary began planning the event immediately, renting the old Metropolitan Opera House, which seated 3,700, for an event to be held Sunday, March 20, 1955. Originally the UNCF tried to get President Eisenhower to be the keynote speaker, but he declined. Instead, they secured John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state. Although Dulles was the drawing card for the event, Benjamin Mays would also be on the agenda and, according to Betty Stebman, just as at past symposiums, he would be “the guy that they would remember when they left.”59 Although the women’s division itself had more than ten thousand names on its mailing list, the UNCF staff thought they would have a difficult time filling the thirty-seven hundred seats and so decided to offer the boxes in the opera house to various groups throughout the city, including the Girl Scouts, the National Council of Negro Women, the National Council of Jewish Women, and Riverside Church. In exchange for a free opera box, the organizations were asked to send invitations to their membership, which greatly expanded the UNCF’s potential donor base. As a consequence, the fund filled all of the opera house seats. The event, which was meant to “show off” the UNCF presidents to New York City, began with a Friday morning greeting from New York’s Mayor Robert Wagner to all of the UNCF member college presidents. Afterward, Columbia University hosted a luncheon in the faculty club for the presidents, during which they dined with the leaders of elite colleges in the region, including those at Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. Of course, this kind of integrated event would never have taken place prior to 1954, at least not with the UNCF name attached to it. But now it was possible because of the Supreme Court’s pronouncement. After lunch, the presidents went to the United Nations, where they were briefed by the United States Committee for the United Nations, as well as other dignitaries. In the evening the presidents participated in a reception hosted by the secretary-general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden. On the following day, the presidents were guests of the New York Public Library for lunch. This event was followed by a dinner at the Cosmopolitan Club dedicated to the alumni associations of all of the member colleges. Certainly, this event was highly significant because in the past, UNCF gatherings at the Cosmopolitan Club never included meals. On Sunday morning, as was traditional before all of the other UNCF convocations, the presidents spoke at churches all over the city. Their sermons were featured on television and radio programs. And in the wake of the Brown decision, Mrs. Waddell’s wish was fulfilled: Members of the women’s division were finally allowed to serve as hosts of integrated dinners. On Sunday evening prior

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to the event at the Metropolitan Opera House, the UNCF arranged for “a hundred dinner parties that took place all over town.” The members of the women’s division served as hostesses for the dinners, which were “approved” by the white, male UNCF leaders in the new “legally desegregated” nation. The evening included performances by the Tuskegee University choir and Leontyne Price, the black opera singer, as well as speeches by John Foster Dulles and Benjamin E. Mays.60 The UNCF handily achieved its goal of getting national press coverage of the UNCF. Both the New York Times and the Herald-Tribune ran front-page stories on the event. In addition, all the television and radio programs featured excerpts from the evening.61 The speech by Benjamin Mays was a huge success. He told his audience that “the American ideal of equality of opportunity for all of the people has taken on a new meaning.” He explained that the nation’s black colleges would be instrumental in realizing that new meaning. He pointed out that “custom made them segregated institutions, but they have never been segregating institutions.” Thus, the Supreme Court’s decision would allow them, and the country’s traditionally white institutions, to include all people, black and white, among their students.62 By the early 1970s, Betty Stebman had left the UNCF and the women’s division “had just about petered out.” According to Vernon Jordan, the new president of the UNCF, “She was the sole force behind it, and Betty had some very determined attitudes about the College Fund and how it ought to operate.” Moreover, “the College Fund was changing—or had changed—in the sense that historically it was white people who had access to the doors of philanthropy, and therefore the staff was largely white.”63 With the onset of an era of increased black consciousness, having a group of older white ladies sponsoring society teas was no longer the right approach for the UNCF. Of course, during this same time, women were on their way to new avenues of power. Over the course of its existence, the National Women’s Committee of the UNCF accomplished much. The core group of white society ladies (Waddell, Loengard, and McCullough), with the help of Betty Stebman, opened the minds of many of New York City’s most elite women. It could be argued that these ladies brought the cause of black education to the center of New York City’s high society so that it eventually sat side by side with the causes of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Opera. They made race work acceptable and desirable among this class of women beginning in the mid1940s through the early 1960s. In addition to providing a space in their homes to discuss the funding of black education, these women made considerable progress in their attempts to integrate social clubs, break societal taboos, and push racial boundaries that their white male counterparts often avoided. Although the Women’s Committee raised, on average, a mere eighty thousand dollars per year, it was the impact on the minds of wealthy white women in New York City that did the greatest service for the UNCF. The women passed the


message of black intellect and support of black education from friend to friend, creating a network of publicity that challenged ignorance.

Notes 1. Andrea Walton, ed., Women and Philanthropy in Education (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3. 2. Kathleen D. McCarthy, ed., Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy, and Power (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); David C. Hammack, Making the Nonprofit Sector in the United States: A Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). See also Sondra Shaw and Martha Taylor, eds., Reinventing Fundraising: Realizing the Potential of Women’s Philanthropy (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995); Walton, ed., Women and Philanthropy in Education; Teresa Odendahl, Women and Philanthropy: Gender and Career Patterns (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988); Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women, Philanthropy, and Civil Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Sarah Deutsch, “Learning to Talk More Like a Man: Boston Women’s Class Bridging Organizations, 1870–1940,” The American Historical Review 97 (April 1992): 379–404; Maureen A. Flanagan, “Gender and Urban Political Reform: The City Club and the Woman’s City Club of Chicago in the Progressive Era,” The American Historical Review 95 (October 1990): 1032–50; and Anne M. Boylan, “Women in Groups: An Analysis of Women’s Benevolent Organizations in New York and Boston, 1797–1840,” The Journal of American History 71 (September 1974): 372–93. 3. Dorothy G. Becker, “Exit Lady Bountiful: The Volunteer and the Professional Social Worker,” The Social Service Review 38, no. 1 (1964): 57–72, 63. 4. Cameron Binkley, “‘No Better Heritage Than Living Trees’: Women’s Clubs and Early Conservation in Humboldt County,” The Western Historical Quarterly 33, no. 2 (2002): 179–202; Barbara Lowney, “Lady Bountiful: Margaret Crocker of Sacramento,” California Historical Society Quarterly 47, no. 2 (1968): 99–112; Gregory Nosan, “Women in the Galleries: Prestige, Education, and Volunteerism at Mid-Century,” Museum Studies 29, no. 1 (2003): 46–71; Beverly Gordon, Bazaars and Fair Ladies: The History of the American Fundraising Fair (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998). 5. McCarthy, Lady Bountiful Revisited; Shaw and Taylor, Reinventing Fundraising; Walton, Women and Philanthropy in Education; Odendahl, Women and Philanthropy; McCarthy, Women, Philanthropy, and Civil Society; Deutsch, “Learning to Talk More Like a Man”; Flanagan, “Gender and Urban Political Reform”; and Boylan, “Women in Groups.” 6. Darlene Clark Hine, “‘We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible’: The Philanthropic Work of Black Women,” in McCarthy, Lady Bountiful Revisited; Linda Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women’s Welfare Activism, 1890–1945,” Journal of American History 78 (September 1991): 559–90; and Anita Shafer Goostein, “A Rare Alliance: African American and White Women in the Tennessee Elections of 1919 and 1920,” Journal of Southern History 64 (May 1998): 219–46.

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7. McCarthy, Lady Bountiful Revisited, xi. 8. Ibid., 4. 9. Arlene Kaplan Daniels, Invisible Careers: Women Civic Leaders from the Volunteer World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). See also Ruth Bordin, Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). 10. Walton, Women and Philanthropy in Education, 5. 11. McCarthy, Lady Bountiful Revisited, 16. 12. Ibid., 5. 13. See Marybeth Gasman, “Frederick Douglass Patterson (1901–1988), College President and Founder of the United Negro College Fund,” The Encyclopedia of Philanthropy, ed. Dwight Burlingame (New York: Oryx, 2001), 368–69. 14. See William J. Trent Jr., “Cooperative Fund Raising for Higher Education,” Journal of Negro Education 24 (Winter 1955): 6–15. By 1954, the number of UNCF member colleges was 31, two less than in 1946. 15. See Eric Anderson and Alfred Moss, Dangerous Donation: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902–1930 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999); James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 16. Frederick D. Patterson to Jackson Davis, 28 May 1943, General Education Board Papers, Record Group 5235-5240, series 1, subseries 3, box 490, folder 5231, Rockefeller Archive Center [hereafter RAC], New York, New York. 17. Frederick D. Patterson in Martia G. Goodson, eds., Chronicles of Faith: The Autobiography of Frederick D. Patterson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991). 18. Martia Goodson, Betty Stebman interview transcript, April 1982, UNCF Oral History, No. 1331, Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, New York, NY. 19. Martia Goodson, Walter Hoving interview transcript, February 1981, UNCF Oral History, No. 1331. 20. “Mrs. Waddell, 63, Was Civic Leader,” New York Times, December 14, 1961, p. 43. 21. Lewis W. Jones, “A History of the United Negro College Fund,” 141, UNCF Papers, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, Atlanta, GA. 22. Goodson, Stebman interview transcript. 23. Martia Goodson, William J. Trent, Jr. interview transcript, October 1980, UNCF Oral History Collection, No. 1331; Goodson, Stebman interview transcript. 24. Becker, “Exit Lady Bountiful,” 71. 25. Goodson, Stebman interview transcript, 78. Descriptions of Catherine Waddell’s visits to Spelman College and her service on the board of trustees were used in letters sent to potential female donors. See Catherine Waddell to Miss/Mrs. [generic salutation], October 20, 1948, and Catherine Waddell to Mrs. [generic salutation], June 21, 1948, UNCF Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, reel 3082. 26. The colleges that make up the “Seven Sisters” included Wellesley (Wellesley, MA), Bryn Mawr (Bryn Mawr, PA), Smith (Northampton, MA), Mount Holyoke (South Hadley, MA), Barnard (New York, NY), Radcliffe (Cambridge, MA), and Vassar (Poughkeepsie, NY).

“I Think I’d Like to Have the Experience of Meeting a Negr0” 1 7 7 27. Goodson interview transcript. For some white middle- and upper-class women, it was easy to see the connections between their plight and those of middle-class black women, especially maintaining their access to higher education generally and women’s colleges in particular. For a detailed exploration, see Yolanda L. Watson and Sheila T. Gregory, Daring to Education: The Legacy of Early Spelman College Presidents (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2005). 28. Goodson, Stebman interview transcript. 29. It was common for the UNCF women’s division to use lists from other organizations, such as the Museum of Modern Art, to generate their own lists of potential donors. See reel 3115, UNCF Papers. 30. In her 1948 fund-raising letters to those women who contributed the year before, Mrs. Waddell referred to segregation as obnoxious and longed for a day when “these institutions can be strengthened . . . when young white men and women can—if they wish . . . attend Hampton, Fisk, or Tuskegee, and young Negroes can go to the colleges of their choice.” See Catherine Waddell to Miss Tucker [sample letter], September 24, 1948, UNCF Papers, reel 3077. In letters to potential donors in 1949, Mrs. Waddell discussed the “weak spot” in America’s vision. See Catherine Waddell to Mrs. Ainslie [sample letter], June 14, 1949, UNCF Papers, reel 3095. 31. Chauncey Waddell to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., November 23, 1947, Messrs. Rockefeller—Education, III 2 G, box 94, folder 655C, RAC. 32. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to Chauncey Waddell, December 11, 1947, Messrs. Rockefeller—Education, III 2 G, box 94, folder 655C, RAC. 33. Ibid. 34. Interestingly, the Davis Polk Law Firm was the firm of John W. Davis, who coincidentally was the same person who argued the Brown v. Board of Education case and lost it to Thurgood Marshall in 1954. See Goodson, Stebman interview transcript. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 93. 37. Binkley, “No Better Heritage Than Living Trees,” 201. 38. Goodson, Stebman interview transcript, 93. 39. Ibid. 40. Goodson, William J. Trent, Jr., interview transcript. 41. Becker, “Exit Lady Bountiful,” 71. 42. Goodson, Stebman interview transcript, 93–94. Although Stebman is correct in her assessment of the “elite” nature attached to lunching at Mrs. McCullough’s home, there were some women who refused to attend, preferring to give to the UNCF on an anonymous basis. They were afraid to have their names associated with the UNCF. See reel 3095 for letters written by Catherine Waddell to “anonymous” donors, UNCF Papers. 43. Goodson, Stebman, interview transcript, 94. 44. Ibid. 45. Gordon, Bazaars and Fair Ladies. 46. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997). 47. Goodson, Lindsley Kimball interview transcript, February 1981, UNCF Oral History, No. 1331, 53.

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48. “Mrs. Hall Park McCullough” Honorary Program copy, n.d., UNCF Papers, reel 1636. For lists of those who attended the luncheons, see UNCF Papers, reel 3091. 49. Goodson, Stebman interview transcript, 106. 50. “Lady Bountiful,” Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms, 2003; Binkley, “No Better Heritage,” 179–202; Lowney, “Lady Bountiful”; Nosan, “Women in the Galleries”; Gordon, Bazaars and Fair Ladies. 51. Mrs. Hall Park McCullough to Mrs. [generic salutation], March 8, 1948, UNCF Papers, reel 3083. 52. Goodson, William J. Trent, Jr., interview transcript, October 1980. 53. Goodson, Lindsley Kimball interview transcript, 55. 54. Ibid., 57. 55. Goodson, Hollis Price interview transcript, May 1987, UNCF Oral History, No. 1331, 63. 56. Ibid. 57. See Kathleen D. McCarthy, “Women and Philanthropy: Three Strategies in an Historical Perspective” (Working Paper 22, Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, City University of New York, Winter 1994); and Hammack, Making the Nonprofit Sector in the United States. For a beautifully written synthesis of this perspective, see Walton, ed., “Introduction,” in Women and Philanthropy in Education. 58. Goodson, Stebman interview transcript, 167. 59. Ibid., 171. 60. Convocation Program, United Negro College Fund, Metropolitan Opera House, New York, New York, March 20, 1955, UNCF Papers, reel 3217. 61. Goodson, Stebman interview transcript. 62. Benjamin E. Mays, United Negro College Fund Convocation, March 20, 1955, 1, UNCF Papers, reel 3217. 63. Goodson, Vernon Jordan interview transcript, January 1982, UNCF Oral History, No. 1331, 26–27.

4

Chapter 9

Linking Fr iendship and Service Education and Phil anthropy among the Bl ack Elite, 1946–60

Kijua Sanders-McMurtry and Nia Woods Haydel

Amid racial strife and conflict in the 1940s, when blacks still suffered racism

and oppression in the United States, a women’s organization was founded to address these social ills.1 On the night of November 9, 1946, nine women gathered to establish a club of elite black women in Philadelphia. Cofounders and Philadelphia educators Margaret Roselle Hawkins and Sarah Strickland Scott invited seven friends to join them to form a new intercity club that would focus on racial uplift for socially disadvantaged members of their race.2 These friends and family members forged an indelible bond and created an organization that would “link friends for service”: The Links.3 This chapter tells the story of this black women’s organization, one that is often overlooked in studies chronicling women’s organizations. We contend, like Darlene Clark Hine, that the study of black women is important because as a group they have been “neglected” and “historically invisible.”4 In particular, we focus on the educational and civil rights activism of The Links.

The Links and Other Black Women’s Organizations Before the founding of The Links, many black women had joined various clubs, associations, and sororities to combat oppression against their people. Indeed,

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the women who founded The Links were daughters, granddaughters, nieces, and cousins of clubwomen who had mobilized since the late 1890s.5 In 1896, black women had organized the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the counterpart to the national white women’s organization, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. One of the NACW’s most important tasks was increasing educational access, be it formal or informal, for members of their race.6 Accordingly, black clubwomen organized mothers’ clubs, kindergartens, nurseries, social settlements, and libraries. Despite the clubwomen’s middle-class status and their efforts to fulfill the NACW motto, “lifting as we climb,” they too suffered discrimination. Black clubwomen, then, conceived of their survival as inextricably linked to that of their fellow brothers and sisters. As Hine noted, “The philanthropic work of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American women ensured the survival of many of the most vulnerable members of their race.”7 The NACW-affiliated clubs continued their social uplift through the 1930s. As Anne Meis Knupfer has documented, clubwomen in Chicago provided food, clothing, and in-kind gifts to families in need. Additionally, the clubwomen founded and supported homes for dependent and orphaned children, as well as for working women. At the same time, the women did not neglect political issues. They agitated for the antilynching bill, fought against discriminatory practices in segregated schools, and educated themselves about black and African history.8 In 1935, former NACW president and college founder Mary McCleod Bethune formed a new black women’s organization with thirty-five other black women leaders: the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). She proposed that the NCNW be an umbrella organization that would coordinate the activities of the many black women’s clubs, sororities, missionary societies, and other groups. While not seeking to supplant the NACW, Bethune hoped that the NCNW would be more active in promoting civil rights legislation and black employment in the federal government.9 At its 1941 meeting, the NCNW announced that “stronger and more militant representations shall be made to the various federal departments for a more equitable distribution of opportunities for Negroes to serve national government in its many ramifications.”10 Bethune hoped that all black women, regardless of social class, would be represented through the NCNW. Yet, as Deborah Gray White has noted, the NCNW, like the NACW, was primarily middle-class in its membership. Nonetheless, the members of the NCNW, similar to the NACW and black sororities, used their status to advocate for social change. The NCNW-member sororities, especially Alpha Kappa Alpha and Delta Sigma Theta, were active in protesting inequities for all blacks, especially in education. For example, Delta Sigma Theta helped to start libraries in several southern states during the late 1940s, preceding the work of The Links.11 During the 1940s and 1950s, the NACW, the NCNW, and black sororities stepped up their civil rights agenda. For example, these organizations advocated

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for wartime employment for black women and the desegregation of the military. Through their efforts and other civil rights organizations, the “color line” blurred in wartime factory work. However, by the end of World War II, there was still considerable racial tension and discrimination in the United States. The condition of many blacks remained abysmal due to inequality in education, housing, employment, and political rights. To illustrate, the lynching of Negro men and women was so prevalent in 1946 that the NAACP called it one of the “grimmest years.”12 Black citizens were painfully aware of their “third-class citizenship” during and after the war years. Black wartime workers and military personnel knew that they had been fighting for other people’s freedom overseas, while many were denied basic rights, such as voting, in their own country. Accordingly, they fought for the “double V”: victory abroad but also at home.13 This prompted Rayford Logan, in What the Negro Wants, to present to the public a list of freedoms demanded by black citizens: equal opportunity, equal pay for equal work, equal protection of the laws, voting rights for all, and the eradication of segregation.14 Bethune, too, argued for certain “unalienable rights,” including voting, an end to lynching, the desegregation of armed forces, equal employment opportunities, and federal programs in housing, health, and education.15 It was within this context of postwar activism that The Links was established. Concerned about these inequitable conditions, Margaret Roselle Hawkins and Sarah Strickland Scott had engaged in numerous discussions about the physical dangers and continued subjugation of blacks. In DuBoisian fashion, they believed that their social status and privilege provided them with the responsibility to help others. Politically savvy, they realized they would need to “cash in” on the networks they had established both professionally and personally. Hawkins and Scott determined that they would start a new women’s club in Philadelphia. The women conceptualized a club that would “link friends in service.”16 They asked their friend Lillian Wall to host their first meeting at her home, where nine women gathered to discuss their roles in addressing the pressing social issues. During this meeting, one of the women offered the name “The Links” to articulate the vision of friends linked together.17 The Philadelphia Links then developed a plan of action for their club. The cofounders conceptualized the club as one that would focus on friendship and service. Although the women who founded The Links were actively involved in other organizations, they envisioned that this club would meet the needs of blacks in ways that other women’s organizations had not—that is, by focusing on educational experiences for disadvantaged children and youth. The cofounders also believed that the club should implement programs to foster cultural appreciation through the arts, develop intergroup relations, and help members to undertake their social and civic responsibilities.18 The national charter of The Links was handled by Dr. Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander. As a lawyer, Alexander was a member of the black elite in Philadelphia,

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and she came from a family steeped in the tradition of advocacy and service in the City of Brotherly Love. Prior to earning her law degree, she had received her doctorate in economics, the first black woman to do so. As one of the few black female attorneys in Philadelphia, she advised and counseled Links members on how to develop and incorporate their organization. A Links member herself, Alexander served on President Truman’s Commission to Study the Civil Rights of All Races and Faiths from 1946 to 1948. She was also active in another women’s club started by one of the founding members of The Links: Jack and Jill of America.19 The goals of this organization—to foster the cultural and educational growth of middle-class black children—were similar to those of The Links, although the latter group targeted low-income children.20 Once they established the Philadelphia chapter and obtained their charter, the cofounders and original members sought to expand their vision. The Philadelphia Links urged their family members and friends in other cities to charter new chapters. Chapters soon followed in the cities of Atlantic City (1947), Washington, DC (1947), Petersburg, Virginia (1948), Baltimore (1948), Pittsburgh (1948), St. Louis (1948), Wilmington, North Carolina (1948), Dayton (1949), and Raleigh, North Carolina (1949).21 The first national meeting with fourteen clubs was held in Philadelphia in June 1949. Representatives from all chapters voted to establish The Links, Incorporated as a national nonprofit organization “of a charitable, social, and intercultural nature.”22 The group later focused on civic, cultural, and educational programs.23 In their efforts to improve the lives of disadvantaged black children and youth, The Links were often accused of elitism. However, as Marybeth Gasman contended, “The charge of classism has been lodged against many elite organizations, including Greek fraternities and sororities, regardless of their racial makeup.” Indeed, black members of these organizations were often held to higher standards and expectations.24 Inherent in the critique of The Links, then, was the recognition that its members were from the middle and upper class, in comparison with many blacks nationally who were poor and had few resources. Nonetheless, black women’s organizations historically were complex and controversial because of their members’ “relative privilege,” to use Linda Gordon’s term.25 To be sure, much of what Links members accomplished was possible because of their very cultural and social capital. Because the cofounders were both teachers and many members were administrators, professors, and teachers, they understood that education was central to blacks’ progress. They also realized that their social status was related to their cultural and social capital and so used their resources to create a network of women with a similar background.26 As stated in a history of the Washington, DC, chapter: “[W]e were upwardly mobile, middle-class women who well understood the huge gap between ourselves and this vast underclass of blacks, who received the worst of everything, including


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schools and jobs. . . . [W]e also understood that whatever our successes and accomplishments, the structure and tenacity of racism in America were so strong that the bonds between the two classes would never be broken.”27 In truth, the process for selecting Links members was more exclusive than the NACW or NCNW. Members were chosen by invitation only, and usually potential members were not even aware they were being considered. Once a person was nominated, the group voted, and if the individual passed this process, she received an official invitation. Despite charges of exclusivity, this process did ensure that members were rooted in “bonds of friendship.” However, members were not simply friends. Most had a demonstrated record of service, either through their affiliation with other activist organizations or because of their distinction in society as a service-oriented woman. Consequently, it was not unusual for many women to become Links members later in their lives, after they had become established professionals in their fields. Given their professional and community stature, members were able to pay substantial dues and to contribute generously to the organization’s cultural, educational, and social projects.28 Despite the claim that the mission of The Links was unique, there were several overlapping interests with other black women’s organizations. Although The Links was not a member organization of the NCNW, both groups were interested in civil rights. As early as 1946, the NCNW had broadened its agenda to include civil rights, which it defined as “economics, education, and political action.”29 The women of the NCNW, like Links members, gave financial support to the NAACP. In fact, after listening to Thurgood Marshall speak at one of their conventions, NCNW members vowed to organize a committee to consult with NAACP officials on an “appropriate plan of action in the implementation of desegregation.”30 Like The Links, the NCNW also became increasingly concerned about the wholesome development of black youth during the 1950s. Consequently, they developed opportunities so that youth and children would develop to their full potential.31 Unlike The Links, the NCNW and the NACW extended their agenda to include the status of women internationally. For example, in 1958, one NACW member had spent time in the Middle East, then reported on women’s social and political conditions there. Other members gave reports on the Pan Pacific and Southeast Asia and Africa, following their visits to these regions. Like the NACW, the NCNW demonstrated its interests in the status of women internationally and black people internationally by becoming observers at the United Nations.32 Despite the similarities and differences among these black women’s organizations, The Links contributed significantly to civil rights and the education of black college students, youth, and children. Below, we detail their various programs and activities.

