ANDREA฀WALTON฀is฀Assistant฀Professor฀

of฀Education฀at฀Indiana฀University,฀
Bloomington,฀where฀she฀teaches฀in฀the฀ Contents
Walton
Women฀and฀ This฀book฀illuminates฀the฀
philanthropic฀impulse฀that฀has฀infl฀uenced฀

Women฀and฀Philanthropy฀in฀Education
women’s฀education฀and฀its฀place฀in฀
Higher฀Education฀and฀Foundations฀
the฀broader฀history฀of฀philanthropy฀in฀
of฀Education฀programs฀and฀is฀also฀a฀

Philanthropy฀
Introduction:฀Women฀and฀Philanthropy฀in฀Education—A฀Problem฀of฀
America.฀Contributing฀to฀the฀history฀of฀
member฀of฀the฀Philanthropic฀Studies฀ Conceptions฀
faculty.฀She฀has฀published฀articles฀on฀ women,฀education,฀and฀philanthropy,฀
1.฀Teaching฀as฀Philanthropy:฀Catharine฀Beecher฀and฀the฀Hartford฀Female฀
women’s฀philanthropy,฀women’s฀higher฀ Women฀and฀Philanthropy฀in฀Education
Seminary
education,฀and฀the฀history฀of฀universities฀ shows฀how฀voluntary฀activity฀and฀
2.฀Philanthropy฀and฀Social฀Case฀Work:฀Mary฀E.฀Richmond฀and฀the฀Russell฀Sage฀
and฀voluntary฀associations฀in฀such฀venues฀ home-grown฀educational฀enterprise฀

in฀Education
Foundation,฀1909–1928
as฀History฀of฀Education,฀Historical฀Studies฀ were฀as฀important฀as฀big฀donors฀in฀the฀
3.฀Southern฀Poor฀Whites฀and฀Higher฀Education:฀Martha฀Berry’s฀Philanthropic฀
in฀Education,฀and฀History฀of฀Education฀ development฀of฀philanthropy.฀The฀essays฀
Strategies฀in฀the฀Building฀of฀Berry฀College
Quarterly.฀She฀is฀currently฀completing฀a฀ in฀this฀book฀are฀concerned฀with฀local฀as฀
book฀on฀the฀history฀of฀women฀at฀Columbia฀ 4.฀Creative฀Financing฀in฀Social฀Science:฀Women฀Scholars฀and฀Early฀Research
well฀as฀national฀effects฀of฀philanthropy,฀
University฀from฀the฀founding฀of฀Barnard฀ 5.฀Considering฀Her฀Infl฀uence:฀Sydnor฀H.฀Walker฀and฀Rockefeller฀Support฀for฀ discussing฀not฀only฀the฀importance฀of฀large฀
College฀in฀1889฀to฀the฀admission฀of฀women฀ Social฀Work,฀Social฀Scientists,฀and฀Universities฀in฀the฀South
monetary฀support฀but฀also฀the฀impact฀
to฀Columbia฀College฀in฀1983. 6.฀Brokering฀Old฀and฀New฀Philanthropic฀Traditions:฀Women’s฀Continuing฀ of฀smaller,฀timely฀gifts฀and฀the฀giving฀of฀
Education฀in฀the฀Cold฀War฀Era
time.฀Each฀provides฀an฀in-depth฀view฀of฀a฀
7.฀American฀Philanthropy฀and฀Women’s฀Education฀Exported:฀Missionary฀ particular฀fi฀gure,฀group,฀or฀institution,฀and฀
Teachers฀in฀Turkey฀
8.฀Sisters฀in฀Service:฀African฀American฀Sororities฀and฀Philanthropic฀Support฀of฀
edited฀by฀ examines฀the฀impact฀of฀the฀philanthropic฀
impulse฀within฀a฀particular฀setting฀or฀set฀
philanthropic฀and฀nonprofi฀t฀studies
Education฀ Andrea฀Walton of฀circumstances฀where฀women฀lent฀their฀
Dwight฀F.฀Burlingame฀and฀ 9.฀“Valuable฀and฀Legitimate฀Services”:฀Black฀and฀White฀Women’s฀Philanthropy฀ support฀to฀education.฀Many฀of฀the฀essays฀
David฀C.฀Hammack,฀editors through฀the฀PTA
focus฀on฀the฀individual฀lives฀of฀female฀
10.฀Women’s฀Philanthropy฀for฀Women’s฀Art฀in฀America,฀Past฀and฀Present philanthropists฀(Olivia฀Sage,฀Martha฀Berry,฀
11.฀“Nothing฀More฀for฀Men’s฀Colleges”:฀The฀Educational฀Philanthropy฀of฀ Catharine฀Beecher)฀and฀offer฀personal฀
Mrs.฀Russell฀Sage฀ portraits฀of฀philanthropy฀in฀the฀nineteenth฀
12.฀The฀Texture฀of฀Benevolence:฀Northern฀Philanthropy,฀Southern฀African฀ and฀twentieth฀centuries.฀These฀essays฀
American฀Women,฀and฀Higher฀Education,฀1930–1950 provide฀evidence฀of฀the฀key฀role฀played฀by฀
13.฀“Contributing฀to฀the฀Most฀Promising฀Peaceful฀Revolution฀in฀Our฀Time”:฀ women฀in฀the฀development฀of฀philanthropy฀
The฀American฀Women’s฀Scholarship฀for฀Japanese฀Women,฀1893–1941 and฀its฀importance฀to฀the฀education฀of฀
14.฀Supporting฀Females฀in฀a฀Male฀Field:฀Philanthropy฀for฀Women’s฀Engineering฀ women.฀
Education
The฀contributors฀are฀Jayne฀R.฀Beilke,฀
Amy฀Sue฀Bix,฀Karen฀J.฀Blair,฀Ruth฀Crocker,฀
Mary฀Ann฀Dzuback,฀Linda฀Eisenmann,฀
Marybeth฀Gasman,฀Frances฀Huehls,฀
Linda฀L.฀Johnson,฀Sarah฀Henry฀Lederman,฀
Eleanore฀Lenington,฀Victoria-María฀
http://iupress.indiana.edu MacDonald,฀Andrea฀Walton,฀
1-800-842-6796 Amy฀E.฀Wells,฀Roberta฀Wollons,฀and฀
INDIANA Christine฀Woyshner.
WOMEN AND PHILANTHROPY
IN EDUCATION
Philanthropic and Nonprofit Studies
Dwight F. Burlingame and David C. Hammack, editors
WOMEN AND PHILANTHROPY
IN EDUCATION

Edited by
Andrea Walton

Indiana University Press

Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA

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䉷 2005 by Indiana University Press

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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized

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The paper used in this publication meets the mini-

mum requirements of American National Standard
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Women and philanthropy in education / edited by

Andrea Walton.
p. cm.—(Philanthropic and nonprofit studies)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-253-34466-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Women in higher education—United States—
History. 2. Endowments—United States—History. 3.
Women philanthropists—United States—History. I.
Walton, Andrea, date II. Series.

LC1757.W63 2005
378.1’982—dc22
2004010950

1 2 3 4 5 10 09 08 07 06 05
To Claire T. Walton and Frank J. Walton
 CONTENTS

acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Women and Philanthropy in Education—A Problem

of Conceptions
Andrea Walton 1

PART I. SCHOOLS, COLLEGES, UNIVERSITIES, AND FOUNDATIONS

1. Teaching as Philanthropy: Catharine Beecher and the Hartford
Female Seminary
Frances Huehls 39
2. Philanthropy and Social Case Work: Mary E. Richmond and the
Russell Sage Foundation, 1909–1928
Sarah Henry Lederman 60
3. Southern Poor Whites and Higher Education: Martha Berry’s
Philanthropic Strategies in the Building of Berry College
Victoria-Marı́a MacDonald and Eleanore Lenington 81
4. Creative Financing in Social Science: Women Scholars and
Early Research
Mary Ann Dzuback 105
5. Considering Her Influence: Sydnor H. Walker and Rockefeller
Support for Social Work, Social Scientists, and Universities in
the South
Amy E. Wells 127
6. Brokering Old and New Philanthropic Traditions: Women’s
Continuing Education in the Cold War Era
Linda Eisenmann 148

PART II. WOMEN’S PHILANTHROPY AS AN AGENT OF SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL CHANGE

7. American Philanthropy and Women’s Education Exported: Missionary
Teachers in Turkey
Roberta Wollons 169
8. Sisters in Service: African American Sororities and Philanthropic
Support of Education
Marybeth Gasman 194

vii
CONTENTS

9. “Valuable and Legitimate Services”: Black and White Women’s

Philanthropy through the PTA
Christine Woyshner 215
10. Women’s Philanthropy for Women’s Art in America, Past and Present
Karen J. Blair 237

PART III. THE POLITICS OF PHILANTHROPY IN WOMEN’S EDUCATION:

RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER
11. “Nothing More for Men’s Colleges”: The Educational Philanthropy of
Mrs. Russell Sage
Ruth Crocker 257
12. The Texture of Benevolence: Northern Philanthropy, Southern African
American Women, and Higher Education, 1930–1950
Jayne R. Beilke 281
13. “Contributing to the Most Promising Peaceful Revolution in Our
Time”: The American Women’s Scholarship for Japanese Women,
1893–1941
Linda L. Johnson 298
14. Supporting Females in a Male Field: Philanthropy for Women’s
Engineering Education
Amy Sue Bix 320

contributors 347
index 351

viii
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book emerged from the synergy between my
experiences in teaching the history of education and in developing
graduate seminars on the history of philanthropy and education at
Indiana University. In designing and teaching these courses I became
more keenly aware of philanthropic influences in education and in-
creasingly interested in exploring the role that philanthropy—the ac-
tions not only of foundations and the wealthy, as the current narrative
of philanthropy suggests, but also of other organizations, communities,
and individuals—has played in shaping colleges and universities and,
indeed, a much broader array of educational institutions. Arguably,
while philanthropy has been one of the most powerful forces shaping
education in the U.S. and, in ways this book examines, a salient aspect
of women’s experience in education, it has also been one of the most
understudied influences on education.
Beginning in 2000, I had the opportunity to expand upon my
growing interest in the history of educational philanthropy as the di-
rector of the Foundation History Network, a project supported with
funds from the Lilly Endowment. This three-year project aimed to
bring together scholars from various institutions who are interested in
the study of philanthropy as a cultural phenomenon and to encourage
research and teaching in the history of philanthropy and education.
This book was the final product of that project. Each of the scholars
whose work appears here—among them, well known scholars of phi-
lanthropy and leading historians of women in education, senior and
junior scholars—brought her expertise to this volume. I am particularly
grateful to the contributors for their insights and wise counsel during
our meeting in Bloomington in December of 2001, when we gathered
to review and critique the draft chapters. Their generous contributions
of time and talent and their encouragement and support throughout
the project were invaluable assets to the success of this project.
Because this edited volume has been a collaborative project and in
many cases presents research that contributors have been engaged in
for a considerable period, a number of individuals and organizations

ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

who have supported and facilitated our work (individual and collective)
deserve to be thanked here. Generous funding from the Lilly Endow-
ment was crucial to supporting our collaboration and in bringing the
idea for this book to fruition. Directing the Foundation History Net-
work and editing this volume has been an intellectually rewarding
experience, and I am grateful for having been given this opportunity.
I would like also to extend my personal thanks to the Indiana
University Center on Philanthropy for its timely support of my initial
research project on women and philanthropy, which paved the way to
the ideas I have explored with colleagues in this volume. Special thanks
go to Darwin Stapleton, Kenneth Rose, and Thomas Rosenbaum of
the Rockefeller Archive Center for assisting a number of the research-
ers whose work is included in this volume, and to the National Acad-
emy of Education, which awarded a grant to support the collaboration
of four former Spencer postdoctoral fellows who contributed to this
project (Amy Sue Bix, Victoria-Marı́a MacDonald, Sarah Henry Led-
erman, and myself).
My work as director of the Foundation History Network and ed-
itor of Women and Philanthropy in Education was aided by several col-
leagues and staff members at Indiana University. Kate Boyle, project
assistant for the Foundation History Network, made all arrangements
for the seminar meetings and helped in editorial correspondence with
contributors. A number of individuals at Indiana University—staff
members Sandy Strain, Lisa Brameier, and Jan Ryser and colleagues
Barry Bull, Ed McClellan, Mary Ellen Brown, and Myrtle Scott—
took an interest in the book project and offered their encouragement.
David Smith, former director of the Poynter Center, lent his support
by co-hosting two speaker sessions related to the book project at the
Poynter Center. A special note of thanks goes to the Indiana Univer-
sity Center on Philanthropy—in particular, to Eugene Tempel, Mel-
issa Brown, and Beverly Ernest, who helped me in various tasks related
to administering the grant project.
A number of talented individuals helped with the production of
the manuscript. I wish to thank Hamid Tuama Mubarak for reading
the draft chapters and critiquing the introduction, and Danille Lind-
quist and Shoshanna Green for editing the manuscript at various
stages. I appreciated the active interest in this book that was shown
by series co-editors David Hammack and Dwight Burlingame and
the Indiana University Press editors Richard Higgins, Marvin Keenan,
Jane Lyle, and Robert Sloan.

x
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As a number of the lives and institutions examined in this volume

show, teaching and learning occur in various contexts and forms and
have often constituted an important bridge between philanthropy and
education. Throughout my studies and career, I have been lucky
enough to meet a number of remarkable teachers. I am especially
grateful to two women whose knowledge of philanthropy kindled my
own interest in the subject. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, noted historian
of the Carnegie philanthropies, introduced me to the history of edu-
cation and philanthropy during my graduate studies. In addition to
respecting her intellectual contributions to the study of educational
philanthropy—contributions that a number of the authors represented
here draw on—I have valued her support as a mentor and colleague.
Working with D. Susan Wisely, former director of evaluation at the
Lilly Endowment and project officer on the Foundation History Net-
work project, has been my good fortune. When I first met Susan in
1996 (as I was researching and interviewing for a biography of the
Hoosier philanthropist Clementine Miller Tangeman), I saw first-
hand her interest in the perspectives that historical scholarship can
bring to the study and practice of philanthropy. Susan has supported
this book project from its earliest days, attended the December 2001
working session for book contributors, and has given generously of her
time, creativity, and counsel. This book would not have been possible
without her. I am indebted to these two teachers and colleagues and
realize that my exchanges with them over the years inevitably kindled
and shaped my ideas about the ties between education and philan-
thropy and sparked my interest in undertaking a volume on women
and philanthropy in education.
While Women and Philanthropy in Education is a collaborative work
and could not have been possible without the assistance and support
of the several individuals and organizations I have mentioned, any
editorial errors or oversights are entirely my own.
Finally, I wish to close by recognizing and thanking my family—
especially my parents, Claire T. Walton and Frank J. Walton, my “first
teachers,” for their support and encouragement throughout my school-
ing and career. This book is dedicated to them.

xi
WOMEN AND PHILANTHROPY
IN EDUCATION
Introduction: Women and Philanthropy in Education—
A Problem of Conceptions
Andrea Walton

Literature has preserved the story. She chronicles the mistakes,

warns of pitfalls, and notes what methods have brought blessing. Lit-
erature has done more than compilation-service. She has brought
Philanthropy out of the chaos of occasional and often misdirected
pity into organic structure. . . . It is Nature’s inexorable law that un-
disciplined Charity shall not bless; that unwise Love shall never be
beneficent; that Wisdom is born of Experience. Now experience is
recorded in Literature; and it is written that Philanthropy cannot be
divorced from Education or from Religion. The three are one.
—Frances Abigail Goodale, The Literature of Philanthropy, 18931

I believe it rests largely with us to redeem the word philanthropy

from the strait and narrow meaning thrust upon it in popular un-
derstanding, if not in lexicography. It has come to signify with most
of us the giving of money, or of time or effort so considerable as to
be the marketable equivalent of money, to relieve sickness, pain, pov-
erty, religious blindness. It should mean far more,—the intelligent
exercise of moral and mental power applied directly or indirectly
through any and every instrumentality towards the physical, intellec-
tual, spiritual elevation of the race, in the man or in the mass.
—Helen Hiscock Backus, “The Need and the Opportunity for
College-Trained Women in Philanthropic Work,” 18872

Since at least the early 1800s, U.S. women have participated in

shaping education through philanthropy.3 They have supported insti-
tutions in which education occurs formally, from preschools and kin-
dergartens to colleges and universities, and they have been influential
as well in institutions and settings that foster more informal modes of
education, sites ranging from the museum and the church to the char-
ity organization. Indeed, by volunteering their time and donating both
money and gifts-in-kind, women have fashioned careers as philan-
thropists and educators, have used education to promote social change,

1
ANDREA WALTON

and have been instrumental in establishing and sustaining a wide array

of institutions where education occurs. Serving as missionaries, estab-
lishing and canvassing for female seminaries, working among the poor
as “friendly visitors” for the Charity Organization Society, organizing
PTA efforts to support local schools, working through sororities to
foster civic pride and race uplift, establishing vocational schools, pro-
viding timely funding for women scholars, tapping foundation support
in order to implement continuing education programs for women, giv-
ing large sums to leverage opportunities for women at male-dominated
institutions, and building the country’s first museum for female art-
ists—in all these philanthropic activities, women have enhanced the
educational experiences of themselves and of others. This volume seeks
to document this variety of women’s philanthropic experiences in ed-
ucation—both as donors and as recipients—over the last two centu-
ries. In so doing, contributors hope to integrate women’s experience
more fully into the narratives of both philanthropy and education.
Despite the long list of women’s philanthropic engagements, until
recent decades women have been virtually absent from dominant ac-
counts of U.S. philanthropy and remain excluded from, or at best
marginalized in, the literature on educational philanthropy.4 As has
been the case in many other fields, women were written out of the
history of philanthropy by virtue of what “counted” in the minds of
those who wrote the conventional histories. However, even a glance
at the literature of the past two decades reveals that scholars of
women’s history have already begun to address this lacuna. For in-
stance, scholars have produced significant works about women’s reli-
gious philanthropy. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Nancy Cott, Jane Hun-
ter, Patricia Ruth Hill, Peggy Pascoe, Susan Yohn, and Amanda
Porterfield have explored how the ideals of faith and self-sacrifice have
influenced white Protestant women’s philanthropy; Evelyn Higgin-
botham has examined women’s leadership within the black church;
Shelly Tennenbaum and Susan Chambre have told the story of Jewish
women’s philanthropy; and Mary Oates and Elizabeth McKeown and
Dorothy Brown have considered the role of Catholic nuns who sought
to address poverty, child welfare, health, and education long before
government involvement in these areas became common.5 In addition
to examining the long-standing traditions of religious philanthropy,
scholars interested in women’s achievements have also begun to study
women’s cultural philanthropy. Studies by Helen Horowitz, Karen
Blair, Kathleen McCarthy, Bernice Kert, and others have documented

2
 INTRODUCTION

women’s patronage of artists, museums, and other cultural institu-

tions.6 During the past two decades, women’s efforts to gain power
and visibility through voluntary associations and other philanthropic
organizations have also drawn scholarly attention. The works of Kath-
leen McCarthy, Anne Firor Scott, Kathryn Sklar, Nancy Hewitt, Suz-
anne Lebsock, Lori Ginzberg, Anne Boylan, Darlene Clark Hine, and
others have led the way in demonstrating how philanthropy enabled
women to exercise considerable power in the public sphere well before
the franchise.7 Indeed, by looking outside the realm of traditional party
politics and considering women’s political action on its own terms, this
literature has contributed new perspectives to both women’s history
and philanthropic studies.8
These efforts notwithstanding, substantial work remains to be done
in order to present a fuller portrait of women’s experience in philan-
thropy. In particular, more studies need to shed light on education—
an arena in which private donations have figured prominently in shap-
ing opportunities for both sexes and where women’s philanthropic
contributions have been long-standing, extraordinarily diverse, and
significant. Save for the stories of female luminaries like settlement
leader and Nobel laureate Jane Addams, of a few women benefactors
who had inherited substantial wealth (such as Sophia Smith and Anita
McCormick Blaine), and of women like Jane Stanford and Pauline
Durant, who gave jointly with their husbands, our knowledge of
women’s philanthropic action in education remains relatively limited.9
It is the premise of this volume that women have been absent from
the major literature on educational philanthropy largely because nar-
row conceptions of both philanthropy and education have dominated
scholarship on philanthropic action in education. As I will outline
below, and discuss at greater length later in this essay, most works
addressing the subject of educational philanthropy have tended to
equate philanthropy with large monetary gifts and foundation activity.
This frame of reference, reflecting a distinctly twentieth-century mind-
set, has produced a male-centered “high” history of educational phi-
lanthropy—a story of big donor giving focused especially on the in-
fluential role of foundations and the largesse of industrialists like
Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.10 While studies of wealthy
philanthropists are essential to understanding the ways elite private
power has shaped education, the emphasis on this type of philanthropy
has captured only a narrow range of philanthropic action in education
and has restricted our understanding of the history of educational phi-

3
ANDREA WALTON

lanthropy. Indeed, disproportionate attention has been paid to settings

where foundations have been most active and influential—notably, the
male-dominated research university—while the intersection of philan-
thropy and education in other settings has been relatively ignored.
More important, the focus on foundations and big donations has ob-
scured the compelling stories of many who have also left their phil-
anthropic mark on education, including people of color, members of
ethnic communities, and—our subject here—women. Therefore,
it may be argued that one major reason we have so little insight into
the history of women as philanthropic actors in education is that we
have underestimated the significance of small but timely gifts—what
John Gardner aptly called the “Mississippi River of small gifts”—that
even today account for a significant share of giving in the United
States.11
Simply put, by thinking about educational philanthropy in narrow
terms—first by equating philanthropy with large monetary donations
and then by conceiving of education only as the formal instructional
activities associated with schools and universities—current scholarship
has not “seen” women’s philanthropic action in education. Indeed, to
borrow David Tyack’s expression, by focusing attention on one partic-
ular “way of seeing,” historians (even historians of women in educa-
tion) have overlooked the expansiveness, complexity, and significance
of women’s giving to education and have not seen this giving as part
of a larger cultural tapestry of women’s philanthropy.12 Accordingly, in
seeking to remedy this problem, this volume aims not merely to iden-
tify women of great wealth or fame who gave generously to colleges
and universities, thereby offering a female image in the mold of the
familiar narrative of men’s giving to education. Instead, this volume
considers women’s philanthropy in education on its own terms. To
achieve this, the fourteen chapters of this book cast their net widely,
adopting very broad definitions of both education and philanthropy.
Each chapter provides an in-depth view of a particular figure, group,
or institution, and examines the philanthropic impulse within a par-
ticular setting or set of circumstances. From these diverse portraits, we
reach new understandings of women’s philanthropic contributions
both to the familiar institutions of formal education—schools, col-
leges, and universities, where the impact of women’s giving has been
thought to be insignificant or negligible—and to foundations, where
women were thought to be virtually absent.

4
 INTRODUCTION

Beyond helping us to see this familiar terrain in the history of

education and the history of philanthropy anew, however, the chapters
also help widen our angle of vision on educational philanthropy as a
cultural phenomenon. When we consider the variety of organizations
and settings where women’s education and giving have occurred in-
formally—among them, for instance, the missionary group, the mu-
seum, and the voluntary association—the importance of educational
philanthropy to the history of women in education and the significance
of women’s educational philanthropy to the story of philanthropy in
the U.S. become more apparent. Collectively, the chapters underscore
the variety of means by which women—who often had less access to
disposable wealth than men—supported education and adopted edu-
cation as a means to advance philanthropic ends. In all, though they
encountered gender-related barriers in nearly every sphere of life, in-
cluding education and philanthropy, women were able, through the
channels of educational philanthropy, to promote new ideas, to ad-
vance their individual and collective goals, and to shape education in
the U.S. over the centuries.

WHY STUDY WOMEN’S EXPERIENCE AT THE INTERSECTION

OF PHILANTHROPY AND EDUCATION?
Exploring the significance and variety of women’s philanthropic
action in education is important because both philanthropy and edu-
cation were among the earliest spaces where women, though still act-
ing within culturally prescribed roles, found opportunities to partici-
pate in the public sphere. The founding of the Society for the Relief
of Poor Widows with Small Children in 1797 represented one of the
earliest examples of women’s leadership in a philanthropic organiza-
tion.13 The closing decades of the eighteenth century and the early
decades of the nineteenth century saw women—often inspired by re-
ligious conviction and enabled by a cultural belief in women’s morality
and nurturing qualities—gain both a modicum of independence and
social recognition as teachers in a host of emerging educational insti-
tutions: the early summer district schools, parochial and mission
schools, and Sunday schools.14 Also by the early decades of the nine-
teenth century, the confluence of religious fervor, democratic senti-
ment, and notions of philanthropy and volunteering had given rise to
a wide array of institutions that provided education to women and

5
ANDREA WALTON

girls—among them the charity school, the missionary school, the ly-
ceum, the academy, and the seminary. For example, rising female lit-
eracy and the need for teachers fostered a demand for women’s higher
schooling as early as the 1820s and, in light of women’s exclusion from
the established colleges, provided the rationale for creating the female
seminary as a new institution founded for women by philanthropic-
minded women like Mary Lyon and Catharine Beecher (see chapter
1).15 These new educational avenues and the collegiate opportunities
that soon followed gave social prominence to the moral and intellectual
qualities of the educated woman who, as a new counterpart to the
leisure-class woman, might contribute to the advancement of society
at home and abroad.16
Throughout the nineteenth century, the growth of urbanism and
the hardships of city life created a special niche for women’s entry into
the public sphere as volunteers in relief societies and charities that
aided widows, unwed mothers, orphans, the sick, and the poor.17 As
settlement leader Jane Addams poignantly described, her generation
of educated women often faced the demands of the “family claim,”
but many felt a special burden to apply their education in broader
public arenas in order to give back to society, and in the process they
enriched their own lives as well.18 Throughout the nineteenth century
changes in women’s education, coupled with changes in women’s life
cycle and increased economic independence for many women, had
opened new horizons for women’s philanthropy in the U.S.—and
much of this effort was directed to education. For instance, women
used philanthropic means and the support of volunteer networks to
augment their influence on the affairs of previously all-male institu-
tions or male-administered institutions such as the school (see chapter
9 on PTAs). More often, as they faced exclusion from these establish-
ments, they sought to create and administer their own institutions.
Indeed, by embracing separatism and building what Kathleen Mc-
Carthy has described as “parallel power structures,” philanthropically
minded women were able to sustain their own political culture, par-
ticipate in institutional development, and effect social reform.19
Through a variety of experiences—in all-female or mixed-gender set-
tings, in well-established institutions or newly founded ones—women
forged identities and opportunities for themselves and contributed to
philanthropy and education alike.20

6
 INTRODUCTION

PHILANTHROPY BROADLY CONCEIVED: NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHRONICLES

OF WOMEN’S PHILANTHROPIC ENGAGEMENTS
Women continued to expand their participation in philanthropic
activities throughout the nineteenth century. By the 1890s, when
women attempted to chronicle the social significance of their public
achievements, they identified philanthropic activity as one of the few
arenas where they had made great strides. Frances Abigail Goodale’s
The Literature of Philanthropy (1893) is such an attempt; it sheds light
not only on what “counted” as philanthropy in the nineteenth century
but also on the connection between philanthropy and education and
on women’s participation in a variety of philanthropic activities.21 As
one of Oneida County’s most prominent clubwomen, Goodale was
invited by the Board of Women Managers of New York State to edit
a collection of writings on philanthropy by the state’s female citizens
during the nineteenth century. The board proposed that Goodale’s
volume on philanthropy would join works on education, such as Anna
C. Brackett’s Women and the Higher Education (1893) and Kate Doug-
las Wiggin’s The Kindergarten (1893), as well as compilations of wom-
en’s writings in other fields. Together, these works were intended to
reflect the caliber of women’s achievements and be a fitting donation
to the Women’s Building at the Chicago Exhibition.22
As Goodale’s volume documents, women were very much at the
forefront of the substantive debates and engagements in the major
philanthropic enterprises of the nineteenth century—they defined,
documented, critiqued, and, in Goodale’s case, advocated and pro-
moted the role of philanthropy in a variety of settings. She herself
drew attention to activism in the movement for the abolition of slav-
ery, work on prison reform, efforts to improve tenement conditions,
and support for the Red Cross, as well as experiments in the edu-
cation of the blind, settlement life, and manual training institutes. In
making clear to the society of her time how important these phil-
anthropic acts were, Goodale argued that these deeds were “variations
of one great theme: the invariable, close interdependence and insep-
arable interests of the different members of the Body Social.” In ed-
ucation, Goodale found an especially powerful “agency of reform” and
a means for providing for the welfare of the poor—the masses whose
condition, if not improved, could become a “desperate menace to
the State.” Furthermore, she eloquently articulated the connection
between inspired philanthropy and education by insisting that

7
ANDREA WALTON

“[p]hilanthropy cannot be divorced from Education nor from Reli-

gion. The three are one.”23
Goodale’s anthology reflects the tenor of scholarship produced by
her generation. It is a work of more limited critical insight and schol-
arly scope than the philosophical writings of her younger contempo-
raries (notably Jane Addams and Florence Kelley); nevertheless, the
volume remains a significant artifact in the history of women and
philanthropy because it sheds light on three important themes. First,
the book reveals that women were conscious of the importance of
philanthropy to society and of the valuable contributions they made
to their communities through this vehicle—a self-awareness evident
before the franchise and long before the women’s movement that gave
rise to women’s studies. Until recently, women generally have not been
thought of as philanthropists nor identified as commentators and writ-
ers on the subject of philanthropy; however, Goodale’s volume suggests
the contrary—that women were very much engaged in both philan-
thropic action and in critiquing and documenting philanthropic activ-
ity.24 Second, given the variety of civic activities and humanitarian
causes that women engaged in and that Goodale considered philan-
thropic acts, one begins to understand that the term philanthropy in
the nineteenth century meant not only the giving of money, but also
the giving of time and talent.25 Third, and hardly least important,
Goodale identified education as a vital vehicle for social uplift and an
important arena for philanthropic action.26
Given Goodale’s volume on women and nineteenth-century phi-
lanthropy, one is compelled to ask: Why are women often thought of
as “new” philanthropists? Why has philanthropy, especially educational
philanthropy, become associated most commonly with monetary giving
and foundation activity? What are the ramifications of this dominant
narrow conception for understanding women’s philanthropic experi-
ence in education? And what course should scholarship on philan-
thropy and education take to provide a better understanding of
women’s philanthropic experience in education? Perhaps a brief review
of the major works on philanthropic action in education during the
twentieth century may shed light on the historiographical problem at
hand.

8
 INTRODUCTION

HISTORIES OF PHILANTHROPIC ACTION IN EDUCATION:

THE PROBLEM OF ABSENT WOMEN
A comprehensive historiography of the literature on philanthropy
in the United States lies outside the scope of this short introduction.
Moreover, a good overview of the major trends in scholarship on phi-
lanthropy may be found in the works of a number of scholars—among
them Merle Curti, Robert Bremner, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Jo-
seph Kiger, Peter Dobkin Hall, and Lawrence J. Friedman.27 Rather,
our intent here is to review briefly the major works that deal directly
with the history of philanthropic action in education in order to help
explain how women’s experience has been eclipsed. Two intercon-
nected trends, one within the practice of philanthropy and the other
within writings about philanthropy, may help us understand why the
story of women’s philanthropy was relegated to the margins of the
larger study of philanthropy and especially of scholarship on educa-
tional philanthropy.
The first trend concerns a shift in the common understanding of
the term philanthropy that may have started well before the beginning
of the twentieth century.28 Philanthropic activity was in the foreground
of daily life during the early decades of the twentieth century no less
than it was in the nineteenth-century world that Goodale had de-
scribed in The Literature of Philanthropy. Increasingly, however, news-
paper accounts of women volunteering in PTAs and charity organi-
zations (for example) became overshadowed by captivating stories of
giving at an unprecedented scale; the press focused on the donor who
single-handedly funded an academic institution, the millionaire who
bequeathed a large sum to the arts, and the activities of great foun-
dations like Carnegie and Rockefeller.29 Philanthropy, which had been
understood as the voluntary giving of time and money on the basis of
deeply held religious, benevolent, and humanitarian ideals, became
more closely associated with organizational innovations and scientific
changes in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the early
decades of the twentieth century: philanthropy became synonymous
with monetary donations, professional fundraising, and foundation ac-
tivity.30 Since women were not among the few who accumulated vast
wealth in the postbellum decades and steered the course of foundation
work, women’s earlier and continued contributions were eclipsed as
histories focused on this crucial but narrow understanding of philan-
thropy.

9
ANDREA WALTON

Concurrent with late-nineteenth-century accumulations of wealth

and shifts in the meaning and scope of philanthropy came a second
trend: the rise of universities. This, in turn, led to the emergence of
educational philanthropy as a subject of study within the history of
education—a field that was striving for legitimacy and direction. In
1919, Jesse Sears’s dissertation on “Philanthropy in the History of
American Higher Education” became the first work to look at edu-
cational philanthropy systematically.31 Searching for a suitable way to
frame his study, Sears turned to economic theory. He chose to regard
philanthropy as an economic rather than a cultural phenomenon,
charting the gifts-in-kind, bequests, endowments, and gifts that, from
his vantage point, were a testament to “social progress” and reflected
“growing confidence” in philanthropy’s ability to sustain higher edu-
cation.32 The story of educational philanthropy as told by Sears began
with a recounting of the small gifts that supported the basic survival
of fledgling institutions and culminated in explaining how big donors
and great foundations not only could meet present needs, but also had
the capacity to support expansion and innovation in higher education.
It is significant that in Sears’s story, women appear only in the early
period of educational philanthropy—a period when gifts to colleges
were small. As Sears considers the nineteenth century, his focus shifts
to major donations and foundation activity, and consideration of
“women-as-donors” suddenly disappears from his narrative.
By the appearance of the next major study of educational philan-
thropy—Ernest Hollis’s Philanthropic Foundations and Higher Educa-
tion (1938)—foundations had proliferated in the U.S. Benefiting from
well over three decades of insight into foundation activity, Hollis’s
analysis moved beyond Sears’s valuable tabulations to consider the
foundation as a social institution that helped “define” the college. Hol-
lis also recognized philanthropy’s role in developing a new type of
“research” institution; the Brookings and the Carnegie Institutions are
examples.33 As for women, Hollis included just two brief mentions:
one reference to studies by Eduard Lindeman, Harold Coffman, and
Earl McGrath of the composition of boards of trustees and the other
a comment on foundation support for curricular experimentation at
Bennington and Sarah Lawrence Colleges.34 Hollis’s focus on foun-
dations placed women as recipients of philanthropy rather than as
philanthropists. Reflecting the gender biases and research methods of
their times, neither Sears nor Hollis examined women’s education in
their works on educational philanthropy—and the few paragraphs or

10
 INTRODUCTION

pages they included merely celebrated women’s increased access to ed-

ucation, with little critical insight into who decided which women
would receive which type of education and with scant recognition of
women’s participation in the broader traditions of philanthropy.
The legacy of women’s philanthropic action in education continued
to recede from view as the history of education developed into a sub-
discipline. Works by Jane Addams, Eleanor Flexner, Mary Beard, and
other female authors that captured important aspects of the relation-
ship between women’s history and philanthropic action in education
were generally discounted as “amateur” writings or minimalized by
scholars of education as contributions to the highly feminized field of
social work.35 Works by these women were thought to have little rel-
evance to the study of modern education and, most especially, to the
intellectual cornerstone of the history of education as a university
study: the history of public schooling. For many historians writing in
the early twentieth century, the charitable and voluntary roots of ed-
ucation were to be studied not in their own right but rather as pre-
cursors, in a story of progress, to the rise of public schooling.36 Given
these preoccupations, as well as the fact that historians writing about
schooling often had different career patterns, institutional affiliations,
and audiences than those studying higher education, it is not surpris-
ing that interest in educational philanthropy lagged. As Peter Dobkin
Hall explains, before the mid-1950s faculty avoided research on
philanthropy-related topics “not only because it tended to lead them
toward the kinds of essentially political concerns with wealth and
power that were unlikely to enhance their career prospects, but also
because studying the relation of philanthropy to higher education
tended to raise uncomfortable questions about their own power, status,
and legitimacy.”37 Such dynamics within the history of education not
only made women’s contributions to philanthropy and to education
far less visible, but they also help explain why, until recently, writing
about educational philanthropy was less the work of historians of ed-
ucation than the province of insiders: foundation men.38
It would not be until the 1950s, when Merle Curti launched an
effort to build philanthropy as an independent field of research, that
a major historian would conceptualize and promote the study of phi-
lanthropy as a phenomenon that is central rather than tangential to
the study of the history of education. Indeed, circumstances in the
1950s presented an opportunity to generate scholarly interest in phi-
lanthropy and education. A confluence of factors—among them, gov-

11
ANDREA WALTON

ernment criticism of foundation politics, Cold War interests in ex-

panding higher education and developing area studies (including
American studies, where Curti left his mark),39 and the private funding
of new institutions (like the Foundation Center) designed to improve
public understanding of foundation activity—created an attractive
niche for the study of educational philanthropy within the university.40
Equally important, the historian who perceived potential in the mo-
ment and who tried to galvanize interest in educational philanthropy
was also one who viewed education as an agency for cultural trans-
mission and was somewhat conversant with women’s history and the
histories of other disfranchised groups.41
Writing in the 1950s, Curti identified philanthropy as an “agent”
and “index” of culture and a “key” to understanding the development
of important intellectual and cultural U.S. institutions, including col-
leges and universities.42 In addition, Curti was one of the earliest his-
torians to trace the usage of the term philanthropy and, especially im-
portant here, to underscore that the concept had in fact changed over
time—from giving anchored in religious charity and encompassing
donations of what are often called “time, talent, and treasure” to giving
that is more associated with monetary gifts, and for secular as well as
religious reasons.43 Though Curti’s work on philanthropy has received
uneven attention from scholars and practitioners over the years, in part
because the social sciences have moved away from the concept of “na-
tional character,” his efforts should be seen as important milestones in
philanthropic studies and the study of educational philanthropy. Curti’s
works pointed to the relationship between philanthropist and recipi-
ent, probed issues of donor motivation, examined the ties between
philanthropy and innovation, and explored the leverage of philan-
thropy to promote certain goals.44 Despite Curti’s efforts, which were
supported by the Ford and Russell Sage Foundations, the type of
sustained interdisciplinary research in the history of philanthropy that
he had hoped to kindle at Wisconsin in the 1950s and early 1960s
did not gain momentum.45 Only recently has a history text appeared
to replace Bremner’s American Philanthropy (1960), and Curti’s Phi-
lanthropy and the Shaping of American Higher Education (1965), which
he co-authored with his student Roderick Nash, remains the most
recent overview of its subject.46
Whereas the decades from Sears’s pioneering work to Curti’s ef-
forts were characterized by intellectual fits and starts, a more sustained
interest in the study of philanthropic action in education began to

12
 INTRODUCTION

germinate in the 1970s and 1980s. As historians of education debated

whether schooling was liberating or an imposition, a number of schol-
ars carried this debate to educational philanthropy, producing a liter-
ature that was polarized between advocacy and social control argu-
ments.47 But despite the divide, scholarship on foundation activity in
education broadened as foundations became more self-conscious about
their history. Responding to political pressure, they encouraged re-
search by making important resources accessible in such venues as the
Rockefeller Archive Center (Sleepy Hollow, New York), the Ruth
Lilly Special Collections and Archives (Indiana University–Purdue
University Indianapolis), and the Rare Book and Manuscript Collec-
tion at Columbia University (New York City).48 Perhaps reflecting
larger debates within U.S. politics, much of the scholarship on phi-
lanthropy tended to be preoccupied with the role of private giving in
shaping U.S. public policy.49 Within the field of education, this ori-
entation translated primarily into a focus on foundation involvement
in higher education.50
Works by Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Steven Wheatley, Kenneth
Ludmerer, Robert Kohler, Donald Fisher, Martin Bulmer, and others
offered case studies that explored questions ranging from the func-
tioning of foundations within a democracy to connections between
foundations and intellectuals, support for research and the institution-
alization of disciplinary knowledge, and standardization and reform
within the professions and educational institutions.51 In addition to
such studies, the efflorescence of scholarship on African American
education inevitably delved into the motivations and outcomes of
foundation action. Studies by John Stanfield, James Anderson, Eric
Anderson and Alfred Moss, and, most recently, William Watkins have
critiqued the politics of benevolence and, to varying degrees, have de-
picted the experiences of recipients and their ability to challenge and,
in some instances, even to subvert a donor’s agenda.52 Notwithstanding
the tremendous value of this recent scholarship in helping to unravel
the complex history of educational philanthropy, this literature did not
consider the impact of foundations on women’s education, nor did it
relate the story of foundation activities to women’s experience either
as recipients of foundation money (see chapter 12) or as program of-
ficers and foundation staff (see chapter 5).53
Thus, a wide terrain remains open for historians to explore. For-
tunately, the works of several scholars writing in the fields of philan-
thropic studies, women’s history, and the history of women in edu-

13
ANDREA WALTON

cation may help in efforts to retrieve the story of women’s philanthropy

in education. The work of Kathleen McCarthy, Anne Firor Scott,
Suzanne Lebsock, Kathryn Sklar, Anne Boylan, Lori Ginzberg, and
others has already pointed the way.54 Moreover, the discussion of
women’s philanthropy has been refined as Nancy Hewitt, Darlene
Clark Hine, and others have brought the politics of race, ethnicity,
and class to the foreground and identified the “fissures” that philan-
thropy, regardless of the giver’s professed intentions, has in some in-
stances opened among women.55 This volume contributes to this
scholarship as the fourteen chapters document various aspects of
women’s philanthropic experience in education and as the authors re-
examine the interconnections of philanthropy and education by re-
claiming expansive definitions for both.

CONCEPTUALIZING PHILANTHROPY AND EDUCATION

Robert Payton’s conception of philanthropy as all “voluntary action
for the public good”56 is conducive to acknowledging much of the
volunteering and financial support that women have given to education
during the last two hundred years. The chapters of this book are in-
formed by a similar orientation toward philanthropy; authors regard
philanthropy as all voluntary giving of “time, talent, and treasure,” by
individuals and organizations, for the “public good,” regardless of
whether the underlying impulse is religious or secular.57 This broader
definition, which embraces financial donations, gifts-in-kind, and vol-
untary service in associations and organizations (what McCarthy has
identified as “an economy of time”), has historical precedent and is
particularly useful for considering the variety of women’s contributions
to education—including the “invisible” careers of female volunteers
whose service remains crucial to advancing educational institutions and
causes.58
Similarly, this volume is informed by a broad definition of edu-
cation. Definitions of education began to narrow much earlier than
did definitions of philanthropy, and the trend continued well into the
early years of the twentieth century. As Ellen Lagemann has argued,
education became more closely associated with formal schooling (K–
12 to university level) at the end of the nineteenth century, to the
exclusion of other environments where learning and teaching occur
informally.59 The narrowing conception of education and the politics
of writing on the history of education excluded or undervalued many

14
 INTRODUCTION

of the experiences and contributions of women.60 For example, themes

related to school administration and the stories of university builders—
the likes of Harvard’s Charles W. Eliot, Cornell’s Andrew D. White,
and Johns Hopkins’s Daniel Coit Gilman—dominated the literature
on education, while “feminized” areas such as teaching and student
affairs received scant attention. However, beginning in the 1970s,
the dearth of historical research on women in education was chal-
lenged as scholars such as Jill Ker Conway, Patricia Albjerg Graham,
Anne Firor Scott, Margaret Rossiter, and Geraldine Jonçich Clifford
brought the methods of the “new women’s history” to the study of
education.61 Such pioneering efforts, attentive to the little-considered
connections between the personal and the public, began the initial task
of recovering women’s achievements in education by drawing upon
lively debates in women’s history and capitalizing on a wave of cultural
revisionism in the history of education, sparked by the writings of
Bernard Bailyn and Lawrence Cremin.62 By considering the dynamics
of colonial life on its own terms as well as the institutions that edu-
cated individuals long before the rise of public schooling, Bailyn ar-
rived at a very broad conception of education: “The entire process by
which a culture transmits itself across the generations.” This broad
conception of education was refined by Cremin in his trilogy on the
history of U.S. education, in which he explored the multiplicity of
institutions and settings that figured prominently in shaping the
American educational experience over the centuries.63 Though neither
Bailyn nor Cremin was especially concerned with matters related to
gender, their latitudinarian approaches together with advances in
women’s history and gender studies have helped further the challenge
of documenting women’s achievements as well as the persistent gender
barriers women have faced in education.
In the past three decades, scholarship on women has looked out-
side the institutions that have traditionally dominated the historical
literature on education, namely, public schools, colleges, and univer-
sities. In so doing, this scholarship identified a myriad of ways and
places in which women were educated; it also drew attention to the
public spaces, organizations, and institutions that women created, led,
and capitalized upon for educational purposes—among them, female
academies and seminaries, normal schools, women’s clubs, sororities,
and social settlements.64 Ellen Condliffe Lagemann’s A Generation of
Women (1979), for instance, built on Bailyn and Cremin’s work and
the “new” women’s history to provide great insight into the education

15
ANDREA WALTON

of women during the Progressive Era.65 Thus, by employing a broader

definition of education, historians have understood women’s education
on its own terms and have increasingly shifted their focus away from
women’s exclusion and marginalization and toward an accounting that
also acknowledges women’s agency. However, in exploring women’s
forays into male-dominated institutions and alternative pathways to
leadership, historians of women in education have not seen women’s
support of education as part of a larger tapestry of women’s philan-
thropy. Thus, the chapters of this volume, informed by Bailyn and
Cremin’s broad conception of education, will consider women’s con-
tributions to education as philanthropists in a variety of settings—from
women’s missionary work in the nineteenth century (chapter 7) to
feminist grassroots fundraising on behalf of women artists in the twen-
tieth century (chapter 10) and from all-female seminaries (chapter 1)
to coeducational research universities (chapter 14).

CHAPTER ORGANIZATION
Though mostly focused on documenting examples of women’s
agency through philanthropy, the chapters of this volume also depict
the types of challenges and limitations women have encountered as
both donors and recipients. While any categorization is artificial, and
inevitably themes in different chapters will overlap, this volume is or-
ganized into three parts and coheres around three broad and inter-
related questions. First, how did women’s benefaction, their fundrais-
ing strategies, and their ability to capitalize on various social and
intellectual networks of support contribute to the advancement of ed-
ucation—by helping to found new institutions, by implementing re-
forms at existing institutions, and by contributing to the organization,
creation, and dissemination of knowledge? Second, what has been the
role of philanthropists and foundations in shaping the content and
mission of women’s education, in leveraging (or perhaps limiting) ed-
ucational and professional opportunities for women, and in defining
the needs of the female student, scholar, and professional—thereby
becoming a major determinant of women’s access to education and to
the resources needed for research?66 And third, how did differences
among women—racial, class, ethnic, religious, and regional—play out
as women’s philanthropic action influenced women’s education and as
women were influenced by philanthropy generally?
Part I, “Schools, Colleges, Universities, and Foundations,” focuses

16
 INTRODUCTION

on institutions devoted to providing or supporting formal instruction.

More specifically, this group of chapters depicts women’s role in the
founding and development of educational institutions and in helping
to shape the disciplines and the professions. In chapter 1, Frances
Huehls’s discussion of Catharine Beecher (1800–1878) provides a use-
ful point of departure for this volume by painting a richly textured
portrait of Beecher and her recognition of the integral ties among
philanthropy, religion, and education. Beecher’s biography sheds light
on earlier conceptions of philanthropy and provides an early example
of women’s self-consciousness about the personal and social signifi-
cance of giving. Huehls notes that Beecher, contrary to the Calvinist
tenets of her upbringing, believed good works were a pathway to sal-
vation. As the founder of one of the earliest women’s seminaries, Bee-
cher conceptualized the exchange between teacher and student as an
expression of good works and, therefore, regarded teaching as a phil-
anthropic activity. Beecher’s ability to promote and institutionalize her
vision rested on her ability to devote sufficient time to administration,
teaching, and fundraising efforts—both at the Hartford Female Sem-
inary and later on the western frontier. In chapter 2, Sarah Henry
Lederman also uses biography to explore the life and career of Mary
Richmond (1861–1928), who began her career at the Baltimore Char-
ity Organization Society and later headed the Charity Organization
Department at the Russell Sage Foundation from 1909 until her death
in 1928. Like Beecher, Richmond theorized about the nature of the
philanthropic relationship between donor and recipient. But Rich-
mond’s most valuable contribution was her attempt to systematize so-
cial work long before this feminized field became a university unit.
Lederman argues that Richmond was able to codify and promote the
tenets of social case work through her publications and teaching in-
stitutes but, in an age of growing bureaucracy, was in the end unable
to control how case work techniques would be used or to preserve her
vision of a caring relationship between social worker and client.
Moving from stories of women like Beecher and Richmond, who
worked within female institutions or feminized fields and whose ca-
reers were built in the Northeast, in chapter 3 Victoria-Marı́a Mac-
Donald and Eleanore Lenington shift the focus to the South by pro-
viding a portrait of Martha McChesney Berry (1866–1942). A proud
Southerner, born and raised in Floyd County, Georgia, Martha Berry
worked tirelessly raising financial support for the industrial schools she
founded to educate poor white mountain children. As MacDonald and

17
ANDREA WALTON

Lenington assert, though Berry’s efforts have received less attention

from historians than the philanthropy of white northern foundations
or the work of Booker T. Washington on behalf of black education in
the South, she was a well-known figure and champion of vocational
schooling in the South. MacDonald and Lenington also show that
although Berry’s efforts were focused in the South, her fundraising
efforts connected her to major national figures in philanthropy and to
leaders of the industrial education movement and others who worked
to improve southern education, including Booker T. Washington,
Robert Ogden, Andrew Carnegie, Olivia Sage, and Berry’s most gen-
erous benefactor, Henry Ford.
The next three chapters of part I examine facets of how philan-
thropic action enabled women to shape the enterprise of higher edu-
cation. In chapter 4, Mary Ann Dzuback focuses on the crucial role
of women’s patronage for female scholars, who generally lacked access
to the foundation resources that promoted the careers of their male
counterparts. Capturing women’s ability to cultivate and capitalize on
“creative financing” in two strikingly different settings—a teaching-
oriented private women’s liberal arts college and a public land-grant
university—Dzuback shows how this small-scale but timely funding
was instrumental in enabling women scholars to produce pioneering
social science research. As Dzuback points out, much of the research
was done on topics that were first deemed relevant only to women’s
experience, but which later emerged as important areas of social sci-
ence (e.g., consumer economics).
Providing a rare view of the donor-recipient relationship from the
perspective of a female foundation officer, in chapter 5 Amy Wells
considers the career and grantmaking philosophy of Sydnor Walker,
who joined the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial in 1924 as a
“research associate” and eventually became acting director of the Di-
vision of Social Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation. Walker had
studied at Vassar and Columbia, and although her career was in some
respects limited by her gender, Wells indicates that she successfully
used her foundation employment as a platform for promoting her view
of research and the social sciences. Displaying an enabling blend of
“heart and head” in her grantmaking, Walker exerted a considerable
influence through her work in providing foundation support to social
scientists in southern universities during the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter
6, by Linda Eisenmann, explores three institutions where university
women, seeking to provide a better fit between the structure of higher

18
 INTRODUCTION

education and the realities of women’s life cycles, capitalized on sup-

port from the Carnegie Foundation (and the interest of Carnegie proj-
ect officer Florence Anderson) to develop pathbreaking continuing ed-
ucation programs for women in the early 1960s. Eisenmann outlines
how traditional forms of women’s giving to education—“grassroots”
alumnae giving and women’s local fundraising networks—were dove-
tailed with support from national foundations; these efforts laid the
ground for further foundation involvement in developing women’s
studies in the 1970s and 1980s.
Whereas part I examines women’s giving to institutions where ed-
ucation takes place formally, part II, “Women’s Philanthropy as an
Agent of Social and Educational Change,” explores women’s philan-
thropic activity in informal educational settings. In chapter 7, Roberta
Wollons connects Mary Lyon’s Mount Holyoke model of women’s
education to the larger story of evangelical Protestantism by consid-
ering the missionary work of Mary and Charlotte Ely (1841–1913;
1839–1915) and Elizabeth Stone (1846–1920), who strove to bring
their Christian convictions and Western values to bear on the people
of the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). In narrating the journey of these
women, Wollons identifies two unexpected outcomes of the philan-
thropic work to which these women were devoted. First, even as the
women students valued their newly acquired literacy, they resisted the
particular vision of Christianity the missionaries offered. Second, and
more significant, the missionaries, who hoped to save “other” women,
were themselves changed—educated, if you will—by them.
Marybeth Gasman provides another view of the relationship be-
tween women’s education and commitment to philanthropic activity
in chapter 8. In this chapter, Gasman gives an overview of the found-
ing and education-related contributions of black sororities, exploring
the historical justification for sororities and explaining their conflicted
status within the African American community. Further, Gasman
shows how the lifetime commitment to service that sorority sisters
affirmed translated into a variety of efforts to offset the paucity of
resources for African Americans in a segregated and unequal system
of education. Among other activities, sorority sisters raised library
funds, sponsored teacher development workshops, and administered
fellowship programs. As Gasman concludes, the visibility and success
sororities achieved in supporting education helped inspire black
women to assume leadership in important political causes such as suf-
frage, desegregation, and, later, the civil rights movement. Much like

19
ANDREA WALTON

Gasman, in chapter 9 Christine Woyshner documents the power of

organized womanhood in the service of education. Woyshner’s essay
focuses on the school-related fundraising of the PTA, a voluntary as-
sociation founded as the National Congress of Mothers in 1897. As
Woyshner notes, the PTA has been understudied—given its long-
standing influence on schools—and generally has been seen as a re-
sponse by communities to the increased bureaucratization of schools.
Instead, Woyshner looks at the PTA within the philanthropic frame-
work of the larger women’s club movement. She asserts that against
the background of a professionalizing school system, gender hierar-
chies created tensions between white PTA women and male school
administrators on the one hand, while on the other, race and class
hierarchies defined the subordination of black PTAs to their white
counterparts.
In chapter 10, Karen Blair considers women’s collective philan-
thropic action in educating the public about women’s art and building
and directing museums to provide a space for women’s art, thereby
challenging traditional canons and establishing alternatives to the mu-
seums founded and supported by philanthropic men. Drawing impor-
tant parallels between women’s efforts in the arts during the Progres-
sive Era and the feminist movement of the 1970s, Blair’s chapter
explores how women activists and artists conceptualized the process
of institution-building as an educational process—one that challenged
old aesthetics, shaped new cultural sensibilities, and (through both
grassroots organizing and large gifts) helped gain public support for
the arts.
The third and final section of this book is entitled “The Politics
of Philanthropy in Women’s Education: Race, Class, and Gender.”
Chapters in part III provide a closer look at the power of these factors
in shaping women’s experience as recipients of philanthropy and in-
fluencing their effectiveness as donors. Ruth Crocker, in chapter 11,
outlines the obstacles that the wealthy heiress Olivia Sage (1828–1918)
faced in trying to use her substantial inheritance to advance women’s
education. Though deeply convinced of the worthiness of this cause
by her feminist friends Mary Putnam Jacobi and Elizabeth Cady Stan-
ton, Sage faltered in executing her giving on behalf of women. Crocker
argues that a confluence of factors—including class loyalties, the pref-
erences of Sage’s lawyers, the ability of institutions to subvert her in-
tentions, and her growing preoccupation with her husband’s and her
family’s legacy—derailed Sage’s initial gender consciousness and lim-

20
 INTRODUCTION

ited her effectiveness as a donor. In chapter 12, Jayne Beilke explores

the impact of philanthropy on women’s education from the perspective
of the recipient. She focuses on the connection between women’s ed-
ucation and race uplift as she considers the stories of African American
women from the South who were able to pursue graduate education
at northern universities from the early 1930s to the late 1950s under
the auspices of the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship program. As Beilke
observes, while the fellowship program offered women certain valuable
opportunities during the Jim Crow era, racism, limited funding, and
the gender biases of the male philanthropists and administrators at the
women’s home institutions remained great barriers.
Linda Johnson considers the impact of another scholarship pro-
gram in chapter 13. This chapter traces the career of Tsuda Ume
(1864–1929), who attended Bryn Mawr College as the holder of the
American Women’s Scholarship for Japanese Women. Later she re-
turned to Japan and founded one of her country’s earliest colleges for
women. Tsuda Ume further championed the cause of Japanese
women’s education by establishing, with the help of American women,
a fellowship program for Japanese women to study at her alma mater,
Bryn Mawr College. The collaboration of Japanese and American
committees was based on shared beliefs about gender and class, notes
Johnson, but certain tensions arose from culturally different impera-
tives in balancing education and Christianity. And finally, in chapter
14, Amy Bix explores individual and group efforts by women to im-
prove women’s status in the engineering profession. Bix focuses on the
$1.5 million gift that Katherine Dexter McCormick (class of 1904)
gave to MIT in 1960 to build a dormitory for women on MIT’s
campus. In the latter part of her chapter, Bix turns to the concerted
effort of the Society of Women Engineers (founded in 1952) to en-
courage female high school students to enter engineering programs
and to support female engineering students.

