Abstract
In the summer of 1944, Indiana University (IU) Dean of Women Kate Hevner Mueller and her husband, Associate Professor of Sociology John Mueller, took a much-needed vacation, both hoping to enjoy a break from IU business. Still, some work arrived by post from her Assistant Dean of Women Margaret Wilson, who managed the office while the dean was away. With war-time jobs offering women high salaries, Mueller found it difficult to maintain head residents in Indiana’s women’s residence halls. She lacked enough supervisors to round out the women’s staff, and Emily Taylor, recently finished with her master’s work, hoped to land one of these positions. Mueller, though, preferred a woman with collegiate dormitory experience, and Taylor had none. Perhaps more important, Mueller did not hold Ohio State’s dean of women, Ester Allen Gaw, in high esteem. Despite Associate Dean Grace S. M. Zorbaugh’s economic and vocational expertise, Mueller found Gaw’s thinking too conventional and hesitated to hire a woman from Gaw’s program over women trained at places such as Syracuse University or Columbia University’s Teachers College. Although deans of women as a group supported women’s liberal arts education and preparation for employment, each dean’s degree of feminist thinking and desire to change women’s roles varied according to many factors—the campus locale and political climate, the university administration, and the dean’s own opinions, to name a few.
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Notes
Marion Talbot, More Than Lore: Reminiscences of Marion Talbot, Dean of Women, the University of Chicago, 1892–1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), 101.
Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 65.
Gail Short Hanson, “Organizational Transformation: A Case Study of the Intercollegiate Association for Women Students” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 1995), 83;
Jana Nidiffer, Pioneering Deans of Women: More Than Wise and Pious Matrons (New York: Teachers College Press, 2000), 99, 112; Talbot, More Than Lore, 110, 144.
Janice Gerda, “A History of the Conferences of Deans of Women, 1903– 1922” (PhD diss., Bowling Green State University, 2004), 97; Nidiffer, Pioneering Deans, 74.
Kathryn Sisson Phillips, My Room in the World: A Memoir (New York: Abingdon Press, 1964), 71.
Christine D. Myers, “Gendering the ‘Wisconsin Idea’: The Women’s Self-Government Association and University Life, c. 1898–1948,” in Gender, Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Experience, ed. Joyce Goodman and Jane Martin (Portland: Woburn Press, 2002): 148–172.
Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Universities, 1870–1937 (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1989), 305. On “social efficiency” versus “citizenship,” see Nidiffer, Pioneering Deans, 93–94, 99, 118–119.
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 246.
John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1938; reprint, New York: Collier Books, 1963), 67.
Talbot, More Than Lore, 123–125; Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1915); Dewey, Experience and Education;
Dewey, Freedom and Culture (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939).
Eunice Mae Acheson, The Effective Dean of Women: A Study of the Personal and Professional Characteristics of a Selected Group of Deans of Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), 38, 51, 76; Hanson, “Organizational Transformation,” 39, 84–89.
For a discussion of how deans of women led the development of the student affairs profession, see Robert Schwartz, Deans of Men and the Shaping of Modern College Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010);
and Robert Schwartz, “How Deans of Women Became Men,” The Review of Higher Education 20, 4 (Summer, 1997): 419–436.
Mueller, Educating Women for a Changing World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954), 147.
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), 167–213. Also, Mueller; “Memoirs of Mueller,” Box 2, Memoirs, 1935–1971; and Mueller, Letter to Mrs. Balz, June 5, 1948, Folder: Women, both in in c170, IUA.
Linda Eisenmann, Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945– 1965 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
Paula S. Fass, Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 161–163;
Robert G. Foster and Pauline Park Wilson, Women after College: A Study of the Effectiveness of Their Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942);
Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York, London: Harper & Brothers, 1947);
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 78;
Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 170;
Lynn White Jr., Educating Our Daughters: A Challenge to the Colleges (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 164–165.
Two of the many books that examine the implications of 1950s culture on women are William Henry Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the 20th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), Chapter 10;
Joanne J. Meyerowitz, ed. Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).
Tuttle, “What Became of the Dean of Women,” 170; Mirra Komarovsky, Women in the Modern World: Their Education and Their Dilemmas (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953); Mueller, Educating Women for a Changing World.
Althea Kratz Hottel, How Fare American Women? (Washington, DC: Commission on the Education of Women, American Council on Education, 1955), 21–23. According to Donna Shavlik, when ACE dismantled CEW, AAUW took over the CEW publications to continue the conversation regarding women’s education. Shavlik, Telephone Interview by Author, May 31, 2014.
Mueller, “The Cultural Pressures on Women,” in The Education of Women— Signs for the Future, ed. Opal D. David (Washington DC: American Council on Education, 1959), 54.
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© 2014 Kelly C. Sartorius
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Sartorius, K.C. (2014). Practicing Political Citizenship. In: Deans of Women and the Feminist Movement. Historical Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137481344_3
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