No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Preparing for the Politics of Life: An Expansion of the Political Dimensions of College Women's Literary Societies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
Extract
One week before the 1908 U.S. presidential election, the women of the Hesperian Literary Society at the State University of Iowa (SUI, now the University of Iowa) presented “a unique program” in the form of a mock political rally. Imagining that they lived in a town where women had “been honored by the legislature with the ballot,” the “Hep” members divided into clubs that supported various candidates and causes. Several women formed the Utopian Club, which promoted William Jennings Bryan's presidential candidacy, while the members who comprised the Women's Culture Club supported William Howard Taft. Heps who pretended to belong to the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) argued for prohibition. Portraying the era's political dynamism, other Heps represented anarchists, socialists, and independents. A woman from each group spoke in support of her cause in front of a crowd that included “a lot of” college men. SUI senior and Hep member Ione Mulnix described the rally in a letter to her parents: “[T]he speeches were of course very ridiculous. The reasons why each was the best were very feminine and would hardly convince a man.” She explained that the Utopian Club representative “argued for Bryan because he was the best looking.” The Heps ended their program by setting loose a toy mouse, causing the actors to scream and scatter. Finding the fictitious rally “awfully funny,” Mulnix noted that the Hep women “acted their parts to perfection” and that the college men “seemed to appreciate it immensely.”
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2014 History of Education Society
References
1 “Hesperian Program,” Daily Iowan (Iowa City, IA), 25 October 1908, 1; Mulnix, Ione to Mulnix, Sally and Mulnix, James (hereafter cited as “IM to SM and JM”), 27 October 1908, Ione Mulnix Papers, Iowa Women's Archives, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, IA (hereafter cited as “Mulnix MSS”).Google Scholar
2 IM to SM and JM, 27 October 1908, Mulnix MSS; for brief descriptions of the senior class breakfast, see “Class Breakfast Tickets,” Daily Iowan (Iowa City, IA), 3 June 1909, 3; and “Class Breakfast,” Daily Iowan (Iowa City, IA), 15 June 1909, 1.Google Scholar
3 On political socialization, see M. Kent Jennings and Richard G. Niemi, The Political Character of Adolescence: The Influence of Families and Schools (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974); Sears, David O., “Whither Political Socialization Research? The Question of Persistence,” in Political Socialization, Citizenship Education, and Democracy, ed. Ichilov, Orit (New York: Teachers College Press, 1990), 69–97; Sapiro, Virginia, “Not Your Parents’ Political Socialization: Introduction for a New Generation,” Annual Review of Political Science 7 (June 2004): 1–23; Lay, J. Celeste, A Midwestern Mosaic: Immigration and Political Socialization in Rural America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 1–10.Google Scholar
4 The most powerful argument that the development of political structures in western civilization originated with men's sexual domination over women is Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1988). For surveys of feminist critiques of and contributions to political science, see, for example, Virginia Sapiro, “When Are Interests Interesting? The Problem of Political Representation of Women,” American Political Science Review 75, no. 3 (September 1981): 701–16; Carroll, Susan J. and Zerilli, Linda M. G., “Feminist Challenges to Political Science,” in Political Science: The State of the Discipline II, ed. Finifter, Ada W. (Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 1993): 55–76.Google Scholar
5 The classic accounts of the political purposes of women's clubs are Blair, Karen J., The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1980); Scott, Anne Firor, Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). For a regional variation of women's clubs, see Haarsager, Sandra L., Organized Womanhood: Cultural Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1840–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Gilmore, Glenda demonstrates the heightened political role of southern African-American women after whites revoked African-American men's voting rights in North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century. African-American women, through women's groups, became politically active in efforts to improve their communities, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), chaps. 6 and 7. Gilmore is one of few historians who connects women's extracurricular involvement to their later political activity by detailing the campus chapters of the WCTU at Black seminaries and colleges in the South, see Gender and Jim Crow, 50–55. Daniel Horowitz explores both the in-class and out-of-class experiences that sensitized Betty Friedan (then known as Bettye Goldstein) to political issues at Smith College some three decades after Mulnix's graduation, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), chap. 2. For women's political involvement situated within the broader developments of the Progressive Era, see Shelton Stomquist's, Re-inventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006) ix, 45–46, 64–67, 100–2, 107–30, 158–62.Google Scholar