In retrospect, there are at least three discernible tendencies that

may have facilitated the strong connection between philanthropy and
education in U.S. history and that may have played prominent roles
in shaping opportunities for women in a variety of settings. The first
is a strong tendency to rely on private, local, and voluntary means
rather than on centralized governmental agencies to conduct services
ranging from municipal works and charity to the vital enterprise of
education. The second is the tendency in American social thought to

21
ANDREA WALTON

view education (in John Dewey’s words) as the “fundamental method

of social progress and reform.”67 These two tendencies combined may
have given rise to a third trend, in which individuals and foundations
have funneled a significant share of the nation’s philanthropic dollars
and voluntary efforts toward education.68 The confluence of these
three tendencies, reflecting broader currents in U.S. social, cultural,
and political history, rendered education a widely contested arena in
which social opportunities for individuals and groups were shaped, and
where philanthropy—emanating from a host of values, including self-
interest—played a salient and complex role. It is with an awareness of
this larger context and an eye toward broad conceptions of philan-
thropy and education that the chapters of this volume have considered
women’s experience. This approach may also be useful in considering
the history of philanthropic action in the lives of other social groups
whose stories have yet to be written.
The emphasis on wealth—particularly the largesse of foundations—
in the literature on educational philanthropy has related the study of
education to important currents in U.S. society (for instance, the role
of private power in shaping public policy), but such a focus has also
obscured other traditions and persistent themes that have shaped the
history of education. One such theme is the story of women’s edu-
cational philanthropy. The stories of women’s giving presented in the
chapters that follow challenge the facile assumption, widely touted in
the popular media in recent years, that it is only now—when women
hold more disposable wealth—that their giving is capable of having a
significant impact on education, especially in colleges and universities.
While in no way undervaluing the potential impact and leveraging
power that women’s increased financial resources and independence
may bring, this volume argues for greater recognition of the range and
effect of women’s earlier philanthropic contributions on their own
terms. The women whose stories are presented here were not female
Carnegies or Rockefellers—only two, Olivia Sage and Nettie Mc-
Cormick, had substantial wealth, and only Sage used her wealth to
establish a foundation. By comparison to male philanthropists who
established foundations and who have become icons in both the his-
tory of U.S. philanthropy and the history of education, the impact of
the woman-led philanthropic activities discussed in this volume may
have been more local, perhaps more relational and institution- or
community-specific, than national. But the stories of these women
remain equally important to the study of education. Indeed, given the

22
 INTRODUCTION

United States’ decentralized approach to education, donations of time

and the targeted gift of financial support can have a tangible impact.
With relatively limited means and well before government concern
with racial or gender equity (before the Brown decision or Title IX,
for instance), women used philanthropy to challenge institutional and
ideological barriers in education, to fashion roles for themselves as
educators who helped to shape new and more equitable modes of social
thought, and to pose alternatives to the educational institutions and
artistic canon supported by philanthropic men.69 Simply put, one goal
of this volume is to dispel the notion that women are “new givers”;
another is to suggest that philanthropy does not emanate only from
massive wealth but, as Goodale put it, also from a deep concern for
the well-being of the “body social.”70
Beyond documenting important aspects of the story of women’s
participation in educational philanthropy, the fourteen chapters of this
volume also seek to foster a reconceptualization of the place of women
in narratives of both education and philanthropy. Much as scholarship
on women’s history has looked beyond the narrow framework of the
fight for suffrage, historians of women in education have recently be-
gun to look beyond women’s access to men’s education and to explore
the plurality of institutions where the majority of women were edu-
cated and where women achieved measurable influence.71 But schol-
arship on the history of education has not necessarily viewed many of
the female initiatives in education as part of a wider tradition of
women’s philanthropy, nor has it considered the woman philanthropist
as a category for studying women’s leadership in education, alongside
the faculty member, the student, and the administrator. For example,
as mentioned, the PTA has been seen as a reform initiated by women
to counter the male-dominated school administrative bureaucracy but
not as part of the larger women’s club movement (see chapter 9),
which is partly a philanthropic enterprise. Thus, this volume may help
us not only to document the history of women as philanthropists in
education, but also to reconceptualize the place of women in both the
history of philanthropy and the history of education. Indeed, by ex-
amining the ties between women-as-philanthropists and educational
institutions, we may move beyond an approach to writing history that
deals with women superficially—or what Geraldine Clifford has de-
scribed as an “add a woman and stir” approach72—to one in which
the narratives of both education and philanthropy see women as
institution- and discipline-builders.

23
ANDREA WALTON

Together, the three parts of this book attempt to capture the variety
of both women’s philanthropic agency in education and the influence
of philanthropy on women’s experience; however, it remains beyond
the scope of this edited volume to provide a comprehensive discussion
of the diversity among women, traditions, and contexts where edu-
cation and philanthropy have intersected. Difficult choices had to be
made about chapter topics, given the necessary constraints on length
and the availability of contributors.73 Because our focus has been on a
particular intersection, some interesting—even pivotal—events in the
history of philanthropy are not included in this volume. This is the
case either because their significance to education per se is less readily
apparent, as in the case of the Sanitary Commission during the Civil
War, or because they are well documented elsewhere, as in the case of
the social settlements.74 Similarly, notable examples of working
women’s philanthropy, like women’s exchanges or mutual aid societies,
are not included here because these were largely entrepreneurial rather
than educational ventures.75
It is peculiar that today we know relatively little about the com-
plexity of women’s philanthropic experience in education—a theme
that Frances Goodale so proudly touched upon in The Literature of
Philanthropy over a hundred years ago. Dealing specifically with an
overview of women’s philanthropy in education, then, this volume is
long overdue. From Mary Richmond’s and Sydnor Walker’s efforts to
enact their ideas through foundation work (a new context for profes-
sional women) to the fundraising efforts of the PTAs, we find ex-
amples of women theorizing about, documenting, and engaging in
philanthropic works that bore directly on educational concerns. There-
fore, as we think about the role of women’s philanthropy in light of
the imminent generational transfer of wealth, and as we witness an
increase in the popularity of women’s giving circles, women’s funds,
and university programs designed to attract female donors, these chap-
ters say: here is a history with which to reflect upon women’s giving.
Indeed, the story of women as philanthropists in education is similar
to the larger problem in women’s history as articulated by Gerda Ler-
ner, who argued that it is not that women have had no presence in
history, but that women have had no consciousness of their history.
Here, one might argue that the problem is not that women have no
philanthropic legacy in education to reflect upon; rather, the problem
lies in the forgetting or erasure of this legacy. Indeed, as is evident in
Goodale’s 1893 attempt to document women’s philanthropy, the story

24
 INTRODUCTION

of women’s experience in educational philanthropy needs first to be

written, so that it may then become a subject of reflection and further
refinement.

NOTES
1. Frances Abigail Rockwell Goodale, “The Literature of Philanthropy,” in The
Literature of Philanthropy, ed. Goodale (New York: Harpers, 1893), 1–2.
2. Helen Hiscock Backus (Vassar ’73), “The Need and the Opportunity for
College-Trained Women in Philanthropic Work,” a paper presented to the New York
Association of Collegiate Alumnae on 19 March 1887. This is an early example of
concern about the narrowing meaning of the term philanthropy. The Association of
Collegiate Alumnae was the forerunner of the American Association of University
Women (AAUW), and its papers are available in the AAUW microfilm papers. The
original papers are housed at the AAUW’s national headquarters in Washington, D.C.
3. For instance, women helped support the colonial colleges with gifts-in-kind,
small donations, and subscriptions. See Jesse Brundage Sears, Philanthropy in the His-
tory of American Higher Education (1922; reprint, with a new introduction by Roger
L. Geiger, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1990), 16, 18, 26.
4. Even the second edition of Robert H. Bremner’s American Philanthropy (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) contains only scant information regarding
women. For a recent critical overview of the history of philanthropy in the United
States, see Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie, eds., Charity, Philanthropy,
and Civility in American History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
5. Representative works on Protestant women’s philanthropy include Carroll
Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City
Mission Movement, 1812–1870 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971); Nancy
Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility:
American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1984); Patricia R. Hill, The World Their Household: The American
Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985); Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The
Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990); Susan M. Yohn, A Contest of Faiths: Missionary Women and
Pluralism in the American Southwest (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995);
and Amanda Porterfield, Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997). For African American women’s experience, see Evelyn
Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Bap-
tist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). For Jew-
ish women’s philanthropy, see Shelly Tennenbaum, “Gender, Capital, and Immigrant
Jewish Enterprises” (working paper 19, Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society,
City University of New York, 1993); and Susan M. Chambre, “Parallel Power Struc-
tures, Invisible Careers, and the Changing Nature of American Jewish Women’s Phi-
lanthropy,” in Women, Philanthropy, and Civil Society, ed. Kathleen D. McCarthy

25
ANDREA WALTON

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 169–89. For Catholic women’s phi-
lanthropy, see Mary J. Oates, The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America (Bloo-
mington: Indiana University Press, 1995); and Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth
McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
6. See Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy
in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976);
Karen J. Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America,
1890–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Kathleen D. McCarthy,
Noblesse Oblige: Charity and Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1849–1929 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982); idem, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and
Art, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Bernice Kert, Abby
Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family (New York: Random House, 1993).
7. For representative works of this group, see Kathleen D. McCarthy, ed., Lady
Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy, and Power (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1990); idem, Women, Philanthropy, and Civil Society (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2001); Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations
in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Kathryn Kish Sklar,
Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995);
Nancy Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984); idem, Southern Discomfort: Women’s
Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s–1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001);
Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern
Town, 1784–1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984); Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and
the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United
States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990); Anne M. Boylan, “Women
in Groups: An Analysis of Women’s Benevolent Organizations in New York and
Boston, 1797–1840,” Journal of American History 71 (December 1984): 497–523; idem,
The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 1797–1840 (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 2002); Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda
Reed, eds., “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: A Reader in Black Women’s History
(Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1995); and Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson,
A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (New York: Broad-
way, 1998).
8. For a discussion of the ways in which feminist literature on women’s voluntary
action has contributed to our understanding of civic life, see Kathleen D. McCarthy,
“The History of Women in the Nonprofit Sector,” in Women and Power in the Non-
profit Sector, ed. Teresa Odendahl and Michael O’Neill (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
1994), 17–38; and also idem, Women, Philanthropy, and Civil Society. For an overview
of women’s role in social welfare history, see Linda Gordon, “The New Feminist
Scholarship on the Welfare State,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 9–35.
9. For an early work that recognized Addams as an educator and philanthropist,
see Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, ed., Jane Addams on Education (1985; reprint, Piscat-
away, N.J.: Transaction, 1994). For a discussion of notable donations to women’s
education, see Merle Curti and Roderick Nash, Philanthropy in the Shaping of American
Higher Education (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 1965), 87–106. For a discus-

26
 INTRODUCTION

sion of Anita McCormick Blaine, see Joyce Antler, “Female Philanthropy and Pro-
gressivism in Chicago,” History of Education Quarterly 21 (winter 1981): 461–69.
10. The idea that the term philanthropy has come to mean the giving of money
(mostly large sums) seems to have been discussed at least as early as the 1880s, as
Backus’s commentary suggests in “The Need and the Opportunity.” However, the
shifting meaning of the term was treated in detail in the 1950s. See Merle Curti,
“American Philanthropy and the National Character,” American Quarterly 10 (winter
1958): 421.
11. John Gardner, “The Independent Sector,” in America’s Voluntary Spirit: A Book
of Readings, ed. Brian O’Connell (New York: Foundation Center, 1983), xx. In 2002,
individuals were responsible for 76.3 percent of the $240.92 billion total philanthropic
contributions in the U.S. (see AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy/Giving USA, 2003,
http://www.aafrc.org/bysourceof.html, accessed 1 March 2004). Only recently has
scholarship on philanthropy begun to direct attention to pluralism. See Lawrence J.
Friedman, “Philanthropy in America: Historicism and Its Discontents,” in Friedman
and McGarvie, eds., Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility, 11–12. Representative of the
emergent literature on diverse philanthropic traditions are Emmett Carson, A Hand
Up: Black Philanthropy and Self-Help in America (Washington, D.C.: Joint Center for
Political and Economic Studies Press, 1993); Charles H. Hamilton and Warren F.
Ilchman, eds., Cultures of Giving II: How Heritage, Gender, Wealth, and Values Influence
Philanthropy (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995); Bradford Smith et al., eds., Philan-
thropy in Communities of Color (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Pier
C. Roger, “Philanthropy in Communities of Color,” ARNOVA Occasional Working
Paper Series, 2001; Cultures of Caring: Philanthropy in Diverse American Communities
(Washington, D.C.: Council on Foundations, 1999); and Laura Tuennerman-Kaplan,
Helping Others, Helping Ourselves: Power, Giving, and Community Identity in Cleveland,
Ohio, 1880–1930 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001).
12. The idea of “ways of seeing” has been used effectively to underscore the in-
terpretive nature of historical inquiry. See David B. Tyack, “Ways of Seeing: An Essay
on the History of Compulsory Education,” Harvard Educational Review 46 (August
1976): 355–89; Elisabeth Hansot and David B. Tyack, “Gender and Public School:
Thinking Institutionally,” Signs 13 (spring 1988): 741–80; and Anne Firor Scott, “On
Seeing and Not Seeing: A Case of Historical Invisibility,” Journal of American History
71 (June 1984): 7–21.
13. Anne Firor Scott, “Women’s Voluntary Associations: From Charity to Re-
form,” in Lady Bountiful, ed. McCarthy, 37.
14. For a general overview of the history of women’s education and a discussion
of the ideology of domesticity, see Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Edu-
cated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985). For women’s early experience as teachers, see
David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in
American Schools (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 18–21. For a
history of the Sunday school, see Anne M. Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of
an American Institution, 1790–1880 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1988), 114–32. For a discussion of the volunteerism of teaching nuns, see Oates,
Catholic Philanthropic Tradition, chapter 7. For relevant overviews of African American
women, see Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth

27
ANDREA WALTON

Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984); and Hine and Thompson, Shining Thread
of Hope.
15. Consider the gains that women in New England made in the period from
1675 to 1790. Within this span, the female literacy rate rose from only 45 percent
(compared to 70 percent for men) to 80 percent, approaching the level of male literacy.
See Linda Eisenmann, ed., Historical Dictionary of Women’s Education in the United
States (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1998), xii.
16. Mrs. Russell Sage, “Opportunities and Responsibilities of Leisured Women,”
North American Review 181 (November 1905): 712–21.
17. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence; and Boylan, Origins of Women’s
Activism.
18. Jane Addams, “The College Woman and the Family Claim” (1898) and “The
Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” (1893), both in Jane Addams, ed. Lage-
mann, 64–73 and 49–63. Kathryn Sklar asserts that the relatively high rates of female
participation in education in the U.S. may help explain women’s prominent contri-
butions to shaping policy. See Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Historical Foundations of
Women’s Power in the Creation of the American Welfare State, 1830–1930,” in Moth-
ers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven
and Sonya Michel (New York: Routledge, 1993), 43–93.
19. Scholars of women’s history were quick to recognize the importance of
women’s voluntary organizations and all-female associations in expanding women’s
horizons and fostering a feminist consciousness, but they did not necessarily see these
bodies as part of the history of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. For a classic
discussion of separatism in women’s history, see Estelle Freedman, “Separatism as
Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870–1930,” Feminist
Studies 5 (fall 1979): 512–29. For a discussion of how women’s philanthropic activities
constituted “parallel power structures” and promoted institution-building and reform,
see Kathleen D. McCarthy, “Women and Philanthropy: Three Strategies in an
Historical Perspective” (working paper 22, Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society,
City University of New York, winter 1994); and idem, Women’s Culture. The use of
nonprofit organizations as alternative power structures by disfranchised groups is also
examined in David C. Hammack, Making the Nonprofit Sector in the United States: A
Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), chapter 6.
20. Goodale, ed., Literature of Philanthropy.
21. For other works during this period that address women’s philanthropy, see
Annie Nathan Meyer, Women’s Work in America (New York: H. Holt, 1891); Backus,
“Need and the Opportunity“; Helen L. Bullock, “The Power and Purposes of
Women,” in The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian
Exposition, ed. Mary Kavanaugh Oldham (Chicago: Monarch Book Company, 1894),
143–47; and Helena T. Grossman, The Christian Woman in Philanthropy: A Study of
the Past and Present (Amherst, Mass.: Carpenter and Morehouse, 1895). This effort
at documenting women’s achievements continued into the twentieth century; see Scott
Nearing and Nellie M. S. Nearing, Women and Social Progress: A Discussion of the
Biologic, Domestic, Industrial, and Social Possibilities of American Women (New York:
Macmillan, 1914), 240–64; and Mary Ritter Beard, Woman’s Work in Municipalities
(New York: D. Appleton, 1915).
22. Anna C. Brackett’s Women and the Higher Education and Kate Douglas Wig-

28
 INTRODUCTION

gin’s The Kindergarten were part of the Distaff Series published by Harper and Broth-
ers in 1893. For a general discussion of women’s involvement in the Columbian
Exposition, see Jeanne Weimann, The Fair Women (Chicago: Academy Chicago,
1981).
23. Goodale, “Literature of Philanthropy,” 1–5.
24. For a pioneering collection of essays on the history of women’s philanthropy,
see McCarthy, ed., Lady Bountiful Revisited.
25. For early works that dealt with the narrowing conception of philanthropy, see
notes 2 and 10. For recent works, informed by historical perspectives, that have called
for a broad view of philanthropy, see Robert Payton, Philanthropy: Voluntary Action
for the Public Good (New York: Macmillan, 1988); Robert Payton et al., Philanthropy:
Four Views (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1988); and Mike W. Martin, Virtuous
Giving: Philanthropy, Voluntary Service, and Caring (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994). A similar latitudinarian view of giving is adopted in Amy Kass, intro-
duction to The Perfect Gift: The Philanthropic Imagination in Poetry and Prose, ed. Kass
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 3.
26. Goodale’s conception of education as a platform for social change reflected
the ethos of late-nineteenth-century progressive thinking that is also found in the
writings of contemporary figures like Jane Addams and John Dewey. See for example,
Addams, “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements”; and John Dewey, “My
Pedagogic Creed” (1897), in Dewey on Education, ed. Martin S. Dworkin (New York:
Teachers College Bureau of Publications, 1959), 19–32.
27. Merle Curti, “The History of American Philanthropy as a Field of Research,”
American Historical Review 62 (January 1957): 352–63; Bremner, American Philan-
thropy, 189–212; Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Private Power for the Public Good: A
History of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 194–205; idem, The Politics of Knowledge:
The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (Middletown, Conn.: Wes-
leyan University Press, 1989), 323–34; a bibliography by Susan Kastan in Ellen Con-
dliffe Lagemann, ed., Philanthropic Foundations: New Scholarship, New Possibilities
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 376–403; Joseph Kiger, Historio-
graphical Review of Foundation Literature: Motivations and Perceptions (New York:
Foundation Center, 1987); Peter Dobkin Hall, “The Work of Many Hands: A Re-
sponse to Stanley N. Katz on the Origins of the ‘Serious Study’ of Philanthropy,”
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 28 (December 1999): 522–36; and Friedman
and McGarvie, eds., Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility, 413–39.
28. Backus, “Need and the Opportunity.”
29. See Albert Shaw, “Millionaires and Their Public Gifts,” Review of Reviews 7
(February 1893): 48–60; Sarah Knowles Bolton, Famous Givers and Their Gifts (New
York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1896); and Merle Curti and Roderick Nash, “Anatomy of
Millionaires,” American Quarterly 15 (winter 1963): 416–35.
30. Judith Sealander, Private Wealth and Public Life: Foundation Philanthropy and
the Reshaping of American Social Policy from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (Bal-
timore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and Merle Curti, Judith Green,
and Roderick Nash, “Anatomy of Giving: Millionaires in the Late Nineteenth Cen-
tury,” American Quarterly 15 (autumn 1963): 416–35. For a discussion of a much
earlier shift in the meaning and nature of philanthropy, see Robert Gross, “Giving in

29
ANDREA WALTON

America: From Charity to Organized Philanthropy,” in Charity, Philanthropy, and

Civility, ed. Friedman and McGarvie, 29–48.
31. The importance of private giving in funding schools and colleges had been
recognized by earlier works, such as George L. Jackson, The Development of School
Support in Colonial Massachusetts (1909; reprint, New York: Arno, 1969) and Edwin
Slosson, Great American Universities (New York: Macmillan, 1910). However, the first
historical study to look systematically at the role of philanthropy in U.S. higher ed-
ucation was a dissertation study completed by Jesse B. Sears in 1919 and published
three years later by the Government Printing Office. As Roger Geiger notes in his
introduction to the 1990 reprint of Sears’s Philanthropy in the History of American
Higher Education, Sears was a pioneer in this area of research and had earlier produced
an entry on “educational philanthropy” in the Cyclopedia of Education IV (1913), edited
by Paul Monroe (Sears’s mentor).
32. Sears, Philanthropy in Higher Education, 109.
33. Ernest Victor Hollis, Philanthropic Foundations and Higher Education (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 7.
34. Ibid., 86–87, 153.
35. Addams, “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements”; idem, Democracy
and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902); Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, intro-
duction to Jane Addams, ed. Lagemann, xii; Beard, Women’s Work; and Eleanor Flexner,
Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959). Similarly, writings by Af-
rican American scholars on philanthropy and education—a topic that received con-
siderable attention in the Journal of Negro History, founded by Carter Woodson—were
also marginalized.
36. Bailyn raises the point that, in focusing on the origins of the rationale for
public funding, early historians of schooling missed seeing the mix of “public” and
“private” funding that had supported education. See Bernard Bailyn, Education in the
Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture,
1960), 109. For a similar point, see Geiger, introduction to Sears, Philanthropy in
Higher Education, ix. For an example of the conventional history of education, see
Paul Monroe, A Text-Book in the History of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1933);
and for a critique of the traditional historiography, see Lawrence A. Cremin, The
Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberly: An Essay on the Historiography of Amer-
ican Education (New York: Teachers College Bureau of Publications, 1965). For a
recent provocative qualification of Bailyn’s assertion that educational historians focused
exclusively on the school and, more centrally, for a critique of Bailyn’s argument that
educational historians were out of touch with mainstream currents in history, see
Milton Gaither, American Educational History Revisited: A Critique of Progress (New
York: Teachers College Press, 2003).
37. Peter Dobkin Hall, “Teaching and Research on Philanthropy, Voluntarism,
and Nonprofit Organizations: A Case Study of Academic Innovations,” Teachers Col-
lege Record 93 (spring 1992): 403. An exception was Eduard Lindeman, Wealth and
Culture: A Study of One Hundred Foundations and Community Trusts and Their Oper-
ations during the Decade 1921–1930 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936).
38. For useful and concise commentary on the philanthropic literature relevant

30
 INTRODUCTION

here, see Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, “Philanthropy, Education, and the Politics of
Knowledge,” Teachers College Record 93 (spring 1992): 362; and idem, “Bibliographic
Note,” in Private Power for the Public Good, 195–205.
39. For a discussion of Curti’s career, see John Pettegrew, “The Present-Minded
Professor: Merle Curti’s Work as an Intellectual Historian,” History Teacher 32 (No-
vember 1998): 67–76; and Frances A. Huehls, “Merle Curti: Remembering a Teach-
ing Life” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 2001).
40. For details about congressional scrutiny of the politics, tax status, and func-
tioning of foundations, see John Lankford, Congress and the Foundations in the Twen-
tieth Century (River Falls: Wisconsin State University, 1964); Thomas C. Reeves, ed.,
Foundations under Fire (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970); Hall, “Teaching
and Research”; and Eleanor L. Brilliant, Private Charity and Public Inquiry: A History
of the Filer and Peterson Commissions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
41. Merle Curti, Social Ideas of American Educators (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1935), 581. For Curti’s early interests in the history of women and African
Americans, see chapters 5 and 8. It is also worth noting that Curti and Nash’s Phi-
lanthropy in the Shaping of American Higher Education (1965) included chapters on
women and African Americans (see chapters 5 and 8), whereas Bremner’s American
Philanthropy, appearing in 1960, did not. Some work on women’s philanthropy came
out of the foundation-funded project on the history of philanthropy, which Curti
directed at the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s and early 1960s. See, for instance,
Kenneth Melder, “Ladies Bountiful: Organized Women’s Benevolence in Early Nine-
teenth Century America,” New York History 48 (1967): 231–54.
42. Curti, “American Philanthropy and the National Character,” 431; and idem,
“History of American Philanthropy,” 352.
43. Curti argues that the “change in meaning of the term from benevolence and
humanitarianism to organized large-scale giving reflects a shift in our society to a
greater emphasis on the role of wealth” (Curti, “American Philanthropy and the Na-
tional Character,” 421). See also notes 2 and 10, above.
44. For details of Curti’s career, see Pettegrew, “Present-Minded Professor”; and
Huehls, “Merle Curti.” For a critique of Curti’s view of philanthropy in education as
roseate, see Walter Metzger’s review of Curti and Nash, Philanthropy and the Shaping
of American Higher Education, in History of Education Quarterly 6 (spring 1966): 75–
76. Curti is overlooked partly because of the outdated idea of American exceptionalism
that is present in his works, but also, I believe, because higher education studies
emphasize public funding, and the emerging field of philanthropic studies has been
heavily influenced by more contemporary politics and policy concerns. For a view that
situates the beginning of philanthropic studies with the 1980 founding of Independent
Sector, a coalition of nonprofit and philanthropic organizations (to the exclusion of
works like Curti’s), see Stanley N. Katz, “Where Did the Serious Study of Philan-
thropy Come from, Anyway?” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 28 (March
1999): 74–82; and for an alternative view that acknowledges Curti’s work, see Peter
Dobkin Hall, “Work of Many Hands,” 522–36, esp. 524.
45. The recruitment of Robert Bremner to write a general history of philanthropy
(Bremner’s American Philanthropy appeared in Daniel Boorstin’s American Civilization
Series) was perhaps the most enduring outcome of Curti’s efforts to stimulate funded
research on philanthropy. The influence of the Wisconsin Project can be traced in

31
ANDREA WALTON

more diffuse ways through the work of Curti’s students and research assistants, notably
David Allmendinger and Paul Mattingly. For details, see Peter Dobkin Hall, “Work
of Many Hands.”
46. For the first major study to provide a revisionist alternative to Bremner’s classic
text, see Friedman and McGarvie, eds., Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility.
47. For insight into the debate surrounding the radical revisionist critique of
schooling, see Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Inno-
vation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1968); and Diane Ravitch, The Revisionists Revised: A Critique of the Radical
Attack on the Schools (New York: Basic, 1978). Appearing at this time, David Roth-
man’s The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1971) provided an early and influential critique of the motives
behind benevolence. To some extent, the history of education and the history of social
welfare cross-fertilized each other during this period. Katz’s own writings have segued
into welfare history. See Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social
History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic, 1986). For a discussion of the ideo-
logical currents in the study of foundation philanthropy and patronage, see Gerald
Benjamin, ed., Private Philanthropy and Public Elementary and Secondary Education:
Proceedings of the Rockefeller Archive Center Conference Held on June 8, 1979 (North
Tarrytown, N.Y.: Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller University, 1980); and Peter
Dobkin Hall, “Theories and Institutions,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 24
(spring 1995): 9. See also Donald K. Fisher, “American Philanthropy and the Social
Sciences: The Reproduction of Conservative Ideology,” in Philanthropy and Cultural
Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad, ed. Robert F. Arnove (Boston:
G. K. Hall, 1980), 233–68; idem, “The Role of Philanthropic Foundations in the
Reproduction and Production of Hegemony: Rockefeller Foundations and the Social
Sciences,” Sociology 17 (June 1983): 206–33; Martin Bulmer, “Philanthropic Foun-
dations and the Development of the Social Sciences in the Early Twentieth Century:
A Reply to Donald Fisher,” Sociology 18 (November 1984): 572–80; and Donald
Fisher, “A Response to Martin Bulmer,” Sociology 18 (November 1984): 580–87. Writ-
ing against the background of this debate, Wayne Urban described philanthropy as
“one of the more explored pieces of that terrain [history of education] in the last two
decades” (Wayne L. Urban, “Philanthropy and the Black Scholar: The Case of Horace
Mann Bond,” Journal of Negro Education 58 [autumn 1989]: 478).
48. Lagemann, “Philanthropy, Education, and the Politics of Knowledge”; and
Dobkin Hall, “Teaching and Research.”
49. For instance, see Barry D. Karl and Stanley N. Katz, “The American Private
Philanthropic Foundation and the Public Sphere, 1890–1930,” Minerva 19 (summer
1981): 236–70; and idem, “Foundations and Ruling Class Elites,” Daedalus 116 (win-
ter 1987): 1–40.
50. Even the few works on philanthropy in K–12 schooling tended to focus on
foundation activities; see Benjamin, ed., Private Philanthropy and Public Elementary
and Secondary Education; and Lagemann, Private Power for the Public Good. See also
the spring 1992 issue of Teachers College Record, edited by Lagemann and devoted to
an examination of what she refers to as “the politics of knowledge.”
51. Representative works include Lagemann, Private Power for the Public Good;
idem, Politics of Knowledge; Steven Wheatley, The Politics of Philanthropy: Abraham

32
 INTRODUCTION

Flexner and Medical Education (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Ken-
neth M. Ludmerer, Learning to Heal: The Development of American Medical Education
(New York: Basic, 1985); Robert E. Kohler, Partners in Science: Foundations and Nat-
ural Scientists, 1900–1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Fisher,
“American Philanthropy and the Social Sciences”; and Theresa Richardson and Don-
ald Fisher, eds., The Development of the Social Sciences in the United States and Canada:
The Role of Philanthropy (Stamford, Conn.: Ablex, 1999). Also see the autumn 1997
issue of Minerva, which editor Martin Bulmer devoted to the theme “Philanthropy
and Institution-Building in the Twentieth Century.” Though not directly concerned
with foundations, an example of another important approach to studying voluntary
action in higher education would be Hugh Hawkins, Banding Together: The Rise of
National Associations in American Higher Education, 1887–1950 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992).
52. John H. Stanfield, Philanthropy and Jim Crow in American Social Science (West-
port, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985); James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the
South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); William
H. Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America,
1865–1954 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001); and Eric Anderson and Alfred
A. Moss, Jr., Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education,
1902–1930 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999).
53. For one of the few studies of a woman whose career was tied to foundation
support and employment, see Guy Alchon, “Mary Van Kleeck and Social-Economic
Planning,” Journal of Policy History 3 (winter 1991): 1–23.
54. See note 7.
55. Nancy Hewitt, Women’s Activism; idem, Southern Discomfort; Darlene Clark
Hine, “ ‘We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible’: The Philanthropic Work of Black
Women,” in Lady Bountiful, ed. McCarthy, 70–93; Hine, King, and Reed, eds., “We
Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”; and McCarthy, “History of Women in the Non-
profit Sector,” 18. I take the term “fissures” from McCarthy.
56. Payton, Philanthropy: Voluntary Action for the Public Good.
57. For the reasons why all voluntary action may be considered philanthropy, see
Payton, Philanthropy: Voluntary Action for the Public Good; and idem, “Philanthropic
Values,” in Private Means, Public Ends, ed. Kenneth W. Thompson (New York: Uni-
versity Press of America, 1987), 21–47, esp. 28. In this definition, the “public good”
is not seen as monolithic. For the idea that many publics exist in a democratic and
multicultural society and therefore that the “public good” is a contested arena, see
Jane Mansbridge, “On the Contested Nature of the Public Good,” in Private Action
and the Public Good, ed. Walter W. Powell and Elisabeth S. Clemens (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 3–18. Here, in Women and Philanthropy in Ed-
ucation, the definition of philanthropy embraces all giving, including what some might
call charity. For the history of the concepts of “charity” and “philanthropy” and the
distinction, if any, between these two terms see Payton, “Philanthropic Values”; and
Gross, “Giving in America.”
58. Kathleen D. McCarthy, “Women, Politics, Philanthropy: Some Historical
Origins of the Welfare State,” in The Liberal Persuasion: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and
the Challenge of the American Past, ed. John Patrick Diggins (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
ton University Press, 1997), 143; and Arlene Kaplan Daniels, Invisible Careers:

33
ANDREA WALTON

Women Civic Leaders from the Volunteer World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988).
59. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann raises this point and elaborates on the narrowing
of the concepts of education and teaching in her introduction to Jane Addams, xiii–
xiv, and idem, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago, 2000), esp. 1. For a relevant discussion of the narrowing
views of education and of philanthropy in relation to the social settlements, see Ad-
dams, “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” and “A Function of the Social
Settlement” (1899), in Jane Addams, ed. Lagemann, 49–63 and 74–97, esp. 55 and
84–85.
60. An example of an early woman university scholar who studied women’s ed-
ucation is Willystine Goodsell, editor of Pioneers of Women’s Education in the United
States: Emma Willard, Catherine Beecher, Mary Lyon (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931),
who in turn has become a subject of interest. See Robert Engel, “Willystine Goodsell:
Feminist and Reconstructionist Educator,” Vitae Scholasticae 3 (fall 1984): 355–78.
61. For ideas from women’s history that influenced the history of women in ed-
ucation, see Gerda Lerner, “Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges,”
Feminist Studies 3 (fall 1975): 5–14; idem, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women
in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); and idem, Teaching Women’s
History (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1980), esp. 6–13. For
early works in the history of women in education, see Jill Ker Conway, “Perspectives
on the History of Women’s Education in the United States,” History of Education
Quarterly 14 (spring 1974): 1–12; Patricia Albjerg Graham, “So Much to Do: Guides
for Historical Research on Women in Higher Education,” Teachers College Record 76
(February 1975): 421–29; idem, “Expansion and Exclusion: A History of American
Women in Higher Education,” Signs 3 (summer 1978): 759–73; Anne Firor Scott,
“What, Then, Is the American: This New Woman?” Journal of American History 65
(December 1978): 679–703; idem, “The Ever Widening Circle: The Diffusion of
Feminist Values from Troy Female Seminary, 1822–1872,” History of Education Quar-
terly 19 (spring 1979): 3–25; Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Strug-
gles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982);
and Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, “Shaking Dangerous Questions from the Crease:
Gender and American Higher Education,” Feminist Issues 3 (fall 1983): 3–62. For an
overview of studies in the history of women in education, see Sally Schwager, “Ed-
ucating Women in America,” Signs 12 (winter 1987): 333–72.
62. Early useful applications of this broader conception of education in relation
to women’s lives include Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, A Generation of Women: Education
in the Lives of Progressive Reformers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1979); Clifford, “Shaking Dangerous Questions”; and Lois Arnold, Four Lives in
Science: Women’s Education in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken, 1984). For
a more recent work influenced by Bailyn and Cremin, see Margaret Smith Crocco
and O. L. Davis, Jr., eds., “Bending the Future to Their Will”: Civic Women, Social
Education, and Democracy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
63. Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society, esp. 14. The general
theory of the multiplicity of institutions that educate (forming varied relationships
that Cremin described as the “configurations of education”) is explained in Lawrence
A. Cremin, Public Education (New York: Basic, 1976), esp. 29–33. Cremin insisted

34
 INTRODUCTION

that education occurs not only in settings where formal instruction takes place—such
as in schools, colleges, and universities—but also in institutions like the family, the
church, and the museum.
64. Representatives of this literature are Clifford, “Shaking Dangerous Ques-
tions”; Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–
1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980); Lagemann, ed., Jane Addams; and Crocco
and Davis, eds., “Bending the Future to Their Will.”
65. Lagemann, Generation of Women.
66. Though the history of philanthropy in education is understudied, an impor-
tant discussion of donor intentions in women’s education is found in Helen Lefkowitz
Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their
Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Knopf, 1984). See also Ros-
siter, Women Scientists in America: Struggle and Strategies; and idem, Women Scientists
in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995).
67. Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” 30.
68. In 2002, education received 13.1 percent of private giving, or $31.64 billion,
ranking second to religion, which received 35 percent, or $84.26 billion. See AAFRC
Trust for Philanthropy/Giving USA, 2003. But, as Ellen Lagemann noted in a 1992
essay, education’s portion in any such reporting becomes considerably larger when one
considers that much of the funds that are reported under religious giving are also used
to support education-related activities. See Lagemann, “Philanthropy, Education, and
the Politics of Knowledge,” 1.
69. See, for example, V. P. Franklin’s use of Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital”
to explore many of the types of actions in support of African American education
that might also be regarded as “philanthropic.” See V. P. Franklin, “Introduction:
Cultural Capital and African American Education,” Journal of African American History
87 (spring 2002): 175–81.
70. Goodale, “Literature of Philanthropy,” 1–5.
71. For a discussion of the limitations of the concept of “access,” see Linda Ei-
senmann, “Reconsidering a Classic: Assessing the History of Women’s Higher Edu-
cation a Dozen Years after Barbara Solomon,” Harvard Educational Review 67 (winter
1997): 689–717; and idem, “Creating a Framework for Interpreting U.S. Women’s
Educational History: Lessons from Historical Lexicography,” History of Education 30
(fall 2001): 453–70. For a discussion of how the study of philanthropy might help us
rethink the meaning of access and illuminate important aspects of the history of
women in education, see Andrea Walton, “Rethinking Boundaries: The History of
Women, Philanthropy, and Higher Education,” History of Higher Education Annual
20 (2000): 29–57; Eisenmann, “Creating a Framework”; and idem, “New Frameworks
for Women’s Educational History: The Importance of Philanthropy,” a paper pre-
sented at the annual meeting of the History of Education Society, Yale University,
New Haven, Conn., 21 October 2001, in the author’s possession.
72. Clifford, “Shaking Dangerous Questions,” 12.
73. For example, it has not been possible, given these constraints, to include
materials addressing the stories of Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Latina, Asian, Native
American, and other minority, religious, and ethnic women’s experience in philan-
thropy.

35
ANDREA WALTON

74. For representative works on the social settlement movement, see Judith Ann
Trolander, Professionalism and Social Change: From the Settlement House Movement to
Neighborhood Centers, 1886 to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press,
1987); Ruth Crocker, Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two
Industrial Cities, 1889–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); and Elisabeth
Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement
House Movement, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
For the Sanitary Commission, see Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence.
75. For this aspect of women’s philanthropy, see Kathleen Waters Sander, The
Business of Charity: The Women’s Exchange Movement, 1832–1900 (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1998).

36
PART I.
SCHOOLS, COLLEGES, UNIVERSITIES,
AND FOUNDATIONS
1. Teaching as Philanthropy: Catharine Beecher and
the Hartford Female Seminary
Frances Huehls

“I would rather my daughters would go to school and sit down

and do nothing, than to study philosophy,” wrote a concerned father
to the editors of the Connecticut Courant in 1829. Notably, education
for women was not the object of his criticism. Indeed, by this era in
the young republic’s history, demand for female literacy together with
other social and economic changes had provided a powerful rationale
for women’s education and, as a result, academies admitting female
students dotted New England and the eastern seaboard, and new
schools where women might study were being founded in the frontier
territories.1 These institutions offered the most advanced education
available to women and in many instances boasted curricula that were
substantially similar to course work offered for young men. The ques-
tion for this worried Connecticut father, then, was not whether women
should be educated but rather what type of education women were to
receive. He was especially concerned about the wisdom of allowing
young women to pursue a course on mental and moral philosophy like
the one offered by educator and philanthropist Catharine Beecher at
the Hartford Female Seminary. “These branches fill young Misses with
vanity to the degree that they are above attending to the more useful
parts of an education,” he wrote pointedly.2
By contrast to the writer to the Connecticut Courant, Catharine
Esther Beecher did not believe that the study of mental and moral
philosophy was an inappropriate pursuit for young women or a certain
pathway to female vanity; indeed, such an outcome would have con-
tradicted Beecher’s own vision of education and of Hartford Semi-

39
FRANCES HUEHLS

nary’s mission. Nor did Beecher view the introduction of a philosophy

course at Hartford solely as an equalizing measure that provided
women with the standard fare found in early-nineteenth-century in-
stitutions for young men. Rather, to Beecher’s mind, the study of phi-
losophy was central to her concept of education and to promoting the
values she hoped to institutionalize at Hartford Female Seminary. In-
deed, deep intellectual investigation was at the heart of the type of
experience Catharine sought to share with her students. She infused
this type of inquiry into the curriculum at Hartford to work toward
enlarging women’s place in society and increasing their contribution
to the common good.
From its inception in 1823, Hartford Female Seminary was a lab-
oratory for Catharine’s beliefs about education, religion, and the role
of women in society. From her vantage point, these were not three
separate sets of ideas, but rather ones that could be united under a
single framework: philanthropy.3 God’s greatest wish for mankind was
happiness, and happiness for oneself could be achieved most effectively
through efforts toward making others happy. Education—the sheer
exercise of the intellect—and the transmission of cultural values from
one generation to the next through teaching were the greatest sources
of personal happiness.4 In opposition to accepted Calvinist doctrine,
Catharine taught that good works—including teaching—were a means
to eternal salvation. Thus, Catharine conceptualized teaching as a phil-
anthropic activity: proffering the gift of education rewarded both giver
and recipient. This chapter will explore Catharine Beecher’s philoso-
phy of education during her years at the Hartford Female Seminary
(1823–1831), demonstrating how and why she defined teaching as a
philanthropic act. In doing so, this chapter will show that women were
engaged not only in doing philanthropy but also in articulating teach-
ing—a woman’s profession—as a philanthropic activity.
Catharine was born in 1800, the first child of Lyman and Roxana
Foote Beecher. Lyman Beecher rose to a position of eminence as an
evangelical preacher during the years of the Second Great Awakening
in New England. His growing influence was reflected in moves to
successively larger and more prestigious churches between 1800 and
1830, including congregations in East Hampton, New York; Litch-
field, Connecticut; and Boston. Lyman Beecher’s evangelical work
stressed active involvement in reform and missionary movements; in
order to foster social solidarity in his religious domain, he facilitated
the formation of benevolent societies within his congregations. The

40
 TEACHING AS PHILANTHROPY

fruits of a family philosophy that emphasized religion and benevolence

are apparent in Lyman Beecher’s offspring. In the course of their lives,
six of his eleven children—Catharine, Edward, Charles, Henry Ward,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Isabella Beecher Hooker—would play sig-
nificant roles in the revision of Calvinist theology and in movements
advocating abolition, woman suffrage, and educational reform.5
Benevolence was central to more than Beecher family life: during
the post-Revolutionary decades, the idea permeated the Protestant tra-
dition. A writer to the Christian Spectator in 1822 noted that “the
public is forming a habit of benevolent exertion.”6 The attitude of
benevolence and its enactment as charity were nested within the uni-
versal love and brotherhood understood in the concept philanthropy.
Further, benevolence was tied to recognition of privilege: those who
had been favored with prosperity and good health had an obligation
to tend to those who were less fortunate, doing good works and pro-
moting happiness through their efforts. The meaning of charity at the
end of the colonial era embraced the attitudes of benevolence and
Christian love but also included the acts of almsgiving and relief for
the poor. The proliferation of benevolent societies in the early decades
of the Republic lent a new and institutionally oriented meaning to the
term; charity came to include gifts for public goods and the activities
of benevolent societies as well as direct aid to the needy. A gift of
money or time was deemed uncharitable when it was rooted in self-
interest rather than altruism. This, however, did not preclude some
level of financial gain. By the 1820s it was not unusual for some work-
ers in benevolent societies—secretaries, nurses, doctors—to be paid
for their work.7
By 1820, benevolent societies for the relief of children, widows,
and orphans, missionary societies, and Sunday schools abounded, par-
ticularly in the northeastern states. Women from a range of socio-
economic situations—from members of the working class to the fi-
nancially affluent—formed the morally elite backbone of social and
humanitarian reform movements that aimed to uplift the disadvan-
taged—including slaves, the physically and mentally handicapped,
children, and other women. The church was often the venue through
which women entered charitable work, becoming the means of access
to an enlarged domestic sphere that included “dependents” beyond the
immediate family unit.8
As Roberta Wollons points out later in this volume, the religious
revivals of the early nineteenth century were linked both to missionary

41
FRANCES HUEHLS

movements, which aimed to spread the gospel, and to reform move-

ments that intended to improve educational opportunities for women.9
The linkage of religious mission and educational opportunity is evident
in the earliest benevolent societies. The Society for the Relief of Poor
Widows with Small Children, formed in New York City in 1797,
organized schools that enabled widows to support themselves by ed-
ucating orphans as well as their own children. The goals of female
benevolence were religious in nature, whether or not the societies were
formed within the confines of the institutional church; the idea was
to “save souls as well as bodies.”10 Women, who constituted the ma-
jority of church members, were viewed as morally superior to men and
the natural purveyors of religious and social values. Moved by the
sentiment that only separate education—woman to woman—of future
mothers could ensure their ability to rear virtuous citizens, provide
Christian guidance for children, and train teachers, women such as
Sarah Pierce, Emma Willard, Zilpah Grant, Mary Lyons, Almira
Phelps, and Catharine Beecher sought to provide an elite education
that would bolster these unique roles of women. Catharine herself was
educated in this liberal tradition, having attended Sarah Pierce’s Litch-
field Academy from 1810 to 1816.11
The women educated in the academies did not represent clearly
defined socioeconomic classes. Distinctions between “upper-class” and
“middle-class” women elude precise economic definition in this era,
since virtue, piety, and gentility were mechanisms of social mobility
that were available to all but the very poor. Social status was of less
concern to educational reformers than the need to arm young women
with the moral means to cope with changing social and economic
conditions.12 In 1847, Catharine wrote, “Everything is moving and
changing. Persons in poverty are rising to opulence, and persons of
wealth are sinking to poverty. There are no distinct classes as in aris-
tocratic lands, whose bounds are protected by distinct and impassable
lines, but all are thrown into impassable masses.”13 Despite the egal-
itarianism of this statement, the economics of running an academy
dictated to some extent who attended. Catharine followed the lead of
Sarah Pierce, drawing students for her school from Hartford’s socially
and financially elite families. During these years, Catharine’s desire for
her own economic independence and the school’s financial stability
caused her to rely on the financial largesse and approval of Hartford’s
moral and moneyed elites.14

42
 TEACHING AS PHILANTHROPY

Liberal education for women was justified on a number of grounds,

ranging from the need to keep a daughter occupied until marriage to
the more enlightened view that a woman’s education was a good in
its own right and needed no further justification.15 For women of
Catharine’s social standing, however, religious conversion constituted
a more critical rite of passage to adulthood than did either educational
attainment or participation in benevolent work. Although Lyman Bee-
cher’s sermons were full of exhortations to perform good works, he
did not believe that benevolence was enough to guarantee eternal sal-
vation. Conversion was essential to overcome original sin and guar-
antee eternal life in God’s love; he was determined that Catharine
would achieve this moral safeguard before marriage. In 1821, Lyman
Beecher began to press Catharine to submit her will to God, renounc-
ing the sin that permeated her life, including her liberal academy ed-
ucation.16
In December of 1821, Catharine was officially engaged to Alex-
ander Fisher, a professor of natural theology at Yale. Fisher’s death at
sea in May of 1822 precipitated a crisis of faith for Catharine: he had
died with an unconverted soul and Catharine could not bring herself
to believe that God would abandon a man who had led a virtuous life.
She wrote to her father, “When I think of Mr. Fisher, and remember
his blameless and useful life, his unexampled and persevering efforts
to do his duty both to God and man, I believe . . . that God . . . does
make the needful distinction between virtue and vice; and that there
was more reason to hope for one whose whole life had been an ex-
ample of excellence than for one who had spent all his days in sin and
guilt.”17 Unable to resolve the emotional and intellectual conflicts of
submitting her will to God, Catharine remained unconverted.
Beecher’s domestic future was also unsettled. Although both Ly-
man Beecher and Catharine had anticipated that she would marry and
move out of the family economic unit, she instead became one of many
young women who, by necessity or design, would defer or find an
alternative to marriage. With traditional marriage and family at least
temporarily out of the picture, she settled on teaching as perhaps the
only useful purpose to which she might be allowed to direct her energy
and her intellect. In 1824, she made a conscious and irrevocable de-
cision to remain a single and financially independent woman, making
the school and its success her primary objective.18

43
FRANCES HUEHLS

EQUAL BUT DIFFERENT: THE MORAL ETHOS OF A SCHOOL

For Catharine, the overall purpose of a woman’s education was to
prepare her to become a teacher, whether of her own children or those
of others. Catharine’s ideas about education were first formalized in
1829 as “Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education Pre-
sented to the Trustees of the Hartford Female Seminary and Published
at Their Request.”19 Rendering children competent in the “three Rs”
was not what she had in mind, however. The role of mothers and
teachers was to educate character, to maintain the health of children,
and to “form immortal minds” by encouraging intellectual and
moral development and by replacing bad habits with proper ones.
Women, Catharine felt, had not been trained to fulfill this important,
but dishonored, role. If women were educated to improve both them-
selves and others, they would bring about overall improvements in
society.20
Catharine asserted her view that these lofty ends could only be
accomplished through facilities and a curriculum comparable to those
available for young men.21 In 1826, Catharine mounted a successful
fundraising campaign to build what she considered a proper school.22
From the time the school had opened with seven students in 1823
until the fall term of 1827, when the student body numbered over
one hundred, Catharine had lacked equipment, classroom space, and
a library. The school had moved from its original rented room above
a harness shop to the basement of a church, but it continued to op-
erate in a single room, with a few teachers teaching many subjects to
classes of mixed ages and abilities. Furthermore, recitations and lec-
tures occurred simultaneously.23 One can only imagine the noise cre-
ated by lecturing, reciting, and coming and going! In 1824, Catharine
herself was teaching rhetoric, logic, natural philosophy, chemistry,
history, Latin, and algebra.24 As a result of Catharine’s successful
campaign efforts, however, the newly incorporated Hartford Female
Seminary that opened for the fall term in 1827 included a large hall
for general instruction, a library, a lecture room, and recitation rooms.
Catharine was able to invest in blackboards and maps, and the di-
vision of teaching responsibilities also improved: eight teachers each
taught one or two subjects. Promising students were trained to be
assistants, further reducing the load on the teaching staff and adding
what could be considered in-service training for potential future
teachers. The additional classrooms made it possible to have small

44
 TEACHING AS PHILANTHROPY

classes of six to ten students, who were assigned to courses based on

ability, as determined by the placement exam administered when stu-
dents enrolled.25
To a great extent, this is where Catharine’s push to emulate male
academies ended, as the environment she created would not duplicate
the competitive spirit prevalent at schools for young men.26 Properly
training the minds of women of the “moral” class required equal fa-
cilities and curriculum, but, in Catharine’s mind, students needed an
environment that was ruled by benevolence, self-discipline, and non-
competition. Not surprisingly, Hartford Female Seminary was also
ruled entirely by women. Through three routes—proper preparation,
internalized self-discipline, and internalized rewards—Catharine
sought to prepare her students for their most important duty: their
future roles as teachers. As she wrote in 1835, a woman’s most critical
responsibility “is the physical, intellectual, and moral education of chil-
dren. It is the care of health, and the formation of the character, of
the future citizens of this great nation.”27
Although many of Catharine’s students came from Hartford’s so-
cially and financially elite families, intellectual elitism was not fostered.
Catharine’s philosophy tended to downplay intelligence in favor of
common sense and morality. Achievements often ascribed to intelli-
gence could in fact be accomplished through training in “good com-
mon sense, persevering energy and high religious principle, and not
by remarkable genius, or by the aid of that literary and scientific train-
ing sought in our colleges and regarded as a marked privilege of which
women have been unjustly deprived.”28 What Catharine referred to as
“intellectual defects” could be remedied through individual attention
and by presenting the material in a number of ways. Thus, an effective
teacher should focus on principles and generalizations, not on the rote
memorization of facts. Students needed to see how knowledge was
connected instead of merely committing information to memory; they
should be able to recognize the common elements of and the rela-
tionships between the various disciplines. Students were also encour-
aged to find alternatives to textbooks for learning, since Catharine
believed that being interested in a subject was critical to learning it.
She cited her own difficulties in learning mathematics, which had been
resolved by applying concepts to real-life situations. In all, then, the
Hartford system tended to encourage self-directed learning. Catharine
also expected her teachers to socialize with their students and get to
know their academic strengths and weaknesses. Teachers and student

45
FRANCES HUEHLS

assistants met regularly to discuss which pupils needed individual at-

tention.29
Catharine’s goal was the development of conscience and congenial
female communities that were also led by women. Because their mem-
bers had internalized discipline as an ethic of self-examination and
self-restraint, these communities would be managed by voluntary sub-
mission to the common good. Consequently, disciplinary practices at
the school encouraged self-control rather than relying on punishment.
Although a governess ultimately enforced the rules of conduct, a sys-
tem of self-reporting evolved over the years. By 1831, students re-
corded their infractions in their journals, which were collected and
read aloud—anonymously—the following day at the common assem-
bly before being submitted to the governess. “Ratting” on fellow stu-
dents was discouraged. Perhaps Catharine drew upon her own child-
hood experience at Miss Pierce’s School in Litchfield, an environment
that also emphasized moral education and relied upon journals and
the self-reporting of rule infractions.30 The boarding system also op-
erated on principles of example and surveillance. Students and teachers
regularly boarded together in the homes of Hartford women of “high
position, culture, and religious principle,” and the teacher held moral
authority over the students in her charge.31
Competition between students was diminished through the em-
phasis on internalized rewards. Although the seminary awarded annual
prizes for academic achievement in the early years, Catharine decided
to curtail this practice in 1831. She felt the students should excel out
of affection for their parents and teachers, out of interest in their own
intellectual improvement, and out of duty to God.32
Views of Hartford Female Seminary that come from sources other
than Catharine’s published writing shed light on the atmosphere of
the school. Angelina Grimké visited the school in 1831, with the
intention of becoming a student there. She found the atmosphere gen-
teel, but purposeful. Catharine encouraged her scholars “to feel that
they had no right to spend their time in idleness, fashion and folly,
but they as individuals were bound to be useful in Society after they
had finished their education, and that as teachers single women could
be more useful in this than in any other way.”33
The emphasis on purposeful piety and gentility should not imply
that there were never occasions for high feelings or pranks. Catharine
had a reputation for being economical—particularly with food—and
sometimes these economies pertained only to the food served to the

46
 TEACHING AS PHILANTHROPY

students. On one occasion, when the girls could not endure what they
saw as a double standard, Sara Willis substituted the students’ low-
grade butter for Catharine’s and then graciously returned it to her as
soon as the headmistress recognized the disparity in taste. Catharine
also experimented with Graham diets, which were essentially vegetar-
ian fare with a strong emphasis on whole-wheat products. The phi-
losophy of Sylvester Graham was dietary temperance—a sound mind
in a sound body—leading to a right and moral life. It was an idea
that appealed to Catharine. With the aim of remedying physical as
well as moral defects, she also introduced a course of calisthenics at
the school.34
Moral education at Hartford was also overt in the sense that re-
ligious practice was a part of daily life as well as a part of the formal
curriculum. Catharine read the Bible to students and held daily wor-
ship services that all pupils and instructors were required to attend.
Private religious counseling for individual students was also available.
Even in 1824, when Catharine took responsibility for teaching mul-
tiple subjects, she kept afternoons open for worship and prayer with
students.35
In the spring of 1826, Catharine led a religious revival that in-
cluded not only her students, but also members of the Hartford com-
munity—particularly women. By this time, she had rented her own
home and used it for prayer meetings. Conversion in the Calvinist
style was her goal, and she adopted the method Lyman Beecher had
used in 1823 to direct conversion. She threw herself whole-heartedly
into this effort, writing to her brother Edward in August of 1826 that
she was so busy molding the character of her students that she had
no time to work on her own salvation.36 The revival produced consid-
erable emotional heat, causing Lyman Beecher to urge Catharine to
moderate her conversion activities. He cautioned her that the proper
mood was indicated by “a genial warmth of heart, of steady benevolent
temperature, compared with the more intense heat and flashings of
holy and animal affections and passions, all boiling at once in the
heart.”37 Although revivals occurred regularly at the seminary over
the years, after 1826 Catharine restricted her conversion activities to
the students rather than taking them into the wider Hartford com-
munity.38 Undoubtedly, she was mindful of Lyman’s view that the min-
istry was not a proper role for a woman and that she had clearly been
acting in that role.

