The Educational Work of Women’s Organizations, 1890–1960

254 Pages·2008·1.159 MB·English

by  Anne Meis Knupfer, Christine Woyshner (auth.)

The Educational Work of Women’s
Organizations,1890–1960
The Educational Work of Women’s
Organizations,1890–1960
Edited by
Anne Meis Knupfer and
Christine Woyshner
THEEDUCATIONALWORKOFWOMEN’SORGANIZATIONS, 1890–1960
Copyright © Anne Meis Knupfer and Christine Woyshner, eds., 2008.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-60007-2
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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ISBN 978-1-349-36943-0 ISBN 978-0-230-61012-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230610125
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Design by Scribe
First edition: January 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Marcelinda Alesch Meis, grandmother,
teacher, and musician
To my parents,
Leonard and Dorothy Woyshner
CONTENTS
Introduction Women, Volunteerism, and Education 1
Christine Woyshner and Anne Meis Knupfer
Part I Advancing Higher Education and
Professional Work for Women
Chapter 1 “Standing Up for High Standards”:
The Southern Association of College Women 17
Joan Marie Johnson
Chapter 2 “Forwarding Our Great Purpose of Research in
Education”: Women and Educational Research in
Pi Lambda Theta, 1920–60 39
Laurie Moses Hines
Chapter 3 Cold War Women: Professional Guidance,
National Defense, and the Society
of Women Engineers, 1950–60 57
Laura Micheletti Puaca
Part II Expanding Women’s Influence in Politics
and Social Reform Institutions
Chapter 4 The National College Equal Suffrage League 81
Jana Nidiffer
Chapter 5 Latter-Day Knights: College Women,
Social Settlements, and Social Class in
the Progressive-Era United States 101
Emily Mieras
viii Contents
Chapter 6 “The Worker Must Have Bread, but She Must
Have Roses, Too”: The Education Programs of
the Women’s Trade Union League, 1908–26 121
Liz Rohan
Part III “Uplifting the Race”
Chapter 7 The Student YWCA: Intersections of
Gender, Religion, and Race, 1915–25 143
Sharlene Voogd Cochrane
Chapter 8 “I Think I’d Like to Have the Experience
of Meeting a Negro”: New York City’s
White Society Women Raise Funds for
Black Colleges, 1944–60 163
Marybeth Gasman
Chapter 9 Linking Friendship and Service:
Education and Philanthropy among
the Black Elite, 1946–60 179
Kijua Sanders-McMurtry and Nia Woods Haydel
Part IV Schooling Children
Chapter 10 “Politics Are Quite Perplexing”:
Bessie Locke and the National Kindergarten
Association Campaign, 1909–60 195
Barbara Beatty
Chapter 11 “We Are from the City, and We Are Here
to Educate You”: The Georgia Federation of
Women’s Clubs and Tallulah Falls School 215
Andra Knecht
Chapter 12 The Suburban PTA and the Good Life, 1920–60 235
Claudia J. Keenan
Contributors 251
Index 255
4
I n t r o d u c t i o n
Women, Volunteerism,
and Education
Christine Woyshner and Anne Meis Knupfer
A
lthough ubiquitous in America’s past, women’s organizations were virtually
invisible for a long time in the scholarship. In recent years, however, the history
of women’s associations has become a more commonly researched topic,
including explorations of study clubs, social service organizations, and political
and social advocacy groups.1 While many studies examine women’s organized
efforts on the social and political landscape, few do so in the arena of education
in the United States.2This book seeks to fill that gap in terms of the educational
work of women’s organizations by drawing on this vast topic of study and plac-
ing it in the context of the history of education. In particular, we recognize the
need to theorize women’s organized efforts. Such theorizing necessarily rests
on gender as a central part of the analytical framework as the contributors
explore how women created, led, and interacted within voluntary membership
organizations.3
The study of gender in the history of education is not absent, for within the
field, the history of women has been a major part of its growth.4In general, the
study of gender has resulted in three major lines of inquiry in the history of
education. The first has to do with women’s roles as teachers and educational
leaders, focusing on the professionalization of teaching.5 These works investi-
gate how gender helped or hindered women’s entry into teaching and leader-
ship positions in education. The second theme analyzes the ways females and
2 Christine Woyshner and Anne Meis Knupfer
males have been educated in the past, from early learning to higher education.
It explores differences in curricula, as well as experiments in and reasons for the
coeducation of young men and women.6A third area of scholarship that can be
considered is the role of women in the professions in higher education and at
universities and colleges.7These works examine women in the academy and, for
the most part, organize their analyses around access to the professions.8
The emphasis on professionalization, formal education, and the professions
omits not only a wider view—one that looks more broadly at education and
educative settings—but also a different perspective. This perspective views the
layers of networks that make up civil society and investigates how organizations
of women functioned in educational settings and on behalf of education. Thus,
in looking at the intersection of two major social institutions in the United
States—education and voluntary organizations—this book asks what functions
women’s organizations performed in education; what were the consequences
of their work; and how associational life affected women’s status.
The study of the educational work of women’s organizations is not mutually
exclusive of women in the education professions or higher education; instead,
it operates on another axis, providing an additional dimension to the existing
research, and hence reveals nuances of women’s lives and work in education.
Therefore, in this collection, we address the ways that networks, or organiza-
tions of women, helped shape education, learning, and educational institutions
and then, in turn, how women were shaped by their connections to others like
and unlike them. Our book builds on the research of Linda Eisenmann who, in
calling for a framework for interpreting women’s educational history in the
United States, suggests four possibilities: institution building, networking, reli-
gion, and philanthropy.9By networks, we mean the voluntary ties and organi-
zations that united women around a particular cause or profession. Considered
to be the heart of civil society, these networks might be local, regional, or
national. Some of the contributions in this book explore local units of a larger
network. Others consider federated organizations, those that were modeled on
the U.S. government with local, state, and national levels of governance and
participation. Other organizations in this collection did not span such dis-
tances. Nonetheless, through their many affiliations—and women did not limit
their memberships to just one or two—women raised money, took part in insti-
tution building, learned a variety of skills, and helped themselves and others
achieve goals.10
Of the twelve women’s organizations examined in this monograph, seven
started during the Progressive era. This is not surprising, given the need for
social reform, the increased numbers of female college graduates, and the rise
of professional opportunities for women in social welfare. Overlapping with the
women’s club movement (1890–1920), women’s volunteerism was the hall-
mark of the period, whether it was through women’s clubs, suffrage associa-
tions, federated associations, or participation in social settlements and child
Women, Volunteerism, and Education 3
study groups.11 Central to these and other women’s organizations was educa-
tion, broadly defined to include public schools and higher education institu-
tions, as well as nonformal community associations. Scholars of women’s
history have amply documented how associations such as women’s clubs edu-
cated themselves through study of subjects as various as literature, art, sociol-
ogy, and politics. In turn, they used their newly gained knowledge to enact
educational, social, and municipal reform.12
The Progressive era was a time of intense activism on behalf of diverse
women who organized themselves to support their own interests and benefit
others. They formed clubs and societies for self-education and to carry out
charitable activities. But white, middle-class women were not the first to organ-
ize; they were merely following the lead of black women, who had created
local-level organizations in the early nineteenth century in the interest of social
and educational reform.13 The last several decades of the nineteenth century
saw increased activity of women’s organizations, as they formed major national
associations in order to carry out their work. As Theda Skocpol argues,
women’s associations during this era became “nationally organized and civically
assertive.”14 Among these major national organizations were the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the General Federation of Women’s
Clubs (GFWC), the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA), and the
National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Other organizations with
smaller memberships were founded during this era, such as the suffrage organ-
izations and the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA), the National
Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), and the Southern Association of College
Women (SACW). Organized women knew they were in the midst of something
unique, as the phenomenon was cataloged by Mary Ritter Beard, who was
commissioned by the National Municipal League in 1914 to write about
women’s organizations in civic reform.15
In conducting research for this project, we noticed that historians follow the
timeline of the women’s club movement with most of the scholarship on
women’s organizations ending with the 1920s, at the time women gained uni-
versal suffrage with the Nineteenth Amendment. The break point at 1920
makes sense, since the central finding is that women, prior to having the vote,
used associational life to wield political power. Once women entered party pol-
itics, their activities in many and varied organizations is less explored by histori-
ans. In fact, some argue that women lost interest in gender-segregated activities
by 1920.16However, the strength of and membership in civic associations con-
tinued well into the twentieth century. Through the middle decades of the
twentieth century, women continued to organize and link together, at the very
least, toward educational ends. As this collection reveals, in the field of educa-
tion, women’s networks had much to offer the professional and the volunteer,
as well as the urbanite and the country woman, throughout the twentieth cen-
tury, until the period of significant decline in voluntary memberships. We end