6 Rudolph, Frederick attributes the development of literary societies at eastern men's colleges “to the general atmosphere of colonial political debate.” Rudolph finds that within these societies college men debated “the exciting political issues of the day.” Rudolph is one of few historians who acknowledge the possibility of internal society politics, noting that fraternities contributed to the demise of the literary societies by introducing “new political complications into literary-society elections.” James McLachlan asserts that the debates of Princeton's two literary societies served “as the capstone of the informal curriculum” in the early nineteenth century. Regarding the influence of these debates on the average Princeton man, McLachlan claims “they pushed him outward, upon the public stage.” Rudolph, Frederick, The American College and University: A History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 137–45, quotations on 138, 145; McLachlan, James, “The Choice of Hercules: American Student Societies in the Early 19th Century,” in The University and Society, vol. 2, ed. Stone, Lawrence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 449–94, quotation on 483. For the political topics of literary society debates, see Harding, Thomas S., College Literary Societies: Their Contribution to Higher Education in the United States, 1815–1876 (New York: Pageant Press, 1971).Google Scholar
7 Kelley, Mary, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), chap. 4, quotations on 118, 129–30; Radke-Moss, Andrea, Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), chap. 3, quotation on 80; Ogren, Christine A., The American State Normal School: “An Instrument of Great Good” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 108–19, quotations on 114, 116. Morelock, Kolan Thomas details men's and women's literary societies at two colleges in Lexington, Kentucky in the late nineteenth century and describes how the men's societies’ oratorical contests served as a prominent community activity, but does not consider the political skills that such activities might have fostered, Taking the Town: Collegiate and Community Culture in the Bluegrass, 1880–1917 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008), chaps. 3 and 4. Historians of higher education have suggested that early college women learned skills and participated in activities that prepared them for later participation in politics, though their treatment of this preparation has been brief. See most explicitly Solomon, Barbara Miller, In the Company of Education Women (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 105–7; Nash, Margaret A., Women's Education in the United States, 1780–1840 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 112–13.Google Scholar
8 For example, Messerli, Jonathan notes Horace Mann and his fellow students joined one of Brown University's two literary societies in the early nineteenth century for two reasons: the social opportunities and “the sheer joy which came from debating.” Although Mann rose from the society's second librarian, the “lowliest position in the hierarchy of [society] officers,” to its official lecturer, the “highest honor the brethren bestowed,” Messerli does not describe any internal political struggles that coincided with Mann's ascension within his society. Messerli, Jonathan, Horace Mann: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1972), 44–48, quotations on 45, 46. On the influence of literary society membership on Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan, see, respectively, Bragdon, Henry Wilkinson, Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1967), 30–34, 43–45; Kazin, Michael, A Godly Hero: The Life of Williams Jennings Bryan (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), 10–13.Google Scholar
9 In contrasting biography with microhistory, writes, Jill Lepore, “If biography is largely founded on a belief in the singularity and significance of an individual's contribution to history, microhistory is founded upon almost the opposite assumption: however singular a person's life may be, the value of examining it lies in how it serves as an allegory for the culture as a whole,” “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (June 2001): 133. Peltonen, Matti considers how microhistory informs the larger historiography, arguing that it allows historians to “show the way in concrete detail how actual entities, personal experiences, or events can relate the micro with the macro,” “Clues Margins, and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research,” History and Theory 40, no. 3 (2001): 349. Historians of early modern Europe have been the best known practitioners of microhistory, see most notably Davis, Natalie Zemon, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Darnton, Robert, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. Tedeschi, John and Tedeschi, Annde (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