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The Links’ Civil Rights and Educational Programs Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, The Links supported various civil rights organizations, especially the NAACP, the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), and the National Urban League.33 Here, Links members were inspired by one of their program chairs and known civil rights worker, Daisy Lampkin. From 1935 to 1947, she had served as the NAACP’s national field secretary. However, she had established herself as a social activist long before then. She has been chair of the executive board of the NACW, had served on the NCNW’s board of directors, and had been involved in the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. She also used her position with the Pittsburgh Courier, a prominent black newspaper, to wield political influence in black communities nationally.34 Given her high social standing and political activism, her membership in The Links was extremely important. Furthermore, her financial campaigns for the NAACP corresponded with The Links’ own financial support of this civil rights organization. Through her leadership and that of others, many chapters became life-term members in the NAACP. This was significant because the NAACP needed monies for its legal funds to challenge the segregation of public schools in the courts. To be sure, The Links stepped up its efforts during the 1950s. At the 1954 national convention, lawyer Thurgood Marshall and NAACP official Roy Wilkins spoke about the NAACP’s litigation efforts.35 That year was momentous for the Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education. Yet even as the Supreme Court had declared that segregation was unequal, The Links continued to support the NAACP, realizing that the desegregation of schools would be a long-term process. At the 1957 national assembly of The Links, held at Morehouse College in Atlanta, President Margaret Hawkins praised Links members for all that the organization had so far accomplished. Many individuals, she noted, had complimented the organization and called it the “most outstanding women’s organization—the women who don’t just talk but really do things.” However, she also cautioned members about the “terrible, frustrating battle that is being fought right now for the very life of Negro America.” She encouraged all members to help “preserve the basic democratic principles of mankind in our great country.”36 The Links responded to her call by giving nearly thirty thousand dollars to the NAACP.37 However, The Links knew that the problem of segregation was not limited to schools in the South. The North, too, had its own color line, evident in schools, employment, and housing. At one panel in Chicago sponsored by The Links, Olive Diggs, a Links member and editor of the Chicago Sunday Bee, spoke of the racial atrocities in Chicago. Noted black journalist Ethel Payne followed her, reminding the audience again of the problems in desegregating


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public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. As she cautioned: “Sputnik may have pushed Little Rock off the front pages, but it has not made the problem go away.”38 To be sure, the civil rights projects that Links members pursued were not separate from their educational ones. Members clearly understood that their support of the NAACP was intricately connected to equal educational opportunity. In addition to supporting civil rights organizations, Links members donated their time and monies to three educational endeavors: access to higher education, cultural and educational activities for children and youth, and “education for democracy.” In the case of higher education, various Links chapters gave scholarships to talented college students. Furthermore, the chapters knew that in supporting these students, they were making history by desegregating their respective colleges. For example, during the mid-1950s, one chapter gave two hundred and fifty dollars to the NAACP for the education of Hiram Whittle, the first black student to attend the College of Engineering at the University of Maryland and the first to live on campus at College Park. They also contributed three hundred dollars for Paul Brent, a black student studying at Peabody Institute in Baltimore. At the same time, various Links chapters continued to support historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). For example, the newly established Tallahassee chapter presented a bookmobile to a new college hospital that served the students and faculty of Florida A & M, as well as the entire county.39 The national Links organization also continued to nurture affiliations with officials of the UNCF and HBCUs. At the 1957 convention, guest speakers included Dr. Frederick D. Patterson, then president of the UNCF.40 At another Links convention, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse College, gave a speech on “Ways to Establish Better Human Relations.” Mays especially emphasized education and philanthropy as the responsibility of the black elite; more importantly, he noted that The Links represented the best and the brightest of the Negro race. He admonished The Links: We must increase the number of outstanding individuals in every area of our development: law, medicine, the ministry, social work, politics, industry, and the like. . . . [W]hat status would the Negro have in life without Douglass (referring to Frederick), Washington, DuBois, Charles Drew, Charles Johnson, Ralph Bunche, Marian Anderson, Mary McLeod Bethune, and others? It is our duty and responsibility to pick out every Negro boy and girl of promise, encourage him or her in every way we can. Races and nations are known in history by the contribution of their great minds. . . . We can establish better human relations by bridging the gap between those of us upon whom fortune has smiled and those who are less fortunate than we. Let there be no chasm between the high and the low, the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the learned and the unlearned, for the destiny of every man is tied up with the destiny of every other man.41

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The Links also increasingly focused on educational opportunities for black children and youth. The theme for the Seventh National Assembly in 1955 was “What Can Links Do Today for Youth of Tomorrow?” There, delegates from fifty different chapters decided that the national focus of the organization would be the educational advancement for youth. According to Links historian Marjorie Parker, each chapter was encouraged to develop an “educational program for integration related to its local community.”42 Activities that centered on education were well documented as Links chapters systematically sent the national office detailed reports about their community efforts. The Links realized that black children and youth needed a rigorous education in order to attend college. Preceding the Head Start programs, The Links understood that early intervention was crucial for children with fewer opportunities and so sponsored civic, cultural, and educational activities for them during the 1940s and 1950s. In addition to creating scholarship funds, The Links provided educational resources such as books and supplies. For example, in 1948, the Washington, DC chapter gave a radio/Victrola, Christmas records, and gift certificate to the Industrial Home School Annex, along with a check for the children.43 The Baltimore chapter made monetary contributions to an interdenominational nursery school. The Atlanta chapter made generous cash donations to the Atlanta Community Chest, the UNCF, and the Phillis Wheatley Branch YWCA.44 The Dayton chapter pledged five hundred dollars to the building fund of the West Side Day Nursery. In Chicago, members raised monies for the South Side Boys’ Club and the black YWCA. The Seattle chapter, chartered in 1955, began its own cultural enrichment program for children, sponsoring eight students from elementary schools in the area on visits to local museums, art galleries, concerts, lectures, and other field trips.45 Links chapters also promoted reading activities for young children. The Chicago Links donated books about black history to the George Cleveland Hall Library, the first library in that city’s black neighborhood. The Sacramento Links, aware of stereotypes and caricatures of blacks in mainstream books, promoted children’s books that positively reflected the experiences of black children and circulated a booklet of suggested readings.46 The Washington, DC, chapter donated books to the public library, presented cultural programs, and worked closely with interested PTA groups and with Howard University. Accordingly, during the late 1950s, Links members concentrated on providing poorer black children with “inspirational” and cultural programs, as well as tutorial and counseling services.47 Indeed, the members were primarily concerned with the damaging effects of racism and segregation on the “self-concept of disadvantaged children” and so “tried in some small ways to alleviate a situation that had so few redeeming features.”48 Some Links chapters supported the education of children with disabilities, as well as delinquent and dependent children. During the mid-1950s, the Houston chapter paid the transportation for several blind children to and from


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their schools. The Miami chapter brought “Christmas cheer” to the children of Youth Hall, a home for juvenile delinquents awaiting court hearings. The Wilmington, North Carolina, chapter, in addition to contributing to a nursery school and a church group that suffered the loss of its church by fire, donated monies toward the education of a child with a disability. Members of the Huntington, West Virginia, chapter volunteered one hour a week at the Scott Community Center, as well as assisted with the transportation expenses to the clinic for a child with cerebral palsy.49 The 1957 National Assembly, held in Atlanta, proved to be one of particular significance to the future status of The Links. The four-year-old Atlanta chapter, led by President Ernestine Brazeal, hosted the conference. The conference theme was “Links Responsibility in Establishing Better Inter-Cultural Relations.” The minutes from this momentous occasion provide a rich documentation of both the mission and the purpose of The Links, according to Margaret Hawkins, then national president. Hawkins’s vision for The Links laid the groundwork for all that the organization would accomplish in the future. By then, The Links had donated more than $37,500 to the NAACP for their efforts to fight segregation, had furthered the cause of civil rights, and had continued to improve race relations. Hawkins encouraged members to go back to their chapters “get on the phone and talk up” the need to raise additional funds for the NAACP.50 At its 1958 National Assembly in New York City, The Links committed to serving black youth through a national initiative, “Educating for Democracy” (later called “Services for Youth”). The initiative was spurred by President Pauline Maloney, a high school educator and guidance counselor in Lynchburg, Virginia.51 She, too, was an activist in her own right, working to end discriminatory policies that disenfranchised blacks in her city. Under her leadership, members became aware that “talent among minority youth was being wasted, even though the successful functioning of a democracy required that every citizen reach his or her highest educational level.”52 In response to this initiative, each chapter was asked to respond to the needs of their communities according to their own resources.53 This meant that some chapters provided scholarships to young people with academic potential and others provided cultural enrichment programs and tutoring. To illustrate, the Durham chapter designed a program for tenth-graders at three high schools. Chapter members contacted the principal and faculty members at the high schools, then asked that a team of six chapter members be allowed to participate in activities at each school.54 Students in the program represented all social classes, for as National Program Director Bernice Munce noted, the “able child comes from no specific socioeconomic level but is as often found in the home of a laborer, as in that of a college professor.”55 Chapter members took the students to art galleries, concerts, museums, theaters, and college campuses in order to contribute to “the[ir] intellectual and social enrichment.”56 Other

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Durham chapter members compiled lists of scholarships, loans, and gifts that would be available for college-bound students. Still other chapter members worked with the students throughout their high school careers until they were placed in colleges.

Conclusion This essay has outlined the educational and philanthropic activities of The Links between 1946 and 1960. Based on the success of these programs, The Links instituted four program areas during the 1960s and 1970s: Services to Youth (1962), the Arts (1964), National Trends and Services (1970), and International Trends and Services (1972). At the same time, The Links continued to endorse and financially support the UNCF. In 1972, The Links made the largest donation of any black organization to another black organization: $132,000 to the UNCF. Cumulatively, the organization has given over $1 million to four black organizations: the NAACP, the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, the UNCF, and the National Urban League.57 The Links has now grown to include 10,000 women who are members of 274 chapters in the United States, Germany, the Bahamas, and South Africa. The rosters of The Links include many notable black women, such as Coretta Scott King (widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), Dr. Betty Shabazz (widow of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, also known as Malcolm X), Dr. Helen Gray Edmonds (a prominent historian and professor), Rosa Parks, and Dr. Johnetta Besch Cole (president of Spelman College).58 They, like the earlier members, have created a legacy of service, social justice, and the promotion of human rights.

Notes 1. Jim Crow laws sanctioned acts of extra legal violence against blacks. Additionally, within the Jim Crow system, an intricate system of black codes and segregation codes existed that were treated as law, subsequently reinforcing racial ostracism that extended broadly across social institutions. For more information, see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 2. Founding members of The Links, Incorporated were Frances Atkinson, Katie Green, Marion Minton, Lillian Stanford, Myrtle Manigault Stratton, Lillian Wall, and Dorothy Wright. For more information on the founding members, see Marjorie Parker, A History of The Links, Incorporated (Washington, DC: Links, 1982). 3. Ibid., 6. 4. Darlene Clark Hine, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Reconstruction of American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 107.


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5. For example, Ilyasah Shabazz noted that her mother, Dr. Betty Shabazz, was greatly influenced by the activism of Helen Malloy (her foster mother), an activist with the Housewives League of Detroit and a delegate to the National Housewives League. For more on Helen Malloy, see Russell Rickford, Betty Shabazz: Surviving Malcolm X (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2003), 7. 6. Numerous books discuss the efforts of black women to increase access to education for many of their brothers and sisters. For a discussion of women’s advocacy for education, see Emmett Carson, A Hand Up: Black Philanthropy and Self-Help in America (Washington, DC: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Press, 1993); Hine, Hine Sight; Anne Firor Scott, “Most Invisible of All: Black Women’s Voluntary Associations,” Journal of Southern History 56 (February 1990): 3–22; Marybeth Gasman, “Sisters in Service: African American Sororities and Philanthropic Support of Education,” in Women and Philanthropy in Education, ed. Andrea Walton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 194–214; and Anne Meis Knupfer, Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood: African American Women’s Clubs in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New York: New York University Press, 1996). 7. Hine, Hine Sight, 109. 8. See Anne Meis Knupfer, The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women’s Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 9. Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 149–50. 10. “Women Have Busy Session in Washington,” Chicago Defender [hereafter CD], October 25, 1941, p. 7. 11. White, Too Heavy a Load, 149, 159. 12. Jessie Parkhurst Guzman, Vera Chandler Foster, and W. Hardin Hughes, eds., Negro Year Book: A Review of Events Affecting Negro Life, 1941–1946 (Tuskegee, AL: Department of Records and Research, Tuskegee Institute, 1947), 192; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Annual Reports, New York, 1911–1981, in Lerone Bennett, Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 543. 13. Rayford W. Logan, “The Negro Wants First-Class Citizenship,” in What the Negro Wants, ed. Rayford W. Logan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 1. 14. Ibid., 14. 15. Mary McCleod Bethune, “Certain Unalienable Rights,” in What the Negro Wants, 252–55. 16. Parker, History of The Links, 3. As of 1950, only 6 percent of black and white female workers were hired as professional and technical employees. Jessie Parkhurst Guzman, Lewis W. Jones, and Woodrow Hall, eds., 1952 Negro Year Book: A Review of Events Affecting Negro Life (New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1952), 156. 17. Nancy Thompson Bowens, ed., “Prologue,” Southern Area History: The Links, Incorporated, 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill, NC: Colonial Press, 1989), box 6, folder 5, Atlanta Links Papers [hereafter ALP], Archives Department, Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History [hereafter AARL]. 18. Parker, History of The Links, 3. 19. V. P. Franklin, “Alexander, Sadie Tanner Mossell,” in Black Women in America, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (New York:

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20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

K i j ua S a n d e r s - M c M u r t r y a n d N i a W o o d s H ay d e l Oxford University Press, 1993), 1:17–19; “18 Outstanding Women of Nation NCNW to Honor,” CD, June 19, 1948, p. 17. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Jack and Jill of America, Inc.,” in Black Women in America, 1:619–20. Parker, History of The Links, 7–8. “Constitution of The Links,” circa 1949, FF 13, box 37, Sadie T. M. Alexander Papers [hereafter SAP], University Archives and Records, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Parker, History of The Links, 3. Gasman, “Sisters in Service,” 209. Linda Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women’s Welfare Activism, 1890–1945,” Journal of American History 78 (February 1991): 559–90. Florida Woods, The Links, Incorporated, in-person interview by second author, July 14, 2003; Patricia Russell McCloud, J.D., The Links, Incorporated, in-person interview by first author, audiotape recording, April 2004; Dr. Dolly Deselle Adams, The Links, Incorporated, interview by first author, April 2004; Florene McMurtry, The Links, Incorporated, interview by first author, November 19, 2004; Ilyasah Shabazz (daughter of Dr. Betty Shabazz and El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, also known as Malcolm X), The Links, Incorporated, in-person interview by first author, November 20, 2005. Eula Trigg and Thelma Perry, “The Washington, DC, Chapter: The Links, Inc.,” July 1986, Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library [hereafter MLKL], Washington, DC, 12. See also Eula S. Trigg, “Washington, DC, Chapter, Links, Incorporated: Friendship and Service,” in Black Women in United States History, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, Tiffany R. L. Patterson, and Lillian S. Williams (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1990), 1177–86. Patricia Russell McCloud, J.D., The Links, Incorporated, in-person interview by first author, April 2004; Dr. Dolly Deselle Adams, The Links, Incorporated, interview by first author, April 2004. See also Lawrence Otis Graham, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), 109; Joe Ferry, The History of African-American Civic Organizations (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003). “NCNW Maps Plans to Extend Civil Rights at Conference,” CD, July 3, 1946, p. 16. “Women’s Council to Hear Marshall,” CD, October 15, 1955, p. 3. “Negro Youth to Highlight NCNW’s 24th National DC Convention,” CD, November 14, 1959, p. 15. “State of Women Around World Main Topic at NCNW Washington Confab,” CD, November 22, 1958, p. 15; “Increasing Accomplishments Spur Leadership Training Institute,” CD, November 29, 1958, p. 14. Trigg and Perry, “Washington, DC, Chapter,” 14. Edna Chappell McKenzie, “Lampkin, Daisy Elizabeth Adam,” in Black Women in America, 2nd ed., 1:225. “Links to Give NAACP $27,000,” CD, July 10, 1954, p. 22. The Links, Inc., Minutes Ninth Annual Assembly, The Links, Incorporated, Dean Sage Hall, Atlanta, GA, 1957, folder 1, box 4, ALP, 5. “Links Buy Membership in NAACP,” CD, July 9, 1959, p. 21.

L i n k i n g Fr i e n d s h i p a n d S e rv i c e 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

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“Northern Negro Lax in Citizenship Duties, Ethel Payne Tells Forum,” CD, December 7, 1957, p. 14. Daisy Lampkin, Report of Program Committee, 1955–56, folder 2, box 1, ALP; Trigg and Perry, “Washington, DC, Chapter,” 14. “Sixty-Six Chapters Present as Links Inc. Invade Atlanta, Ga.,” CD, July 27, 1957, p. 15. Benjamin E. Mays, “Ways to Establish Better Human Relations”, Ninth National Assembly, June 27–28, 1957, The Links, Inc., folder 1, box 4, ALP, 5. Parker, History of The Links, 32. Trigg and Perry, “Washington, DC, Chapter,” 10. Daisy Lampkin, Report of Program, Reports of Houston, TX, Miami, FL, and Atlanta, GA, chapters, box 1, folder 2, ALP. Knupfer, The Chicago Black Renaissance, 97; Turkiya L. Lowe, The History of the Greater Seattle Chapter of The Links, Incorporated, 1955–2005 (Washington, DC: The Links, 2005), 4. Knupfer, The Chicago Black Renaissance, 97; “Links Launch Series of Seasonal Efforts,” CD, December 7, 1957, p. 15. Trigg and Perry, “Washington, DC, Chapter,” 14. Ibid. Lampkin, Report of Program, Reports of Houston, TX, Miami, FL, Atlanta, GA, and Huntington, WV, chapters, ALP, box 1, folder 2, 1–6. The Links, Minutes Ninth Annual Assembly, The Links, Incorporated, Dean Sage Hall, Atlanta, GA, 1957, folder 1, box 4, ALP, 4. Ernestine Brazeal was a member of the Atlanta chapter of The Links and a member of the black elite in Atlanta. She was director of alumnae affairs at Spelman College. Her husband, Brailsford Brazeal, was academic dean and professor of economics at Morehouse College. Their daughters, Aurelia and Ernestine Brazeal, were discussed in a new book on the activism of Spelman College students. See Harry G. Lefever, Undaunted by the Fight: Spelman College and the Civil Rights Movement, 1957–1967 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005), 37–38, 175. See http://www.linksinc.org/about/pres_maloney.html (accessed August 8, 2006). Parker, History of The Links, 75. Ibid., 73. Ibid. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 73. Kijua Sanders-McMurtry and Nia Woods Haydel, “The Links, Incorporated: Advocacy, Education, and Service in the African American Community,” in Uplifting a People: African American Philanthropy and Education, ed. Marybeth Gasman and Katherine V. Sedgwick (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 111. Coretta Scott King is listed as a charter member of the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of The Links in 1959, and appears in a photograph of the Montgomery chapter found in Bowens, ed., “Prologue,” Southern Area History. In addition, King is later listed as a transferee to the Atlanta chapter of The Links from the Birmingham chapter in the early 1960s. The Atlanta Links Scrapbook 1961–66, oversize box 14, photo, date unknown, Atlanta Area Chapter of The Links,

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K i j ua S a n d e r s - M c M u r t r y a n d N i a W o o d s H ay d e l Incorporated Papers, AARL. It is not known whether Ms. King was an active member of The Links until her death. Dr. Betty Shabazz became an active member of The Links when she chartered the Greater Hudson Valley, NY, chapter of The Links in the late 1980s. Her membership in this organization was active until her death in 1999. Ilyasah Shabazz, in-person interview. Ilyasah Shabazz also writes about The Links in her autobiography. Both Ilyasah Shabazz and Dr. Betty Shabazz were members of the Greater Hudson chapter. For more information, see Ilyasah Shabazz, Growing Up X (New York: One World/Ballantine Books, 2003). Edmonds was the fifth national president of The Links, Incorporated. Dorothy Cowser Yancy, “The Links, Inc.” in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 1, eds. Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993), 722. For biographical information on Helen G. Edmonds, see Betty Hodges, “Historian, Artist Are Honored,” Durham Morning Herald, May 10, 1975; and “New Graduate, Undergraduate Deans Announced,” July 31, 1964, oversize box 20, folder 1, Helen Edmonds Papers [hereafter HEP], Duke University Archives, Durham, NC. For additional information on Helen Gray Edmonds and her membership and presidency of The Links, see box 1, HEP, Rosa Parks accepted an honorary membership into The Links in 1998. See “Rosa Parks Becomes Links Member at 90!” Jet (March 10, 2003): 8. Dr. Johnetta B. Cole lists herself as a member of The Links, Inc. in most of her biographies. It is unknown whether she was initiated into a chapter or made an honorary member.