47
FRANCES HUEHLS

“ELEMENTS OF MENTAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY”:

TEACHING AS PHILANTHROPY
The lectures on mental and moral philosophy that were to gain
editorial note in the Connecticut Courant were a natural outgrowth of
Catharine’s need to protect and nurture the overall development of her
students. The course also provided an academic venue for her ministry,
one more acceptable than her efforts at conversion. Catharine had an
enduring fear for the unconverted (including herself); at one point she
noted, “ ‘What must we do to be saved’ became the agonizing inquiry
for myself and all I loved most.”39 She decided to take personal re-
sponsibility for this philosophical instruction after she failed to per-
suade the eminently devout Zilpah Grant to come to Hartford as
chaplain and director of religious education.40 Catharine’s lectures on
the subject led to the volume The Elements of Mental and Moral Phi-
losophy Founded upon Experience, Reason, and the Bible.41 While the
work was never published for public consumption, Catharine did cir-
culate a number of copies for “leaders of thought in both the literary
and religious world.”42 Except for the removal of what Catharine said
were a few pages that would have been considered heresy by Calvinists
of her father’s persuasion, the content of Elements approximates what
the young women heard in class.
On its long and winding path, Elements binds together the mental,
the physical, and the moral. At the risk of oversimplifying, only the
strands that lead most directly to her ultimate thesis will be discussed
here. These include happiness for the self and others, the relationship
of experience to education, and the roles that both of these elements
played in salvation. At the outset of the lectures, Catharine was careful
to set out definitions, saying that mental states could be identified and
definitions could be applied. In her opinion, philosophy was not an
inexact science, but rather one susceptible to logic and reason.
In these lectures, happiness emerges as an emotional state sanc-
tioned by and enabled through the gift of Jesus Christ, who took on
the form of man and died for human sins. Catharine enumerated nine
forms of pleasurable emotions that result from right and virtuous acts:
conscious “being” itself, enjoying intellectual superiority, receiving
sympathy, giving and appreciating affection, exercising the intellect,
employing physical and moral power (which Catharine defined as the
ability to bend the will of another), feeling sympathy for the happiness

48
 TEACHING AS PHILANTHROPY

of others, living a virtuous life (“conscious rectitude”), and enacting

benevolence.
Catharine’s definition of benevolence, one of the pleasurable emo-
tions and the natural state of the human mind, was “such love for the
happiness of other minds, as induces a willingness to make sacrifices
of personal enjoyment, to secure a greater amount of good to others.”
It would, in Catharine’s opinion, be difficult to love someone who was
not benevolent.43
Thus, happiness for the self was important but it was not enough.
A higher level of happiness could be gained by adding to the happiness
of others. Catharine argued that God created us with minds so that
we could be happy and make others happy; the mind continuously
sought out happiness, avoiding anything that destroyed enjoyment or
promised suffering. Further, the exercise of the mind itself was a source
of happiness: consciousness allowed one to enjoy the intellectual and
moral qualities of others and to gain pleasure from being a source of
happiness for them. “The consciousness of virtue,” Catharine wrote,
“which consists in acting for the general good, instead of for contracted
selfish purposes, is another source of happiness, while those who wit-
ness its delightful results, rejoice to behold and acknowledge it.”44
Good habits that led to virtuous behavior were also a source of hap-
piness and a pleasure that did not dim with time or repetition. Those
activities that resulted in bringing good to the self and to others were
always a source of enjoyment.
However, happiness did not always mean immediate gratification.
There were times when pleasure needed to be deferred for a future
and more enduring good. Although long- and short-term goods co-
incided occasionally, in cases where immediate pleasure was chosen
over the greater good the wrong choice had clearly been made. Ap-
pearing numb to pain and suffering was not an indication of immoral
development if such behavior was aimed at helping another develop
habits of benevolence.
Catharine concluded that people were obligated not to cause suf-
fering or to destroy happiness. “For it is the fear of suffering,” she
wrote, “which is the most powerful restraint, in deterring one mind
from interfering with the happiness of others. Both mind and matter
are so constituted, that nothing is contrived for the direct purpose of
producing pain, which our very susceptibilities of suffering are used as
a means of promoting the general happiness.”45

49
FRANCES HUEHLS

Attention to the overall good was ultimately what would secure

the highest and most enduring happiness. People could be expected
to defer or moderate personal pleasure in order to achieve greater ends,
since happiness in its highest sense could not always be achieved with-
out sacrifice. “A mind then, which is fitted to secure the object for
which it is created, is one that has formed habits of acting invariably
and constantly for the general happiness, irrespective of its own partic-
ular share.”46 Only a disordered mind placed immediate gratification
and selfish needs ahead of the greater good. Voluntary action for the
public good was an ordered state of the mind that was developed and
sustained through good habits; such a mental state combined with
physical action produced the greatest general happiness.
Education, through the exercise of the mind, thus became a source
of pleasure, as did teaching: the benevolent act of helping others secure
the happiness of exercising their own minds. These were enduring
pleasures, not subject to boredom from repetition. If the discomfort
of watching a student struggle to learn did not always result in sym-
pathy from the teacher, this was not an indication of moral failure on
the instructor’s part. The student was growing in the habits of moral
rectitude and benevolence, and the temporary loss of enjoyment was
for a noble and greater good. There was reciprocity in the cycle of
pleasure from learning, teaching, and seeing right habits develop that
would lead to additional happiness.
Experience was the path to three sources of knowledge: personal
experience, the experience of others, and reasoning based on experi-
ence of the self and others. A fourth source of understanding was
revealed knowledge, given to man by God through the experience and
testimony of others. Personal experience included primarily what one
could learn through sensory means, which was meager compared to
what one could learn from the other three sources. If people needed
to rely primarily on the experience of others, who were they to trust
when they discovered contradictions?
Reasonable individuals, Catharine wrote, would give the most cre-
dence “to the testimony of those who are the most intelligent, and thus
least likely to be deceived; the most conscientious, and thus least likely
to be in habits of falsehood; and least interested, and thus most likely
to be freed from prejudice and selfish considerations.”47 If students
were to grow in knowledge, they must be conscientious in their work
and rely on the greater knowledge and experience of their teachers.
Then they, in turn, would become knowledgeable teachers in their own

50
 TEACHING AS PHILANTHROPY

right. It was the well-educated teacher, imbued with moral rectitude,

who was intelligent and conscientious, but did not put her own in-
terests before the welfare and happiness of others.
Although Catharine had been zealous at times in seeking the re-
ligious conversion of her students, Elements suggests that she was no
longer convinced of its necessity. This is not to say that she discounted
the importance of religion; common wisdom of the day held that the
future of the nation relied on the virtue of the people, and their virtue
depended on religion. Catharine focused on a design that defined sal-
vation in terms of Christian belief coupled with good behavior rather
than on the submission of the will to God. Ultimately, happiness was
dependent upon one’s behavior toward others. Her standard of behav-
ior was stated in the rule Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy
strength, and thy neighbor as thyself.48 Implicit in this, certainly, were
faith and belief in the sources of the rule: Jesus as the deliverer of this
command and the Bible as the legitimate source of revealed truth.
People, Catharine proposed, had been given a standard of right
behavior but needed strong motivation to overcome bad habits. The
means to this end were to love God and desire to live in his love:
“Love to God, then, is the golden chain to eternal happiness, that is
forever to unite in one interest, and in one tide of perfect enjoyment,
the Creator and all his holy and infinite family.”49 This kind of love
encompassed all levels of happiness and was itself the source of eternal
happiness, but it had to be chosen consciously by individuals, as an
exercise of free will. Love to God also meant obedience to God and
to his commandment to secure the happiness of others.
Of course, people were capable of choosing the wrong path, ne-
glecting to be concerned first and foremost with the happiness of oth-
ers. But the choice was of great import. She wrote, “[T]he mind is
brought to a stand in reference to the great object of existence, in
regard to a future state of being, and the question to be decided is,
shall happiness be found in gratifying certain other desires, or shall
the governing purpose of mind be obedience to God, thus securing
the happiness of conscious rectitude, and of being the cause of hap-
piness to others?”50 Here Catharine makes explicit reference to a “fu-
ture state of being,” linking salvation to mindfulness of the happiness
of others and obedience to the commandment love thy neighbor as
thyself.
She was also explicit as to how this love should be manifested. It

51
FRANCES HUEHLS

was not charitable to accept your neighbor’s word that he was in right
relationship with God. “The term charity is often applied to signify
simply ‘believing every human being safe and on the way to heaven,
who honestly believes what he professes.’ But that is not the signifi-
cation which is warranted by Scripture, where we find it used to ex-
press that benevolence enjoined and practiced by the Lord and his
Apostles, who declared men to be in darkness and blindness, which
was voluntary and guilty, and who went about to seek and save, ‘those
who were lost.’ ”51 At the highest level, then, securing the happiness
of others was contingent upon recognizing their moral poverty. Char-
ity, by Catharine’s definition, meant loving your neighbors enough to
be certain that they were in a right relationship with God, even if that
meant pointing out their moral weaknesses. If the tables were turned,
she explained, we would expect this kind of love from our neighbors.
The proper approach to seeking and saving the lost was not fire and
brimstone but “gentleness, kindness, meekness, and benevolence in the
heart, but the expression of it, by accommodation to the tastes and
prejudices of others, by gentle manners, mild tones of voice, and kind
and winning words.”52 Moral poverty was the affliction to be healed,
and a successful healing process resulted in the greatest happiness for
both giver and recipient.
In line with Catharine’s focus on the training of upper-class leaders
was the idea that moral poverty pervaded all social classes and crossed
all socioeconomic lines. Consequently, locating one’s “neighbor” did
not necessarily mean working in the streets with the hungry and
homeless; benevolence could be exercised within the confines of one’s
social class. Charity—seeking to alleviate the physical pain and suf-
fering associated with poverty—was different to her and was not a
topic taken up in Elements. In 1869, Catharine devoted more attention
to the right purposes of charity in The American Woman’s Home and
gave the term a broader definition. There she defined the biblical
“neighbor” as anyone whose needs are known, anyone who suffers
from moral and intellectual poverty, or anyone with immediate phys-
ical needs. She cautioned that not as many people needed physical
relief as it might seem and that the able-bodied could find work if
they were able to develop sufficient virtue. She concluded that it was
important to satisfy physical wants, but it was best to help people find
a means of support and then concentrate on tending to their spiritual
needs.53
However insistent Catharine was about moral training, there is no

52
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indication that she encouraged her students to have hands-on contact

with the physically poor and needy. An announcement that appeared
in the Connecticut Courant in March of 1826 declared that the new
term’s courses would offer “occasional opportunities of mingling in
good society.”54 Catharine may have tried the patience of many a Hart-
ford father with her revivals and enhanced curriculum, but she did
maintain a “respectable” social environment for their daughters. Al-
though Angelina Grimké toured the benevolent institutions of Hart-
ford with Catharine—including the prison, the school for the deaf,
and the insane asylum—she did so at her own request. The students
perhaps participated in social action from afar by sending bandages to
Greece during wartime; they also may have attended one of the public
meetings Catharine organized on behalf of Cherokee rights. But there
is no evidence that they were active in the community in the way we
think of voluntarism today.55 Catharine’s own primary connection to
the economically less fortunate of Hartford was through the leaders
of benevolent institutions. On Saturday evenings, Catharine gathered
these people in her home for religious and literary activities.56
Catharine went on in Elements to build a stronger case for “good
works,” dividing humanity into two classes. The first class put prece-
dence on personal gratification and the happiness of friends. These
are those unconcerned with the greater good, who observe religion in
an outward and superficial way. When the self comes first, Catharine
declared, religiosity is often motivated by fear of God. Also in this
class were those with disordered minds who made no pretense of con-
cern for the general good. The second class of people live out of love
for God, work at correcting selfish habits, and
regard the temporal interests of themselves, of their children, and of
all they hold dear, as of secondary consideration and not ever to be
put in competition with the general eternal welfare of their fellow
men. They are acting for eternity instead of for time, and in this
relation, objects, which to other men are matters of deep concern,
are trifles to them. Regarding the rescue of mankind from the evils
of selfishness in this and in a future life, as the greatest of all con-
cerns, it is this which interests their thoughts and their efforts, more
than the attainment of any earthly good for themselves or for oth-
ers.57
Here again, Catharine directly links good works with eternity, by-
passing the issue of conversion.
It was not by profession of faith that the righteous were to be

53
FRANCES HUEHLS

identified, but by their good deeds. “A good tree cannot bring forth
evil fruits; wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” The righteous
could be identified in the temporal world by their acts, but ultimately
the world—for eternity—would be divided along these lines. “From
the laws of mind and from past experience then, we can establish the
position, that at some future period, if the mind of man is immortal,
the human race will be permanently divided into two classes, the per-
fectly selfish and the perfectly benevolent.”58
The break with orthodox Calvinist doctrine is quite clear in Cath-
arine’s conception of an eternity defined by benevolent acts. Catharine
had always been too much her father’s daughter to indulge in a merely
temporary revolt. She admired Lyman and was inspired by him, but
intellectually she could not accept the necessity of conversion. Benev-
olence had become her standard, manifested in seeking the greater
good and happiness of others, a way to live for now and for eternity.
Philanthropy—as voluntary action for the public good, as love, as be-
nevolence—defined the road to eternal life. Education, religion, and
the noblest role of woman were united in teaching, made sweet by the
reciprocity of the philanthropic act. Teaching—by promoting happi-
ness and the greater good, by working to alleviate the poverty of a
soul—was not only a continuing source of happiness but also a route
to salvation. Only a noble profession could promise such a noble re-
ward.

REFLECTIONS ON A MORAL EXPERIMENT

Although Catharine’s philosophy of education crystallized during
these years, her dream of an endowment for Hartford Female Semi-
nary did not. Economics and orthodoxy clashed as Catharine’s lectures
on mental and moral philosophy drew criticism from members of the
Hartford community.59 Frustrated by the trustees’ refusal to pursue
endowment, Catharine decided to close the school and go to Cincin-
nati with her father, who felt that the moral destiny of the nation
depended upon educating the generation that would build the West.
“Catholics and infidels” already had a start there and he intended to
do something about it. Cincinnati, he promised, would supply an ex-
cellent opportunity for Catharine to test her theory of moral educa-
tion.60
Catharine’s students were not unaffected by her ideas. Angelina
Grimké’s diary of her days in Hartford tells of students who became

54
 TEACHING AS PHILANTHROPY

teachers out of the desire to be useful, rather than out of financial

necessity. Four Hartford graduates had gone on to open a school in
Huntsville, Alabama.61 Two other students of particular note are re-
membered for activities other than teaching. Sara Payson Willis Par-
ton wrote her humorous essays under the pseudonym Fanny Fern. The
champion of the housewife, Parton spoke out in support of women’s
intellectual equality and against a double standard of morality for men
and women. Written in everyday language, her columns sympathized
with the ever-present problems of housework and large families. Mary
Grew, whose father was a stockholder in Hartford Female Seminary,
was an activist on many fronts. As an abolitionist and member of the
Female Anti-Slavery Society, she worked alongside Lucretia Mott and
Sarah Pugh. During the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840,
she and the other female delegates were refused access to the conven-
tion floor. That experience inspired more than fifty years of activism
on behalf of women’s rights, including petitioning for property rights
in Pennsylvania and work as the founding president of the Pennsyl-
vania Woman Suffrage Association. Perhaps neither columnist nor
suffragette would have fit Catharine’s ideal, but like her, Parton and
Grew made their stands and left their marks on society as unmarried
women. Like Catharine, they believed a better life for women would
permanently improve the whole of society. Finally, Catharine’s shy and
retiring younger sister Harriet was both student and teacher at Hart-
ford. Under Catharine’s relentless prodding, she honed her mental and
literary skills, growing up to leave her literary mark as the “crusader
in crinoline.”62
Throughout the remainder of her life, Catharine worked to ad-
vance the priorities she had outlined in Hartford. She raised funds for
female academies and colleges, recruited teachers for the West, and
wrote relentlessly to promote the idea of the moral superiority of
women in society. In most writing about Catharine, the Hartford Fe-
male Seminary years are eclipsed by her subsequent failures—such as
the Western Female Seminary (1850–1852)—as well as her arguments
against legal rights for women—particularly suffrage—that made her
appear reactionary and elitist.63 But in her days as Hartford’s head-
mistress, she was a visionary who had made her vision a reality. If she
continued to preach a message of education for women that led to
lives consecrated to teaching moral living, it was because she had seen
at Hartford that her system could work.
Catharine Esther Beecher was herself an example of the philan-

55
FRANCES HUEHLS

thropic life she encouraged others to lead. At Hartford, her own mind
had come to life through preparing to teach. She had developed a
curriculum comparable to what was offered young men at the acade-
mies of the day and had elevated moral education from its place in
extra-curricular activities like religious revival and chapel service, in-
stitutionalizing it instead within the lecture hall. In the process of
refining and teaching her moral philosophy, she resolved many of her
own personal issues with Calvinism and offered her students a moral
curriculum for their own teaching. Her own education and teaching,
when united with her personal beliefs, gave her life a purpose and
meaning that religion alone had not provided. Teaching also allowed
her to remain financially independent. At that moment and in her
own way, we might say Catharine Beecher both “walked the walk” and
“talked the talk.” She was training “immortal minds” so that they, in
turn, could train others. If Hartford Female Seminary was a laboratory
for her personal philosophy of education and teaching, she was perhaps
its greatest experiment. Is it any wonder that she returned the gift of
this experience by dedicating her life to encouraging others to follow
in her path?

NOTES
1. Discussions of education for women in this era can be found in Barbara Miller
Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Edu-
cation in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 1–42; Margaret
A. Nash, “ ‘Cultivating the Powers of Human Beings’: Gendered Perspectives on
Curricula and Pedagogy in Academies of the New Republic,” History of Education
Quarterly 41 (summer 2001): 239–50; Kim Tolley, “The Rise of the Academies: Con-
tinuity or Change?” History of Education Quarterly 41 (summer 2001): 225–39; and
Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 101–25.
2. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), 94.
3. The idea that philanthropy and religion were intimately connected permeated
social thought throughout the nineteenth century. See Frances A. Goodale, The Lit-
erature of Philanthropy (New York: Harpers, 1893) and Walton’s review of Goodale’s
book in the introduction to this volume.
4. This definition of education as the transmission of culture is informed by
Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities
for Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early
American History and Culture, 1960).
5. Lyman Beecher’s evangelical career is discussed in Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 3–

56
 TEACHING AS PHILANTHROPY

77; see also Stephen H. Snyder, Lyman Beecher and His Children: The Transformation
of a Religious Tradition (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1991), 3–6.
6. Conrad Edick Wright, The Transformation of Charity in Postrevolutionary New
England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 159.
7. Definitions of charity and benevolence are discussed in Wright, Transforma-
tion, 159–87; Kathleen D. McCarthy, “Parallel Power Structures: Women and the
Voluntary Sphere,” in Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy, and Power, ed.
Kathleen D. McCarthy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 1–
31; and Anne Firor Scott, “Women’s Voluntary Associations: From Charity to Re-
form,” in Lady Bountiful, ed. McCarthy, 35–38. See also Oxford English Dictionary,
online edition, 2002, s.v. “benevolence” and “charity.” Under these definitions, teaching
would not have been considered uncharitable merely because teachers were paid for
their services; see, in particular, the discussion of paid services in Wright, Transfor-
mation, 187.
8. The growth of Protestant benevolent activities is discussed in Wright, Trans-
formation, 51–76; Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality,
Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1990), 11; McCarthy, “Parallel Power Structures,” 4–8; and Scott,
“Women’s Voluntary Associations,” 35–38. According to Wright, Catholic institutions
began to spring up in the 1820s (Transformation, 188–89). Jewish benevolent societies
that were distinctly separate from the synagogues did not appear prior to the 1840s
(Leon A. Jick, The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820–1870 [Hanover, N.H.:
University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1987], 97–113).
9. Roberta Wollons, “American Philanthropy and Women’s Education Exported:
Missionary Teachers in Turkey,” this volume.
10. Scott, “Women’s Voluntary Associations,” 37.
11. The philosophy behind separate education for women is discussed in Cott,
Bonds, 112–25; Solomon, Educated Women, 14–26; and Barbara Leslie Epstein, The
Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century
America (1981; reprint, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986), 45–
65. Beecher’s years at Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Academy are noted in Cott, Bonds, 19;
and Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 16–18.
12. For discussions of social class in the early 1800s see Stuart M. Blumin, The
Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 182–218; Cott, Bonds, 123; and Ginzberg,
Women and the Work of Benevolence, 23–24.
13. Cott, Bonds, 123–24.
14. Beecher’s catering to financial and social elites is noted in Solomon, Educated
Women, 24; also Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 59–77.
15. Solomon, Educated Women, 27–41.
16. Discussion of Beecher’s failed conversion and her relationship with Alexander
Fisher can be found in Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 28–55; see also Snyder, Lyman Beecher,
38–50.
17. Quoted in Redding S. Sugg, Motherteacher: The Feminization of American
Education (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 44.
18. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 61.
19. Catharine E. Beecher, “Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education

57
FRANCES HUEHLS

Presented to the Trustees of the Hartford Female Seminary and Published at Their
Request,” in Pioneers of Women’s Education in the United States: Emma Willard, Cath-
erine Beecher, Mary Lyon, ed. Willystine Goodsell (1931; reprint, New York: AMS
Press, 1970), 143–63.
20. Ibid., 147.
21. Catharine E. Beecher, “Female Education,” American Journal of Education
(Boston) 2 (April/May 1827), 219–23, 264–69.
22. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 72.
23. Beecher, “Improvements in Education,” 152–53.
24. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 61.
25. Beecher, “Improvements in Education,” 155.
26. Academic competition in the academies is discussed in Nash, “Gendered Per-
spectives,” 248–49.
27. Catharine E. Beecher, “Essay on the Education of Female Teachers,” in
Goodsell, ed., Pioneers, 172.
28. Catharine E. Beecher, Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions (New York:
J. B. Ford, 1874), 27.
29. Ibid., 28–29, 35–37.
30. Although Catharine never looked upon the public reading of her journal as
an ordeal, as had many of the girls, she may have realized that this system did not
encourage honesty. She comments on her disciplinary philosophy in Educational Rem-
iniscences. See also Sklar, Catharine Beecher; and Nicole Tonkovich, Domesticity with a
Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret
Fuller (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997).
31. Beecher, Educational Reminiscences, 46.
32. Mae Elizabeth Harveson, Catharine Esther Beecher: Pioneer Educator (1932;
reprint, New York: Arno, 1969), 49.
33. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 98.
34. The butter incident is related in Tonkovich, Domesticity, 165. See also Richard
H. Shryock, “Sylvester Graham and the Popular Health Movement, 1830–1870,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review 18 (September 1931): 172–83. Beecher discusses
the sound-mind-and-body concept and the course of calisthenics in Educational Rem-
iniscences.
35. Beecher, Educational Reminiscences, 47; Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 61.
36. Jeanne Boydston, Mary Kelley, and Anne Margolis, The Limits of Sisterhood:
The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Woman’s Sphere (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1988), 41; Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 64, 71.
37. Lyman Beecher, Autobiography, Correspondence, etc. of Lyman Beecher, D.D.,
vol. 2 (New York: Harper, 1864–65), 63.
38. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 71.
39. Beecher, Educational Reminiscences, 51.
40. Beecher’s attempt to recruit Zilpah Grant is discussed in Harveson, Catharine
Esther Beecher, 57–60. See also Sugg, Motherteacher, 48.
41. Catharine E. Beecher, The Elements of Mental and Moral Philosophy, Founded
upon Experience, Reason, and the Bible (Hartford, Conn.: Peter B. Gleason, 1831).
42. Beecher, Educational Reminiscences, 52.
43. Beecher, Elements, 57.

58
 TEACHING AS PHILANTHROPY

44. Ibid., 244.

45. Ibid., 245.
46. Ibid., 253.
47. Ibid., 157–58.
48. Ibid., 248
49. Ibid., 279.
50. Ibid., 81.
51. Ibid., 241.
52. Ibid., 413.
53. Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s
Home, or, Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance
of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes (1869; reprint, Hartford,
Conn.: Stowe-Day Foundation, 1987), 242–43.
54. Connecticut Courant, 20 March 1826.
55. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 99.
56. Ibid., 61.
57. Beecher, Elements, 338.
58. Ibid., 357.
59. Snyder, Lyman Beecher, 58.
60. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 102.
61. Excerpts from diaries of Angelina Grimké can be found in Sklar, Catharine
Beecher, 98; and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 63.
62. Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger, “Parton, Sara Payson Willis,” and Ira V.
Brown, “Grew, Mary,” in Notable American Women, 1607–1950, ed. Edward T. James,
Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1971), vol. 3, 24–25 and vol. 2, 91–92. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s years
at Hartford are discussed in Boydston, Kelly, and Margolis, Limits of Sisterhood, 49–
60.
63. See Sklar, Catharine Beecher, for discussion of Western Female Seminary, 130–
31; endowment of Milwaukee Female College, 223–26; debate over the rights of
women, 132–35 and 268–70.

59
 2. Philanthropy and Social Case Work:
Mary E. Richmond and the Russell Sage
Foundation, 1909–1928
Sarah Henry Lederman

In 1897 Mary E. Richmond, general secretary of the Baltimore

Charity Organization Society (and, later, an officer of the Russell Sage
Foundation), implored delegates to the National Conference of Char-
ities and Correction to create a “Training School in Applied Philan-
thropy.” She insisted that young people had a right to demand “from
the profession of applied philanthropy (we really have not even a name
for it) that which they have a right to demand from any other pro-
fession; further opportunities for education and development, and, in-
cidentally, the opportunity to earn a living.”1 Many of Richmond’s
colleagues agreed. Within a year, Dr. Edward T. Devine, general sec-
retary of the New York Charity Organization Society and a professor
at Columbia University, invited students to apply for the first official
school of social work in the United States: a six-week course at the
New York Summer School in Philanthropy.2
Richmond’s call for a school of social work was motivated in part
by her desire to attract talented individuals to the charity organization
movement. But she was also motivated by a desire to make charity
organization ideals and practice the mainstay of social work education.
Richmond saw a widening rift between leaders in the field of philan-
thropy, a field that included charity organizations, settlement houses,
child saving missions, and prison reform campaigns. While settlement
house workers, the people who provided classes, health care, and other
services to inner-city immigrants, wanted to fight poverty through
campaigns for education, public health, and labor legislation, charity
organizers, who attempted to fight the problem of urban poverty by

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 PHILANTHROPY AND SOCIAL CASE WORK

helping one individual at a time, insisted that each difficult case re-
quired intense, individualized attention. In the late 1890s, Richmond
sensed that the former program was proving to be more popular with
young people than the latter. Her plea for general training schools in
philanthropy reflected her desire to boost the charity organization
movement by creating a prestigious social work education program
with social case work as the centerpiece of the curriculum. The open-
ing of the New York School in 1898 was followed by the opening of
schools of social work, in Boston (1902), Chicago (1903), and St.
Louis (1905). Through her regular lectures at these schools, her cor-
respondence with the first generation of teachers, and her preparation
of curriculum materials, Richmond exerted extraordinary influence
over the emerging profession of social work.
Richmond’s ability to shape social work education resulted from
her connection with the Russell Sage Foundation. Richmond pro-
duced books and periodicals for teachers and students, while she
guided Foundation officials in their funding decisions for the schools.
Richmond’s unique position provided her with an unparalleled oppor-
tunity to organize knowledge for an emerging profession. It also won
her a host of enemies. The partisan nature of Richmond’s approach
to social work education alienated many leaders in the field of social
welfare, including social scientists Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith
Abbott, settlement house leaders Lillian Wald and Mary Simkhovitch,
and Homer Folks, director of the New York State Charities Aid As-
sociation. While in recent years a substantial and growing literature
has documented the contributions of these figures, the controversies
surrounding Richmond during her life have obscured her contribution
to the social work profession. One of the few women associated with
a large private foundation during this era, Richmond has not attracted
the attention of scholars working in the areas of women’s history or
(unlike her male contemporaries in the foundation world) the interest
of scholars bent on forging the critical study of foundation history.
Nor has this self-styled educator—a woman who, with only a high
school education, spearheaded efforts to provide an educational foun-
dation for social work—received attention from scholars interested in
the rise of the helping professions. Indeed, Richmond remains a shad-
owy figure in the history of American philanthropy and relatively un-
known in the history of education. This essay seeks to address these
lacunae by examining Richmond’s achievements as an employee of the
Russell Sage Foundation and assessing her legacy.

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SARAH HENRY LEDERMAN

Richmond’s tenure at the Russell Sage Foundation raises questions

about the relationships connecting women, power, and philanthropy.
To what extent was Richmond able to use the Russell Sage Foundation
to meet her goals? Was her vision of social work implemented at the
schools? Did she succeed in organizing knowledge while she balanced
the requirements for competent and compassionate case work? The
answers to these questions reveal that Richmond’s career provides an
excellent example of the challenges women faced in the course of en-
gaging in philanthropy and in applying education to philanthropic
ends. This essay begins with an examination of Mary Richmond’s
life and work. It traces the origins of her ideas about social case work
and her views of the relationship between philanthropy and educa-
tion. Mary Richmond—much like an earlier woman educator-
philanthropist, Catharine Beecher, whose philosophizing on the con-
nection between philanthropy and teaching in the early 1800s is
examined in chapter 1 of this volume—greatly respected the power of
education and philanthropy to shape ideas and behavior. For Rich-
mond, the challenge was to articulate the need for systematizing the
study of philanthropic practice in social work. In examining Rich-
mond’s place within the history of women and philanthropy in edu-
cation, then, this essay focuses on her ideas and her influence, through
her association with the Russell Sage Foundation, on the profession-
alization of social work.3

MARY RICHMOND’S CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION

The themes of illness, death, and perseverance reverberated
through Mary Richmond’s early years. Born in 1861 in Belleville, Il-
linois, to Baltimore natives, Mary was the second of four children and
the only one to survive past age two. Henry Richmond, Mary’s father,
moved to Illinois to work as a blacksmith in a munitions factory.
Mary’s mother, Lavinia Harris Richmond, returned with Mary to Bal-
timore before the end of the Civil War. In April 1865, two weeks
after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Lavinia Harris died of tuber-
culosis. Though Henry Richmond moved back to Baltimore and re-
married, Mary remained with her grandmother, Mehitable Harris, an
eccentric but inspiring matriarch.
Born in Boston in 1797, Mehitable had moved to Baltimore, mar-
ried a jeweler and part-time realtor, and borne eleven children between
1820 and 1842. She lost five children in the cholera epidemics of the

62
 PHILANTHROPY AND SOCIAL CASE WORK

1830s and ’40s, and lost her husband, William Calendar Harris, when
he was prospecting for gold in California in 1848.4 Endowed with an
indomitable spirit, Mehitable Harris joined movements to promote
abolitionism, women’s rights, and spiritualism. She subscribed to nu-
merous newspapers and substituted committee work for domesticity.
Though Harris was nearly seventy when Mary became her ward, the
two formed a close attachment. Richmond attended many meetings
with her grandmother and even passed the collection basket at a spir-
itualist convention. Richmond’s involvement in her grandmother’s
work led her to sign her earliest letters “Yours for the Ca[u]se.”5 It is
strangely fitting that case work would become her cause.
In order to support young Mary and two spinster daughters, Me-
hitable ran a boardinghouse in a formerly well-to-do section of Bal-
timore. The house was untidy and disorganized but the atmosphere
suited Richmond. Some of the boarders taught her writing, and her
aunt, Ellen Harris, taught her elocution. In the 1870s Ellen Harris
gained a bit of notoriety as a teacher in a school for African American
children, unusual work for a white woman in Reconstruction Balti-
more.6 The political activity of her Harris relatives forced Richmond
to consider the plight of marginalized groups, while their dedication
to causes infected her with a desire to join a movement.7
The combination of Richmond’s frailty and Mehitable Harris’s dis-
dain for public education prevented Richmond from attending school
until she reached age eleven. Up to that time a neighbor appeased
Richmond’s insatiable appetite for books by lending her volumes on
the condition that she return them with thorough written reports. This
practice served Richmond well. At age fourteen she passed the highly
competitive entrance exams of the elite Eastern Female High School.
Though Richmond enjoyed the school’s intellectual challenge, she
found the social adjustment difficult. Attired exclusively in her aunts’
old-fashioned hand-me-downs, she became very self-conscious about
her appearance. However, social handicaps did not discourage Rich-
mond from planning for her future. She spoke of her dreams in a
graduation speech entitled “Aspirations” and later told friends, “Am-
bition is a good thing. . . . It has always been a part of any great thing.
. . . To feel you are thoroughly useful in this world do your work well.
Doing something for others will do as much as anything to bring
about happiness.”8 Over the next decade she would combine her desire
for success with her altruistic impulse.
Shortly after graduating in 1878 Richmond moved to New York

63
SARAH HENRY LEDERMAN

City, where her Aunt Ellen was employed at a publishing firm. Ellen
Harris helped Richmond obtain work at the same firm and then re-
turned to Baltimore. Richmond found herself alone and nearly desti-
tute. During the next two years, she became increasingly ill as she
struggled to pay the rent. Finally, loneliness and ill health drove her
back to Baltimore. In later years, Richmond confessed that she was
glad no “lady bountiful” had tried to rescue her. She insisted, “a
woman’s best position after all is a certain sense of independence and
self-respect.”9 She would later see case work as a tool for cultivating
independence and self-respect in others.
In Baltimore, Richmond continued to develop her speaking and
writing skills. By day she worked as a bookkeeper in a stationery shop.
During the evenings she read and wrote, preparing speeches for a
literary club made up of Eastern Female High School alumnae. On
weekends she taught Shakespeare to Sunday school students at her
Unitarian church, and in 1888 she published an article about Balti-
more using a pen name, R. E. Marel. For local newspapers she wrote
a weekly précis of the sermons delivered by Charles Weld. Reverend
Weld admired Richmond’s achievements as a teacher and writer and
in December 1888 he urged her to apply for the position of assistant
treasurer at the Baltimore Charity Organization Society. Richmond’s
erudition impressed her interviewers. One Society board member re-
called, “she looked pathetically young and she talked like the Ancient
of Days!”10 In January 1889 Richmond embarked on a crash course in
philanthropy.

THE CHARITY ORGANIZATION MOVEMENT

The idea of organizing charity was developed by British reformers
who were determined to reduce poverty by controlling the distribution
of food and money to impoverished people. They established the Lon-
don Society for Organising Charity to coordinate the work of
thousands of tiny relief agencies in the hope that “worthy” families
would receive the help they needed. Leaders of the movement aimed
to increase donations by issuing effective and uniform financial appeals
to the upper classes, while cutting costs by providing a centralized
clearinghouse of information for workers in the member agencies. The
clearinghouse was designed to prevent one family or individual from
obtaining aid from numerous sources.
Two important strains of thought characterized the charity orga-

64
 PHILANTHROPY AND SOCIAL CASE WORK

nization movement in America: thrift and service. The notion of thrift

appeared prominently in the work of British Presbyterian minister Ste-
phen Humphreys Gurteen, who was a founder of the first charity
organization in the United States, in Buffalo, New York, in 1877.
Gurteen proclaimed that the primary goal of charity organization was
to keep careful records and conduct thorough investigations in order
to expose frauds, the “unworthy” poor, while reserving funds for the
“worthy” poor. Many civic leaders in Buffalo embraced this brand of
charity organization because they believed it would reduce the cost of
providing relief. In Buffalo, the idea of thrift and efficiency prevailed
over the idea of service.11
The precept of service, of providing some kind of help to all people
in need, percolated throughout the proceedings of the American Social
Science Association (ASSA) and its successor, the National Confer-
ence of Charities and Correction (NCCC).12 In Boston, leaders of
organized charity provided service through hundreds of “friendly vis-
itors.” Led by Zilpha Drew Smith, Boston charity organizers set out
to cultivate relationships between the visitors they enlisted and the
families who applied for aid. Smith believed that the friendship be-
tween the visitor—either a volunteer or a paid agent (later known as
a social case worker)—and the individual or family (later known as a
client) was the key to reform.13
In preparation for her new job, Richmond spent a week in Boston
in January 1889 studying charity organization with Zilpha Smith.
Richmond attended case conferences where dedicated upper- and
middle-class volunteers and paid agents discussed the problems of each
family under their care. These problems included unemployment, low
wages, sickness, lack of education, addiction, and homelessness. The
committee proposed solutions ranging from jobs to medical treatment
to training programs to housing reform. Ideally the solution would be
based on plans the case worker had discussed with the client. Under
Smith’s tutelage Richmond became convinced that sympathy was more
important than donations. Understanding the situation in its entirety
and enlisting the cooperation of the client were important first steps.
The lessons Richmond learned from Smith in 1889, and for the next
twenty years as she corresponded with Smith, led Richmond to eschew
superficial labels such as “worthy” and “unworthy” poor.14
Back in Baltimore Richmond attacked her new job with the zeal
of a recent convert. She delivered dozens of speeches exhorting au-
diences to fight poverty by donating money or by volunteering at the

65
SARAH HENRY LEDERMAN

Baltimore Charity Organization Society (BCOS). “We need a thou-

sand more at once, and to you, the public, we look for recruits. . . .
Put out the fires; put out the fires of hopeless misery, of intemperance;
of wrong relations of man to man, and plant God’s sunlight there in
place of them.”15 Richmond astonished her employers with her success
at raising funds and recruiting visitors. In 1891 the Society’s board
members promoted her to the chief executive position, general sec-
retary.
Richmond’s commitment to the cause set her apart from BCOS
authorities who were less interested in individual cases of need than
they were in studying poverty and developing cures. Under the guid-
ance of Daniel Coit Gilman, a longtime member of the American
Social Science Association, leaders of the Baltimore Society amplified
the original charity organization goals of thrift and service by aiming
to provide training for future leaders in philanthropy. As president of
Johns Hopkins University, Gilman hoped the BCOS would serve as
a laboratory where students of philanthropy, economics, history, and
political science could analyze poverty and develop treatments in the
same way that the combined hospital and laboratory enabled medical
students to study and treat diseases. The first few general secretaries
at the BCOS, such as Hopkins Ph.D. Amos G. Warner, soon dis-
covered that the scientific scrutiny of poverty did not yield ready cures.
As the men at the BCOS became impatient with the intractable daily
problems of destitute families, particularly among Baltimore’s large
population of African Americans, they retreated to the university.
Richmond, a handful of female employees (future case workers), and
a cadre of volunteers were left to put BCOS ideals into practice.16
Richmond realized she needed to teach case workers to develop
sympathetic relations with the individuals who applied for aid and
their families. Richmond believed that fledgling case workers could
develop constructive relationships if they had the right motive. “The
right motive is best stated in the radical meaning of the word charity—
love. It may be restated as the desire of every living, human soul to
share its best with others. Note the difference between mere giving,
which drops the gift and passes on, and generous sharing which lov-
ingly stands by and claims no life apart.”17 For workers with the right
motive, professional training would be an important next step. Over
time Richmond resolved to provide this training. She read journals
and followed developments in numerous professions, especially med-
icine at Johns Hopkins. She created a periodical to report on and

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 PHILANTHROPY AND SOCIAL CASE WORK

promote BCOS activities. The key to success, she believed, lay in

developing and disseminating a standard methodology for charity or-
ganizers. In 1896 Charles S. Loch introduced her to the case record
forms used at the London COS and to the idea that sympathy could
be combined with thorough investigations. It was this methodology—
a combination of compassion and intelligence, or “love working with
discernment,” as Charles Loch described it—that she hoped to refine
and promote.18
One of the greatest challenges Richmond faced was persuading
people that distributing money was detrimental to charity work. The
problem intensified during periods of severe unemployment. In de-
pression eras, such as 1893–1895, the workload at the BCOS became
unmanageable. Yet Richmond maintained that case workers should
refrain from distributing money unless they had conducted thorough
investigations and could maintain cordial relations with the family. She
constantly reminded her staff that sympathetic relations were impos-
sible when money interfered. How could friendship thrive when the
client viewed the charity worker as nothing more than a source of
revenue? Meanwhile, contributors to the BCOS expected that poor
people could count on the agency to help families when jobs were
scarce. Some donors stopped supporting the agency when they learned
that it denied many requests for assistance.
Richmond hoped that education, for the general public as well as
for her staff, would resolve misunderstandings about the COS mission,
and she persisted with her information campaign. As she told one
correspondent in 1902, “Charitable societies do not refuse to pay rent
as a usual thing because they are so hard-hearted (though this is what
I used to think), but because the more they pay back debts of any
kind the bigger the debts become and the less the poor are benefitted.
. . . It is only after long and bitter experience that I have learned to
attack the cause of non-payment (such as lack of work, or thrift or
skill, etc.) and let the rent go, except where ejectment would mean
suffering to some sick or helpless person.”19
By the late 1890s Richmond feared that confusion over the role
of the case worker was delaying the professionalization of philan-
thropy. In 1897, in addition to pleading for a school of social work,
she prepared a seventy-page manual to guide case workers in their
interactions with impoverished families.20 She wanted to teach case
workers to make patient investigations and to weigh evidence objec-
tively. While Richmond hoped the manual would mark the beginning

67
SARAH HENRY LEDERMAN

of her formal work as an educator, she sensed that her board of di-
rectors at the COS did not support her education objectives. In the
spring of 1900 she resigned from the BCOS in order to accept a job
as general secretary of the Philadelphia Society for Organizing Charity
(PSOC). She hoped her new position would give her time to develop
a training program for practical philanthropists.21

THE RETAIL METHOD OF REFORM

Richmond was persuaded to move to Philadelphia by several in-
fluential women at the PSOC and the Philadelphia Civic Club who
promised to support her work in education. She hoped that their in-
tellectual and financial endorsement, coupled with the support of Sam-
uel McCune Lindsay at the University of Pennsylvania, would free her
from daily administrative duties and provide teaching opportunities.
Her expectations were never realized. During her nine years in Phil-
adelphia, aside from two lectures she delivered at the University of
Pennsylvania, “The Basis of Fact in Charity” in 1906 and “Three
Stages in the Development of Relief ” in 1907, she had little time to
establish standards in social work.22
In Philadelphia, instead of focusing on education, Richmond
found herself battling her agency’s great budget deficit. To make mat-
ters worse she became caught in a struggle between two groups of
PSOC board members. One group wanted “case work development”
while another clamored for “community development.”23 Inspired by
the reform enthusiasm of the Progressive Era, Richmond steered the
PSOC into campaigns to support child labor laws, housing and san-
itation reform, and civil service exams. In 1905 she served as the chair
of the Committee on Cooperation for the City Party, and she helped
elect a reform platform, which put forty women on local school boards.
In 1906 Richmond and the City Party were congratulated on handing
Philadelphia “one of the most spectacular, far-reaching and significant
municipal revolutions ever witnessed in any American city.”24 Rich-
mond neglected social work education for the sake of these achieve-
ments. A year later she discovered that poverty persisted despite these
campaigns.
Her professional reckoning soon followed. In 1907 thousands of
wage earners lost their jobs when a depression struck Philadelphia.
The PSOC’s resources appeared meager in the face of the desperate
requests for assistance that poured into the district offices each week.

68
 PHILANTHROPY AND SOCIAL CASE WORK

Although Richmond had trained a handful of agents in the eighteen

districts, only a few provided the level of thorough, compassionate
service Richmond demanded. Families in need of aid were turned
away by exhausted case workers. As a result the PSOC drew public
criticism both for its expenditures on administration and for its failure
to attack poverty at its roots.
In response, Richmond introduced a new concept to explain the
benefits of social case work. She contrasted social case work, the “retail
method” of reform, to the legislative solutions or the “wholesale
method” of reform embraced by advocates of social justice.25 By em-
phasizing the advantages customized service provided through “retail”
reform, Richmond hoped to persuade donors that the service provided
by charity organizers was a more reliable form of help than the help
that could be rendered through “wholesale” reforms. Regardless of the
effort spent by female organizers to pass new laws, Richmond argued,
male politicians never appropriated adequate funds to implement the
legislation. Politicians, she concluded, were too fickle to be entrusted
with matters of human welfare. She longed for a chance to publicize
her ideas about case work.
The opportunity presented itself when John M. Glenn—a former
board member of the Baltimore COS—became president of the Rus-
sell Sage Foundation in 1907. Robert W. de Forest, the driving force
behind the Foundation, conspired with Glenn to bring Richmond to
New York. De Forest had tried for many years to hire Richmond at
the New York Charity Organization Society, where he had been pres-
ident since 1888. As board member and later vice president of the
American Red Cross (ARC) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art—
to name only a few of his positions—de Forest had combined his
social contacts with his legal acumen to become one of New York
City’s most influential philanthropists. He served as tenement house
commissioner of New York State from 1900 to 1901 and of New York
City from 1901 to 1903.26 When de Forest failed to install Richmond
at the NYCOS, he helped arrange the creation of a national publicity
agency for the charity organization movement, called the Field De-
partment, and he made Richmond the director. Started in 1905 and
funded through the NYCOS publication Charities (later Charities and
the Commons, then The Survey), the Field Department fostered the
exchange of information between charity organization societies in or-
der for the weaker agencies to learn from the stronger ones.
Richmond welcomed her appointment as director of the Field De-

69
SARAH HENRY LEDERMAN

partment, but she had trouble juggling her work at the PSOC with
the responsibility of editing publications for member agencies. The
situation grew more difficult after 1907 as relations deteriorated be-
tween Richmond and Paul Kellogg, the Charities editor. Kellogg found
organized charity “old-fashioned” and undemocratic. Determined to
attract readers who “felt a sense of wrong,” Kellogg shifted his editorial
focus away from charity organization work and toward social problems
such as immigration, race relations, labor laws, and tenement conges-
tion.27 De Forest tried to resolve the tension by separating Richmond
and the Field Department from Kellogg and Charities. He created the
Charity Organization Department (COD) of the Russell Sage Foun-
dation to oversee fieldwork, publication, and education related to
charity organizing. He and Glenn persuaded Richmond to become
the COD’s full-time director. She announced her resignation from the
PSOC in March 1909.28 Richmond was delighted to finally have the
chance to develop standards for social case work.

THE CHARITY ORGANIZATION DEPARTMENT OF THE RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION

In September 1909, Mary Richmond settled into her Russell Sage
Foundation office in the Charities Building on East Twenty-second
Street. She planned to sponsor research projects, publish results, and
train case workers. After the frustrations of her previous positions,
Richmond relished the opportunities presented by the Sage Founda-
tion.
In 1907 Olivia Margaret Slocum Sage had founded the Russell
Sage Foundation in memory of her husband. Its mission—the “im-
provement of social and living conditions”—resulted from the close
connection between the Foundation’s board members and the charity
organization movement. Many foundation officials—most notably
Sage’s lawyer, Robert W. de Forest (who convinced her to create the
Foundation), and its president, John M. Glenn—hoped to infuse the
emerging profession of social work with the principles of the charity
organization movement.
Social work’s delayed professional development was due in part to
disagreements about the relative merit of the “retail” versus the “whole-
sale” method of reform. While Richmond and her charity organization
colleagues argued that the key to fighting poverty lay in the training
of expert case workers, who would lead private social service agencies

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in restoring families to prosperity one case at a time, leaders of the

settlement house movement, including Jane Addams, Lillian Wald,
Graham Taylor, Sophonisba Breckinridge, and Mary Simkhovitch, ar-
gued that agitation for social justice would provide more long-term
benefits to economically disadvantaged groups. While Jane Addams
tried to minimize the differences between the two approaches in her
1909 presidential speech at the National Conference of Charities and
Correction, entitled “Charity and Social Justice,” many of her allies in
the settlement movement demanded “justice not charity.” Settlement
workers scorned what they saw as the paternalistic approach to poverty
adopted by Richmond and her colleagues.29 They campaigned for wid-
ows’ pension legislation, juvenile courts, and the Children’s Bureau.
Up to 1907 Richmond made efforts to bridge the gap between the
philanthropic ideas of settlement house leaders and charity organizers.
She promoted cooperation between the two groups, insisting they
could learn from each other. Her strategy changed after 1907 when
she rejected settlement workers’ increasingly aggressive calls for welfare
legislation. Disillusioned by the political chicanery, corruption, and
racial discrimination she had witnessed in the administration of Civil
War pensions in Maryland, Richmond steadfastly denied that govern-
ment grants to individuals could solve the problem of poverty. She
believed social case work, conducted by trained experts, would provide
poor families with the tools they needed to become self-sufficient. She
feared that government intervention would prevent case workers from
mediating social relations between members of diverse social and racial
groups.30 Richmond’s fears were realized during the campaign for wid-
ows’ pensions.
The passage of state laws designed to provide cash grants to wid-
ows with children marked a turning point in American social welfare
history.31 Organizations supporting the pensions drew thousands of
women into politics. These predominantly middle-class women sym-
pathized with the plight of lower-class widows with hungry children.
Richmond agreed that single mothers faced hardships, but disagreed
with reformers who believed that male legislators would provide ad-
equate funds to enable widows to stop working outside the home in
order to focus exclusively on raising their children. While Richmond
admitted that the system of charity organization societies had yet to
provide a paragon of relief work, she insisted that overworked widows
and their children could best be helped through a constructive rela-

71
SARAH HENRY LEDERMAN

tionship. According to Richmond, the therapy depended on the sym-

pathy between the case worker and the mother, not on the amount of
money distributed.32
Between 1909 and 1915, twenty states passed laws providing as-
sistance to some widows and their children. Although Richmond and
others at the Russell Sage Foundation had mobilized significant re-
sources to fight the pensions, they lost the battle. Later, as Richmond
had predicted, the lack of administrative apparatus created serious
problems. Ironically, when thousands of widows applied for pensions,
civil servants turned to charity organizers for guidance. Desperate to
staff new-born offices for pension distribution, administrators begged
many of Richmond’s students, some of whom were outspoken oppo-
nents of widows’ pensions, to supply experienced case workers in order
to help evaluate the widows’ applications.33 Richmond advised her col-
leagues to decline work with state officials because she feared that the
failure she anticipated would be blamed on the case workers.34
Across the United States, civil servants used some social case work
techniques to investigate pension applicants. These investigations
aimed to expose weaknesses in the widows’ cases and to disqualify the
“unworthy poor,” as had the early investigations conducted at the Buf-
falo COS. Richmond’s colleagues reported that case workers in the
pension offices denied pensions to most African Americans and for-
eigners.35 As Richmond feared, poorly trained case workers misun-
derstood the point of asking questions. Since her 1889 visit to Boston,
Richmond had maintained that the purpose of a case worker’s ques-
tions was to cultivate sympathy between the case worker and the client.
Yet the relentless questions to separate the “worthy” from the “un-
worthy” poor, coupled with the tiny allowances, made the pensions
more punitive than helpful, especially when the eligibility rules re-
quired these women to resign from any work outside the home. By
the early 1920s public officials admitted that the pension legislation
yielded disappointing results.36
Richmond and her colleagues at the Russell Sage Foundation failed
to defeat widows’ pension legislation, but they succeeded in making
case work a central element of the social work profession. Throughout
the tempestuous pension debate Richmond worked to develop and
promote standards. Social Diagnosis, her 1917 volume on case work
methods, proved to be more popular than she anticipated. Despite
Abraham Flexner’s 1915 claim that social work could not be consid-
ered a profession, the field was steadily gaining practitioners who

72
 PHILANTHROPY AND SOCIAL CASE WORK

clamored for guidance.37 At leading schools of social work and in social

service agencies, Social Diagnosis became the case workers’ bible.
The United States’ entry into World War I fueled the transfor-
mation of social case work from a philanthropic ideal into a widely
used technique for mediating social relations.38 In 1917 the American
Red Cross mobilized “Home Service,” a division dedicated to provid-
ing advice and aid to soldiers’ families. In order to train the thousands
of division recruits, Red Cross officials (many of whom were former
COS administrators) asked Richmond to prepare a pamphlet. Her
slim, unsigned volume, Manual of Home Service, guided thousands of
case workers in advising military families. Between July 1917 and Feb-
ruary 1919, the ARC estimated that over five hundred thousand fam-
ilies received advice provided by the manual.39 Richmond published a
less technical book as well—What Is Social Case Work?—in 1922.
Taken together, this trilogy taught one clear lesson: the successful res-
olution of a family’s or individual’s problems rested on the case worker’s
ability to interpret the problems and develop solutions in cooperation
with the client.
While increasing numbers of people embraced social case work
theory, those in public agencies found her ideas difficult to realize in
practice. Civil servants who embraced her plans soon discovered that
Richmond’s concept of case work was ill-suited for giant bureaucracies
with massive case loads. Her guidelines offered no solutions to wide-
spread unemployment, substance abuse, or homelessness.
By the 1920s the social work profession was fully established, but
leading social workers continued to debate the merits of social case
work. No event reveals the disagreement more clearly than the con-
troversy over the 1922 presidential election to the National Conference
of Social Work (the NCCC was renamed after World War I). Social
workers looked forward to celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the
founding of the National Conference in 1923, and therefore special
attention was paid to selecting a president who represented all social
workers. Both charity organizers and settlement house leaders had
served as Conference presidents over the years, including Richmond’s
fellow charity organizers, Robert W. de Forest (1903), John M. Glenn
(1901), and his wife Mary Wilcox Glenn (1915). Richmond’s friends
tried to have her nominated in 1921 but they did not succeed until
the following year. A powerful group of social workers, settlement
leaders in particular, objected to Richmond’s nomination. When she
was nominated in 1922 to serve as president for the 1923 anniversary

73
SARAH HENRY LEDERMAN

they prevented her election. Graham Taylor, a settlement house leader

from Chicago, objected to Richmond’s nomination on the grounds
that she was only specialized in one area of social work. Homer Folks,
director of the State Charities Aid Association and an advocate of
widows’ pensions, told the veteran leader of Chicago’s Hull House,
Jane Addams, that if she did not run again he would pursue the pres-
idency himself, simply to block Richmond. Addams’s refusal caused
Folks to snatch the honor from Richmond. When he invited Rich-
mond to serve on the 1923 program committee she declined. The
negative reaction to Richmond’s nomination testifies to the long-term
resentment generated by the Russell Sage Foundation’s support of so-
cial case work.

In 1927 Richmond sent a discouraged note to the Foundation

president, John M. Glenn. She complained that leaders in the Amer-
ican Association for Organizing Family Social Work (AAOFSW, the
descendant of the Field Department of the COS) were wasting the
time of hard-working members by burying them under an avalanche
of documents instead of providing direct, practical assistance for case
workers in the field. Not only did support of this organization rep-
resent a misuse of Foundation funds, according to Richmond, but it
also betrayed the original mission of the Field Department. From the
beginning Richmond and her colleagues had prided themselves on
providing personalized advice to member agencies throughout the
United States in order to ensure that case workers in turn provided
personalized advice to their clients. Richmond resented the fact that
current personnel did not offer this grade of service. In conclusion
Richmond urged Glenn to make AAOFSW funding conditional on
the improvement of its work.40
In his response, Glenn attempted to console Richmond. He de-
fended the AAOFSW leadership (Linton Swift in particular), saying
that he had heard much praise for the AAOFSW at the most recent
National Conference of Social Work. He advised Richmond to “take
the world as it comes and not worry too much if our ideals are not
carried out in practice.” This was a cruel rebuke to a woman who had
dedicated her career to putting ideals into practice. Glenn concluded,
“I write you this merely because I think it is unfortunate for your sake
that you should feel blue about the growth of your child. I think it is
a pretty lusty youngster and growing steadily in a healthy way and you
have excellent reason to congratulate yourself and the world at large

74
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on what has happened and what is happening.”41 Glenn’s paternalistic

tone reveals Richmond’s impotence. By supporting Linton Swift and
at the same time calling the Association Richmond’s “child,” Glenn
portrayed Richmond as an irrational mother fretting about her way-
ward progeny. More importantly, it shows that Glenn disagreed about
the educational role that the AAOFSW, and by extension the Sage
Foundation, should play in social work education.
The Russell Sage Foundation empowered Richmond in many
ways. Between the start of her tenure at the Foundation in 1909 and
her death in 1928, she launched a periodical dedicated to social case
work, taught hundreds of charity organizers through her annual
month-long Charity Organization Institute, developed a methodology
for schools of social work, edited a social work series, and wrote three
books on social case work. Under her watchful eye social case work
had become the standard course of study in all schools of social work.
In 1931 more than 60 percent of graduates from two-year social work
programs embarked on careers in social case work, and by 1941 the
number had risen to 82 percent.42 Nevertheless, Richmond’s ideas for
social case work methods foundered on the shoals of misunderstand-
ing. Elements of Richmond’s program were appropriated by the very
people—overworked civil servants—she believed were least likely to
implement them. Successful case work, in Richmond’s opinion, de-
pended on competent and compassionate practitioners. It required as
much flexibility and as little bureaucracy as possible. Richmond hoped
to educate a generation of case workers in the “art of helping” at
privately funded social service agencies. But her view of philanthropy
as a relationship that was rewarding to both case worker and client
was never realized in an institutional setting.43 From Glenn’s perspec-
tive the institutional apparatus that Richmond had created proved the
success of social work education. From Richmond’s perspective the
hollow content of the increasingly mechanical implementation of so-
cial case work proved that her work had come to naught.
Mary Richmond’s career at the Russell Sage Foundation offers two
important lessons. First, her experience demonstrates that foundation
personnel could excel in developing and publicizing ideas, but they
could not control the implementation of these ideas in the public
domain. Just as Abraham Flexner regretted misunderstandings gen-
erated by his report on medical education, so Richmond rued the
misappropriation of case work by public servants.44 Second, the case
of Mary Richmond shows that the Russell Sage Foundation shared

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SARAH HENRY LEDERMAN

the strengths and weaknesses of other foundations. Foundation leaders

could attempt to guide a profession, but they could not control its
development in every direction. Richmond could not ensure that com-
petence and compassion became an integral part of professional prac-
tice. Just as efforts to professionalize medicine and nursing exalted
science at the expense of sympathy, so the codification of social case
work emphasized technique over service.45 Richmond insisted that so-
cial case work, or, as she preferred to call it, the “art of helping,” was
not a science. But Richmond’s friends as well as her detractors dis-
agreed. In 1921 Smith College awarded her an honorary master of
arts for “establishing the scientific basis of a new profession.”46 In the
years following Richmond’s 1928 death social case work came to be
practiced mainly by poorly paid women in publicly funded bureauc-
racies. While some of Richmond’s protégés, such as Gordon Hamilton
and Joanna Colcord, continued to advocate compassionate case work,
the onset of the Great Depression and the use of case work methods
in large institutions prevented case workers from following Richmond’s
plans. Despite the expenditure of Russell Sage Foundation resources,
Mary Richmond’s model for social case work—its implementation by
compassionate practitioners in private social service agencies—re-
mained an elusive goal.

NOTES
The research for this project was sponsored in part by a dissertation fellowship
and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Spencer Foundation.

