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Education and Marginality: Race and Gender in Higher Education, 1940–1955

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Margaret Smith Crocco  and
Catty L. Waite
Margaret Smith Crocco
Affiliation:
Program in Social Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University
Catty L. Waite
Affiliation:
Teachers College, Columbia University
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Extract

Whether it be my religion, my aesthetic taste, my economic opportunity, my educational desire, whatever the craving is, I find a limitation because I suffer from the greatest known handicap, a Negro — a Negro woman. (Mary McLeod Bethune, “Closed Doors,” 1936).

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , February 2007 , pp. 69 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 History of Education Society 

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References

1 Jim Crow is another term for segregation. Jim Crow laws were those that outlined the parameters of black access. According to Woodward, C. Vann, “The origin of the word ‘Jim Crow’ is lost in obscurity … The term had become an adjective by 1838,” in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 7. A few of the recent works documenting the contributions of women to racial uplift during this era are Vicki Crawford, Jacqueline Rouse and Barbara Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long: African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Hine, Darlene Clark and Thompson, Kathleen, A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (New York; Broadway Books, 1998); 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); Bettye Collier-Thomas and Franklin, V.P., eds., Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Ransby, Barbara, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Knupfer, Anne Meis, The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women's Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).Google Scholar

2 bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989).Google Scholar

3 Only a few publications have treated the black women doctorate, but recently an article was written about black women historians that touches on a few of such women. Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, “Black Women Historians from the Late 19th Century to the Dawning of the Civil Rights Movement,” The Journal of African American History 89, (Summer 2004): 241–261. Earlier articles may be found in an historical overview on black women's impact on higher education in Journal of Negro Education 51 (Summer 1982). This special issue includes an article on Jane McAllister, one of the first black PhD's in education, and first black doctorate at Teachers College. In 1929, McAllister became the first black female head of the department of education at Fisk, among other notable achievements during her career. See Williams-Burns, Winona, “Jane Ellen McAllister: Black Pioneer in Teacher Education,” Journal of Negro Education 51, (Summer 1982): 342–357.Google Scholar

4 Stetson, Erlene. “Black Feminism in Indiana, 1893–1933.” Phylon: Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture 44, (1983): 292, as quoted in Stephanie Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 10.Google Scholar

5 DuBois, W.E.B., Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 638.Google Scholar

6 Many books have documented the important role of education in the African American community. A few of the classical works include Henry Allen Bullock, A History of Negro Education in the South, from 1619 to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); Anderson, James, Education of Blacks in the South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Robert Margo, Race and Schooling in the South, 1880–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Leloudis, James L., Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Litwack, Leon, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Random House, 1998); Adam Fairclough, Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001); and Drewry, Henry N. and Humphrey Doermann, Stand and Prosper: Private Black Colleges and Their Students (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).Google Scholar

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8 Michele, Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 10. Darlene Clark Hine, in “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West.” Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 912–920, has commented on the ways in which black women created a culture of dissemblance that masked their private lives: “in the face of the pervasive stereotypes and negative estimations of the sexuality of Black women” (p. 916). Deborah Gray White has concluded that this explains some of die difficulties of finding primary source materials about black women's personal lives. See Deborah Gray White, “Mining the Forgotten: Manuscript Sources for Black Women's History,” Journal of American History 74, (June 1987): 237–242.Google Scholar

9 Hine, 919.Google Scholar

10 See, for example, Kelley, Robin D.G., “We Are Not What We Seem': Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” The Journal of American History 80, (June 1993): 75–112. Kelley describes the myriad forms of resistance of black working-class women and men to Jim Crow.Google Scholar

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13 DuBois, W.E.B., “The Work of Negro Women in Society,” Spelman Messenger 18, (February, 1902): 1–3.Google Scholar

14 Cooper, Anna Julia, “Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration of a Race,” read before the convocation of colored clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Washington, DC. As quoted in Charles Lehmert and Esme Bahn, The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 63.Google Scholar

15 A number of works support this contention. See in particular Elizabeth Higginbotham, Too Much to Ask: Black Women in the Era of Integration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow; Margaret Smith Crocco and Davis, O.L., eds. “Bending the Future to Their Will”: Civic Women, Social Education and Democracy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Margaret Smith Crocco, Petra Munro and Kathleen Weiler, Pedagogies of Resistance: Women Educator Activists, 1880–1960 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999); Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation; Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves 1884–1994; Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do; Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race.Google Scholar

16 Shaw, 2.Google Scholar

17 Shaw coins this phrase to speak to the parameters that defined the role of the black woman.Google Scholar

18 As quoted in White, Too Heavy a Load, 22. Hine, in “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” notes that “At the core of essentially every activity of [National Association of Colored Women's Clubs] individual members was a concern with creating positive images of Black women's sexuality, lb counter negative stereotypes, many black women felt compelled to downplay, even deny, sexual expression” (918). Maintaining a sense of propriety was paramount in the lives of many middle-class, black women.Google Scholar

19 According to Sara Jane Deutsch, “In 1920 five times more married black women than women of any other racial or ethnic group worked outside the home. More than 50 percent of adult black women earned wages.” In “From Ballots to Breadlines,” in Nancy F. Cott (ed.), No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 431. However, as Deutsch also points out, the vast majority of black women in 1920 earned their wages in domestic service.Google Scholar

20 Hine, “Rape and the Inner lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” 912–920.Google Scholar

21 We recognize that black men and women also attended predominantly white colleges in the North such as Oberlin, Amherst, and the seven sister colleges but the vast majority of blacks with college degrees attended historically black institutions.Google Scholar

22 Bertaux and Anderson, “An Emerging Tradition of Educational Achievement,” 18.Google Scholar

23 Noble, Jeanne L, “The Negro Woman Looks at Her College Education,” (PhD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 1955), 29.Google Scholar

24 Bond, Horace Mann, Black American Scholars: A Study of Their Beginning (Detroit, MI: Balamp Press, 1972), 80. We document the phenomenon of the black education doctorate more fully in Cally L. Wake and Margaret Smith Crocco, “Fighting Injustice through Education,” History of Education 33, no. 5 (September 2004): 573–583. This work owes a debt to James Anderson's monograph, The Black Education Professoriate, SPF Monograph Series, 1984.Google Scholar

25 Horace Mann Bond, Black American Scholars, 80.Google Scholar

26 Bertaux and Anderson, 18.Google Scholar

27 Looking at doctorates produced outside of education, the picture is more uneven. Bond's study, Black American Scholars, reveals that between 1896 and 1960 only about 16 percent of doctoral degrees across all disciplines went to black women. In 1921, three black women became the first in the United States to earn the PhD. Sadie Alexander took her degree in economics at the University of Pennsylvania; Eva Dykes pursued philology at Harvard; and Georgiana Simpson earned a degree in languages at the University of Chicago.Google Scholar

28 See, for example, John Hope Franklin's essay, “The Dilemma of die American Negro Scholar,” in his Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938–1988 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 295–308; Franklin, John Hope, Mirror to America (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005); and Keith Janken, Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African American Intellectual (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983).Google Scholar

29 Ambrose Caliver, “The Education of Negro Leaders,” Journal of Negro Education 17, no. 3 (Summer 1948): 240–248, 244.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., 247.Google Scholar

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33 Gaither, Milton, writing in American Educational History Revisited: A Critique of Progress (New York: Teachers College Press, 2003), notes that women educational scholars such as Marion Thompson Wright and Jeanne Noble “took positions that had not previously been considered by male historians” (125). Julie Des Jardins in Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 2003) describes the “womanist consciousness” among black female historians in response to difficulties encountered in trying to break into the field of the “New Negro History,” 145.Google Scholar

34 Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982) suggests the importance of mentors in supporting students in pursuing topics that are considered to be novel.Google Scholar

35 For a description of some of the problems encountered by black students at Teachers College and the work of the white rural educator Mabel Carney in supporting them, especially women, see Kathleen Weiler, “Mabel Carney at Teachers College: From Home Missionary to White Ally,” Teachers College Record 107, (December 2005): 2599–2633.Google Scholar

36 Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women,” 912.Google Scholar

37 Marion Cuthbert, “The Dean of Women at Work,” Journal of the National Association of College Women 13–14 (April 1928): 39–44. Cuthbert concurs with Lucy Diggs Slowe, dean of women at Howard University in the 1920s, about tie sexism shaping college women's lives on campus.Google Scholar

38 Johnson, Charles S., The Negro College Graduate (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938).Google Scholar

39 Cuthbert, Marion T., “Education and Marginality: A Study of the Negro Woman College Graduate,” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1942), xiv.Google Scholar

40 Ibid., 38.Google Scholar

41 Ibid., 76.Google Scholar

42 Ibid., 7.Google Scholar

43 Ibid., 119.Google Scholar

44 Ibid., 74.Google Scholar

45 Ibid., xvi.Google Scholar

46 ibid., 68.Google Scholar

47 On the subject of black college women, marriage and motherhood during these years, see Hine, 919; for white women, see 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); Geraldine Joncich Clifford, Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Institutions 1870–1937 (New York: Feminist Press, 1989); Patricia Palmieri, In Adamless Eden. The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

48 Cuthbert, 117.Google Scholar

49 Ibid.,75.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 86–90, 119.Google Scholar

51 Ibid., xiv.Google Scholar

52 Ibid., 116.Google Scholar

53 Goodsell, Willystine, The Education of Women (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920).Google Scholar

54 Bolton, Ina B., “The Problems of Negro College Women” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1949). Bolton asserts on page 8 that there have been no previous studies of Negro college women.Google Scholar

