Girl's Schooling During The Progressive Era

From Female Scholar to Domesticated Citizen

Karen Graves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135606978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This work traces the impact of a differentiated curriculum on girls' education in St. Louis public schools from 1870 to 1930. Its central argument is that the premise upon which a differentiated curriculum is founded, that schooling ought to differ among students in order prepare each for his or her place in the social order, actually led to academic decline. The attention given to the intersection of gender, race, and social class and its combined effect on girls' schooling, places this text in the new wave of critical historical scholarship in the field of educational research.

CHATPER 1

St. Louis: The Future Great City of the World?

The first time I ever saw St. Louis I could have bought it for six million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it.¹

Mark Twain’s avowal in Life on the Mississippi required little explanation for his late-nineteenth-century readers. St. Louis had grown to national prominence during the steamboat era, from a major frontier trade center to one of the preeminent manufacturing centers in the United States. The 1870 population of 313,301 established St. Louis as the fourth largest city in the nation, a title citizens were eager to claim.² Concerning its position relative to other leading American cities, St. Louis was reaching its zenith in the final three decades of the nineteenth century. By the third decade of the twentieth century, however, it was clear that St. Louis had not become the “great city of the world” that had been prophesied by enthusiasts of the 1870s. Nonetheless, the transformation that did occur was no less significant than that recorded by Twain during the years of steamboat ascendancy.

Urban historians have held the premise that cities were the central arenas in which major facets of life in the United States were shaped.³ The proposition was on the mark regarding public high schools. The extension of the high school in the United States during the twentieth century reached into most citizens’ lives. As Erving Goffman wrote in Asylums, every institution has encompassing tendencies. But during the first decades of the twentieth century, the circumference of public-school influence on students’ lives expanded.⁴ Along with the growth of extracurricular activities and Americanization efforts, the curricular form that has come to dominate the public high school was forged in urban schools at the turn of the century. In the style of a new direction in urban history that emphasizes the city as a locus for change, this book draws upon the canvas of St. Louis.⁵ To begin, demographic etchings of the city are presented.

FOUNDING AND EARLY HISTORY

The difference between St. Louis and Chicago, Cincinnati and New Orleans, is not only, or mainly, that of larger and smaller, but that of origin, of history, of relative constituent elements in the sources of pride and in the social and other problems to be met.… This city has a life, a history, an influence upon the Mississippi Valley all its own.⁶

With these words Bishop C.F. Robertson provided a prelude for inquiry into the city of St. Louis. Perhaps a more representative example of nineteenth-century development in the United States would be difficult to find. The lives of a diverse group of people converged in St. Louis as it grew from a frontier settlement to a key distribution center to a primary manufacturing city. Its location near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers allowed the city to become known as the “Gateway to the West” as, for decades, pioneering adventurers of European descent encroached upon Native American nations. Further, St. Louis was a major player in the culture and commercial maturation that were generated by Fulton’s harnessing of steam. Economic progress in St. Louis continued as the riverboat gave way to the railroad. Slavery, which was probably first introduced to present-day Missouri by the French as early as 1719, strengthened its hold in St. Louis with the migration of American settlers from such states as Virginia and Kentucky.⁷ In 1820 the area became the focal point of the national slavery debate, which ended, in that instance, with the Missouri Compromise.⁸ Finally, like other United States cities of the nineteenth century, the growth of St. Louis was propelled by immigration. So it was that the people of St. Louis found themselves involved in the defining issues of the U.S. political economy of the nineteenth century: the frontier, slavery, industrialization, and immigration.

St. Louis was founded 15 February 1764, by Pierre Laclede Ligueste and other members of The Louisiana Fur Company. The majority of the early settlers were French Americans who had come to engage in fur trading with Native Americans along the Missouri River. Walter B. Stevens, in his two-volume work, St. Louis, the Fourth City, 1764–1911, was careful to distinguish these pioneers from their European counterparts.

While branches of these families, at home in France, were thinking the way to republican theories, the American offshoots were breathing free air and practicing liberty by instinct. There was little that was Parisian, and nothing of degeneracy, physical or mental, in the first families that settled St. Louis.⁹

The first families--those who were European American-did, however, accept slavery as a mainstay of their economy. African-American slaves worked in lead mines owned by French Americans before St. Louis was founded. After the end of the French and Indian War, Missouri slaves labored, primarily, in agricultural work.¹⁰

Although French Americans maintained great influence in St. Louis, the territory actually was ceded to Spain by the Treaty of Paris at the time that St. Louis was settled. The treaty allotted land east of the Mississippi River, excluding New Orleans, to Great Britain, while New Orleans and land west of the Mississippi went to Spain. The government of Great Britain adopted a more active posture toward the pioneers than that of Spain and, as a result, many French Americans moved west of the Mississippi River to live in St. Louis under Spanish rule. Spain returned Louisiana to France in the 1800 Treaty of San Ildefonso prior to France’s transfer of the territory to the United States in 1803.