1. Mary E. Richmond, “The Need of a Training School in Applied Philan-

thropy” (1897), in The Long View: Papers and Addresses by Mary E. Richmond, ed.
Joanna C. Colcord and Ruth Z. S. Mann (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1930),
100.
2. Though Edward Devine invited Richmond to lecture in 1898, she delayed
until the following year (Edward Devine to Mary Richmond, 24 January and 26
January 1898, Family and Children’s Society Records, Johns Hopkins University, Bal-
timore, Md. [hereafter cited as FCSR]). Richmond used the term philanthropy to
describe gifts of time, talent, or money. According to Richmond, philanthropists in-
cluded benefactors such as George Peabody and Andrew Carnegie as well as the lowly
widows who eked out a living by working for charity organization societies. She used
the word philanthropy in the Greek sense, literally “love of mankind,” to describe work
that would be defined in the twenty-first century as social service.
3. Several important dissertations discuss Richmond. See Muriel Warren Pum-
phrey, “Mary Richmond and the Rise of Professional Social Work in Baltimore: The

76
 PHILANTHROPY AND SOCIAL CASE WORK

Foundations of a Creative Career” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1956); Betty

Page Broadhurst, “Social Thought, Social Practice, and Social Work Education: San-
born, Ely, Warner, Richmond” (D.S.W. diss., Columbia University, 1971); Sarah
Henry Lederman, “Reluctant Reformer: Mary E. Richmond and the Creation of
Social Case Work” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1994); and Elizabeth N. Ag-
new, “Charity, Friendly Visiting, and Social Work: Mary E. Richmond and the Shap-
ing of an American Profession” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1999). Judith Sea-
lander’s 1997 book Private Wealth and Public Life: Foundation Philanthropy and the
Reshaping of American Social Policy from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University, 1997) has an interesting chapter on Richmond and
the Russell Sage Foundation. Her claim that the trio of Sophonisba Breckinridge,
Edith Abbott, and Richmond formed an “alliance” to shape the administration of
widows’ pensions is not supported by documents in the Richmond papers at Columbia
University. Richmond’s career receives a fair assessment in Roy Lubove, The Profes-
sional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1880–1930 (New York: Ath-
eneum, 1965), 22–54.
4. Lederman, “Reluctant Reformer.”
5. Mary E. Richmond copybook, May 1872, part I, box 1, folder 8, Mary Ellen
Richmond Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New
York (hereafter cited as MERP).
6. Patricia Ann McDonald, “Baltimore Women, 1870–1900” (Ph.D. diss., Uni-
versity of Maryland, 1976), 146.
7. Afro-American, 26 May 1900, part IV, scrapbook I, MERP.
8. “Aspirations,” in Pumphrey, “Professional Social Work,” 23; and report of
Mary E. Richmond, talk at the Myrtle Club, 13 February 1891, part IV, scrapbook
I, MERP.
9. Richmond to Constance Biddle, 24 February 1908, part I, box 5, folder 87,
MERP; and Mary E. Richmond, “Attitude of a Working Woman toward Working
Women,” 30 April 1897, part I, box 4, folder 55, MERP.
10. Colcord and Mann, eds., Long View, 31.
11. Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare
in America (New York: Basic, 1986), 72–84.
12. The English organization attracted intellectuals such as John Stuart Mill and
many politicians. Members included housing reformer Octavia Hill, who believed that
the purpose of charity work was to help the wealthy understand the problems of the
poor. Other members, such as Bernard Bosanquet, represented the English charity
organization societies which defined their work as “concerted action in neighborly
service.” These ideas about charity and reform spread rapidly through the National
Conference of Charities and Correction, founded in 1874 in the United States by the
ASSA, which was itself modeled on its British counterpart, the National Association
for the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS). Mary E. Richmond, “Background for
the Art of Helping” (1924), in Colcord and Mann, eds. Long View, 574–83; Bernard
Bosanquet, “The Principles and Chief Dangers of the Administration of Charity,” in
Philanthropy and Social Progress: Seven Essays, ed. Henry C. Adams (New York: Tho-
mas Y. Crowell, 1893), 249; Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social
Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of
Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); and Lawrence Goldman, “A

77
SARAH HENRY LEDERMAN

Peculiarity of the English? The Social Science Association and the Absence of So-
ciology in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Past and Present 114 (February 1987): 133–
71.
13. Frank Dekker Watson, The Charity Organization Movement in the United
States: A Study in American Philanthropy (New York: Macmillan, 1922).
14. Zilpha Drew Smith, “Report of the Committee on the Organization of Char-
ity,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction (1888), 120–30;
and Richmond to Jane Addams, draft, n.d., part I, box 4, folder 70, MERP. (This
letter is filed with material from 1899. Though it is undated, it was clearly written in
response to Addams’s 1902 book, Democracy and Social Ethics. Richmond would always
favor service over thrift. While the distinction was important to people within the
charity organization movement, few people outside the movement understood the
tension that existed between the charity organizers who focused on service and those
who focused on thrift.)
15. Mary E. Richmond, “The Friendly Visitor” (1890), in Long View, ed. Colcord
and Mann, 42.
16. Charles Hirschfeld, A Social History of Baltimore, 1870–1900 (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941), 138–39; Hugh Hawkins, Pioneer: A History
of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874–1889 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1960); Mary Jo Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1988), 316–17; Helen M. Thompson to Rich-
mond, 6 November 1892, FCSR; and Broadhurst, “Social Thought,” 420–21.
17. Mary E. Richmond, The Confidential Circular 10 (1892): 1–2, FCSR.
18. Pumphrey, “Professional Social Work,” 326; and Colcord and Mann, eds.,
Long View, 36.
19. Richmond to Mrs. J. C. Winston, 10 June 1902, part I, box 5, folder 74,
MERP.
20. Mary E. Richmond, “The Work of a District Agent,” 1897, 1900, part I, box
4, folder 60, MERP.
21. The only book Richmond published while at the BCOS was Friendly Visiting
among the Poor (1899), a handbook for volunteers. In 1915 she told a group of students
she wished she could recall every copy (Pumphrey, “Professional Social Work,” 428).
22. “Chronology,” part I, box 7, folder 134, MERP; Anna Davies to Richmond,
22 February 1900; Helen Parrish to Richmond, 23 February 1900; Susan P. Wharton
to Richmond, 3 March and 7 March 1900; all in part I, box 4, folder 50, MERP.
23. Richmond to Annie E. Gerry, 18 July 1917, part II, box 2, folder 29, MERP.
24. Clinton Rogers Woodruff, “Practical Municipal Progress,” American Journal
of Sociology 12 (1906): 190–215; part IV, Philadelphia scrapbook, MERP; Lloyd M.
Abernethy, “Progressivism, 1905–1919,” in Philadelphia: A 300 Year History, ed. Rus-
sell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 540–45; and Helen Foss Woods,
undated transcript of memorial speech read in Philadelphia, 6, part I, box 7, folder
135, MERP.
25. Mary E. Richmond, “The Retail Method of Reform” (1905), in Long View,
ed. Colcord and Mann, 214.
26. James A. Hijiya, “Four Ways of Looking at a Philanthropist: A Study of
Robert Weeks de Forest,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (De-
cember 1980): 404–18.

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 PHILANTHROPY AND SOCIAL CASE WORK

27. Robert W. de Forest to John M. Glenn, 23 October 1906, series 1, box 2,

folder 11, Russell Sage Foundation Papers, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hol-
low, N.Y. (hereafter cited as RSFP); and Clarke A. Chambers, Paul U. Kellogg and
the Survey: Voices for Social Welfare and Social Justice (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1971), 18–19, 42.
28. Colcord and Mann, eds., Long View, 185; and Ada Morawetz to Richmond,
24 February 1909; Alice Higgins to Richmond, n.d.; both in part I, box 5, folder 86,
MERP.
29. Lubove, Professional Altruist; Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social
Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1967); Lela B. Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and
Edith Abbott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Clarke A. Chambers,
“Women in the Creation of the Profession of Social Work,” Social Service Review 60
(March 1986): 1–33; Katz, Shadow of the Poorhouse; Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female
Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991);
Daniel J. Walkowitz, “The Making of a Feminine Professional Identity: Social Work-
ers in the 1920s,” American Historical Review 95 (October 1990), 1051–75; Beverly
Stadum, Poor Women and Their Families: Hard Working Charity Cases, 1900–1930
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Who
Funded Hull House?” in Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy, and Power,
ed. Kathleen D. McCarthy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990),
94–115; and idem, “The Historical Foundations of Women’s Power in the Creation
of the American Welfare State, 1830–1930,” in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist
Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 43–93.
30. She would articulate this point most clearly in her major book on case work,
Social Diagnosis (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1917), 367–68.
31. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social
Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1992); Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History
of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994); and Joanne L. Goodwin, Gender
and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers’ Pensions in Chicago, 1911–1929 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997).
32. Mary E. Richmond, “Motherhood and Pensions” (1933), in Long View, ed.
Colcord and Mann, 350–64.
33. Richmond to Gertrude Vaile, 1 October 1912, part II, box 25, file 408,
MERP; and Helen Glenn to Richmond, 13 January 1916, series 3, box 13, folder
112, RSFP.
34. Richmond to C. C. Carstens, 23 October 1913, part II, box 25, folder 409,
MERP.
35. Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 48.
36. Frances O’Neill to Richmond, 19 January 1923 and 16 February 1923; and
Richmond to O’Neill, 5 February 1923; all three in part II, box 3, folder 51, MERP.
37. Abraham Flexner, “Is Social Work a Profession?” Proceedings of the National
Conference of Charities and Correction (1915), 576–90.
38. Charity Organization Department Report, 17 December 1917, History of the
Charity Organization Department, part II, box 36, folder 621, MERP.

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SARAH HENRY LEDERMAN

39. [Mary E. Richmond], Manual of Home Service (New York: American Red
Cross, 1917), part II, box 28, folder 450, MERP; American Red Cross, The Work of
the American Red Cross during the War: A Statement of Finances and Accomplishments
for the Period July 1, 1917, to February 28, 1919 (Washington, D.C.: American Red
Cross, 1919), 26; and Henry P. Davison, The American Red Cross in the Great War
(New York: Macmillan, 1919).
40. Richmond to John M. Glenn, 20 April 1927, series 3, box 13, folder 113,
RSFP.
41. John M. Glenn to Richmond, 7 May 1927, series 3, box 13, folder 113, RSFP.
42. Philip Klein, From Philanthropy to Social Welfare: An American Cultural Per-
spective (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1968), 226.
43. Harry Specht and Mark E. Courtney, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has
Abandoned Its Mission (New York: Free Press, 1994); and Leslie Margolin, Under the
Cover of Kindness: The Invention of Social Work (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1997).
44. Kenneth Ludmerer, Learning to Heal: The Development of American Medical
Education (New York: Basic, 1985), 182.
45. Hilary Graham, “Caring: A Labour of Love,” in A Labour of Love: Women,
Work, and Caring, ed. Janet Finch and Dulcie Groves (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1983), 13–30; Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory of
Caring,” in Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, ed. Emily K. Abel and
Margaret K. Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 35–62; and
Nel Noddings, “The Caring Professional,” in Caregiving: Readings in Knowledge, Prac-
tice, Ethics, and Politics, ed. Suzanne Gordon, Patricia Benner, and Nel Noddings
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 160–72.
46. Richmond to Helen Wallerstein, 25 June 1921, part II, box 2, folder 45,
MERP.

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3. Southern Poor Whites and Higher Education:
Martha Berry’s Philanthropic Strategies in the
Building of Berry College
Victoria-Marı́a MacDonald and Eleanore Lenington

The closing decade of the nineteenth century and the opening

decades of the twentieth century—a period of American history often
designated the Progressive Era—witnessed the expansion of southern
white women into arenas previously closed to them. Whether by
choice or by necessity born of social turmoil in the aftermath of the
Civil War, southern white women began to claim the right to effect
changes in southern life.1 Born into this climate of increased expec-
tations and broadened opportunities for women was Martha Mc-
Chesney Berry (1866–1942), philanthropist and educator. Berry’s ef-
forts on behalf of mountain children in northwest Georgia began with
Sunday schools and ultimately grew into Berry College of Rome,
Georgia. Her life and work expand our understanding of southern
women educators during the decades after Reconstruction, a time
when education became a vehicle for the regeneration of southern
society.
Philanthropy, education, and the American South traditionally
have been linked with the work of southern blacks and northern phi-
lanthropists. Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, Samuel
Armstrong’s Hampton Institute, and the American Missionary As-
sociation’s network of academies and colleges in the postbellum era all
offered an opportunity for education that southern states could not or
would not provide to African Americans in the decades following Re-
construction.2 During this same period, however, parallel work aimed
to further educational opportunities for children of rural poor white
families. Martha Berry’s efforts on behalf of this population illuminate

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an unexplored aspect of southern history and education. Her donation

of personal time and property to those she called her “heirs”—the
mountain children—reveals how a white woman whose birthright nat-
urally would have propelled her into a more traditional sphere as
homemaker and society woman chose instead to dedicate her life to
the less privileged.3
Berry’s personality, a unique amalgam of convention and radical-
ism, placed her both in and ahead of her time and sustained her when
fundraising took her far from the Georgia hills. Ever the refined,
upper-class southern woman, Berry was willing to leave conventional
social and geographic spheres of influence in order to enter the very
public realm of business and politics where she could further her quest
to give mountain children the chance to be “independent, thrifty and
self-respecting.”4 Berry brought her philosophies of hard work and
perseverance from the small town of Rome, Georgia, to the attention
of the early twentieth century’s most prominent philanthropists, pol-
iticians, and educators.
Martha McChesney Berry was born in 1866 at Oak Hill, the fam-
ily plantation in Floyd County, Georgia. Although the Civil War had
devastated many southern families, including the Berrys, Martha’s par-
ents were determined to regain their prewar prosperity. Thomas and
Frances Berry also believed it was imperative to lend aid to less-
fortunate neighbors; their example would guide their daughter’s life
and work.
Before the war, Martha’s father had risen from the post of shop-
keeper’s helper to become a successful cotton broker. Primarily a busi-
nessman, he distrusted “fire-eater” politicians from North and South,
and he hoped their disputes would not lead the nation into conflict.
But when the Confederates shelled Fort Sumter in April 1861, he
formed an infantry company from his county, one which included
Scotch-Irish Highlanders. After the war, in the midst of southern
defeat, Berry privately determined to help these loyal Georgians and
their families, whose prewar poverty had been exacerbated by the war’s
destruction.5
Thomas did not shield his young daughter from the turmoil of
Reconstruction. He often took her with him on his regular trips to
provide the Highlanders with food, clothes, and money. According to
Martha’s recollection, he told her, “These people don’t want charity.
They want to help themselves. Don’t ever forget that, Martha. They’re
not shiftless by any means. They like to work and work hard, but they

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don’t know how to use their heads. They don’t try new methods. They
don’t improve their lot. It’s up to us to help them do that.”6 Just as
his northern financier acquaintances had given Berry the means to
rebuild his business after the war, he believed in giving others tools to
help themselves. He taught this strategy to his daughter. As she de-
veloped her own charitable projects, Martha’s preferred tool was ed-
ucation.
As life for the Berrys slowly improved after the war, they were able
to send Martha to Madame LeFevre’s Edgeworth Finishing School in
Baltimore in 1883. Martha did not feel comfortable in the sophisti-
cated surroundings of Baltimore, where city girls ridiculed her “coun-
try” clothes. She wrote to her father, “I don’t belong here and never
will. The girls make fun of my wardrobe and shun my company. It is
all too, too humiliating, papa. Please may I come home?” Her father
replied immediately by wire: “A Berry never forsakes a goal until it is
attained. Do not come home. You will be sent back to Baltimore on
next train.”7 To ease his daughter’s unhappiness, however, he simul-
taneously wired money to Madame LeFevre—more than enough to
provide his daughter with an appropriate wardrobe. Still, Martha
sensed that her peers’ acceptance of her new, more cosmopolitan ap-
pearance was superficial, and the new clothes did not ease her home-
sickness. She did leave school at the end of the term, but her home-
coming was bittersweet; her father had suffered a stroke. And she
never forgot the discomfort of having the wrong clothes and being
subject to hurtful teasing.
Before Thomas Berry died, he gave Martha a tract of land across
the road from Oak Hill. After gently advising her of its value, he
cautioned that “no society can survive without land” and counseled her
to manage the land and its timber carefully so that she would always
have an income. Proud of her “giving hands,” he again reminded her,
“A person knows very little about the art of living until he learns to
give. But just don’t hand a man a peck of potatoes, then forget him.
That’s not the kind of giving that will help him. It’s far better to give
him seed and tools so that he can grow a patch of his own. That way
he can thank you without trading off his pride.” The influence of these
words would be evident in later years.8
After her father’s death, Martha spent considerable time working
at the family’s cotton brokerage in town and at their summer home
in Mentone, Alabama. Her mother took over management of Oak
Hill and the family’s other business interests, and quite often Martha

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would take her younger brothers, sisters, and cousins to Mentone to

escape the hot weather. Here she had the freedom to wander the
mountain trails, where she spent time with the Highlanders and
learned their language, lore, and traditions. Her associations with these
people “outraged the social conventions of the upper-class southerners
with whom she had grown up.” Even Aunt Martha, informally called
“Aunt Marth”—a former slave who had cared for the Berry children
before the war and remained to oversee the Berry household servants
after emancipation—warned Martha to keep her distance from the
“inferior” white mountain children.9
Martha was not deterred by such admonitions. In the mountains
surrounding Mentone she met Highlanders like those who lived in
the north Georgia hills of her home. Like many northern women who
came south infused with a missionary spirit, Martha saw opportunities
to improve the living conditions of mountain people, particularly
through schooling.10 Education for these children was problematic: at
this time schools in rural Georgia were limited and only offered for
five months a year. As a result many backwoods children—who lacked
transportation or the proper clothes to attend school even when it was
in session—were deprived of education.11 Berry observed that the ex-
isting rural public schools were small, isolated, crumbling, and often
led by “an old man as tired as the building itself.” Furthermore, the
curriculum entailed teaching “classic subjects for which the mountain-
eers had no use.”12 Filtering this lack of educational opportunities
through her commonsense approach to life and her growing attach-
ment to the mountain families, Berry came to recognize that her av-
ocation was to “devote her entire time and means to teaching them
ways to help themselves.”13
Through her actions she was carrying out the type of philanthrop-
ical work that politically disenfranchised but financially elite southern
white women of this era pursued. Frustrated by the lack of govern-
mental provisions for schools, health care, and other matters, Berry
responded to this public problem with her own personal solution—to
build an institution for this overlooked set of children.14

TRANSFORMING IDEAS INTO REALITY

The opening of the Berry Schools form a piece of Georgian folk-
lore—what historian Anne Firor Scott has called an “epic saga.”15 The
story—told and retold by many of Martha Berry’s admirers, as well as

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by placards in the Oak Hill Museum on the Berry University cam-

pus—tells of a woman of leisure who had a desire to improve the
world, yet lacked a mission. The Berry Schools provided that mission.
One day twenty-four-year-old Martha Berry was reading comfortably
in the log cabin playhouse her father built, now converted into a re-
treat. Upon observing some young children peering in her window,
she invited them in. Shy, nervous, and ready to run, the ragged chil-
dren entered cautiously. Martha read them Bible stories and gave them
apples to eat; when they left, she asked them to return the following
Sunday with their siblings and friends. In just a few weeks her im-
promptu Sunday school had filled the log cabin to capacity. In 1900
she opened her first formal Sabbath School in a larger building on her
family’s property. In 1902 she deeded her inherited land to the Boys’
Industrial School, the first boarding school she would create.
Martha traveled throughout the countryside recruiting boys who
were interested in learning and willing to work their way through
school. The first group of boys numbered only six, but their number
continually increased. For seven years she accepted only boys, believing
that they could help more with the construction work necessary for
buildings. She acknowledged later, “If I had known how much more
they could eat, I would have started with girls!”16 The townspeople
called her students the “biscuit eaters,” and socialites wondered if she
had lost her head devoting her time and energy to the disparaged poor
whites of the region. White Southerners were highly class conscious
(a legacy from antebellum slave society); the term “poor white” des-
ignated the often propertyless plain people of the South.17 Although
many mountaineers owned their property, they were still stigmatized
in the minds of most white Southerners.
In 1909 Berry opened a girls’ school, and its pupils—like those of
the boys’ school—worked at the day-to-day operation of the institu-
tion. Each student followed a regular public school curriculum but was
also required to devote two hours to chores every day. The Berry
Schools received accreditation for high school work in 1923; however,
the goal of self-sufficiency was barely being reached. After World War
I, education beyond high school became necessary for many jobs in
the rapidly expanding industries of the South, but many of Martha’s
students found the few state universities open to them intimidating
and too expensive.18 As a result, in 1926 she opened a junior college
and in 1930 Berry College inaugurated a full four-year program.
The first obstacle Berry had to confront was the reluctance of par-

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ents to send their children to boarding school. The usual problems of

fluctuating attendance because children were needed to work in the
fields or watch younger siblings mingled with more deeply rooted is-
sues of parents’ independence and pride.19 Berry had observed these
difficulties when she attempted a day-school arrangement three years
prior to opening the Boys’ Industrial School. As a strategy to circum-
vent the problems of spotty attendance, and perhaps as an unconscious
reflection of her own class perspective, Berry determined that boarding
schools were necessary. Under her constant, watchful eye, attendance
could be ensured. Furthermore, like the officials of the Native Amer-
ican boarding schools, she wanted to remove the mountain children
at least temporarily from their home environments in order to accus-
tom them to more mainstream southern middle-class culture.20 In a
boarding school she believed that her students would be “surrounded
by fine things so that they can absorb them and become part of
them.”21
Unlike administrators of boarding schools for Native Americans,
Berry did not seek to stamp out the children’s birth culture entirely,
but worked to instill pride and preserve part of the children’s heri-
tage.22 The Berry curriculum reflected Martha’s belief in an “education
of hand and mind, in which one would not be a stranger to the
other.”23 The traditional (but not classical) academic curriculum fol-
lowed that of the public schools and was balanced with industrial
training. Boys and girls had separate responsibilities, as was typical of
industrial education during the Progressive Era.24 In the early years
the boys spent their two hours doing farmwork and the girls took care
of domestic chores. As time progressed and Berry was able to enlarge
her schools to accommodate the many would-be students, she also
added projects that could prepare students for future occupations.
Berry tried to ensure that her students would learn up-to-date pro-
cedures, whether for planting crops or canning vegetables. For in-
stance, students were exposed to “scientific agriculture,” with its em-
phasis on crop rotation and soil conservation. U.S. Department of
Agriculture specialist W. J. Spillman concurred that the Berry School
modeled modern agricultural techniques, writing in 1908, “I do not
hesitate to say, after having visited most of the agricultural schools in
this country, that you are doing the best work in agricultural education
that I have seen anywhere in this country. I regard the success of your
school as a critical factor in developing the type of education for our
farmers’ boys that will open the door of success to them on the farm.”25

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 SOUTHERN POOR WHITES AND HIGHER EDUCATION

Berry viewed this knowledge as a means to preserve mountain heri-

tage. If students could improve local agriculture they would be less
likely to permanently leave the land for the city or other regions of
the country. In later years the work schedule was modified, with two
days per week reserved for some type of farmwork and four days de-
voted to class work. Students who so desired could also work exclu-
sively for four months in order to earn eight months of uninterrupted
schooling.26
Berry’s industrial focus was entirely in keeping with educational
conventions of the time, although similar efforts had been directed
toward African American and Native American populations, rather
than toward poor whites.27 As U.S. industries clamored for more
trained workers, vocational education received increased attention in
educational circles. Furthermore, progressive educators believed in
linking the world of the classroom to real life rather than studying
abstract theories and requiring rote memorization.28 In rural areas such
as Floyd County, Georgia, educators called for agricultural training to
help students learn “the things to be done in life” and prepare to serve
a role “that meets the demands of real community life.”29 For students,
the Berry Schools, Junior College (1926), and College (1930) also met
a critical need for inexpensive and practical education. Educators and
benefactors who supported the Berry Schools saw them as vehicles for
creating self-made twentieth-century individuals who, through hard
work and opportunity, could rise above their origins.
By the 1920s the Berry Schools had long waiting lists and were
receiving the attention and money of philanthropists throughout the
country. The persistence, determination, and political savvy that per-
mitted Berry to tap the wealth generated by early-twentieth-century
industrialists and entrepreneurs allowed the Schools and College to
expand and also attracted national attention to the work school
model.30

ARISTOCRACY OF WORK
When Martha started her first school in January 1902, she hired
a female college graduate as an instructor. Armed with a degree from
Stanford College, Californian Elizabeth Brewster trekked across the
country to take part in a novel educational experiment in the rural
South. In those first years Brewster and Berry performed what we
today would call “multitasking.” During the day they were teachers,

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while in the evenings they tried to ease the homesickness of the young
boys who were away from family and home for the first time in their
lives. These genteel women also made beds, scrubbed laundry, cooked
innumerable meals on the school’s wood stove, and cleared away un-
derbrush. Berry, like many of her social class in the early twentieth
century, believed that some mountain whites were “shiftless” and
needed to be taught a healthy work ethic. Daily, she and Elizabeth
Brewster lived the philosophy that work was honorable. Early on,
though, Berry discovered that this philosophy could run contrary to
local cultural values. A near rebellion took place during the first weeks,
when the boys discovered they were to perform the “women’s work”
of laundry and cooking. Berry firmly stepped in to quell the boys’
resistance to gender-specific tasks.31
Another obstacle the Berry Schools had to overcome was an as-
sociation between manual labor and African Americans. The legacies
of slavery in the South ran deep, decades past the actual emancipation
of slaves. The story is told that early in the school’s history Martha
and her small crew of boys were cutting a new path to the building
when a buggy full of townswomen stopped by to “see for themselves
. . . the odd things” they had heard were happening on Oak Hill.
When the visitors cried out, “You poor things. . . . She has you work-
ing like prisoners in a chain gang . . . just like field hands!” the boys
dropped their shovels and lowered their heads in “dismay and shame.”
Berry, knowing exactly what type of racial resentments the women
were trying to inflame, scolded them, “Look here. . . . If you women
would go around encouraging people to work, the South wouldn’t have
the poorest farms in America! We wouldn’t be crawling with sickness,
and we’d have decent farms and taxes paid so we’d have better
schools!”32 Berry’s comments reveal her political awareness of the rap-
idly shifting racial dynamics of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century
South. As Grace Hale has explored in Making Whiteness: The Culture
of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940, southern white women played
a pivotal role in shaping the “space” that whites would permit African
Americans to participate in after Reconstruction.33
Despite the assurances of students and alumni that they did not
view themselves as exploited laborers, Martha Berry and her schools
would periodically come under fire for relying upon the labor of stu-
dents rather than paid workers.34 Rarely did whites make public ac-
cusations that blacks or Native Americans in industrial schools were
being exploited, and Berry remained vigilant to keep alive what she

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called the “aristocracy of work. We teach here that the only true aris-
tocrat is the worker—men and women who are doing something for
someone, who are helping others in their day work—in the shop, on
the farm, in the dairy and in the laundry.”35

“BEGGING TRIPS”
The work ethic inculcated at the school captured the attention of
philanthropists in the early twentieth century. Martha initially believed
that between the modest tuition charged for each boy ($40 to $50
annually in the early years) and the labor of the students in construct-
ing new buildings and planting and harvesting their own food, the
school could manage to be self-sufficient. As more and more boys
enrolled, however, sometimes with only a pig or calf as a donation
toward tuition, she realized she would need financial assistance. Local
donations from friends and small amounts from philanthropists in
Atlanta sustained the school initially. According to school folklore,
Martha asked the students to pray for a means to acquire more funds.
One night she overheard a boy praying, “I’m wonderin’, Lord, whether
You ain’t showin’ the way right now. I read in the paper about some
New York people givin’ money to schools. Dear God, give Miss Berry
strength to get up there and tell them folks how much we need things.
Amen.”36
Although “almost petrified” at the thought of begging for money,
Berry headed up to New York in the harsh winter of 1905. With only
one or two introductions from former schoolmates, she quickly became
discouraged. At last a Presbyterian minister took pity on her and al-
lowed her to speak to his congregation. Not only was she able to
arouse some interest in her school, but—more important—she also
acquired the names of wealthy Wall Street businessmen. The first sig-
nificant donation she received in New York was from R. Fulton Cut-
ting for five hundred dollars.37 In many cases Martha called upon
individuals with whom she had no prior acquaintance and invited po-
tential donors to visit the campus. Her first excursion north resulted
in a total of $1700 for the school—and a severe case of pneumonia.
Before long Berry became better acquainted with the network of
philanthropists who gave money to southern education. In order to
educate herself and gain information about potential donors, she at-
tended meetings such as the Conferences on Education for the South
and the popular adult-education Chautauqua Institutes. Lacking a

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high school, normal school, or college degree, Berry taught herself

about educational theories through these conferences and spread the
gospel of her school. An example of her early success was her ac-
quaintance with George Foster Peabody, a native of Columbus, Geor-
gia, who moved north as a child and became a successful New York
banker. He served as treasurer of both the Southern Education Board
(SEB) and General Education Board (GEB) in the early twentieth
century. The GEB and SEB exerted tremendous influence on southern
education, particularly in fostering the idea of industrial education for
African Americans.38 The General Education Board had barely been
founded in 1902 when Martha Berry began her appeals to that agency.
She persisted in her appeals to the GEB for several decades until her
illness and death in 1942.39 However, it would not send funds to
Berry’s schools. During its first fifteen years the GEB supported public
secondary schools in the South, and worked to encourage taxation for
public schools. Private schools such as the Berry Schools were viewed
as competitors to the GEB’s vision of spreading public education.40
Although the GEB did not give funds to Martha Berry and her
school, members of the SEB and GEB who were sympathetic to her
cause and school donated monies directly. For example, George Foster
Peabody contributed to her school’s new recitation hall in 1905–
1906.41
The Berry Schools were fortunate when, in 1906, Robert Ogden,
president of the GEB and SEB, announced a plan to bring one of his
famous groups of donors to the schools.42 The year 1906 was also
notable because educators from Georgia’s Department of Education
visited the school to learn and adapt ideas for the creation of agricul-
tural high schools in the state.43
In 1907 Martha Berry scored another coup with the acquisition of
a grant from the wealthy philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. The steel
magnate had proved elusive as a donor; Berry complained to her sec-
retary that it was “impossible to penetrate the web of secretaries at his
office.” During one of her trips to New York she decided she could
not leave the city without speaking to him. According to school lore,
she rang the door of the Carnegie mansion one cold evening and,
despite the butler’s insistence that Carnegie could not be disturbed,
she scribbled a note on one of her cards and requested that he give it
to the famous philanthropist. A few minutes later she was led into a
room where Carnegie was posing for a portrait. With Carnegie as her
captive audience, Berry described her school’s work. Finally he led her

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to the next room, asked several questions, and said, “Miss Berry, this
is how I do things. Fill out that form in detail, and later if I decide
to help, I’ll give a certain amount—provided you raise a similar
amount from other sources.”44 Shortly afterward she received his
pledge for $25,000. Although the precise details of Martha’s famous
encounter with Andrew Carnegie may never be known, correspon-
dence from Carnegie himself verifies that by 1912 he had already given
the Berry Schools over thirty thousand dollars. To John D. Rockefeller,
Jr., he wrote admiringly that “Miss Berry’s consecration of herself is
really sublime.”45 But Carnegie’s support did not end with this financial
donation. In order to help Berry meet his challenge for the remaining
sum, Carnegie invited Berry to accompany him and his wife to a
dinner with his fellow philanthropist Mrs. Olivia Sage. Although
Berry had already received a small amount from Sage, this luncheon
netted her $5,000 toward matching Carnegie’s grant. As Ruth
Crocker’s work in this volume illustrates, Olivia Sage was receptive to
schools that promoted practical education, and the Berry Schools be-
came one more of the hundreds of institutions Sage supported.
Martha Berry also pursued funds in the larger cities of the South.
Atlanta, only two hours away by train, was becoming the king of the
New South cities, and she actively sought out wealthy and influential
Atlantans for her cause.46 Martha not only approached influential men
such as governor and then senator Hoke Smith,47 but she also relied
upon assistance from women. Mrs. Frank Inman of Atlanta assisted
the Berry Schools through the creation of “Berry Circles” in Atlanta
and other southern cities. A member of the nouveau riche in post-
Reconstruction Atlanta, Inman invited wealthy women to her home
for social gatherings and to “talk Berry.”48 Inman’s determination to
“let those people up there [Northerners] see that the Southerners were
also interested” reveals her regional sensitivity. Like many New South
women of the Progressive Era, Louise Inman turned her energies to
improving conditions in the South through social and educational wel-
fare voluntarism.49
Berry’s first national exposure involved the visit of former president
Theodore Roosevelt in October of 1910. Several years earlier she had
met with Roosevelt in the White House and secured his respect for
her combination of practical education, Christian values, and hard
work. Roosevelt’s concern over the future of the Anglo-Saxon race
during decades of heavy immigration to the U.S.—what he called “race
suicide”—most likely contributed to his interest in Berry’s work for

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poor white boys. Furthermore, Roosevelt championed the outdoors

and the preservation of masculinity, both associated with this rural
setting.50 Before his visit he wrote, “There is not a school in which I
have taken more interest than in the Berry School, which is in very
fact what its title denotes, a Christian industrial school for country
boys.”51 After Roosevelt, Berry secured an audience with every presi-
dent until her death in 1942.52
The mountain background of Berry’s students aroused interest
among Northerners during the late 1800s and early 1900s. During a
time of enormous immigration to the urban Northeast, Appalachian
whites became an object of admiration for their alleged Anglo-Saxon
racial purity, pioneer stock, independence, and patriotism. Berea Col-
lege president William G. Frost lauded the craftsmanship of this
population through demonstrations at his Kentucky institution.53 His-
torian Nina Silber has called this outpouring of interest in mountain
whites at the turn of the century part of a “cult of Anglo-Saxonism.”54
Berry highlighted the Anglo-Saxon ancestry of her students in pro-
motional literature, which noted that pupils were recruited “from the
descendants of the good old English and Scotch-Irish stock which
early peopled the hill-country and the mountain valleys.”55 The interest
in poorer southern whites was not exclusively northern. Walter Hines
Page’s attention to the “Forgotten Man” of the white South in 1902
prompted educational, health, and other reforms aimed at the im-
provement of poorer whites in the region.56

“A PARTIAL RECOMPENSE”: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

AND THE BERRY SCHOOLS
World War I presented new challenges to the growing Berry
Schools. With the addition of the Girls’ School in 1910, enrollment
had increased to almost two hundred students. Many students who
had not had a chance for formal schooling when they were younger
attended Berry in their later teens and early twenties, and the war
drew students away from school to the European front. Similarly,
many of Martha’s advisors and trustees were also called to active ser-
vice. Regular sources of philanthropy were turned to the war cause,
and she was increasingly left on her own to manage the schools’ affairs
and generate funds from new sources. Although the GEB consistently
turned down her requests, she observed that it did fund black private

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schools, such as the Tuskegee Institute. In 1915 she was presented

with an opportunity to learn first-hand about the work of Booker T.
Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and tap into his network of wealthy
donors. Like the Berry institutions, Tuskegee emphasized industrial
education, and students worked while also attending classes. John Ea-
gan, another wealthy Atlantan who served on Berry’s board of trustees,
passed on to Martha a request for scholarship money he had received
from Booker T. Washington in January 1915.57 By the next month
Martha had managed to join a group of donors and trustees visiting
Tuskegee. Impressed with the extent of involvement and deep pockets
of Tuskegee’s trustees, Martha determined to market her schools to
the same people. She earnestly started a campaign that declared, “We
are doing just such a work for the poor white boys and girls of the
South as Dr. Washington has done for his race.”58
Booker T. Washington generously assisted Martha by providing
the names and addresses of his trustees and visitors to Tuskegee. He
wrote to her in February 1915, “Dear Miss Berry:—as a partial rec-
ompense for not calling on you to speak before you left, (and I fully
meant to do so but did not know you were going to New York with
Mr. Low’s party) I am sending you the names of all the visitors with
their addresses with the hope that you may interest them in your
work.” He then pleaded, “Please do not use my name in any use you
may make of the list.”59 His letter crossed in the mail one from Martha
Berry dated 27 February, in which she thanked him for her wonderful
visit to Tuskegee. She also sent him a donation, regretfully adding, “I
only wish I could send you what my heart dictates for the work, but
as I cannot, I am sending you my ‘little mite.’ ”60 She immediately
replied to Washington when the list of names arrived, writing, “I wish
to thank you very heartily. . . . Of course I shall not use your name at
all with any of these people.”61
Booker T. Washington’s clandestine support for Martha Berry and
her schools sheds further light on this complex man. Biographer Louis
Harlan emphasizes his ability to “wear the mask” in the variety of
situations in which he found himself as a powerful black man during
an era of extreme racism.62 Washington’s theories of hard work es-
poused in his memoir Up from Slavery and put into practice at Tus-
kegee Institute, an industrial school open to all students with a desire
to learn and willingness to work, were shared by Berry. Although they
served different clients, Martha’s “Gates of Opportunity” at the Berry

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MACDONALD AND LENINGTON

Schools and Washington’s industrial school both aimed to inculcate

the value and promise of hard work in poor white and black southern
children alike.63
Armed with Washington’s valuable list, Berry began a written cam-
paign in 1915 to convince Tuskegee’s donors that her efforts should
be supported as well. A savvy politician, Berry pointed out how ed-
ucating rural poor white Southerners helped African Americans. To
Miss Adelia Williams of Roxboro, Massachusetts, she argued, “Al-
though this is a school for white mountain people and people from
the rural districts—our own neglected Americans—in a way it touches
upon the negro question.” She continued, “Our mission classes among
the boys here are studying the problem of housing of the negroes in
the South. They also conduct services in the jails and convict camps.
These chaingangs are composed largely of negroes, and what these
boys are doing will show the breadth of the Christian training here.”64
Berry was not completely satisfied with the list Washington ini-
tially provided her, and her determination and zeal for her work drove
her to secure more names of Tuskegee donors, sometimes through
dubious means. In private correspondence with northern friends she
confided that she was “very anxious to secure a year book from Booker
Washington’s school at Tuskegee—I mean the financial year book
which they send out to their donors. I saw one at a friend’s house for
a few minutes; and it was a great temptation to even look between
the leaves because I saw some such good names that I should have
been glad to have copied so as to send them appeals.” She added,
“However, I could not, under the circumstances, ask for even the loan
of this book—I felt that it would be too delicate a thing to do.”
Although Martha was reluctant to ask for the book herself, she asked
her New York friend Charlotte Young “if, through your friends, you
could secure a year book of Tuskegee without letting it be known that
it was for me. Of course I would let no one know how I secured the
book. If I had it, or reports of other large institutions, I could make
good use of them by sending to those addresses some of the literature
of our school, which, like the patent medicine men, I believe is a ‘cure-
all.’ ”65
Although it appears that Martha was only partially successful in
securing Tuskegee materials in order to augment her list of donors,
the Tuskegee matter provides two insights into this woman and her
work. As a woman Berry appears to have been on the margins of “old
boy” networks in educational philanthropy and their august cast of

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wealthy male donors and power brokers. Standing outside the inner
circle of these individuals, she resorted to stealth to tap into the net-
work of northern wealth. Second, racial resentment did not appear to
undergird Berry’s drive for Tuskegee money. She shared with Booker
T. Washington a common philosophy about the value of industrial
education and believed that southern youth, black and white, could
rise above their origins. As was typical of southern progressive reform-
ers, she emphasized to potential donors that her work with poor whites
indirectly assisted the cause of African Americans in the South
through the eradication of ignorance and the creation of economic
prosperity.66 Booker T. Washington’s untimely death in 1915 ended
this unusual and unknown alliance between two southern educators of
the early twentieth century.

“THE BEST AND PUREST ANGLO-SAXON BLOOD”

Berry’s pursuit of funds directed toward institutions of industrial
education shifted during the late teens and early 1920s. During these
later years of the Progressive Era, Martha capitalized upon patriotic
ideology surrounding World War I—including its increased nativism—
to bolster support for her schools. Although Georgia, like the rest of
the South, sheltered fewer immigrants than most of the country, anti-
foreign rhetoric led to the passage of restrictive immigration measures
such as the Quota Law of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924.67
The term “Anglo-Saxon stock” creeps into her promotional literature
during this period, revealing both her own bias toward the white race
and her canny ability to profit from shifting trends in society.
Around 1908 she had discovered the promotional benefits of pub-
lishing both a magazine—The Southern Highlander—and the Berry
Schools Bulletin, which contained the course catalog and school an-
nouncements. She took copies of this literature—filled with inspira-
tional stories of successful students, ideas for specific donations, letters
from grateful alumni, and copies of letters from prominent donors—
on what she called her “begging trips.” Hundreds of copies of her
pamphlets and magazines were purposely left on trains, in waiting
rooms and stations, in doctors’ offices, in the hands of socialites, and
anywhere she felt they might be read by a potential donor.
The 1916 pamphlet What the Berry Schools Are Doing for America
profiles young men and women who arrived at Berry penniless and
illiterate. In these Horatio Alger stories, the Berry experience trans-

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MACDONALD AND LENINGTON

forms students from residents of small cabins and farms in the hills
of North Georgia into successful teachers, farmers, and homemakers
who will return to their communities and “help other poor mountain”
folk.68 The students are portrayed in photographs depicting them both
when they arrived as “raw material” and then after they emerged as
the “finished products”: clean-cut young men and women. Berry ex-
horts her readers, “In these times the highest patriotism demands that
we utilize every resource of our nation. The best material in the world
is to be found hidden away among these southern hills. . . . Can we
perform a more patriotic service than to educate these boys and girls
of the mountains in whose veins flow the best and purest Anglo-Saxon
blood?”69
Correspondence from donors of this era confirms that some ac-
cepted her proclamation about the importance of saving the Anglo-
Saxon race. A donor from Brooklyn wanted to donate clothes or
money on the condition that the institution assisted be “purely a white
school,” adding, “I approve of your efforts for the white boys and
girls.”70 In the stories of young women who arrive at Berry, Martha
notes that they had often received scholarships from the Daughters of
the American Revolution, again emphasizing the patriotic and Anglo-
Saxon character of the Berry students.71

KINDRED SPIRITS
The end of World War I ushered in a new era in philanthropical
acquisitions for the schools. Martha’s annual “begging trips” finally
paid off handsomely in the 1920s when she made the acquaintance of
automobile manufacturer Henry Ford and his wife Clara. The Fords
developed a warm friendship with Martha and her schools that lasted
until the end of her life. According to historian Jonathan Atkins, the
values of hard work and opportunity promoted at the Berry Schools
struck a chord among wealthy industrialists because they “paralleled
their own social assumptions.”72 The first half of the twentieth century
was indeed the age of philanthropy, but it also took acumen, persis-
tence, and, in Martha Berry’s case, dramatic flair to gain access to
individuals or to the gatekeepers of their wealth. The story of how
Martha convinced the Fords to visit her campus and eventually secured
almost four million dollars exemplifies the strategies and tactics she
used with many philanthropists.
For several years Martha had wished to speak with Henry Ford

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 SOUTHERN POOR WHITES AND HIGHER EDUCATION

about her school, but she was unsure of how to approach him. He
had a reputation for being standoffish and his eccentricities were also
well known. Through her friends and donors Thomas Edison and his
wife Martha, Berry was finally able to stir Ford’s interest in her
schools. One day in 1923 she learned through the newspapers that the
Fords were traveling through Alabama. According to her former sec-
retary, Martha “dropped everything” and rode directly to the train
station, where she sent a note to the Fords in their private car. Ford
listened to her discussion of schools that emphasized hard work with-
out charity and, after asking numerous questions, agreed to visit the
campus.73
The result of Ford’s visit surpassed Martha’s greatest dreams. Be-
ginning with new dining and residential halls, Ford and his designers
recreated an elegant collegiate campus replete with Gothic architecture
in the hills of north Georgia. Henry and Clara Ford did not simply
give money to the Berry Schools; they adopted them as a special object
of philanthropy. For twenty years they visited the campus each year,
spending time with Martha and her administrators, making plans for
the campus, and enjoying the southern countryside. According to eye-
witnesses, Ford felt very much at home on campus. One observer
noted that he “shed much of his suspicion, his protective covering
against the world.” Another associate remarked that the schools “grew
deeper and deeper inside the man’s heart.”74 Perhaps this is because
the Berry campus and its founder, Martha Berry (only three years his
junior), tapped into Ford’s paradoxical love for the rural premodern
world and technological innovation.75
Ford’s willingness to help Berry is not surprising, particularly when
one considers the pragmatic philosophy that guided both of their lives.
Berry’s emphasis on a utilitarian education struck a chord with the
industrialist, and it would be safe to suggest that Ford would also have
felt a bond with Thomas Berry, Martha’s father. Ford and both of the
Berrys held to a steady belief in the ability of practical education to
ensure a lifetime of productivity and independence, and they were
determined to provide that commodity to the less fortunate. Equipped
with such tools, their students could view their futures through the
twin lenses of possibility and potentiality.
In 1916, seven years before he would meet Martha Berry, Ford
had himself opened a trade school in Michigan. Like Berry, Ford
believed that what passed as charity trained “the mind to regard life
as a benevolent system of Providence; if you train a boy to look for

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MACDONALD AND LENINGTON

favours from others instead of looking to his own power to create or

command what he needs, then already the seeds of dependence are
sown, the mind and will are warped, and life is crippled.”76 The Henry
Ford Trade School was governed by three principles: A boy was a
student first and was not to be turned into a “premature working man”;
an academic education was to be equally combined with an industrial
education; and a boy would be trusted with responsibility by being
trained on articles which were to be used in actual production.77 When
Ford finally met Berry, he simply found his dream and philosophy
transplanted to a rural, southern setting.78
With the assistance of Ford money, the 1920s were a heyday for
the Berry Schools. Expansion had allowed Martha Berry to admit
more students than ever. By the 1920s she had acquired over twenty
thousand acres of land, and students numbered in the hundreds. They
worked in up-to-date agricultural, cooking, and laundry facilities while
securing an academic education. The Berry Schools now included the
Mountain School for older men (an early continuing education pro-
gram) and Faith Cottage, a small school for girls (many of whom were
orphans) too young to attend the high school. Among the residents
of Faith Cottage in the 1920 census is a two-and-a-half-year-old
“adopted” girl born in Arkansas and named Martha Berry. Apparently,
the orphans were named after Martha or given another temporary
name until they were old enough to reclaim their former names or
choose new ones.79 The academic preparation offered by the schools
was also emphasized during this period; the catalog indicated that
Berry Schools prepared students for admittance “without examination
to the Freshman class of most southern colleges and universities.”80
However, the success of Martha Berry’s schools also aroused sus-
picion and envy. In the 1920s, for example, attorneys in Rome, Geor-
gia, addressed Georgia’s governor in a newspaper article, arguing that
money Martha Berry acquired for her schools from outside the state
should be taxed. They charged that the schools formed a “wealthy
corporation, owning vast holdings of land from which a lucrative rev-
enue is yearly derived.”81 The attorneys also recommended that taxes
from the Berry Schools be used to assist Confederate veterans. In
response, Berry alumni quoted Joseph Sharp, a Confederate survivor
who stated that “veterans would rather give money to the Schools. . . .
The Berry Schools are already helping the Confederate veterans in the
work they are doing to educate the grandchildren of Confederate vet-
erans.”82

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 SOUTHERN POOR WHITES AND HIGHER EDUCATION

Another sore spot was Ford’s sponsorship, which created a per-

manent foundation for what would soon become Berry College. In
1926 the Junior College was created and in 1932 it graduated its first
four-year class. During the early years of construction on the elaborate
Ford buildings, the extent of money and attention given to this project
had stirred ill will. Rumors spread that the school was “rich now and
it doesn’t need my help any more”; “Whatever they want, Ford gives.”83
Although the buildings were in place, the expense of upkeep was not
included in Ford’s grant, and when the Great Depression hit, the Berry
Schools again fell on hard times. By relying on a large network of
small donors, the Berry Schools survived, while many other small in-
stitutions did not.84
At the time of Martha Berry’s death in 1942 at the age of seventy-
six, Berry College had increased its landholdings to more than thirty
thousand acres. Her accomplishments earned her honors still rare for
southern white women. In 1924 the Georgia legislature granted her
the title “Distinguished Citizen of Georgia.” In 1925 the muckraking
journalist Ida Tarbell identified Berry as one of America’s fifty most
influential women. The next year Martha received the Theodore Roo-
sevelt Medal for Distinguished Service. In 1932 the governor of Geor-
gia appointed her the first woman member of the Georgia University
System Board of Regents. And in 1934 she received international rec-
ognition for her work when she was presented at the court of King
George V of England.
Today, Berry College offers both undergraduate and graduate de-
grees and has been recognized as an outstanding small comprehensive
southern college. The institutional mission of the school has not
changed greatly from the early 1900s: “Berry College serves humanity
by inspiring and educating students. Berry emphasizes a comprehen-
sive, educational program committed to high academic standards,
Christian values and practical work experience in a distinctive envi-
ronment of natural beauty. The college serves all of its students with-
out regard to economic status.”85 As one of the few federally desig-
nated work colleges, Berry continues to attract notice nationally and
internationally.86
The philanthropic work of Martha Berry, evidence of her deter-
mination to expand educational opportunities in rural Georgia, con-
stitutes one of the largely untold stories of “the great educational awak-
ening” in the early-twentieth-century South.87 Contemporary southern
educators such as Mary McLeod Bethune, Julia Tutwiler, and Celeste

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MACDONALD AND LENINGTON

Parrish have received modest attention in histories of education, but

the history of women and higher education in the pre–World War II
South remains an untilled field.88 Beginning in the second half of the
twentieth century, historians began a slow and uneven effort first to
acknowledge the presence of these women and then to tell their sto-
ries.89 Martha Berry was a leader in southern education whose phil-
anthropic activities altered the educational landscape for thousands of
rural white children. As a southern white woman in the first half of
the twentieth century, she often had to adapt her strategies to her still
marginal position in society. Persistent and creative in her search for
funding, she created an enduring institution.

NOTES
1. See Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930
(1970; reprint, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); LeeAnn Whites,
The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1995); Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits
of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1993); Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the
New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern
Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1997); Laura F. Edwards, Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women
in the Civil War Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Glenda E. Gilmore,
Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina,
1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Michele
Gillespie and Catherine Clinton, Taking Off the White Gloves: Southern Women and
Women Historians (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998).
2. James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss,
Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902–1930
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999); and William H. Watkins, The White
Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865–1954 (New York:
Teachers College Press, 2001).
3. Martha Berry, “Uplifting Backwood Boys in Georgia,” World’s Work 8 (July
1904), 4986–92.
4. Ibid., 4992.
5. General information on Martha Berry’s family is obtained from the following
tributes to her life and work: Harnett T. Kane with Inez Henry, Miracle in the Moun-
tains (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956); Evelyn Hoge Pendley, A Lady I Loved
(Mount Berry, Ga.: Berry College, 1966); Tracy Byers, The Sunday Lady of Possum
Trot (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932); Joyce Blackburn, Martha Berry: A
Woman of Courageous Spirit and Bold Dreams (Atlanta, Ga.: Peachtree, 1992), originally

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 SOUTHERN POOR WHITES AND HIGHER EDUCATION

published as Martha Berry, Little Woman with a Big Dream (Philadelphia: J. B. Lip-
pincott, 1968); and William L. Stidger, The Human Side of Greatness (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1940). See also Victoria-Marı́a MacDonald, “Martha Berry,” in
American National Biography, ed. John Garraty (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999). Correspondence and materials relating to the Berry Schools are preserved at
the Berry College Archives in Rome, Georgia (hereafter cited as BCA).
6. Blackburn, Martha Berry, 19–20.
7. Ibid., 28. Soon after opening her school, Berry decided that standard dress
for the students would avoid such problems for them. Boys wore overalls, girls wore
gingham dresses.
8. Ibid., 34.
9. Ibid., 37, 43.
10. David E. Whisnant discusses various motivations for becoming involved with
rural mountain residents in All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an
American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).
11. Dorothy Orr, A History of Education in Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1950), 249–52.
12. Kane with Henry, Miracle in the Mountains, 29.
13. Blackburn, Martha Berry, 47.
14. See essays in Elna C. Green, ed., Before the New Deal: Social Welfare in the
South, 1830–1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999); and the discussion in
R. Claire Snyder, “Gendered Radicalism and Civil Society: What Can Democratic
Theorists Learn from Southern White Ladies?” Polity 34 (spring 2002): 393–407.
15. Scott, Southern Lady, 116.
16. Blackburn, Martha Berry, 64.
17. Wayne Flynt, Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites (Tuscaloosa: University
of Alabama Press, 1989).
18. For information on the early southern state universities open to women, see
Amy Thompson McCandless, The Past in the Present: Women’s Higher Education in
the Twentieth-Century American South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
1999).
19. I. A. Newby, Plain Folk in the New South: Social Change and Cultural Persis-
tence, 1880-1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 426.
20. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the
Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).
21. Kane with Henry, Miracle in the Mountains, 29.
22. See Whisnant, Native and Fine.
23. Kane with Henry, Miracle in the Mountains, 49.
24. Jane Bernard Powers, The “Girl Question” in Education: Vocational Education
for Young Women in the Progressive Era (Washington, D.C.: Falmer, 1992).
25. W. J. Spillman to Martha Berry, 9 April 1908, folder 416, box 46, series 1.1,
Early Southern Program, record group XX, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rocke-
feller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. (hereafter cited as RAC).
26. Berry School Bulletin, 1921, BCA.
27. Adams, Education for Extinction; Anderson, Education of Blacks.
28. Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in Amer-
ican Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Knopf, 1961).

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MACDONALD AND LENINGTON

29. Proceedings of the Conference for Education in the South (Washington, D.C.:
Executive Committee of the Conference for Education in the South, 1900), 247; see
also the Conference’s 1912 Proceedings, 285.
30. Jonathan M. Atkins, “Philanthropy in the Mountains: Martha Berry and the
Early Years of the Berry Schools,” Georgia History in Pictures, Georgia Historical
Quarterly 82 (winter 1998): 856–76.
31. The boys reportedly stated, “We don’ do no women’s work. I ain’ never seen
no mankind do no washin’ ” (Kane with Henry, Miracle in the Mountains, 60).
32. Ibid., 60–61.
33. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the
South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage, 1998), 47.
34. A very public condemnation of Berry by an alumnus appeared in the New
Republic in the 1930s (Don West, “Sweatshops in the Schools,” New Republic, 4
October 1933). Alumni and friends of Berry sent over two hundred letters in defense
of the schools. See “Response,” New Republic, 25 October 1933, 292, and a follow-
up report, “About the Berry Schools, An Open Letter,” New Republic, 14 April
1934.
35. Martha Berry, “The Greatest Influence in My Life,” undated speech, BCA.
36. Kane with Henry, Miracle in the Mountains, 74.
37. Ibid., 77.
38. Anderson, Education of Blacks, 86–90.
39. The first correspondence with Berry in the GEB records appears in December
1902 (George Foster Peabody to Berry, 18 December 1902, folder 416, box 46, series
1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC).
40. For a discussion of the GEB’s policies during these years see Eric Anderson
and Alfred A. Moses, Jr., Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern
Black Education, 1902–1930 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 85–107.
41. Berry to Peabody, 5 June 1905; and Berry to Peabody, 1 January 1906; both
in container no. 1—general correspondence, George Peabody Papers, Library of Con-
gress. In the existing histories of Berry, no mention is made of Peabody’s contribution
toward the recitation hall.
42. For more information on Ogden, see Anderson, Education of Blacks, chapter
3.
43. Orr, History of Education, 265–67; and Kane with Henry, Miracle in the Moun-
tains, 97.
44. Kane with Henry, Miracle in the Mountains, 106–107.
45. Andrew Carnegie to J. D. Rockefeller, Jr., 9 December 1912, folder 416, box
46, series 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
46. Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charles-
ton, Mobile, 1860–1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
47. Hoke Smith to Wallace Buttrick, 8 April 1916, folder 416, box 46, series 1.1,
Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
48. Kane with Henry, Miracle in the Mountains, 113.
49. Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Ur-
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); and Mary Martha Thomas, The New Woman
in Alabama: Social Reforms and Suffrage, 1890–1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Ala-
bama Press, 1992).

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50. Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 143–56.
51. “What One Georgia Woman Is Doing for Poor Children,” Leslie’s Weekly, 27
October 1910, 434 (box 45, BCA).
52. Atkins, “Philanthropy in the Mountains,” 865. See, for example, Berry’s ability
to bring presidential influence to her schools (Woodrow Wilson to Buttrick, 13 April
1916; Wilson to Buttrick, 21 April 1916; and Buttrick to Wilson, 19 April 1916; all
three in folder 416, box 46, series 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC).
53. Whisnant, Native and Fine, 64–67.
54. Silber, Romance of Reunion, 143.
55. Robert H. Adams, “The Widening Circle,” Southern Highlander, January–
February 1909, 11.
56. Walter Hines Page, The Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths: Being Essays To-
wards the Training of the Forgotten Man in the Southern States (New York: Doubleday,
Page, 1902).
57. Booker T. Washington to John J. Eagan, 30 January 1915, correspondence
file, BCA.
58. Berry to William G. Willcox, 29 November 1915, correspondence file, BCA.
59. Washington to Berry, 26 February 1915, correspondence file, BCA.
60. Berry to Washington, 27 February 1915, correspondence file, BCA. A sub-
sequent letter from Tuskegee indicates that she had sent five dollars (Washington to
Berry, 3 March 1915, correspondence file, BCA).
61. Berry to Washington, 1 March 1915, correspondence file, BCA.
62. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–
1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).
63. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1927).
64. Berry to Adelia C. Williams, 29 March 1915, correspondence file, BCA.
65. Berry to Charlotte Young, 22 March 1915, correspondence file, BCA.
66. Dewey Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and
Tradition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983).
67. Thomas J. Archdeacon, “Immigration Law,” in The Oxford Companion to U.S.
History, ed. Paul S. Boyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 365.
68. “Estelle’s Story,” in What the Berry Schools Are Doing for America (1916–17),
6–8, box 215, BCA.
69. Ibid., 8.
70. Letter to Berry from 85 Park Place, Brooklyn, N.Y. (author name illegible),
15 November, circa 1916, box 3, correspondence file, BCA.
71. What the Berry Schools Are Doing for America.
72. Atkins, “Philanthropy in the Mountains,” 865.
73. Kane with Henry, Miracle in the Mountains, 202–203.
74. Ibid., 211.
75. John M. Staudenmaier, “Henry Ford,” in Boyer, Oxford Companion, 275. See
also Anne Jardim, The First Henry Ford: A Study in Personality and Business Leadership
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970); and David L. Lewis, The Public Image of Henry
Ford: An American Folk Hero and His Company (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1976). Studies of Ford and his life rarely mention his relationship to the Berry

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MACDONALD AND LENINGTON

Schools. Future research at the Henry Ford Archives and Manuscripts Collection in
Dearborn, Michigan, will reveal more detailed information on the relationship be-
tween the Fords and the Berry Schools.
76. Henry Ford, in collaboration with Samuel Crowther, Today and Tomorrow
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1926), 178.
77. Ibid., 180.
78. The Fords also developed an interest in the South and provided a community
center, reconditioned homes, and a sawmill for Georgia residents outside of Savannah.
See Carol Gelderman, Henry Ford, The Wayward Capitalist (New York: Dial, 1981),
388–89.
79. United States Bureau of the Census, Manuscript Population of the Fourteenth
Census, 1920, Floyd County, Ga. (National Archives, Washington, D.C.), 262–63,
microfilm reel T625.
80. Berry Schools Bulletin 9 (November 1921), 28, BCA.
81. “Berry Schools Alumni Reply to Statement Recently Published Concerning
That Institution,” Rome Tribune-Herald, n.d. (circa 1920s), Berry Schools—Alumni
file, BCA.
82. Ibid.
83. Kane with Henry, Miracle in the Mountains, 215.
84. David Levine, The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 1915–1940
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
85. Berry College, “About Berry College,” http://www.berry.edu/about.asp (ac-
cessed 8 December 2003).
86. William Stacy Longstreth, “Lamps in the Mountains: American Liberal Arts
Colleges with On-Campus Mandatory Student Work Programs” (Ph.D. diss., Clare-
mont Graduate School, 1990).
87. Grantham, Southern Progressivism, 246.
88. A notable new exception is McCandless, Past in the Present. For bibliographic
information on Bethune, Parrish, and Tutwiler, see Maxine Schwartz Seller, ed.,
Women Educators in the United States, 1820–1993 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood,
1994).
89. Glenda Gilmore, “Gender and Origins of the Old South,” Journal of Southern
History 67 (November 2001), 781.

