Deans of Women and the Feminist Movement

Emily Taylor's Activism

K. Sartorius

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137481344
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores how deans of women actively fostered feminism in the mid-twentieth century through a study of the career of Dr. Emily Taylor, the University of Kansas dean of women from 1956-1974. Sartorius links feminist activism by deans of women with labor activism, the New Left movement, and the later rise of women's studies as a discipline.

C H A P T E R 1

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Visions of Economic Citizenship

Twenty-two-year-old Emily Taylor sat quietly in a corner of the dean of women’s office suite at Ohio State University (OSU). Unsure about pursuing a career in the field of guidance and counseling, Taylor had asked Associate Dean of Women Grace S. M. Zorbaugh if she could shadow her to learn more about the profession of “deaning.” On that summer day in 1937, she glanced down at a document on the table, hoping the student meeting with Zorbaugh would not notice Taylor’s presence as she listened intently to the conversation on the other side of the room. She typically found the stories she heard interesting. This one, however, disturbed her.

The young woman who sat across the wide desk from Zorbaugh in Pomerene Hall differed from most of the students who came to the dean of women’s office for advice. This woman was older, in her mid-to-late twenties, and a mother of two young children. During her sophomore year of college, she had married a smart young man with aspirations for an academic career. She then dropped out of the university herself and waitressed to finance her husband’s graduate schooling. To celebrate the completion of his PhD, the couple took their children on vacation—where he drowned. As the woman recounted the story to Zorbaugh, Taylor realized that this woman, responsible for two children, had invested all of her earnings into her husband’s education, and was now left with no means to support the family, and no qualifications other than waiting tables. Taylor, who had just completed her bachelor’s degree at Ohio State that year, found herself questioning one of the most normative expectations for white, middle-class womanhood: that a young woman should secure her financial future through marriage to a well-positioned man. For this young woman, the choice had gone horribly wrong. Zorbaugh often reminded her graduate students that all college women should be prepared for a career—and now Taylor understood why.

The young widow’s story produced an epiphany for Taylor. It clarified why a college education mattered for women, and fed a latent feminism inside her—one that had been growing since her high school days. Taylor had experienced her own disappointments in a society that favored male accomplishment and relegated women to second-class status. First, there was the secondary school oratory contest that she had clearly won, but the judges awarded first place to a boy because they felt he should not lose to a girl. Then, she learned that her high school principal recommended the male salutatorian of her high school class to OSU as if he were the valedictorian, despite the fact that Taylor actually earned the top title. Her discontent with society’s unequal treatment of men and women would continue to grow. Soon, as a part-time graduate student and full-time high school teacher, she discovered that she earned significantly less income than a male counterpart of equal experience. When she asked the principal about the inequity, he dismissively replied that the man had a family to support. In that moment, Taylor became an equal-pay advocate. Disgruntled over the principal’s logic, especially since she was paying for both her own graduate education and her younger sister’s undergraduate degree, these inequities sparked in her an advocacy for women’s fair and equal wages that would never cease during her many decades as a dean of women.¹

However, in 1937, Taylor did not have a word to label her feelings—no one she knew used the word “feminism.” Instead, Taylor was simply following the path she thought would provide her with much-needed income. Like most college women of the 1930s who planned to work, she trained to be a teacher, an acceptable and welcoming profession for women. She dated a young man she met at Urbana College—he was intellectually her equal, and the two considered marriage—though Taylor had a difficult time imagining herself in the supporting position that gender roles prescribed for wives. As she questioned how education, career, and her personal life might fit together for her, she worked her way through college during the Depression. She felt lucky to secure a part-time job for Ohio State students at a local government agency. The position paid a wage near what she might make as a teacher, and when she graduated with her Bachelor of Science degree, her manager suggested she enroll in graduate school so she would continue to have income until she found employment as a teacher.

I thought that was a wonderful idea . . . I went over to register and since I’d just graduated, my record was right there. No difficulty in getting admitted . . . There was a young man, probably a graduate assistant, and he said, “What field?” And all of a sudden I said, “Gee, I don’t know.” “You don’t know? What do you want to be when you grow up?” And I said, “Well, I think I’d like to be the dean of women.” And he said, “Oh, that’s guidance and counseling.”²

Although a bit haphazard, Taylor made a pragmatic decision to enroll in guidance and counseling—abandoning her deeper hope to study law. She knew that she needed an income, and most advised her that employment as an attorney would be impossible as a woman. Perhaps, she thought, as a dean of women she might help other young women move into the field of law. Zorbaugh, she knew, spent hours preparing women for work, and studying how to open occupations to women.

