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Anglo-Saxon and Academic Opportunities for Women, Civil War-WWI

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Public Medievalists, Racism, and Suffrage in the American Women’s College

Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

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Abstract

This chapter investigates the ways that three basic types of academically legitimate women’s colleges established themselves at this period: coordinate women’s colleges affiliated with men’s colleges, independently founded women’s colleges, and women’s colleges that developed from previously founded seminaries or academies. In all three types, Anglo-Saxon was an important part of their curriculum as they presented themselves as academic equivalents to the leading men’s colleges of the period. As undergraduate women learned Anglo-Saxon, some of them pursued graduate study and then became English and Anglo-Saxon professors themselves, serving in the first generations of female faculty at US colleges; the study of Anglo-Saxon thus provided women with professional opportunity throughout the growing college and university system.

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Notes

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    Rosalind Rosenberg provides a national overview of the issue in the first chapter of Changing the Subject: How the Women of Columbia Shaped the Way We Think About Sex and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 8–47.

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    A notable exception is Oberlin College, founded in Ohio in 1833, which uniquely accepted male and female, black and white students from 1835. See http://new.oberlin.edu/about/history.dot, accessed 8 March 2016.

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    Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Campus Life (New York: Knopf, 1987), Chap. 2, especially 67–68; Amy Thompson McCandless, The Past in the Present: Women’s Higher Education in the Twentieth-Century American South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 85; Rosalind Rosenberg, “Chapter One: The Battle Over Coeducation,” Changing the Subject: How the Women of Columbia Shaped the Way We Think About Sex and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 8–47; Rosalind Rosenberg, “The limits of access: the history of coeducation in America,” in Women and Higher Education in American History: Essays from the Mount Holyoke College Sesquicentennial Symposia, eds. John Mack Faragher and Florence Howe (New York: Norton, 1988), 107–129.

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    Mount Holyoke College, Annual (South Hadley, MA: The College, 1892); Mount Holyoke Seminary, Annual Catalogue (Northampton, MA: Bridgman and Co., 1880–1887); Mount Holyoke Seminary and College, Annual Catalogue (South Hadley, MA: The Seminary and College, 1888–189; accessed 2 February 2014, http://clio.fivecolleges.edu/mhc/catalogs/

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    Wheaton College, College History, see note 18.

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    Smith College, Official Circular (Northampton, MA: The College, 1874–1879). Accessed 2 February 2014, http://clio.fivecolleges.edu/smith/catalogs/. On a related note, the first female professor to teach Anglo-Saxon to a coeducational class was probably Louise Dudley, who taught Anglo-Saxon at Lawrence College (now Lawrence University) in Appleton, WI, in 1914/1915; see Lawrence College, Sixty-Fifth Annual Catalogue of Lawrence College, Lawrence University Archives (Appleton, WI: Lawrence College), 1915.

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    Elizabeth Scala, “‘Miss Rickert of Vassar’ and Edith Rickert at the University of Chicago” Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 127–45.

  32. 32.

    Nine are listed in J.R. Hall’s appendix to “Nineteenth-Century America and the Study of the Anglo-Saxon Language: An Introduction,” in The Preservation and Transmission of Anglo-Saxon Culture: Selected Papers from the 1991 Meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, eds. Paul E. Szarmach and Joel T. Rosenthal (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), 37–71. Hall does not include Alma Blount in his list.

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    David Malone, “Wheaton History A-Z: Alma Blount,” Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections, 2010, accessed 19 January 2014, http://a2z.my.wheaton.edu/faculty/alma-blount.

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    George Philip Krapp, ed., The Vercelli Book, ASPR vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press 1932), lxxxix.

  35. 35.

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  36. 36.

    Francis March, “The Study of Anglo-Saxon,” The Report of the Commissioner of Education (Washington, D.C.: US Bureau of Education 1876), 475–479; reprinted in Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter, eds., Selected Writings of the First Professor of English (Easton, PA: Friends of Skillman Library, Lafayette College, 2005), 231–239.

  37. 37.

    Martha Anstice Harris, A Glossary of the West Saxon Gospels: Latin-West Saxon and West Saxon-Latin, Yale Studies in English (Boston: Lamson, Wolffe, 1899), accessed 1 February 2014, archive.org.

  38. 38.

    William Charles Barber, Elmira College, the First Hundred Years (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 145–147.

  39. 39.

    “Dean Harris Tenders Resignation,” Elmira College Bulletin: Alumnae News 20.8 (1929): 2.

  40. 40.

    Martha Anstice Harris, High School Program for the Study of Ivanhoe and for the Accompanying Composition and Rhetoric Lessons (Elmira, NY: Elmira College, 1907), accessed 1 February 2014, archive.org.

  41. 41.

    Elmira College Archives, File DE:11:7—Harris, compiled in the Archives in 1956/1957.

  42. 42.

    Mary Dockray-Miller, “Feminine Preoccupations: English at the Seven Sisters,” Modern Language Studies 27.3 (1997): 139–155, at 146.

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Dockray-Miller, M. (2017). Anglo-Saxon and Academic Opportunities for Women, Civil War-WWI. In: Public Medievalists, Racism, and Suffrage in the American Women’s College. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69706-2_2

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