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4. Creative Financing in Social Science:
Women Scholars and Early Research
Mary Ann Dzuback

The significance and impact of creative financing in the social sci-

ences is evident in the development of the social science disciplines.
One case in point is anthropology. American anthropology was fun-
damentally shaped by the work of Franz Boas and his students, who
themselves became leading scholars in their fields. Adequate funds for
travel—as well as money to develop collections, pay informants, and
publish findings—proved essential, and much of the funding came
from individual donors. One donor, herself an anthropologist, was
Elsie Clews Parsons. Women anthropologists in the Southwest simply
would not have been able to produce scholarly research at the pace
they did without Parsons’s help. Ruth Benedict, Ruth Bunzel, Esther
Goldfrank, Gladys Reichard, Ruth Underhill, Dorothy Keur—as well
as Boas himself and other male anthropologists—completed work sup-
ported by Parsons. She enabled countless others to conduct fieldwork
by financing field schools for the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa
Fe and stipulating that women receive places as researchers in them.1
Parsons followed a tradition of women philanthropists who had
been supporting social reform for decades before the turn of the twen-
tieth century, often using their wealth to widen women’s access to
higher and professional education. These philanthropists offered ma-
terial support coupled with encouragement, or patronage. For example,
under the tutelage of M. Carey Thomas, Mary Garrett made a major
bequest to the Johns Hopkins University for the establishment of a
medical school on condition that women as well as men be admitted
as students. Olivia Sage supported the Russell Sage Foundation’s pro-

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gram of social research and social reform. Phoebe Apperson Hearst

contributed to a number of buildings and programs on the campus of
the University of California that benefited male and female students.2
The creative financing (given and received by women) explored in
this chapter enabled women to further their work as principal inves-
tigators and as social science scholars who could define the scope of
their own projects. This material support also influenced education
within institutions and helped produce external scholarly publications,
shaping programs and policies within and among institutions. Colleges
might provide time and library materials for women’s scholarship, but
they rarely offered the necessary financial support to the extent that
philanthropists did.
Analyzing strategies women used to gain financing for their re-
search projects helps us to understand the nature and impact of the
research those strategies produced. Financing for women’s research in
higher education comes from three kinds of sources: fellowships, pri-
vate sponsorship, and foundations. Funds from these sources over-
lapped within institutions and time periods and influenced scholarship
in different ways; however, I will discuss them in the order in which
they first became available to social science researchers.
The first option, fellowships, included woman-generated support
through organizations. For example, many women graduate students
applied for fellowships from the Association of Collegiate Alumnae
(later the American Association of University Women or AAUW).
This kind of support was available throughout the twentieth century,
but became somewhat less significant as women found limited access
to more prestigious fellowships, like those from the Social Science
Research Council, in the 1920s and 1930s. However, because most
university graduate fellowships were granted to male students, AAUW
fellowships continued to provide crucial support for women pursuing
graduate study, as did fellowships provided by women’s colleges for
their graduates. Both the individual scholar and her academic advisor’s
expertise and interests shaped the research funded by these fellowships,
although the questions pursued tended to fall squarely within those
valued by the leading scholars in the disciplines—in part to assure the
legitimacy of the research, in part to obtain male support for it, and
in part to suggest that women could apply as much painstaking rigor
as men did in dominant research areas. Yet AAUW and college fel-
lowships offered some autonomy to women scholars in pursuit of
doctorates, enabling them to explore graduate programs in the United

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States and abroad and to begin research on projects that emerged from
their undergraduate work.3
The second source of financing developed for faculty women; in-
dividuals and families supported both short-term projects and ongoing
research. This kind of patronage began as early as the turn of the
century and continued over the next five decades, but—like fellow-
ships—it became a less salient and respected source of support as the
large foundations increasingly sustained academic social science re-
search beginning in the 1920s. Nevertheless, private support was crit-
ical for much of women scholars’ work in the first half of the twentieth
century. Before 1920, such funding enabled women to complete grad-
uate work and pursue research that they chose as significant. Between
1920 and 1940, as philanthropic funding increased but focused on
men’s projects in research universities that employed few women schol-
ars, funding from individuals continued to be essential for women
scholars. Studies financed in this way tended to be shaped by the
scholar herself, in conjunction with the giver’s concerns (often similar
or shared) and with the program goals and emphases of the researcher’s
home institution. Such autonomy allowed women to pursue their work
even when prominent male social scientists and foundation officials
did not consider their questions and methods central to the developing
disciplines. Parsons’s support of anthropology, for example, furthered
disciplinary research that was still considered marginal in many insti-
tutions, particularly in its focus on North America. Thus, patronage
by individuals helped to shape emerging science disciplines and
women’s contributions to them, despite the relatively smaller scale of
funds involved.4
The third source of philanthropic support for women was the large
foundations. For example, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial
focused on developing social science inquiry at research universities.
However, most women faculty of the period had appointments at the
women’s colleges, not research universities; moreover, the principal in-
vestigators of research projects typically were men well connected in
the academic world, where women struggled against marginalization
as scholars. Despite these problems, women obtained access to some
of these foundation funds as staff and faculty associated with university
research institutes and in social work and home economics graduate
programs. Projects financed in this way and involving women tended
to be shaped by the rare woman scholar entrusted with administration
or by male faculty who invited women students and colleagues to con-

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tribute to the larger effort. Women at the School of Social Service

Administration at the University of Chicago had access to Rockefeller
funding for dissertation and other projects in the 1920s and 1930s,
but this was atypical. Such funding, which granted both stature and
the stamp of high-level disciplinary academic approval, was key to
promoting particular questions and research methodologies in the so-
cial sciences and in particular institutions.
Each of these funding sources helped shape both the focus of
scholarly research and the ways it was conducted by women social
scientists in the first half of the twentieth century. Although I will
touch on the fellowships and foundation research funds that women
provided, sought, and received, this chapter will emphasize “creative
financing” women obtained by tapping into less institutionalized
sources. If we only examine the large foundations that financed social
science research in the first third of the twentieth century, we miss
two important aspects of the development of the social sciences. One
is the ways that women academics used their networks of friends and
colleagues to garner financial support for their efforts to influence so-
cial and economic research and (less directly) local, state, and national
policymaking. The other aspect that might be missed is the large body
of often interdisciplinary, grounded research that academic women
conducted into the kinds of problems they considered important and
the often subtle ways they contributed to theoretical and empirical
formation of the disciplines. Without creative financing, much of the
most interesting and valuable work women social scientists accom-
plished would have been nearly impossible—there simply was no other
source of funding for it.5
The personal characteristics of women academics in this period
may have affected their ability to secure creative financing: before the
1940s, most were white, middle-class, and Protestant. They came from
small-town, urban, and occasionally rural families. They typically had
parents who had completed some formal education, up to or including
college, and at least one parent who strongly supported his or her
daughter’s further education. Exceptions to this profile included Jewish
and African American women, women from wealthy and occasionally
poor families, and women who lacked parental approval of their ed-
ucational choices. All of the women in my study were confident of
and committed to their own and often other women’s full intellectual
development in spite of women’s marginalization in academe. In many
cases, the donor-recipient relationship was formed within social net-

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works already established. In others, it was formed in networks taking

shape as more women pursued graduate degrees and became social
science researchers, meeting each other in graduate programs, in social
reform organizations, and in higher education institutions as faculty
and members of boards of trustees.

SUPPORT FOR WOMEN’S RESEARCH IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

An early example of grounded, woman-defined research emerging
out of such networks was a study conducted by the Association of
Collegiate Alumnae (ACA). This study, completed in 1885, was de-
signed as a direct response to Edward Clarke’s Sex in Education (1873).
Clarke argued on the basis of a few anecdotal examples that intellectual
pursuits depleted women’s physical health and robbed them of their
capacity to reproduce. In response, researchers in the Association sur-
veyed over 1200 women college graduates and found that their re-
sponses contradicted Clarke’s “evidence.”6 The study results supported
ACA members’ determination to provide both graduate and under-
graduate opportunities, so that women could do “the hardest kind of
intellectual work,” add “to the world’s stock of knowledge,” and join
the ranks of teachers and scholars increasingly sought by colleges and
universities.7 To foster these kinds of opportunities, the Association
determined to provide women with fellowships to study in graduate
programs in Europe and the United States. The ACA was the first
organization to recognize and finance the work of American women
scholars; it began doing so as early as 1890 with its annual European
Fellowship for overseas graduate work. Over the years, the ACA and
then the AAUW became the principal national-level organization to
which individuals and groups donated funds to support fellowships
and scholarships for women. The contributions of the AAUW to de-
veloping social science knowledge cannot be ignored; fellowship funds
enabled dozens of women social scientists to pursue graduate study
before 1940 and launched them on their academic careers.8
Clearly, however, the AAUW’s fellowships for graduate students
represented a drop in the bucket. Some colleges, including Vassar and
Bryn Mawr, provided graduate fellowships for alumnae to study at
European institutions. Most graduate institutions also provided in-
house fellowships, but women received few of these in the first half
of the twentieth century, and before the 1920s money was scarce for
both men and women as principal investigators on research projects

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of their own. Some funding was available in this period: John D.

Rockefeller, Edward S. Harkness, and James B. Duke supported
higher education institutions; the General Education Board, the Ro-
senwald Fund, and the Jeanes Foundation helped finance the construc-
tion of public schools in the South; and local and national philan-
thropies raised funds for relief efforts before and during World War
I. But philanthropic foundations did not begin giving generously to
social science research until the 1920s. When they did, the money was
targeted toward producing scientific data that would support the or-
ganization and management of what Guy Alchon calls a “techno-
corporatist state.” In other words, funders wanted to promote coop-
erative management of capitalistic growth by both public and private
organizations, with the ultimate goal of reducing class friction, un-
employment, and other socioeconomic ills that had emerged by the
turn of the century with the expansion of industrial capitalism.9
Several philanthropies supplied some funds for survey research, in-
dustrial studies, and investigative reports before the 1920s. The most
notable, the Russell Sage Foundation, began financing studies in 1907,
but research was only one of several funding priorities, and the studies
were designed to furnish “disinterested” statistical and other kinds of
information for voluntary associations, government offices, and legis-
lators attempting to address large social problems at the municipal and
state levels. Academic researchers received some of the Russell Sage
funds, but most of the support stayed within the foundation for in-
ternally led studies or was administered through local charity organi-
zation societies, of the kind conducted by Mary Richmond in Phila-
delphia and New York, as Sarah Lederman illustrates in this volume.10
But these institutional grants were exceptions; male and female
social scientists in the early 1900s relied largely on individuals or fam-
ilies to support projects. Women carried this pattern forward into the
1920s and 1930s, often using the funds to develop and maintain co-
operative and multidisciplinary projects that explored social economic
and social welfare problems. Two cases illustrate this form of support:
the social economy research program at the University of California,
Berkeley, and the Council of Industrial Studies at Smith College. I
focus on these two programs because they capture emerging fields
within the study of economics and economic history. In addition, they
demonstrate how critical noninstitutional grants were in supporting
women’s efforts to develop new social science knowledge, particularly
in the interwar period. Finally, the Berkeley and Smith programs sug-

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gest the kinds of contexts in which women were able to elicit and use
such support. The former program emerged in a university that was
transforming its identity from a teaching to a research institution; the
latter developed in a women’s college, where graduate students were
scarce and monetary resources for supporting faculty research were
almost nonexistent.

THE UC BERKELEY SOCIAL ECONOMY RESEARCH PROGRAM

The social economy research program at Berkeley was developed
largely by one faculty member: Jessica B. Peixotto, the first woman
appointed full-time to the University of California faculty. She had
received her Ph.D. (the second awarded to a woman at Berkeley) in
political economy in 1900 after completing a dissertation entitled “The
French Revolution and Modern French Socialism” under Bernard
Moses. In 1904 she became the economics department’s lecturer in
socialism. Promoted to assistant professor in socialism (1907), then
associate professor (1912), and eventually professor in social economy
(1918), she built a steady record of research and service at the local
and national levels. By the late 1910s, Peixotto had established social
economy as one of the department’s three programs, something of a
distinction in a department among the earliest to name itself a De-
partment of Economics. Peixotto used the social economy program to
bring more women into this department at Berkeley, one of the few
in the country to hire women as instructors and, in time, as tenure-
track faculty.11
After completing service during World War I as a member of the
Council of Defense Subcommittee on Women and Children, Peixotto
began enlarging her earlier research program by conducting a study
for the California Civil Service Commission that investigated cost of
living issues among clerical, wage-earning, and executive state em-
ployees. From this study, Peixotto concluded that annual pricing of
family and household budgets could be theoretically interesting if she
expanded the criteria typically used to examine the decision-making
processes in household spending.
It was this work that captured Clara Hellman Heller’s interest and
drew her financial support. Heller was a close friend of Peixotto’s; both
women had come of age in the upper echelons of San Francisco’s
merchant elite and shared similar progressive political views. Peixotto’s
father Raphael had moved to the city when Jessica was a child and

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raised his large family there as he expanded his business interests.

Heller’s father, Isaias Hellman, was a banker who migrated north from
Los Angeles and developed both business and real estate holdings in
the city. Her husband, Emanuel S. Heller, a lawyer with a lucrative
practice, was a University of California alumnus and himself a philan-
thropist. But it was largely Clara Heller’s money that supported Pei-
xotto’s work. She was a generous benefactor of the university and the
Democratic Party as well as such San Francisco institutions as the San
Francisco Opera, the Symphony Association, the Museum of Art, and
the Children’s Hospital.12
Heller’s ongoing grants for Peixotto’s work were targeted to help
expand the research capabilities of women in social science at Berkeley.
They contributed significantly to the development of consumer eco-
nomics in a critical period. And her faith in the nature and quality of
the research moved her to continue supporting the Heller Committee
for Research in Social Economy under the leadership of Emily
Huntington, who took over after Peixotto retired in 1935. By 1943,
Heller’s annual grants totaled $63,050, and when she died, her son
(who was on the university’s board of regents) continued to finance
the committee until his death in 1961.13
Heller expected the committee to conduct “studies of problems in
Social Economics with special reference to conditions in the State of
California.” Peixotto used this broad mandate to become a major in-
fluence in developing the theoretical and empirical sophistication of
the field of consumer economics. The Heller studies can be divided
into three groups: quantity and cost budgets, published annually; in-
come and expenditure studies; and special studies. The first two com-
prised cost of living studies and bore some relationship to the third,
which encompassed investigations into such areas as care for the de-
pendent aged and children, unemployment relief and the unemployed,
California’s labor market and problems of re-employment, the nutri-
tive value of diets among particular population groups, and standards
and methods of relief.14
The quantity and cost budget studies began with a straightforward
premise. In perusing the cost of living research, Peixotto discovered
that not enough distinction was made between the ways families in
various social and economic groups spent their money in relation to
their incomes. Beginning in 1923, the committee conducted price sur-
veys in the San Francisco Bay region to determine the living costs for
families of wage earners, clerks, and professionals. By 1929, Peixotto

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could claim that the budgets were “used in wage arbitrations, by union
and business officials, charity workers, the Labor Bureau, Inc., the
State Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other agencies.” In 1932–1933,
the committee added a fourth budget, to cover dependent families on
relief. A fifth was added in 1939; it investigated single working
women’s living costs.15
One innovation in the committee’s approach was the wide range
of items priced—from food to household furnishings to recreation
activities—and the incorporation of concerns about other household
management costs. This work was modified and revised whenever the
committee pursued an income and expenditure study that contributed
new insights into the substance and methods of the budget surveys.
The result, as Peixotto claimed in 1933, was a rare effort “to measure
[the changing standards of living] in quantitative terms,” involving
tracking the “increasing proportion of income that is being spent for
the so-called ‘miscellaneous’ items—including automobiles, recreation,
in fact all expenses other than food, clothing, and shelter.” The index
published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not reflect the typical
expenses of salaried professionals—including domestic service and au-
tomobile upkeep—and applied the clothing expenditures for wage
earners to middle-class earners. Peixotto suggested in 1935 that “the
interest in these budgets continues, particularly since no other agency
in the country prices a complete set of detailed budgets at regular
intervals.” Moreover, the attention to detail regarding how families
spent their incomes, as opposed to how economists thought they prob-
ably spent it, expanded the categories examined and made the studies
more reliable.16
Another innovation was Peixotto’s challenge to the taboo of vio-
lating that “romantic and shadowy domain of home life, ‘hopelessly
private,’ ‘sacred,’ ” in which families had been “shut away” making their
budgetary decisions. Introducing psychologically and sociologically in-
formed explanations of consumer choice, she presented a case for “the
American standard of living” reflected in professionals’ desires and
actual decisions, a standard that represented a kind of ideal annual
household income for all “standard” families consisting of a husband,
a wife, and “two growing children.” She developed what she called the
“ ‘comfort’ standard,” of about “$7,000, the sum needed to satisfy a
set of desires for goods and services, desires that at the present time
influence widely and profoundly the way men earn their money and
the way they spend it.” Moreover, she brought this “hopelessly private”

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life, in which middle-class women played an increasingly dominant

role, into public discussion by publishing the research and encouraging
its use in the making of public policy. By using as a guiding principle
“the unswerving faith of our time in the social value of a rising stan-
dard of living; the growing belief especially among wage earners in a
universal ‘right’ to a comfort standard,” she succeeded in placing eco-
nomic decisions at the household level squarely within a widely shared
social vision of American middle-class life. No doubt Peixotto’s per-
sonal experience, including the eleven years she devoted to domestic
and charitable occupations between high school and college to satisfy
her father’s paternalistic concerns, helped to shape her understanding
of these issues. But so, too, did the changing conditions of social and
economic relationships in families and in society; the age of advertising
and consumption framed the ways families, and often women, made
decisions about household budgets.17
The Heller Committee program of the late 1920s and early 1930s
reflected Peixotto’s success in connecting the committee’s research and
distribution activities to other local agencies, including the YWCA,
welfare associations, unions, and school boards. Under Huntington,
the most significant larger-scale special studies of the middle to late
1930s were an indication of the committee’s effort to place the local
findings in a national context, in light of New Deal efforts to respond
to unemployment and poverty. By insisting that the committee remain
in the economics department, governed by faculty members appointed
by the chair, Peixotto and Heller assured that the work would have
an impact on the character of the department, as well as on the larger
social economic research and policymaking community. As many of
the researchers actually associated with Heller Committee work were
women Ph.D. students and faculty in economics and home economics,
the committee created a safe and respected haven for women social
scientists at the University of California in the very years the university
was expanding both its research and its teaching commitments in the
state. Further, the Heller annual donations were among the university’s
earliest sources of outside funding for social science research. When
the university agreed to begin financing the committee’s work, Heller’s
donations decreased proportionally. When the university’s commit-
ment slackened under the presidency of Robert Gordon Sproul in the
1930s because the research itself was considered less significant than
other kinds of social and economic research and theory making, Hel-

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ler’s donations increased in order to sustain the committee’s work, still

in demand by such agencies as the Brookings Institution.18
Why is this case significant in a collection of studies of women
and educational philanthropy? First, the University of California was
a land-grant institution. Accordingly, until the 1920s most public
funding for research went to projects in the sciences and to studies
related to agriculture and food production, major contributors to the
state’s economy. Consumer economics was not a priority of the state,
nor was labor economics until the middle to late 1920s. The Heller
grant provided seed money, or an opening for the university to help
finance the research. Second, the funding and the program trans-
formed the department’s activities and faculty representation. The
Berkeley Department of Economics was among the very few then
extant to appoint not just one woman, but eventually four in positions
that led to tenure; three became full professors in economics and the
fourth a full professor in the law school. Still other women were ap-
pointed to faculty research and assistant positions for varying periods
of time. Third, the social economy program was unusual in its full
integration into the department’s teaching and research. The Heller
funding raised the profile of Peixotto and the work of her social econ-
omy colleagues and students among members of the university com-
munity. And it served the university well in the 1930s. When Presi-
dent Sproul received inquiries regarding the university’s response to
the Depression, he could point to the work in the department. Heller’s
support was critical to creating and maintaining these distinctive char-
acteristics in Berkeley’s economics department for four decades.
Fourth, the grant enabled women to direct research into areas that
were avoided or overlooked by male economists. Because this research
focused on households and used women as informants about budgetary
decision making, they were less likely to be funded by foundations
seeking to support the more “objective” and “scientific” domains of
male economists’ work.19

THE SMITH COLLEGE COUNCIL OF INDUSTRIAL STUDIES

The Smith College Council of Industrial Studies offers a different
example of creatively funded research. Supported largely by a single
donor to further the work of women social scientists on the Smith
faculty, the Council conducted research that could not have been done

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otherwise. In the 1920s and 1930s, Smith College occasionally pro-

vided faculty with leaves of absence and small stipends in order to
foster faculty development. Although hiring of women faculty ex-
panded in most colleges in the 1920s, funding for “extras” like research
was not plentiful. By the 1930s, colleges were hard-pressed even to
hire new faculty. Small stipends were available to faculty with strong
proposals (they were typically used for travel, books, or research assis-
tance), but completing social science research projects was often dif-
ficult and expensive in colleges located in relatively rural areas. Thus,
women faculty at Smith’s Northampton, Massachusetts, campus felt
the effects of isolation, the struggle for access to libraries, the need for
clerical assistance to complete statistical research, and a heavy teaching
load. As an economist herself and a member of the faculty, donor
Dorothy Wolff Douglas recognized these difficulties.20
Douglas was appointed instructor in the economics department at
Smith in 1924, just before she finished her Ph.D. at Columbia in
French economic history and theory. She had been married to econ-
omist Paul H. Douglas, who relinquished his position at the University
of Chicago to teach at Amherst in order to keep his household and
family intact and encourage his wife’s academic career. By 1930, when
Smith promoted her to assistant professor, Douglas was divorced, car-
ing for four children, and sharing her house in Northampton with her
domestic partner Katherine D. Lumpkin. She had inherited a good
deal of family money and contributed generously to social and political
causes, particularly those supporting organized labor. By the 1930s she
was exploring female and child labor and labor legislation. One result
was Child Workers in America (1937), co-authored with Lumpkin. Her
politics and her own research shaped her belief that contemporary
policy discussions, particularly regarding labor issues, had to be in-
formed by economic history. Her contributions to establish the Coun-
cil of Industrial Studies at Smith arose out of these concerns and
commitments.21
On condition that it remain independent of the economics de-
partment and include an interdisciplinary advisory board of faculty
from Smith’s economics and history departments, Douglas provided a
grant of $3,500 to Smith College to establish and develop the Council
in 1932. She believed the focus should be on the Connecticut River
Valley region and suggested that the college contribute up to $1,500
beginning in the second two years, after which her support would end
and the college could decide whether to continue the Council’s work.

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 CREATIVE FINANCING IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

William A. Neilson, Smith’s president, appointed Katherine D.

Lumpkin to serve as the Council’s first director (1932–1939) on a half-
time basis. Lumpkin had done some master’s-level work in sociology
at Columbia, participated in a YWCA effort toward interracial student
organization in her native South, finished a Ph.D. at the University
of Wisconsin in 1929, and taught at Mount Holyoke for one year.
This was followed by a research fellowship from the Social Science
Research Council to study families in New York seeking public assis-
tance, and then by involvement in a project with the Bryn Mawr
Department of Social Economy and Social Research.22
The work of the Council represented a concerted effort to make
this a coordinated enterprise—to utilize the expertise of faculty at a
number of colleges in the region, to offer research support to graduate
students from other institutions working on their dissertations, and to
envision the projects as a series of related studies that would yield a
coherent body of work about the valley. The grant was designed to
accomplish two additional goals. One was to capture the region’s his-
torical and economic transformations over the course of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. The other was to collect and preserve what-
ever documentary evidence existed in the various industrial and social
agencies in the valley. Both of these, Douglas hoped, would also result
in some collaboration with businesses, agencies, and individuals in the
region, helping to popularize the idea of research within local com-
munities.23
Two directors, first Lumpkin and then Constance McLaughlin
Green, headed the Council’s program from 1939 to 1948. The chair
throughout the 1930s and 1940s was Esther Lowenthal, professor of
economics at Smith. Douglas, Lumpkin, and Lowenthal originally
hoped that the committee’s research would explore why industries that
had long been located in the valley were abandoning “valuable prop-
erty” to undertake “new investment” outside of western Massachusetts.
But because some industrial leaders would not open their papers and
decision-making processes to Smith’s researchers, the Council settled
on exploring the impact “of plant abandonment” on families, institu-
tions, government, and other economic activity when a major industry
pulled up stakes and left town. By the early 1950s, the Council had
produced studies exploring the development and decline of transpor-
tation systems, trade practices going back to the colonial period, ag-
ricultural practices in the nineteenth century, women workers in local
war industries, and the rise and decline of a number of industries in

117
MARY ANN DZUBACK

the Holyoke and Springfield areas. The studies were all carefully co-
ordinated to increase understanding of the region’s transformation
historically and as it was actually taking place by the middle of the
twentieth century. The second Douglas donation of $3,500 was de-
pleted by 1936, and the Smith College board of trustees agreed to
support the Council’s work on a year-by-year basis, with a reduced
budget, until Green resigned after her husband’s sudden death in
1948. By then, the Council had produced a significant body of research
and uncovered and helped to preserve a large collection of pri-
mary materials that otherwise would have been lost to subsequent
researchers.24
The Smith case presents an important form of creative financing
by and for women. For Lumpkin and the Smith faculty, the Council
offered resources for pursuing work in economic history and labor
economics during the Depression, when private and public funding
for social science research was harder to obtain than it had been in
the 1920s. This was particularly the case for women doctoral students
at the dissertation stage. By 1938, five of approximately seven projects
conducted by the fellows were being used for dissertation studies.
Smith College faculty were able to work with doctoral-level students,
a rarity at the women’s colleges, where most women academic social
science scholars were employed. In addition, the studies produced in-
valuable archival materials: diaries, collections of correspondence, oral
histories, industrial publications going back to the colonial period, and
a variety of business papers and town records. These materials were
catalogued and preserved by the Council’s researchers. Finally, the
studies were coordinated in an unusually rigorous way for social science
research. The Council’s projects offered the opportunity to examine
the impact of the immediate economic situation on the valley; by fo-
cusing on the region, Douglas, Lowenthal, and Lumpkin ensured that
as each project was defined it fit within the larger scope of the grant,
contributed to the other studies, and extended and enriched the body
of work the Council produced. And in the process of creating this
work, both the knowledge and the networks of the women increased.
The fellows often overlapped in their stay at Smith and were able to
share work with each other, while benefiting from faculty oversight.
The scholarship produced was impressive; many of the studies were
published in Smith College Studies in History.25 Thus, as in the Social
Economy program at Berkeley, targeted, private funding had a measur-
able impact on social science research by women at Smith.

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 CREATIVE FINANCING IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

FOUNDATION SUPPORT: THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA CASE

Beginning in the 1920s the third type of funding—foundation
grants—became available when women academic social scientists were
able to access funds already allotted to male colleagues. The University
of Chicago’s Local Community Research Committee, Harvard’s Bu-
reau of International Research, and the University of Pennsylvania’s
Department of Industrial Research are examples of programs that re-
ceived such funding. (An exception was a $7,000 grant Emily
Huntington secured from the Rockefeller Foundation to augment
Heller funds for a study of unemployment and re-employment in Cal-
ifornia in 1937; she remained the principal investigator and controlled
the grant.) The situation at Penn nicely illustrates how women scholars
made use of foundation money.
Penn’s Department of Industrial Research was initially financed by
the Carnegie Corporation, the Philadelphia Association for the Dis-
cussion of Employment Problems, and the university under the direc-
tion of Joseph Willits in 1921, who co-founded the department with
Anne Bezanson and appointed her as his assistant director. In 1928–
1929, after the Carnegie Corporation ended its support, the depart-
ment received a five-year grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller
Memorial (LSRM), effectively tripling the budget for that period. The
grant was given on condition that the university increase its support
over the same period.26
Bezanson, who did not initially have a faculty appointment at Penn
despite her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard (1929), became co-
director in 1934, after Willits left to act as dean of the Wharton
School. In 1939, when Willits left for the Rockefeller Foundation,
Bezanson became director. The department was established to offer
courses in industrial relations and to pursue “co-operative industrial
research in the Philadelphia community.” As funding increased in the
late 1920s, its purposes expanded to include building social science
research within the community. Another emergent goal, that of con-
ducting “fundamental studies of the economic and human problems
and phenomena of industry,” gave the faculty and research associates
considerable latitude in designing projects. This latitude was always
tempered by the idea that the research itself would be conducted in a
coordinated fashion rather than by lone scholars in isolation.27
The Rockefeller support for Penn’s Department of Industrial Re-
search continued into the middle 1940s, although at a reduced level.

119
MARY ANN DZUBACK

As a result of this financing, approximately one-third of its total bud-

get over two decades, the department created an enormous body of
research. This encompassed work in personnel and labor relations; the
hosiery, upholstery, textile, and bituminous coal industries; and com-
munity labor studies that included examinations of labor market
trends, personnel relations, wages, and transportation. Under Bezan-
son and Willits, the department hired several women to conduct re-
search, including Eleanor Lansing Dulles, who contributed a number
of studies, and Gladys Palmer, who directed the research after Bezan-
son’s retirement. These appointments occurred at a time when the
University of Pennsylvania hired no women to its social science fac-
ulty.28

In the early twentieth century, women scholars in the social sci-

ences turned to a number of sources in their quest for research funding.
Individual and family donor support for research was highly valued in
certain kinds of institutions into the 1920s, including colleges and
universities in the early stages of redefining themselves as research
institutions in the social as well as other sciences. This was largely
because few other external sources of funding existed for these research
interests. Such support continued to be important into the 1930s and
1940s for maintaining research programs that otherwise would not
have received any outside funding. However, in the 1920s philan-
thropic foundation support had surpassed this earlier kind of funding
both in quantity and in its ability to accord status to the receiving
institutions. The experience of the Industrial Research Department at
the University of Pennsylvania illustrates what large allocations of re-
search funds made possible for scholars in institutions fortunate
enough to benefit from them. For women social science scholars who
did not have access to these funds, the best means of gaining financing
and controlling their own projects was by securing the first and second
kinds of support: fellowships for investigator-initiated projects, and
grants from private individuals to support programs and research proj-
ects in the institutions in which women academics worked—typically
four-year colleges, often women’s. By the 1930s, both of these kinds
of financing offered women far less prestige and recognition in the
social sciences than foundation support granted to a named principal
investigator, but both were critical to keeping women in the academic
social sciences and funding their work.

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 CREATIVE FINANCING IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

When women were the beneficiaries of foundation support in pro-

grams such as Penn’s, they were not usually able to translate that sup-
port into career advancement strategies at the pace and rate of men.
They rarely were granted principal investigator status or appointed to
the research universities most prominent in social science research.
Emily Huntington at Berkeley, Anne Bezanson at Penn, and a few
others were exceptions. Given this lack of professional visibility and
recognition, the extent to which women were able to carry on their
research programs is truly remarkable. The support these scholars re-
ceived was largely due to their sharing research and reform goals with
wealthy donors, carefully cultivating these donors and aligning with
them in commitment to women as researchers and the kinds of knowl-
edge needed for municipal and state social reform, and determinedly
pursuing continued and new funding.
This resourcefulness and persistence were set against a variety of
difficult limitations throughout the first half of the twentieth century,
including institutional discrimination—which relegated most women
academic Ph.D.s in social sciences to teaching colleges—as well as a
system of philanthropic financing that favored male rather than female
leadership in social science research. The constraints women research-
ers faced make all the more clear how important creative financing
was for women social scientists in the 1920s and 1930s, the decades
when increasing numbers of women were completing Ph.D.s and en-
tering academe. Situated in the women’s colleges, these scholars not
only lacked access to foundation support for research in the 1920s, but
were also not as well protected as their male research university col-
leagues from the budgetary reductions higher education institutions
suffered in the 1930s.29
The women I have discussed here brought to their work a com-
mitment to understanding the impact of economic change on social
organizations and relations at the state and community levels, com-
bining the most recent methodologies (in statistical and ethnographic
research) with the questions they identified as critical. Peixotto’s work
in social economics at Berkeley yielded new theoretical perspectives,
while Lumpkin and the Council of Industrial Studies at Smith—and,
to some extent, Bezanson and the Penn Industrial Relations Depart-
ment—enlarged understanding of the regional effects of historical eco-
nomic changes. In examining what Bezanson accomplished with large-
scale funding from the LSRM, one cannot help but wonder what kind

121
MARY ANN DZUBACK

of impact Peixotto’s and Lumpkin’s research might have had on the

social science disciplines and public policy had they had access to sim-
ilar support.
Much of the work of these research enterprises was in high de-
mand by federal and local agencies, and the demand increased
throughout the Depression. As Nancy Folbre suggests, women econ-
omists (and social economists, particularly) braved the masculine world
of academic economics—the basic premises of which were designed
to protect patriarchal interests in economic theory and research—in
order to promote research questions that granted women an active
place in the productive economy. Folbre focuses on Edith Abbott’s
and Sophonisba Breckinridge’s struggles to frame the discipline and
influence public policy, but her conclusions also apply to the cases of
Peixotto and Lumpkin. Peixotto’s efforts to explore how household
earnings and consumption functioned in relation to each other, and
Lumpkin’s efforts to understand local regional economic transforma-
tion, were unlike most kinds of research financed by large funding
organizations in that period. Nevertheless, these studies produced im-
portant findings for policy makers and others seeking to offer munic-
ipal, state, or philanthropic intervention in an unstable economic pe-
riod. Their studies continue to be important to anthropologists seeking
to understand the sociohistorical transformations that shaped the
physical and cultural contexts of the populations they investigate. Fur-
ther, the value of those studies today is inestimable for economists
who, rather than relying primarily on rational choice models to explain
economic activity, are seeking to understand how the discipline de-
veloped and to place economic activity in broader and more complex
social contexts.30

NOTES
My thanks to Peter Best, Peter D. Hall, Andrea Walton, and the contributors to
this volume for their critical readings of different versions of this chapter, and to the
Spencer Foundation for its generous support of the larger project of which this is a
part.
1. Margaret Rossiter argues that “creative” philanthropy was also “coercive,” used
to pressure institutions to accept women graduate students and appoint women faculty
(Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 [Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1982], 39). For information about Parsons, see Louis A.
Hieb, “Elsie Clews Parsons in the Southwest,” in Hidden Scholars: Women Anthropol-

122
 CREATIVE FINANCING IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

ogists and the Native American Southwest, ed. Nancy J. Parezo (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1993), 63–75; Desley Deacon, Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing
Modern Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), chapter 10; and Andrea
Walton, “Rethinking Boundaries: The History of Women, Philanthropy, and Higher
Education,” History of Higher Education Annual 20 (2000): 29–57. Kamala Viswes-
waran analyzes the financing women anthropologists obtained in “ ‘Wild West’ An-
thropology and the Disciplining of Gender,” in Gender and American Social Science:
The Formative Years, ed. Helene Silverberg (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1998), 86–123.
2. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New
York: Knopf, 1994), chapter 12; and David C. Hammack, “A Center of Intelligence
for the Charity Organization Movement: The Foundation’s Early Years,” in Social
Science in the Making: Essays on the Russell Sage Foundation, 1907–1972, ed. David C.
Hammack and Stanton Wheeler (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994), 1–33.
3. Susan Levine, Degrees of Equality: The American Association of University
Women and the Challenge of Twentieth-Century Feminism (Philadelphia: Temple Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 8–9. On the dominant lines of research in social sciences before
1920, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1991).
4. Thanks to Andrea Walton for helping me to clarify this point. On funding
for women in the sciences, see Martin Bulmer and Joan Bulmer, “Philanthropy and
Social Science in the 1920s: Beardsley Ruml and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller
Memorial, 1922–29,” Minerva 19 (autumn 1981): 347–407; Lawrence K. Frank, “The
Status of Social Science in the United States,” 1923, file 679, box 63, series III, Laura
Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow,
N.Y. (hereafter cited as LSRMA); and Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles
and Strategies, 39, 46–50, 205–206.
5. Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Fem-
inism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982); Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless
Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990); and Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform,
1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). On the importance of female
networks in securing support, see Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in
the Progressive Era (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).
6. See Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls (Bos-
ton: James R. Osgood, 1873); and Sue Zschoche, “Dr. Clarke Revisited: Science, True
Womanhood, and Female Collegiate Education,” History of Education Quarterly 29
(winter 1989): 545–69.
7. Christine Ladd Franklin, quoted in Ruth W. Tryon, Investment in Creative
Scholarship: A History of the Fellowship Program of the American Association of University
Women, 1890–1956 (Washington, D.C.: American Association of University Women,
1957), 5.
8. Marion Talbot and Lois Kimball Mathews Rosenberry, The History of the
American Association of University Women, 1881–1931 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1931); Levine, Degrees of Equality; and Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles
and Strategies to 1940, 39–40. For the period after 1940, see Linda Eisenmann’s
chapter on continuing education for women, this volume; and Margaret W. Rossiter,

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MARY ANN DZUBACK

Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972 (Baltimore, Md.:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
9. Guy Alchon, The Invisible Hand of Planning: Capitalism, Social Science, and
the State in the 1920s (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 5. On fel-
lowship allotment, see Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies
to 1940, chapter 10; and Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres. See also Robert H.
Bremner, American Philanthropy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988), chapters 7 and 8; and Theresa Richardson and Donald Fisher, “Introduction:
The Social Sciences and Their Philanthropic Mentors,” in The Development of the
Social Sciences in the United States and Canada: The Role of Philanthropy, ed. Theresa
Richardson and Donald Fisher (Stamford, Conn.: Ablex, 1999), 3–21.
10. John M. Glenn, Lilian Brandt, and F. Emerson Andrews, Russell Sage Foun-
dation, 1907–1946, vol. 2 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1947), 678. Leah
Feder, a doctoral student in social economy at Bryn Mawr College, received funds for
her thesis research and writing (“Unemployment Relief in Periods of Depression”):
see student files, School of Social Work and Social Research Papers, Bryn Mawr
College Archives, Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pa. (hereafter
cited as BMCA); and Mary Ann Dzuback, “Women and Social Research at Bryn
Mawr College, 1915–1940,” History of Education Quarterly 33 (winter 1993): 579–
608. On the goals of the Russell Sage Foundation, see Hammack, “Center of Intel-
ligence”; Guy Alchon, “The ‘Self-Applauding Sincerity’ of Overreaching Theory, Bi-
ography as Ethical Practice, and the Case of Mary van Kleeck,” in Gender and Amer-
ican Social Science, ed. Silverberg, 293–325; and Sarah Henry Lederman, this volume.
On Sage, see Ruth Crocker, “Margaret Olivia Slocum, ‘Mrs. Russell Sage’: Private
Griefs and Public Duties,” in Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives: Women in Amer-
ican History, ed. Kriste Lindenmeyer (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2000),
147–59; and Crocker’s chapter about Sage’s involvement in philanthropy for higher
education, this volume.
11. Most economics study was conducted in economics and sociology departments
or political economy departments that included political science programs; see Mary
E. Cookingham, “Social Economists and Reform: Berkeley, 1906–1961,” History of
Political Economy 19 (1987): 47–65. The other two programs in the Berkeley depart-
ment were in business economics and labor economics. On Peixotto: Jessica B. Pei-
xotto Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter cited as
BL); Henry Rand Hatfield, “Jessica Blanche Peixotto,” in Essays in Social Economics
in Honor of Jessica Blanche Peixotto (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935),
5–14; Clarke A. Chambers, “Peixotto, Jessica Blanche,” in Notable American Women,
1607–1950, vol. 3, ed. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 42–43; “Jessica
Blanche Peixotto,” In Memoriam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941), 24–
25; Mary Ann Dzuback, “Peixotto, Jessica Blanche,” in American National Biography,
ed. John Garraty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Clark Kerr, inter-
view with author, 14 May 1996, Berkeley, Calif.
12. William R. Roberts, archivist at the University of California, Berkeley, was
most helpful in searching for more information on the Hellers. See “Rites Today for
Clara H. Heller,” San Francisco Chronicle, 18 August 1959, 41; and “Heller Millions
to 3 Grandchildren,” San Francisco Chronicle, 25 August 1959, 36.

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13. For the reports of the committee, see Heller Committee, University of Cal-
ifornia Presidents’ Papers (CU-5 series 2) for Campbell and Sproul, University Ar-
chives, BL. (University of California Presidents’ Papers are hereafter cited as PP, with
the then president’s name and the year of the item in question.) For the committee
under Emily Huntington, see her “The Heller Committee for Research in Social
Economy,” 20 January 1943, PP (Sproul), 1943: 471. Heller’s annual support varied
over three decades, beginning at $4,000 per year throughout the 1920s, decreasing to
$2,400 per year in the 1930s, when the university began allocating research funds to
the committee, and increasing to $3,600 in 1935 and to $4,800 in 1940.
14. Jessica B. Peixotto, “Annual Report on the Heller Fund for Research in Social
Economics” (hereafter cited as HC Annual Report), 1, PP (Campbell), 1924: 1388.
15. Peixotto, HC Annual Report (1929–30), 4, PP (Sproul), 1930: 248. See also
Huntington, “Heller Committee,” 471. Some of this work was completed in coop-
eration with the university’s Department of Home Economics; see Maresi Nerad, The
Academic Kitchen: A Social History of Gender Stratification at the University of California,
Berkeley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
16. Peixotto to Julius Wangenheim, 7 June 1933, PP (Sproul), 1933: 471; and
Peixotto, HC Annual Report (1935), 3, PP (Sproul), 1936: 471.
17. Jessica B. Peixotto, Getting and Spending at the Professional Standard of Living:
A Study of the Costs of Living an Academic Life (New York: Macmillan, 1927), vii,
viii.
18. Emily H. Huntington, Unemployment Relief and the Unemployed, 1929–1934
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939), 1, 3.
19. A. O. Leuschner to Dean C. B. Lipman, 29 October 1930, PP (Sproul),
Economics/Heller Committee: 1930: 248. On Peixotto’s contributions to economics,
see Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, vol. 5 (New York:
Viking, 1959), 570–78; and Elizabeth Hoyt, The Consumption of Wealth (New York:
Macmillan, 1928). See also Nancy Folbre, “The ‘Sphere of Women’ in Early Twenti-
eth-Century Economics,” in Gender and American Social Science, ed. Silverberg, 35–
60.
20. Social Science Research Council, “Summary of the Conference on Research
in the Social Sciences in Colleges,” 12 and 13 December 1931, 8–10, Marion Edwards
Park Office Files, 1922–1942, box 28, BMCA.
21. On Douglas, see Faculty Biographical Files, Dorothy Douglas, Smith College
Archives, Northampton, Mass. (hereafter cited as FBF). On Douglas and Lumpkin,
see Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The
American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massa-
chusetts Press, 1998), chapter 3.
22. “Suggested plan,” n.d. (circa 1932), box 38, Office of the President, William
A. Neilson Papers, Council on Industrial Studies Files, box 38, SCA (hereafter cited
as WAN). On Lumpkin, see FBF, Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall,
“ ‘To Widen the Reach of Our Love’: Autobiography, History, and Desire,” Feminist
Studies 26 (spring 2000): 230–47; idem, “Open Secrets: Memory, Imagination, and
the Refashioning of Southern Identity,” American Quarterly 50 (March 1998), 109–
24; and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner (New York: Knopf,
1946).
23. Katherine D. Lumpkin, “Report of the Director of Research of the Council

125
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of Industrial Studies,” Bulletin of Smith College, President’s Report Issue, 1933, 49–57,
SCA.
24. Esther Lowenthal, “Foreword,” in Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Shutdowns in
the Connecticut Valley: A Study of Worker Displacement in the Small Industrial Com-
munity, Smith College Studies in History, vol. 19, April–July 1934, 141, SCA. See also
correspondence on Council of Industrial Studies, boxes 398 and 38, WAN.
25. Katherine D. Lumpkin, “Brief Resume of the Work of the Council of In-
dustrial Studies, 1932–1938,” box 398, WAN; and idem, “Report(s) of the Director
of Research of the Council of Industrial Studies,” in Bulletin of Smith College, Presi-
dent’s Report Issue, 1933–1938, SCA. See also vols. 19, 21, 23, 24, 26, 28, 33, 37,
Smith College Studies in History.
26. The Carnegie Corporation shifted support from research institutes to popular
education in the middle to late 1920s (Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of
Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy [Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989]). On the LSRM grant: Josiah H. Penniman
to Beardsley Ruml, 13 June 1927, and other materials in file 792, box 75, series III,
LSRMA. The university’s obligation increased from $10,000 (1928–29) to $40,000
(1931–32); the LSRM’s decreased from $50,000 (1927–28) to $10,000 (1931–32).
27. University of Pennsylvania: The Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, An-
nouncement, 1922–1923 (Philadelphia: University Press of Pennsylvania, 1921), 66;
and Announcement, 1934–1935, 26, University Archives, University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, Pa. According to Steven A. Sass, LSRM funding increased the budget
to over $110,000 (The Pragmatic Imagination: A History of the Wharton School, 1881–
1981 [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982], 208).
28. The Rockefeller Foundation appropriated $50,000 over two years in 1932 and
$75,000 over five years in 1935 (“Minutes,” 9 May 1932 and 17 April 1935, box 5,
file 78); in 1939, the Foundation gave $11,000 for two specific projects (Norma S.
Thompson to Alfred H. Williams, 25 October 1939, box 8, file 112); and in 1940,
$105,000 for three years (“Minutes,” 17 May 1940, box 5, file 78); all in Rockefeller
Foundation Archives, record group 1.1, series 241, Rockefeller Archive Center.
29. See, for example, Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A
History (1962; reprint, with an introduction and bibliography by John R. Thelin,
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 465–69; and Rossiter, Women Scientists
in America: Struggles and Strategies, chapters 6 and 7.
30. Folbre, “ ‘Sphere of Women,’ ” 54; Alan Swedlund, University of Massachu-
setts, conversation with author, August 1993; and David Hogan, formerly of the
University of Pennsylvania, conversation with author, July 1993. See also, for example,
Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson, eds., Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory
and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Helene Silverberg,
“Introduction,” in Gender and American Social Science, ed. Silverberg, 3–32.

126
5. Considering Her Influence: Sydnor H. Walker and
Rockefeller Support for Social Work, Social Scientists,
and Universities in the South
Amy E. Wells

Through the largesse of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial,

higher education experienced a unique era of institution-building dur-
ing the 1920s. Established in 1922 by John D. Rockefeller, Sr., to
honor his wife and “support certain welfare activities in which she was
interested,” the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM) later
assumed a distinct objective: to advance the social sciences. The Me-
morial’s overall program dispersed an unprecedented twenty million
dollars, usually in the form of fluid research funds to social science
research institutes in universities. Recipient institutions in the United
States included Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Stanford, and the Univer-
sities of Chicago, North Carolina, Virginia, and Texas; the London
School of Economics and universities in Stockholm and Berlin also
received funding. While the Memorial existed for only seven years
before being absorbed by the Rockefeller Foundation (RF), it contrib-
uted to “notable progress” in the field. In particular, it helped persuade
university administrators and trustees that social science research de-
served facilities, time, and money and that the “non-academic world”
was hungry for the “results of scholarly investigation.”1
Foundation historians and scholars have previously considered the
significance of the LSRM,2 especially how the Memorial’s plans re-
lated to the ambitious leadership of its director, Beardsley Ruml.3
However, very little is known about those who worked with him.
Sydnor Harbison Walker was one of his associates. An LSRM research
associate who later became an acting director of the division of social
sciences in the Rockefeller Foundation, she was one of few female

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program officers in a major foundation during the late 1920s and

1930s. This study assembles the first biography of Walker and then
considers her influence upon southern higher education through her
relationships with grant recipients and through her funding decisions.
Exploring a biographical portrait of Sydnor Walker as a triple lens
for discovery in the three related areas of women’s history, the history
of philanthropy, and higher education history, this chapter draws heav-
ily from the research and analysis of a larger study of southern scholars
and emerging universities in the South from 1920 to 1950.4 However,
source materials from the institutions where Walker worked, as well
as data gleaned from her own scholarship—her master’s thesis, dis-
sertation, books, and articles—also inform this chapter. No autobio-
graphical or oral history artifacts are available about Walker. Admit-
tedly, then, this analysis errs on the side of “officializing” her by
drawing on work-related correspondence and the few personnel rec-
ords available, records that do not capture the many interpersonal in-
teractions that occur beyond the official gaze.
Who was Sydnor Walker? And what was her influence upon
southern social scientists and southern universities? Margaret Rossiter’s
scholarship about women scientists through the 1940s provides a valu-
able framework for understanding Sydnor Walker as a talented intel-
lectual who used foundation employment to earn a living and to ad-
vance her views of research and the social sciences.5 As she allocated
funds first from the LSRM and later from the Rockefeller Foundation,
Walker demanded, by requiring matching grants, that southern uni-
versities increase their financial support for research, and she often
decided the level of support that southern scholars and universities
could seek from the foundation—or whether they should seek it at
all. Thus, Walker exerted tremendous influence upon southern social
scientists and universities just as they were taking on more complex
university missions.
In addition to demonstrating the type of influence that foundation
personnel had on developments within higher education, a study of
Walker’s life and work can contribute new and complicated detail to
our somewhat limited historical understanding of daily work in foun-
dation philanthropy, especially for women. To southern social scien-
tists, Walker was more than a gatekeeper. In her, they gained a con-
fidante, a caretaker of regional plans for university recognition, and an
insider willing to educate them in the intricacies of foundation giving.

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In return, southern social scientists validated Walker’s intellect and

expertise by seeking her counsel and publishing her research. In this
way, Walker’s relationships with grant recipients and applicants evi-
denced mutual warmth and respect.
That said, Walker also exercised prudence in her decision making.
In the 1930s, she decidedly curtailed funding to southern social sci-
entists and universities that she (and Rockefeller funding) had nur-
tured in the prior decade.6 Even though Walker’s disposition evinced
this curious mix of “heart and head” suited to foundation philanthropy
and despite the fact that she advanced within the Rockefeller orga-
nization, the balance of her research and responsibility fell within pre-
scribed gender roles and expectations. Whether Walker noticed these
limitations or felt frustrated by them remains uncertain. Perhaps Syd-
nor Walker never felt the weight of her pioneer status even as she
earned an unrecognized place within the foundation’s history.

WHO WAS SYDNOR WALKER? HER EDUCATION AND WORK WITH THE LSRM
While the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial appointed
Beardsley Ruml as its director when Ruml was twenty-six, Sydnor
Walker took her position with the Memorial in June 1924 at age
thirty-three. Previously employed by the American Friends Service
Committee on European Relief (1921–1923), Walker might appear to
have had the kind of resume she later described as customary for social
work in her time—i.e., a bachelor’s degree from a women’s college
(Vassar, 1912) and a desire to “get into the midst of things.”7 Upon
closer inspection, however, Walker’s credentials and resume include
academic and business experience less common for women involved
in social welfare work. After graduating from Vassar with honors, Walk-
er briefly taught English and Latin in secondary schools in Louisville,
Dallas, and Los Angeles.8 While in Los Angeles, she completed a
master’s degree in economics at the University of Southern California;
her thesis traced the origins of the general strike to European “Syn-
dicalism” and assessed its “practicability” for improving American labor
conditions.9
In 1917, Walker returned to Vassar as an instructor in economics.
One of her colleagues, historian Mabel Newcomer, eulogized Walker
by noting her popularity in the hall where she lived with students.
Newcomer asserted that Walker’s “quick wit and gaiety” extended to

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her teaching, along with her “clarity of thought and expression.” How-
ever, Newcomer warned that Walker could also be “sharply critical of
the careless and dilatory.”10
This aspect of Walker’s personality possibly explains why, after just
two years of teaching at her alma mater, Walker sought “practical
experience.” She turned to personnel work, first for the Scott Com-
pany and then for Strawbridge & Clothier in Philadelphia. Walker’s
short tenure at the Scott Company, a “pioneering firm of industrial
relations,” resulted in a lifelong relationship with Beardsley Ruml, who
later recruited her to the LSRM and served as a co-executor of her
estate upon her death.11
Walker’s next move took her overseas for one year of relief work
in Vienna and another in Russia as part of the American Friends
Service Committee. This introduction to private philanthropy made a
lasting impression upon Walker and greatly influenced her future anal-
ysis of social “case work” methods. About her responsibility for over-
seeing the feeding and clothing of thousands each week, Walker re-
ported, “Our work is done on an individual basis, which we think to
be the soundest, not only from a social point of view, but because we
believe that method essential for the creation of a spirit of international
good-will.”12 This “practical experience” in personnel and relief work,
and the tour abroad, prepared Walker for her next five years’ work
with the LSRM and for her subsequent fourteen-year term with the
Rockefeller Foundation.
Walker’s employment with the LSRM in 1924 as a “research as-
sociate” of Beardsley Ruml reflects the employment opportunities
available to unmarried women scientists in universities, government,
and industry of the 1920s and 1930s. Rossiter explains that the as-
cendancy of the “female research associate” resulted from the coales-
cence of various “intellectual, technological, financial, and social forces
that were transforming science into an increasingly team-oriented en-
terprise in those very years that women were seeking to enter it.”
Instead of gaining the professorial appointments given to men with
similar academic credentials, women with Ph.D.s were a boon to in-
stitutions expanding their research efforts because they willingly filled
associate positions, with proportionately lower salaries.13
Familiar with Walker from their days together at the Scott Com-
pany in Philadelphia, Ruml recruited her to the LSRM in 1924 to
assist him in promoting scientific research, standardization, and pro-
fessionalism in the social sciences. This increased emphasis on “sci-

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entific” approaches for solving problems in the fields of sociology, psy-

chology, anthropology, political science, economics, and even history
remained a fundamental or guiding principle of the LSRM plan for
the advancement of the social sciences. Through the Memorial, Ruml
institutionalized a belief that workers in the social fields needed the
concerted and cooperative effort of social scientists to generate “widely
accepted generalizations as to human capacities and motives as to the
behavior of human beings as individuals and in groups.”14 Thus, in his
quest to make the social sciences more “scientific,” Ruml also copied
the ascendant model for conducting research in universities by hiring
the unmarried Walker as a “research associate.” Walker, like women
scientists who garnered the sponsorship of female-supportive male
professors overseeing research laboratories,15 gained a valuable sponsor
in Ruml.
Walker earned her Ph.D. in economics from Columbia (1926)
while working for the LSRM, and her dissertation, “Social Work and
the Training of Social Workers,” was published by the University of
North Carolina Press in 1928. In many ways, Ruml and other Rocke-
feller Foundation officers supported Walker’s scholarship. For exam-
ple, in the preface to her study, Walker reveals that Ruml and Edmund
E. Day, the new director of the Rockefeller Foundation Division of
Social Sciences, gave her their “interest and counsel” during its prep-
aration.16 Walker also used her work time and responsibilities to her
academic advantage. The notes from meetings with grant applicants
and officers of various social welfare agencies and professional orga-
nizations clearly provide the content and organization of her study.17
However, the support given to Walker by Ruml, Day, and even
the economics department at Columbia fell within the fields and re-
search interests often deemed appropriate for women scientists at the
time.18 Like those of women scientists in the field of home economics,
Walker’s research and job responsibilities safely involved the female-
dominated field of social work. At first glance, the topic of Walker’s
dissertation study—social work—might appear to reflect the rich tra-
dition of social service work upheld by many women college graduates,
a tradition illustrated by the stories of other women in this volume.
However, a closer reading of Walker’s scholarship belies this assertion.
Walker’s thesis on social work displays little passion for the subject,
congruent with the underlying assumption that knowledge is gained
best through objective, nonparticipant observation—the standard of
research the LSRM advocated for the overall improvement of the so-

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cial sciences.19 Like Abraham Flexner’s Carnegie-supported study of

medical education in the United States and Canada, which he con-
ducted as a layperson and wrote for a general audience,20 Walker’s
study employed a research design of site visits to social work schools
and attendance at meetings of the National Conferences for Social
Work. Comparatively less exhaustive than Flexner’s study (because of
the smaller number of social work schools) and recipient of much less
fanfare, Walker’s study and the job responsibilities it reflected appro-
priately involved the female-dominated field of social welfare work.
More important, her conclusion that professional training in social
work should be carried out by universities ultimately provided a nec-
essary rationale for declining future grants to applicants who lacked
university training.
Like many academics, Walker identified primarily with her disci-
pline. As an economist, she framed her thesis on social work as part
of her interest in the field of “private philanthropy.”21 If indeed Walker
displays any zeal in her volume on social work, it is in her discussion
of the role of private philanthropy in the economy. In this discussion,
Walker shows her ideological alignment with Ruml and other Rocke-
feller philanthropists, who have been characterized by Donald Fisher
as “sophisticated conservatives.”22 As such, Walker desired to solve the
problems of capitalist systems without fundamentally changing the so-
cioeconomic structure.
Drawing from her master’s thesis on American labor, Walker con-
trasted supporters of social welfare work with organized labor, describ-
ing the former as “persons who believe that existing conditions are
subject to improvement without radical departure from present insti-
tutions and customs” and the latter as comparable to those who de-
mand “action through the machinery of government.”23 Sharing
Ruml’s “deep and abiding faith in the potential of social science knowl-
edge for putting things right,”24 Walker believed that there was little
wrong with the American economic system that an organized, scien-
tific, comprehensive social science plan could not fix. Offering social
welfare as a “corrective for the present somewhat faulty system of dis-
tribution of the national income,” Walker assigned social workers the
task of caring for those unable to support themselves “under a capi-
talist—and probably under any other—economic system.” Walker rea-
soned that time and the scientific organization of industry would even-
tually mitigate the need for assistance.25
Walker’s intellectual understanding of the economic purpose of so-

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cial welfare went beyond the altruism typically ascribed to lay workers
in the field. She parlayed her academic knowledge, backed by Rocke-
feller monies and work responsibilities, into “expert” status. In the fall
of 1929, she received an invitation to participate in some meetings of
President Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends and con-
tributed an impressive chapter on privately supported social work to
the resulting publication.26
Surveying the field of social work in her day, Walker recognized
the trend toward state control of welfare functions formerly handled
by private agencies.27 Because the state tended to be “more conserva-
tive and less flexible than private organizations in its methods,” Walker
expected private philanthropy to take the lead in assisting the state
with proper management and “setting standards for tax-supported wel-
fare activities.”28 More important, as Walker wrote about this leader-
ship role for private philanthropy, she lived it.
As a foundation expert in partnership with other social scientists
and the state,29 Walker adopted the type of approach to or strategy of
giving that Marxist critics of philanthropy have generally characterized
as the state-foundation alliance for the redistribution of wealth and,
in this case, government resources.30 Assuredly, Walker would have
been offended by this assessment of her involvement. However, as an
economist, Walker recognized the problem of concentration of cor-
porate wealth in private hands and valued private philanthropy and
state welfare assistance as vehicles for redress.31
Yet within the LSRM and Rockefeller Foundation leadership
structure, Walker’s expert status came gradually and evolved with her
job responsibilities. During her years of work with the LSRM (1924–
1929), Walker’s responsibilities centered on social science work in uni-
versities and social welfare work in larger cities, endeavors often de-
scribed as “social technology.”32 Accordingly, she met and corre-
sponded daily with social scientists and social workers from all over
the country. She also attended the meetings of various academic and
professional associations. Walker often visited universities and social
welfare agencies to monitor the progress of grant recipients, to identify
good work and encourage prospective applicants, and to evaluate and
make recommendations about current applicants. The Memorial’s
principle and policy statements and regular communication with Ruml
and other officers guided Walker in her work.
In 1929, the LSRM consolidated with the Rockefeller Foundation,
and Walker joined the Foundation as assistant director of the Division

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of Social Sciences, which was led by Dr. Edmund Day. The diary of
notes from Walker’s appointments shows that in her early years, she
carried on with many of her work responsibilities from the LSRM.33
However, in the mid-1930s, Rockefeller Foundation officers became
disillusioned with the Memorial’s tradition of support for institutional
research centers and switched instead to funding individual projects in
the concentrated areas of international relations, social security, and
public administration.34 Walker was promoted to associate director in
1933 and acting director from 1937 to 1939, and her areas of expertise
changed along with the foundation’s program to include international
relations.35 This transformation is also depicted in her diaries for the
years 1933 through 1940, when the diary concludes.36
The analysis that follows is one snapshot of Sydnor Walker’s work
with Rockefeller-supported philanthropy. By investigating only her re-
lationships with and decisions involving southern social scientists and
southern universities, we can draw a speculative portrait of her influ-
ence as a foundation program officer. The next section begins with
background information on the LSRM regional plan for social science
support; the chapter concludes by returning to what is known about
Walker’s life during her final years at the Rockefeller Foundation and
her return to Vassar.

