Rooms of Our Own: Race, Region, Religion, and Class in the Higher Education of Women

7/29/2019 Rooms of Our Own: Race, Region, Religion, and Class in the Higher Education of Women

1/9

Rooms of Our Own: Race, Region, Religion, and Class in the

Higher Education of Women

Amy Thompson McCandless

Journal of Women's History, Volume 23, Number 2, Summer 2011,

pp. 200-207 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2011.0018

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by New School University at 12/18/12 9:38PM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jowh/summary/v023/23.2.mccandless.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jowh/summary/v023/23.2.mccandless.htmlhttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jowh/summary/v023/23.2.mccandless.html


2/9

Journal of Womens History200 Summer

2011 Journal of Womens History, Vol. 23 No. 2, 200207.

Rooms of Our Own: Race, Region, Religion, and Class in the

Higher Education of Women

Jennifer OConnor Duffy. Working-Class Students At Radcliffe College19401970: The Intersection of Gender, Social Class, and Historical Context.Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. x + 205 pp. ISBN 10:0-7734-5098-X (pb).

Stephanie Y. Evans. Black Women In The Ivory Tower: 18501954: An Intel-lectual History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. xv + 275pp.; ill. ISBN 10:0-8130-3268-7 (pb).

Judith Harford. The Opening of University Education to Women in Ireland.Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008. xiv + 194 pp.; ill. ISBN 10: 0-7165-2854-8 (cl).

Joan Marie Johnson. Southern Women at the Seven Sister Colleges: FeministValues and Social Activism, 18751915. Athens: The University of GeorgiaPress, 2008. x + 229 pp.; ill. ISBN-13:978-0-8203-3095-2 (cl); 10:0-8203-3095-7 (pb).

Andrea G. Radke-Moss. Bright Epoch: Women & Coeducation in the AmericanWest. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. xii + 352 pp.; ill.ISBN 10:0-8032-3965-3 (cl).

Susan Rumsey Strong. Thought Knows No Sex: Womens Rights at Alfred Uni-versity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008. xii + 217pp.; ill. ISBN 10:0-7914-7513-1 (cl).

Amy Thompson McCandless

In ARoom of Ones Own, Virginia Woolf vividly contrasts the universitymilieu of Oxbridge (i.e., Oxford and Cambridge) men and women in the1920s. The mens colleges are splendidthe rooms are elegant and spaciousand the grounds are beautifully landscaped; students enjoy ne food anddrink; expansive and comfortably furnished common rooms encouragecamaraderie and conversation. The womens accommodations, on the other

hand, are cramped and shabby; their gardens, unkempt. The food is plainand sparse, and water, not wine, is served at meals. Why, Woolf wonders,


3/9

Book Reviews: Amy Thompson McCandless2011 201

was there such a discrepancy? Men endowed libraries and educational in-stitutions to educate and edify their sons, giving them a strong foundationfor worldly success. Women, on the other hand, were conned to mother-

hood and domesticity, and consequently had neither the energy nor meansto engage in intellectual pursuits. Until women have money and a room of[their] own (the same resources as their brothers), Woolf argues that theywill never be able to succeed.1

The histories of higher education by Jennifer OConnor Duffy, Stepha-nie Y. Evans, Judith Harford, Joan Marie Johnson, Andrea G. Radke-Moss,and Susan Rumsey Strong focus on women from different backgrounds andhistorical eras and on universities in different regions. The authors approachtheir topics from the perspectives and methodologies of historians (John-

son and Radke-Moss), African American and womens studies specialists(Evans), reference librarians (Strong), and higher education administratorsand education specialists (Duffy and Harford). Yet the stories of universitywomen they relate are remarkably similar. All depict the momentous ef-forts required to create rooms for women in the educational edices of thelate-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

The history of the rst universities is the story of elite, European malespreparing for professions in the church, law, and medicine. While womenwere not totally absent from this tale, their presence as students and faculty

was seen as an anomaly well into the nineteenth century. As social statusin the western world increasingly became dened by level of education,admission to the academy opened the way to economic and political success.Educational philosophy and practice consequently could not be separatedfrom the wider societal context of gender, race, region, religion, and class.

Enlightenment discussions of natural rights led both Europeans andAmericans to question inherited statuses and privileges, including those ofthe patriarchy. In her study ofEuropean Feminisms, the historian Karen Offencontends that the debate on the woman question became a central feature

of the Enlightenment exploration of human society.2 Writer after writercontemplated the origin and nature of gender distinctions, critiqued thesocietal consequences of womens education and institutionalized marriage,and considered gender-specic contributions to the progress of civilization.Indeed, Mary Wollstonecraft began her 1792 treatise, AVindication of theRights of Women, with a profound conviction that the neglected educationof my fellow-creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore . . . .3

In Thought Knows No Sex: Womens Rights at Alfred University, SusanRumsey Strong describes the powerful inuence Enlightenment thought had

on the students, faculty, and administrators of Alfred University. Charteredin 1857, Alfred was the rst coeducational university in New York state. Its


4/9


president, Jonathan Allen, combined Enlightenment condence in humancapability with religious belief in the equality of all souls, proclaiming,The essential powers of the spirit are neither masculine nor feminine, but

human, sexless. Thought knows no sex. A common education in family andschool places worthiness above gender . . . (109). Allens wife Abigail wasa faculty member and life-long suffragist who encouraged her students toBe radical, radical to the core (3). Although the couples inuence on theschool was huge, a unique combination of regional, religious, and economiccharacteristics also contributed to the universitys egalitarianism. Alfredswestern location was one factor in the mix. The rst coeducational collegesin the United States were founded in what still were frontier areas ofthe country. But early nineteenth-century coeducational institutions such

as Oberlin and Antioch had very different expectations for their male andfemale students. Women at Oberlin, for instance, were denied the right evento read their own graduation essays.

Religious motivation was also an integral part of the Alfred story.Social reform often emanated from a liberal theology. Alfred citizens anduniversity students were Seventh Day Baptists, who valued basic educationand social reform activity (7). But faith in the social gospel did not alwaystranslate into feminism. The Protestant fervor that inspired Oberlin studentsand faculty to support abolition, Strong notes, did not extend to womens

rights. Strong nds social class especially signicant in explaining Alfredsprogressive views of gender roles and relations. Whereas the ideology ofseparate spheres ourished among the middle classes of the towns, farm-ing communities such as Alfred demanded much more uidity in socialroles and relied much more on group cohesiveness than on individual ac-complishments. Regardless of their gender, Alfred graduates were expectedto work for the commonweal. The same egalitarian rural conditions andseparatist faith that led the small village of Alfred in western New York tosee coeducation as natural also explained the university communitys

unwavering support of abolitionist and feminist reforms. The rooms forwomen at Alfred University were consequently much more welcomingthan those Woolf encountered at Oxbridge half a century later.

In Bright Epoch, Andrea G. Radke-Moss looks broadly at coeducationin the American West, examining womens experiences in the years from1870 to 1900 at four land grant institutionsIowa Agricultural College, theUniversity of Nebraska, Oregon Agricultural College, and Utah State Agri-cultural College. Like Strong, she argues there is much more to the success ofcoeducation than western exceptionalism. Although she concedes that the

frontier conditions of the West made coeducation more widely acceptable,Radke-Moss shares Mary Ann Dzubacks belief that gender is the central


5/9


story of the history of higher education. (10) For the rst students at thewestern land-grant colleges, gender determined where they would live,what and where they would study, and how they would behave.

Like Woolf, Radke-Moss is interested in the physical and ideologicalspaces available to women for intellectual and social development. Shestresses the importance of literary societies as places where women couldacquire the rhetorical skills associated with the public sphere: Perhaps atno other level in American society in the 1870s and 1880s were men andwomen publicly discussing current social and political issues in open,organized meetings (93). Women also claimed new space for themselveson the sports eld and in the military, organizing their own athletic teamsand petitioning for their own military companies. Radke-Moss concludes

that the land-grant experience is a story of the negotiation of genderedspacesat times toward greater inclusion for women, and at times towardseparation. Women took an active part in the process of achieving inclusion,but sometimes they chose to segregate themselves from the male sphere(289). Their efforts made the last three decades of the nineteenth centurya bright epoch for coeducation at the western land grant institutions.