4 Part IV

Schooling Children


4

Chapter 10

“Politics Are Quite Perplexing” Bessie Locke and the National Kindergarten Association C ampaign, 1909–60

Barbara Beatty

After getting the California legislature to pass an enabling act for public

kindergartens in 1913, Bessie Locke, the director of the National Kindergarten Association, continued lobbying in other states. It took seven attempts to get kindergarten legislation through in South Carolina in 1919. North Carolina was even more frustrating. To Locke’s dismay, the bill that she thought had passed there in 1915 was declared null because of a clause (of which she was not aware) that said bills had to be passed on two consecutive days. Locke encountered many other roadblocks in her campaign to make good on the National Kindergarten Association’s motto to extend public “Kindergartens for all the nation’s children.” In 1939, when hearings were being held on a bill for federal support for kindergartens, Locke wrote in her “Executive Secretary’s Report” to the National Kindergarten Association “Politics are quite perplexing.”1 Politics were quite perplexing for many female activists in education. Reformers such as Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and Margaret Haley, who focused on issues of public welfare, child labor, and union organizing, came into frequent direct confrontation with male-dominated political structures, as did suffragists. However, many female reformers in women’s groups involved in causes within the more traditional women’s sphere of education avoided politics, and often saw their causes as apolitical. In an era in which American women still could not vote in national elections, politics was thought by many to be unladylike, and considered socially unacceptable for women, despite the

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increasing number of women taking up political causes. Nevertheless, political encounters were necessary to achieve many goals in education, especially goals that entailed gaining public funding. What were some of the ways that women’s groups in education interacted with other actors at the national, state, and local level when politics were at issue in educational reform efforts?2 Scholars of female activism have struggled with how to deal with the range of political values represented by female reformers. In her influential article in History of Education Quarterly, Anne Firor Scott proposed that the values of early female reformers such as Mary Lyon, Catharine Beecher, and Emma Willard should be viewed on a spectrum of liberal to conservative attitudes in the historical context of the day. Furthermore, women’s positions were fluid rather than fixed; that is, they often varied on specific issues and changed over their lifetimes. In their edited volume, Changing Education: Women as Radicals and Conservators, Joyce Antler and Sari Knopp Biklen used the term “conservator” rather than “conservative” to describe the values of some female activists whose work did not challenge existing stereotypes of gender in radical ways. Many kindergarten advocates, for instance, were “conservators” of values pertaining to women’s traditional roles as mothers and on suffrage, but were more radical toward aspects of educational reform. Women’s political views can be hard to categorize, however, especially those of less well-known followers and participants in women’s groups. Moreover, some members of women’s groups may not have been conscious of the alignment of their political views. Nor should we assume that the impact of their efforts was necessarily conservative. Traditional views may assuage a broad audience precisely because the reforms in question are not a threat to the status quo and thus unwittingly serve as a “cover” for more radical reforms.3 I would like to propose another spectrum: the extent to which women engaged in the male-dominated sphere of politics or remained within the women’s sphere of female-dominated causes. Some members of women’s groups, especially leaders, were active in the political domain, while others worked behind the scenes. Women could venture into the political domain at the national, state, and local levels. Local involvement might be seen as safer and more traditional, but might also have a more lasting impact than national or state involvement, the effects of which could be more diffuse and disconnected from the grassroots reforms that affected women’s and children’s daily lives. I want to explore some of the complexity of women’s political involvement through the examination of a case study, of Bessie Locke and the National Kindergarten Association’s campaign for public kindergartens.4 Founded by Bessie Locke in 1909, the National Kindergarten Association (NKA) provides an example of a women’s organization that had a major impact on American education. This success did not come easily. Locke encountered numerous obstacles, especially in the male-dominated world of politics at the national, state, and local level. She persevered and devised methods to deal with

“Po l i t i c s A re Q u i t e P e r p l e x i n g”

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these political impasses. What was Bessie Locke like? How was the NKA organized, what were its strategies, and how were they different from those of some other women’s clubs, groups, and organizations involved in educational reform? What rationales did Locke put forth for public kindergartens and how might these rationales have been perceived by different audiences? What might this case study of Locke and the NKA tell us about the role of politics in the challenges faced by other women’s groups as agents for educational reform?

Bessie Locke Neither from an upper-class background, nor a college graduate, Bessie Locke was in some ways rather different from the stereotype of the affluent clubwoman or progressive, female, social reformer. Born in West Cambridge (now Arlington), Massachusetts in 1865, Locke was the daughter of William Henry Locke, a printer and Jane MacFarland Schouler. The family moved to New Jersey, where Locke’s father lost his printing company in the Panic of 1869, and then moved to Brooklyn, where Locke attended a private kindergarten, one of the few English-speaking kindergartens in the country at the time.5 Locke gradually found her way from the world of for-profit work to educational causes. As a teenager, she attended the Brooklyn Public Schools and worked as a bookkeeper to earn money. After graduating from high school, she took business courses at Columbia University, but did not earn a degree. She worked at a variety of jobs, including assisting the pastor of All Souls Church in Brooklyn for two years and managing her uncle’s millinery store for two and a half years. An avid reader, she was enthralled by Charles Dickens’ novels and those of other authors who described the miseries of children living in poverty. As with many other female reformers, the emotionally gripping details of starving, suffering children who fell into crime and other ill pursuits motivated Locke to want to do something to help. She may have read some of the popular novels written by Kate Douglas Wiggin, a charity kindergarten director in San Francisco, whose 1887 sentimental favorite The Bird’s Christmas Carol was preceded in 1882 by The Story of Patsy, the tragic tale of an abused boy who recovered his health in a charity kindergarten, only to die in his kindergarten teacher’s arms. Whatever Locke read, like other American women in the late nineteenth century, she was surrounded by emotionally gripping popular literature that dramatized the plight of women and children and by stories in the press describing child abuse and neglect.6 A brief encounter with a charity kindergarten changed Locke’s life. In 1892, she reportedly visited a kindergarten in New York City run by her friend Nan Crawford. Locke was impressed but skeptical. Could playing with Friedrich Froebel’s gifts and occupations, the rigidly sequenced wooden blocks and other materials the German kindergarten founder had designed in the 1830s, really

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have much of an effect on children’s lives? When Locke came back six months later, she was astounded by the changes she saw. Irish and Italian children who spoke with heavy accents or barely spoke English at all were starting to act “American,” behave politely, and show other signs of “proper” manners and socialization. Here, Locke thought, was the solution to helping the growing horde of hapless waifs who were crowding New York’s streets in the 1890s as the pace of immigration quickened. A convert, Locke took up the kindergarten as a cause.7 The kindergarten movement was in full swing when Locke began her crusade. Introduced from Germany in the 1850s by immigrants fleeing from the failed liberal revolution of 1848, the first kindergartens were private, conducted in German in independent schools, or in German-American academies in German-speaking enclaves in New York City, New Jersey, and Midwestern cities such as Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. German kindergarten experts such as Maria Kraus-Boelte, who trained Locke’s friend Nan Crawford, came over from Germany and founded kindergarten training schools. In 1860, Transcendentalist social reformer Elizabeth Peabody opened the first Englishspeaking kindergarten in the United States, in Boston. Peabody wrote a Kindergarten Guide, began publicizing kindergartens in her journal The Kindergarten Messenger, and helped found the American Froebel Union. Connecticut school reformer Henry Barnard published information about kindergartens in his influential American Journal of Education. In 1873, Susan Blow, who had studied with Maria Boelte, convinced St. Louis Superintendent of Schools William Torrey Harris to start public kindergartens. Most kindergartens in the 1870s and 1880s, however, were private and tuition dependent, or run as charities supported by church groups, kindergarten societies, and wealthy female philanthropists such as Phoebe Apperson Hearst in San Francisco and Pauline Agassiz Shaw in Boston. In 1888, the Boston Public Schools assumed responsibility for Shaw’s charity kindergartens; in 1892, the Chicago Public Schools adopted kindergartens. That same year, the New York Public Schools committed some money for a few kindergartens, but not enough to serve all needy children in the city. Public kindergartens spread to other cities and suburbs, but were by no means accessible to all children.8 After visiting her friend’s kindergarten, Locke began collecting money to start another and organized the East End Kindergarten Union in Brooklyn. She began fund-raising for the Brooklyn Free Kindergarten Association, of which she was a trustee and financial secretary from 1896–1923, and became financial secretary of the New York Kindergarten Society in 1899. With her business skills and practical attitude, Locke proved to be a brilliant organizer and a genius at fund-raising. Fearlessly accosting businessmen, writing them letters, and asking to visit them at home to solicit funds, Locke collected some seven hundred thousand dollars for charity kindergartens in New York. One of her greatest coups was persuading John D. Archbold, president of Standard Oil of


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New Jersey, to contribute two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for housing for the New York Kindergarten Society in a building that contained a community center for mothers’ meetings and other activities.9 Locke soon decided to expand her cause to extending public kindergartens nationwide, to children from all social class backgrounds. Motivated in part by visiting her sister’s children in New Jersey and realizing that there were no public kindergartens for them to attend, Locke came up with the idea for creating a national kindergarten organization that could coordinate kindergarten efforts throughout the country. She founded the NKA in 1909 as the National Association for the Promotion of Kindergarten Education and renamed it the National Kindergarten Association in 1911. The NKA’s first annual report began with a statement from Kate Douglas Wiggin that public kindergartens were necessary as “the vestibule to our school work,” as a “philanthropic agent, leading the child gently into right habits of thought, speech, and action from the beginning,” to “help in the absorption and amalgamation of our foreign element,” and for “social training” and the “development of the citizen-virtues, as well as those of the individual.”10

Structure of the National Kindergarten Association The NKA was not a three-tiered organization with national, state, and local branches like the National Congress of Mothers, which became the National Congress of Parents and Teachers and later the Parent Teacher Association, and many other national women’s groups. Instead, the NKA operated with a small national office in New York City and state field workers. Staffed by Locke and her close friend and colleague Florence Jane Ovens, the New York office focused primarily on fund-raising, networking with other organizations, and political lobbying. By 1912 the NKA had a field secretary in thirty-seven states. Selected by Locke, the field secretaries were often members of other women’s groups and helped Locke contact influential businessmen and state politicians. In a particularly effective arrangement, the state field secretaries contacted local organizations, such as the PTA and church groups, whose members became advocates at the grassroots level. This relatively inexpensive structure, through which a few NKA workers lobbied to get public kindergartens onto the agenda of larger local groups and piggybacked on these groups’ efforts, proved to be very successful and cost-effective. Locke cleverly realized that she could parlay NKA funds more widely, thus leaving money available for larger national advocacy efforts.11 In her home office in New York City, Locke was also very successful at engaging influential men to become involved in the kindergarten cause. Structured like a political action group rather than a charity, women’s club, or

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professional organization, the NKA had an executive secretary, Locke, who ran the organization; an executive committee and president, with whom Locke consulted; and an education committee, with whom Locke also conferred. The executive committee was made up primarily of prominent men who were willing to lend their names to the NKA efforts. The honorary male presidents and vice presidents whom Locke appointed included college and university presidents G. Stanley Hall of Clark, David Starr Jordan of Stanford, A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, and Benjamin Ide Wheeler of the University of California at Berkeley. John Dewey came onto the executive committee in 1912 and served as president for three years. Wealthy businessmen also served on the board.12 Locke knew that she needed the support of kindergarten leaders as well, and formed an education committee that met separately from the executive committee. Some of the most influential kindergarten leaders in the country served on the committee, many of whom were leaders of kindergarten organizations and members of other women’s groups. Elizabeth Harrison, president of the Chicago Kindergarten Club and the director of the Chicago Kindergarten Training School, later the Chicago Kindergarten College, with which the NKA was formally affiliated, was an important member of the committee. Author of the enormously popular 1890 A Study of Child Nature from the Kindergarten Standpoint, Harrison was the most active kindergarten leader in the mothers’ education movement. With the support and help of a wealthy Chicago woman, Harrison organized the 1894 Chicago Conference of Mothers, forerunner of the National Congress of Mothers and other mothers’ conferences. Maria Kraus-Boelte, the influential German-American kindergarten leader who had trained Locke’s friend and from whom Harrison received some of her training, was also on the education committee, as was Kate Douglas Wiggin, and many other kindergarten educators.13 Locke linked the NKA with another powerful kindergarten organization, the International Kindergarten Union (IKU), the main kindergarten professional group in the United States at the time. She was careful, however, not to get caught up in the philosophical and pedagogical disputes that were raging within the kindergarten movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Unable to reach a consensus, from 1903 to 1913, members of the IKU argued over adherence to “pure” Froebelian methods and fractured into three groups, “liberals,” “moderates,” and “conservatives.” Locke’s avoidance of this internecine warfare within the kindergarten movement, which became embroiled in highly technical disputes over whether Froebel’s gifts had to be used in his exact, prescribed order or could be modified based on the findings of the emerging science of developmental psychology, enabled her to be more effective as a lobbyist for the movement as a whole. Trained in business rather than education, she could speak the language of business and industry with men as well as that of education, and mediate between the highly feminized kindergarten movement and other organizations.14


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Adept at networking, Locke saw the NKA as a national “umbrella organization” and formed links with other women’s groups. The NKA was formally affiliated with the largest and most influential women’s organizations, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the National Congress of Women, and the National Congress of Mothers. Locke used these affiliations wisely and called upon members of these organizations to put support for public kindergartens into their platforms. She spoke at state and national conferences and did everything she could to keep public kindergartens high on the agenda of women’s groups. The National Congress of Mothers, which supported various initiatives in education, made public kindergartens one of its priorities and with its huge membership nationwide was enormously important in the kindergarten effort.15 Locke was a member of a number of organizations and served on many boards. She headed the kindergarten division of the National Congress of Parents and Teachers from 1913 to 1922. From 1921 to 1946 she was on the board of directors of the National Council of Women, and was honorary vice president after 1946. She was a life member of the International Council of Women. She was also on the board of Elizabeth Harrison’s National College of Education and a member of the Association for Childhood Education. Exemplary of the interlocking directorate of women’s clubs and education organizations, these ties all strengthened the NKA.16

The NKA’s Advocacy at the National, State, and Local Levels Locke had hopes of getting federal support for kindergartens, a bold goal. While working on trying to get kindergartens in the South, she began corresponding with influential University of Tennessee education professor Philander P. Claxton. Locke and Claxton knew that the South lagged behind the rest of the country in its support for public kindergartens. According to NKA records, only two percent of four- and five-year-olds were enrolled in kindergartens in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Mississippi, and only one percent were enrolled in North Carolina, Tennesssee, and West Virginia, compared to 28 percent in New Jersey and 29 percent in New York. Locke and Claxton also knew that many southern school districts were woefully poor and did not have the resources to start kindergartens and would thus need outside help.17 An ardent kindergarten advocate, Claxton became Locke’s ally. Claxton’s connections with many other education organizations and causes made him a powerful supporter. He was a member of the influential Southern Education Board, the group of educators which in 1901 began funneling northern philanthropy into a campaign for free, tax-supported, public schools in the South,

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an administrator of the Board’s Bureau of Information, and editor of its journal. Claxton became even more influential when he was appointed U.S. Commissioner of Education in 1912. As commissioner, he suggested to Locke that the NKA sponsor a special kindergarten division within the U.S. Bureau of Education. Locke jumped at the chance to collaborate with Claxton at the national level. The NKA-funded division within the Bureau of Education came to be known as the Kindergarten Bureau, and appeared to be a federal agency, giving the kindergarten more recognition and status within the political world. Locke served as the director of kindergarten extension within the Kindergarten Bureau throughout its existence from 1913 to 1919. Her official title and office in Washington added to her clout as a national kindergarten advocate. The Kindergarten Bureau collected numerous statistics and published and distributed Kindergarten Circulars under the letterhead of the Department of the Interior, produced by the Government Printing Office.18 Written by Locke and other public kindergarten advocates, the circulars documented the many rationales Locke used to attract support. As Horace Mann had emphasized almost a century earlier in his campaign for common schools, Locke stressed that kindergartens were a good investment in that they would help train docile workers. She also focused on how the kindergarten would reach and Americanize immigrant children and their mothers. In her June 1919 Kindergarten Circular, “Manufacturers Indorse the Kindergarten,” published at the height of the influenza epidemic, strikes, and “Red Scare,” Locke stated that the “ominous signs of unrest so apparent in our country to-day warn us to take prompt measures for safeguarding it future.” Those measures were, of course, establishing more public kindergartens. The pamphlet included kindergarten endorsements from businessmen at companies such as Dan River Cotton Mills in Danville, Virginia; Plymouth Cordage Company in North Plymouth, Massachusetts; and West Point Manufacturing Company in West Point, Georgia, some of which maintained kindergartens for employees’ children. Such rationales must have appealed to more conservative segments of the population and to politicians who worried about the economy and socialism.19 Locke and Claxton even had plans for a Kindergarten or Children’s Building, which they hoped John D. Rockefeller, whose wife had been a kindergarten supporter, might fund. Though the plans for the special building never materialized, the Kindergarten Bureau gave Locke and the NKA great visibility and credibility. The Kindergarten Bureau provided information about kindergartens to other government agencies and began publishing kindergarten articles for parents, much like the federal Children’s Bureau and Women’s Bureau, which also did intergovernmental coordination and extensive outreach to mothers. Like the Children’s Bureau established in 1912 and Women’s Bureau established in 1920, both of which were conceived by female social activists in the women’s club movement, the Kindergarten Bureau was another example of the flow of resources and advocacy from the private sector “women’s sphere”


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to public projects for social welfare. Thus, the Kindergarten Bureau became part of the fabric of what Jane Addams, who supported a kindergarten at Hull House, called “social housekeeping” and a product of the networking and coordination that were hallmarks of the women’s club movement.20 The main focus of the Kindergarten Circulars was the education of mothers in the home. In 1919, the NKA took over responsibility from the Kindergarten Bureau for publishing the circulars, and Locke’s colleague Florence Jane Ovens became editor. The circulars were used in state home education study groups and eventually reached more than thirty-eight million people throughout the United States, and were distributed in forty-three countries internationally, giving the NKA enormous reach and extending awareness of kindergartens.21 At the height of the Depression, which negatively affected funding for public kindergartens more than other grades, Locke began lobbying for direct federal support for kindergartens. A U.S. Office of Education survey reported that almost 20 percent of American cities had reduced or cut kindergartens between 1931 and 1933 (the number did not rise to pre-Depression levels until 1944). Determined to stop the cutbacks, Locke hired a professional lobbyist who helped push a national kindergarten bill Locke had drafted. Introduced in 1934 by Congressman Sol Bloom (D-NY), the bill called for an initial six million dollars to be followed by annual increments of two million dollars to support public kindergartens. The carefully worded bill made sure to ensure quality so that only qualified teachers with appropriate kindergarten training would be hired, as much as was feasible. Training was an enormously important issue among kindergarten educators, who believed strongly that at least two years of fulltime training in an approved kindergarten department, college, or training program, including student teaching, was necessary. Locke and the NKA had worked with the IKU to prepare a kindergarten circular on training, published by the Kindergarten Bureau in 1916. The new federally supported kindergartens were to be “conducted by graduates of kindergarten or nursery-school courses for teachers at accredited institutions.” Locke was also careful to ensure that local school and kindergarten educators and state and local education authorities would not lose control. As much as possible, the federally supported kindergartens were to “leave all supervision, management, control, and choice of kindergarten and nursery-school means, processes, and programs to State, Territorial, and local governments.”22 Locke included wording about nursery schools in the bill, too. She knew that the federal government was supporting Emergency Nursery Schools as a job-enhancement measure for workers hit by the Depression, and hoped that this effort might be expanded to public kindergartens. Locke wrote to Works Progress Administration head Harry Hopkins to see if he would support the kindergarten bill. The reply came instead from Grace Langdon, a federal Emergency Nursery School administrator, who wrote that kindergartens had been expressly left out of the federal nursery school program to maintain local

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control. “We carefully protected the kindergarten,” Langdon wrote, “by taking only children from two to four years,” leaving the kindergarten “as it always has been, a function of the community.” Locke petitioned Eleanor Roosevelt and others on behalf of federal support, but was informed that kindergartens, like other levels of the public schools, would not receive federal funding because of the principle of local control of education.23 Turning to others for renewed private support of kindergartens during the 1930s, Locke encountered the opposite argument that since kindergartens were now public programs, in part the result of her Herculean efforts, they should no longer need private funding. She wrote, for instance, to the famous American novelist Theodore Dreiser, asking for a ten dollar contribution, saying that that her “very little letter” was “the meekest of reminders of the very little children who would like to go to kindergarten.” Dreiser’s secretary replied curtly, saying that Dreiser believed that the “work of the type your organization is doing is properly a function of government, and that private individuals should not be expected to contribute to it.” Not fully adopted publicly and suffering cutbacks yet already perceived by some as a public program, and thus no longer deserving of private philanthropy, the kindergarten was in a difficult position.24 Locke also tried to get kindergarten funding included in the bill for elementary and secondary education that the National Education Association (NEA) was trying to get through Congress during the Depression. Founded in 1857 as the National Teachers Association, the NEA began as a group of prominent male educators, which by the 1920s had evolved into a national, three-tiered, professional association for elementary and secondary education teachers with many female members, a national secretary, and an increasingly bureaucratic structure. Although the NKA was formally affiliated with the NEA, a relationship Locke had fought to achieve, this linkage did not help Locke when the two organizations came into conflict over federal funding. Locke encountered the behind-the-scenes politics of Washington lobbying head on as she met resistance from male NEA lobbyists and administrators who saw her bill as competition. The NEA refused to add wording about kindergartens to their bill. When Locke went to hearings to try to speak on behalf of public kindergartens, NEA supporters refused to recognize her. Locke experienced first hand what many other female activists had discovered: When the chips were down and money was at stake, public school administrators frequently cut women’s groups out of negotiations. The NEA bill did not pass either because of the principle of federal nonintervention into local control of education. In 1935, Acting Secretary of the Interior Charles West wrote to Locke that since the kindergarten “merely represents another grade level of general education,” there was “no more reason for subsidizing that level than any other complete grade level in the regular school course.” It was not until President Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 that federal funding would be allocated for local schools, and then only for economically disadvantaged children.25