At this juncture, American settlers from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Connecticut, and other states began making their way down the Ohio River to the Mississippi. A strong southern United States element soon challenged the French culture of St. Louis. Although black codes had been established under French and Spanish rule, the newer arrivals patterned a set of black codes in 1804 after those in Virginia. Under these slave codes, African Americans were not allowed to testify in court, could not own or carry guns, and were restricted from leaving a slave owner’s farm without permission.¹¹

During the frontier period, then, St. Louis was governed by France, Spain, and the United States. Culturally, French Americans were dominant until after 1800 when the Southern influence began to grow. African Americans were held in slavery throughout this period, and Native Americans came into contact with the citizens of St. Louis only peripherally.

The first steamboat arrived in St. Louis in 1817 and with it was borne a surge of commercial activity that would last through the end of the century. St. Louis’ economic expansion during this period was built on its strength as a distribution center. Utilizing the expansive river system, St. Louis businesses could ship goods south to the Gulf of Mexico, throughout the southwest, and into the newly explored northwest territory. As the economy grew, major manufacturing firms were established to complement the distributive activity. Blessed with access to an abundance of farm land, mineral deposits, and timber, by 1870 the city had established industries producing flour and mill stuffs, clothing, tobacco, wooden ware, brick and tile, bagging and bags, as well as foundries.¹² In 1849 the city was hit by a devastating fire and a cholera epidemic. The fire, which consumed property valued at over three million dollars, seemed to revigorate the city’s economy rather than retard its progress.¹³ Just eleven years later, in 1860, St. Louis boasted 1,126 manufacturing industries employing 11,737 workers. The value of products produced that year was estimated at $27,000,000 with an additional $12,733,948 in capital. This was enough to rank the city’s economy as eighth in the nation on the eve of the Civil War.¹⁴

The national struggle over slavery was played out in full on the smaller stage of Missouri and often the people of St. Louis were thrust into the spotlight, for instance, with the Missouri Compromise and the Dred Scott decision.¹⁵ The fact that St. Louis had drawn its citizens from the South and New England was reflected in the operation of both the largest slave market in the state and a central depot for the Underground Railroad.¹⁶ The southern element exerted greater control, however, dating back to the days of the drafting of the first Missouri constitution when a ticket of antislavery candidates to the constitutional convention was defeated.¹⁷ The abolitionist perspective found some expression in St. Louis, Elijah P. Lovejoy’s voice among them, but the abolitionist movement did not congeal into a potent force in Missouri. William Greenleaf Eliot, Unitarian minister of the Church of the Messiah and founder of Washington University, argued for African colonization. As president of the Young Men’s Colonization Society of St. Louis, Eliot contended that to give African Americans

equal footing, to give them equal political, social, and civil privileges with the whites is quite an impracticable thing in our day, and probably will be impracticable for many generations to come, if not forever. I am by no means sure that it is desirable. I am certain of its impracticability¹⁸

Racist pragmatism characterized the thoughts of members of the upper intellectual echelon in St. Louis.

In spite of a dangerously racist environment, free African Americans lived and prospered in St. Louis. The first list of taxpayers in the city was not a lengthy one, but it included African Americans who owned real estate.¹⁹ By 1858, African Americans controlled several million dollars' worth of real and personal property in St. Louis. Freedman Cyprian Clamorgan identified a select social group of St. Louisans as “The Colored Aristocracy,” similar in description to an elite class in Philadelphia. In 1860, most of the 1,500 free African Americans in St. Louis, however, worked as waggoners, blacksmiths, carpenters, house servants, cooks, waiters, draymen, stonemasons, watchmen, carnage drivers, painters, gardeners, hostlers, stable keepers, store owners, chambermaids, washwomen, ironers, and seamstresses.²⁰

Although free African Americans made up a small percentage of the total population, Lorenzo J. Greene, Gary R. Kremer, and Anthony F. Holland have made the point that the “widespread fear of the free black class as a potential threat to slavery manifested itself in laws and social customs designed to institutionalize black, rather than merely slave, inferiority and subjugation.”²¹ In Missouri, African Americans were not considered legally free without a deed of manumission, certified by governmental authorities. In 1835, laws were passed that required African Americans to purchase a “license” to stay in a Missouri county and county courts were required to “apprentice” all free African Americans between the ages of seven and twenty-one. An 1847 law forbade schooling for all African Americans and required a county official to attend all religious services conducted by African Americans. Yet the church and the school became two of the most important institutional vehicles for confronting legalized oppression. A number of examples recount the efforts of African Americans to pursue education in St. Louis, which was the only city in Missouri in which the African-American church achieved any measure of success against the stringent legal codes.²² John Berry Meachum was minister of the First African Baptist Church of St. Louis as well as a businessman who owned a barrel factory in which slaves worked to purchase their freedom. Meachum continued to operate a sch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 St. Louis: The Future Great City of the World?
• Chapter 2 St. Louis Women in United States History: Breaking the Silence
• Chapter 3 The Decline of an Academic System
• Chapter 4 The Changing Composition of the Student Population
• Chapter 5 The Eclipse of the Female Scholar
• Chapter 6 The Ascent of Domesticated Citizen
• Epilogue
• Index