THE REGIONAL PLAN FOR SUPPORT OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

In a number of memoranda and policy statements, LSRM officers
reasoned that the “best auspices for research is the university” and
granted resources to universities primarily for use by academics at their
own discretion. Seeing in universities a certain stability, permanence,
and opportunity for training future researchers through graduate and
undergraduate instruction, the LSRM depended upon scholars to pro-
duce research immediately useful to various practitioners in the social
field. Imagining collaboration between university researchers and com-
munity agencies, the Memorial set its sights on solving problems re-
lated to the elderly, children, occupations, leisure, immigration, race,
and poverty.37
The specifics of the LSRM plan for institutional support of the
social sciences first involved funding outstanding institutional centers
of research and advanced training at Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, the
University of North Carolina, and the Brookings Institution in Wash-
ington, D.C.38 Over time, concerns mounted about the dominance of

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Chicago and northeastern universities in Rockefeller-funded social sci-

ence efforts.39 To alleviate these concerns, the University of North
Carolina’s Howard Odum and several others advocated funding social
science research in southern universities.
Odum, a promising sociologist and director of UNC’s School of
Public Welfare, attracted national attention in 1922 by launching the
journal Social Forces. In fact, Odum originally thought of developing
a university institute for social science research.40 In 1924, North Car-
olina’s Institute for Social Science Research (later to become the In-
stitute for Research in the Social Sciences, or IRSS) opened and was
immediately boosted by a three-year grant from the LSRM for
$32,500 annually.41 Hence, Howard Odum became the primary point
of contact for Rockefeller-supported social science research in the re-
gion. His central position is confirmed by the lore of southern social
scientists42 and the fact that Odum’s endorsement of Wilson Gee,
professor of rural economics and rural sociology at the University of
Virginia, eventually landed funding for Virginia’s own institute in Feb-
ruary 1926, with a five-year grant of $27,000 annually.43 Odum’s re-
gional role was legitimized further as the IRSS took on the mission
of conducting research pertinent to the entire southern region, while
in contrast the Virginia institute’s scope of study was limited to prob-
lems within the state.44
Another institute—the University of Texas Bureau of Research in
the Social Sciences (BRSS)—was established in 1927, taking shape
nearly as the LSRM’s work was coming to a close. Implemented to
focus on Texas’s social problems, the BRSS received a sizeable grant
of $250,000 ($50,000 annually) with a sophisticated dollar-for-dollar
matching scheme employed in the grant’s last three years.45 LSRM
grant documents cited the state’s “abundant natural resources,” espe-
cially its mineral wealth, as first among reasons for selecting Texas.
The Memorial believed that the state’s wealth would allow it to nour-
ish its university with healthy appropriations when other southern state
universities were starving for support.46
During the years the LSRM and the RF were supporting insti-
tutional grants for research in the social sciences, Sydnor Walker pre-
sided over grants to the Universities of North Carolina, Virginia, and
Texas totaling $1,165,500—the sums of $518,000, $242,500, and
$405,000 were allotted to each respectively. Adjusted for inflation, to-
day these grants would be valued at nearly $14 million. Remember,
these funds were granted to boost research efforts and were not in-

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tended for social science faculty salaries, equipment, or facilities. In

most cases, follow-up grants required matching contributions for re-
search either from the university’s general budget or from legislative
appropriations. (The exceptions to this pattern prove interesting and
illustrate Walker’s influence as a foundation program officer.) Never-
theless, the Rockefeller monies, combined with university and state
contributions at North Carolina, Virginia, and Texas, brought mo-
mentum to these state universities precisely when they needed it to
bolster their research efforts.47

MATTERS OF THE HEART: A GLIMPSE INTO WALKER’S RELATIONSHIPS

WITH GRANT RECIPIENTS
In her extensive survey of the field of social work, Walker described
numerous ways that social welfare programs were implemented, such
as the “community-chest” approach, in which cities centrally collected
donations or tax contributions and dispersed them to needy organi-
zations. Walker’s in-depth discussions of various options for benevo-
lence reveal some of her expectations for beneficial relationships be-
tween donors and recipients. The community-chest movement was
spurred by a desire to make community agencies more businesslike
and efficient, but she criticized it, lamenting a possible loss of inter-
action between donors and recipients. Proclaiming interaction as a
necessary “spark” for making “charity more than a duty,” Walker
warned, “If the economy, the efficiency, and the thoroughness of the
community-chest method are stressed at the expense of the human
interest side of welfare work, support may in time come grudgingly,
or only from a desire for social approbation and advancement.”48
Walker obviously heeded her own words in foundation work, be-
cause she gave much time and energy to her relationship with Howard
Odum. Apparently, Walker and Odum thought similarly about society,
the nature of individuals, social work, and the social sciences. For
example, Odum read and edited Walker’s dissertation, eventually pub-
lishing it as a monograph in UNC’s Social Studies Series. Then he
required the book as a text in his teaching. Odum also sponsored
Walker’s participation in the President’s Research Committee on So-
cial Trends, and her chapter precedes his in the resulting publication.
The two corresponded regularly—although admittedly Odum carried
the lion’s share of this burden, sometimes sending two or three letters
a day to Walker and other officers.49

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At first, Odum’s enthusiasm is puzzling. Some may argue that he

finessed Walker in order to gain more Rockefeller funding. My reading
of Odum’s papers in the UNC library suggests that Odum’s relation-
ship with Walker was central to him and his work.50 He often sought
her counsel on substantive matters. In contrast, a close reading of
Walker’s diaries and documents at the Rockefeller Archive Center
show that to Walker, Odum was one of many grant recipients, al-
though she astutely comprehended his strengths and weaknesses, al-
ways maintaining respect and appreciation for the sociologist. I con-
tend that this difference in perspective demonstrates how effectively
Walker maintained her “spark” for building and maintaining caring
donor relationships.
Sometimes Walker simply listened as Odum shared frustrations.
For example, in one 1929 letter Odum disparaged those who blamed
southern social scientists and southern universities for not solving the
region’s various social problems. Odum wrote,

I am reminded much of certain added responsibilities which south-

ern social science folk have in the smaller universities. I think no
one would ordinarily hold the professors of the University of Chi-
cago responsible for Big Bill’s fundamentalism or the gang warfare
of Chicago, or the Columbia professors for strikes, East Sides and
difficulties in New York. And yet, as you probably know, our con-
stant stream of inquiry implies that the University of North Carolina
professors could not be very progressive or else they wouldn’t let so
many things happen at Gastonia and elsewhere.

Indicating that he expected no reply from Walker, Odum closed his

letter by asking his confidante to “jot down” his frustrations “simply
as a little conversation across the table.”51
At other times, Walker nurtured Odum’s optimism. For example,
in 1933, upon his return from a Georgia Press Institute and Emory
University Institute of Citizenship, Odum confided to her about his
southern colleagues, “It is almost pathetic to see the eager enthusiasm
of our southern institutions to go forward.”52 Later that year, Odum
noted the often “paradoxical and contradictory nature” of his state-
ments, when he confessed to Walker that “the outlook here and in
other parts of the South is very promising and it is very gloomy. We
have here an admirable set-up, and we are on the brink.”53
Yet on other occasions Walker challenged Odum, giving the full
weight of her professional opinion. Noting to Odum that meetings

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had been taking place in New Orleans about a new social work de-
partment at Louisiana State University, Walker told him that she was
skeptical of the plan. She scrutinized his endorsement:
I cannot say that I share your confidence that a School or Depart-
ment of Public Welfare Administration can be developed at Loui-
siana State University without treading on the toes of the Tulane
school. It is difficult to imagine their going far with their plans
without developing an outlet in New Orleans for field work. In view
of the past record of Louisiana State University I am inclined to
think that they would not be respectful of Tulane’s prerogatives. Per-
haps you can convince me otherwise.54

Through their correspondence Walker and Odum created a mutually

beneficial relationship. Walker was confidante and steward of Odum’s
dream to promote research excellence in the social sciences in the
South, while Odum affirmed her intellect and provided information
about southern universities.
Even as Walker fostered Odum’s vision of research excellence, she
was aware of his negative habits and the University of North Carolina’s
limited resources. Although admitting he was diligent in his work,
Walker assessed the sociologist’s efforts as “scattered,” sometimes com-
plaining that he spread himself “too thin.”55 Often Odum’s dreams
were bigger than the university’s ability to support them with outright
appropriations—a key consideration for future grants from the LSRM
and the RF. Thus, Walker had the task of reining in the enthusiastic
academic when he sought additional funding.
At least twice Odum put himself in a precarious position with
Walker. In 1929, for example, Odum traveled to New York to request
funding for his School of Public Welfare, which needed additional
resources to attract an outstanding scholar as its director. Believing the
university had made a commitment for salary and the Rockefeller
Foundation a commitment for program funding, Odum witnessed his
scheme evaporate as foundation officers informed him that the uni-
versity had made “no such commitment!” Walker and the other pro-
gram officers sternly chastised Odum for “trying to ‘cover the earth’ ”
instead of focusing on a few initiatives.56 Follow-up correspondence
from Walker confirmed her position:
I hardly know what to say which should be characterized as advice.
I, too, should dislike seeing the School of Public Welfare lapse but
it is a hard alternative for you to give up a number of things in

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which you are interested. I feel one thing clearly, and that is that
you should not be driven to sacrifice everything else for the school.
If, as you say, writing is the thing now, you shouldn’t abandon it.
Don’t forget that south of the Mason and Dixon line there is an
equivalent of the Puritan conscience which is not necessarily an en-
lightened guide. . . . I am sorry you are in such a quandary but sym-
pathy is all I have to offer.57
Later that summer at a social science conference, Odum faced further
jeopardy when he “overstated things a bit” regarding the university’s
support for the IRSS. At the conference, Odum claimed that the uni-
versity would give $10,000 to the IRSS—when $4,500 was all it had
to contribute.58
Today, Walker’s chastisement and correspondence might be re-
garded as “tough love.” Colloquialism aside, I suspect that practitioners
of foundation philanthropy might confirm that strong donor relation-
ships require reasonable measures of challenge and support. Yet the
continued Rockefeller funding for the North Carolina IRSS, despite
the university’s persistent failure to contribute matching funds for re-
search, suggests that Walker’s strong relationship with Odum advan-
taged the institution in her funding decisions. Setting aside Walker’s
relationships or “matters of the heart,” I now turn my discussion to
some of her funding decisions.

MATTERS OF THE HEAD: A GLIMPSE INTO WALKER’S FUNDING DECISIONS

Walker critiqued the community-chest movement in social welfare
for sometimes sacrificing the quality of donor relationships in the drive
to make community agencies more efficient.59 Clearly, Walker under-
stood the importance of establishing and maintaining strong relation-
ships with grant recipients. However, her push to make programs sus-
tainable by requiring matching research grants from universities
sometimes sacrificed program effectiveness to program efficiency and
fiscal strength. A comparison of North Carolina’s IRSS and Texas’s
BRSS, which received nearly equal amounts of Rockefeller funding,
illustrates this point.
RF program evaluation documents penned by Walker in 1932 con-
firm that although the Texas BRSS began with an appropriate plan
of action in 1927, the social science faculty soon strayed from its focus
during the Bureau’s early years because of a change in university ad-
ministration. Lacking organization and purpose, for a few years BRSS

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faculty conducted research with little concern over its relevance to the
social sciences. Walker’s project notes further verify that instead of
functioning as intended—as an interdisciplinary, cohesive institute
overseeing individual research projects—the institute at one point
stooped so far as to merely distribute monies pro rata among depart-
ments, including Home Economics and Education.60
By 1929, Walker reported, the situation had improved under the
leadership of a new university president and because of the appoint-
ment of sociology professor Warner Gettys as the new BRSS direc-
tor.61 However, her optimism overlooked significant deficiencies. For
example, the Bureau often carried over large balances from the pre-
vious year, a sure sign that it had more money than it could use.62
Also, in the years 1933 through 1940, it tallied only twenty-one stud-
ies. While a few studies from this period merit attention, e.g., “The
Economic and Social Condition of the Mexican in Texas,” “The Ad-
ministration of Justice in Texas with Special Reference to Factors of
Race, Class, and Sex,” and “United States–Mexican Boundary Prob-
lems with Special Reference to the Distribution of Water,” the Bureau
failed to deliver on its potential to solve problems related to the “rel-
ative sparsity of population, vast distances, and the complexity of racial
adjustments among white, Mexican, and negro populations.” Unfor-
tunately, Walker’s decisions regarding Texas leave the impression that
the Bureau received increased funding simply because the university
successfully matched the Rockefeller grants.63
The case of the University of North Carolina and its IRSS stands
in stark contrast to that of Texas. Where Texas’s state government and
university provided generously for social science research, the Depres-
sion hit North Carolina particularly hard, eliminating a sizeable por-
tion of the university’s appropriations for 1929 and 1930.64 Under
these circumstances research became an unaffordable luxury rather
than a priority. As a result, Odum’s ambitious plans and requests for
Rockefeller grants in 1927 and 1931 were curtailed significantly, be-
cause the University could contribute only limited amounts to the In-
stitute for Rockefeller monies to match.65
Despite depleted coffers, however, North Carolina’s record of
achievement is striking. By the end of the IRSS’s first decade (1934),
the Institute had published 162 research report manuscripts and vol-
umes.66 Included among these studies was some of the most substan-
tive research in race and race relations that can be attributed to
Rockefeller-supported institutes in the era.67 Also by 1934, the UNC

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Department of Sociology was one of only two programs in the South

cited for eminence by the American Council on Education’s Com-
mittee on Graduate Instruction.68
Yet North Carolina’s success in sociology also frustrated Sydnor
Walker and Edmund Day, who were displeased with the “make-up of
the Institute,” finding “sociologists too numerous and the sociological
approach too prevalent.”69 Odum felt Walker’s dissatisfaction and ex-
pressed his anxiety repeatedly in their meetings and through his cor-
respondence.70 Walker’s decision to withhold funding from North
Carolina because she did not believe it could match the grants con-
strained the Institute and diminished its achievements, illustrating that
when there is an abundance of academic talent, there is really never
enough money.
In sum, Walker’s funding decisions regarding Texas and North
Carolina yield an interesting finding related to program permanence
and matching grants—the strategy vigorously employed by the LSRM
to prevent the Memorial from becoming the primary supporter of any
project it did not control.71 Not long after the Rockefeller Foundation
redirected support from university centers to individual projects, the
Texas BRSS folded. However, the North Carolina IRSS flourished,
later winning “the first National Science Foundation science devel-
opment grant awarded in the social sciences.”72
Of course, in presenting this analysis of Sydnor Walker’s funding
decisions, the danger remains that some may attribute her actions to
gender without considering the demands of her role. The truth is that
the decisions of few individual program officers have undergone equal
scrutiny. This analysis benefits from time, a luxury not afforded to
Walker when she considered grant applications. Should she be faulted
for her short-sightedness or for funding inadequate research? No. Per-
haps a rigid idealist, Walker was not a bystander. Her decisions had
consequence for the social sciences in the South and southern univer-
sities.73 Only time and further research can measure the extent of her
influence.

WHO WAS SYDNOR WALKER? RETIREMENT FROM THE ROCKEFELLER

FOUNDATION AND RETURN TO VASSAR
In November of 1930, the Rockefeller-funded General Education
Board reconsidered its interest in colleges for women. GEB officers
determined that “Miss Walker of the Rockefeller Foundation might

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AMY E. WELLS

visit some of the more important colleges for women” to assist with
their project.74 Essentially, this early request from GEB officers pre-
saged Walker’s candidacy for “the presidency of a prominent college
for women.”75 Her status as a presidential prospect was heightened at
the end of her term as acting director of the RF’s Division of Social
Sciences (1939), when the Vassar faculty voted her a member of their
board of trustees. But Walker’s extensive leadership experiences were
not to culminate in a presidential appointment. In October 1941, Wal-
ker suffered a spinal infection and the beginning of a traumatic, par-
alytic illness.76
Walker’s friends later asserted that she “rejected the idea of per-
manent immobility,” but they claimed that the ordeal of surgeries,
“mistaken diagnoses,” and clinical rehabilitation eventually signaled to
Walker that she would not fully recover.77 When she resumed her
public intellectual life in 1945 by editing a volume on the atomic age
for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation,78 her friends were pleased. And
three years later, when Walker’s work life recommenced with her ap-
pointment as the assistant to Vassar’s president, Sarah Blanding, one
friend called the opportunity “God-given.”79 Of course, the dilemma
for the researcher is that Walker’s own reflections about her illness and
return to work are absent from the personnel records and press releases
available. Very little can be discerned about Walker’s work life after
her return to Vassar. It is known that she served as secretary to the
Mellon Committee and chair of the Lectures Committee and the
Committee on the Library.80 On occasion, she represented the presi-
dent and the board to the press.81 She held her position for nine years,
retiring in 1957.82
Born to Walter and Mary Sydnor Perkins Walker in Louisville,
Kentucky, on 26 September 1891,83 Sydnor Walker mentioned home
infrequently in her correspondence. Usually unsentimental, Walker
once confessed to Howard Odum that “the thought of Louisville at
Easter had a pulling effect.”84 However, in her later years Vassar Col-
lege became Sydnor Walker’s home; like her science and teaching co-
horts who retired and settled near their campuses to live out their
days,85 Walker retired to a “large colonial house, reminiscent of her
native Kentucky,” in Millbrook, New York. There, on 12 December
1966, Walker died at age seventy-five.86 Her bequest of ten thousand
dollars to Vassar College gave lasting testament to her affection.87
Sydnor Walker’s life and work as a research associate and later
program officer for the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and the

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 CONSIDERING HER INFLUENCE

Rockefeller Foundation constitute a new and important chapter in the

history of women, philanthropy, and higher education. In Walker’s
experience two important trends coalesce: increased employment
for women scientists in universities, government, industry, and
foundation-related work; and a unique era of Rockefeller-funded
institution-building in the social sciences in the 1920s and 1930s. Her
life was that of a foundation pioneer who not only earned her liveli-
hood through philanthropy, but who also advanced her views of re-
search, social work, and the social sciences in concert with foundation
principles. Her work—especially her relationship with Howard Odum
and her funding decisions regarding southern social science institutes—
illustrates the origins of influence: the mix of challenge and support
required in strong donor relationships, and the problematic conse-
quences of matching-grant strategies. Her death bears witness to the
notion of alma mater as home and safe harbor for a generation of
women scientists and teachers somewhat marginalized by the academy.

NOTES
1. Raymond B. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (Long Acre,
London: Odhams, 1952), 212–30.
2. Ibid. See also Donald Fisher, Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences:
Rockefeller Philanthropy and the United States Social Science Research Council (Ann Ar-
bor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); and Robert Shaplen, Toward the Well-Being
of Mankind: Fifty Years of the Rockefeller Foundation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1964).
3. Fisher, Social Sciences, 31–32. Ruml graduated with a Ph.D. in psychology
from the University of Chicago in 1917. He studied with James Rowland Angell, an
experimental psychologist, and produced a thesis on the reliability of mental testing.
4. See Amy E. Wells, “From Ideas to Institutions: Southern Scholars and
Emerging Universities in the South, circa 1920–1950” (Ph.D. diss., University of
Kentucky, 2001).
5. Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to
1940 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
6. During the late 1930s, the foundation became disillusioned with the results
of its support for university social science centers and decided to fund, instead, specific
projects in international relations, social security, and public administration (Fisher,
Social Sciences, 179). See also “Proposed Social Science Program of the Rockefeller
Foundation,” 13 March 1933, folder 13, box 2, series 910, record group 1.1, Rocke-
feller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. (here-
after cited as RAC); and “The Social Sciences Statement of Program Presented at
Special Trustees Meeting,” 15 December 1936, folder 14, box 2, series 910, record
group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.

143
AMY E. WELLS

7. Sydnor H. Walker, Social Work and the Training of Social Workers (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1928).
8. “Office of Public Relations, Vassar College,” March 1951, College Archives,
Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. (hereafter cited as
Vassar Special Collections).
9. Sydnor H. Walker, “The General Strike with Particular Reference to Its Prac-
ticability as Applied to American Labor Conditions” (master’s thesis, University of
Southern California, 1917).
10. Winifred Asprey, Josephine Gleason, Clarice Pennock, and Verna Spicer,
“Memorial Minute,” n.d. (1968?), Vassar Special Collections.
11. Ibid. See also “Office of Public Relations,” Vassar Special Collections; and
“Sydnor Harbison Walker,” Rockefeller Foundation Biography Files, Rockefeller
Foundation Archives, RAC. This information about Walker’s estate is provided in
“Lived in Millbrook: Miss Walker’s Will Makes Gift of $71,500,” Poughkeepsie Journal,
8 January 1967, Vassar Special Collections.
12. Asprey et al., “Memorial Minute.”
13. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies, 204–205.
14. “Memorial Policy in Social Science: Extracts from Various Memoranda and
Dockets,” from a General Memorandum, October 1922, folder 10, box 2, series 910,
record group 3, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
15. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies, 209.
16. Walker, Social Work, preface, n.p.
17. Notes from a meeting with Frank J. Bruno, Washington University and the
Association of Schools of Professional Work, outline points made in Walker’s book.
See Sydnor Walker officer’s diary, 31 December 1925, record group 12.1, Rockefeller
Foundation Archives, RAC.
18. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies, 237.
19. “Memorial Policy.”
20. Abraham Flexner, Medical Education in the United States and Canada (New
York: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1910).
21. “Release, Office of Public Relations, Vassar College,” n.d., Vassar Special Col-
lections.
22. Fisher, Social Sciences, 32–34.
23. Walker, Social Work, 74–75.
24. Fisher, Social Sciences, 32–34.
25. Walker, Social Work, 74–75.
26. Sydnor H. Walker, “Privately Supported Social Work,” in Recent Social Trends
in the United States, ed. President’s Research Committee on Social Trends (New York:
Whittlesey House, 1934), 1168–1223.
27. Walker, Social Work, 178.
28. Ibid., 43.
29. Fisher, Social Sciences, 8–20. Fisher explains that to social scientists the foun-
dations were an important conduit to the state whereby they received public recog-
nition and expert status.
30. Clyde W. Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism
and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894–1928 (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 3–7.

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 CONSIDERING HER INFLUENCE

31. Walker, Social Work, 74–75.

32. “Rockefeller Foundation Newsletter,” n.d. (1967?), Vassar Special Collections.
33. Sydnor Walker officer’s diary, vol. 1 (28 October 1925–14 December 1928),
record group 12.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
34. “Social Sciences Statement.” The first ideation of the change in program oc-
curred in 1933, with the establishment of the new focus areas “economic structure
and process, international relations, and social organization and procedures, with spe-
cial reference to problems of community organization and planning.” See “Proposed
Social Science Program.”
35. “Rockefeller Foundation Newsletter,” Vassar Special Collections.
36. Sydnor Walker officer’s diary, vol. 2 (1 February 1929–5 September 1940),
record group 12.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
37. “Memorial Policy.”
38. “The Social Sciences under the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, 1923–
1928,” 11 April 1933, folder 12, box 2, series 910, record group 3, Rockefeller Foun-
dation Archives, RAC.
39. This dominance was exacerbated by the make-up of the Rockefeller-funded
Social Science Research Council (SSRC). See Fisher, Social Sciences, 203.
40. Guy Benton Johnson and Guion Griffis Johnson, Research in Service to Society:
The First Fifty Years of the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of
North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 13, xii. Odum
earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia and a Ph.D. in psychology from Clark
University, where he studied under the direction of G. Stanley Hall, Clark’s president.
41. Harry W. Chase to Beardsley Ruml, 8 August 1924, folder 781, box 74, series
III, sub-series 6, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Archives, RAC.
42. Howard Odum’s influence within the region and with Rockefeller-funded
philanthropies is noted in a letter from W. C. Binkley (Department of History and
Political Science) to Chancellor J. H. Kirkland, Vanderbilt University, 3 May 1933,
Vanderbilt University Special Collections and University Archives, Nashville, Tenn.
43. Howard Odum to Ruml, 28 January 1926; and Edwin Alderman to Ruml, 8
February 1926; both in folder 812, box 78, series III, sub-series 6, Laura Spelman
Rockefeller Memorial Archives, RAC.
44. “The New Institute for Research,” editorial, The Daily Progress, 30 October
1926, Charlottesville, Va., folder 812, box 78, series III, sub-series 6, Laura Spelman
Rockefeller Memorial Archives, RAC.
45. “University of Texas—Research—Social Sciences Grant Action,” 13 April
1932, folder 38, box 4, series 249, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives,
RAC.
46. Ibid. For details on Texas’s wealth compared to that of other southern states,
see Howard W. Odum, Southern Regions of the United States (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1936), 181–85.
47. Wells, “Ideas to Institutions,” 38–60. Today the grants to North Carolina,
Virginia, and Texas would equal approximately $6,100,000, $2,900,000, and
$5,000,000, respectively. For inflation conversions see Robert Sahr, “Inflation Con-
version Factors for Dollars 1665 to Estimated 2013.” Available online: http://
oregonstate.edu/dept/pol_sci/fac/sahr/sahr.htm (accessed 2 March 2004).
48. Walker, Social Work, 42.

145
AMY E. WELLS

49. Johnson and Johnson, Research in Service, 343.

50. See the Howard Washington Odum Papers (#3167), Southern Historical Col-
lection, Wilson Library, UNC.
51. Odum to Sydnor Walker, 29 October 1929, folder 113, box 9, series 236,
record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
52. Odum to Walker, 13 February 1933, folder 306, Odum Papers.
53. Odum to Walker, 18 April 1933, folder 314, Odum Papers.
54. Walker to Odum, 9 December 1932, folder 122, box 10, series 236, record
group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
55. “Memorandum of Interview,” 8 March 1927, folder 777, box 74, series III,
sub-series 6, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Archives, RAC.
56. Johnson and Johnson, Research in Service, 105.
57. Walker to Odum, 18 November 1929, folder 113, box 9, series 236, record
group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
58. Johnson and Johnson, Research in Service, 105–106.
59. Walker, Social Work, 42.
60. “University of Texas—Project Record,” 9 February 1932, folder 38, box 4,
series 249, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
61. Ibid.
62. “Interviews: SHW (Benedict)” and “Interviews: SHW (Gettys and Miller),”
both 29 February 1932, folder 38, box 4, series 249, record group 1.1, Rockefeller
Foundation Archives, RAC.
63. See Wells, “Ideas to Institutions,” 53–60. For the University of Texas, the
matching-grant strategy was incredibly successful. President Benedict went to great
lengths to guarantee that the BRSS received the full amount offered each time. A
series of letters between Benedict and Walker and between Benedict and Edmund
Day in the academic year 1933–34 convey Benedict’s enthusiasm and success in the
pursuit of more money. See Benedict to Day, 5 January 1934, 8 January 1934, and
13 February 1934, all in folder 39, box 4, series 249, record group 1.1, Rockefeller
Foundation Archives, RAC.
64. William D. Snider, Light on the Hill: A History of the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 208–
209. See also Tyre Taylor to Frank Porter Graham, 3 January 1931; and Mrs. D. F.
Harris to the editor, 17 January 1931; both in the Frank Porter Graham Files, 1930–
1932 (#40006), series 5: business and finance, Records of the Office of the President,
University Archives, Wilson Library, UNC.
65. Graham to Day, 22 March 1932, box 24, sub-series 6, Robert Burton House
Series, Records of the Office of Chancellor, University Archives, Wilson Library,
UNC. See also “University of North Carolina–Institute for Research in Social Sci-
ence,” folder 130, box 11, series 236, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Ar-
chives, RAC; and “University of North Carolina,” folder 125, box 10, series 236,
record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
66. Johnson and Johnson, Research in Service, 54.
67. “Staff Conference,” 14 January 1930, folder 17, box 3, series 904, record group
3, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
68. George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945, vol. 10

146
 CONSIDERING HER INFLUENCE

of A History of the South, ed. Wendell Holmes Stephenson and E. Merton Coulter
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 498.
69. Sydnor Walker officer’s diary, 9 March 1938.
70. “Memorandum of Interview.”
71. Jerome D. Greene to members of Rockefeller Foundation, 22 October 1913,
folder 163, box 21, series 900, record group 3, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
72. Frank J. Munger, foreword to Research in Service, ed. Johnson and Johnson,
ix.
73. For example, following Walker’s lead the foundation did not support programs
in rural social work. In the predominantly rural South, this hindered the profession-
alization of social work (except in New Orleans). In 1929, the University of Alabama
successfully entered negotiations for its own School of Social Work. See Sydnor Wal-
ker officer’s diary, 4 April 1929. In another example, at Walker’s recommendation the
University of Georgia’s request for support of an Institute of Public Affairs and In-
ternational Relations was declined in 1930. See “The Rockefeller Foundation Activ-
ities under Consideration,” 1 September 1930, folder 18, box 18, series 904, record
group 3, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
74. “Officers’ Conference, General Education Board,” 15 January 1931, folder 8,
box 1, series 904, record group 3, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
75. Asprey et al., “Memorial Minute.”
76. Ibid. See also “Sydnor Harbison Walker.”
77. Asprey et al., “Memorial Minute.”
78. Sydnor H. Walker, ed., The First One Hundred Days of the Atomic Age (New
York: The Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 1945).
79. Untitled document, n.d., Vassar Special Collections. Walker’s appointment as
assistant to the president and assistant secretary to the board of trustees was announced
in “Release, Office of Public Relations,” Vassar Special Collections.
80. “S. Walker Assists President Blanding,” n.d., Vassar Special Collections.
81. “Doubt Change at Vassar to Co-Ed School,” Newburgh New York News, 3
October 1956, Vassar Special Collections.
82. Asprey et al., “Memorial Minute.”
83. “Miss Sydnor Walker Dies; Former Trustee at Vassar,” 13 December 1966,
Vassar Special Collections.
84. Walker to Odum, 22 April 1925, folder 776, box 74, series III, sub-series 6,
Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Archives, RAC.
85. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies, 20–22.
86. “Miss Sydnor Walker Dies.”
87. “Lived in Millbrook.” Rossiter describes many women scientists and teachers
who left similar bequests to women’s colleges (Women Scientists in America: Struggles
and Strategies, 22).

147
 6. Brokering Old and New Philanthropic Traditions:
Women’s Continuing Education in the Cold War Era
Linda Eisenmann

Foundation support of American women’s collegiate education was

insignificant and generally undirected before the early 1960s.1 During
the Cold War, however, women attracted foundation attention for an
instrumental reason: they had become potential “womanpower” for
perceived shortages in the professional and technological labor force.
The Carnegie Corporation provided the first concentrated boost to
woman-oriented philanthropy when it supported a small group of
“continuing education for women” programs in the early 1960s. Al-
though this was not a large effort, Carnegie money proved to be pres-
tigious, newsworthy, and fertile, kindling a women’s continuing edu-
cation movement that would produce over a hundred similar programs
by 1965.2 From this modest beginning, the continuing education
movement and the philanthropy behind it paved the way for larger,
more radical, and longer-lasting developments in women’s education
in the 1970s and 1980s—much of which was supported by founda-
tions. This later growth in women’s studies, women’s research insti-
tutes, and women’s resource centers found its origins in the little-
explored continuing education movement of the early 1960s.
This chapter, which is part of a larger project, examines the origins
of women’s continuing education at three Carnegie-funded programs:
those of the University of Minnesota (1960), Radcliffe College (1960),
and Sarah Lawrence College (1962).3 These pioneers parlayed their
Carnegie connection into national influence, propelling a movement
to return to the educational mainstream women who had halted their
educational careers in response to the prevailing postwar domestic ide-

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 BROKERING OLD AND NEW PHILANTHROPIC TRADITIONS

ology. However, foundation support was not the only form of philan-
thropy that ignited this movement. An older tradition of women sup-
porting women helped these early programs as well as subsequent
dozens that replicated the initial ideas. The University of Michigan
program (1964) exemplifies endeavors built not with foundation fund-
ing but through the dedicated philanthropy of alumnae and local fe-
male supporters.
Thus postwar women’s continuing education is significant for two
reasons. First, through Carnegie support, it spurred an efficacious
combination of a new female-oriented foundation philanthropy with
an older tradition of women’s local fundraising. Second, an examina-
tion of these pioneer programs demonstrates the groundwork laid for
larger, more sustained foundation support in the 1970s and 1980s,
when the women’s movement and gender equity concerns interested
and motivated a broader segment of the nation.4

AMERICAN WOMEN’S POSTWAR SITUATION

World War II produced considerable economic and professional
gains for women. The wartime dearth of men had opened up oppor-
tunities and energized women, propelling them into many previously
closed business, government, and academic posts. Women made up
45 percent of all college students during the war, they earned 57 per-
cent of master’s degrees and 19 percent of Ph.D.s by 1946, and they
held 28 percent of college faculty posts. However, postwar America
did not so eagerly support women’s continued professional participa-
tion. The influx of G.I. Bill veterans—nearly one-half of all students
in 1946 and 1947—overwhelmed collegiate women, and women’s
gains waned as they were eased out in favor of bright, usually younger,
men.5
A new domestic ideology urged women into family roles and val-
ued them more as wives and mothers than as professionals. Popular
stereotypes like the television families on Father Knows Best and Leave
It to Beaver suggest that postwar mothers were white, middle-class
females who rarely worked outside the home, and, if they had prepared
for a career, were content to let that training lie idle while they devoted
themselves to family.
In fact, recent scholarship reveals that women abandoned neither
jobs nor education to the extent popularly believed. The frequently
assumed large dip in the postwar female labor force did not occur.

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LINDA EISENMANN

Alice Kessler-Harris notes a net female labor force gain of 16 percent

between 1940 and 1950, and she shows that women worked in greater
numbers in 1960 than in 1940. Further, the largest gains occurred
among married and older women.6 In higher education, too, the over-
all trend has been upward. Although women’s proportion as college
students dipped in the G.I. Bill era, their actual numbers increased
annually from 1947 to the 1980s, with exceptions only in 1950 and
1951. In other words, contrary to the general impression, the long-
term trend for women’s participation in both college and the labor
force has been steadily upward.7
These differences between expectations and behavior provoked
tensions for postwar women caught between competing ideologies. To
be patriotic citizens, they were urged to stay home and defend the
country, one household at a time, against communism and domestic
disruption. To be ideal economic citizens, women became a reserve
labor pool, working only when necessary, subordinating their status
and pay to men. Culturally, women’s domesticity was valued, as were
their volunteer contributions in civic and family organizations. Psy-
chology, too, supported motherhood. The era’s strong Freudianism
argued that women would be satisfied primarily through accepting
their reproductive role and rejecting competition and ambition.8

HIGHER EDUCATION CONSIDERS THE FEMALE STUDENT

Mary Ingraham Bunting, who as president of Radcliffe College in
1960 created one of the first continuing education centers, described
these conflicting postwar demands as a “climate of unexpectation” for
women.9 People accepted, or even assumed, that a well-trained woman
would cede her job when marriage or motherhood called. Similarly, a
woman student might hear a mild sigh from her dean or professors if
she abandoned college for marriage, but she would find ready under-
standing among her parents and classmates.
A short-term view predominated in the 1950s, with many
women—including some educators—focusing on the immediate ap-
peal of marriage and motherhood and ignoring the longer-term pos-
sibilities of education and career. Anecdotal evidence suggested that
women were turning their backs on higher education in favor of mar-
riage. The president of Mills College organized an entire analysis
around such a complaint: “On my desk lies a letter from a young
mother a few years out of college: ‘I have come to realize that I was

150
 BROKERING OLD AND NEW PHILANTHROPIC TRADITIONS

educated to be a successful man and now must learn by myself how

to be a successful woman.’ The basic irrelevance of much of what
passes as women’s education in America could not be more compactly
phrased.”10
Yet many educators worried that foreshortening expectations would
lead both to labor market problems and to dissatisfied middle-aged
women. A few 1950s groups championed a different approach to
women’s education. Most notably, the American Association of Uni-
versity Women (AAUW) and the National Association of Women
Deans and Counselors (NAWDC) devoted both money (in the form
of fellowships) and discussion (through conferences and sharing of
information) to women’s concerns.
But the most scholarly attention was paid by the Commission on
the Education of Women, sponsored by the American Council on
Education (ACE) from 1953 to 1961. Many female Commission ap-
pointees were also members of the AAUW and NAWDC. The Com-
mission was created through a philanthropic gift by Kathryn Sisson
Phillips, a founding member of NAWDC. Phillips lamented the state
of women’s education and persuaded her husband to contribute
$50,000 from their family foundation to begin the work. The Com-
mission fostered research on the condition of women in higher edu-
cation, encouraged pilot studies, and publicized work on behalf of
collegiate women.11
The ACE Commission actually represents an example of postwar
lack of philanthropic interest in women. Phillips intended her $50,000
as seed money for support by bigger foundations, as happened with
most ACE projects. However, the records of the Commission’s first
four years detail a Sisyphean effort to secure support. Commissioners
spent every early meeting honing their mission statement for presen-
tation to a foundation. Commission director Althea Hottel (dean of
women at Penn), chair Esther Lloyd-Jones (professor at Columbia
Teachers College), and ACE president Arthur Adams approached the
Ford, Rockefeller, Russell Sage, Guggenheim, Kellogg, and Mellon
Foundations, as well as the Carnegie Corporation, all without success.
They sustained the project only through careful stewardship of the
Phillips money and small infusions of ACE funding.
The effort finally succeeded in 1956 when the Carnegie Corpo-
ration—after declining to support the larger Commission program—
contributed $9,000 for “a conference to assess the present status of
research on the education of women.” This gathering produced a

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LINDA EISENMANN

strong volume, The Education of Women: Signs for the Future.12 More
good news followed. Although the Lilly Foundation is scarcely men-
tioned in the minutes, ACE announced in 1957 that Lilly had pro-
vided $75,000 for three years. Although the Commission finally had
help, Carnegie and Lilly together provided less than $100,000, con-
siderably shy of the million dollars Commission members had bud-
geted for their research agenda.

CONTINUING EDUCATION PROVIDES AN ANSWER

The research analyzed by the ACE Commission demonstrated a
disjunction between expectations for women’s lives and women’s later
actual performance in education and at work. Over time, as families
grew, women who had seen college as irrelevant found more time and
energy for work, increased volunteer opportunities, and re-engagement
with the world of ideas.
Educators and researchers advanced a “life-cycle” understanding of
women’s lives which acknowledged that women moved through roles
sequentially. Postwar women revealed different demographic charac-
teristics than their mothers or grandmothers:
By the time they reach twenty, half the women in the country are
married. Their last child is born by the time they are twenty-six
years old. So, it’s a thirty-two year old mother who takes her youn-
gest child off to first grade. When this same last child graduates
from high school, twelve years later, his mother is forty-four years
old.13

Not only were these forty-four-year-old mothers virtually child-free,

but they were also likely to join the work force. Nearly one-third of
all women worked in the late 1950s, and almost half of them were
wives or mothers.14 By outlining the contours of the average woman’s
experience, educators accentuated the fact that rearing children occu-
pied only part of a woman’s lifespan. Two educational implications
resulted. First, while in college women should be better informed
about their likely futures and encouraged to plan for a complicated life
cycle. Second, women who had abandoned college because of its pre-
sumed irrelevancy should be encouraged to return when older to finish
degrees or retrain for a different future.
The continuing education movement developed out of these two

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 BROKERING OLD AND NEW PHILANTHROPIC TRADITIONS

concerns, suggesting that women should not be ignored because of

their early decisions about college. Rather, they should be encouraged
to resume education. Before the movement, women who left college
were often simply written off, and the brave soul who returned found
little support, no special programming, and many barriers. Schools did
not routinely allow part-time study, especially at the graduate level,
and part-time students rarely qualified for fellowships. Women who
had moved, usually to support a husband’s profession, found it hard
to win collegiate credit for work done elsewhere. Although today’s
notion of “continuing education for women” can connote rather low-
profile programs, in the early 1960s this movement was quite radical,
pushing for institutional change in response to women’s needs.15

FOUNDATIONS DISCOVER WOMEN’S POTENTIAL

The key to winning foundation support for continuing education
was educators’ recognition of the manpower implications of the pool
of returning female students. Increasingly, labor force analysts had
called for “womanpower” to supplement the trained workforce. In
1954, Dael Wolfle published America’s Resources of Specialized Talent
for the Rockefeller-supported Commission on Human Resources and
Advanced Training. Wolfle emphasized women’s potential; further, he
encouraged colleges and universities to find better ways to attract both
women and minorities to science and technology fields, proving quite
sophisticated in his understanding of how cultural and economic as-
sumptions inhibited their full participation.16
A second study of American labor force needs was conducted by
the National Manpower Council, funded by Ford. Like Wolfle, NMC
analysts had not planned to highlight women, but added them to their
agenda fairly early. In its 1957 Womanpower, the Council declared that
“women constitute not only an essential but also a distinctive part of
our manpower resources,” and devoted the entire report to the devel-
opment of womanpower (in schools, colleges, and private sector pro-
grams), the effective utilization of female employees (in hiring and
promotion), and the enhancement of knowledge about women
(through increased research).17
Joining Ford and Rockefeller in support of the womanpower trend,
Carnegie developed a funding stream for the “better use of human
resources.” Its 1960 annual report noted, “Many studies indicate that,

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numerically at least, the greatest wastage of human resources in the

United States today is the under-utilization of intelligent women.
Part—and perhaps a major part—of this waste is unnecessary.18

THE FIRST CONTINUING EDUCATION FUNDING

Once educators recognized the connections between their students
and national womanpower needs, they found an easier fit with foun-
dation interests. Carnegie led the support of womanpower through
the continuing education programs. The first to win its attention was
the Minnesota Plan for the Continuing Education of Women, which
in 1960 became the first nationally prominent program designed spe-
cifically for older women returning to college.
The Plan was a hybrid of ideas developed by two women, Virginia
Senders and Elizabeth Cless. Senders, a lecturer in psychology, worried
about women who left college to marry. For several years she had
pushed innovative programming for women, sparked by earlier expe-
riences at Antioch and Mount Holyoke Colleges. Senders envisioned
women returning to school part-time while still playing their family
role, and she hoped that college-age women could be influenced to
see more value in education.19 Meanwhile, Elizabeth Cless, in Min-
nesota’s General Extension Division, was creating liberal arts courses
for community women not ready to attend college full-time. She ex-
perimented with “New Worlds of Knowledge” seminars to update
women on changes in science and the humanities. Senders and Cless
joined their ideas in a creative plan that caught Carnegie’s attention.
Fully employing manpower language, the educators matched
women to the nation’s needs in outlining two goals for their new
program:
It is widely recognized that the United States urgently needs to
develop and utilize all possible resources of trained or trainable man-
power, and particularly needs to make use of its gifted and high-
ability individuals. . . . The principal objective of the program pro-
posed here is to make possible the full utilization of our resources
of able and educated womanpower. A second objective, complemen-
tary rather than competitive with the first, is an increase in the per-
sonal happiness and satisfaction of many individual women.20

The Minnesota Plan proposed a three-pronged approach to serving

undergraduate and community women simultaneously. First, for

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traditional-aged undergraduates, the Plan provided “orientation to the

multiple roles of later life so that realistic preparation can be made for
them.” The second component—whose popularity surprised its plan-
ners—was targeted to young homemakers with family responsibilities.
These women received special curricula, along with strong counseling.
Finally, for “the mature woman whose formal education is already far
behind her,” the Plan offered special courses and guidance in using
the university’s wide resources.
The Plan’s efforts to develop opportunities at this large, land-grant
institution particularly appealed to Carnegie. While the foundation
valued the Plan’s programming, it also emphasized the importance of
embedding the program within existing local resources. Making the
Plan a part of the overall university from the beginning would aid in
its seamless absorption into the institution when Carnegie pilot fund-
ing expired.21

WHY THE CARNEGIE CORPORATION?

Three elements help explain why the originators of the Minnesota
program approached Carnegie. First was Senders’s previous role as a
Mount Holyoke student under the tutelage of John Gardner, who later
become Carnegie’s president. Senders had done independent study
work with Gardner and stayed in touch, sending him her ideas about
women’s education.22 A second reason was the clear—and carefully
crafted—match between the Plan and Carnegie’s interest in “better
use of human resources.” A third factor was the active involvement of
a key Carnegie player: Florence Anderson, secretary of the Corpora-
tion.
Anderson was very influential at Carnegie.23 She joined the foun-
dation in 1934, a fresh college graduate working as an actual secretary.
She advanced through the ranks (the only woman to do so) from
administrative assistant (1937–1947) to assistant secretary (1947–
1957), associate secretary (1951–1954), and then secretary of the Cor-
poration in 1954. Her responsibilities ranged widely, but in 1955 An-
derson’s personal interest in women’s issues drew her to a meeting of
the ACE Commission on the Education of Women while Carnegie
considered its funding request. Several continuing education pioneers
identified Anderson as the linchpin of Carnegie’s involvement. Cless
noted that the “practical and tenacious” Anderson “returned academic
proposals in this field over and over again, until they were rewritten

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in such a way that they could stand on their own.” Historian Margaret
Rossiter recognized Anderson’s influence when few women sat in the
inner circle of foundation decision making. “An astute applicant for a
possible grant would quickly discover,” she noted, that Anderson “in
fact handled most of the proposals and played an important role in
the foundation’s ambiguous collective decision making.”24
The histories of the three Carnegie-funded continuing education
pioneers—Minnesota, Sarah Lawrence, and Radcliffe—record in-
creasingly close correspondence with Anderson as the representative
of Carnegie interests. At Minnesota, Anderson and the directors were
soon on a first-name basis. Of the 1963 program report, Anderson
wrote, “I was particularly pleased to note the many ways in which this
program has been made an integral part of the University rather than
a tangential activity.”25 The extension of the Sarah Lawrence program
beyond the “tangential” similarly enjoyed Anderson’s support. At that
small, experimental, single-sex college, dean (and later president) Es-
ther Raushenbush instigated continuing education efforts that differed
considerably from Minnesota’s, but appealed to Carnegie’s wish to
spark innovation and provide models.
Raushenbush investigated older women’s concerns by talking with
alumnae and the mothers of her students. Noting how easily older
women’s needs were set aside, she explained, “The trouble is that we
have generally evaded the hard task of helping [women] accomplish
what we have said they should accomplish, as soon as the simple line
of continuous education has been broken.”26
In 1958, Raushenbush created special continuing education sem-
inars, and with president Paul Ward, she tried to secure funding from
the Ford Foundation. She was disappointed, even indignant, when
Ford rejected her idea as too traditional, too focused on curricular
tinkering, and insufficiently experimental. Raushenbush countered that
her effort was, in fact, experimental in three important ways: she was
investigating the “intellectual potential” of women on whom little at-
tention had been focused, she was creating a research and planning
function to study their progress, and she was providing new curricular
formats seldom offered to mature students.27
Still smarting from Ford’s rejection, Raushenbush and Ward
jumped on the lead of Minnesota’s success at Carnegie. After an initial
rejection, Raushenbush worked closely with Florence Anderson to
craft an appealing program. In fact, in her initial rejection letter to
President Ward, Anderson noted, “since this is an area in which I have

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 BROKERING OLD AND NEW PHILANTHROPIC TRADITIONS

a personal interest, I should enjoy discussing the plan with Mrs.

Raushenbush at her convenience.”28 Anderson’s “personal interest”
paid off: Carnegie gave Sarah Lawrence $76,000 in 1961. When cou-
pled with a $15,000 anonymous contribution from a Sarah Lawrence
alumna, the Carnegie grant allowed the school to fund both operations
and physical plant for its new Center for Continuing Education in
1962.
Unlike Minnesota, which moved its continuing education students
into the mainstream, Sarah Lawrence created a parallel track where
students took special seminars under the watchful care of hand-picked
faculty. After the first year, Sarah Lawrence stretched its mission in a
new direction. Taking advantage of its metropolitan New York City
setting, the college created partnerships with area universities that al-
lowed students to pursue graduate training. The first collaboration, in
1963, was for a master’s degree in education with the NYU School of
Education, and shortly thereafter, a master’s degree in social work.
With both programs, a key was the opportunity for part-time field
and class work; another was willingness to grant credit for previous
classes and experience. A third, less successful, program in library sci-
ence was created with the Pratt Institute.29
Carnegie liked this new direction, and the Corporation funded the
joint programs with nearly $300,000. Since graduate schools had rarely
welcomed part-time or older female students, this seemed a new av-
enue for tapping into womanpower. In her oral history, Raushenbush
told of her first meeting with John Gardner. Florence Anderson had
warned Raushenbush that Gardner was “willing to talk to you, but
he’s not excited about it.” In their meeting, Gardner was cordial but
told Raushenbush that her continuing education program wouldn’t do
much long-term good since the graduate schools would be uninter-
ested in older female college graduates. Raushenbush responded that
she would just have to work on the graduate schools. “So he laughed,”
she remembered. “He had a little gleam in his eye, and he said, ‘Oh
well, if you’re going to crack the grad schools, then that’s different
then. Maybe we’ll give you the money.’ ”30
Between funding Minnesota in 1960 and Sarah Lawrence in 1961,
the Carnegie Corporation also made a grant to the Radcliffe Institute
for Independent Study, a third pioneer that addressed a quite different
clientele. Where the other centers served women still earning degrees,
the Radcliffe Institute believed that women already holding the Ph.D.
represented an ideal lever for change. The program created by Presi-

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LINDA EISENMANN

dent Bunting provided fellowships, a research center, office space, ac-

cess to Harvard faculty and libraries, and uninterrupted time for
women whose careers had slowed due to family responsibilities. Rad-
cliffe’s only requirements of fellows were to work on a project and to
present their work at a public colloquium.31
Bunting’s ideas did not develop in a vacuum. Besides discussing
plans with Raushenbush, Bunting also was no stranger to Florence
Anderson. In her oral history, Bunting describes fellow Brooklynite
Anderson as an old friend with whom she had enjoyed horseback
riding.32 Further, by the early 1960s, Bunting was one of the nation’s
best-known women educators. She served on several national boards,
becoming chair of the ACE Commission on the Education of Women
in 1959. Her scientific training (a Ph.D. in bacteriology from the
University of Wisconsin) made her a frequent choice for technical
committees, such as the National Science Foundation’s Advisory
Committee to the Office on Scientific Information and Research.
There, Bunting learned the manpower utilization language that helped
sell her educational ideas. She also astutely connected her plan to the
concept of equal and excellent education that John Gardner had trum-
peted.33
Bunting appreciated Gardner’s work, especially his notion that “we
get the excellence we value” and his sensitivity to including women in
educational planning. In her appeal for Carnegie funding, she told
him, “There is something about the education of women in this coun-
try that reminds one of plants cultivated under conditions permitting
excellent early vegetative growth but few flowers and less fruit.”34 Ap-
parently convinced, Carnegie provided a five-year grant of $150,000
for fellowships.
In the foundation game, Bunting was even more successful than
her Minnesota and Sarah Lawrence colleagues. Her work attracted
interest from Laurance Rockefeller, who invited her funding appeal.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund provided $250,000, and both Laurance
Rockefeller and staff member Nancy Hanks served on the Radcliffe
Institute’s advisory board.35

SHORT- AND LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF FOUNDATION SUPPORT

Although Rockefeller actually surpassed Carnegie in its start-up
gift to Radcliffe, it was the intentionality of the Carnegie grants that

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 BROKERING OLD AND NEW PHILANTHROPIC TRADITIONS

drew national attention to continuing education. In selecting a range

of projects, Florence Anderson wished to disseminate both informa-
tion and models. With the initial trio, she had picked a large public
university, a small liberal arts college, and a medium-sized women’s
college attached to a prestigious research university.
Selection by Carnegie brought benefits beyond the financial. Both
Sarah Lawrence and Radcliffe won prominent coverage in the New
York Times; Raushenbush and Bunting relate how their switchboards
were swamped with phone calls the morning after favorable articles
by education editor Fred Hechinger appeared in the paper. The leaders
of the three programs were frequent conference speakers, they were
invited to tout their work in the October 1961 Educational Record,
they received broad publicity in Carnegie materials, and they corre-
sponded with dozens of educators hoping to establish continuing ed-
ucation programs.36
In the short run, then, Carnegie support was influential for these
programs and for the continuing education movement. In the longer
term, Carnegie’s decision to tie women’s programming into its scheme
for “better use of human resources” paved the way for increased interest
by other foundations—notably Ford—in the subsequent stages of the
women’s movement.
Ford showed little interest in women’s issues during the early
1960s.37 In the 1970s, however, Ford would lead the way in national
support of women’s studies. Rosa Proietto has characterized five phases
of Ford’s support through the 1980s: a fellowship program for indi-
viduals, beginning in 1972; funding for fifteen women’s research
centers; support of a national journal (Signs) and a national research
council; curriculum mainstream projects throughout the 1980s; and,
in the late 1980s, funding for women’s programs outside the United
States.38
Carnegie’s early contribution to women’s continuing education
paled in comparison to Ford’s later support; in addition, continuing
education was never a huge part of Carnegie’s agenda. Throughout
the 1960s, Carnegie support of women’s programming never exceeded
3 percent of its total U.S. grants.39 Nevertheless, continuing education
leaders, with the help of Florence Anderson, leveraged Carnegie
money and influence to sustain a movement that grew from 20 pro-
grams in 1963, to 100 in 1966, to 376 by 1971, and that modeled
foundation involvement in women’s education.40

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LINDA EISENMANN

AN ALTERNATIVE STREAM OF SUPPORT FOR WOMEN

Foundation funding clearly played a major role in the new pro-
grams at Minnesota, Sarah Lawrence, and Radcliffe. However, foun-
dation money tells only part of the story of how leaders built the
continuing education movement. In fact, given foundations’ limited
role, an older tradition of women giving to women was needed to
spark and sustain the movement. Contributions by local women’s
groups, alumnae, and individual benefactors all supplemented foun-
dation funding, extending an old tradition in higher education.
Although women’s financial contributions have not always been
well recognized, local female philanthropy made all the difference in
opening colleges to women. Such philanthropy created female insti-
tutions, opened schools previously limited to men, supported women
students with fellowships and housing, and funded teaching posts spe-
cifically for women. Educational history provides scattered stories of
female philanthropy, but seldom has it emphasized the significance of
the whole effort.41 The continuing education movement provides an-
other example in the long story of women supporting women.
Two of the three pioneers in continuing education for women used
female philanthropy to supplement foundation funding. Although
Minnesota managed solely on Carnegie and university funding, both
Radcliffe and Sarah Lawrence raised money from individuals. Sarah
Lawrence welcomed a “timely” gift of $15,000 from an anonymous
local donor who refurbished a campus building for the new center. At
Radcliffe, Bunting had been told to fund her project with outside
money, and she secured several individual gifts, including $50,000
from Agnes Meyer of the Washington Post.

LOCAL SUPPORT CREATES THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN CEW PROGRAM

Although the pioneers had enjoyed Carnegie support, newer pro-
grams found the foundations less interested in supporting the move-
ment as it grew. The history of the center at the University of Mich-
igan exemplifies a successful program that raised its entire budget
through the older approach to supporting women’s education. Mich-
igan’s Center for the Education of Women (CEW) opened in 1964,
just two years after Carnegie funded Sarah Lawrence. In that short
time, many educators had studied the pioneers, hoping to borrow the
most relevant methods for meeting their local women’s needs. Mich-

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 BROKERING OLD AND NEW PHILANTHROPIC TRADITIONS

igan modeled itself most closely after the Minnesota Plan, which em-
phasized opening institutional resources and advocating for women on
a large public campus. Michigan developed a tripartite mission of ad-
vocacy, service, and research, with particular focus on providing infor-
mation to students wishing to resume education, guiding those stu-
dents toward appropriate local resources, and—most importantly—
“working with the administration and faculty to achieve further flex-
ibility in university programs and requirements.”42
In appeals to foundations, the Michigan program attracted little
interest. Perhaps its approach seemed too similar to that of the model
schools. Louise Cain, Michigan’s co-founder, visited Carnegie while
still in her planning stage. However, Cain recalled in a later interview
that she had not devoted much time to raising outside funds, citing
only one unsuccessful overture to the Kellogg Foundation. Generally,
Cain asserted that unless the university itself was willing to support
the center financially, it would not be able to attract outside funding.43
Instead, founders of the Michigan program turned to local options,
directing the first fundraising appeal to alumnae. Michigan’s women
had a long history of supporting female students and faculty. In 1890,
local women had funded the Michigan League, a women’s social cen-
ter, as a counterpart to the all-male Michigan Union. A women’s dor-
mitory and gymnasium also were built through local philanthropy.
When Louise Cain and Vice President for Academic Affairs Roger
Heyns approached the Michigan Alumnae Council about funding the
new center, the alumnae were already raising money on behalf of the
long-dormant Alice Freeman Palmer Professorship.
Despite their devotion to the Palmer effort, the alumnae responded
positively, especially after they won Heyns’s agreement to match any
money they raised. In September 1964, the alumnae committed to
raising $15,000 annually for three years. Their commitment was a
huge one: they assumed a total obligation of $45,000 for a venture
that had been operating less than three weeks.
The alumnae’s success in raising CEW money involved careful
planning and hard work. Louise Cain worked with an alumnae Com-
mittee on Continuing Education that shared reading lists, distributed
a survey, and prepared a public relations blitz on behalf of the new
Center. Alumna Jean Cobb single-mindedly focused on raising money,
spending nearly four years heading the effort.44 Cobb’s work, the com-
mitted support of Heyns, alumnae publicity to the city’s women’s clubs
(including the American Association of University Women and the

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Business and Professional Women’s Club), and the excellent reports

of the center’s initial accomplishments all combined—after a rocky
start—to help the club reach its goal.
Over time, Michigan was notably successful raising outside money
for its research program, which was considerably stronger than those
of most of the early programs. Initially, however, Michigan distin-
guished itself as the only center to support itself completely through
the combined contributions of its alumnae and its home university.