55 Ibid., 1.Google Scholar

56 Ibid, 216.Google Scholar

57 Ibid., 101.Google Scholar

58 Ibid., 218.Google Scholar

59 Ibid., 220.Google Scholar

60 Ibid.,219.Google Scholar

61 Ibid., 226.Google Scholar

62 Ibid., 226.Google Scholar

63 Ibid., 183.Google Scholar

64 Jessie Carney Smith, ed., Notable Black American Women (Detroit: Gale Research, 1992); Jeanne Noble, “The Negro Woman College Graduate” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1955). Noble's dissertation was reissued by Teachers College Press in 1956, and again by Garland Publishing Company in 1987.Google Scholar

65 Noble, Jeanne, Beautiful Also Are the Souls of my Black Sisters (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1978). See also, Burt Landry's Black Working Wives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) for crediting Noble with highlighting this model of black womanhood.Google Scholar

66 Noble, 1.Google Scholar

67 Ibid., 1, 4, 18. Noble's belief echoes that of W.E.B. DuBois and others.Google Scholar

68 Ibid., 51–66.Google Scholar

69 Kaledin, Eugenia, Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s (Boston: Twayne, 1984). Kaledin notes that the fifties was a decade of progress for black women, who, as Noble reports, found new employment opportunities opening up (p. 149). Nevertheless, Noble's emphasis on marriage and family can be read as a concern mat such opportunities not be taken up at the expense of marriage and family.Google Scholar

70 Noble, 39.Google Scholar

71 Ibid., 66.Google Scholar

72 Ibid., 87, 104.Google Scholar

73 Ibid., 101. Noble's view is reminiscent of Lucy Diggs Slowe's position on this issue. Ronald Butchart in his 1988 essay, “‘Outthinking and Outflanking the Owners of the World': A Historiography of the African American Struggle for Education,” History of Education Quarterly 28, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 333–366, notes the importance of politics and power to the history of education and the contradictory ways in which education in a liberal culture affects individuals, moving them toward more private ends and away from communal ones.Google Scholar

74 Noble, 137.Google Scholar

75 Ibid., 101.Google Scholar

76 Ibid.,114.Google Scholar

77 Ibid.Google Scholar

78 Ibid., 112.Google Scholar

79 Ibid., 141.Google Scholar

80 Over a third of this group took their degrees at Teachers College, Columbia University. A fifth attended New York University (NYU). The institutions graduating more than one black female doctorate during this period, in order of numerical preponderance, are as follows: Columbia University Teachers College, NYU, Ohio State, University of Michigan, Cornell, University of Cincinnati, Indiana, Northwestern, University of Minnesota, and University of Chicago. Undoubtedly, the top two institutions’ locations in New York City, with opportunities for forging relationships within the thriving black community in Harlem and finding work among professional organizations headquartered there, such as the YWCA, NAACP, and Urban League, help explain, in part, their attraction to black female scholars.Google Scholar

81 See, for example, Clifford, ed., Lone Voyagers; Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Nadya Aisenberg and Mona Harrington, Women of Academe: Outsiders in the Sacred Grove (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). The situation of the black male academic has also been characterized as marginal. See Janken, Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African American Intellectual; John Hope Franklin, “The Dilemma of the African American Intellectual,” in his Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938–1988 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

82 For example, Marybeth Gasman's recent review, “Education in Black and White: New Perspectives on the History of Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” Teachers College Record. Published January 25, 2006, http://www.tcrecord.org (accessed August 3, 2006), provides much evidence of the “great man” approach to historicizing this topic.Google Scholar

83 Jayne Beilke's article, “The Changing Emphasis of the Rosenwald Fellowship Fund 1928–1948.” Journal of Negro Education 66 (Winter 1997): 3–15, mentions a number of women who received awards, but no systematic comparison of gender and receiving an award is given. As the Fund changed its emphasis, however, from a more practical/technical to a liberal arts/social sciences orientation, it is quite possible that women's chances for an award diminished.Google Scholar

84 James S. Cunningham and Nadja Zalokar, “The Economic Progress of Black Women, 1940–1980: Occupational Distribution and Relative Wages,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 45, no. 3 (April 1992): 540–555.Google Scholar

85 See Beverly Guy-Sheftall, “Black Women and Higher Education: Spelman and Bennett Colleges Revisited,” Journal of Negro Education 51 (Fall 1982): 278–87.Google Scholar

86 The Black Women's Oral History project provides testimonial evidence of these problems and includes women in this study as well as several others who took their degrees outside education but who ended up working in this field: Olivia Stokes, Eva Dykes, Hattie Kelly, and Inabel Lindsay. These women voiced frustration about the chauvinistic attitudes of black male superiors and colleagues at places of employment and within professional organizations. See Ruth Edmonds Hill and Patricia Miller King, eds., The Black Women Oral History Project: A Guide to the Transcripts (Cambridge, MA: Radcliffe College, 1987). See also Perkins, “Lucy Diggs Slowe: Champion of the Self-Determination of African-American Women in Higher Education,” 89–104; Crocco, Munro, and Weiler, Pedagogies of Resistance. Google Scholar

87 Cuthbert, 14.Google Scholar

88 Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women,” 293.Google Scholar