10 Office of the Registrar, “University of Iowa Enrollment Chart, 1856–1942,” available online at http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/Archives/faq/enroll1856-1942.htm; Persons, Stow, The University of Iowa in the Twentieth Century: An Institutional History (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), chap. 1; Breaux, Richard Melvin, “‘We Must Fight Race Prejudice Even More Vigorously in the North': Black Higher Education in America's Heartland, 1900–1940” (PhD Dissertation, University of Iowa, 2003), 93–101, 162–73; Gilson, James Edward, “Changing Student Lifestyle at the University of Iowa, 1880–1900” (PhD Dissertation, University of Iowa, 1980); Hevel, Michael S., “Public Displays of Student Learning: The Role of Literary Societies in Early Iowa Higher Education,” Annals of Iowa 70 (Winter 2011): 1–35; Lavender, Helen E., “A History of the Erodelphian and Hesperian Societies of the State University of Iowa with a Brief Resume of the Octave Thanet, Whitby, Athena, and Hamlin Garland Societies” (Master's Thesis, State University of Iowa, 1937); Powell, Clifford, Smith, L. O., and Brant, I. N., History and Alumni Register of Irving Institute of the State University of Iowa (Iowa City: Irving Institute of the State University of Iowa, 1908); Wanerus, Theodore A., History of the Zetagathian Society of the State University of Iowa, (Iowa City: Zetagathian Society, 1911). SUI's literary societies lost their prominence in campus life following World War I. Due primarily to students’ shifting interests and the usurpation of much of their activities, including journalism, dramatics, and public speaking, into the formal curriculum, all of SUI's literary societies became defunct by the early 1930s.Google Scholar
11 Historians have developed an increasingly complex portrait of the campus climate that college women found at coeducational institutions. College women who attended institutions that began as men's colleges before becoming coeducational faced the greatest hostility, while women who comprised the majority of students at state normal schools found the least. Those women who enrolled at institutions that began as coeducation but enrolled greater numbers of men, such as SUI, found middling levels of opposition to their presence on campus. Perhaps the most well-known account of college men's hostility toward women students in this era is Lynn Gordon's discussion of the University of California—Berkeley. Gordon, Lynn D., Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), chap. 2. See also Conable, Charlotte Williams, Women at Cornell: The Myth of Equal Education (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). For women students’ full-fledged involvement at coeducational state normal schools, see Ogren, The American State Normal School, chaps. 4 and 5. College women who attended state land-grant institutions seem to have experienced a medium level of hostility similar to SUI women, see Radke-Moss, Bright Epoch. Google Scholar
12 Wood, Sharon E., The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 248; Noun, Louise R., Strong-Minded Women: The Emergence of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in Iowa (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1969), chap. 10; Buffum, Hazel P., “Iowa Federation of Women's Clubs: The Federation Grows,” Palimpsest 34 (May 1953): 209–56. For examples of the political activities of women's clubs in Iowa around the turn of the twentieth century, see Mason, Karen M., “Women's Clubs in Iowa: An Introduction,” Annals of Iowa 56 (1997): 1–11; Pawley, Christine, “‘Not Wholly Self Culture': The Shakespearean Women's Club, Osage, Iowa, 1892–1920,” Annals of Iowa 56 (1997): 12–45; Morgan, Francesca, “‘Regions Remote from Revolutionary Scenes': Regionalism, Nationalism, and the Iowa Daughters of the American Revolution, 1890–1930,” Annals of Iowa 56 (1997): 46–79.Google Scholar
13 IM to SM and JM, Early October 1904, Mulnix MSS. For a description of a society reception designed to recruit new students, see “Irvings and Eros Entertain Freshmen,” Daily Iowan (Iowa City, IA), 30 September 1908, 1.Google Scholar
14 IM to SM and JM, 14 November 1904, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
15 By naming these skills and characteristics “political,” I do not suggest that these skills are only useful to political ends. Rather, I argue that they empower individuals to maximize their potential political impact.Google Scholar
16 IM to SM and JM, Late November 1907, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
17 IM to SM and JM, 18 March 1908, 27 April 1908, Mulnix MSS. According to Anne Firor Scott, “Every [women's] group, however small, had its constitution and by-laws, and hewed to the line of Robert's Rules of Order,” Natural Allies, 81.Google Scholar
18 IM to SM and JM, 28 March 1905, 21 March 1906, 22 March 1907, 8 April 1907, 18, 30 March 1908, 9, 27 April 1908, 6 June 1908, 14 December 1908, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
19 IM to SM and JM, 4 March 1907, 18 March 1908, 27 April 1908, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
20 IM to SM and JM, November 1907, 25 November 1908, Mulnix MSS. The independent play that the Heps and Zets presented seems to have been quite successful, “Hep-Zet Play to Be Repeated,” Daily Iowan (Iowa City, IA), 7 May 1909, 1.Google Scholar
21 IM to SM and JM, 25 November 1908, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
22 IM to SM and JM, 25 November 1908, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
23 IM to SM and JM, 8 October 1906, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
24 IM to SM and JM, 8 October 1906, 12 October 1907, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
25 IM to SM and JM, 7 October 10, 1908, Mulnix MSS; “Carberry Chosen Senior President,” Daily Iowan (Iowa City, IA), 13 October 1908, 1. Indeed, Carberry's election was the Zets and Heps sole bright spot in campus elections that year, having lost the junior and sophomore class elections. “Much Politics in Class Elections,” Daily Iowan (Iowa City, IA), 29 September 1908, 1; “Carl Loos Elected Sophomore President,” Daily Iowan (Iowa City, IA), 4 October 1908.Google Scholar
26 IM to SM and JM, 12 October 1907; 8 March 1909, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