The interplay between inclusion and segregation is also a theme inJudith Harfords The Opening of University Education to Women in Ireland. Theexpansion of higher education for Irish women was very much entangled

in the broader political and religious issues of the island. As Roman Catho-lics lobbied for equal rights in the last decades of the nineteenth century,educational equity became part of the larger Irish Question. Should themajority Catholic population have its own institutions? Male and femalecoreligionists collaborated to provide for the children of their own faith. Theadvent of high schools and colleges for Irish Protestant girls and women ledIrish Catholics to support similar educational opportunities for Catholic girlsand women, despite the Church hierarchys initial opposition to womenshigher education. In fact, women religious took the lead in pressing for

Catholic intermediate schools and colleges, arguing that parents seekinghigher education for their daughters would otherwise send them to Prot-estant institutions. Competition between religious groups spilled over tocompetition between the genders, with girls schools and womens collegescomparing their test scores to those of their male counterparts. It was notmerely coincidental that the non-denominational Royal University of Ireland(RUI), created by the University Education (Ireland) Act of 1879, was therst on the island to grant degrees to Catholics and to women. Likewise,once the RUI became coeducational, there was increased pressure on the

all-male denominational universities to admit women.


6/9


Separate colleges were the key that opened the doors to universityeducation in Ireland for women. But, Harford observes, getting into thebuilding did not result in more or larger rooms for women. Instead, once

the top Irish universities became coeducational, the all-womens collegeswere downgraded to teacher-training institutions. Although Harford seesthe admission of women to the prestigious national universities as recogni-tion of their abilities, she is ambivalent about the consequences for womensintellectual and social development. The opportunities for leadership andadvancement enjoyed by women in the single-sex womens colleges werenot forthcoming under the new regime, and women students and academicshad to ght for meaningful inclusion under the co-educational model (173).Harford is less condent than Strong and Radke-Moss that coeducational

institutions can provide sufcient room for women to succeed.Single-gender education has been touted as superior to coeducation

because women are guaranteed intellectual and social space of their own.As Joan Marie Johnson shows in her study ofSouthern Women at the SevenSister Colleges, this freedom from male dominance of curricular and extracur-ricular spaces gave women condence in their abilities and inspired feministvalues and social activism. Like Strong and Radke-Moss, Johnson believesthat regional characteristics often inuenced the design of the educationalspace provided for women. She examines the life paths of approximately

one thousand white women who left their native South to study at the elitewomens colleges of the Northeast in the years between 1875 and 1915.These were a privileged group of white women whose socioeconomicbackgrounds were similar to those of their northern classmates. But thecultural spaces they encountered at the Seven SistersBarnard, Bryn Mawr,Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesleywere quite differ-ent from those at womens colleges in the South. Here they were exposedto progressive professors who not only taught about feminism and reform,but who also encouraged students to volunteer at settlement houses and to

campaign for womens suffrage. Coming from a racially segregated societywhere African Americans were treated as inferiors, white southern womenfound themselves in the same room with African American women whoseabilities and actions deed the stereotypes. The result was that Southernwomen who attended college in the North were profoundly changed bythe experience (7) and in later life were disproportionately likely to leadwomens activism than their sisters who remained home in the South (146).

In Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 18501954 Stephanie Y. Evans illus-trates how African American women overcame gender, racial, and class

obstacles to their inclusion in the academy. Evans examines three periods ofeducational attainment for black women. The rstfrom 1850, when Lucy


7/9


Stanton became the rst known African American woman to receive a col-lege degree, to the end of the Civil War in 1865was a time when only a fewschools in the North and Midwest opened their doors to African Americans.

The secondfrom 1865 to 1910saw the advent of what today are known asHistorically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), typically private andcoeducational institutions, located in the South and focused on teacher andindustrial training. The third periodbetween 1921 and 1954witnessedthree African American women earning their doctorates. Evans contendsthat race and gender gave African American women a unique standpointthat compelled them to work for the wellbeing of their campuses and com-munities. Not only did they create a room for themselves at the university,but they recongured this space to simultaneously uplift the black race,

improve womens status and add to human knowledge (125). Evans takesthe stereotype of the Ivory Tower and shows how the entrance of AfricanAmerican women scholars changed both the complexion of the professori-ate and the image of the academy. African American women expanded theuniversity from a place far removed from the humdrum of daily affairsto one immersed in the social, political, and economic issues of the widerworld, providing a blueprint for sustainable balance between scholarlyrigor, effective pedagogy, and a service imperative (193).

Jennifer OConnor Duffy concurs with Evans that gender alone can-

not explain womens experience in the academy. In Working-Class Studentsat Radcliffe College, 19401970, Duffy sees social class as the elephant in theroom, noting that Americans have been more willing to acknowledge gen-der and racial differences than class ones. She feels this blindness has kepthigher education from addressing social impediments to educational attain-ment; as a result, American higher education is more socio-economicallystratied today than at any time during the past three decades (3). Usingthe Radcliffe Centennial Survey of 1977 to examine the college experiencesand career trajectories of graduates from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Duffy

argues that social class was the factor that best explained commonalitiesamong alumnae from these decades. Working-class women were especiallyappreciative of the advising/mentoring they received from faculty and staffand of the postgraduate opportunities a Radcliffe degree provided them.Although alumnae from all backgrounds entered high-status professionsin similar proportions, working-class women were less likely to be full-time homemakers and more likely to be career women than their wealthierclassmates. The College enabled women from less privileged families toachieve social and economic success. While middle-class women tended to

marry men from similar backgrounds and to nd professional employmentsimilar to their parents, working-class women found Radcliffe a gateway


8/9


to mobility (146). Duffy concludes with a plea for contemporary universi-ties to consider ways to bring more working-class women into their rooms.

Virginia Woolf bases her description of the rooms at Oxbridge in the

1920s on her own experiences. Her essay incorporates talks she gave atGirton and Newnham, the rst two Cambridge colleges for women. Herctional narrator, like Woolf herself, is frustrated by the paucity of histori-cal and literary sources written by women and angered by the portrayal ofwomen in works authored by men. Yet she is optimistic that the expansionof higher education will give women new opportunities for intellectualand social development and that literature will be the richer for their con-tributions. Woolf searches the British Library in vain for womens writings;eighty years later, Strong, Radke-Moss, Johnson, Harford, Evans, and Duffy

nd abundant sources in student letters and essays, college publications,and administrative records, as well as in monographs authored by women.The opportunity to have rooms of their own has not only given voice towomens interests and aspirations, but it has also led historians to reevaluatewomens contributions to the creation of the modern university.

Woolf feels her own contemporaries are too sex conscious (103),insisting that it is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex (108).Woolfs comments bring to mind Alfred president Jonathan Allens as-sertion that Thought knows no sex. But even Strong, who uses Allens

words in the title of her book, makes the point that Alfreds egalitarianismwas unusual for the time. All six volumes demonstrate that the history ofhigher education has not been gender blind. The college women highlightedin these works all worked with and around as well as against gender ste-reotypes and expectations. Not everyone would agree that gender is thecentral story of the history of higher education, but few would argue thatthe history of womens higher education could be written without the sexconsciousness that Woolf decries.

The six authors celebrate the active roles women from diverse back-

grounds have played to claim rooms for themselves in the modern univer-sity. Their stories varied tremendouslywith plots complicated by gender,racial, class, religious, and regional issues. Sometimes women sought spacesthat were identical to and shared with those of their male counterparts. Atother times, they preferred separation and independence.

Although there are many more educational opportunities for womentoday than when Woolf penned A Room of Ones Own, the questions sheraised in her 1929 essay remain germane. What conditions are necessaryto enable women to benet fully from their education? How do we ensure

that women of color, women from low socioeconomic strata, and womenfrom diverse cultures and regions are given access to the university? Once


9/9


they are in the room, how do we make it conducive to learning? Advocatesof single-gender colleges and HBCUs emphasize the importance of cul-tural and physical comfort to academic achievement. Studies on retention

and graduation rates show the correlation between nancial support andcompletion levels. As Woolf concluded, it is much easier for a woman tothink lofty thoughts and to write elegant discourses when she has moneyand a room of her own.

Notes

1Virginia Woolf, A Room of Ones Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace &O World,Inc., 1929), 4.

2Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 17001950: A Political History (Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 35.

3Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed..Miriam Brody(London: Penguin Books, 1992; rst published 1792), 79.

Rooms of Our Own: Race, Region, Religion, and Class in the Higher Education of Women

Documents

Transcript of Rooms of Our Own: Race, Region, Religion, and Class in the Higher Education of Women