Continuing education programs from the early 1960s may appear

timid compared to the exuberant women’s movement that hit cam-
puses only a half-decade later, generating women’s studies programs,
women’s research centers, and resource centers for women’s needs. In
addition, the limited philanthropic support of Carnegie and Rocke-
feller may seem insignificant compared to Ford’s later robust contri-
butions to women’s studies. Yet, in their modest aims and unpreten-
tious means, the continuing education programs were suited to their
era, when women were often seen as “incidental students” on their
own campuses. As Esther Raushenbush explained their approach, the
leaders employed a “respectful way of working within the system” that
merely asked for a fair share of resources and a recognition that women
could make contributions.45
Yet the long-term accomplishments of these programs should not
be overlooked. In asserting women’s place in collegiate settings, con-
tinuing education programs were early institutional efforts at gender
equity. Born in an era of little encouragement for women, the centers
organized around women’s needs as students, and many remained vi-
able by adapting their missions when the women’s movement subse-
quently burst onto campuses. Continuing education also laid ground-
work for later, more focused women’s programming by recognizing
women’s nascent needs that would grow over time. The leaders’ ad-
vocacy and calls for research drew attention to women, even if the
time was not yet ripe to address them fully.
In drawing foundation support to women’s programming—even at
a modest level—continuing education efforts paved the way for larger
woman-oriented foundation agendas in the 1970s and 1980s. At the
same time, the history of this movement reveals an older educational
tradition of women helping women. As such, continuing education
offers a significant case study wherein a legacy of old-style female

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 BROKERING OLD AND NEW PHILANTHROPIC TRADITIONS

philanthropy combined with a new and powerful funding source on

behalf of women’s education.

NOTES
1. Although some foundations supported women’s education (e.g., the Laura
Spelman Rockefeller Memorial with child study and the General Education Board
with collegiate buildings), no significant funding program for women students ap-
peared before the 1950s. See Andrea Walton, “Rethinking Boundaries: The History
of Women, Philanthropy, and Higher Education,” History of Higher Education Annual
20 (2000), 29–57; and Kathleen D. McCarthy, ed., Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women,
Philanthropy, and Power (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
2. Elizabeth L. Cless, “The Birth of an Idea: An Account of the Genesis of
Women’s Continuing Education,” in Some Action of Her Own: The Adult Woman and
Higher Education, ed. Helen S. Astin (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington, 1976), 15.
3. See Linda Eisenmann, Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1946–
1965: Reclaiming the Incidental Student (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, forthcoming).
4. See Mariam Chamberlain and Alison Bernstein, “Philanthropy and the Emer-
gence of Women’s Studies,” Teachers College Record 93 (spring 1992): 556–68; and
Rosa Proietto, “The Ford Foundation and Women’s Studies in American Higher
Education,” in Philanthropic Foundations: New Scholarship, New Possibilities, ed. Ellen
Condliffe Lagemann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 271–84.
5. For college women, see Thomas D. Snyder, ed., 120 Years of American Edu-
cation: A Statistical Portrait (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Education, Office of
Educational Research and Improvement, National Center for Education Statistics,
1993); and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial
Times to 1970, 2 vols. (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus International Publications, 1989).
For postwar women, see Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning
Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Margaret
W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972 (Bal-
timore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). For the G.I. Bill, see Keith
Olson, The G.I. Bill, the Veterans, and the Colleges (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1974).
6. Kessler-Harris, Out to Work; and Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender
Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990).
7. See Snyder, ed., 120 Years of American Education.
8. Linda Eisenmann, “Educating the Female Citizen in a Post-war World:
Competing Ideologies for American Women, 1945–1965,” Educational Review 54
(June 2002): 133–41.
9. Mary Ingraham Bunting, “Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study,” Edu-
cational Record 42 (October 1961), 279–86.
10. Lynn H. White, Jr., Educating our Daughters (New York: Harper and Brothers,

163
LINDA EISENMANN

1950), 18. For the era’s debates on women, see Paula S. Fass, Outside In: Minorities
and the Transformation of American Education (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989).
11. See records of the Commission on the Education of Women, American
Council on Education, series B-22, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard
University.
12. Opal David, ed., The Education of Women: Signs for the Future (Washington,
D.C.: American Council on Education, 1957).
13. From “To Be Continued,” a script by the Minnesota Plan for the Continuing
Education of Women as part of the public television series Freedom to Learn, broadcast
in 1962. Probable authors were Virginia Senders and Elizabeth Cless. In “Publicity”
folder, box 1, Minnesota Women’s Center collection, University of Minnesota Ar-
chives, Minneapolis (hereafter cited as UMA).
14. Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap, 17.
15. For a contemporary discussion emphasizing women’s “educational track,” see
Mary I. Bunting, “A Huge Waste: Educated Womanpower,” New York Times Mag-
azine, 7 May 1961. For a discussion of issues facing 1950s collegiate women, see
Linda Eisenmann, “Advocacy, Research, and Service for Women: The Pioneering
Origins of the Center for the Education of Women at the University of Michigan,”
Research Report of the Center for the Education of Women, University of Michigan,
February 2001.
16. Dael Wolfle, America’s Resources of Specialized Talent (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1954).
17. National Manpower Council, Womanpower (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1957), 9.
18. Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1960 Annual Report, 42.
19. Donald L. Opitz, Three Generations in the Life of the Minnesota Women’s Cen-
ter: A History, 1960–2000 (Minneapolis: Minnesota Women’s Center, 1999), 4.
20. Proposal for the Minnesota Plan for the Continuing Education of Women,
1, in “Women’s Continuing Education, 1960–1966,” box 16, collection 951, General
Extension Division, UMA.
21. See Opitz, Three Generations; and Virginia Senders, “The Minnesota Plan for
Continuing Education: A Progress Report,” Educational Record 42 (October 1961),
270–78.
22. Senders discusses her relationship with John Gardner in an oral history in-
terview with Donald Opitz, 8 January 2000, available in UMA.
23. In her history of the Carnegie Corporation, Ellen Lagemann stresses that, as
president, John Gardner gave considerable authority to his staff, encouraging them to
help formulate policy (Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation,
Philanthropy, and Public Policy [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1989]).
24. Cless, “Birth of an Idea,” 7–8; and Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before
Affirmative Action, 251. See also Barry Dean Karl, “Going for Broke: The Historian’s
Commitment to Philanthropy,” in Philanthropic Foundations, ed. Lagemann, 288–89.
25. Florence Anderson to Vera Schletzer, 24 October 1963, in “Women’s Con-
tinuing Education, 1960–66,” box 16, collection 951, General Extension Division,
UMA.

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 BROKERING OLD AND NEW PHILANTHROPIC TRADITIONS

26. Esther Raushenbush, “Unfinished Business: Continuing Education for

Women,” Educational Record 42 (October 1961), 264. For a discussion of her growing
interest in continuing education, see Raushenbush’s oral history interviews (1973 and
a 1974 addendum), Oral History Office, Columbia University, New York City.
27. Esther Raushenbush to Elizabeth Pascal, Fund for Advancement of Educa-
tion, 31 May 1961, in Esther Raushenbush folder, box 1, Center for Continuing
Education, Sarah Lawrence College Archives, Bronxville, N.Y.
28. Anderson to Paul Ward, 18 April 1961, “Carnegie Corporation, 1961–1964,”
box 1, Center for Continuing Education, Sarah Lawrence College Archives.
29. Melissa Lewis Richter and Jane Banks Whipple, A Revolution in the Education
of Women: Ten Years of Continuing Education at Sarah Lawrence College (Bronxville,
N.Y.: Sarah Lawrence College, 1972), 58.
30. Raushenbush 1973 oral history interview, 478–79.
31. The best source for a discussion of Radcliffe is Bunting, “Radcliffe Institute.”
32. Raushenbush describes a chat between the two educators when they served
on a Middle States Evaluation accrediting team. See her 1973 oral history interview,
15. Bunting mentions Anderson on page 97 of her oral history memoir with Jeanette
Bailey Cheek, 1978, Radcliffe College Archives, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Insti-
tute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
33. Bunting refers frequently to Gardner in her oral history, including 68, 93, 97.
For Gardner’s ideas, see Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Pursuit of Excellence (Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958); and Gardner’s Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent
Too? (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961).
34. Mary Bunting to John Gardner, 11 October 1960, Records of the Bunting
Institute, series 6-1, Radcliffe College Archives.
35. Bunting oral history interview, 97.
36. Fred Hechinger, “Radcliffe Plans Institute to Aid the Gifted Woman,” New
York Times, 3 November 1960, 1; and “Sarah Lawrence Plans New Center,” New York
Times, 11 January 1962, 35.
37. Ford did fund a prior continuing education effort by Bunting during her
deanship of Douglass College. There, Bunting created a small program for older
women interested in returning to school to pursue mathematics. See her 1973 oral
history interview, 71–74. On the development of Ford’s interest in women’s issues,
see Susan M. Hartmann, The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), esp. chapter 5.
38. Proietto, “The Ford Foundation,” 274–76. Proietto notes that Ford gave $9
million to women’s studies from 1972 to 1981 (282).
39. Data gathered from Annual Reports of the Carnegie Corporation, 1959 through
1969.
40. Helen S. Astin, “Adult Development and Education,” in Some Action of Her
Own, ed. Astin, 49.
41. See Walton, “Rethinking Boundaries”; Linda Eisenmann, “Creating a Frame-
work for Interpreting U.S. Women’s Educational History: Lessons from Historical
Lexicography,” History of Education 30 (fall 2001): 453–70; and Merle Curti, Philan-
thropy in the Shaping of American Higher Education (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1965).
42. “Proposal for CEW,” 1964, in box 6, CEW collection, Bentley Historical

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LINDA EISENMANN

Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. For the Michigan center, see Eisenmann,
“Advocacy, Research, and Service for Women.”
43. Louise Cain, Jean Campbell, and Jane Likert, joint interview by Ruth Bordin
for CEW’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1989. Tape is available in the CEW collection,
University of Michigan.
44. Unprocessed papers of the alumnae Continuing Education Committee are
available in the CEW collection, University of Michigan. See also Eisenmann, “Ad-
vocacy, Research, and Service.”
45. Raushenbush, 1973 oral history interview, 27.

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PART II.
WOMEN’S PHILANTHROPY AS AN AGENT OF
SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL CHANGE
7. American Philanthropy and Women’s Education
Exported: Missionary Teachers in Turkey
Roberta Wollons

Throughout the nineteenth century, women from the United

States traveled both alone and with their husbands to remote regions
of the world under the auspices of missionary work. One of the largest
of the missionary organizations was the American Board of Commis-
sioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), originating in Boston, Mas-
sachusetts, in 1810. The ABCFM, along with other missionary or-
ganizations, not only gave women the respectability and institutional
support they needed to travel, but also placed them in situations of
unprecedented autonomy. Missionaries have generally been concep-
tualized solely within the framework of their Christian identity and
evangelical goals, and their actions are commonly interpreted as cul-
tural imperialism.1 This essay recontextualizes those ideas, focusing on
individual women missionaries as philanthropists, educators, and social
reformers, formed in the same mold as the settlement workers who
flocked to poor urban immigrant neighborhoods in the late nineteenth
century. In this case, however, they were placed in the politically and
religiously tumultuous region of Ottoman Turkey.
The women I discuss here were educated at women’s colleges in
the United States and in turn became the founders of educational
institutions for women and girls in Turkey. Missionaries were prohib-
ited by the Turkish government from proselytizing among Muslims
and concentrated their efforts among Greeks, Armenians, and other
minorities within the borders of the Ottoman Empire. As founders of
schools for women and girls, missionaries were engaged not only in
the central missionary enterprise of religious conversion, but also in

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reformulating concepts of womanhood, in understanding the political

context of education and national identity, and in navigating tensions
among powerful and competing religious ideologies.
This essay focuses on the interplay of education, evangelism, and
adventure that motivated women to choose missionary work. It further
explores the tangled interaction between the missionaries and the peo-
ple they came to “save,” under the pressure of a polarizing political
climate that led them inevitably to take sides. American missionaries
by design became bilingual and, in the process, deeply bicultural. Over
time, they accommodated themselves to local religious practices and
to the limitations placed on both Muslim and Christian women. The
women missionaries I present here, the Ely sisters in Bitlis, Turkey,
and Ellen Stone in Macedonia, were shaped by the Mount Holyoke
model of women’s education, traveled as single women, and were in-
volved in founding or directing schools for girls. Located in small
towns and villages, they became pivotal figures between warring reli-
gious and political factions and in the process experienced their own
conversion from evangelists to educators, and from educators to po-
litical partisans.

The religious revival that took place in the United States in the
early nineteenth century gave rise to two major movements that con-
tinued into the twentieth century. First was the missionary crusade to
spread the gospel throughout the world, and second was the advance-
ment in higher education for women.2 The two movements came to-
gether in the missionary enterprise of the American Board of Com-
missioners for Foreign Missions. In the early years of America’s
Second Great Awakening (1800–1830), an evangelistic movement
arose in response to a perceived decline in religious uniformity. The
revival was linked to other antebellum reform movements, including
abolitionism, women’s rights, and temperance. The revivals of the pe-
riod spread to college campuses, inspiring four students at Williams
College—in what came to be called the “Haystack Prayer Meeting”—
to petition the state of Massachusetts to form a society solely to sup-
port foreign missions.3 Deeply committed to the principles of evan-
gelism, they formed the American Board of Commissioners for For-
eign Missions in 1810. While the founders were Congregationalist,
the ABCFM did not have a specific denominational agenda. The
group was emboldened, rather, by three religious-intellectual ideas: the
biblical injunction to “go ye into all the world and preach the gospel

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 AMERICAN PHILANTHROPY AND WOMEN’S EDUCATION EXPORTED

to every creature” (Mark 16:15);4 the conviction that America had a

special and disproportionately large role in God’s saving plan for hu-
mankind; and the vivid and horrible notion of millions of heathen
perishing yearly without Christ.5 The idea took hold, and the ABCFM
sent its first missionaries abroad in 1812.6
Equally inspired by the New England revivals, educator Mary
Lyon—building on the ideas of Emma Willard in Troy, New York;
Zilpah Grant in Ipswich, Massachusetts; and Catharine Beecher in
Hartford, Connecticut—formulated the Mount Holyoke model for
the education of women. Along with a classical curriculum, Lyon en-
couraged charitable service as defined by the New Divinity concerns
for piety and benevolence.7 While charity and philanthropy were
broadly conceived Christian values, “Christian self-sacrifice,” as
Amanda Porterfield notes, “was one arena in which American women
in the nineteenth century could compete with men and win.”8 Mis-
sionary work not only celebrated self-sacrifice, however; it also allowed
for self-expression and social activism. As the aggressive evangelical
movement swept through the colleges and universities, it attracted the
women of Mount Holyoke as it had the men of Williams. Once an-
imated by the idea of missionary work, Mary Lyon loyally supported
the American Board. Each year, a stream of missionaries came through
Mount Holyoke to talk about their experiences in Japan, Africa, India,
and Asia Minor (Turkey) and to recruit new missionaries. She brought
to campus Dr. Rufus Anderson, the Board’s energetic secretary, and
Fidelia Fiske, the legendary missionary to Persia, who enthralled
Mount Holyoke students with their stories of exotic adventure and
salvation.9 In 1843, Mary Lyon alone raised $900 to support Fiske,10
and when Fiske finished her missionary career, she returned to teach
at Mount Holyoke. After the Civil War, missionary work was not only
permitted for women, but, along with teaching, nursing, and writing,
was actively encouraged by the presidents of women’s colleges, partic-
ularly by Mary Lyon at Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts and Anna
Peck Sill at Rockford Female Seminary in Illinois. Interestingly, a
disproportionate number of the Turkish educational programs for girls
and women founded by the American Board traced their lineage to
Mount Holyoke.11
An increasing call for single women missionaries came from male
American missionaries in the field who saw the need for women to
do the work among native women. They were frustrated by customs
that prohibited girls from studying with male teachers or in the com-

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pany of boys. Emily White Smith, second president of the Women’s

Board (1871–1906) and Mount Holyoke graduate, argued, “The most
definite reason for organizing women’s boards to do women’s work for
women was the existence of millions of women who were so secluded
in Zenans [India] and Harems [Turkey] that only a Christian woman
could reach them with the message of salvation.”12
The connections between the Protestant commitment to serve and
the rising acceptance of women’s education gave women an unprece-
dented opportunity to devote themselves to a life of service and ex-
traordinary adventure. During the period 1837–1888, a total of 178
Mount Holyoke graduates enlisted in the foreign missions, a consid-
erable percentage of the school’s alumnae.13 Bess Vickery, historian of
Mount Holyoke missionaries, pointed out the enormity of the decision
to serve:
Naive and inexperienced, the majority of these young women had
traveled less than fifty miles from their places of birth before em-
barking for societies that were nearly incomprehensible within the
aegis of their upbringing. Often, in addition, the people they met
were generally hostile to the aims of the missionary movement of
which they were a part.14

The motives propelling women missionaries were complex and often

idiosyncratic, but they stemmed in great part from their Christian and
classical education, which instilled both a deep appreciation for the
importance of education for all women and the call to philanthropic,
charitable service. The Mount Holyoke Missionary Association was
founded in 1879, and in 1888 members pledged to identify themselves
with the organized missionary effort as an auxiliary to the Hampshire
County Branch of the Woman’s Board of Missions. In doing so they
made official the college’s commitment to promoting missionary work
among the students. While the actual effect of their encounters abroad
is difficult to evaluate, missionary women actively promoted female
literacy, commitment to the necessity of monogamy and marital af-
fection, and the well-being of children.15 These ideas, well embedded
in Western thought and assumed to be natural by educated American
women, were perceived in Turkey as revolutionary and, by the 1930s,
women missionaries in Turkey presented a challenge to prevailing no-
tions of womanhood and were described as militants.16
In the early years of the ABCFM, the Protestant emphasis on
individual salvation and reading the Bible required that women first

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 AMERICAN PHILANTHROPY AND WOMEN’S EDUCATION EXPORTED

become literate and learn enough history, geography, mathematics,

logic, and science to interpret the Bible according to Protestant teach-
ings. The perceived importance of educating indigenous women was
growing, and because missionary wives were not always trained as
teachers the ABCFM reconsidered its policy prohibiting the recruit-
ment of single female teachers. In 1868, the Women’s Board was
formed to support and oversee the work of single women.
The spread of women’s missionary societies has been called the
largest mass women’s movement in the late nineteenth century,17 with
an estimated membership of more than three million by 1915. These
societies, together with the women’s club movement and the Women’s
Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), constituted the forerunners
of women’s activism in social reform during the Progressive Era. No-
riko Ishii, historian of the women’s boards of the ABCFM, argues
that in the same spirit as the club movement, after 1868 women or-
ganized and joined separate women’s boards for foreign missions be-
cause they wanted to “do more, to exert some influence on the world
around them.”18
Several separate women’s boards for foreign missions were orga-
nized across denominations during and after the Civil War.19 The first
two ABCFM boards, the Women’s Board of Missions (WBM) in
Boston and the Women’s Board of Missions of the Interior (WBMI)
in Chicago, were organized in 1868. In 1873, the Women’s Board of
the Pacific (WBMP) separated from the WBMI and became one of
the three women’s boards of the ABCFM. The formation of the
boards contributed substantially to the ABCFM’s overall fundraising.
By 1899, receipts from the women’s boards constituted over 40 percent
of ABCFM revenue.20
In addition to becoming an essential economic force in the mission
movement, the separate women’s boards opened up the possibility that
single women might seek careers as foreign missionaries. The pre-
vailing nineteenth-century attitude was that unmarried women needed
protection; therefore, the few single women who traveled alone were
widows. As mission historian R. Pierce Beaver observed, “somehow
. . . if the women were widows, it was all right to send them out
single.”21 The person responsible for supporting the women’s boards
was Rev. N. G. Clark, newly appointed foreign secretary of the
ABCFM in 1866. Unlike his predecessor, Rufus Anderson, who had
opposed the formation of women’s boards, Clark recognized the im-
portance both of women’s education and of women’s work among

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native women abroad. Clark came from a family of educated women

and served on the board of trustees for both Mount Holyoke and
Wellesley Colleges, ultimately serving as president of the Wellesley
board of trustees from 1888 to 1893.22 During his tenure as foreign
secretary, in addition to supporting the development of the women’s
boards, he presided over the founding of colleges for women in Turkey
and elsewhere.
Unlike the ABCFM men, who viewed their relationship to non-
Christian men from the position of American and Anglo-Saxon su-
periority, the women who formed the women’s boards included in their
rhetoric the coexistence of dual concepts: that American women were
superior to the native women in mission fields, but that the two groups
could unite as women despite their cultural differences. The WBMI
believed their superiority lay in Christianity, and therefore felt they
could elevate the less fortunate women by extending Christian edu-
cation to them. Education and evangelism were linked in the minds
of the women missionaries from the beginning. On this issue, the
ABCFM and the WBMI sharply diverged, as the ABCFM main-
tained a strong prejudice against education in evangelical work. It
would be a long struggle for the ABCFM to redefine and elevate
education on a par with evangelism for men. This difference in atti-
tude toward education demonstrated the fundamental differences be-
tween the background and training of the men and women who made
up the gender-divided boards. The leaders of the two women’s boards
were college-educated, sympathetic to the political and legal changes
coming for women, and committed to reaching “native” women
through education rather than evangelism. The women who chose to
become missionaries in foreign fields were educated at Mount Holy-
oke, Rockford College, Wellesley, and Smith; they were schooled in
social amelioration, and their classmates became settlement workers in
New York, Boston, and Chicago. The men, however, largely came to
missionary work through religion and the ministry and distrusted
higher education in their quest for “civilizing” non-Protestant Chris-
tians. These differences were clear in the women’s focus on reproduc-
ing their education abroad, and in the men’s discomfort with and
suspicion of the growing autonomy of the women who were teaching
secular curricula in educational institutions in Japan, Turkey, China,
and Africa.23
From the beginning, the women’s boards operated on three fun-
damental principles: “the work was for their own sex; they would send

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 AMERICAN PHILANTHROPY AND WOMEN’S EDUCATION EXPORTED

single women only as their missionaries; and they would consider the
establishment and support of girls’ boarding schools as of primary
importance.”24 By 1903, sixteen collegiate institutions in nine countries
were closely connected to the American Board, of which four were
already under a separate board of trustees. Of the remaining twelve,
four were women’s colleges—two in Ottoman Turkey, one in Spain,
and one in Japan.25 The WBMI founded the first boarding school for
girls in Japan, which became Kobe College, and took over three others:
the Central Turkey College for Girls in Marash, the school for girls
in Samokov, Bulgaria, and the newly formed North China Union
Women’s College, all of which they believed could be classed as col-
leges.26
At home, the WBMI employed several strategies to secure sup-
port. Its members reached local networks of women through churches
and women’s seminaries. Using strategies that emphasized personal
relationships, they raised interest in missionary work by creating what
the WBMI called a “sense of immediateness.”27 This was an effort to
directly link lay supporters to the women missionaries in foreign fields.
They promoted missionary interest among children and accepted very
small donations so that even women of small means could participate.
In these ways, the women’s boards increased the number of local aux-
iliaries much more quickly than the ABCFM. They organized the
locals into state associations, which linked to the national association.
By 1872, when only four years old, the WBMI had organized 208
chapters in the Midwest alone, and by its ten-year anniversary the
number had increased to 669, including 150 children’s “mission bands”
and branches in women’s seminaries. At the end of thirty years, in
1898, there were 2,692 societies, including junior and children’s or-
ganizations. Individual societies supported individual missionaries, giv-
ing the societies a sense of connection and immediacy. Collecting “tiny
gifts from hired girls in farmhouses throughout the land,”28 casting
widely across class and region, the WBMI was able to raise funds to
support its missionaries. Nevertheless, despite its financial support for
the ABCFM, women missionaries’ salaries were less than half those
of men, and support for the women’s schools, hospitals, and other
endeavors was consistently less than that given to the men. For years,
women of the WBMI chafed under this unequal support, argued for
better pay for teachers and greater support for buildings and supplies,
and meanwhile did what they could to ensure the education of the
women in their mission fields.

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ROBERTA WOLLONS

Following the formation of the women’s boards, the numbers of

single, educated American women who went to Turkey rose. While
each missionary professed her desire to bring the word of Christ to
the “heathen” of Turkey, the Turkish government had banned the
teaching of Christianity among Turkish Muslims, thus limiting po-
tential converts to Armenians, Jews, Nestorians, and other religious
minorities within the Turkish realm. Under these conditions, the mis-
sionaries stationed in the minority villages were unavoidably caught
up in struggles over religious and political control.
Two early missionary travelers to Turkey were Mary and Charlotte
Ely, graduates of Mount Holyoke and models of American female
culture. They were, as Vickery described, equally romantic and com-
mitted to the missionary ideals as presented to them by visiting mis-
sionaries in the parlors of Mount Holyoke. Once in Turkey, however,
they found themselves in a place that was not only profoundly alien
but hostile to their sincerest aims. Over time, the sisters were able to
fashion an American-style education for women, symbolically and
concretely, while adapting to the limits set by the political, cultural,
and religious forces shaping their students’ lives.
Although Mary and Charlotte were born respectively in 1841 and
1839, the Ely sisters graduated together in 1861. The sisters grew up
in Connecticut with their minister father, Reverend Judah, and mother
Caroline, an Englishwoman from Bath, Bristol County. Their father
died when the sisters were young and they were raised by their mother,
a devout Christian who supported missionary causes. The sisters
taught briefly after graduating from Mount Holyoke, then in 1865
went to visit family and to study in Europe for a year. Charlotte stud-
ied music and Mary studied French and German. On their return
voyage, they happened to meet aboard ship the Reverend George and
Alzina Knapp, who were just beginning a furlough from their mis-
sionary station in the Armenian village of Bitlis, Turkey. For the du-
ration of the voyage, the sisters sat mesmerized on a Turkish rug with
the Knapps, listening to their tales of travel and adventure.29 At the
end of the voyage, the Knapps invited both Mary and Charlotte to
Bitlis to work with them, an offer that neither sister was prepared to
accept.
Missionary activities began in Turkey with the arrival in 1820 of
Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk, who found themselves drawn to the
region. “[I]n historical, archeological, and Biblical interest no lands
compared with Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt.”30 A printing press was

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 AMERICAN PHILANTHROPY AND WOMEN’S EDUCATION EXPORTED

set up in Malta to publish the Bible in vernacular languages, and in

1831 the first permanent station was established in Constantinople
(modern Istanbul). Of all missionary activities, educational undertak-
ings would prove to be the most influential, widespread, and long-
lasting. Under the directorship of William Goodell, the first American
Bible school was established in 1831, and a girls’ school followed in
1834. Goodell and those who came after him envisioned literacy as a
way to enable the Bible to be read more widely. By the 1840s, the
first theological seminary had been founded by Cyrus Hamlin for the
training of future pastors and teachers. Odul Bozkurt, historian of
missionaries in Turkey, argues that a central aspect of the period was
the introduction of female education on a large scale. The schools
expanded significantly after the formation of the women’s boards, and
by the 1890s missionaries had established twenty secondary schools
for girls in the Ottoman Empire. From the beginning, with the re-
strictions against proselytizing among Muslims (Kurds and Turks) and
little interest among Jews and Gregorian Armenians, the missionaries
located in eastern Turkey focused their attention largely on the com-
munities of Protestant Armenians. For the Ely sisters, this would
prove to be a painful political alliance.
The Knapps had arrived at their missionary station in the ancient
city of Diarbakir on the Tigris River in eastern Turkey in 1856. Two
years later, Rev. Knapp was advised to spend some time in the nearby
mountains of Bitlis for his health. Bitlis is situated on a mountain
plateau at five thousand feet, rising from a narrow river valley into the
mountain slopes. An ancient mountain castle dominates the town,
with houses cut from lava blocks terraced into the hills. In the nine-
teenth century, it was the capital of a semi-autonomous Kurdish prin-
cipality, with a population of thirty thousand Armenians, Kurds, and
Turks. Here, the air was fresh and cool, and Bitlis was considered to
be one of the most picturesque and healthy towns.
Upon their arrival, the Knapps—the first Protestants and only
Americans in town—proceeded to spread the word of the gospel. In
1860, they were joined by a second missionary couple, the Rev. and
Mrs. Lysander Burbank, who established a Bible class for men. De-
spite an edict from Constantinople declaring religious freedom in the
Empire, the Burbanks faced resistance from the local Armenian
church hierarchy in Bitlis, which forbade Armenian children from go-
ing to the Protestant schools. After the Knapps protested to the Brit-
ish ambassador, Armenian church leaders took a less confrontational

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but more competitive approach, opening up free schools for both boys
and girls right across from the Protestant chapel, thereby temporarily
undermining the Protestant enterprise.31
The Knapps and Burbanks pressed on with their work and by
1866, with the help of a missionary widow from Harput, they were
able to open a school for girls. It was their hope, however, to recruit
a teacher and principal from the United States to run a boarding
school.32 That year, both the Knapps and the Burbanks, tired and in
ill health, took a lengthy furlough from their work and returned to
the United States. It was on the last leg of their trip, aboard the ship
from Liverpool to New York, that they crossed paths with the Ely
sisters. Of the two, Charlotte was most attracted to the Knapps’ sto-
ries, and upon her return to the U.S. she contacted her college class-
mates from Mount Holyoke to find a volunteer for the Bitlis station.
Charlotte was unsuccessful in finding a recruit for Bitlis, but the idea
stayed with her for the next year and a half until she was visited again
by the Knapps toward the end of their furlough. When the Knapps
renewed their offer, Charlotte had already decided to go, and Mary
agreed to join her.
The Knapps and Burbanks were not the first missionaries with
whom the Ely sisters had had contact. At Mount Holyoke they met
Fidelia Fiske, one of the first single women to go to the Middle East
as a missionary in 1843, and other experienced missionaries also taught
at Mount Holyoke by then, including Dr. Justin Perkins, who had
been in the Middle East for thirty years. Moreover, the Elys’ own
mother, Caroline, had as a girl wanted to become a missionary to the
South Sea Islands, but was thwarted by fragile health. Instead, she
married an American Presbyterian minister and moved to Philadelphia
from her native England. A bit of wanderlust may have been in the
Ely women’s blood.
The underlying motivation of these single women missionaries to
travel to remote lands and alien cultures intrigues us today, and it also
worried the ABCFM’s board of examiners. In responding to the Elys’
applications, the board’s foreign secretary wrote of his concern that
they were guided by sentimental, romantic wishes to see an exotic
country. Notwithstanding their hurt protestations in response, surely
Mary and Charlotte were as drawn to the unknown as they were sure
of their commitment to their Christian faith and the missionary pur-
pose. In fact, historian Barbara Merguerian argues that adventure and

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 AMERICAN PHILANTHROPY AND WOMEN’S EDUCATION EXPORTED

romance were compelling draws for the Ely sisters.33 Like many of the
women who chose missionary work, they brought with them a concept
of privilege and service that had been cultivated by Mary Lyon at
Mount Holyoke. Educated at the highest level available to American
women, they were imbued with equally strong lessons of philanthropy
and civic responsibility that defined Lyon’s concept of Christian char-
ity. It was a singularly female model, which both preserved women’s
sphere and at the same time elevated that sphere through literacy and
the training of the mind. It is particularly significant that, like all the
missionary women who traveled to Turkey in this period, the Ely
sisters and other single women coming out of women’s colleges were
offered an opportunity to start schools in their own image.
Once arrived, Mary and Charlotte Ely optimistically named the
new school “Mount Holyoke in Bitlis,” a tribute to their alma mater
and their hope for the women and girls of their village. Over time,
the school’s curriculum grew with the increased demand for education
in the village. They reproduced the “Mount Holyoke plan,” which
meant that the students were responsible for domestic work. The pur-
pose of education was not only to impart knowledge, but also to shape
and mold their character. In keeping with the principles of the Amer-
ican Board, Mount Holyoke in Bitlis was to retain as much as possible
the native customs of the students and avoid “Westernizing” or “mod-
ernizing” them in a way that would separate them from their families
and villages. In a letter written in 1869, the sisters said of their stu-
dents,
We are fully persuaded it is best to train them in keeping with the
condition of the people—not to raise their general habits of living
so far above the ways of the nation at large as to make any distinction
of class and thus enfeeble their influence with their own people. In
a word, our aim is to teach them the Gospel, not civilization.34

Implied in this assessment is their belief in Western cultural superi-

ority, and that Western education and religion had the power to uplift
the students, independent of the local culture. These dual concepts,
intrinsic to the missionary mind and unwittingly patronizing, were
blinders that made the resistance of the Turkish government to the
Christian missionary presence difficult for the missionaries to com-
prehend. At the same time, however, these two ideas also allowed
common ground between the modernizing desires of parents and the

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philanthropic impulse of the missionaries. A Western-style education

for girls appealed to growing numbers of parents, who easily welcomed
its benefits without adopting the missionaries’ form of Christianity.
Over time the curriculum expanded, following Mary Lyon’s stress
on science along with arithmetic, grammar, astronomy, physiology, and
eventually the full range of the classical curriculum. In 1870, in a
dramatic act symbolizing the bringing of Western education to Bitlis,
Charlotte Ely had a Steinway piano imported from Boston so she
could teach singing. The piano reached the port of Trabzon, whence
it was carried over two hundred miles by porters south across moun-
tainous eastern Turkey to the hill town of Bitlis, “sustaining surpris-
ingly little damage.”35
Along with education, the Ely sisters communicated a Protestant
theology that valued the individual’s autonomous relationship to God
and community. Over time, they altered the curriculum to suit the
ideas and needs of the community and altered the Western practice
of Protestant Christianity to accommodate the practices of the local
Armenians and their mixture of Christian and ancient pagan
traditions. While much of their original vision changed, Mary and
Charlotte held to their belief in the education of girls and women,
despite opposition rooted in local traditions of early marriage and the
devaluation of girls in favor of boys. Little by little, the Ely sisters
became only occasional travelers to America, having shifted their cul-
tural center to some location halfway between who they had been and
whom they now served.
In 1895, the town of Bitlis was one of the targets for a wave of
Muslim attacks on Armenians. Eyewitness accounts listed five hun-
dred dead in Bitlis alone, leaving hundreds of orphans in the hands
of the Ely sisters and the school. Missionaries around the region wrote
to the regional governors for help, but to no avail. Nor did the gov-
ernment either protect the missionaries or assist the Armenians. The
Ely sisters were asked to leave Turkey, which they did temporarily, but
they returned again in 1897 to help rebuild the village. The school
continued on with new missionary arrivals and some hope until the
outbreak of World War I. In 1913, as the sisters were about to cele-
brate forty-five years in Bitlis, Mary became ill with a heart condition
and died at the American hospital in Beirut at the age of 72. Charlotte
stayed on in Bitlis without her lifelong companion until war broke out
between Russia and Turkey in the fall of 1914. A general uprising of
the Kurds against the government had brought Turkish soldiers into

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 AMERICAN PHILANTHROPY AND WOMEN’S EDUCATION EXPORTED

the city, and then in 1915 another final round of massacres by the
Turkish military began in the villages surrounding Bitlis. Charlotte
Ely fled to nearby Van, while Armenians were massacred or led on
marches out of their homes. Devastated by her incomprehensible
losses, Charlotte Ely died in Van in July 1915.
The Ely sisters did not abandon their belief in American excep-
tionalism, but they did shift their work from purely philanthropic and
evangelical goals to a focus on the singular importance of education
for girls. They turned their lives over to the world they created at
Mount Holyoke in Bitlis and in the end could do little as their town
crumbled around them.

One of the most compelling factors sustaining the international

missionary enterprise, and the one most vulnerable to modification
over time, was the belief in American exceptionalism. In his book on
the missionary experience in China, Lian Xi argues that the missionary
ideology relied on traditional binary distinctions between civilization
and barbarism, light and darkness. For some missionaries, however, a
growing belief in the worth of local cultural traditions threatened the
distinctions that were required to sustain pure dedication to Christian
evangelism.36 While the Ely sisters met the culture halfway, Ellen
Stone abandoned those distinctions and came to identify with the local
culture.
In the 1870s and again in late 1895, missionaries across Turkey
were witnesses to a systematic program of hostilities toward Bulgarians
and Armenians carried out by Turkish soldiers and nationals in count-
less villages. Ellen Stone, an American missionary working in a Bul-
garian village in Macedonia, was one of those witnesses. Like the Ely
sisters in eastern Turkey, Stone became wholly committed to her life
in the outposts of the Ottoman Empire. And, like the Ely sisters, she
could not have foreseen how local politics and centuries-old internec-
ine struggles would affect her directly.
On 3 September 1901, Ellen Stone was taken captive by a band
of brigands. She and a small entourage of teachers from the local
Protestant primary schools were traveling along a remote mountain
path between Bansko and the Razlog region of Macedonia. Stone was
in Bansko to conduct a two-week training and refresher course for
local teachers in the Protestant primary schools and for “Bible
women,” who worked under the auspices of the missionary station at
Salonika. A few hours outside of Bansko, the brigands surprised and

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surrounded them. Brandishing knives and shouting in what sounded

to the teachers like poor Turkish, they immediately separated Stone
from the group. In keeping with social norms that would not permit
a woman to travel alone in the company of men, they singled out
Katerina Tsilka, a young Bulgarian teacher, to be her companion.
Madam Tsilka was married to an Albanian Christian minister who
watched helplessly as the two women were taken off into the moun-
tains. She was six months pregnant at the time.
Ellen Stone was an unlikely captive. Born in Roxbury, Massachu-
setts, in 1846, she taught school in Chelsea, Massachusetts, before
joining the editorial staff of the Boston Congregationalist. In 1878, at
the age of thirty-two, Stone made the decision to dedicate herself to
missionary service and applied for foreign service with the Board. Her
first assignment was with the girls’ school in Samokov, Bulgaria, and
she was reassigned to Plovdiv in 1883. In accordance with Board prac-
tice, she studied the Bulgarian language in preparation for her work.
Much of the next ten years was spent visiting Protestant Bulgarian
women in their homes, teaching reading, science, and rudimentary
hygienics while propagandizing for Protestant Christianity. Stone also
began to train a corps of native Protestant women to perform similar
work. She took charge of the Plovdiv Girls’ School for a time and also
traveled to Sofia during 1885 to minister to the casualties of the
Serbian-Bulgarian war. In 1898 she was assigned to the Salonika Mis-
sion Station and placed in charge of evangelical work for women in
the area. Her new job required much touring throughout Protestant
communities in Macedonia, most of them isolated in rural mountain-
ous areas.
Katerina Stefanova Tsilka was Bulgarian by birth and had been
educated in America at the Northfield Seminary, later graduating from
the training school for nurses at the Presbyterian Hospital in New
York City. Two years before, she had met and married the Reverend
Gregory Tsilka, an Albanian by birth who was completing his studies
at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. Both had studied
at the missionary schools in Monastir and Samokov before going to
America, and both were fluent in English and Bulgarian. The summer
after their marriage, they returned to Macedonia to devote their lives
to Christian work in their homeland. Katerina Tsilka had relatives in
Bansko, whom she had been visiting when the incident occurred.
Prior to the kidnapping, according to Ellen Stone’s memoir in
McClure’s Magazine, she had a few trifling brushes with the bandits

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plaguing Macedonia.37 These encounters made her conscious of the

dangers of touring, but as she had traveled the road from Bansko to
Gorna Dzhumaia many times, she did not fear the trip. In fact, her
facility with the language and familiarity with the people of the area
gave her a distinct feeling of security.
The decision to seize Ellen Stone was not an easy one for her
captors. She was, after all, a woman of fifty-five who might not survive
the difficult and hazardous flight through the mountains. However,
they believed that the Turkish government would ransom her quickly
to avoid international complications. In this they misjudged both Ellen
Stone’s fortitude and the Turkish government’s compliance.
The identity of Ellen Stone’s captors was suspected shortly after
her capture. They were the latest warriors in a five-hundred-year-old
struggle of the Bulgarian people against the Ottoman Empire. It was
only since the mid-nineteenth century that Bulgarians had experienced
a cultural revival of language, religion, and literary tradition, resulting
in the establishment of schools and a Bulgarian church. International
powers pressured Turkey to grant civil and religious rights to the
Christians in its Balkan territories, but with little effect. The April
Uprising of 1876 that resulted in the massacre of Bulgarian Christians
by the Turks, which occurred just prior to Stone’s arrival, prompted
the European powers to discuss the fate of Bulgaria.
Russia recommended creating an autonomous Bulgarian state, but
England, fearing that such a state would have disproportionate power
because of its size and location, recommended creating two smaller
states. Russia accepted the compromise, but the suggestion was uni-
laterally rejected by the Ottoman government, and Russia declared
war. Russia swiftly occupied all the northern territories of the Ottoman
Empire, threatened Constantinople, and in 1878 the Turks conceded
an autonomous Bulgarian principality. The Treaty of Berlin, signed in
July 1878, divided the Principality of Bulgaria into three regions, but
did not include Macedonia, which remained within Turkish borders,
laying the groundwork for the revolutionary movement.38 Formal de-
mands for reforms that would protect the religious and civil rights of
Bulgarians in Macedonia did not move the Turkish government. Be-
cause of tight censorship of newspapers published in the Ottoman
Empire and the illegality of political activity in Macedonia, the peo-
ple’s demands for reform were publicized only in the press of the
Bulgarian principality and in the Zornitsa, a Bulgarian-language news-
paper published in Constantinople by American missionaries. It was

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certainly through this newspaper that Ellen Stone, fluent in Bulgarian,

followed the ongoing discontents and the hopes of the Bulgarian
Christians in Macedonia.
Turkish propaganda demanding that Bulgarians take up Serbian
nationality and accept the authority of the Greek patriarch further
inflamed Bulgarian national pride. In 1896, a small Macedonian Rev-
olutionary Movement (IMRO) was formed, dedicated to the full po-
litical autonomy of Macedonia. Money, however, was a constant prob-
lem. Robberies, extortions, and kidnappings were all considered as
expedients, despite swift and generally violent reprisals by the Turkish
government. Over the next few years, the movement suffered from
lack of organization, bungled robberies and kidnappings, and on-
again, off-again relations with Bulgaria, which wished both to assist
and to control the Macedonian Bulgarian movement. By the summer
of 1901, the organization, desperate for money to fund training and
propagandizing in villages, decided to kidnap a wealthy Turkish leader.
Before the kidnapping could take place, however, the targeted man
suffered a debilitating stroke. At that point, Yane Sandansky and
Khristo Chernopeev headed to Bansko to construct a new plan.
The town of Bansko had both a thriving Protestant church and
an active chapter of IMRO. Dimitur Lazarov, chairman of the local
revolutionary committee, was also an active member of the Protestant
church. Protestants, it was said, were more zealous than their orthodox
counterparts. The new kidnapping target was Dr. John House, a mis-
sionary in Sofia who was planning a trip to Bansko. But House refused
to travel in the area, believing it to be too dangerous. However, San-
dansky and Chernopeev learned that an American missionary was in
Bansko at that very moment preparing to travel. It is not clear who
suggested kidnapping a missionary,39 but the links between the revo-
lutionary movement and the Protestant community were apparent to
those closest to the kidnapping. In the first few weeks of her capture,
Ellen Stone was suspected by journalists and local officials of not only
being aware of the revolutionary goals, but of possibly being a co-
conspirator.40 Fearing Turkish reprisals, the bandits tried to deflect
suspicion from themselves by wearing Turkish military uniforms and
speaking in Turkish. They further hoped that waiting to act until the
entourage was out of town would spare the village from harm by angry
Turkish militia.
Within hours of the kidnapping, messages were sent to the Amer-
ican consul general in Constantinople and to the State Department in

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 AMERICAN PHILANTHROPY AND WOMEN’S EDUCATION EXPORTED

Washington, D.C., alerting both the ABCFM and the American gov-
ernment. Local Turkish authorities reacted swiftly, but had little suc-
cess tracing the kidnappers or learning their identities. Turkish gov-
ernment officials were immediately suspicious that the Protestants had
worked together with the revolutionaries in planning the kidnapping.
Within days the Bulgarian government closed its borders with Mac-
edonia to prevent the kidnappers from crossing it. Few were fooled
into thinking that the kidnappers were Turkish.
On September 24, the kidnappers finally sent a ransom note, in
Ellen Stone’s handwriting, demanding 25,000 lira, or $100,000, in
payment for the release of the two women. Stone described them as
merciless and their situation desperate, though her own memoir would
later say that she and Tsilka were treated quite well, despite being
moved continually.41 The letter went to Reverend H. C. Haskell at
the American School in Samokov, who carried it immediately to Con-
stantinople. Speculations about the kidnappers were rampant. The
Bulgarian press supported the theory that the group was composed of
Turkish soldiers, while the Turkish government and the American
minister to Constantinople believed that Bulgarians had organized in
Bulgaria for the purposes of kidnapping Stone for ransom. Mission-
aries were convinced that the kidnapping had political as well as mon-
etary motives. According to this theory, the bandits were aided by the
Macedonian revolutionary committee in Bulgaria. The missionaries
also believed the kidnapping was revenge for their failure to support
the Macedonian cause in the past and that it was intended to provoke
foreign intervention in Macedonia’s plight. One more theory, held by
some Turkish officials, was that Stone and Tsilka had had a hand in
their own kidnapping, either because of their sympathies for the Mac-
edonian revolutionaries, or because they expected a large part of the
ransom for themselves.
The Ellen Stone story captivated the American imagination. She
was the first known American woman captured outside the continental
United States and a representative of a powerful religious segment of
the American population.42 It is not surprising that her dramatic plight
became a national cause célèbre, championed by the American govern-
ment. While the State Department sent out press releases and warned
the Turkish government about possible consequences if she were
killed, they did not agree to pay a ransom. Nor did the American
Board of Foreign Missions, for fear of setting a precedent. The Bul-
garians insisted that the crime took place in Turkey and was therefore

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the responsibility of the Turkish government, whereas the Turks be-

lieved the brigands were Bulgarians and so also refused to pay. On
October 3, a month after the abduction, the acting secretary of state
recommended to the foreign secretary of the American Board that the
money be raised by private donations. The secretary of state assured
the Board that the American government would make every effort to
secure money from the government found responsible for the kidnap-
ping, or, at the very least, urge Congress to reimburse the contributors.
With these assurances, a committee of Stone’s friends, her brother
Charles, and the employees of the Christian Herald—the voice of the
ABCFM—began a campaign across the nation to raise money for her
release. Within days they had set up an account for contributions and
notified the State Department that the money would be raised. By
October 26, the committee had raised an astonishing $66,000 for the
ransom of Ellen Stone.43 This rapid mobilization of resources doubt-
less reflected the national network of women’s auxiliaries the women’s
boards had developed to support the missionary work abroad. With
thousands of local branches linked to missionary activities, it is pos-
sible to imagine the outpouring of concern for Ellen Stone and the
immediate response to the request for donations to free her from cap-
tivity.
What followed was a series of complicated and arcane negotiations
among representatives of the State Department, the governments of
Bulgaria, Russia, Turkey, and England, and finally the kidnappers
themselves. During this interminable period, Stone and Tsilka were
moved from place to place in the Macedonian mountains with winter
approaching and Tsilka nearing childbirth. The ransom had been col-
lected in October, and no one involved would have predicted that the
captivity would drag on through the winter. Tsilka gave birth on 2
January 1902.44 Both women later presented vivid and dramatic ac-
counts of their primitive accommodations, the places they were taken,
and the drama of Tsilka’s childbirth in captivity. Never in their mem-
oirs, however, do the women identify their captors, nor do they crit-
icize the cause for which they were held in captivity. In the letters
written by Stone pleading for the government to meet the ransom
demands and save her life, she signed her name using the Bulgarian
form, Ellenova. She never says whether that signature was coerced or
chosen.
In the end, the kidnappers were never identified or caught, and
only revealed their identities by choice many years later. While the

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missionaries and American and Turkish government officials were

convinced the kidnappers were part of the Macedonian movement,
they had no tangible evidence and neither Stone nor Tsilka was very
helpful in providing information that could have led to their capture.
In interviews with police immediately upon their release, as in the
accounts in McClure’s, Stone reported the brigands were “unquestion-
ably Turkish subjects,” despite their fluency in the Bulgarian language
and failure to follow Muslim traditions of food or prayer. While she
probably told no outright lies, Stone “could not remember” much of
what she was asked about.45 The Ottoman government suspected that
the plan had been carried out with the knowledge and agreement of
the Tsilkas, who were Christian Bulgarians. Journalists at the time
reported that most people did not suspect that Stone was a willing
participant in her own kidnapping, but they did suspect her of not
telling the whole truth. It is possible that Stone’s captors threatened
her and Katerina Tsilka, whose family lived in Bansko, within easy
reach of the Macedonian revolutionaries. Perhaps Stone chose to pro-
tect Tsilka’s family, or to preserve the interests of the Protestant mis-
sion; perhaps she deliberately protected her captors.46
Stone did not reveal any incriminating information about the band
once she returned to the United States. She may have provided more
information in a book she was writing, but the manuscript was de-
stroyed in a fire at her home in Massachusetts in 1908.47 She did,
however, become an ardent and open supporter of Macedonian in-
dependence and the leading exponent of Ottoman responsibility for
the affair. In a series of lectures across the United States in 1903 and
1904, Stone described Turkish atrocities in Macedonia and preached
the necessity of freeing Macedonia from the Ottoman Empire. At the
end of the 1902 memoir in McClure’s, she summarized her position:
Had Turkey ever fulfilled her promise, made twenty-four years ago
in the Treaty of Berlin, to introduce reforms for the betterment of
the various Christian nations ruled over by her, Macedonia might
not be overrun and terrorized as now it is by brigands and this
strange spectacle of women kidnapped by them and held in the heart
of the Balkan peninsula for an exorbitant ransom might never have
happened.

Stone’s lectures led many missionaries to strongly censure her for

“singing too much the song of the brigands themselves,”48 and the
American Board finally warned her that they would have to disasso-

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ciate themselves from her if she continued her anti-Turk, pro-

Macedonian lectures.
Over the next few years, Stone petitioned the government to re-
imburse each of the more than 2,200 individuals who had contributed
to her ransom. From 1905 to 1908, she pressed the State Department
to secure repayment from the responsible government, but the State
Department could not determine whether the claim should be pressed
against Turkey or Bulgaria. Unsatisfied, Stone took the matter to Con-
gress, which was responsive, having been notified by the secretary of
state that the assurances of repayment had been “instrumental in en-
abling Miss Stone’s friends to secure the sum of $66,000.” Between
1908 and 1912, the Senate four times passed legislation authorizing
repayment of the money raised to ransom Ellen Stone, but the bill
never passed the House of Representatives. Finally, on 21 May 1912,
Congress passed a bill enabling the secretary of state to return to
contributors who filed a claim within two years of the passage of the
bill “the money raised to pay the ransom for the release of Miss Ellen
M. Stone, an American missionary to Turkey who was abducted by
brigands on September third, nineteen hundred and one.”49
What happened to Ellen Stone? What led to her transformation
from a New England Congregationalist missionary to a spokesperson
for the Macedonian revolutionary cause? We can assume that the mis-
sionary Ellen Stone did not intend to become the Patty Hearst of her
day. The plight of the Bulgarian Christian community undoubtedly
influenced her attitudes up to the moment of her capture in 1901, and
her support for the Bulgarian cause is unexpected but understandable.
Perhaps by then Stone believed her calling was not only to teach and
uplift, but also to assist in the political liberation of an oppressed
Christian minority. Surely Stone could not have predicted her own
transformation from a traveling missionary educator in remote Mac-
edonian villages to the centerpiece of an international political kid-
napping.
Stone came to Macedonia with a level of education still unusual
among American women and a deep Protestant conviction of the in-
violability of the individual in relation to God. She found herself the
guest of a government hostile to the people she came to serve, in a
period of international political alignments, when she knew of and
even witnessed brutal acts by the Turkish government against the Prot-
estant Bulgarians. In concert with the long-standing universal mis-
sionary practice of learning the vernacular language, Stone was fluent

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in Bulgarian, not Turkish. Her educational goals for women and chil-
dren, her Protestant religious convictions, her belief in republican free-
doms, and her years of intimate familiarity and friendship with, and
concern for, the people among whom she worked are possible reasons
for her decision to publicly support the Macedonian cause after nearly
six months in captivity. Stone never told us why she adopted her views,
but upon her return, she publicized them, clearly and often, to the
alarm of the American Board.
The transformation of Ellen Stone is a study in her evolution from
educator and evangelist to advocate for the political rights of a Chris-
tian minority. While she went abroad with the conviction that she
could promote Protestant Christianity, education, and respect for
women, she departed as a political prisoner and partisan for the Mac-
edonian liberation movement. Stone redirected the impulse for phi-
lanthropy and education to a lifetime commitment to political reform.
In this way, she is not unlike her college classmates who became set-
tlement workers and advocates for social change. In the process, she
abandoned the binary distinctions that defined “other” as inferior and
misguided, and replaced them with a view of the people of Macedonia
as oppressed equals.

“In all mission fields,” Merguerian argues, “the American schools

were popular with the indigenous populations, but not always for the
reasons intended by the board. American schools became a vehicle for
the acquisition of a Western education by students who often had no
interest in the Protestant religion.”50 Indeed, this proved to be the case
in Turkey. Why, then, did missionaries continue to go to these unre-
pentant lands, generation after generation, and why did they stay?
Missionaries were educators, adventurers, and reformers of a particular
sort, who shared some commonalities. They were middle class, well
educated for their day, and had not ventured beyond their own regions
before taking off alone into a challenging and often dangerous un-
known. In addition to their commitment to Christian service, they
were captivated by the stories told by missionaries on furlough, indi-
viduals who fueled their imaginations with images of exotic places and
wild adventures. It is not surprising that the American Board com-
missioners worried about their motivations.
Missionary status both allowed women to travel alone and defined
the parameters of their experiences. It was work that required a level
of commitment and confidence unasked-for in other work they might

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have chosen. The missionaries in the field did not stay because they
were successful at bringing the heathen to Christ. At this they were
decidedly unsuccessful. They stayed because they became bilingual,
bicultural, and embedded in the daily lives of their communities. Each
was deeply committed to the education of girls and women, and to
the improvement of the lives of individuals. The missionaries who
stayed were able to maintain high standards of education, while in-
corporating the fundamental values of local cultures. Ellen Stone could
teach Bible studies and support a political insurrection against her host
country. And the Ely sisters, dramatically importing a Steinway piano
from Boston to their mountain village in eastern Turkey, did not con-
vert many Armenians to Protestantism, but did teach girls to read and
write and offered them the chance to be teachers as well as wives. The
missionaries presented here, and many others like them, were as pro-
foundly changed by their experiences as they were agents of change
for the people of their adopted towns and villages.

NOTES
Research for this chapter was made possible through a generous grant from the
Spencer Foundation. I would also like to acknowledge sabbatical and Faculty Fellow-
ship support from Indiana University Northwest and the office of Indiana University
International Programs.

1. See, for example, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Missionary Enterprise and Theories
of Imperialism,” in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John King
Fairbank (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974); William R. Hutchison,
Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1987); and Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study
of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (1935; reprint, Chicago: Quadrangle,
1963).
2. This idea is developed by Barbara J. Merguerian in “Mt. Holyoke Seminary
in Bitlis: Providing an American Education for Armenian Women,” Armenian Review
43 (spring 1990): 31–65.
3. For an account of the founding of the American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions, see William Ellsworth Strong, The Story of the American Board: An
Account of the First Hundred Years of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions (1910; reprint, New York: Arno, 1969), 7–9; and Fred Field Goodsell, You
Shall Be My Witness: An Interpretation of the History of the American Board, 1810–1960
(Boston: ABCFM, 1959), 5–10.
4. See Lian Xi, The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant
Missions in China, 1907–1932 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1997), 7.

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5. The history of the ABCFM is vast and complex, encompassing missionary

enterprises in Japan, China, the Ottoman Empire, Africa, India, Burma, Bulgaria,
and the American West. The most complete archival holdings for the ABCFM are
in the Houghton Manuscript Library of Harvard University, including the years from
its founding in 1810 to 1967. The majority of the primary material for this chapter
comes from the ABCFM archive of the Houghton Library.
6. The first missionary was sent to India in 1812, and the second to the Sand-
wich Islands (Hawai’i) in 1819 (Frank A. Stone, “Mt. Holyoke’s Impact on the Land
of Mt. Ararat” [reprinted in The Muslim World: A Quarterly Review of History, Culture,
Religions, and the Christian Mission in Islamdom 66 (1976): 44–57]). Emma Bliss, the
wife of one of the ABCFM founders, Reverend H. J. Van Lenney, was a Mount
Holyoke graduate and the first woman to perish in service to Turkey, one year after
her arrival there in 1834, becoming a martyr and heroine of the new missionary
agenda.
7. The most comprehensive analysis of the Mount Holyoke tradition and its
relationship to the missionary movement is in Amanda Porterfield, Mary Lyon and
the Mount Holyoke Missionaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). See also
Bess Vickery, Mount Holyoke Courageous: A Call to the Near East (New York: Carlton,
1994); and Merguerian, “Mt. Holyoke Seminary in Bitlis.”
8. Porterfield, Mary Lyon, 5.
9. Eager for women’s support of mission work, Anderson nevertheless opposed
sending single women missionaries abroad; he also opposed the formation of the
women’s boards. It was not until his retirement in 1866 that the women’s boards were
approved under the leadership of Rev. N. G. Clark, who succeeded Anderson and
supported women’s missionary work from the beginning of his appointment.
10. Stone, “Mt. Holyoke’s Impact,” 47.
11. Ibid.
12. Quoted in Noriko Kawamura Ishii, “American Women Missionaries at Kobe
College, 1873–1909” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1998), 48. As early
as 1834 Rev. David Abeel, a missionary in China, had appealed to Christian women
in the U.S. and England to evangelize among the degraded native women in India
and China (47).
13. Between the years 1837 and 1940, a total of almost four hundred Mount
Holyoke graduates were appointed overseas, of whom some sixty served in the four
American Board missions in Turkey (Stone, “Mt. Holyoke’s Impact,” 47).
14. Vickery, Mount Holyoke Courageous, xxii.
15. For an excellent study of the impact of missionary education on Turkish
women in the early twentieth century, see Odul Bozkurt, “The Making of Young
Women at an American Missionary School in Early Republican Turkey: A Study
Based on the Life Histories of the 1928–1940 Graduates of the American Collegiate
Institute for Girls in Izmir” (master’s thesis, Bogazici University, Turkey, 1995).
16. See Louise Porter Thomas, Seminary Militant: An Account of the Missionary
Movement at Mount Holyoke Seminary and College (South Hadley, Mass.: Department
of English, Mount Holyoke College, 1937).
17. Patricia R. Hill, The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign
Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1985), 2–3, 8.