Taylor possessed an unusually clear picture of the work of deans of women. As an undergraduate, Taylor first glimpsed the world of deaning when she stopped by Zorbaugh’s office for advice as a transfer student from Urbana College. Waiting to speak with someone, Taylor thumbed through the only reading material in the waiting room. Zorbaugh walked in, saw Taylor reading an article on consumption economics, “and said ‘Oh, you are interested in consumer cooperatives. I just got back from Sweden where I’ve been studying them.’ ”³ Zorbaugh promptly invited Taylor to do a radio show on consumer cooperatives with her, and though Taylor had little interest in economics, she began volunteering with the associate dean regularly, attracted to the opportunity to learn outside the classroom. Zorbaugh drew Taylor into the inner organization of the office, involving her in the campus Associated Women Students (AWS) chapter, and during Taylor’s senior year, appointing her as the formal assistant to the AWS Vocational Information Committee.⁴ Once involved in Zorbaugh’s occupational counseling efforts, Taylor gained access to the national stage of deans of women and their feminist organizing to move women into careers outside the home. At Zorbaugh’s vocational conferences, Taylor heard professional women, other Ohio deans, and the US Department of Labor Women’s Bureau Director Mary Anderson discuss opening male-dominated lines of work and creating career options outside marriage and motherhood.⁵

Without realizing it, by attending OSU Taylor had chosen a university in the heart of the network of midwestern deans of women—the group that largely defined both US student affairs and the dean of women’s role in coeducational institutions. At OSU, Taylor’s counseling education stood on the cumulative efforts of the earliest deans of women, and her training covered the methods they developed to prepare college-educated women to access gainful employment. Through Zorbaugh, Taylor absorbed the feminist philosophy of women’s coeducation that early deans involved in Progressivism and social housekeeping incubated into deaning.

A direct descendant of this legacy, Zorbaugh taught Taylor guidance techniques crafted out of an economic theory of women’s financial independence which early deans developed. An economist herself, Zorbaugh developed a counseling strategy to help each female student determine how she planned to obtain basic needs such as food, shelter, and clothing. For the many young women who answered that they expected their husbands to provide these, Zorbaugh steered them to think about contingency planning. How, she asked, did young women intend to support themselves and their children if their husband died or became disabled?

After hearing the widow of the drowned husband recount her desperate situation, Zorbaugh’s lesson stuck with Taylor. In fact, much further into her career, more than one of Taylor’s students recalled elatedly announcing engagement plans to Taylor, who then promptly asked the student how she planned to support herself if her fiancé died. Taylor’s stark question arose from decades of knowledge produced by deans of women. While other deans may have delivered the message more subtly than Taylor, “contingency planning” permeated their philosophy and practices, providing a socially acceptable means to advocate for women’s professional employment and economic citizenship.⁶

Taylor’s formative experiences of injustice—her frustrations during her young life that society valued her contributions less than those of men around her—crystallized into a feminist agenda for women’s access to careers, equal pay, and professional advancement on the same terms as white men.⁷ She would combine this consciousness with an activist approach as she donned the mantle of a dean of women. Her advocacy for women’s education—and particularly, vocations for women—grew out of her awareness that the economic dependency of women limited not only their independence, but their ability to care for their families if they became single parents. These concerns became the hallmark of her early forays into college administration of women, and would define her brand of feminism. Through her mentors and the knowledge produced by early deans of women rooted in the Midwest and its coeducational institutions, Taylor became one of the most progressive deans of women; insisting all women prepare for economic citizenship—the right to earn a living and be paid equitably—and make their own decisions for themselves.