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Locke lobbied strenuously for her kindergarten bill, which was reintroduced to Congress each year for fifteen years. She and Ovens tried every tactic they could muster. They got to know politicians’ secretaries and lay in wait outside of congressmen’s offices. They ambushed congressmen in elevators. Democratic Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, who introduced the bill in 1939 and 1940, called Locke and Ovens “two of the most indefatigable workers he had ever seen.” Their efforts, however, were to no avail. In 1947, Pepper stopped introducing the bill, which he said was no longer needed. For Pepper and some other politicians, federal support for kindergartens was seen as an emergency measure to help the war effort, like the Emergency Nursery Schools. Now that the war was over, mothers could return home, and the “release of mothers for employment in war industries” was “no longer a problem.” Locke, of course, saw public kindergartens as a public good, and the NKA continued lobbying until 1975, when the board of directors declared its mission accomplished and disbanded the organization.26 Locke and her fieldworkers lobbied similarly hard at the state and local level, where they had more success than at the federal level. The success of the NKA in California in 1913, the result of intense local lobbying throughout the state, propelled the public kindergarten movement forward. Getting state approval usually required passing enabling legislation to allow public funds to be spent on children younger than the traditional school entrance age of six, and encouraging local school boards to adopt kindergartens if parents demanded them. But this was only the beginning. Local women’s groups then had to get local school boards to pass motions to allocate funds. Garnering local taxpayers’ money for adding another year to the public schools, an expensive year as kindergarten materials were more costly than the paper, pencils, and textbooks used in upper grades, was enormously difficult. As Locke wrote in her annual report for 1925, “securing legislation which makes it compulsory to establish kindergartens when parents petition for them” was extremely hard because it meant dealing “with the fear of a strain on the purse strings.” The resistance of taxpayers to making a long-term commitment to funds for new programs was a challenging obstacle for the NKA, and for many other women’s groups seeking to implement permanent educational reforms.27 Locke realized that she would need creative strategies to motivate local taxpayers to part with their hard-earned money. Here she marshaled the potential of new media. Locke got Thomas Alva Edison’s studio to film a short movie entitled At the Threshold of Life, which NKA fieldworkers screened in local theaters around the country as part of benefit parties for the NKA. Targeted at the audience of wealthy, well-educated women who might be convinced to become kindergarten supporters and contributors and get their husbands and male friends to contribute donations, the plot focused on Miss Gray, a kindergarten teacher who rejects a marriage proposal from her rich boyfriend unless he will permit her to continue teaching kindergarten and supporting the kindergarten cause. Complete with the requisite crippled street urchin, who Miss Gray persuades to enroll in her class, the film

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ends with a final scene in which Miss Gray’s boyfriend Roger comes to understand her need to work as a kindergarten teacher and writes a check for five thousand dollars, made out to the NKA. Viewers see a close-up of the check. The multiple messages were clear. Men who wanted to marry well-educated women (many of whom were undoubtedly clubwomen) needed to support their fiancées’ desire to work and should support the causes to which these idealistic young women were committed.28 Locke encountered many political obstacles at the state and local levels, including some failures in South Carolina and North Carolina and many towns, where she came up against political maneuvering. She also had much success. She found out when legislatures met and sent model statutes to legislators. She traveled to legislatures or had her fieldworkers there when kindergarten bills were being discussed and votes taken. Locke and her fieldworkers got to know governors’ wives and influential business leaders and their wives. At the local level, ministers’ wives were particularly important in convincing school committees and taxpayers, as were members of local women’s clubs. Locke’s efforts paid off. Over the course of her long career, her work with the NKA resulted directly in the opening of 3,260 kindergartens enrolling more than 1.6 million children. In 1954, two years after Locke died, an NKA survey documented a 300 percent increase in enrollments in public kindergartens since 1910, an increase due significantly to the advocacy of Bessie Locke and the NKA.29

Using Politically Persuasive Rationales Locke’s use of politically persuasive rationales was one of the keys to her success with politicians and the general public. During the Red Scare, influenza epidemic, and at the height of immigration, she talked about combating social instability and warding off the threat of “un-American” foreigners. Her most consistent rationale was preventing crime, a rationale that universal preschool supporters use today. Locke summed up her arguments for kindergartens in an article published in the American Federationist in May of 1934, when she was trying so hard to get her kindergarten bill through Congress. Crime was “preventable,” she began, and went on to say that even children from “some of our best homes” sometimes ended up in the penitentiary. Locke was not alone in her views on crime. Preventing juvenile delinquency was a major focus of many women’s groups and social reformers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and an especial target of the Children’s Bureau.30 As many other social welfare and preschool advocates did, Locke pointed to lack of parent education as one of the main causes of crime and other problems. Many mothers did not know how to mother well, she argued. She quoted an expert who said that “not one mother in five hundred” claimed to know how to train her own children and most of those who thought they did were “usually


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wrong.” She cited psychologist Karl Buhler, whose research on what he called “the defiant stage” meant that mothers should expect children between the ages of three and four to exhibit “strong self-will.” Kindergarten teachers were taught how to deal effectively with these normal stages, another reasons why providing kindergarten education for all children was so important.31 Harking back to her first observations in her friend Nan Crawford’s New York kindergarten, Locke included moving anecdotes about children for whom, she claimed, attending kindergarten had meant the difference between success and a life of crime. There was “Tony,” whose father was serving a sentence in Sing Sing and whose mother was driven to distraction by Tony’s high energy. Being in a kindergarten had channeled Tony’s active nature, kept him out of “mischief,” and stopped him from “infecting” other children. There was “Pedro,” whose father was “serving a life sentence for manslaughter.” The kindergarten was helping Pedro learn how to control himself, too, and it was helping “Katie,” who was prone to shoplifting. Listening to her friend tell her about how these children were now evincing good habits rather than antisocial behavior, and observing it herself, had convinced Locke that “the kindergarten held the greatest possibilities for crime prevention.”32 Locke went on to cite figures on how few kindergartens there actually were, despite the movement’s publicity. “Out of fourteen children in the United States,” she wrote, “only 2 may go to kindergarten and out of every 700 children 600 have no such opportunity.” This meant that “Four million children of kindergarten age” were “not being given a fair chance.” Then she quoted statistics on juvenile delinquency. A Department of Labor Bulletin, Locke said, stated that “About 200,000 different children, yearly, pass before our courts on delinquency charges.” Furthermore, the Department of Labor stated, “The foundations of delinquent behavior are usually laid in very early childhood,” providing yet another reason for supporting public kindergartens.33 To make her rationales even more persuasive, Locke included quotations from college presidents in four states about the benefits of kindergartens in shaping early positive behaviors. From Utah: “The kindergarten period is the time when many habits and attitudes basic in life can be formed.” From Michigan: “Universal kindergarten education will decrease crime and increase efficiency and happiness.” From Pennsylvania: a report from “the chairman of the education committee of the assembly . . . who volunteered the information that in all his experience as district attorney he never had a case brought before him [in which] the culprit had attended kindergarten, and he had made a practice of noting this point.” And in a rousing finale, Locke included the personal testimony of a kindergarten teacher in New York, possibly her friend, who, after thirty-five years of teaching in the same kindergarten, which about two thousand children had attended, had never known one to require “court discipline.” Some of this teacher’s former students were now forty years old, and they were “doing better work and living happier lives because of that early training.”34

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These rationales were likely to have been especially persuasive at the local level, where individual taxpayers had to be convinced to let go of some of their own money. They would also have been more effective in larger cities where there was more crime. This is exactly what the U.S. Bureau (later Office, then Department) of Education records showed: Public kindergartens grew fastest in urban areas. In 1912, three years after the NKA was founded, there were 353,446 children enrolled in kindergartens nationwide; by 1930, there were 777,899 enrolled, a more than 100 percent increase. It was not until relatively late in the twentieth century, however, that many rural areas began to offer kindergarten, and some small towns in relatively rural states, such as New Hampshire, still do not provide kindergarten. Notably, Locke’s rationales did not refer to children’s rights or reforming pedagogy, the kinds of arguments that kindergarten leaders and women working within the feminized realm of preschool education were wont to use. She went straight to the pocketbook and to concerns about social stability.35 Bessie Locke was what political scientist John Kingdon calls a “policy entrepreneur.” She saw a need for public kindergartens, worked in a policy “window” when kindergartens were seen as a solution to pressing social problems, and mustered political rationales to focus intensively on this single interest. Part of Locke’s success was undoubtedly due to her sustained concentration on one issue, promoting public kindergartens. She was also successful because she did not directly represent a professional interest group and stayed out of the fray of kindergarten and preschool educators fighting over arcane pedagogical minutia of little interest to the general public. The structure of the NKA as an umbrella organization and clearinghouse for information on the progress of public kindergartens, with a small national office, state fieldworkers, and reliance on other local organizations, freed Locke to do the kind of intense, political lobbying needed to keep public kindergartens on national, state, and local agendas.36 Locke encountered some fierce resistance. She ran into a roadblock when she came up against the larger, more powerful interests of the male-dominated NEA, which acted threatened by NKA’s competition for federal money. She also encountered resistance from some professionals promoting a similar “women’s cause,” public nursery schools. Such competition among women’s groups for public support warrants more historical research. As this volume documents, scholars have begun mapping the interconnections among women’s groups. Now we need mapping of support and competition for advocacy and control of specific issues and of the kinds of resistance different groups met.37 Ultimately, Locke and the NKA had the most success at the local level. Here too, though, she encountered a huge obstacle, the resistance of local taxpayers to approving costly, permanent reforms. The relative political conservatism of Locke’s rationales may have helped the NKA overcome this local fiscal resistance, an example of how achieving progressive goals and progress on children’s


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and women’s welfare may sometimes depend on relatively conservative rationales that appeal to a wide spectrum of politicians and voters. Scholars of women’s groups need to view reform efforts within this broad political context. One of the most difficult of areas in which to do historical research, grassroots movements are particularly important, especially church groups and other traditional organizations. It is important not to romanticize these groups, which often opposed suffrage and other more “radical” women’s causes, but could also be avid supporters of other movements and effective political lobbyists at the local level. Conversely, while women’s clubs and female-run political action groups may have been successful when they used relatively conservative rationales, such as crime prevention, they may also have run into resistance because they were proposing public support for programs identified with women’s private roles of mothering and other traditional women’s responsibilities.38 Getting public support for the causes women’s groups promoted usually required political activism on some level. Gauging and comparing the range of the political activism of women’s groups within the specificity of local politics and context of state and national resistance and support may help us better understand the history of the progress, or lack thereof, of causes for which women advocated. Bessie Locke was right. Politics can be perplexing, but learning how to engage in debate in the rough and tumble of the political arena is necessary for the promotion of social change in a democracy.

Notes 1. Bessie Locke, “Executive Secretary’s Report for March 19,” 1919, file 3, box 7, and 1915 Annual Report, Annual Reports, “Executive Secretary’s Report,” 1939, file 7, box 7, National Kindergarten Association Collection [hereafter NKA], MS Group 16, Special Collections, The Gottesman Libraries, Teachers College, Columbia University. Parts of this chapter appeared in a modified version in Barbara Beatty, “The Politics of Preschool Advocacy: Lessons from Three Pioneering Organizations,” in Who Speaks for America’s Children? The Role of Child Advocates in Public Policy, ed. Carol J. De Vita and Rachel Mosher-Williams (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 2001), 165–90. 2. There are many sources on the history of women’s role in politics. On female reformers within the female domain, see among many others, Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Sheila Rothman, Woman’s Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices, 1870 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1978). 3. Anne Firor Scott, “‘The Ever-Widening Circle’: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822–1872,” History of Education Quarterly 19 (Spring 1979): 3–25; Joyce Antler and Sari Knopp Biklen, eds., Changing

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4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

B a r b a r a B e at t y Education: Women as Radicals and Conservators (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). Theda Skocpol examines connections among different levels of reform in her edited volume (with Morris P. Fiorina), Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999). Much has been written on the notion of separate spheres for men and women. A classic work on the topic is Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). Important caveats regarding the facile application of the spheres trope are found in Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, and Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9–39. Information on Locke’s life comes from various NKA records, and from Barbara Beatty, “Bessie Locke,” in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 798–99, which is available online; Franklin Parker, “Bessie Locke,” Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement Five, 1951–1955, ed. John A. Garraty (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977), 437–38; and Robert McHenry, ed., Liberty’s Women (Springfield, MA: G. C. Merriam, 1980), 249–50. Kate Douglas Wiggin, The Story of Patsy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895). On Wiggin and charity kindergartens, see Barbara Beatty, Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); on Wiggin, see, among others, her autobiography, My Garden of Memory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923) and Doyce B. Nunis, Jr., “Kate Douglas Wiggin,” in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. E. T. James and J. W. James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 1:605–7. Beatty, “Bessie Locke.” On the history of the kindergarten movement see, among others, Beatty, Preschool Education in America; V. Celia Lascarides and Blythe F. Hinitz, History of Early Childhood Education (New York: Falmer, 2000); Elizabeth Dale Ross, The Kindergarten Crusade: The Establishment of Preschool Education in the United States (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976); Michael Steven Shapiro, Child’s Garden: The Kindergarten Movement from Froebel to Dewey (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983); Nina Vandewalker, The Kindergarten in American Education (New York: Macmillan, 1923); and Evelyn Weber, The Kindergarten: Its Encounter with Educational Thought in America (New York: Teachers College Press, 1969); McHenry, “Bessie Locke,” 249. Beatty, “Bessie Locke”; Parker, “Bessie Locke,” 437. National Kindergarten Association, Annual Report 1909–1911, Gutman Library Special Collections, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 3. Beatty, “The Politics of Preschool Advocacy,” 172. On the tripartite structure of reformist organizations and their impact on society, see, among others, Skocpol and Fiorina, Civic Engagement in American Democracy. On organizational advocacy for children, see Theda Skocpol and Jillian Dickert, “Speaking for Families and Children in a Changing Civic America,” in De Vita and Mosher-Williams, Who Speaks for America’s Children, 137–64. On “piggybacking” with other women’s groups, see Christine Woyshner, “Race, Gender, and the Early PTA: Civic


12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

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Engagement and Public Education, 1897–1924,” Teachers College Record 105, no. 3 (2003): 520–44. NKA, Annual Reports; Beatty, “The Politics of Preschool Advocacy,” 171. On Elizabeth Harrison, see her biography, Sketches Along Life’s Road (Boston: Stratford, 1930); Robert L. McCaul, “Elizabeth Harrison,” in Notable American Women, 2:147–49; Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 86–91; and Agnes Snyder, “Elizabeth Harrison,” in Dauntless Women in Childhood Education, 1856–1931 (Washington, DC: Association for Childhood International, 1972), 127–66. On Kraus-Boelte, see Lascarides and Hinitz, History of Early Childhood Education, 237–39; and Anna K. Harvey, “Maria Kraus-Boelte,” in International Kindergarten Union Committee of Nineteen, Pioneers of the Kindergarten in America (New York: Century, 1924), 75–84. International Kindergarten Union, The Kindergarten: Reports of the Committee of Nineteen on the Theory and Practice of the Kindergarten (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1913); Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 106, and “Politics of Preschool Advocacy,” 170–71. Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 171. On the National Congress of Mothers, see Woyshner, “Race, Gender, and the Early PTA.” Parker, “Bessie Locke,” 438. On the overlap in leadership of women’s clubs, see Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). Marguerite Crespi Marsh, “Resume of National Kindergarten Propaganda,” in International Kindergarten Union Yearbooks, 1915–1918, 96, file 6, box 1, Archives of the Association for Childhood Education International, Historical Manuscripts and Archives Department, University of Maryland College Park Libraries, College Park, MD, and see Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 107–8. On Claxton and the Southern Education Board see, among others, Clinton B. Allison, “Southern Education Board,” in Historical Dictionary of American Education, ed. Richard J. Altenbaugh (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 346–47 and James L. Leloudis, Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Bessie Locke, “Manufacturers Indorse the Kindergarten,” Kindergarten Circular No. 4, Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 1–4. On the Kindergarten Bureau see, Beatty, “The Politics of Preschool Advocacy,” 171. The Children’s Bureau is discussed in Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). On the use of the term social or municipal housekeeping, see Scott, Natural Allies, chap. six. Parker, “Bessie Locke,” 437–38. On kindergarten cuts, see Bess Goodykoontz, Mary Dabney Davis, and Hazel F. Gabbard, “Recent History and Present Status of Education for Young Children,” in The Forty-Sixth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, vol. 2 of Early Childhood Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 44–99. On kindergartens during the Depression see also, Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 172. Bessie Locke, “Report of the Executive Secretary,” November 14, 1935, NKA, file 6, box 7, National Kindergarten Association, “Highlights of the

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23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

B a r b a r a B e at t y Bill,” in “Report of the Executive Secretary,” May 28, 1947, NKA, file 8, box 7; and see Beatty, “Politics of Preschool Advocacy,” 173. Locke, “Report of the Executive Secretary,” November 14, 1935, pp. 2–3, and see Beatty, “Politics of Preschool Advocacy,” 173–74. Bessie Locke to Theodore Dreiser, n.d., and Dreiser’s secretary to Bessie Locke, October 21, 1931, MS Collection 30, “Correspondence with Theodore Dreiser, 1931,” Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania Library. Locke, “Report of the Executive Secretary,” November 14, 1935. On the National Education Association see, among others, Wayne J. Urban, Why Teachers Organized (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982); and Marjorie Murphy, Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900–1980 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). Locke, “Report of the Executive Secretary,” May 28, 1947, pp. 6–7, and see Beatty, “Politics of Preschool Advocacy,” 173–75. On the lobbying strategies on women’s groups, see Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). National Kindergarten Association, Annual Report 1925, 7. The film is described in detail, along with photographs, in the National Kindergarten Association Annual Report 1909–1911, 34. See also, Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 106–7. Parker, “Bessie Locke,” 438; McHenry, “Bessie Locke,” 250; National Kindergarten Association, “Report for 1954,” n.p. On juvenile delinquency, see among many others, Robert M. Mennel, Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquents in the United States, 1825–1940 (Hanover, NH: University of New England Press, 1973); Judith Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing America’s Young in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Steven Schlossman, Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of “Progressive” Juvenile Justice, 1825–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); David Wolcott and Steven Schlossman, “In the Voices of Delinquents: Social Science, the Chicago Area Project, and a Boys’ Culture of Casual Crime and Violence in the 1930s,” in When Science Encounters the Child: Education, Parenting, and Child Welfare in 20thCentury America, ed. Barbara Beatty, Emily D. Cahan, and Julia Grant (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006), 116–35. Bessie Locke, “The Kindergarten as an Agency for the Prevention of Crime,” American Federationist 41 (May 1934): 523. Locke, “Kindergarten as Agency for Crime Prevention,” 524. Ibid., 524–25. Ibid., 525–26. Kindergartens in the United States: Statistics and Present Problems, U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education Bulletin No. 6 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914), 7 and “Statistical Summary of Education,” Biennial Survey of Education in the United State, 1956–58, quoted in Neith Headley, The Kindergarten: Its Place in the Program of Education (New York: Center for Applied Research in Education, 1959), 11; and Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 111.


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36. John Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984). 37. For examples of some of this jockeying for jurisdiction among children’s professionals see When Science Encounters the Child. 38. On community church group activism in education see, among others, Dennis Shirley, Valley Interfaith and School Reform: Organizing for Power in South Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).


4

Chapter 11

“ We Are from the City, and We Are Here to Educate You” The Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs and Tallul ah Falls School

Andra Knecht

I

n the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people living in rural areas of the United States, especially the South, had limited opportunities for formal education. With less exposure to public schooling, white rural children were at a distinct disadvantage compared to their urban counterparts. They were even further behind children in the North. In response to these disparities, reformers, philanthropists, and educators, strove to improve—and sometimes to establish—systems of primary and secondary education in rural areas of the Southern United States. Although women and their social organizations have played an integral role in bringing education to isolated areas, most published works addressing women’s groups have devoted minimal attention to these activities. For example, one study examined black and white women’s organizations in Atlanta, Georgia to discern their cultural functions and social characteristics. Tallulah Falls School—which is the focus of this essay—and other schools were only briefly mentioned.1 Southern women’s clubs worked initially in urban areas, but over time their efforts were superseded when the professionalism of public welfare work and public agencies took over responsibilities for the urban poor. Women’s clubs then turned their attention to rural reform, especially the education of poorer children and women. The white Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs contributed significantly by establishing and supporting industrial and

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model schools for mountain children in northern Georgia, especially Tallulah Falls School.

The Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs The Georgia Federation was an outgrowth of both women’s clubs in the state and the national organization, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC). In 1890, Jane Cunningham Croly and members of Sorosis, the first woman’s club in New York City, had founded the GFWC to consolidate women’s reform efforts nationally. By 1896, the GFWC had grown nearly tenfold, from fifty-one to almost 500 clubs.2 That year, white clubwomen from Georgia also established their own state federation. Like most state chapters, the Georgia Federation promoted social welfare legislation, such as child labor and compulsory school attendance laws. Given the dire conditions of rural education in the state, the clubwomen responded by supporting traveling libraries, providing scholarships for young women to attend normal schools, establishing free kindergartens, promoting manual and industrial training, and beautifying school campuses.3 To be sure, the clubwomen did not conceive of child welfare issues as separate from educational ones. For example, as early as 1902, clubwoman Mary Ann Lipscomb spoke before the Georgia Federation about the large number of children who worked in Georgia’s mills and factories. Because the children helped support their families, many were unable to attend school and so never learned the basic skills of reading and writing. Indeed, in 1900, the percentage of illiteracy among children ages ten through fourteen in Georgia was more than three times higher than the national percentage, 22 percent to 7 percent.4 The clubwomen sought to improve educational opportunities for the children through their advocacy of child labor and compulsory school attendance legislation, as well as through the establishment of industrial schools. Despite the women’s prodigious efforts at lobbying, the state legislature did not pass a child labor law until 1916. Even then, the law did not include small-scale farmers, most of whom did not send their children to school regularly since they needed them as workers.5 However, the Georgia Federation was more successful than the above efforts would indicate in working with school officials to improve educational opportunities for poorer children. During the 1890s, the Georgia Federation, in cooperation with the state school commissioner, had conducted a survey and published their findings of school conditions from kindergarten to the university in the state.6 To be sure, the clubwomen understood how higher education for women, especially for teachers, was inseparable from the improvement of rural schools. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, higher educational opportunities for women in Georgia were limited to the state normal school and single-sex institutions, such as the Lucy Cobb Institute in

“We Are from the City, and We Are Here to Educate You” 2 1 7

Athens. As early as 1896, the clubwomen had petitioned the University of Georgia to admit women. However, it was not until 1918 that women were allowed to enroll in the University’s Colleges of Agriculture and Education, but not the more prestigious College of Liberal Arts.7 Nonetheless, not all of the clubwomen agreed on the advantages of coeducation. Some members of the Athens Woman’s Club favored single-sex schools, such as the Lucy Cobb Institute, where the club held its monthly meetings. In fact, at least two of its club members, Mary Ann Lipscomb and Rosa Woodberry, had been affiliated with the school as principal and teacher respectively. No doubt, many clubwomen were persuaded by then principal Millie Rutherford, who spoke adamantly of the important work of the Institute, as well as her disapproval of coeducation. In her estimation, coeducation did not provide equal educational opportunities for women; furthermore, it threatened the very survival of the institute. Collectively, the club members decided to endorse the institute’s single-sex status, as well as women’s admission to the University.8 Additionally, the Georgia Federation raised monies so female students could attend higher educational institutions. In the case of the Athens Woman’s Club, they provided scholarships for young women to attend normal schools, especially important for improving the quality of teachers in the rural and mountain areas.9 So important were qualified teachers that in 1914 the club voted to give money to one industrial school on three conditions: that only teachers trained in normal schools be employed there; that the school term be lengthened; and that the club to allowed to design its new school house.10 Here again, the clubwomen conjoined reform issues and used their financial support to strategically leverage improvements for rural schooling. Southern clubwomen, like their Northern counterparts, were able to accomplish much of their reform initiatives because of their maternalist concerns for children’s and women’s welfare.11 Unlike Northern white clubwomen, however, Southern white women played a distinct role in helping to rebuild the educational and political infrastructure of the new progressive South. They did so by working in tandem with other women’s organizations, most notably the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), and the Southern Association of College Women (SACW). At the same time, they negotiated their reformist roles within a power structure that was largely male. Although Northern women, too, often deferred to male legislators and businessmen, Southern women had to mediate traditional images and expectations of what it meant to be a Southern lady.12 For example, when Lipscomb spoke at the Columbian World Exposition in Chicago in 1893, she argued that women were not only as capable as men but better at handling money. Lest she appear too radical, she qualified her argument by adding: “I am not an advocate of woman’s rights in the opprobrious sense of that expression. I do not care to see—hope never to see the women of America leave the quiet sanctity of their homes and thrust themselves out into the political world.”13

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However, as historian Rebecca Montgomery has astutely argued, many clubwomen, including Lipscomb, had experienced the difficulties of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which precipitated their involvement in politics and social reform.14 Indeed, prior to the establishment of women’s clubs, middleclass Southern women had a rich associational life through which they helped those in need.15 As SACW member and normal school teacher Celeste Parrish emphasized, Southern women had “proven their womanhood” through their courage and strength, not their fancy dresses or submissiveness.16 Southern clubwomen also negotiated the thorny issue of race. Northern women, too, had restricted their club memberships to whites initially and many of their outreach efforts were to poor, “deserving” immigrants, not blacks.17 In the case of the Georgia Federation, the members circumscribed most of their educational work around poor rural whites. The clubwomen used the salient ideas of racial purity to promote their educational work in the northern mountains of Georgia. In doing so, they often relied upon stereotypical images of their ancestry and their traditions. Lipscomb, for one, spoke of the mountain people’s “fine American heritage; that they were of the purest Anglo-Saxon blood in America.”18 Purposefully, in their efforts to uplift poor whites, the clubwomen forged new identities and political spaces for themselves.19

Tallulah Falls School, 1909 to 1940 In 1900, the Georgia Federation decided to establish twelve “model schools” in rural areas to teach industry and thrift by adding industrial and agricultural training to existing schools. The clubwomen did not work in isolation, however. Religious denominations, colleges, and other women’s organizations, such as the DAR, had established model schools throughout the Appalachian region during the early twentieth century. As of 1920, there were over one hundred and fifty settlement and model schools in remote mountain villages, sixteen of them in Georgia.20 The Georgia Federation and other reformers considered these industrial schools “more human, more rational, [and] more nearly related to the life of the children and the homes in which they live[d].”21 The Athens Woman’s Club was especially instrumental in the supporting rural schools in Georgia. As of 1912, the club pledged their support to at least four industrial rural schools, three in the state’s northern mountains. In fact, the club created a special committee, “Education and Tallulah Falls Circle,” to oversee that particular school’s development.22 Additionally, club members supported the Ella F. White Memorial School, an industrial mountain school named after one of their club members. Through teas and tag days, the women contributed at least half of the money needed to build the school. After five years of fund-raising, the school opened in 1917 with over one hundred students. Realizing that mountain schoolchildren needed qualified teachers to succeed,


the Atlanta club stipulated that only teachers trained in normal school be hired there.23 One of the driving forces behind the establishment of Tallulah Falls School was Lipscomb, who had vacationed in the area since she was young. The daughter of William and Laura Battaille Cobb Rutherford, she had grown up on the campus of the University of Georgia, where her father was a professor. After graduating from the Lucy Cobb Institute, she worked as an English literature teacher until she married Francis Adgate Lipscomb, son of Chancellor Andrew A. Lipscomb, in 1869.24 In the summer of 1903, when Lipscomb returned to Tallulah Falls to vacation with her grandchildren, she could not have known how fundamentally the trip would change her life. As the neighboring mountain children played with her grandchildren, Lipscomb realized that they could neither read nor write, and she eventually learned why. They did not have a regular schoolhouse. Instead, the only space available was a room above the county jail, “a place not so good as an ordinary barn.”25 This school was not unlike others reformer John Campbell had found in the southern highlands. Generally, he noted that if a school building existed, it was a one-room structure “poorly lighted and very inadequately heated . . . [sometimes without] desks, blackboards, or chalk.”26 Perceiving that the mountain people should be considered among “Georgia’s most valuable asset[s],” Lipscomb was determined to open a school for them.27 She invited local residents to her cottage to gain their input and to lay the groundwork for the school. Initially, the residents were not enthusiastic, but Lipscomb was not deterred. She continued to engage them, and over time, they became interested and offered what assistance they could. As a member of the Georgia Federation, Lipscomb decided to solicit the women’s help as well. In 1904, she sent letters to the member clubs, asking for their cooperation.28 The next year, the Georgia Federation agreed to “adopt” Tallulah Falls School as a project at the annual convention. Their first activity was to establish the school’s board of trustees with five members. Not surprisingly, Lipscomb was appointed. Thereafter, she issued appeals in newspapers across the state, such as the Savannah News, urging clubwomen in particular to take an interest in the mountain school: In no part of our state are [industrial] schools needed as in the mountainous districts; and in no mountainous district are they more needed than at Tallulah Falls. . . . It is believed that, if cooking and caring for the home is to be carried into the future homes of these girls, they must be taught to practice it at the school. The school will be starting as a day school, but, as the work grows, it is hoped that dormitories may be added, and it may grow into a boarding school.29

Lipscomb was determined to adapt the curriculum to what she perceived to be the needs of the mountain people. She and other club members were concerned that many day schools established by outsiders in other remote southern

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regions had failed because they lacked “connection to the community and region within which [they were] situated.”30 But Lipscomb had the foresight to include the community as much as possible in the school’s planning and operation. She understood that the curriculum needed to take into account the economic and geographical aspects of the local region in order for the school to be successful. For example, students would need to learn what crops were appropriate for the available land and how to grow them. For girls, sewing materials that could be found locally would need to be considered and “especial attention should be given to a balanced and varied diet at the school table.”31 She and the clubwomen reasoned that if the mountain people could achieve an adequate standard of living in their communities, they would not migrate to the mill and factory towns. According to urban reformers, their migration created problems since the mountaineers were unable to interact appropriately with the townspeople. Furthermore, their relative innocence of urban, worldly ways made them vulnerable to those who might take advantage of them. Improving education in the mountains, then, was a solution to both problems.32 With tenacity and belief in a dream for the uplifting the mountain children, Lipscomb set about raising the funds for the land and materials needed to make the school a reality. Mrs. B. M. A. Young Cartledge, a local resident from one of the pioneering families, donated the initial five acres of land, with the condition that the school be built within two years.33 Lipscomb secured the design for a six-room structure from J. W. Barnett, an architect in Athens. She gave the plans to Jonathan Lambert of Clarkesville, Georgia, who agreed to construct the building for $2,900.34 Unfortunately, Lipscomb could not generate the necessary funds for the school building in a timely manner and the opportunity was lost. Persevering, Lipscomb secured enough funds by 1907 to purchase a five-acre tract of land from another local resident, Sarah E. White, with a similar stipulation of building within the next two years.35 Again using Barnett’s plans, Lipscomb conferred with Alex Saye, an Athens contractor, who ascertained that the cost would be “something over” two thousand dollars to erect the building.36 The Georgia Federation appeared to be well on its way to opening the industrial school. The Georgia Federation had initially decided to maintain ownership and operation of the school, which would be the “only industrial federated school in the United States.”37 After completion of the school’s first five-room building, though, the clubwomen agreed to allow the school to be used for cooperative services with state and local school authorities. On June 30, 1909, after meeting with ninety commissioners, forty members of various county boards of education, and over one hundred visitors, the school was formally dedicated. During the dedication ceremony, Chancellor David C. Barrow of the University of Georgia thanked the people responsible for the planning and completion of the school, “and for all it would mean to those young people for whose enlightenment and uplift it was intended.”38 State Commissioner of


Education Jere M. Pound also spoke, admonishing the other commissioners to accept any help the Georgia clubwomen might offer: Ten years ago when they began to offer help and suggestions to the educational system in Georgia, their proffers were received with many raisings of eyebrows and curlings of the lip, and yet what has happened? . . . There are those who find it manly and clever to curl the lip at the efforts of clubwomen. I am here to say I am not one of these, nor should any man be so who appreciates real service to the cause of education in Georgia.39

Prominent members of Tallulah Falls, including the mayor and sheriff, also attended the dedication ceremonies. Mayor Taylor spoke a few words, and, in closing, pushed for a compulsory attendance law that would help to keep the children in school.40 It should not be surprising that local officials were supportive of the school. What was surprising was that no local newspaper within more than a forty-mile radius reported either the dedication or the opening of the school. One possible explanation was that many of the residents in the surrounding mountainous area were too poor to subscribe to or unable to read a newspaper, so the editors did not deem the school’s activities worth printing. A second possibility was simply the lack of interest on the part of local reporters, although the large number of people who attended the dedication, indicated the interest of local residents. It is conceivable, too, that the local newspapers did not see the significance of opportunity for education that the new school would provide. In contrast, the Atlanta Constitution regularly covered the school’s development. For example, within a week an editorial appeared, offering an opportunity for “inexpensive philanthropy” and asking for donations of second-hand textbooks which the editor knew were “plentiful in the homes of the city . . . and of little value to their owners [but would be] of inestimable value in the heroic work of [the] mountain school.”41 More than likely, the editors had been approached by the clubwomen to assist in this cause. The Georgia Federation worked diligently to hire qualified teachers for the mountain school. As Campbell had observed, the teachers in Appalachia were mostly “inexperienced, untrained, young, and unformed in character . . . [with] only the education they [had] been able to acquire in such elementary schools as they [were] now themselves teaching.”42 Their salaries were also meager. Tallulah Falls’ first teacher, Annie Thrasher, began teaching the school’s first twenty students in July and served until September when she had to return to her regular job in nearby Watkinsville. Frances Campbell, a graduate of the state normal school then took over. Soon thereafter, Madeline Quillian, also a state normal school graduate, and Gladys White joined Campbell to teach until the school vacation in December. Initially, there appeared to be a high turnover of teachers. But within a short time, some of its graduates studied at normal and

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other schools, then returned to teach at Tallulah Falls. For example, one female student attended the state normal school and reportedly did “creditable work” there. Two more girls who received scholarships prepared to take teachers’ examinations in 1912 so they could return as teachers at Tallulah Falls School. Significantly, most, if not all, of the teaching staff were women, at least until 1924.43 Regardless, the teachers had difficulty finding reasonable accommodations near the school as of 1909. The executive board of the Georgia Federation then decided that the teachers needed a place of their own. At the February 1910 board meeting, the proposal was presented and accepted to build a model cottage at the school for them. The plan included sufficient space for ten to twelve students to reside during the school year since some lived too far away to be day students.44 Within a short time, offers came in for house plans, as well as donations of lumber, hardware, and money. The policy of the board was to not incur any debt, so the contributions were gratefully accepted until all the necessary material and funds were available to build the teachers’ cottage.45 In the meantime, the Georgia Federation found a small house for the teachers to rent, for which the Atlanta Woman’s Club donated furniture and other furnishings. Initially, two students boarded with the teachers, including a “big strong, capable boy [who had received the] first scholarship and [hoped] to . . . go on to the State Agriculture School.”46 By the end of the 1910 school year, the school plant had expanded to include a five-room school building with school rooms, a “school parlor (with splendid piano),” a sewing room, a kitchen, and a workshop, whose value was an estimated five thousand dollars, with an overall annual operating cost of twelve hundred dollars.47 This plan was consistent with that recommended by Philander Claxton, who was affiliated with the Southern Education Board and head of the Department of Education and the new Summer School of the South in Knoxville as of 1902. Like other progressive Southern reformers, Claxton believed that the teachers’ house or “teacherage” should be the community center of every mountain school. There, teachers would model how community members, especially women, might improve their living conditions. Ideally, the country school would also have a shop, and large assembly room for community gatherings, an orchard, gardens, and vineyards.48 The residents of Tallulah Falls were eager to improve the school grounds and so worked with the teaching staff and the students. In 1910, Thomas A. Early, professor of school extension at the University of Georgia, volunteered to help plant an apple orchard and school garden. He worked side by side with the students and local citizens to clear the land. Upon completing the work, Early noted, “The men of the neighborhood cooperated with me quite well. . . . One of the best indications of the success of the school is the interest shown by the people.”49 The men had also used tools donated to the school as equipment for the boys’ workshop. The workshop was an important addition since the boys


did not have space where they could work and had to go home while the girls engaged in their domestic science lessons.50 In addition to the regular academic course work outlined by the state, the students engaged in industrial work, such as basketry, gardening, animal husbandry, field work, and cooking. Cooking classes were held each week and the students took special interest in learning new recipes. They wrote them down in their notebooks, then took the notebooks home and introduced the new foods—such as stuffed potatoes, muffins, and biscuits—to their families. In their cooking classes, the teachers emphasized preparing foods from local produce. As a result, the school cooking lesson repeated “itself all through the mountains round about.”51 Parents were receptive to the school, evident in the increased number of children attending and also boarding at the teacherage. Furthermore, parents seemed to appreciate that their children were learning basic academic skills, important for negotiating with the “wider” world. At the same time, the school did not neglect industrial skills necessary to improve the material conditions of the families’ lives. Furthermore, the lessons in cooking, weaving, and other industrial arts drew from the region’s natural resources. Finally, parents and relatives participated in some of the school’s entertainments, thereby contributing to the school becoming “the social centre [sic] of the town.” For example, before school closed for Christmas vacation, the children helped set up two holly trees at the schoolhouse for a Christmas celebration. The students made paper chains and popped corn to decorate it. They also made gifts such as little baskets, needle cases, and pin cushions for their family members. One student’s grandmother even walked several miles to see the Christmas tree and declared it was the first one she had ever seen. Indeed, according to clubwomen and teachers, many of the children had never seen a Christmas tree “and knew nothing of the story of the Christ child.” By the time school closed for the winter, the number of students had tripled, and most did not want the school term to end.52 From 1909 to 1912, the school had grown from twenty students, one building, and one teacher to eighty-six students, two buildings, and three teachers.53 Initially, Lipscomb wrote, she and many clubwomen had not realized that most rural schools were in session only three months a year and that the school buildings were not “often inhabitable” and the quality of teaching poor.54 Local taxation was not a solution since most people in the mountainous counties had “little to tax.” Since Tallulah Falls School lay on the county line between Habersham and Rabun Counties, both counties adopted the school, and thereafter the school “[received] regularly its pro rata of county funds” for each student from both counties. The only other means of income for the school were the contributions of the clubwomen, plus one hundred and fifty dollars from the state.55 However, the amount the state gave to rural schools, such as Tallulah Falls, was much less than what it provided to urban schools. As of

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1907, Georgia spent less than four dollars per rural student, compared to thirteen dollars for each student in municipal school districts. Fortunately, the Tallulah Falls’ school board was able to meet the monthly operating costs of one hundred and twenty dollars, at least during in its initial years, because of the clubwomen’s contributions.56 Lipscomb congratulated the clubwomen for their continued generosity, which demonstrated their awareness of the “hopeless educational conditions” of the mountain residents. She asked that they continue to support the school’s industrial program to “equip the children for lives of usefulness and independence in their own local environment.”57 In truth, however, not all of the federated clubs supported Tallulah Falls School. As of 1914, only eighty of the 246 clubs pledged their support, and of these, only thirty actually donated money. The Athens Woman’s Club, however, did give their continuous support.58 Undoubtedly, the clubwomen were engaged in other reforms then, especially the war-time work of selling war bonds and knitting for the soldiers. Lipscomb drew from these concerns and promoted teaching the Tallulah Falls children patriotism so they would be better citizens. Working with Anne Carrington Davis, a new teacher and principal as of 1915, Lipscomb was determined to “open the [students’] eyes to the world around them.”59 Although it is unclear how patriotism was taught at the school, Lipscomb made her intentions clear. She maintained that despite “war and rumors of war, [and] the stringencies of the money markets . . . the school [would] and must go forward.”60 Students learned about the work and history of the Red Cross, and they were urged to join. Lipscomb also recommended that Davis “gather the teachers and pupils in the boarding house around a good wood fire and give them a lesson on Patriotism with practical illustration.”61 Davis did so, although she did not elaborate how. Regardless, she reported that the students responded enthusiastically. Some were even determined to earn enough money to join the Red Cross. The students used materials they found at or near the school to make baskets, bird boxes, and furniture, which they sold, so they could become members. They also purchased thrift stamps to “do their bit for the government, show their loyalty and patriotism, and at the same time lay by something for the future for themselves.”62 Clubwomen’s concern for instilling patriotism may have also been related to the fact that many of the mountain people had been opposed to secession and their “disaffection toward the Confederacy was manifested from the beginning.”63 Not surprisingly, Union sentiments had been strong during the Civil War. Those mountain counties had voted Unionist in 1861 and had resisted conscription in 1863.64 Lipscomb wanted to know how the young people felt about conscription during World War I. She questioned one young man from Rabun County about local opposition to the draft law, as well as whether he was registered and how he felt about going to war. He replied that he knew only a few who were opposed to the draft law. He had registered and enlisted, but


admitted he did not want to go to war, “but if my country needs me, I am ready and willing to go.”65 Consequently, Lipscomb concluded that the allegations were wrong. She knew they were “a brave and sturdy set of boys and [would and did] make good soldiers. With our mountain girls working in the Red Cross and buying books of Thrift Stamps there need be no fear of the loyalty and bravery of our mountain boys.” She also knew that there was “no better lesson to be taught” than patriotism at Tallulah Falls and other mountain schools, especially during the war time.66 In fact, seven of the boys at the school were already “in uniform,” and others were waiting to be called. Some of the students also joined the Red Cross after having earned money for the membership fees. Others made knitting needles and constructed furniture of rhododendron to sell for the war cause.67 In 1914, Lipscomb was forced to step down as director because of failing health. She was succeeded by Lucy Lester Willet, a former president of the Georgia Federation from 1909 to 1911. Lipscomb knew that the school was in good hands and that she had helped to establish a sound foundation. At that time, eighty-six students were enrolled in grades one through eight. Valued at over ten thousand dollars, the school plant included a model kitchen, a wellequipped workshop, a model home where three teachers and seven students lived, a library, orchards, and gardens. Willet continued to work with Lipscomb and M. L. Duggan, a state supervisor, to bring the school up to the standards of other progressive industrial schools in the country. To do so, they needed to purchase five more acres and add a playground. Lipscomb would assist by helping to raise five hundred dollars to purchase the additional land.68 Under Willet’s directorship, the school revised its industrial curriculum, based on recommendations by Celeste Parrish, then state school supervisor who oversaw over two thousand rural schools in Georgia’s northern mountain counties. Committed to John Dewey’s philosophy of connecting children’s home and community life to rural schools, Parrish encouraged the teachers to engage the schoolchildren in meaningful activity.69 Accordingly, the teachers at Tallulah Falls taught lessons in raising poultry and dairying and organized canning clubs for girls and corn and pig clubs for boys. As of 1917, the school offered courses in basketry, weaving, knitting, woodworking, cabinet making, carpentry, furniture making, wood carving, shoe repairing, sewing and crocheting, and gardening. The townspeople assisted the teachers as well. For example, several women taught sewing and crocheting, and a cobbler taught shoe repair. The students enjoyed their work and took pride in their school. They made furniture from rhododendron branches for the school’s front porch and built bird houses for the school grounds. Their work in the garden, dairying, and animal husbandry also helped to defray the school’s expenses.70 Indeed, Willet was concerned about the rising cost of the school and its low endowment. Like Lipscomb, she devoted a great deal of time to fund-raising

