No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Students Writing Race at Southern Public Women's Colleges, 1884–1945
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
Extract
Scholars have long debated the complicity of Southern white women after the Civil War in helping create a racialist and racist regional identity and denying or delaying civil rights for African Americans. These studies have largely focused on the activities of elite white women property owners, club members, and writers. Yet few scholars have examined college women's activities in this regard, particularly those of the eight public colleges for women established in the South between 1884 and 1908: Mississippi State College for Women (MSCW) (1884), Georgia State College for Women (1889), Winthrop College in South Carolina (1891), North Carolina College for Women (NCCW) (1891), Alabama College for Women (ACW) (1893), Texas State College for Women (TSCW) (1901), Florida State College for Women (FSCW) (1905), and Oklahoma College for Women (1908). Little studied today, these schools served as important centers of women's education in their states, collectively educating approximately 100,000 women before World War II and with combined enrollments exceeding that of the Seven Sisters schools for many years.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2010 by the History of Education Society
References
1 See Censer, Jane Turner, The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Johnson, Joan Marie, Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region, and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890–1930 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); Faust, Drew Gilpin, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Whites, LeeAnn, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).Google Scholar
2 This lack of scholarly attention may be due in part because their identities as women's colleges were largely subsumed as they became coeducational state schools in the years after World War II; they are now Mississippi University for Women (scheduled to soon change to a gender-neutral name), Winthrop University, Georgia College and State University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the University of Montevallo, Texas Woman's University, Florida State University, and the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma.Google Scholar
3 For treatments of rhetorical instruction at private women's colleges, see Campbell, JoAnn, “Controlling Voices: The Legacy of English A at Radcliffe College 1883–1917,” College Composition and Communication 43, no. 4 (December 1992): 472–485; Campbell, JoAnn, “Freshman (sic) English: A 1901 Wellesley College ‘Girl’ Negotiates Authority,” Rhetoric Review 15, no. 1 (Fall 1996): 110–127; Simmons, Sue Carter, “Radcliffe Responses to Harvard Rhetoric: ‘An Absurdly Stiff Way of Thinking,”’ in Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write, ed. Hobbs, Catherine (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 264–92.Google Scholar
4 Farnham, Christie Anne, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 3.Google Scholar
5 McCandless, Amy Thompson, The Past in the Present: Women's Higher Education in the Twentieth–Century American South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 14.Google Scholar
6 See Newman, Louise Michele, White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Green, Elna C., Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).Google Scholar
7 Johnson, Joan Marie, “'Drill into Us the Rebel Tradition': The Contest over Southern Identity in Black and White Women's Clubs, South Carolina, 1898–1930,” Journal of Southern History 66, no. 3 (August 2000): 525–62.Google Scholar
8 Cash, Wilbur J., The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941), viii.Google Scholar
9 The American Missionary Association-sponsored Tougaloo (now Tougaloo College) received state appropriations through 1890; Holly Springs was closed by the state in 1904. A third black school, the land grant Alcorn A&M College (1871, now Alcorn State University), was male-only until 1895.Google Scholar
10 Andrew, Sledd, “The Negro: Another View,” Atlantic Monthly 90, no. 537 (July 1902): 65–73; Dodd, William G., “Florida State College for Women: Notes on the Formative Years,” unpublished MS, 1958–59, Special Collections, Florida State University, 25. The Sledd article had previously been responsible from him being forced to resign from a position at Emory.Google Scholar
11 Bailey, Fred Arthur, “Free Speech at the University of Florida: The Enoch Marvin Banks Case,” Florida Historical Quarterly 71, no. 1 (July 1992): 1–17; Banks, Enoch Marvin, “A Semi-Centennial View of Secession,” Independent, 9 February 1911, 299–303.Google Scholar
12 Dodd, , “Florida State,” 62.Google Scholar
13 Report of the Board of Control of the State Educational Institutions of Florida, 1909–1910, 96.Google Scholar
14 Trelease, Allen W., Making North Carolina Literate: The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, from Normal School to Metropolitan University (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2004), 127.Google Scholar
15 Hubbard, Louis H., Recollections of a Texas Educator (Salado, TX: the author, 1964), 81–86; White, Edmund Valentine, Lengthening Shadows, or, From Country School to College Campus (Denton, TX: the author, 1948); White, Edmund Valentine, Senegambian Sizzles: Negro Stories (Dallas: Banks Upshaw, 1945); White, Edmund Valentine, Chocolate Drops from the South: A Book of Negro Humor and Philosophy (Austin: Steck, E. L., 1932); “Dean White's Black Stories,” Texas Outlook 17, no. 4 (April 1933): 45; Roosevelt, Eleanor, Eleanor Roosevelt's My Day: Her Acclaimed Columns, 1936–1945, ed. Chadakoff, Rochelle (New York: Pharos, 1989), 52.Google Scholar
16 Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 188.Google Scholar
17 Veysey, Laurence R., The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 381.Google Scholar
18 Dodd, , “Florida State,” 2.Google Scholar
19 Leloudis, James L., “School Reform in the New South: The Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina, 1902–1919,” Journal of American History 69, no. 4 (March 1983): 886–909; Dean, Pamela, “Learning to Be New Women: Campus Culture at the North Carolina Normal and Industrial College,” North Carolina Historical Review 68, no. 3 (July 1991): 286–306.Google Scholar