A COLLEGE WITHIN A COLLEGE

One of the nation’s last deans of women, Taylor’s story of feminist deaning began when middle-class and elite white women first entered male higher education. In the nineteenth century, these women stepped out of the private sphere of domesticity and into the public world, which historically belonged to white men of means. The “problem” of coeducation, as it was so often called, was a problem of overlapping private and public spheres and the gender roles that accompanied them. When a woman matriculated into a college or a university, she signed up for participation in public life, and American society had few blueprints for that in the late 1800s. While women of color and working-class women had always labored in the public world through low-paying service jobs, the spheres had long stood as separate for white men and women of means. This divide left little basis for determining the curricula that women should study. As Northwestern University acting president Oliver Marcy said in 1877, “We are now very sure the public opinion was, and still is, not just clear as to the kind of education most young women would seek if all the institutions of the country were open to them and they comprehended the character of the course of instruction given in them.”⁸

Some who supported women’s education advocated the same liberal arts curriculum prescribed for men. Most, however, called to train women for domestic roles in the private sphere of home and family—with one exception—teaching. Collegiate alumnae planning to work found employment in the nation’s schoolhouses due to a long tradition of educating women to prepare the next generation of male citizens. The concept of Republican Motherhood, educating women in order for them to teach their own sons, meant society had long accepted teaching as an occupation for women. However, only single or widowed women taught, making the profession a bridge between women’s education and their assumed eventual marriage.⁹

Others argued that women were unsuitable for higher education altogether. By the late nineteenth century, opponents frequently referenced Dr. Edward Clarke’s 1873 book Sex in Education, which asserted that higher education for women would tax women’s brains, cause their bodies to weaken, and their reproductive organs to atrophy. While this thesis sounds ridiculous today, the book went through 16 printings and garnered significant attention in its time. Clark’s argument summarized the prevailing opinion regarding women’s education: “Educate a man for manhood, a woman for womanhood, both for humanity.”¹⁰ It is not surprising, then, that some of the earliest women scholars applied their knowledge to curricular programs that dealt with domesticity, including household sanitation and hygiene.¹¹

Higher education responded to women’s pursuit of postsecondary study in several ways. The established schools of the Northeast and South rarely admitted women, so women’s colleges in these regions filled the gap by educating women separately from men. However, the younger institutions in the Midwest and West often offered coeducation. Oberlin Collegiate Institute first admitted young women alongside male students in 1833 as part of a religious project to train women as Christian teachers and missionaries. Most of these schools, though, admitted women because they faced a stark challenge to find the funds needed to construct campuses and hire faculty. With a limited number of families able to afford higher education, enrolling daughters alongside sons provided a significant increase in needed tuition dollars. While elite schools of the Northeast often receive the most historical attention, these midwestern and western schools are where most early college women received their training. By 1915, the Midwest and West’s coeducational institutions housed 75 percent of all women students. This influx of women propelled presidents to create a means to manage women students, particularly in the Midwest, where females had reached close to 50 percent of some schools’ student bodies by the early 1900s.¹²

As the numbers of women students grew, late nineteenth-century coeducational university presidents found themselves on new ground. Saddled with lingering Victorian social conventions, presidents could not simply mix young men and women on campuses and expect parents’ or society’s approval. At the time, middle- and upper-class white women depended upon their sexual purity to remain marriageable, and parents expected social conventions that ensured young women had a constant chaperone when with men. Most university presidents came to the same conclusion that William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago reached in 1892—he needed a scholarly woman to take charge of women students’ academics and guard their virtue. In appointing the first formally titled dean of women, Harper recreated society’s separate spheres on the Chicago campus. Other coeducational presidents and trustees followed suit with a dean of women to head the women’s arena—sometimes in formally separate “women’s colleges”—though most often dividing women from the core institution through housing, advising, and campus regulations. This “college within a college” approach replicated within the institution the normative organization of society, and provided a structure to regulate women’s conduct, control interactions between male and female students, and enforce the supervision and chaperoning parents expected. For presidents, the arrangement satisfied public expectations, and freed male faculty from advising women. For deans of women and their students, it fashioned a realm within the public sphere for their own advancement. Early women deans, some of whom remembered isolation during their own coeducational experiences, prized this socially sanctioned space. It provided both a community for women students, and a platform for organizing women’s educational pursuits.¹³

At the University of Chicago, Harper recruited the respected scholar and former president of Wellesley, Alice Freeman Palmer, to define women’s education on the new Chicago campus. The nation’s first to bear the title “dean of women,” Palmer had graduated from the Universit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Visions of Economic Citizenship
• 2 Practicing Political Citizenship
• 3 Unlocking Women’s Autonomy
• 4 A World without Parietals
• 5 The Dean of Women in the Age of Protest
• 6 From Quiet Activism to Radical Tactics
• 7 From Deans to Presidents
• Notes
• Archival Records
• Index