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and encouraging the clubwomen, as well as administered to the school’s daily needs. As she wrote to the Georgia Federation’s district presidents: “Like the teachers, I often work from 6 a.m. until twelve at night. Last year [1916] I wrote 550 letters personally, paid out of my own funds $100.00, made nine trips to Tallulah at my own expense. . . . It takes time and thought and many times when funds are low it is an almost maddening responsibility.”71 She was especially concerned about the teachers, who when the school fell short of funds, were not paid. Despite Willet’s attempts to build up the school’s endowment, she was unsuccessful until 1918, when Lipscomb’s children donated five thousand dollars on the condition that the women’s clubs of Georgia and friends of the school raise an additional twenty-five thousand dollars. By 1920, twenty-six thousand dollars were pledged.72 Another development occurred in 1920 when Willet, Davis, and State School Superintendent Brittain met to discuss separating the public school from the industrial school at Tallulah Falls. One of the changes proposed was that day students would no longer be enrolled after the current school year. That year, there were eighty-five students, including twenty-four students who boarded at the school. If day students attended the public county school, the Georgia Federation could then focus on the industrial school and those children who lived too far from the school to be day students. Brittain agreed that notice should be given to the day students who would attend the public school since a statewide local tax law had recently been passed.73 The local population in Rabun County, though, had come to rely on Tallulah Falls School. They insisted that “they did not want a school of their own. . . . [They asked] for the privilege of continuing to send their children . . . [even] offering to pay . . . for the privilege.” The school accepted the offer, and Davis related that the “mountain people [had] learned to appreciate the school,” and strove to pay however they could. The school was willing to “take produce of any kind that they [could] furnish in order that they may feel their independence.”74 In 1922, Willet died and Passie Fenton Ottley became third director of Tallulah Falls School. A longtime member of the Georgia Federation and one of the original trustees of the school, she knew the school’s operational needs well. One of Ottley’s first tasks was to continue Willet’s work of raising the endowment by directing the Greater Tallulah movement, a two-year campaign to raise “not less than $50,000 [for] physical expansion and financial permanence.”75 To help inspire interest, Davis formulated a slogan, “give and get for a Greater Tallulah.”76 Davis also encouraged the clubwomen’s donations by showcasing some of the students’ handiwork at the Georgia Federation’s convention in 1922. By the end of the convention, the clubwomen pledged over twenty-five thousand dollars for the school. The clubwomen, however, were not the only ones who supported the school then. Groups, such as the State Association for Education of Georgia Mountaineers, assisted, as did private donors, including one from Cleveland, who gave the school ten thousand dollars, plus fifty acres of land for farming.77


The groundbreaking ceremony for the new school building was held in May 1924. The campaign had provided for the construction of a new eight-room school cottage named for Davis, principal of Tallulah Falls School for ten years. Additions to the school plant included an auditorium, a large crafts shop, a small dormitory, a guest house for the trustees’ use, two heating plants, and accommodations for seventy students. Additionally, three buildings were remodeled and the property fenced. The Georgia Federation also established sixteen scholarships of two thousand dollars each to support students for eight years of schooling. By the end of the campaign in 1925, the school plant had more than doubled in size and the finances were more stable.78 As of 1926, the school was home to one hundred students, with an additional one hundred day students. The following year the school accommodated 215 students, 115 of whom lived at the school. There were now eleven grades, which fulfilled State Department of Secondary Education requirements for its certification as a Class A high school.79 The school also gained a new source of financial support. In 1927, four Tallulah Falls Circles were established through the trustees’ encouragement. One of these was the Atlanta Young Matrons’ Circle. Although little is known about this young group of donors or how they fund-raised, they contributed thousands of dollars to the school from the 1920s through the 1950s.80 As of 1928, the school had developed considerably. From 1922 to 1928, the school had grown from ten to fifty acres of land, from two to eleven buildings, and from thirteen thousand dollars to eighty thousand dollars in invested funds. The student body had more than doubled—from 102 to 265, as had the number of teachers, from five to twelve. There was now a Home Economics building and two large crafts shops, one with over thirty looms.81 The weaving curriculum had expanded, in part to provide additional income. Tourists who vacationed there bought the woven goods, as well as hooked rugs and baskets. During some Depression years, the Tallulah Falls students brought in nearly one thousand dollars. But the weaving and other handiwork classes also taught students about their local traditions. Eliza Shirley, who had learned weaving as a student, continued her education at Lynchburg, Virginia and New York City, then returned to Tallulah Falls School as a teacher. She not only taught the traditional patterns of weaving but also how to make natural dyes.82 As one writer idyllically described the shop with looms and spinning wheels: “ . . . mountain girls as dainty and pretty as flowers . . . are making the same exquisite rugs and coverlets and chair seats and table linens their greatgreat-great-grandmothers did.”83 Despite the extra income generated from the students’ work, the Depression years took a toll on the school. As of 1930, the Georgia Federation had assumed one third of the school’s expenses at ten thousand dollars. Yet the clubwomen were unable to fulfill this obligation because of the difficult years. As of 1937, only 103 of the 218 clubs had donated at least ten dollars to the school. Fortunately, the trustees were able to raise the remaining twenty thousand

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dollars through private donors and the Young Matrons Circles.84 Collectively, the Georgia Federation and other supporters brightened Tallulah Falls Schools, the “light of the mountains.” The Georgia Federation chose an alternate means to address the educational needs they found in their state. Through model schools, such as Tallulah Falls School, the clubwomen worked to improve educational opportunities for rural children. They went beyond school beautification and added industrial and agricultural training to the traditional curriculum to instill a positive work ethic and raise the community’s standard of living. They were also not reluctant to use political means to achieve their goals. Seeing that the state inadequately provided for public education in rural areas, they pushed for legislative measures concerning child labor and compulsory education. To be sure, the clubwomen had their challenges and their limitations. Like Northern clubwomen, Southern clubwomen relied upon traditional and often middle-class ideas to improve the lives of rural families and their children. For example, the girls at the school learned domestic skills, while the boys learned farming. They also disapproved of the men’s liquor stills, without considering them as an additional form of income.85 By focusing on poor whites, the clubwomen also eschewed school reform for blacks. Indeed, their very portrayals of mountain children as “pure-blood[s]” and “fine Anglo-Saxon boys and girls” spoke to their prejudices.86 Despite the Georgia Federation’s biases, Tallulah Falls School survived and is still in operation as a private school. More work is needed to bring to light the story of Mary Ann Lipscomb’s dream and how she and the Georgia Federation responded to the need for education in the northern Georgia mountains. Their vision was not driven by religion, although they were often devoutly religious. Rather, they wanted to promote patriotism and loyalty and inspire the local population, through the children, to adopt the industrial model of work and to obtain a modern understanding of nutritional health and scientific knowledge. The result was the Tallulah Falls School, a school owned and operated by the Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, which offered academic and industrial education, gave a glimpse of the wider world to the mountain residents, and significantly improved the lives of the people in the mountains of northern Georgia.

Notes 1. Darlene Rebecca Roth, Matronage: Patterns in Women’s Organizations, Atlanta, Georgia, 1890–1940 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1994). 2. Jennie June Croly, The History of the Women’s Club Movement in America (New York: Henry G. Allen, 1898), 15–34; Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993),


3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

116–18. See also Rebecca S. Montgomery, The Politics of Education in the New South. Women and Reform in Georgia, 1890–1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006). Croly, The History of the Women’s Club Movement, 362–63; Mrs. A. O. Granger, “The Work of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs Against Child Labor,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 25 (May 1905): 106–07; Mrs. A. O. Granger, “The Effect of Club Work in the South,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 28 (September 1906): 50–58; Sandra Gioia Treadway, Women of Mark: A History of the Women’s Club of Richmond, Virginia, 1894–1994 (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1995), 44; Marsha Wedell, Elite Women and the Reform Impulse in Memphis, 1875–1915 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 117–18; Scott, Natural Allies, 149–50. Olive Dame Campbell and Katherine Petit, who respectively founded the John C. Campbell Folk School in Virginia and the Hindman Settlement School and Pine Mountains School in Kentucky, as well as Lilian Wyckoff Johnson, who established a mountain school in Tennessee, were influenced by their state federated women’s clubs that also engaged in outreach to mountain women. As chair of the Rural Organization Department of the Tennessee Federation of Women’s Clubs, Johnson had participated in rural reform for women in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Her vision was to link the women’s club reforms to the Country Life Movement and the cooperative associations. See Anne Meis Knupfer, “The Urban and Rural Reform Activities of Lilian Wyckoff Johnson (1864 to 1956),” The Journal of East Tennessee History (2005): 1–27. Montgomery, The Politics of Education in the New South, 66. Athens Woman’s Club Minutes, April 28, 1913; May 24, 1915, Athens Women’s Club Minutes, 1912–20, vol. 1, Heritage Room, Athens-Clarke County Library, Athens, GA; also located at http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/athenwomansclub/chron ology.php. See also Montgomery, Politics of Education in the New South, 77. Croly, The History of the Women’s Club Movement, 358; Mary Celestine Mitchell Brown, “An Address Delivered on June 25, 1903, Before the Educational Association of Georgia at Cumberland Island,” Atlanta Journal, July 19, 1903; repr., New York: Eastern Printing, 1956, 5. Montgomery, Politics of Education in the New South, 35; Athens Woman’s Club Minutes, February 28, 1916; September 25, 1916. Ruth Blair, Georgia Women of 1926 (Atlanta: Georgia Department of Archives and History, 1926), 19–20; Athens Woman’s Club Minutes, January 28, 1918; February 28, 1916. Athens Woman’s Club Minutes, April 1914; September 17, 1912; January 27, 1913; May 24, 1915; January 28, 1918. Athens Woman’s Club Minutes, September 1914. On the ideology and practices of maternalism, see Molly Ladd-Taylor, MotherWork. Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993). The most prominent book on southern women’s reform is Scott, Natural Allies. See also James L. Leloudis, Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

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13. Mary Ann Rutherford Lipscomb, “Woman as a Financier,” in The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U.S.A., 1893, ed. Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle (Chicago: Monarch Book Company, 1894), 470. 14. Montgomery, Politics of Education in the New South, 15. See also LeeAnn Whites, Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Elna C. Green, ed., Before the New Deal: Social Welfare in the South, 1830–1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999). 15. See, for example, Roth, Matronage, chap. 2; Scott, Natural Allies. 16. Parrish quoted in Montgomery, Politics of Education in the New South, 59. 17. For progressive reformers’ distinctions between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, see Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994). 18. Lipscomb quoted in Montgomery, Politics of Education in the New South, 154. 19. Ibid., 14. 20. Ibid., 68; Philis Alvic, Weavers of the Southern Highlands (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), xiii–xiv, 4. 21. Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, Yearbook, 1910–1911, Tallulah Falls School Museum (hereafter TFSM), Tallulah Falls, GA, 68. 22. Athens Woman’s Club Minutes, January 22, 1912. 23. Athens Woman’s Club Minutes, April 28, 1912; June 4, 1912; September 17, 1912; December, 1912; March 24, 1912; November 23, 1914; January 24, 1916; September 25, 1916; January 22, 1917; April 23, 1917. 24. “Lipscomb, Mary Ann Rutherford,” in Dictionary of Georgia Biography, vol. II (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 625–27. 25. Georgia Federation of Women’s Club, Yearbook, 1907–1908, TFSM, 67–68. 26. John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1921), 264. 27. Tennie DeJarnette, A Pattern of Education in Living (Tallulah Falls: Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, ca. 1950), 5–6. 28. Tallulah Falls School Scrapbook, 1903–17, TFSM, 10; Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, Tallulah Falls School, Tallulah Falls, Georgia, 1909–1946 (Atlanta: Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1946), 16. 29. Tallulah Falls School Scrapbook, 1903–17, 52. 30. Campbell, The Southern Highlander, 274, 281. 31. Ibid., 278–79. 32. Montgomery, The Politics of Education in the New South; for the debate about mountain people and their migration to urban areas, see Thomas R. Dawley, Jr., “Our Southern Mountaineers,” World’s Work 19 (March, 1910): 12704–14; see also Sallie Barker Hill, “The Case of the Southern Mountaineers,” typed manuscript, Walter B. Hill Papers, Sallie Barker Hill Division, box 54, folder 2, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens. 33. Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, Yearbook, 1906–1907, TFSM, 13; Yearbook, 1907–1908, 74. 34. Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, Yearbook, 1907–1908, 72. 35. Habersham County, Georgia, Deed (Form B-152), Habersham County, 1908, TFSM.

“We Are from the City, and We Are Here to Educate You” 2 3 1 36. Tallulah Falls School Scrapbook, 1903–17, 12. 37. Mrs. W. B. Price-Smith, “New Year Wishes for Christmas,” Atlanta Constitution, January 12, 1913, p. F6. 38. Tallulah Falls School Financial Report, 1934–35, p. 3; “Tallulah Falls Industrial School Formally Dedicated on Wednesday,” Atlanta Constitution, July 4, 1909, p. C5. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. “A Chance at Inexpensive Philanthropy,” Atlanta Constitution, July 18, 1909, p. B4. 42. Campbell, The Southern Highlander, 264. 43. Carol Stevens Hancock, The Light in the Mountains: The Story of Tallulah Falls School (Toccoa, GA: Commercial Printing Company, 1975): 19–20, 254–55. 44. “Important Work Was Outlined at Meeting of Executive Board,” Atlanta Constitution, February 13, 1910, p. 4; Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, Yearbook, 1910–1911, 82; Handwritten draft by Mary Ann Lipscomb, c. 1910, box 3, folder 6, Mildred Lewis Rutherford Papers [hereafter MLR], Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, 10. 45. Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, Yearbook, 1910–1911, 82. 46. Ibid., 72. 47. “Equipment Secured by Atlanta Woman’s Club for Teachers’ Home,” “Reports Show Wonderful Progress Made at Tallulah in Single Year,” Atlanta Constitution, May 15, 1910, p. 9; Hancock, The Light in the Mountains, 23–24. 48. P. P. Claxton, “A Model School,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 22 (September 1903): 1–4. 49. Agricultural Work Started Under Professor T. A. Early,” Atlanta Constitution, May 15, 1910, p. 9. 50. Ibid., “Important Work was Outlined at Meeting of Executive Board”; “Chairman of Education Writes of the Needs of Federation’s Schools,” Atlanta Constitution, March 20, 1910, p. 4. 51. Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, Yearbook, 1910–1911, 71. 52. Handwritten draft by Mary Ann Lipscomb, 8–9; Hancock, The Light in the Mountains, 19–20; “Christmas Tree Celebration at Tallulah Falls School,” Atlanta Constitution, January 23, 1910, p. 4. 53. “Tallulah School Growth is Told by Mrs. Lipscomb,” Atlanta Constitution, January 12, 1913, p. F6. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Montgomery, Politics of Education in the New South, 66. 57. “Tallulah School Growth Is Told by Mrs. Lipscomb,” Atlanta Constitution, January 12, 1913, p. F6. 58. Montgomery, Politics of Education in the New South, 182; Athens Woman’s Club Minutes, April 1914; May 24, 1915; February 28, 1919; January 25, 1920. 59. Handwritten draft by Mary Ann Lipscomb, n.d., Mary Ann Lipscomb Family Papers [hereafter MAL], box 1, folder 10, p. 3, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens. 60. Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs Yearbook, 1913–1914, TFSM, 23.

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61. Handwritten draft by Mary Ann Lipscomb, MAL, 1. 62. Ibid., 2, 3. Even though it is unclear how patriotism was taught at Tallulah Falls School, some indication may be gleaned from Christine Woyshner, “From Assimilation to Cultural Pluralism: The PTA and Civic Education, 1900–1950,” in Social Education in the Twentieth Century: Curriculum and Context for Citizenship, ed. Christine Woyshner, Joseph Watras, and Margaret Smith Crocco (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 93–109. Woyshner reveals how women’s clubs focused on patriotic efforts in schools by circulating patriotic films that showed proper flag etiquette and coordinating essay contests. 63. Georgia Lee Tatum, Disloyalty in the Confederacy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 73. 64. Carl N. Degler, The Other South: Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 170. 65. Handwritten draft by Mary Ann Lipscomb, MAL, 3. 66. Ibid., 4. 67. Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, Yearbook, 1917–1918, TFSM, 36. 68. Hancock, The Light in the Mountains, 34, 40–41; Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, Yearbook, 1914–1915, 30; “Tallulah School to Be Standardized,” Atlanta Constitution, September 6, 1914, p. F2. 69. Ibid., 38; Louise Anderson Allen, “Silenced Sisters: Dewey’s Disciples in a Conservative New South, 1900–1940,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 (April 2006): 119–38. These activities were not unlike those sponsored by the General Education Board and appeared to be more industrial than “progressive.” 70. Hancock, The Light in the Mountains, 39, 44–45. 71. Ibid., 64. 72. Ibid., 46. 73. Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, Yearbook, 1920–1921, TFSM, 75–76. 74. Hancock, The Light in the Mountains, 47–50. 75. Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, Tallulah Falls School, Tallulah Falls, Georgia, 1909–1946 (Atlanta: Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1946), 19. 76. Hancock, The Light in the Mountains, 53. 77. Ibid., 41, 49–50. 78. Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, Yearbook, 1925–1926, TFSM, 71, 84; Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, Yearbook, 1924–1925, 94; DeJarnette, A Pattern of Education for Living, 19; Hancock, The Light in the Mountains, 50, 53–54. 79. Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, Second Biennial Council, Yearbook, 1926–1927, TFSM, 49; Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, Third Biennial Council, Yearbook 1927–1928, TFSM, 42. 80. Hancock, The Light in the Mountains, 58, 66–67, 74. Other women’s organizations also assisted in increasing the endowment fund and scholarship program, including the Georgia Federation of Business and Professional Women, the Atlanta section of the National Council of Jewish Women, and unnamed Catholic women’s organizations. Roth, Matronage, 117. 81. Hancock, The Light in the Mountains, 62. 82. Alvic, Weavers of the Southern Highlands, 183–84, 115–16.

“We Are from the City, and We Are Here to Educate You” 2 3 3 83. 84. 85. 86.

Vera Connolly quoted in Hancock, The Light in the Mountain, 240. Ibid., 80, 66. Montgomery, The Politics of Education in the New South, 172–73. Roth, Matronage, 118.


4

Chapter 12

The Suburban PTA and the Good Life, 1920–60

Claudia J. Keenan

“ Trouble in PTA land?” inquires a suburban husband of his anxious wife, a

PTA officer who senses a crisis brewing in her organization just before its president is murdered. Among the suspects—the entire PTA board—are an “arts and crafts guru and a self-appointed decorating committee goddess.”1 The characters vie for the opportunity to direct such popular events as the “spring social” and the “fall carnival.” Inevitably, the climax occurs at an art fair at the elementary school. These details from a murder mystery published in 2002 evoke the inner workings of a contemporary suburban PTA chapter that is, for many Americans, instantly recognizable. The control of social relations has long been part of “PTA land” as much as book sales, carnivals, science fairs, and teacher appreciation luncheons. Furthermore, the very name of the organization, PTA, may conjure up images of suburban housewives with too much time on their hands who compete for powerful board and committee positions, and enviously eye each other’s culinary, organizational, and decorating accomplishments. Why is it that the PTA is so easily characterized, even mocked, while members of the Junior League, the League of Women Voters, the American Association of University Women, the YWCA, and other women’s groups have been spared stereotypes?

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One possible answer is that during the 1920s, upscale suburban communities came to be recognized as fun, relaxed places where everyone seemed to have an affinity with one another and the women were deeply involved in promoting activities and events that would become central to residents’ social lives. While most inhabitants of these suburban towns and villages enjoyed a strong sense of community, the public came to associate with suburbia certain conventions that endured through much of the twentieth century and were popularized through mass culture. Conformity in suburban style and behavior would become most intense after World War II, but had emerged surprisingly early, in the late nineteenth century, with the gospel of evangelical domestic ideology preached by Catharine Beecher.2 “Smug satisfaction” characterized the “commuters and their shopping-bound wives,” John R. Stilgoe suggested, invoking the educational reformer Edward Yeomans, who attacked the typical suburban community as “actually reptilian in its hissing anger against the opponent of orthodoxy.”3 Observers snickered at suburban women, too, who were also described in print. “It is hard for you, and you are in no mood to be laughed at. The pretty house is all in order and your husband is away all day, . . . ” stated an essay that appeared in Good Housekeeping in 1909.4 “I have heard their shrill voices in a room full of bridge tables,” confessed an ex-suburbanite.5 “Neat little houses on their neat little patches of lawn, to say nothing of the neat little housewives, their neat little children, and their neat colonial lives,” intoned a writer for The Outlook in 1928.6 “The women’s great difficulty, we suppose, is that they are so near to being economically superfluous. They do not do anything . . . that they can afford to have somebody else do for them,” wrote the Los Angeles journalist Farnsworth Crowder.7 Arguably, the suburban woman and the PTA woman became synonymous, both consumed with social affairs, caricatured as self-absorbed, frivolous, and shallow.8 Whether or not the characterization was fair, it would stick for decades. Another explanation for the PTA stereotype relates to the official work of the local chapters, which were obligated to fulfill an important mission. Improved education and community-school relations and greater collaboration between parents and teachers were the major goals laid out by the founders of the National Congress of Mothers (NCM). These were serious goals that would seem to require serious purpose. Yet, to achieve them, the suburban PTAs that started up in the twenties began to pursue a largely social agenda that belied the significance of their work. Lectures, fund-raising, art exhibitions, and teacher recognition programs—these and other events were presented as opportunities for adults to socialize together. To outsiders, it may have appeared that the local PTA was not taking its mandate seriously, an impression that has persisted. “In the generation after 1920, a consensus about objectives remained elusive, as PTAs undertook several different and sometimes incongruous functions, including member entertainment, parent and teacher education, school and

T h e S u b u r b a n P TA a n d t h e G o o d L i f e , 1 9 2 0 – 6 0

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community service, political activity, and organizational maintenance,” William W. Cutler, III, observed.9 By 1924, Molly Ladd-Taylor suggested that the National PTA’s reputation as an amateurish organization reflected the local chapters’ excessive sociability.10 The National PTA’s reputation was also damaged by the local chapters’ emphasis on “purchasing equipment and sponsoring social events,” Julia Grant has argued.11 Without a strong social component, the suburban PTA could not have reached its goals, yet its accomplishments have been blurred by the social whirl that surrounded them for at least a few decades. Despite all stereotypes, suburban PTA groups achieved the objectives that were first set out by the NCM and reiterated by successive national boards through the first half of the twentieth century. The local chapters not only stirred parents’ interest in the public school, they secured a strong commitment to the school from the entire community. Suburban chapters not only passed along news about the work of teachers and administrators, they offered numerous opportunities for the professionals to enunciate their educational philosophy and become acquainted with the parents. The suburban PTA drew women’s involvement to such an extent that many schools became the centerpiece of the community. Effectively, these women fitted the PTA to the emergent world of the suburbs. They adapted the goals of the National PTA to a series of social events and activities that felt far away from the stern demands associated with school. I would argue that interwar PTAs were not, in fact, plagued by organizational weakness. Rather, they established and demonstrated an important axiom: Good schools go together with the good life. In suburban America, it is unlikely that one would exist without the other. Certainly that was the case with my subject, the village of Bronxville, New York.