20 Trelease, , Making North Carolina Literate, 127.Google Scholar
21 Ibid., 96. Lindeman would go on to have a distinguished career at the New York School of Social Work (later part of Columbia University) and would become a leader in adult education.Google Scholar
22 From 1909 to 1932 he was head of the department of history, becoming dean in 1915, then vice-president and head of the new social science division in 1922. In 1932 he left for an administrative position at the University of North Carolina, then returned as president in 1934 until his retirement in 1950. Under the state university system, which consolidated in 1931, Jackson's official tide was Dean of Administration, then later Chancellor.Google Scholar
23 Trelease, , Making North Carolina Literate, 196–97.Google Scholar
24 Censer, Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 274.Google Scholar
25 Ibid., 272.Google Scholar
26 Ibid., 262, 270.Google Scholar
27 Trelease, , Making North Carolina Literate, 35.Google Scholar
28 Pettigrew, Thomas F., “Intergroup Contact Theory,” Annual Review of Psychology 49 (1998): 65–85; Emerson, Michael O., Kimbro, Rachel Tolbert, and Yancey, George, “Contact Theory Extended: The Effects of Prior Racial Contact on Current Social Ties,” Social Science Quarterly 83, no. 3 (September 2002): 745–761.Google Scholar
29 Oklahoma College for Women, The Trend, 24 October 1922, 1.Google Scholar
30 North Carolina College for Women, Representative Essays, 1905–11, Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In the school's early years, the best of these were delivered by students at commencement. The practice ended in 1912.Google Scholar
31 North Carolina College for Women, State Normal Magazine, February–March 1916, 241.Google Scholar
32 State Normal Magazine, October 1900, 30.Google Scholar
33 State Normal Magazine, April 1901, 212–14.Google Scholar
34 Florida State College for Women, Florida Flambeau, 8 February 1918, 1.Google Scholar
35 W. E. Burghardt Du Bois and Dill, Augustus Granville, The College-Bred Negro American (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1910), 46–47.Google Scholar
36 Cooper, Anna Julia, A Voice from the South (1892; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 108.Google Scholar
37 White, Deborah Gray, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: Norton, 1999), 102–4. For Wells’ response to Willard, see Wells, Ida B., Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900, ed. Royster, Jacqueline Jones (Boston: Bedford, 1997), 138–48.Google Scholar
38 Brown, Charlotte Hawkins to Stone, Galen, 1921[?], Charlotte Hawkins Brown Papers, Harvard University.Google Scholar
39 White, , Too Heavy a Load, 88.Google Scholar
40 Farnham, , Education of the Southern Belle, 2.Google Scholar
41 Johnson, , Southern Ladies, New Women, 3.Google Scholar
42 Censer, , Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 275–76.Google Scholar
43 Johnson, , Southern Ladies, New Women, 5.Google Scholar
44 Numerous campus documents refer to the notable percentages of students who were fatherless or orphaned, were supporting themselves or helping to pay for their education, or lacked the funds to have attended another college.Google Scholar
45 North Carolina College for Women, State Normal Magazine, June 1898, 284–86.Google Scholar
46 Alabama College for Women, 1909 Yearbook, 80.Google Scholar
47 Florida State College for Women, Talisman, November 1910, 6:Google Scholar
48 North Carolina College for Women, State Normal Magazine, February 1901, 117–18. “Useful” is a keyword here, as it was at the heart of the purpose of public women's colleges and a term often employed in institutional literature.Google Scholar
49 Florida State College for Women, Talisman, January 1914, 7. Long was president of the junior class and the Thalian Literary Society.Google Scholar
50 Talisman, May 1906, 27.Google Scholar
51 Texas State College for Women, Daedalian, Winter 1927, 21–22.Google Scholar
52 The poem appears in Childs’ De Namin’ ob de Twins and other Sketches from the Cotton Land (New York: Dodge, B. W., 1908), 26, which she dedicated to the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The book was popular enough to go through four editions through 1928.Google Scholar
53 Censer, , Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 2.Google Scholar
54 W, Director D. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, essentially rewrote Reconstruction, glorified the Klan, and justified white supremacy. In the wake of World War I, economic instability, trenchant racism, and fear of rising black assertiveness led to heightened mob violence against African-American communities; at its worst, in what James Weldon Johnson called the “Red Summer” of 1919, there were over two dozen separate events nationwide.Google Scholar
55 Johnson, , “Drill into Us,” 543.Google Scholar
56 The others were Edna St. Vincent Millay, Teasdale, Sara, and Lindsay, Vachel. “Records Show Students Read Serious Books,” Florida Flambeau, 18 May 1934, 7.Google Scholar
57 North Carolina College for Women, Coraddi, February 1931, 14; Florida State College for Women, Distaff, 20 December 1930, 6–7.Google Scholar
58 Florida State College for Women, Distaff, 15 May 1929, 3–6.Google Scholar
59 North Carolina College for Women, Coraddi, April 1925, 16–17; White, Newman Ivey and Jackson, Walter Clinton, eds., An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes (Durham, NC: Trinity College Press, 1924).Google Scholar
60 W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Oliver, Terri Hume (1903; repr., New York: Norton, 1999), 17; Leloudis, , Schooling the New South, 177.Google Scholar
61 Gilmore, , Gender and Jim Crow, xvi.Google Scholar
62 Birnbaum, Shira, “Making Southern Belles in Progressive Era Florida: Gender in the Formal and Hidden Curriculum of the Florida Female College,” Frontiers 16, no. 2/3 (1996): 230.Google Scholar
63 “Review of The Negro and His Songs, by Odum, Howard W. and Johnson, Guy B.,” Journal of Negro History 10, no. 4 (October 1925): 775–76.Google Scholar
64 Gilmore, , Gender and Jim Crow, xix–xx.Google Scholar