27 The best distinctions between the debate topics are the surviving literary society posters that announced upcoming programs, see Hesperian Program Poster Collection, Hesperian Literary Society Papers, UIA; Zetagathian Program Poster Collection, Zetagathian Literary Society Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University Libraries, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA (hereafter cites as “UIA”). See also Hevel, “Public Displays of Student Learning,” 13–14.Google Scholar
28 IM to SM and JM, 22, 31 January 1905, Early February 1905, November 1907, Mulnix MSS; “Hesperian Program,” Daily Iowan (Iowa City, IA), 14 October 1908, 1.Google Scholar
29 IM to SM and JM, 30 March 1908, Mulnix MSS; Program Poster for May 8 (no year), Zetagathian Program Poster Collection, Zetagathian Literary Society Papers, UIUA.Google Scholar
30 Mulnix's lack of mentioning any controversies within Hep regarding women's alcohol use indicates that the literary society served as a space that supported prohibitionist women. Mulnix never noticed the presence of alcohol or mentioned imbibing college men or women at any of the Hep and Zet parties she attended.Google Scholar
31 IM to SM and JM, 30 March 1908, 22 March 1907, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
32 IM to SM and JM, 17, 22 March 1907, 30 March 1908, 24 April 1907, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
33 Radke-Moss, Bright Epoch, chap. 4; Gilson, “Changing Student Lifestyle,” 188–89; Hevel, “Public Displays of Student Learning,” 24–25.Google Scholar
34 Bailey, Beth L., From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), chap. 1; quotation on 23–24. An excellent recent exploration on campus dating and sexual behavior is found in Nicholas L. Syrett, The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 165–81, 186–92.Google Scholar
35 Although several historians have documented same-sex romantic relationship between early college women, mostly at eastern women's colleges, Mulnix's romantic attentions were centered on college men. On the prominence of women's intense and often romantic same-sex relationships at college, see Nancy Sahli “Smashing: Women's Relationships Before the Fall,” Chrysalis 8 (Summer 1979): 17–27; Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from their Nineteenth Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Knopf, 1984), 65–68, 75, 166–67, 190–93, 282, 315–16. On the presence of these relationships at southern women's institutions, see 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), chap. 7. On the presence but lower prominence of these relationships at western coeducational universities, see Radke-Moss, Bright Epoch, 132–40.Google Scholar
36 For examples of joint programs, see IM to SM and JM, 7 October 1908, 14 December 1908, 8 March 1909, 25 May 1909, Mulnix MSS. For examples of society parties, see IM to SM and JM, 12 November 1906, 24 January 1907, 4 February 1907, 8, 16 April 1907, Late November 1907, 8 March 1909, Mulnix MSS. For examples of smaller, informal gatherings, see IM to SM and JM, 11 February 1907, 24 April 1900, 8 May 1909, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
37 IM to SM and JM, Late November 1904, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
38 IM to SM and JM, Late November 1904, Early December 1907, 25 February 1907, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
39 IM to SM and JM, 26 October 1904, 5 January 1905, Late May 1905, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
40 IM to SM and JM, 5 January 1905, 13 January 1907, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
41 IM to SM and JM, 11 February 1907, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
42 IM to SM and JM, 29 January 1908, 9 March 1908, Mulnix MSS. On the nature of the “leap-year role reversal,” see Radke-Moss, Bright Epoch, 114–15.Google Scholar
43 IM to SM and JM, Early December 1907, 4 February 1907, 15 May 1907, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
44 See IM to SM and JM, 17 March 1907, 8 October 1906, 6 January 1907, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
45 Less than three months after Hep dropped her, Mulnix reported to her parents that the Dean of Women had expelled Heinsius from SUI after the young woman “was found in a man's room… by his landlady.” IM to SM and JM, 8 October 1906, 28 September 1906, 6 January 1907, 17, 22 March 1907, Mulnix MSS. Heinsius's student record notes that she “accepted official advice to withdraw from the University” in the Spring of 1907. Cecil Mercedes Heinsius student file, Office of the Registrar, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA.Google Scholar
46 On the emergence of dancing at SUI, see Gilson, Changing Student Lifestyle, 187, 200, 204–5, 210, 215–19, 222–23, 230, 237, 241, 248.Google Scholar
47 IM to SM and JM, 5 April 1906, November 1907, 4 March 1907, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
48 IM to SM and JM, Early December 1907, 29 January 1908, 31 January 1909, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
49 IM to SM and JM, 3 November 1908, Mulnix MSS.Google Scholar
50 IM to SM and JM, 2 June 1909, Mulnix MSS. The picnic that Mulnix danced at seems to have been announced in the student newspaper, “Hep Zet Picnic,” Daily Iowan (Iowa City, IA), 27 May 1909, 3.Google Scholar
51 Pawley, “Not Wholly Self Culture,” 29; Morgan, “Regions Remote.”Google Scholar
52 Rymph, Catherine E., “'Keeping the Political Fires Burning': Republican Women's Clubs and Female Political Culture in Small-Town Iowa, 1928–1938,” Annals of Iowa 56 (1997): 105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar