Abstract
On an April afternoon in 1997, I nervously tugged at my blazer as I stood on the porch waiting for 83-year-old Dr. Emily Taylor to answer the door. My college housemother had arranged for us to meet, although I truly did not know what we had in common—this was before social media and the current ease of perusing someone’s biography. I had completed master’s work in American and women’s studies, but I did not know that Taylor once led the Office of Women in Higher Education (OWHE) at the American Council on Education (ACE), or what that meant. At that time, women’s studies rarely discussed the institutionalization of feminism in offices such as the OWHE. Nor did I understand what a dean of women was. The position had disappeared in the late 1970s after Title IX became law, well before I enrolled in college in 1989. Sixty years my senior, Taylor later confided that she met me only as a courtesy—but there we were in her living room in Lawrence, Kansas. She sat in a tall wingback chair by the fireplace, an imposing figure in a black dress, her left hand atop a silver-headed cane, her hair snow white. I felt small and unsure perched on the edge of a velvet settee. We began with pleasantries and I hesitatingly asked what it was like to be dean of women at the University of Kansas (KU).
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Notes
Sara M. Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).
Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
For discussion of men taking over the profession of student affairs, see Robert Schwartz, “How Deans of Women Became Men,” The Review of Higher Education 20, 4 (Summer 1997): 419–436;
and Schwartz, Deans of Men and the Shaping of Modern College Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
See Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004);
Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Universities, 1870–1937 (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York: Distributed by the Talman Co., 1989);
Susan Levine, Degrees of Equality: The American Association of University Women and the Challenge of Twentieth-Century Feminism (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995).
Jana Nidiffer, “More Than ‘a Wise and Pious Matron’: The Professionalization of the Position of Dean of Women, 1901–1918” (EdD diss., Harvard University, 1994);
Nidiffer, “From Matron to Maven: A New Role and New Professional Identity for Deans of Women, 1892 to 1916,” MidWestern Educational Researcher 8, 4 (1995): 17–24;
Nidiffer, Pioneering Deans of Women: More Than Wise and Pious Matrons (New York: Teachers College Press, 2000)
Nidiffer, “The First Deans of Women: What We Can Learn from Them,” About Campus 6 (2002): 10–16;
Linda Eisenmann, Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945–1965 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006);
Carolyn Terry Bashaw, “Stalwart Women”: A Historical Analysis of Deans of Women in the South (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999);
Janice J. Gerda, “A History of the Conferences of Deans of Women, 1903–1922” (PhD diss., Bowling Green State University, 2004);
Gerda, “Gathering Together: A View of the Earliest Student Affairs Professional Organizations,” NASPA Journal 43, 4 (2006): 147–163; Schwartz, “How Deans of Women Became Men;” Schwartz, Deans of Men;
Eisenmann, Historical Dictionary of Women’s Education in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998);
Eisenmann, “A Time of Quiet Activism: Research, Practice, and Policy in American Women’s Higher Education, 1945–1965,” History of Education Quarterly 45, 1 (2005): 1–17.
Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (New York: Random House, 2010), 212.
Beth L. Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 78–80.
Kathryn Nemeth Tuttle, “What Became of the Dean of Women? Changing Roles for Women Administrators in American Higher Education, 1940– 1980” (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1996), 25–27;
Renee Nicole Lansley, “College Women or College Girls? Gender, Sexuality and in Loco Parentis on Campus” (PhD diss. Ohio State University, 2004), ii–iii; Bailey, Sex in the Heartland, 78–79.
Gail Short Hanson, “Organizational Transformation: A Case Study of the Intercollegiate Association for Women Students” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 1995), 82, 85.
Edmund Griffith Williamson, The Student Personnel Point of View (Washington, DC: American Council on Education Committee on Student Personnel Work, 1949).
Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (Canada: Random House, 1977).
Ruth Barry and Beverly Wolf, Modern Issues in Guidance–Personnel Work (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1957);
Lynn M. Gangone, “Navigating Turbulence: A Case Study of a Voluntary Higher Education Association” (EdD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 1999); Tuttle, “What Became of the Dean of Women?” 345–346.
Two books that illustrate this view are Marty Jezer, The Dark Ages, Life in the United States, 1945–1960 (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1982); and Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums.
Linda Nicholson, “Feminism in ‘Waves’: Useful Metaphor or Not?” New Politics XII, 4 (2010), http://newpol.org/node/173.
The argument that the second wave of the women’s movement was born from women’s participation in racial civil rights activism and the New Left belongs to Evans, Personal Politics. Another important text supporting this argument is Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Also see Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums. Rusty Monhollon credits the KU women’s movement to the same influences, while also noting that Taylor contributed to the growth of liberal feminist views at KU, in This Is America? The Sixties in Lawrence, Kansas (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
William Henry Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the 20th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 202.
Dorothy Truex, “Education of Women, the Student Personnel Profession and the New Feminism,” Journal of the National Association of Women Deans and Counselors 35 (Fall 1971), 13.
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), xx.
Bailey, Sex in the Heartland; Cynthia Ellen Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945–1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Bailey’s excellent consideration of the sexual revolution at KU notes that Taylor must have been supportive of the students’ changes in order to assure their success. However Bailey suggests that the students “co-opted” the administration’s philosophy regarding creation of responsible adults to advocate for their own rule changes, and does not reference the work Taylor did in the late 1950s and early 1960s to push women students to release the rules.
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© 2014 Kelly C. Sartorius
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Sartorius, K.C. (2014). Introduction. In: Deans of Women and the Feminist Movement. Historical Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137481344_1
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