The Good Life Moving out of the city has always held appeal to those Americans who saw in it little more than poverty, diversity, dirt and noise, and anomie.12 Many towns and villages were naturalistic with orchards and rocky terrain, streams, and ancient trees unspoiled by development. The quality of suburban life was greatly idealized, notably the advantages of childrearing in a healthy, open environment and opportunities for adults to acquire new hobbies and pursue new activities. Even new configurations in floor plans for suburban homes enabled alternative ways to organize family life.13 Suburbia, as it was not yet called, held out the promise to entice fathers into the family circle and engage women in a public sphere that felt comfortable. It had the potential to create a new culture of childhood and adulthood among those who could afford it.14 Although American suburbanization had begun since before the Civil War, after 1900, the suburban population grew at a steady pace. Train lines expanded

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to new and renewed towns and villages. Mansions and more modest homes went up quickly. Suburban communities welcomed new families to the church and country club. Parents eagerly enrolled their children in the public school. Men joined the Lions and Kiwanis clubs and women found places in social groups and volunteer associations. Suburban culture would be shaped largely by the women and men who became involved in community organizations.15 The suburbs were where women became “full-time mothers and homemakers,” wrote Christopher Lasch, “free at last to arrange things exactly as they pleased.”16 Bronxville is a largely affluent, beautiful village about seventeen miles north of New York City in Westchester County. Historian Kenneth T. Jackson has described it as “the prototype of the high-status, high-prestige community.”17 Bronxville’s public schools are widely regarded as excellent, and its commercial district is a mecca for many county residents. Bronxville has managed to maintain a semi-permeable border between itself and the more diverse communities that surround it. From its founding in 1898, Bronxville benefited from strong civic leadership and local philanthropy. Until the 1960s, this one-square-mile village grew yet remained socially exclusive: white, upper-middle to upper class, and Protestant. However, Bronxville has always had another side of the tracks where lower-middle-class families reside in two-story homes and apartment buildings. Established as an artists’ colony during the late nineteenth century, the village would, after World War I, expand its appeal to business executives and others who enthusiastically supported a “progressive education” program initiated in the Bronxville public schools in 1922. In the United States between 1910 and 1940, the popular child-centered stream of progressive education involved individualized instruction, a developmental philosophy, the expansion of the curriculum, and a strong emphasis on creative expression.18 In the early twenties, Bronxville was one of a handful of progressive public school districts nationwide; by the late twenties, private and public progressive schools were springing up in the Midwest and on both coasts.19 Among the early progressive school districts were Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Winnetka, Illinois. A district that could commit fully to a child-centered program would probably have a larger tax base, which explains why progressive districts tended to be affluent. However, it is important to note that elements of child-centered education existed in many urban and suburban school districts in the United States by the late 1920s.20 Just a small yellow schoolhouse in 1898, the Bronxville School flourished when it moved into two new brick buildings across the street from the First Presbyterian Church and the board of education hired its first superintendent, Alexander J. Stoddard, who was formally trained for the position. Enrollment nearly doubled in the decade 1910 to 1920, growing from 226 to 485. It would increase consistently from 861 in 1926, the year that superintendent


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Willard W. Beatty arrived from Winnetka, to 1,329 in 1934, when Beatty’s reputation as a progressive educator reached its zenith. In the two decades following World War II, enrollment climbed to 1,700.21 Over the years the Bronxville PTA membership remained high and women clamored to participate, as was the case in hundreds of other suburban districts. However, the greatest zeal to support the Bronxville School existed from 1926 to 1936.

“Their Neat Colonial Lives” From its start, the National PTA encouraged the proliferation of local chapters that were overseen by the state branches. In New York, local chapters were not initiated widely until after World War I. Like many suburban communities, Bronxville supported various women’s organizations and clubs that predated the PTA by thirty years or more. The Woman’s Civic Club embraced “work and play, spirituality and sociability, education and culture.”22 The Bronxville Woman’s Suffrage Association had sent a large contingent to New York City’s multitudinous suffrage parade in 1912. The Bronxville Junior League and the Women’s Society of the Reformed Church performed charity work and raised funds. The Red Cross ladies, as they were known, rolled bandages in a local mansion during World War I. The largely college-educated members of the Nondescript Club presented papers and discussed the arts, education, architecture, and European history.23 Then, soon after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, members of the Woman’s Civic Club determined to establish a PTA chapter. In 1922, nearly two hundred Bronxville residents agreed to form a PTA. Echoing the charge of the National PTA, Bronxville’s new president cited the improvement of relations between teachers and parents. The members also hoped to help parents understand modern education, particularly socialization and curriculum, and to provide better local housing for teachers.24 Inevitably, chapters sought to address issues of concern in their own districts, as well as those raised by the National PTA. “Their adaptability to local needs was a strength,” historian Christine Woyshner has argued.25 Urban, suburban, and rural issues naturally were different, though all chapters shared the need for money.26 “Theirs was a philanthropy of necessity,” Woyshner notes of the southern Black PTAs during the 1920s,27 yet the work of most PTA chapters would become characterized by a certain intensity or perhaps even frenzy. Among the problems addressed by urban PTAs were child labor, nutrition, and disease prevention. Suburban PTA goals invariably included assisting teachers with classroom and extracurricular activities and beautifying school buildings. Their issues intersected often enough, as in the case of low salaries for teachers or children’s vaccinations. In 1916, for example, PTAs from all over adopted the National PTA’s priorities of evaluating popular films and improving school safety.28

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One of the great strengths of the national organization was preparing and distributing all kinds of written material: brochures, guides, books, yearbooks, and journals. Yet little specific instruction existed for the new PTA officers of the World War I era as they set about building parents’ awareness of the importance of supporting and participating in the public school. There were no directions that stated explicitly “a strategy to raise money,” “a plan to get fathers involved,” and “how to convince parents to attend lectures.” As the suburbs grew, local PTA leaders without a prototype were pretty much on their own as they faced the challenge of creating enthusiasm and encouraging active interest in their communities. Ironically, the absence of strategies was a gift to the PTA leaders in uppermiddle-class suburban towns and villages. It freed them up to invent their own approach. The process of developing a way to generate support for the local public school was aided by the suburban climate of boosterism, the strong presence of college-educated women who had just secured the vote, the public’s passion for recreation and expertise, and a pervasive desire to have a good time.29 The first wave of suburban PTA leaders circa 1920 tended to be young, mostly under thirty. National PTA founders Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Hearst, born in 1858 and 1840, respectively, were akin to their grandmothers’ generation. Until the year 1964, not a single National PTA president had been born in the twentieth century.30 Therefore, it is possible that many of the prosperous young women of suburbia had no particular appreciation for the early achievements of the National PTA, such as day nurseries and the first regularly published magazine devoted to child welfare. During at least half of the twentieth century, then, the PTA harbored a generation gap that correlated to a culture gap.

Having a Great Time With elegant homes and an excellent school, Bronxville drew an array of prominent businessmen including Everette Lee DeGolyer, president of Emerada Petroleum Corporation, James Cash Penney, founder of JC Penney, James McNaughton, president of the American Locomotive Company, and Leland Rex Robinson, an investment banker who directed the Bureau of Commerce during the Harding administration. Scholars and nonprofit executives—including Beardsley Ruml, Merle Curti, Allan H. Nevins, Twentieth Century Fund director James G. McDonald, and Edmund E. Day, director of social sciences for the Rockefeller Foundation—also raised families in the village.31 The village population increased from 1,863 in 1910 to 3,055 in 1920, 5,500 in 1926, and 10,000 in 1934. It would then drop dramatically to 6,888 in 1940 and stabilize at 6,744 by 1960.32 Students attended school in one building that incorporated elementary, junior high, and high school. That made for a larger, more


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coherent and formidable PTA, as opposed to a district where multiple schools existed. Although not particularly congenial himself, Willard W. Beatty, who served as Bronxville superintendent from 1926 to 1936, encouraged the PTA’s close support and involvement. He did not enjoy socializing with parents, but he evidently understood how doing so would serve the school. Born in Berkeley, California, in 1891, Beatty was orphaned at seven years and raised by an uncle. He graduated from Berkeley and the San Francisco State Normal School, and then became a disciple of Carleton Washburne who, as superintendent, would bring Beatty to Winnetka in 1922. Four years later, having served as a Winnetka principal and assistant superintendent, Beatty was invited to become Bronxville superintendent.33 Crossing easily between the realms of school administration, education theory, political activism, and social reform, Beatty appealed equally to conservative businessmen, New Dealers, and the circle of social reconstructionists at Teachers College. He assembled a brilliant faculty, increased teacher pay, hired a school psychologist, created a junior high school, and introduced laboratory science, performing, visual, and manual arts, physical education, and sex education. While generating controversy over such issues as Harold Rugg’s social studies texts, the elimination of standardized testing, and Bronxville’s participation in the Eight-Year Study, Beatty enunciated respect for the work of the PTA and in return received its devoted support for his initiatives.34 During the 1920s, the work of the Bronxville PTA took shape in three main social contexts: gatherings of women only, gatherings of men and women together, and gatherings where the role of the adults was to chaperone high school students. I will address the last two categories. In most cases, the women of the PTA did much of the planning in order to create social events that combined traditional formality with modern informality. In this way, the PTA’s social planning not only promoted the community’s support of the school, but also helped to extend the life of genteel customs from the nineteenth century while allowing new, post–World War I conventions to be introduced. As many historians of education have agreed, the PTA affirmed white, upper-middleclass norms. In order to serve such a purpose for the younger generation as well, PTA women planned and chaperoned numerous social events where they attempted to exercise control over their children’s behavior. Mixed gatherings were designed to cultivate the support of husbands, businessmen, and taxpayers for the public school. They were necessary because some parents, repressing strong memories from their youth, did not find the prospect of entering a school building particularly inviting. How best to usher men back to school in order to introduce them to the building and help them to feel comfortable there? It was, after all, essential to draw men in, for their votes were needed for bond referendums and tax increases. Initially, Bronxville women got their husbands in the door by promoting a lecture series that was

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inaugurated in 1922 and continued into the 1960s. These women did not invent the lecture series, of course. The National PTA encouraged its chapters to invite guest lecturers to their schools. The speeches helped fulfill the mandate to educate and inform parents and teachers, and neatly capitalized on the nation’s infatuation with expertise while also reinforcing the school’s progressive philosophy. The first person to lecture at Bronxville was a self-proclaimed expert, William Heard Kilpatrick, illustrious Teachers College professor and a proponent of child-centered education.35 Over the years, other Teachers College professors—Patty Smith Hill, Goodwin Watson, and Jesse Newlon—would speak at Bronxville. In part, their appearance reflected the unusually large number of Bronxville teachers and administrators who received their master’s degrees from Teachers College.36 They also appreciated an educated laymen audience and an influential superintendent. Among other lecturers were Dr. Frank Aydelotte, president of Swarthmore College; Dr. John B. Watson, professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University; and Dr. Frankwood E. Williams, director of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene.37 A leading figure in the mental hygiene movement that began around 1900 and surged during the 1930s, Williams believed that mental illness should not be treated in hospitals or mental institutions. Rather, he envisioned preventive measures in the form of child guidance and outpatient clinics, awareness programs in schools and colleges, and education at home. This vision naturally complemented the emphasis placed by progressive educators on creative and emotional development, but conflicted with the ideas of behaviorist Dr. John B. Watson, a seemingly incongruous speaker choice for Bronxville. More in line with the school’s philosophy was educational psychologist Dr. Caroline Zachry, who was invited to discuss progressive education and mental hygiene among children and adolescents before a PTA audience in 1933.38 While the National PTA urged schools to secure speakers, local chapters realized that the lectures would need to be more than just a speech. The Bronxville chapter almost immediately added a reception at the front end of the evening in order to catch commuters who were hungry for dinner. In other ways, suburban PTAs altered the audience’s expectations of lectures that had been shaped by years of tedious club meetings. The entire schedule of speakers would be announced at the start of the school year. The PTA would request that speakers address a specific topic given in advance, rather than a topic chosen by the speakers themselves. The point of the lecture involved ideas and discussion, not organization business, and the lecture itself would come to be regarded as entertainment as well as instruction.39 The organization of the lecture series was the work of the PTA program committee, while the coffee and sandwiches in the cafeteria were the work of hospitality. As the Bronxville PTA continued to secure experts, the menu expanded to include supper. The two committees worked together to establish the lectures as a place to learn and a


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place to socialize. Seated in the new high school auditorium with room for five hundred and dark red velvet curtains framing the stage, the fathers felt the deep pride and anticipation that were essential to commitment. They also felt that they were getting something back. Back-to-School Night, also introduced in suburban schools in the 1920s, similarly enticed fathers to school during the evening. In this case the focus was on students, not experts. Students’ work hung in the hallways and in classrooms. Teachers and administrators welcomed parents and answered questions. Many parents who visited the schools at this time were surprised by the curricular and social changes that had occurred, particularly in the elementary grades. Was it better to be traditional or up-to-date, modern or ordinary? For many Bronxville fathers, the appeal of child-centered teaching lay largely in its symbolism: being “progressive,” but more significantly, being able to afford to be progressive. Investment in the school’s physical plant, as well as its philosophy, gradually became part of the ethos of the community and would be reinforced at events like Back-to-School Night. When a father wandered down to the buffet dinner in the cafeteria, he met other men who shared his investment. From the women’s perspective, the coming together of fathers was as important to the well-being of the school as meeting the teachers and administrators. It was like being a member of a club. By 1926, the Bronxville PTA women had effectively stirred the support of men so that the superintendent stated: I view the future of this association with confidence . . . predicated on the knowledge that the mothers of the children in Bronxville will continue to cooperate with the faculty and the children in the same hearty manner they have always done, and . . . that the mothers henceforth will receive a larger measure of the active, sympathetic, and understanding support of the fathers of the community than they

have enjoyed heretofore.40

The PTA built on its success, continuing to sponsor a variety of entertainment programs. Parents gathered at the school for the annual PTA meeting and the Election Day Bake Sale, which always included eating and drinking. In the late 1920s, the PTA introduced the Benefit Bridge fund-raiser to raise money for camp tuition and doctors’ fees. Hundreds of parents congregated in the high school gymnasium to sit at card tables, eat, drink, and win prizes. The annual “benefit party”—different from “Benefit Bridge”—became “one of the mostlooked-forward-to events in the spring, with bridge, games and singing, and refreshments provided by the newly formed hostess committee.41 Through the late twenties and thirties, the Bronxville PTA continued to create new committees to find new ways to promote and raise money for the school. The Lookout Committee, whose purpose was to welcome newcomers to the school, became instantly popular when it organized the first “Lookout Party.” It became an annual evening event invariably given at one of Bronxville’s enormous homes.

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The mayor, school and village trustees, prominent citizens, and selected PTA members received formal invitations; others coveted them. Women bought new dresses, their husbands were asked to come home early from work, schoolrooms were redecorated, and florists were hired. The menu, initially “wine and hors d’oeuvres,” quickly grew to include dinner.42 Eventually the PTA compiled and sold The Lookout Cookbook.43 After World War II, the annual Fun Fair made its debut, along with PTA potluck suppers, “Harvest” dinners, and bingo nights. What came out of these many events? The tangible return was money that the PTA used to sponsor social activities and academic programs for students after consulting with administrators. The intangible reward was the community’s delight in the school—its architectural beauty and reputation for excellence—as well as the support for pro-school trustees and the seemingly endless expansion of the physical plant. Finally, there was the sense of community that flowed from the schools. Despite the Depression, the Bronxville PTA continued to foster social events that became an integral part of village life, which in turn kept the public school at the center of village life. It is evident that such socialization helped to maintain most parents’ commitment to the school. Although PTA chapters were not allowed to make endorsements of school board candidates, when its members supported bond referendums, assessments, and increases in school taxes, the voters even in conservative Bronxville came out to support the school.

Regulation and Socialization Among the functions served by PTA women, none proved as intrusive as the management of students’ social lives. The regulation occurred in part through the enforcement of proper conduct at school-sponsored athletic events, music and theater performances, and ceremonies. Mothers also tried to regulate student behavior through PTA-sponsored events that were intended to establish guidelines for the students’ social lives. Organizing and supervising these extracurricular activities became one of the essential ways that parents were drawn in to socialize and support the school. The suburban PTA tradition of discreetly managing children’s attitudes and interests began when the chapters were established. There were records of Bronxville students shoplifting and pillaging as early as 1900.44 By the mid1920s, Halloween mischief had become one of the most serious problems with which the superintendent wrestled. The PTA believed that good behavior was essential because the students would need to reflect favorably on the school in order to maintain high levels of community support. However, the rise of a youth culture in the 1920s, tantamount to a “revolution in manners and morals,” as Frederick Lewis Allen reflected, became a challenge to parents that


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required extra PTA vigilance.45 The mothers aimed to push back popular culture: music, dress, demeanor, language, pluralism, and defiance of authority. Extracurricular adult-sponsored activities were “a means of exercising control and authority over youth,” wrote Laurie Moses Hines, referring largely to the influence of men’s organizations such as the Elks, the Masonic Order, and the Rotary Club but not the PTA.46 It was the PTA, however, that stretched this principle as far as it would go. The behavior of the spectators at football games worried Bronxville parents, who tried to keep everyone on the bleachers in plain sight. There were rumors of flirting, of students sneaking away from the game, smoking in the bushes, and hiding in cars. The PTA was mortified and urged parents to come out for every game. The parents responded quickly, as noted in an editorial in the high school newspaper: Surely no school has ever had more devoted and untiring workers than the parents. The gift of blankets to the school by an interested group of mothers and fathers will enable more comfort at football games, while the parents’ organization of transportation to “away games” also will boost school spirit among our students.47

Appreciative students failed to recognize what the PTA minutes revealed: “away transportation to games is the best way to insure proper chaperoning.”48 Theater productions also drew attention from parents who participated by making costumes and scenery, meeting regularly for conversation and preparation, and observing students in rehearsal and as members of the audience. When the Bronxville PTA sponsored a “Steak Party” in 1931, mothers eagerly prepared a dinner that featured “sauerkraut, clam juice cocktails, fried herrings, and steak with chopped onions in melted butter.”49 Cooking, serving, and clearing, they might well have been hostesses at their own dinner parties; conversely, they were figuratively and actually the servants of their children. That same year the PTA executive committee created the position of social chair for high school events. The new chairwoman would be assisted by several chaperones. She complained about the students’ bad habits: “the mad rush to the punch bowl and dancing only with the most popular guests.”50 At the end of the year, she recommended strategically “placing” stories about proper dance behavior in various local newspapers. Dances were not the only way that the PTA occupied Bronxville students and circumscribed their social interactions. There were dance classes, “teen centers,” sock hops, suppers, the senior breakfast, the senior picnic, the tea for new girls, talent shows—all entailing hundreds of hours of adult volunteer time by men and women. Despite all their efforts, as Paula Fass has noted, parents and teachers still remained fearful of the possibility of “sub-rosa youth life that was probably far worse than the reality.”51

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How did the regulation of students’ social lives become one of the main purposes of women who volunteered with suburban PTAs? Clearly, the National PTA desired that local groups promote the social and mental hygiene of students, and the Bronxville PTA chose to interpret that mandate as a call for intensive hands-on supervision. That supervisory role continued to grow as PTA women insinuated themselves into their children’s extracurricular pursuits, such as football games and homecoming dances. No longer onlookers, they became organizers. The PTA also sponsored numerous social activities to keep children busy and to encourage “appropriate” behavior. They assisted teachers with field trips and class parties, particularly in the primary grades. Many parents used these opportunities presented by the PTA to closely evaluate their children’s peers while reinforcing their own places in the social order of the community.52 Being at the center of the students’ socialization enabled the suburban PTA to control behavior and attitudes. The PTA needed the students to behave properly. Everything about the students reflected on the school: the winning football team, the beautiful drawings in an art exhibition, a theater performance, a public speaking contest, and the list of colleges where students were admitted. Students were the living, breathing part of the school and represented it to the community. If they behaved badly, their parents were embarrassed. If they pleased the taxpayers who observed them at work and at play, support for the school could only grow. For at least half of the twentieth century, the imagery of the “good life” associated with cocktail parties, golf, and other quintessential suburban pursuits was closely entwined with that of the “good schools” that most suburbs fostered. The images reflected reality. The suburban PTA created the connection between “the good life” and “good schools” by developing and sponsoring a range of social events for which it became well known, even stereotyped. While some of the events were instructional (public lectures, for example), historians have fairly characterized the PTA’s sponsorship of class teas, bridge parties, and gala evenings as “social.” “Social” implies frivolity and enjoyment. It further implies fun for its own sake, as its own purpose. The suburban PTA’s orchestration of fun caused observers to believe that it was not a serious organization, although it did in fact take itself very seriously. The relative absence of programs involving study, interpretation, and intellectualism set off the PTA from its counterparts, whether child study groups or organizations such as the American Association of University Women and the League of Women Voters. Locating a coffee urn, deciding whether to serve canapés or sandwiches, and scheduling the Election Day Bake Sale were hardly cerebral tasks. If anything, they underscored how very much suburban women appeared to be consumed with food, style, and social conventions. Looking back, it may be difficult to discern the true service component of the suburban PTA. Yet the suburban PTA women could not have relied upon an entirely


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“serious” framework to secure parents’ involvement and support of the local school. Instead, they largely used entertainment to create an approach that was both sociable and practical. The intersection of “sociable” and “practical” was, in a sense, the place that they knew best.

Notes 1. Leslie Kane, Death of a PTA Goddess (New York: Fawcett, 2002), 16, 25. 2. Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (1869; repr., New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 3. John R. Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 285; Edward Yeomans, “The Suburb de Luxe,” Atlantic 125 (January 1920): 105–7. 4. Grace Duffield Goodwin, “The Commuter’s Wife: A Sisterly Talk by One Who Knows Her Problems,” Good Housekeeping (October 1909): 362. 5. Constance Cassady, “Escape from the City,” Atlantic 157 (March 1939): 348. 6. Christine Frederick, “Is Suburban Living a Delusion?” Outlook 148 (February 22, 1928): 290. 7. Farnsworth Crowder, “Farewell Suburbia,” Forum 98 (September 1937): 136. 8. See, for example, Leonora Beck Ellis, “The Woman in the Suburbs,” Independent 52 (March 29, 1900): 768–71; “Suburbanism,” Independent 54 (February 27, 1902): 530–32; and “Concerning Suburbs and the Auto-Locomotion of WashLadies,” Outlook 21 (March 15, 1919): 383. 9. William W. Cutler, III, Parents and Schools: The 150-Year Struggle for Control in American Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 47. 10. Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work, Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 64–65. 11. Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 59. 12. Stilgoe, Borderland, 185; Robert Fishman, The Rise and Fall of Suburbia: Bourgeois Utopias (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 153. While the conventional view of suburbia is that it was a middle- and upper-middle-class refuge from urban chaos, alternative theories exist. Historian Paul Mattingly, for example, has argued that “the roots of suburbia were not controlled exclusively by affluent commuters” and that “the urban dynamics that drove suburban development need not represent elitist, hostile, or destructive forces. . . . ” Paul H. Mattingly, Suburban Landscapes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 112. 13. Interpretation of early twentieth-century suburban culture is especially incisive in Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Mattingly, Suburban Landscapes also contain important background on suburban development. 14. Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Stilgoe, Borderland, 279–308; Marsh, Suburban Lives, esp. chaps. 2 and 3.

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15. See, for example, Leonora Beck Ellis, “The Woman in the Suburbs,” Independent 52 (March 29, 1900): 768–71; Maud Van Buren, “Women and Town Improvement,” American City 12 (February 1915): 104–5; and Ethel Longworth Swift, “In Defense of Suburbia,” Outlook 148 (April 4, 1928): 543–44. 16. Christopher Lasch, “The Sexual Division of Labor, the Decline of Civic Culture, and the Rise of the Suburbs,” in Women and the Common Life, ed. Elisabeth LaschQuinn (New York: Norton, 1997), 104–5. 17. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 95. 18. See Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), chaps. 6, 7, and 8; William J. Reese, “The Origins of Progressive Education,” History of Education Quarterly 41 (Spring 2001): 1–24. 19. Cremin, Transformation; Susan F. Semel and Alan R. Sadovnik, eds., “Schools of Tomorrow,” Schools of Today: What Happened to Progressive Education (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 1–20; Arthur Zilversmit, Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice 1930–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 20. Examples of child-centered schooling in districts near Bronxville are in William H. Holmes, Chronicle of an Evolving School System: Mount Vernon, New York, 1894–1940 (Mount Vernon, NY: Mount Vernon Public Schools, 1940) and Carol O’Connor, A Sort of Utopia: Scarsdale 1891–1981 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983). 21. Enrollment statistics are from “Bronxville Public School Budget, 1945–46,” in Educating Our Children in the Bronxville School: A Report by the Board of Education, March 1946; Selected Enrollment and Financial Data for School Districts in Westchester, January 1959; Population Data for School Districts Westchester County, April 1960; and School District Population in Westchester, April 1957. All titles are published by Westchester County Department of Planning, Collection of the Westchester County History Society. The 2006 Bronxville School enrollment is fourteen hundred. 22. Founding Charter, Woman’s Civic Club (1914), Local History Room [hereafter LHR], Bronxville Public Library [hereafter BPL]. 23. Besides the Woman’s Civic Club Records in the LHR, BPL, detailed histories of Bronxville women’s organizations reside with the individual groups. 24. “Parent & Teachers Association Meeting,” Bronxville Review, February 5, 1922, p. 1. 25. Christine Woyshner, “Valuable and Legitimate Services,” in Women and Philanthropy in Education, ed. Andrea Walton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 217. 26. Ibid., 220. 27. See, for example, Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 66–78; and Kate Rousmaniere, City Teachers (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997), 70–73. See Woyshner, “Valuable and Legitimate Services,” 219, for a nearly comprehensive list of PTA activities during the 1920s. 28. National PTA, The PTA Story: A Century of Commitment (Chicago: National PTA, 1997), 35.


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29. Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995), 85–97; Warren I. Susman, Culture as History (New York: Pantheon, 1984), part III; and Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), chap. 6. 30. “National PTA Presidents” chart; e-mail to author from Bernadette French, National PTA, December 20, 2001, author’s possession. 31. Eloise L. Morgan, Building a Suburban Village: Bronxville, New York, 1898–1998 (New York: Charles Davey, 1998); Who’s Who in Westchester County (n.p.: The Hastings Press, 1929); Helmuth W. Joel, Essex, CT, to author, April 24, 1995, and May 9, 1995, Bronxville School Archives [hereafter BSA], BPL. 32. Bronxville Board of Education, The School Question for the Voters in Bronxville, Bronxville Press, February 1927, poster in possession of author; “Parent Association Lecture,” Bronxville Review, February 11, 1922, p. 5. 33. Dr. Walcott H. Beatty, San Francisco, to author, July 26, 1995, BSA; Carleton W. Washburne and Sidney P. Marland, Winnetka, The History and Significance of an Educational Experiment (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963), 153. 34. See chap. 5 in Claudia Keenan, Portrait of a Lighthouse School: Public Education in Bronxville, New York, 1920–1960 (Saline, MI: McNaughton & Gunn, 1997); “Bronxville Parent-Teachers Welcome Superintendent Beatty,” Bronxville Review, May 15, 1926, p. 1. 35. “Parent Association Lecture,” Bronxville Review, February 11, 1922, p. 5. 36. Bronxville Faculty Personnel Records, BSA. 37. “Eminent Psychologist Will Speak at PTA,” Bronxville Mirror, November 18, 1925, p. 1; “PTA Speakers,” Bronxville Mirror, October 21, 1926; “Swarthmore College President to Speak Here,” Bronxville Review, March 2, 1929, p. 9. 38. “Dr. Zachry Warns PTA Parents,” Bronxville Review, February 28, 1934, p. 2. 39. Changing expectations of local audiences were based on comparisons of social notes in Bronxville Review, Bronxville Review-Press, Tuckahoe (NY) Record, and Mount Vernon (NY) Daily Argus, 1910–40. 40. “Bronxville Parent-Teachers Welcome Superintendent Beatty,” Bronxville Review, May 15, 1926, p. 1; emphasis added. 41. Clipping, n.d., found in “Benefit Party” file, PTA files, BSA. 42. Miscellaneous PTA Committee Notes, 1930–55, BSA; Catherine B. Karlen, interview by author, June 1996, Bronxville, BSA; Mary Kimball Holland, interview by author, April 2000, Bronxville, possession of author; Frieda Riggs, interview by author, November 1999, BSA. 43. The Bronxville School PTA, The Lookout Cookbook, 1950, BSA. 44. Minutes of the Bronxville School District, 1900–10, BSA. 45. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (New York: Harper & Row, 1931), chap. 5. 46. Laurie Moses Hines, “Community and Control in the Development of the Extracurriculum,” in Hoosier Schools Past & Present, ed. William J. Reese (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 105, 112. 47. Editorial, Bronxville High School Mirror, November 21, 1928, p. 2. 48. PTA Executive Committee Minutes, October 1, 1928, BSA. 49. “Standard Menu for Steak Party,” 1931 file, BSA. 50. “New Rules for Dances,” Bronxville High School Mirror, November 14, 1931, p. 1.

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51. Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 216. 52. Virginia Babcock, interview by author, April 1995, Bronxville, BSA; Eleanor Burts, Norfolk, VA, to author, March 11, 1996, BSA; Emmy Hammond Shakeshaft, Ames, IA, to author, February 5, 1996, BSA. See also “Class Mothers,” Miscellaneous Files, BSA.

Contr ibutors

Barbara Beatty is Associate Professor and Chair of the Education Department at Wellesley College. Her book, Preschool Education in America, was published by Yale University Press in 1995; her edited volume, When Science Encounters the Child, was recently published by Teachers College Press. She is working on a book on the applications of Jean Piaget’s psychology in American education. Sharlene Voogd Cochrane, Professor and Director of the Division of Interdisciplinary Inquiry, Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences, Lesley University, holds a Ph.D. in American history from Boston College and an M.A. in American Studies from New York University. Her research and writing interest is cultural identity and responses to institutional racism, especially the interplay of gender, race, class, and religion in women’s lives. Marybeth Gasman is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work explores the history of African American higher education, with a particular interest in historically black colleges and philanthropy. Her most recent book is Envisioning Black Colleges: A History of the United Negro College Fund, forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. Nia Woods Haydel is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University. She and Kijua Sanders-McMurtry have published an essay on The Links in Uplifting a People: African American Philanthropy, edited by Marybeth Gasman and Katherine Sedgewick (Peter Lang Publishers, 2005).

252

C o n t r i bu to r s

Laurie Moses Hines received her Ph.D. in 2000 from Indiana University at Bloomington. Her research interests are the history of teacher professionalization and the relationship between teachers, teacher education institutions, school administrators, and communities. Moses Hines currently is an Assistant Professor at Kent State University-Trumbull. Joan Marie Johnson is the author of Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region, and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890–1930 (University Press of Florida, 2004) and the editor of Southern Women at Vassar: The Poppenheim Family Letters (USC Press, 2002), as well as several articles on southern women, gender, race, reform, and education. She is currently completing a book entitled Making Progressive Women in the South: Northern Colleges, Feminist Values, and Social Activism. She teaches American history at Northeastern Illinois University. Claudia Keenan is an adjunct professor at Emory & Henry College. She received her Ph.D. in History of Education from New York University. Her research interests include progressive education and the historiography of First Ladies. Andra Knecht is a doctoral student at Mississippi State University, where she also teaches U.S. history survey courses. Her master’s thesis is entitled “The Tallulah Falls School: Female Reform and Rural Education in the New South.” Her dissertation research focuses on philanthropic organizations that started education programs and schools in rural areas of the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anne Meis Knupfer is professor in Educational Studies and adjunct professor in the History and American Studies departments at Purdue, where she teaches history of education courses. Her book publications include Toward a Tender Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood: African American Women’s Clubs in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (1996), Reform and Resistance: Gender, Delinquency, and America’s First Juvenile Court (2001), and The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women’s Activism (2006). Kijua Sanders-McMurtry is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University. She and Nia Woods Haydel have published an essay on The Links in Uplifting a People: African American Philanthropy, edited by Marybeth Gasman and Katherine Sedgewick (Peter Lang Publishers, 2005). Emily Mieras is Associate Professor in the American Studies Department at Stetson University, where she teaches courses in women’s and gender history and American culture. She has published in Gender & History, and her current project is a history of community service among college students in the Progressive Era.

C o n t r i bu to r s

253

Jana Nidiffer is Jean Campbell Scholar in Residence, Center for the Education of Women (CEW), at the University of Michigan. Her book publications include Pioneering Deans of Women: More Than Wise and Pious Matrons (Teachers College Press, 1999) and Women Administrators in Higher Education: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (SUNY Press, 2001), coedited with Carolyn Terry Bashaw. Laura Micheletti Puaca is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation is entitled “A New National Defense: Higher Education, American Feminism, and the Quest for ‘Scientific Brainpower,’ 1940–1965.” Her recent awards include the Spencer Dissertation Fellowship for Research Related to Education and the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies. Liz Rohan is Assistant Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, where she teaches writing and American Studies courses. She has published several articles about women’s literacy, particularly during the Progressive Era. Two of these articles have won national awards. With Gesa Kirsch, she is coediting a book about how researchers come to find and become invested in their research subjects. Christine Woyshner is Associate Professor of Education at Temple University. She has published several articles on women’s organized school volunteerism in the twentieth century. Her books include Minding Women: Reshaping the Educational Realm (1998), coedited with Holly Gelfond, and Social Education in the Twentieth Century: Curriculum and Context for Citizenship (2004), coedited with Joseph Watras and Margaret Smith Crocco. She is currently working on a manuscript on the PTA and civic engagement.


INDEX

Addams, Jane, 18, 88, 103–4, 124, 125, 195 American Association of University Women (AAUW), 5, 235 See also Association of Collegiate Alumnae American Federation of Labor, 122 Anderson, Mary, 124, 130 Anthony, Susan B., 83 Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA), 3, 5, 23, 25, 26 collaboration with SACW, 23–24, 28, 32–33, 37n62 suffrage, 93 See also American Association of University Women Athens Woman’s Club, 217–18 Beatty, Willard W., 241 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 180 Blackwell, Alice Stone, 81 Breckinridge, Sophonisba, 24–25, 25–26, 28

Bronxville, New York, 238, 239, 230–31 schools in, 238–39, 241, 244 See also Bronxville PTA Bronxville PTA, 9, 10 entertainments, 243–44 fund-raising activities, 241–42, 244 social class, 241, 246 speaker series, 242–43 supervision of students, 244–46 Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 123, 137n16 Burns, Agnes, 131, 132–33 Claxton, Philander, 201–2 Cold War anxieties about, 58, 63, 64, 65–66, 68 brainpower shortage, 58, 63, 68 women engineers, 58, 63–64, 68

256

INDEX

See also Society of Women Engineers College Settlement Association (CSA), 5, 8 history, 102, 103, 114 membership, 101–2 See also Denison House; Scudder, Vida Dutton Colton, Elizabeth Avery, 23–24, 26, 27, 28, 29 survey of southern women’s colleges, 29–30 See also Southern Association of College Women Daughters of American Revolution (DAR), 6, 32, 217 Davis, Helen E., 44–45 Denison House biases of student volunteers, 104, 105, 106–7, 111, 112–13 classes, 110–11 conditions in neighborhood, 105–6 legacy of student work, 113–14 play performances, 107–10 See also College Settlement Association; Scudder, Vida Dutton Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, 7 Dimmick, Mary Ann, 32 Ella Victoria Dobbs Fellowship research projects about women, 42, 44–47, 49 support of research, 39, 40, 41 employment, female immigrant, 122, 128 working-class, 121, 128, 136n7

fund-raising, and wealth, 164, 170, 171 See also Bronxville PTA; United Negro College Fund General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), 3, 6, 25, 32, 216 Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, 5, 7, 8, 9, 215, 226, 227–28 child welfare reform, 216, 217 founding of Tallulah Falls School, 219, 220 higher education for women, 216–17 fund-raising activities, 220–21, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228 organization, 216 See also Lipscomb, Mary Ann; Tallulah Falls School Goodykoontz, Elizabeth, 40, 44, 47 Grinnell College, 9 See also Young Women’s Christian Association, Student Harkness, Mary Leal, 26–27, 33 Harrison, Elizabeth, 200 Hatcher, Orie Latham, 17, 18, 19, 21, 26 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HCBUs), 6 See also Mays, Benjamin; United Negro College Fund higher education of women, 8, 49 liberal arts vs. home economics debate, 26–28 Northern women’s colleges, 17, 18, 19–20, 23 Southern women’s colleges, 18, 20, 25

INDEX See also Pi Lambda Theta; Seven Sisters colleges; Society of Women Engineers; Southern Association of College Women Hull House, 103, 122 industrial education See Tallulah Falls Industrial School International Kindergarten Union (IKU), 200 See also Locke, Bessie Johnson, Lilian Wyckoff, 18, 22–23, 24 Keller, May Lansfield, 31, 36–37n54 Kelley, Florence, 88, 124, 125, 195 Kindergarten Bureau, 7, 202–3 kindergarten circulars, 202, 203 kindergarten movement in United States, 198, 203, 207, 208 See also National Kindergarten Association; Locke, Bessie League of Women Voters, 82, 95, 235 legislation for kindergartens, 195, 203–6 See also National Kindergarten Association; Locke, Bessie Lipscomb, Mary Ann, 217, 219, 224, 225 See also Tallulah Falls School Links, The, 6, 8, 9 educational programs for children, 186–87, 187–88 elitism, 182–83 founding, 179–80, 181–82 fund-raising for civil rights organizations, 184, 187 Philadelphia chapter, 181, 182

257

support for higher education, 185 Locke, Bessie, 195, 196–98, 201 arguments for kindergartens, 206–8 Kindergarten Bureau, 202 lobbying for kindergarten legislation, 204–6, 208 See also National Kindergarten Association Lucy Cobb Institute, 216–17, 219 maternalism, 5, 217 male-dominated politics, 196, 208–9 Mays, Benjamin, 163, 167–68, 171, 174, 185 See also United Negro College Fund McBroom, Maude, 39 McVea, Emilie Watts, 22, 23, 28 Mead, Margaret, 42, 44 mental hygiene, 242, 246 model schools in rural Georgia, 218 See also Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs Mossell, Sadie Tanner, 181–82 National Kindergarten Association (NKA), 5, 6, 7, 9, 195 founding, 196–97, 199 networking with other women’s organizations, 201, 206 organization structure, 199–200, 205 See also Locke, Bessie National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), 82, 83, 89, 94 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 6, 181, 183, 184, 187, 188

258

INDEX

National Association of Colored Women (NACW), 3, 180, 183 National Association of Deans of Women (NADW), 93 National College Equal Suffrage League (CESL), 5, 8 fund-raising activities, 86–87 goals, 85, 87 history, 81, 84 recruitment of members, 87–88, 89, 90 Seven Sisters colleges, 91–93 National Congress of Mothers (NCM), 6, 32, 236 See also Parent-Teacher Association National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), 3, 6, 32 National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), 6, 180, 183 O’Reilly, Leonora, 124, 129 Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), 3, 4, 6, 9, 235, 242, 246 local chapters, 236, 239 national activities, 235–36, 239–40 See also Bronxville PTA; National Congress of Mothers Park, Maud Wood, 81, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 95 Parrish, Celeste, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29–30, 218, 225 Patterson, Frederick, 163, 165, 166 See also United Negro College Fund Paul, Alice, 94, 95 professionalization and women, 2, 5 See also Pi Lambda Theta; Society of Women Engineers progressive education, 241, 242

Progressive era, 2–3, 17 Phi Delta Kappa, 39, 40 Pi Lambda Theta, 7, 8 disseminating research, 50–51 goals, 40, 41, 46 membership, 40, 49, 50 research in teaching profession, 42–43, 44, 51 research on parenting, 43, 44 research on women in professions, 44–46, 47, 48, 51 preparatory schools for women, 20, 21, 31, 34n7 Robbins, Margaret, 125, 129, 130, 131 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 165–66, 168 research objectivity, 42, 44 See also Pi Lambda Theta Ruskin, John, 103, 104 Schneiderman, Rose, 121, 122, 133–34 Scudder, Vida Dutton, 101, 102–3, 104, 114 See also College Settlement Association; Denison House Seven Sisters colleges, 5, 8, 17, 18, 19, 20 See also College Settlement Association; National College Equal Suffrage League Shaw, Anna Howard, 31 social settlements, 2, 103 See also College Settlement Association Society of Women Engineers (SWE), 5, 7, 8 founding, 57, 58–59, 61 goals, 57–58, 65 membership, 59, 61, 62–63, 71 publications, 66, 67–68

INDEX recruitment of women into engineering, 65, 68–71 stereotypes of women engineers, 65, 66, 72–73 Southern Association of College Women (SACW), 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 217 founding, 19, 22 goals, 19, 23 promoting higher education for southern women, 31 social reform, 31–32 standards, 28–29, 30, 31 Southern womanhood and reform, 218 See also Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs; Southern Association of College Women Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 83 Student Volunteer Movement, 156 suburbs, life in, 236, 237–38, 247n12 suffrage associations, 2 suffrage movement, 82–84, 87, 96n6 See also National College Equal Suffrage League Talladega College, 9 See also Young Women’s Christian Association, Student Tallulah Falls School, 9, 216 expansion, 222, 223, 227 finances, 220–21, 223–24, 225–26, 227–28 founding, 218–21 industrial curriculum, 220, 222–23, 224, 225, 227, 228 patriotism, 224–25 teachers, 221–22, 224, 227

259

See also Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs; Lipscomb, Mary Ann Thomas, M. Carey, 88, 89, 91 Training School for Women Workers in the Labor Movement, 123, 129–30, 131 See also Women’s Trade Union League United Negro College Fund (UNCF), 6, 9, 184, 188 founding, 165–66 men’s committee of, 173 women’s division, 163, 166–67, 167–68, 169–70, 171, 172, 173–75 U.S. Bureau of Home Economics, 7, 43, 46 U.S. Women’s Bureau, 46, 47, 66, 67 Wilson, Woodrow, 87, 94, 95 Women Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 3, 6, 32, 217 women’s clubs, 2, 31 See also Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs women engineers employment, 59–60, 62 percentage, 72 See also Society of Women Engineers Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), 8–9 classes, 123, 126, 131, 132, 133 development, 122–23, 124, 133–34 literacy, 124–25, 126–27, 129, 132, 133, 134 publications, 123–24, 125, 126, 127, 131 union organizing, 128–29, 130, 131–32, 134

260

INDEX

Woodhouse, Chase Going, 44 World War Two, 48 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), National, 5, 6, 7, 9, 235 history, 144–45, 146 segregation, 146–47 black women, 146–47, 147–48, 158

Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), Student black college women, 144, 148–49, 149–53 history, 145 interracial alliances of, 155–57, 158 religious activities, 143–44 white colleges women, 144, 149–55, 157 Young Matrons Circle, 228

Educational Work of Women's Organizations, 1890-1960

Spirituality, leadership, work and organizations

Inside Organizations: Anthropologists at Work

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