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ROBERTA WOLLONS

18. Ishii, “American Women Missionaries,” 44.

19. Ibid., 45. The Woman’s Union Missionary Society was organized in 1861.
Formation of the ABCFM Women’s Board was followed by Methodist, Presbyterian,
Baptist, and Episcopal women’s boards.
20. Ishii, “American Women Missionaries,” 46. In 1889, the total revenue from
the American Board in the Interior District was $93,164, of which $45,701 came
from the WBMI.
21. R. Pierce Beaver, All Loves Excelling: American Protestant Women in World
Mission (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1968), 63.
22. Ishii, “American Women Missionaries,” 58.
23. The ABCFM closed down the women’s boards in 1927. For a full discussion,
see Ishii, epilogue, 304–31.
24. Goodsell, You Shall Be My Witness, 162.
25. Ishii, “American Women Missionaries,” 42.
26. Their idea of a collegiate curriculum was largely comparable to that offered
at Mount Holyoke.
27. Ishii, “American Women Missionaries,” 74.
28. Ibid., 79.
29. Anna Edwards Alumnae Biographical File, Mount Holyoke College Archives
and Special Collections, South Hadley, Mass.
30. Bozkurt, “The Making of Young Women,” 19.
31. Merguerian, “Mt. Holyoke Seminary in Bitlis,” 33–34.
32. Prior to 1868, wives of missionaries, although they had “assistant missionary”
status, were not given much responsibility, nor were they often trained as teachers.
They were largely expected to support the work of their husbands, organize meetings
for women, and visit homes. In Turkey, the customary separation of women from
men made the role of the missionary wives more important.
33. Merguerian, “Mt. Holyoke Seminary in Bitlis,” 35.
34. Ibid., 39.
35. Ibid., 44.
36. Lian Xi, Conversion, 9–10.
37. Ellen Stone, “Six Months among Brigands,” McClure’s Magazine, May 1902,
3.
38. The non-Muslim population of Macedonia was diverse, including Greeks,
Serbs, Albanians, Bulgarians, Jews, and Gypsies, with each group feeling vulnerable
to the Turkish government.
39. Laura Beth Sherman, Fires on the Mountain: The Macedonian Revolutionary
Movement and the Kidnapping of Ellen Stone (Boulder, Colo.: East European Mono-
graphs, distributed by Columbia University Press, 1980), 22.
40. Eugene P. Lyle, Jr., “An American Woman Captured by Brigands,” Every-
body’s Magazine, January 1902, 44–55.
41. The details of their days in captivity, the consideration shown to them by
their captors, the discomforts of their daily existence, and the cold of winter were
published in a six-part series in McClure’s Magazine, May to October 1902.
42. Sherman, Fires on the Mountain, 37.
43. Ibid., 49. There were 2,261 donors to the Ellen Stone fund.

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44. Katerina Tsilka’s detailed account of the conditions under which her daughter
was born appeared in McClure’s Magazine, August 1902.
45. Sherman, Fires on the Mountain, 88.
46. Ibid., 89–90.
47. Ibid., 89.
48. Ibid., 90.
49. Actually, $77,432 was contributed to the ransom fund (House Committee on
Claims, Repayment of Ransom of Ellen Stone, 62nd Cong., 2nd sess., 1912, H. Rept.
807, 2–3, 5).
50. Barbara Merguerian, “The Beginnings of Armenian Women: The Armenian
Female Seminary in Constantinople,” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 5
(1991): 117.

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 8. Sisters in Service: African American Sororities and
Philanthropic Support of Education
Marybeth Gasman

African American sororities have long been one of the major arenas
for black self-help and educational advancement. Their rise can best
be understood within the context of black women’s advances within
education and the professions in the early twentieth century. Faced
with the challenges of racism and sexism, African American women
had few career options in the early 1900s. They were refused entry
into most professions other than domestic work,1 encountering sub-
stantial barriers to entry even into the so-called women’s careers, such
as nursing, social work, and teaching.2 Despite these considerable ob-
stacles, African American women sought out education as a way to
move beyond a life of servitude and to acquire the “greater quality of
life and status derived from professional work.”3
The progress that black women achieved in education and the
professions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was
felt not on the level of the individual but in the growing consciousness
of black women as a group. Indeed, progress in education and the
professions led to the development of several black women’s organi-
zations between the late 1800s and the mid-1920s, among them the
National Association of Colored Women and the National Republican
Colored Women’s League. The era also saw black women increase
their participation in established organizations that spoke to their life
circumstances, such as the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and the
Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA).4 And, during this
same period, black female students began to organize and founded

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black sororities on college campuses. Through these venues, black

women learned “how to identify issues needing to be addressed, how
to mobilize their sisters, how to develop persuasive arguments and how
to fight for the survival and well-being of their families and com-
munities.”5
This chapter illuminates the philanthropic efforts of black sorority
women to support and further education—both formal and informal—
as a means of serving their communities and working toward social
justice. Such an exploration of black women’s work in sororities can
deepen our historical understanding of the range and significance of
black women’s civic leadership and contributions to public life. Al-
though this aspect of history is too often overlooked, black women
were influential players before and during the Civil Rights movement.6
Women “organized and operated the structures of the movement, the
groups that got things done, while men were spokespersons who in-
teracted with white male leadership.” The church, specifically, provided
black women with opportunities to lead the masses and “share the
tribulations they encountered on the job and at home while providing
them the means and faith to triumph and overcome their trials and
tribulations.”7 According to Laverne Gyant, this communal experience
in the church led to a desire for similar coalitions in educational arenas
as well as in the professions.8 Black sororities are an example of the
coalitions to which Gyant refers.
Despite their important contributions to education, philanthropy,
and civil rights, however, African American sororities have received
scant coverage by historians. This is due in large part to the secretive
nature of these organizations. Several of the sororities have not opened
their records to the general public; as a result, interested parties must
piece together information through oral histories, house histories, and
small collections of documents at various colleges across the country.
In recent years, two authors have examined the history of the black
Greek system; both are “insiders.” Lawrence C. Ross, Jr., has provided
a basic overview of the nine most prominent fraternities and sororities,
one that summarizes their goals and activities.9 Paula Giddings has
looked more intensely at one group, crafting a well-documented por-
trait of Delta Sigma Theta that situates the sorority nicely in the
political, social, and economic contexts in which it developed.10 Other
scholars have explored the experiences of individual black sorority
members who have led prominent lives.11 However, the literature in
this area lacks an explicit discussion of sorority membership and par-

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ticipation as a means of philanthropic action. Likewise, although Dar-

lene Clark Hine, Kathleen Thompson, and Evelyn Brooks Higgin-
botham look at the role of African American women in shaping the
church and society, they do not focus their discussions on philanthropy
per se.12 This study seeks to set the history of black sororities in a
broader context of education and action for social justice.
Like their white counterparts, black sororities were founded by
college women “with the idea of creating social bonds or a sense of
sisterhood among [their] members.”13 These young women were ini-
tially interested in transforming the individual sorority member into a
“finer woman,” but given the important societal issues receiving greater
notice at the turn of the century, their purposes came to include
women’s and civil rights issues.14 According to Giddings, sorority lead-
ership shaped the members to be “agents of change”: leaders educated
members about the political and legislative issues of the time, includ-
ing the suffrage movement and the racial climate for blacks.15
Greek life is, in limited respects, similar for African American and
white women. Both groups’ organizations have an esoteric culture that
is rich with ritual and symbols and subject to charges of exclusivity.
Each has membership criteria and some sort of “intake” procedure,16
and members in each organization form social bonds with similarly
minded students.17 While membership is lifelong in both systems, in
the case of African American sororities, women generally make a life-
time commitment to volunteerism, philanthropic giving, and the sup-
port of the African American people.18
Membership in a black sorority historically has been considered a
sign of commitment to one’s scholarly pursuits and a “mark of aca-
demic distinction.”19 The emphasis on scholarship served two main
purposes. First, it was proof of the intellectual capabilities of black
women in a society that doubted their ability to succeed in the aca-
demic environment. Second, it signaled the sororities’ efforts to in-
crease black women’s access to education, as part of the racial obli-
gation to “graduate and reach back to uplift others.”20 In this sense,
the goals of black sororities were much closer to those of honor so-
cieties like Phi Beta Kappa than they were to those of their white
counterparts. According to Lawrence Otis Graham, “[black] sororities
. . . are a lasting identity, a circle of lifetime friends, [and] a base for
future political and civic activism.”21
This chapter will explore the contributions of African American
sororities to education, especially with regard to women’s education in

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the twentieth century. It will consider the sororities’ funding of schol-

arships, schools, and colleges, as well as their support of specific causes
related to education, such as desegregation and civil rights. The chap-
ter will also demonstrate the sororities’ efforts to educate a cadre of
future professionals. As this effort was often subject to charges of
elitism and exclusivity,22 the chapter will discuss the complex social
and economic factors involved in the development and maintenance
of these organizations.

ESTABLISHED WITH A FOUNDATION OF PHILANTHROPY

Ethel Hedgeman, a student at Howard University, developed the
idea of forming a sorority in the summer before her junior year.
Hedgeman told her friends about her plan to “form an association of
women students through which the talents and strengths of these stu-
dents could be organized for the mutual benefits of all.”23 Ethel’s
friends began working to create a formalized structure; within a week
of solidifying their idea, the young women approached the Howard
University administration to apply for official organizational status on
the black college campus.24 Shortly afterward, in 1908, the university
conferred this status on the organization, named Alpha Kappa Alpha
(AKA). The nation’s first white sorority, Alpha Delta Pi, had been
established fifty-seven years earlier.
At first glance, AKA appeared to be mimicking a white cultural
tradition. However, its members were dedicated to community activ-
ism and service to the African American community and saw the
formalized student organization as a way to accomplish their goals.25
According to the preamble of AKA’s 1909 constitution, the sorority
was established to “cultivate high scholastic and ethical standards, im-
prove the social stature of the race, and promote unity and friendship
among college women.”26 In the words of AKA’s twenty-third Su-
preme Basileus (president) Mary Shy Scott, sorority leaders took their
founding charter seriously: “Every president has tried to emulate the
preamble and to make sure that under her watch there’s a print that
shows that she’s been there.”27
With the success of the Howard chapter, AKA members soon
decided to expand to other college campuses. This required some
changes in organizational structure—such as legal incorporation. But
a group of younger members pushed for more extensive changes. They
questioned the meaning of the sorority’s name, noting that it was a

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MARYBETH GASMAN

mere offshoot of their male counterpart, Alpha Phi Alpha (established

1906). Motivated by the feminist movement of 1912, the young
women wanted to move AKA in a more political direction nationally.28
Part of their inspiration also came from the emergence of strong black
intellectual leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois.29 Unable to reach con-
sensus, the membership divided; those advocating broader changes es-
tablished Delta Sigma Theta on 13 January 1913.30
The Delta members pledged to work to establish a sorority that
was “not only a social group but a working group,” with each young
woman committed to helping her own community.31 They sought to
use “their collective strength to promote academic excellence and to
provide assistance to persons in need.”32 Although the Delta mission
is similar to that of AKA, the organization considers itself the first
and only black sorority founded specifically on the principle of ser-
vice—thus, to the Delta members, service was a mark of status.33
It would be seven more years before another black sorority would
form on the Howard University campus. Zeta Phi Beta (Zeta) was
founded by five women on 16 January 1920.34 According to one mod-
ern Zeta history, “These women dared to depart from the traditional
coalitions for black women and sought to establish a new organization
predicated on the precepts of Scholarship, Service, Sisterly Love and
Finer Womanhood.”35 However, this “daring” mission appears quite
similar to that of the AKAs and the Deltas. Perhaps, as Lawrence
Otis Graham suggests, the Zetas’ need to create a new sorority was
due to ideological or class differences within the existing sororities.36
Several years later, on 12 November 1922, seven young women
organized another sorority—Sigma Gamma Rho (Sigma)—that em-
phasized service and achievement. What differentiated it from previ-
ous sororities was its location on a predominantly white campus: Butler
University in Indianapolis, Indiana. The founders had a straightfor-
ward mission: in accordance with their motto “Greater Service,
Greater Progress,”37 they sought “to promote and encourage high
scholastic attainment.”38

GROOMING FOR MEMBERSHIP

As the sororities grew, so did their reach into the community. For
example, AKA Supreme Basileus Mary Shy Scott was groomed for
this leadership position by her sixth-grade piano teacher: “She was an
excellent person to emulate. She was determined that I would be an

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 SISTERS IN SERVICE

Alpha Kappa Alpha.” As an undergraduate, Scott attended Spelman

College, which did not allow sororities on campus at the time—so she
joined after graduation. Scott’s experience highlights a key difference
between black and white sororities. Many African American women
join a graduate sorority chapter instead of joining during their under-
graduate years. Scott explained, “We are structured differently from
other sororities. We have undergraduate chapters and graduate chap-
ters. This makes us unique and keeps our members involved.”39
Like Scott, Sibyl Avery Jackson was groomed from birth to be a
member of Delta Sigma Theta. In her words, “All the women in my
family are Deltas. My mom had a Delta paddle that she kept visible
in our house. . . . I didn’t even think about which sorority to join. I
was raised on public service and excellence and that’s what Delta
Sigma Theta embodies.”40 Another AKA member, Zenda Bowie,
joined the sorority while attending Talladega College. Her mother was
an AKA member, as were most of the women in her family. According
to Bowie, “AKA is a service organization that is specifically interested
in doing whatever we can to enhance the community and lift up our
people. This organization is about empowering and education. Edu-
cation empowers people.”41 Giddings has noted that the “challenge of
the sorority . . . is to maintain that sense of sisterhood while striving,
organizationally, for a more general purpose: aiding the Black com-
munity as a whole through social, political, and economic means.”42
These black women had many reasons for joining a sorority, but many
of those reasons were shared, including their interests in education,
their desire to cultivate future professional women, and their support
of desegregation and civil rights activities.

SUPPORTING EDUCATION THROUGH PHILANTHROPY

Large-scale activism and philanthropy began among black sorori-
ties with the involvement of Delta Sigma Theta members in the 3
March 1913 march on Washington on behalf of women’s suffrage.
The Deltas marched with women of all backgrounds and ethnicities
and endured taunts and insults from an angry crowd. According to
the Baltimore Afro-American, “The women, trudging stoutly along un-
der great difficulties, were able to complete their march only when
troops of cavalry from Fort Myers were rushed into Washington to
take charge of Pennsylvania Avenue.”43 By participating in the march,
the Deltas were acting in defiance of the Howard University admin-

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MARYBETH GASMAN

istration and, in many cases, against the wishes of their parents.44 Par-
ticipation in the Woman’s Suffragette March was the beginning of the
Deltas’ enduring commitment to service.
Black sororities fulfilled their stated commitment to education in
a variety of ways. In the 1940s, the Grand Basileus of Zeta Phi Beta,
Lullelia Harrison, initiated the Prevention and Control of Juvenile
Delinquency project. The Zeta sisters were cognizant of increasing
problems with juvenile delinquency and wanted to launch a national
effort to provide young people with an alternative to crime. In con-
junction with U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark, the Zetas designed
neighborhood-specific programs to aid youth.45 Involvement with chil-
dren, especially young girls, has been a cornerstone of Zeta activities.
For example, the Manhattan alumnae chapter in New York City, char-
tered in 1950, formed a cohesive partnership with Gompers High
School in the Bronx. In cooperation with the school’s administration,
the Zeta volunteers taught reading, math, and science to African
American and Hispanic girls in after-school programs. Over time, the
sorority’s volunteer efforts grew to include an emphasis on writing,
which culminated in scholarship competitions. From the onset of their
scholarship program, the Zetas tracked the recipients, inquiring as to
their success after college, and many times brought them into the
sorority as undergraduate or graduate members.46 By stressing academ-
ics, the Zetas encouraged women to strive for greater achievement in
education, especially in nontraditional areas.
Because there were very few college-educated women during the
early years of the black sororities, the members of Alpha Kappa Alpha
became role models for many youth. This role was formalized at the
AKA’s fifteenth anniversary Boule (annual meeting) in Baltimore,
Maryland, in 1923. Following Booker T. Washington’s “practical ap-
proach” to education, the sorority decided to formally support what it
called “vocational education” for children. But the AKA program also
encompassed skills that went beyond the menial work often associated
with industrial or vocational education.47 The AKA women wanted to
“help students qualify for entrance into . . . [the] professions.”48
During their 1937 national convention, the sisters of Delta Sigma
Theta launched a nationwide library project. Their efforts addressed
an urgent need in the black community—especially in rural areas—
for reading education. Of the nine million African Americans living
in the South, two-thirds were without public library services and thus
had little or no exposure to books.49 The national chapter of Delta

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 SISTERS IN SERVICE

Sigma Theta asked all of its chapters to donate a minimum of ten

books, worth approximately $2.50 each. Each local chapter was
equipped with a “book basket with a lock and key to facilitate the
transportation of the books.”50 The project was aided by the contri-
butions of Delta member Mollie Lee, who held teaching positions at
Atlanta University and North Carolina College. Lee advised the li-
brary project and asked local teachers and principals to help by as-
sisting with the distribution of books. Perhaps one of the most in-
novative aspects of the program was the emphasis on providing books
about black history and black achievement to people in rural com-
munities, a strategy that gave African American children a glimpse of
the past and of the possibilities that lay ahead. After the first year of
the program, many teachers and parents wrote to the Deltas to pro-
claim their appreciation for the library project. Even more significant,
several of the rural towns continued the sorority’s efforts by creating
permanent libraries.51 In areas that could not support the infrastructure
of a library, the Deltas offered help—sometimes providing furniture,
film projectors, and trained personnel.52 The Deltas were also instru-
mental in lobbying state legislatures in Georgia, North Carolina, and
Alabama for library funds, and when none were allotted they provided
bookmobiles with librarians.53

PHILANTHROPIC EFFORTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

In a letter to me dated 29 August 2001, AKA member Joanne
Jackson Jones remarked, “Our sorority has placed an emphasis on ed-
ucation by offering scholarships to students who are academically wor-
thy and to students who demonstrate a financial need.” Her words
exemplify the black sororities’ commitment to higher education, spe-
cifically scholarships for African American women. At their fifth
Boule, for example, the AKAs established a fund “to be used as a
revolving loan for members who needed financial aid to further their
education and made long-range plans for the establishment of grad-
uate awards for foreign study.” A form of self-help, this fund strength-
ened the black female economic base by helping women to attain
higher degrees and enter higher-paying professions.54 According to
Supreme Basileus Mary Shy Scott, the AKAs “support education first
because the ladies who started the sorority were students at Howard
University and realized two things: that there were black women com-
ing into Washington, D.C., who needed support and help and that

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MARYBETH GASMAN

there were black children coming in who needed support, help, and
education.”55
Alpha Kappa Alpha did much to support women and children
with their Summer School for Rural Negro Teachers program, which
was developed in 1934.56 Through this program, AKA volunteers
sponsored classes in early child development, art, music, social sci-
ences, and other topics that served the needs of the rural teachers.
This was especially important to African American female teachers in
the South because they rarely had opportunities for professional de-
velopment.57 Moreover, additional training for teachers had a signifi-
cant impact on the education of children living in rural areas.58
Within the ranks of AKA, there were many role models for young
women. One of the most influential AKA women was founder Lucy
Diggs Slowe. A nationally known educator, Slowe started as a teacher
at Armstrong High School in Washington, D.C., in 1915, and later
was asked by the board of education to organize the first junior high
school in the area.59 She served as principal of the school for three
years and then secured a position as the first dean of women at How-
ard University.60 In addition to her duties as dean, Slowe created the
National Association of College Women and served as the organiza-
tion’s president. A visionary, Slowe “began in 1933 [to] emphasize the
importance of education for all women and [to] advis[e] that Black
women, in particular, study economics and government so as to have
the necessary knowledge to improve social conditions for Black peo-
ple.”61 According to biographer Linda M. Perkins, “Unlike many who
often discussed educating women for the ‘uplift’ and benefit of the
race, Slowe wanted to prepare black women for the ‘modern’ world”—
a world in which economic stability was crucial.62 Slowe’s ideas were
consistent with those of prominent black sociologists of her day, spe-
cifically Charles S. Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois.63 Both men called
for economic stability as a way to gain equality.
In addition to individual economic autonomy, the women of Alpha
Kappa Alpha promoted financial stability for black colleges. On a
grand scale, they supported the efforts of the United Negro College
Fund (UNCF), as did the other three sororities. The UNCF was an
example of African Americans working together to pool their fund-
raising efforts in order to aid institutions that did not have access to
prominent philanthropists.64 Individual chapters and the national
chapter have contributed funds to the UNCF annually from its incep-

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tion in 1944 to the present. Further, the leadership of AKA publicly

supported the efforts of the UNCF leadership.65
Individual Alpha Kappa Alpha chapters and coalitions of chapters
worked together to support individual black colleges. According to
AKA historian Marjorie Parker, “They support[ed] ‘their’ [black col-
leges] through financial support, community and public relations ef-
forts, [and] recruitment of students.”66 The focus on black colleges has
been a major tenet of the AKA’s mission from its beginnings. In par-
ticular, the sorority has paid attention to first-generation college stu-
dents and transfer students coming from community colleges to the
four-year setting. Sorority members also placed special emphasis on
encouraging HBCU students who have “majored in the areas of sci-
ence or technology to go on to graduate school.”67 This is another
example of black sorority efforts to reshape women’s education to in-
clude fields that traditionally have been dominated by men.

POLITICAL ACTIVITY, CIVIL RIGHTS, DESEGREGATION, AND PHILANTHROPY

Given their support of social and economic equality through ed-
ucation, it is not surprising that black sororities also promoted legal
equality through their philanthropic efforts in the area of desegregation
and civil rights issues.68 The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision
was the impetus for much change and activity among black sororities.
The women of Zeta Phi Beta, for example, showed their support by
opening leadership roles in the sorority to non–African Americans.
They also began to affiliate with and financially support the National
Council of Negro Women and the National Congress of Christians
and Jews. Individual members of the sorority did their part in the civil
rights movement as well. Prior to the well-publicized Woolworth sit-
ins, Clara Luper worked “to integrate the eating establishments of
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and ultimately was successful.”69 Likewise,
in the late 1950s, the women of Zeta Phi Beta gave both verbal and
financial backing to the nine high school students who attempted to
integrate Little Rock Central High School. To support the students,
the sisters drafted a formal citation at their Dallas Boule and donated
$500 to the students in honor of their efforts.70
The women of Alpha Kappa Alpha solidified their role in national
political change under the leadership of Supreme Basileus Barbara
Phillips. According to Mary Shy Scott, Phillips “pulled a committee

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together internationally—one representative from every region—and

they planned how [AKAs] as a group could support the political rights
of our people first, and second, look at candidates and educate our
people on how to vote.”71 This political force was a bi-partisan effort
that focused on education and civil rights. According to AKA member
Zenda Bowie, “the sorority places an emphasis on educating blacks so
that they become more active and able to participate in race relations
issues.”72
Of course, this was not the first time that the AKAs had come
together in an effort to lobby for civil rights and changes in education.
Under the leadership of Norma Boyd in 1938, the AKAs formed the
Non-Partisan Lobby for Economic and Democratic Rights. Boyd’s
lobbying efforts concentrated on the alleviation of police brutality, the
attainment of the minimum wage for laundresses, and access to edu-
cation for blacks. However, after much internal discussion, the Non-
Partisan Lobby was renamed the American Council on Human
Rights and grew to encompass most of the black sororities and fra-
ternities.73 Parker writes that the “invitation to other Greek letter
groups to share that unity and cooperative action was a significant
trend of the times, and, in this unprecedented action, AKA once again
blazed a trail toward a new level of cooperation among fraternities and
sororities.”74
Sigma Gamma Rho concentrated its civil rights efforts on mone-
tary support of the NAACP and President Johnson’s Anti-Poverty
Program;75 however, Delta Sigma Theta took a more frontline ap-
proach to making change. For example, after a violent outbreak of
police bullying during the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965,
Delta member Lynnett Taylor helped students rally support for the
civil rights movement at Alabama State University. Likewise, the Delta
chapter at South Carolina State University sponsored parties at which
it raised money for bail bonds for student activists. Further, much like
their sisters in Zeta Phi Beta, the Deltas supported the efforts of the
Little Rock nine. They gave $300 to the students and additional sup-
port to Daisy Bates, the president of the Little Rock NAACP, who
led the students in their efforts. When Bates’s NAACP newspaper the
State Press was in danger of going under because advertisers were afraid
to continue support, eighty-three Delta chapters banded together and
purchased ads so the paper could continue to serve as a much-needed
information source for blacks.76 In the words of Giddings, “In the

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fifties, before the sit-ins, before the national press gave sanctions to
defying state authorities, before going to jail or losing one’s job became
a badge of honor, before, even, the NAACP had become entirely
‘comfortable’ with Bates’s methods of direct challenge, Delta had sup-
ported Bates when few others did.”77
In a 1959 incident, Petersburg, Virginia, officials tried to prevent
fifty-seven black seniors from graduating from high school. Rather
than comply with the Supreme Court’s mandate to integrate the
schools, officials shut them down. To aid the students, Delta Sigma
Theta raised scholarship money so that students could attend schools
elsewhere and graduate on time. In 1961 and 1962, the Deltas sup-
ported students trying to desegregate schools in McComb, Mississippi,
and Albany, Georgia. According to Giddings, these events “signified
a less conventional posture of the sorority.” Unlike some of the other
groups, Deltas were willing to support efforts that “confronted au-
thorities with direct-action campaigns.”78

CREATING PROFESSIONAL WOMEN

Black sororities have trained, supported, and funded African
American women to help them pursue their career goals. According
to Walter M. Kimbrough, membership in black Greek organizations
is “valued overwhelmingly among members, [and] provide[s] them
with more and earlier opportunities for leadership development than
[do] White-dominated student groups [and local organizations].”79
With this leadership experience comes more pressure to be responsible
and take care of the less fortunate among the race. Darlene Clark Hine
and Kathleen Thompson note that “the more educated [the women]
were, the greater the sense of being responsible, somehow, for the
advancement of the race and the uplift of black womanhood. They
held these expectations of themselves and found them reinforced by
the demands of the black community and its institutions.”80
Each black sorority has developed and fostered programs to aid
women in their pursuit of leadership roles. Zeta Phi Beta, for example,
has focused on economic and career development programs. Interested
in creating entrepreneurs among black women, each local chapter pro-
vided mentors and resources to young women. Even more important,
the Zetas emphasized careers for women in nontraditional areas such
as space exploration, architecture, contracting, and engineering. Zeta

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MARYBETH GASMAN

women also have been prominent leaders in the field of education.

For example, Elizabeth Koontz was the first black president of the
National Education Association (1968–1969) and Deborah Wolfe
served as the United States education chief (1958–1965).81
Through affiliations with the National Council of Negro Women
(NCNW), which was founded by Delta member Mary McLeod Be-
thune, Delta Sigma Theta also provided leadership opportunities for
African American women. Bethune “wanted black women to be able
to be independent, and to have the means to make it possible for
others to be so as well.” In addition, she “knew the value of jobs and
their connection to the power and independence black women could
have if they commanded extensive government and private re-
sources.”82 As president of the Deltas, Dorothy Height worked for the
same goals that Bethune had set forth for women. In 1944, Height
initiated the Delta Jobs Project to “expand black women’s opportu-
nities beyond the fields of teaching, nursing, and social work. . . . And
to keep Delta members abreast of national and international issues,
Height involved people [in national conventions] who were not di-
rectly tied to race issues.”83 Height’s leadership in Delta Sigma Theta
would eventually lead her to the presidency of the NCNW, a position
in which Height would have even more influence on the future of
black women. Height broadened the organization’s membership and
brought in celebrity personalities like Lena Horne to chair member-
ship drives. In addition to Height and Bethune, Delta Sigma Theta
boasted many other leaders in the area of education, including Mary
Church Terrell, a teacher and founder of the National Association
of Colored Women (NACW). As president of the NACW, Terrell
led efforts to increase services for mothers and children. She was
also instrumental in desegregating Washington, D.C., restaurants in
1953.84
In the 1960s, Alpha Kappa Alpha solidified its efforts to assist
women in the pursuit of leadership roles with the establishment of the
Leadership School and Fellows Program. Annual workshops, which
were held throughout the country, focused on political action, eco-
nomic development, and cultivating future leaders among young
women. Women were also given opportunities to participate in in-
ternships in government, nonprofit, and corporate settings. Perhaps
what was most significant about the Leadership Program is that many
of the women who participated in the early years later returned to
teach and prepare a new generation of young women.85

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ELITIST OR PHILANTHROPIC?
Although founded on philanthropic service and academic excel-
lence, black sororities have become “a magnet for not just the intel-
lectual elite but also the economic elite, who looked at the groups as
a way to distinguish themselves from nonmembers who could not
afford the membership fees or pay for the kinds of clothes, parties,
and automobiles that were de rigueur for members.”86 Of course these
charges of elitism are also leveled at white sororities, but since those
organizations generally are tied to undergraduate experience only, the
effect is less significant. African American sociologist E. Franklin Fra-
zier (1957) and African American newspaper publisher Claude A.
Barnett (1925–1966) have offered the most scathing critiques. In Fra-
zier’s words,

The weekly accounts in the Negro press of the activities of Negro

“society” are invariably stories of unbridled extravagance. These sto-
ries include a catalogue of the jewelry, the gowns, and mink coats
worn by the women, often accompanied by an estimate of the value
of the clothes and jewelry, and the cost of the parties which they
attend. One constantly reads of “chauffeured” Cadillac cars in which
they ride to parties and of the cost of the homes in which they live.
. . . For these top “social” and intellectual leaders, the fraternities and
sororities represented their most serious interest in life.87

Frustrated with this “black elite,” Frazier wrote that membership in

exclusive organizations served to “differentiate the black bourgeoisie
from the masses of poorer Negroes.”88 He claimed that Washington,
D.C., the very place where three of the four sororities were established,
was the center of black “society.” It was here that the black professional
class was largest and that Howard University, the hallmark of black
education, stood. According to Frazier, “The Negro ‘society’ which
developed in Washington was composed of the upper-class mulattoes
who, in fleeing from persecution and discriminations in the South,
brought to Washington the social distinctions and color snobbery that
had been the basis of their ascendancy in the South.”89
Prior to World War I, family background and skin complexion
were important components of selection for elite organizations, es-
pecially black sororities. However, black social mobility and physical
migration after the war led to changes in the requirements for mem-
bership. “Family background and color snobbishness based upon white

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MARYBETH GASMAN

ancestry” became less important for membership among social elites.90

Instead, occupation and education became the keys to admission into
elite organizations. This transition, according to Frazier, brought on a
black obsession with income level and professional stature. He pays
homage to the volunteer work and philanthropy undertaken by the
black elite but points out that in many cases they spent extravagant
amounts of money creating an atmosphere in which to raise money.
Frazier gives the following example, which appeared in a 25 February
1954 issue of Jet magazine: “There appeared . . . under the section la-
beled ‘People Are Talking About,’ the statement that $1,500 was
raised by a group of . . . society women who wore over $500,000 worth
of furs and gowns.”91 Frazier looked at the community service of fe-
male elite organizations, including sororities, as a justification for their
exclusive nature, which he claimed resulted from their members’ being
shunned by the white middle class.92
Like Frazier, Claude A. Barnett was also highly critical of black
sororities. Barnett was the president of the Associated Negro Press
(ANP), which was the largest black press service in the United
States.93 Founded by Barnett in 1919, the ANP supplied news stories,
opinion columns, essays, and book and movie reviews to black news-
papers throughout the country. The ANP not only provided news to
black communities but also “helped to heighten black self-esteem long
before the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.”94 In 1951, Barnett sent
a letter to Zeta Phi Beta Grand Basileus Nancy Bullock McGhee,
informing her that he would no longer publicize events that were
exclusively social. Barnett wrote similar letters to the leaders of the
other black sororities, warning them that the tradition of merely cel-
ebrating social accomplishments was over.95
Although the types of criticism lodged by Frazier and Barnett have
existed throughout the history of black sororities, the scope of these
organizations’ philanthropic efforts have helped to offset the negative
image such criticism creates. Further, sororities have consciously
worked to change this reputation and portrayal of their organizations.
Black sororities have undergone a “constant redefining of the meaning
of class and achievement within [their] own ranks.”96 According to
Delta Sigma Theta member Tiffany Franklin, “Our founders saw a
need for a black women’s organization that would be more than just
a social organization, sitting around sipping tea and being an arm piece
to a male fraternity. They saw an organization that would recognize

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social injustices of the time and fight to correct them as well as trying
to uplift the black community.”97
As the black sororities emerged historically, they strove to be more
than social clubs and as a result developed into dedicated service or-
ganizations. They have been involved in virtually all aspects of African
American social, political, educational, and economic advance, either
through direct action or through philanthropic support. Black soror-
ities make little distinction between what is political and what is phil-
anthropic. Born of a racial climate that discouraged serious education
for blacks, and particularly black women, these organizations and their
philanthropic efforts remain inherently political.
Through the years, the charge of classism has been lodged against
many elite organizations, including Greek fraternities and sororities,
regardless of their racial make-up. However, to apply this charge uni-
formly to black and white sororities is to ignore the unique leadership
role the African American groups have had in the advancement of
black education through philanthropic means. In the black community
an expectation exists that is not necessarily present in the white com-
munity: “once you make it, you must reach back and pull a sister up.”98
This expectation is even more pronounced among black women, who
arguably have the most difficulty achieving success in a nation that has
not placed faith in their abilities. Seen in this light, the sororities’
achievements have been quite remarkable. By opening their organi-
zational papers to historians of education and philanthropy, black so-
rorities may deflect some of the suspicions that have always been held
about elite social groups. Until then, they will be open to greater crit-
icism and their efforts will continue to be overshadowed by those of
more mainstream philanthropic and voluntary organizations.

NOTES
1. Bettye Collier-Thomas, “The Impact of Black Women in Education: An
Historical Overview,” Journal of Negro Education 51 (summer 1982): 173–80.
2. The following sources discuss the role that black women have played in shap-
ing education: Mary Frances Berry, “Twentieth-Century Black Women in Education,”
Journal of Negro Education 51 (summer 1982): 288–300; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of
Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present
(1985; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1995); and Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your
Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984).

209
MARYBETH GASMAN

3. Paula Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge
of the Black Sorority Movement (New York: William Morrow, 1988), 6.
4. Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Them-
selves, 1894–1994 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); Bettye Collier-Thomas and
V. P. Franklin, Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–
Black Power Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001); and Sibby
Anderson-Thompkins, “Lugenia Burns Hope: Black Clubwoman and Progressive Re-
former” (unpublished class paper, Georgia State University, 2002, in author’s posses-
sion).
5. Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope: The
History of Black Women in America (New York: Broadway, 1998), 245.
6. Constance Carroll, “Three’s a Crowd: The Dilemma of Black Women in
Higher Education,” in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of
Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Bar-
bara Smith (New York: Feminist Press, 1982), 115–28.
7. Hine and Thompson, Shining Thread of Hope, 200; and Laverne Gyant, “Pass-
ing the Torch: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of
Black Studies 25 (May 1996), 637.
8. Gyant, “Passing the Torch.”
9. Lawrence C. Ross, Jr., The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fra-
ternities and Sororities (New York: Kensington, 2000).
10. Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood. See also Felecia Carter Harris, “Race, Gen-
der, Mentoring, and the African American Female College Experience: A Case Study
of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority” (Ph.D. diss., North Carolina State University,
1994).
11. See Linda M. Perkins, “Lucy Diggs Slowe: Champion of the Self-Determi-
nation of African-American Women in Higher Education,” Journal of Negro History
81 (autumn/winter 1996): 89–104; White, Too Heavy a Load; and Audrey Thomas
McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith, eds., Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
12. Hine and Thompson, Shining Thread of Hope; and Evelyn Brooks Higgin-
botham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church,
1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
13. Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood, 6.
14. Sorority constitutions are located at Delta Sigma Theta, 1707 New Hamp-
shire Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20009; Alpha Kappa Alpha, 5656 S. Stony
Island Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60637; Zeta Phi Beta, 1734 New Hampshire Ave. NW,
Washington, D.C. 20009; and Sigma Gamma Rho, 8800 South Stony Island, Chi-
cago, Ill. 60617.
15. Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood, 6.
16. Mary Shy Scott, member of the National Black Pan-Hellenic Council and
twenty-third Supreme Basileus, Alpha Kappa Alpha, interview by author, Atlanta,
Ga., 5 October 2001.
17. Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood.
18. Alexandria Berkowitz and Irene Padavic, “Getting a Man or Getting Ahead:
A Comparison of White and Black Sororities,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
27 (January 1999): 530–57; and Valerie Smith Stephens, “A Historical Perspective of

210
 SISTERS IN SERVICE

the Influence of African-American Sororities in Higher Education” (Ph.D. diss., Rut-

gers University, 1998).
19. Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood, 18; and White, Too Heavy a Load.
20. Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood, 19.
21. Lawrence Otis Graham, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class
(New York: HarperPerennial, 2000), 85.
22. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class in the
United States (1957; reprint, New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1997); Graham, Our
Kind of People; and William B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–
1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
23. Ethel Hedgeman quoted in Marjorie H. Parker, Alpha Kappa Alpha through
the Years, 1908–1988 (Chicago: Mobium, 1990), 9.
24. The founders of AKA were Hedgeman, Beulah Burke, Margaret Holmes,
Lillie Burke, Marjorie Hill, Marie Taylor, Lucy Diggs Slowe, Anna Brown, Ethel
Lyle, and Lavinia Norman (http://www.aka1908.com/aka/history/founders.htm [ac-
cessed 8 December 2003]).
25. AKA founders’ histories, Alpha Kappa Alpha Papers, Moorland-Spingarn
Collection, Howard University, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as AKA Papers).
Histories of the founders of Sigma Gamma Rho, Delta Sigma Theta, and Zeta Phi
Beta are located at the national headquarters of each sorority.
26. Scott, interview.
27. Ibid.
28. Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood.
29. Ross, The Divine Nine.
30. The founding members of Delta Sigma Theta were Winona Alexander, Mad-
ree White, Wertie Weaver, Vashti Murphy, Ethel Black, Frederica Dodd, Osceola
Adams, Pauline Minor, Edna Coleman, Edith Young, Marguerite Alexander, Naomi
Richardson, Eliza Shippen, Zephyr Carter, Myra Hemmings, Mamie Rose, Bertha
Campbell, Florence Toms, Olive Jones, Jessie Dent, Jimmie Middleton, and Ethel
Watson (Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, “Delta History,” http://www.deltasigma
theta.org/d_history/index.htm [accessed 8 December 2003]).
31. Bertha Campbell quoted in Helen G. Edmonds, “The History of Delta Sigma
Theta Sorority,” unpublished manuscript in Delta Sigma Theta Headquarters, 1954,
33; and Naomi Richardson, interview by the Mid-Hudson Alumnae Chapter, New
York, 1976, quoted in Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood, 53.
32. Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, “Delta History.”
33. Sibyl Avery Jackson, Delta Sigma Theta, interview by author, Atlanta, Ga.,
13 August 2001.
34. The founders were Pearl Neal, Viola Tyler, Fannie Pettie, Myrtle Tyler, and
Arizona Cleaver (Ross, The Divine Nine), 213–43.
35. Zeta Phi Beta, “Heritage,” http://www.zphib1920.org/heritage/index.shtml
(accessed 8 December 2003).
36. Graham, Our Kind of People, 83–100.
37. Ross, The Divine Nine, 213–43; the motto is quoted on the sorority’s Web
site at http://www.sgrho1922.org/index2.html (accessed 8 December 2003).
38. Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, “National History,” http://www.sgrho1922
.org/history.html (accessed 8 December 2003). Sigma Gamma Rho’s founders were

211
MARYBETH GASMAN

Mary Lou Little, Nannie Mae Johnson, Dorothy Whiteside, Hattie Mae Redford,
Cubena McClure, Bessie Downey Martin, and Vivian Marbury.
39. Scott, interview. All sorority members interviewed for this project noted this
distinction.
40. Jackson, interview. A paddle is a souvenir of the initiation process; it is given
by both white and black Greek organizations to their members.
41. Zenda Bowie, AKA member, interview by author, Atlanta, Ga., 5 September
2001.
42. Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood, 10.
43. Baltimore Afro-American quoted in Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood, 58.
44. Ross, The Divine Nine, 213–43.
45. Organizations material 1945–77, Tom C. Clark Papers, series IV, Tarlton Law
Library, Jamail Center for Legal Research, University of Texas School of Law, Austin,
Tex.
46. Ross, The Divine Nine, 257.
47. Washington believed that blacks should be committed to economic improve-
ment and eventually civil rights would follow. Economic improvement would come
through a steadfast commitment to hard work and the ownership of property. See
Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Compromise,” a speech given at the Cotton States
and International Exposition, September 1895, Atlanta, Ga., contained in the Booker
T. Washington Papers, Tuskegee University Archives, Tuskegee, Alabama (there are
copies of it on display); Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black
Leader, 1856–1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); and idem, Booker T.
Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1983).
48. Parker, Alpha Kappa Alpha, 181.
49. Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood, 27–45; Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro
Segregation (New York: Cronwell, 1943), 52–56.
50. Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood, 183.
51. Ibid.
52. AKA Papers.
53. Mary Elizabeth Vroman, Shaped to Its Purpose: Delta Sigma Theta—The First
Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1964), 15–17.
54. Parker, Alpha Kappa Alpha, 164.
55. Scott, interview.
56. Collier-Thomas and Franklin, Sisters in the Struggle, 28–29.
57. Darlene Clark Hine, “ ‘We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible’: The Phil-
anthropic Work of Black Women,” in Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy,
and Power, ed. Kathleen D. McCarthy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1990), 70–93.
58. White, Too Heavy a Load, 158–59.
59. Lucy Diggs Slowe, AKA founders’ histories, located at national headquarters,
Chicago.
60. Jana Nidiffer, Pioneering Deans of Women: More Than Wise and Pious Matrons
(New York: Teachers College Press, 2000).
61. AKA historical documents, located at national headquarters, Chicago.
62. Perkins, “Lucy Diggs Slowe,” 89. See also Geraldine J. Clifford, ed., Lone

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 SISTERS IN SERVICE

Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Universities, 1870–1937 (New York: Fem-

inist Press, 1989); and John M. Faragher and Florence Howe, eds., Women and Higher
Education in American History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988).
63. Marybeth Gasman, “W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles S. Johnson: Differing
Views on the Role of Philanthropy in Higher Education,” History of Education Quar-
terly 42 (winter 2002): 493–516. See also W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in
America, 1860–1880 (1935; reprint, New York: Touchstone, 1962); and Charles S.
Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation (1934; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966).
64. Lea E. Williams, “The United Negro College Fund in Retrospect,” Journal
of Negro Education 49 (autumn 1980): 363–72; and William Trent, Jr., “Cooperative
Fund Raising for Higher Education,” Journal of Negro Education 24 (winter 1955): 6–
15.
65. AKA to William Trent, Jr., 1958, endorsement of UNCF campaign 1944–
58, microfiche 1905, United Negro College Fund Papers, Woodruff Library, Clark
Atlanta University, Atlanta, Ga.
66. Parker, Alpha Kappa Alpha, 172.
67. Ibid., 173.
68. Black sororities were also involved in anti-lynching activities; however, a dis-
cussion of their efforts is beyond the scope of this chapter.
69. Ross, The Divine Nine, 248.
70. Ibid., 247–49.
71. Scott, interview.
72. Bowie, interview.
73. One fraternity chose not to belong to the Council: Omega Psi Phi.
74. Parker, Alpha Kappa Alpha, 241.
75. Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, http://www.sgr1922.org/sgrgeninfo.htm (ac-
cessed 13 July 2001).
76. Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood, 244–45.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid., 256–57.
79. Walter M. Kimbrough, “Self-Assessment, Participation, and Value of Lead-
ership Skills, Activities, and Experiences for Black Students Relative to Their Mem-
bership in Historically Black Fraternities and Sororities,” Journal of Negro Education
64 (winter 1995), 63–74.
80. Hine and Thompson, Shining Thread of Hope, 221.
81. Ross, The Divine Nine, 244–74.
82. White, Too Heavy a Load, 191–92.
83. Ibid., 192.
84. Ross, The Divine Nine, 164–212.
85. Parker, Alpha Kappa Alpha, 43–46.
86. Graham, Our Kind of People, 86.
87. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 202–203.
88. Ibid., 195.
89. Ibid., 198.
90. Ibid., 198.
91. Ibid., 206.

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MARYBETH GASMAN

92. White, Too Heavy a Load, 217, 251.

93. Claude A. Barnett Papers, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Mass.
94. General Information Guide, Claude A. Barnett Papers, Chicago Historical
Society, Chicago, Ill. (hereafter cited as Barnett Papers).
95. White, Too Heavy a Load, 187–89; see also folders 332–33, series G, Phil-
anthropic and Social Organizations 1925–1966, Barnett Papers.
96. Giddings, In Search of Sisterhood, 20.
97. Tiffany Franklin, Delta Sigma Theta member, interview by author, 15 August
2001, Atlanta, Ga.
98. Scott, interview; see also Marybeth Gasman, “An Untapped Resource: Bring-
ing African Americans into the University Giving Process,” CASE International Jour-
nal of Educational Advancement 1 (winter 2002): 280–92.

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9. “Valuable and Legitimate Services”: Black and White
Women’s Philanthropy through the PTA
Christine Woyshner

In 1928, when Cornell professor of education Julian Butterworth

finished his study of white parent-teacher associations, he concluded,
“It is not the responsibility of the parent-teacher association to finance
the schools.” That women in such groups spent so much of their time
raising money was proof to him that they did not understand “the
basic principles of public school financing, as now generally accepted
by progressive thinkers.”1 Butterworth’s study not only revealed a typ-
ical educator’s opinion that volunteer involvement by women was usu-
ally officious and uninformed; it also acknowledged the overwhelming
commitment of women’s associations to philanthropy in local schools.
Had he conducted a similar study in the segregated schools of the
South during this era, he would have found an even more striking
example of educational philanthropy on the part of black teachers and
community members.
Historians of education generally argue that the proliferation of
parent-teacher associations in public schools during the first half of
the twentieth century was a reaction by citizens to the bureaucrati-
zation of public education and the professionalization of teaching.2
William J. Reese exemplifies this interpretation in his explanation that
parent-teacher groups “helped break down the isolation of institutions
whose increasingly professionalized and centralized nature threatened
to drive them far away from the life of the average citizen.”3 However,
this argument does not take into account women’s beneficence through
widespread networks of women’s clubs and associations, in part be-
cause these scholars conflate the notions of “mother” and “parent” in

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CHRISTINE WOYSHNER

their analyses. When we examine the development of home-school

associations within the context of the women’s club movement, a dif-
ferent picture emerges. Therefore, in this chapter I maintain that
women’s organized interest in public education through school im-
provement societies, parent-teacher associations, and women’s clubs
was as much an extension of the rapidly growing women’s club move-
ment as it was a reaction to the rise of the education professions and
the reorganization of school administration.4 The theory of municipal
housekeeping—the notion that women’s legitimate activities in the
“home sphere” included caring for the civic community—provided the
justification for women’s associations to take to the schools and fulfill
a much-needed munificent role.5 In a contemporary chronicle of club-
women’s extensive efforts in municipal settings, Mary Ritter Beard
observed in 1915 that women’s associations contributed significantly
to the schools, so much so that the schools were becoming “one huge
settlement with a thoroughly democratic basis in place of a philan-
thropic foundation.”6

Prior to the 1920s, women’s organized philanthropy in schools was

both a local phenomenon and a national movement directed by groups
like the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the National Congress
of Mothers, and the National Association of Colored Women
(NACW). For most of the 1910s, the extensive educational reform
efforts of women’s associations were coordinated through the National
Education Association’s (NEA’s) Department of National Women’s
Associations.7 By the mid-1920s, however, when gender-segregated
reform activities had largely lost their appeal,8 women’s activism in
public education became less intrusive in school affairs and was sub-
sumed under the direction of the National Congress of Mothers,
which in 1924 changed its name to the National Congress of Parents
and Teachers (or National PTA). Though the name change reflected
PTA leaders’ desire to represent fathers as well as mothers, male mem-
bership in the white PTA was negligible.9 At this same time, a seg-
regated PTA—the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teach-
ers—was organized in the South by African American women
teachers. In the 1920s the membership of the white PTA began to
grow exponentially; by 1930 it had a paid membership of one million
in forty-nine states and territories.10 Enjoying a larger percentage of
male leaders and members—though a smaller proportion of the black
population—the Colored Congress merged with the white PTA in

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 “VALUABLE AND LEGITIMATE SERVICES”

1970. Despite the existence of a black membership, the National PTA

has remained a white, middle-class women’s association in the public
consciousness.
This chapter focuses on the philanthropy of black and white
women through parent-teacher associations and analyzes the compli-
cations that arose as a result of these women’s beneficence. In this
context, I view most PTA activities as philanthropic, including the
material contributions that women’s groups made to schools in the
form of donations and fundraisers, as well as time spent volunteering
at local schools. (Admittedly, some of the other purposes of PTAs,
such as sponsoring parent education workshops and coordinating so-
cial hours, are not philanthropic and thus fall outside my purview.)11
Viewing PTA work through the lens of philanthropy highlights
women’s contributions to education and foregrounds the power they
wielded through voluntary networks; it also redirects other scholars’
analyses away from a focus on the parent-teacher relationship, orient-
ing it instead toward gender and race complications in school im-
provement endeavors.12 Prior to the 1920s, black and white women’s
associations can be given much of the credit for purchasing books and
materials, providing school lunches and nurses, working for better
teacher wages, and ensuring that schools were built or renovated. After
the 1920s, black PTA philanthropy continued to a marked degree out
of necessity. The philanthropic efforts of black and white PTA women
formed a web of support for public education that changed as schools’
needs changed; their adaptability to local needs was a strength.
White and black women’s PTA efforts, while beneficial to local
schools and generally welcomed by school leaders, nevertheless re-
mained a threatening prospect due to gender and racial dynamics.
Most PTA women felt that because they were women, they possessed
special qualities that had the potential to influence society for the
better; therefore, their educational philanthropy was legitimate work
in the public realm. However, this kind of municipal housekeeping
challenged the rising male administrative hierarchy of schools, posing
a threat to the power structure that sought to manage and control
women through parent-teacher associations and women’s clubs.13 For
example, in Denver in 1897, the women of the mothers’ clubs were
“denounced as ‘faddists’ ” for their support of kindergartens and nature
study. Denver’s male school administrators were so threatened that
they “led a successful smear campaign against the 4,000 women in the
city’s educational union in the 1890s, causing it to disband.”14

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CHRISTINE WOYSHNER

In turn, the growing number of black parent-teacher associations

in segregated schools in the first half of the twentieth century pre-
sented a threat to white PTA women, who attempted to monitor the
segregated associations’ activities and who ironically criticized their
overreliance on fundraisers and other acts of beneficence. In contrast
to white women’s experience, black women’s school improvement as-
sociations and clubs were more localized and were usually organized
by women teachers, so they did not necessarily pose a threat to black
school leadership.15 However, they did at times challenge the white
school boards and community leaders who were in charge of disbursing
funds to segregated schools. A pecking order of racial and gender
hierarchies was thereby established in which those with more power
sought to control the philanthropic activities of those with less. That
is, male administrators sought to manage and direct white women’s
PTA beneficence, while white PTA women after 1930 criticized black
PTA women for not adhering more closely to the dictates of the white
PTA, which placed fundraising secondary to educational activities.
This criticism failed to recognize the needs of segregated schools in
the South that depended upon the “double taxation” of its community
members to survive.16 In what follows, I outline the various manifes-
tations of PTA philanthropy and analyze the roles of gender and race
in the philanthropic work of white and black PTA women.

THE PHILANTHROPY OF PARENT-TEACHER ASSOCIATIONS

As the beneficent work of parent-teacher associations intensified
in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and as women played
a greater role in shaping public education, principals and other school
administrators noted that their “material contributions . . . have been
commendable.”17 The philanthropy of the PTA and local women’s
clubs included both monetary (fundraising) and nonmonetary activi-
ties. The monetary contributions helped fund schools or school ren-
ovations and additions, purchase materials for schools, provide uni-
forms for sports teams, and serve hot lunches. According to
Butterworth, providing cash donations was by far the most extensive
work of parent-teacher associations, accounting for more than fifty
percent of all activities ranked in his 1924–1925 study.18 When non-
monetary contributions are taken into account, the percentage of ma-
terial contributions climbs significantly higher.
Noncash contributions were just as essential and pervasive as mon-

218
 “VALUABLE AND LEGITIMATE SERVICES”

etary beneficence and affected entire school systems as well as partic-

ular programs within schools.19 These contributions helped enact cur-
ricular reforms such as kindergartens, vacation schools, and vocational
education programs; they also improved teachers’ pay and benefits and
provided for school lunches. Donations of time allowed for greater
decision-making power among clubwomen, who successfully lobbied
for school suffrage and women on school boards. Black and white PTA
women also worked to improve school facilities by initiating health
inspections and promoting playgrounds, better ventilation, and sani-
tary measures such as drinking fountains. When schools were suffi-
ciently renovated, clubwomen turned to philanthropy in the aesthetic
and patriotic arenas by purchasing artwork and flags for schools. Ex-
amples of women’s philanthropy through groups and associations are
many and varied; oftentimes PTA women would hold fundraisers and
use the money to purchase materials for classrooms or institute new
programs personally.
While these efforts were almost universal around the United
States, regional differences allowed women to address specific needs.
Butterworth’s study found that poorer communities relied more heavily
on PTA philanthropy, “either because a reasonable tax rate does not
bring in enough or because the citizens are more reluctant to raise
funds for school purposes.”20 The three southern states in his study—
North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia—ranked the highest in percent-
age of time spent by PTA women providing money for schools.21 Con-
ditions for white schools in the South during the early decades of the
twentieth century were indeed dire, and women’s associations helped
gather the capital for establishing educational institutions. In James L.
Leloudis’s study, local units of North Carolina’s white Woman’s As-
sociation for the Betterment of Public Schools (WABPS) raised the
tax revenues to build an average of one school a day between 1902
and 1910.22
Once schools were built, PTAs did not disband, but rather moved
on to the next phase of philanthropy, contributing supplies and ma-
terials. This evolution was noted by contemporaries like Mary Ritter
Beard, who commented, “The movement for sanitary school buildings
in which women have sometimes led, instigated officials to lead,
helped personally, or inspired janitors to act, has been followed up by
the decoration of the buildings.”23 For example, at the turn of the
twentieth century in Illinois, a white PTA provided better ventilation
and sanitary conditions in schools and introduced innovations such as

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“bubble fountains and proper toilets for boys.” Two decades later, the
health renovations completed, the association renamed itself the
School Beautiful Committee and turned its attention to school aes-
thetics and encouraging the arts. Projects in the 1920s and 1930s
included landscaping and running photo competitions for students.24
This attention to aesthetics reflected white middle-class women’s belief
that attractive schools would translate to an ideal educational setting,
thereby imbuing schools with the “cultural conventions of middle-class
life.”25
Transportation to and from school stood as a major challenge to
both white and black communities, especially with the widespread
consolidation of rural schools at the turn of the twentieth century. For
example, in the early 1900s, white Iowa clubwomen addressed the
transportation issue by “band[ing] themselves together and . . .
provid[ing] a covered vehicle [to carry] the little ones to school.”26 In
segregated schools, transportation was a major function of black PTAs,
since these schools were overlooked in the pupil transportation move-
ments of the 1920s and 1930s. In Vanessa Siddle Walker’s study of
the Caswell County Training School in North Carolina, parents co-
ordinated rides to school for the African American students and even
drove them to various extracurricular activities. During the Depression,
as the need for a school bus became ever greater and white school
boards were unrelenting, the local black PTA raised funds to purchase
a bus and donated it to the state so that students would have trans-
portation.27
Though the amount of time spent on philanthropic activities by
white parent-teacher associations was significant, it was nonetheless
surpassed by black teachers and community members in the segregated
schools of the South. Theirs was a philanthropy of necessity. For black
communities the “primary purpose of the PTA was to provide for the
financial needs of the school.”28 Black parents typically built the
schools they wanted for their children or matched funds from white
boards of education. Donations by black parents often increased after
schools opened, since the work of education had just begun and com-
munity groups needed to raise money for books and materials.29 These
differences between white and black women’s PTA philanthropy in
education can be attributed to general patterns in white and black
women’s giving. White women generally worked to reform institutions
and gain political power while black women worked locally. Elisabeth
Clemens argues that the more conservative white women’s associations

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opted to continue voluntary contributions while the more radical white

women’s groups worked for cash contributions to get political power.30
White PTA women used both strategies; they volunteered their time
and they raised money, and as a result white women in PTAs chal-
lenged the authority of male administrators in schools more than the
average taxpayer ever could. White PTA women’s influence far ex-
ceeded taxpayer power because they were organized and typically
worked from inside a school. Their meetings were usually held in
school auditoriums and classrooms and the focus of their work was on
school improvement. In response, male administrators began to ques-
tion whether such extensive philanthropic work was the best use of
volunteers’ time. I now turn to an examination of the role that gender
played in white women’s school philanthropy.

GENDER AND PTA PHILANTHROPY

White women’s PTA philanthropy in the first half of the twentieth
century changed over time as it traversed two phases in the develop-
ment of public education. The first phase included the consolidation
of rural school districts and the creation of public school systems in
urban settings, extending roughly from the 1890s to the 1920s. The
second phase, after 1930, was one in which the white PTA simulta-
neously became a household name and grew less involved in the es-
tablishment and renovation of schools. Its role at this time was sup-
portive, though philanthropy continued to be a central activity of local
units. During the first phase, local associations gave significant aid to
public schools in rural as well as urban settings and ensured that such
programs as affordable lunches and school nurses were taken over by
school management by the 1920s.31 Most of the money that PTAs
raised came from sponsorship of entertainment programs, donations,
and sales.32
Generally, white PTA women did not intend to continue their
contributions for the long term. Through their municipal housekeep-
ing in the Progressive Era, clubwomen sought to “transform public
policy, to move from personal and private encounter to state action,
to bring about compulsory legislation of one sort or another.”33 And
this understanding carried over to their school improvement endeav-
ors. As with wider social welfare legislation reforms, PTA women en-
acted reforms that they believed school authorities and boards of ed-
ucation should eventually assume. For example, vacation schools that

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were begun in Chicago in the 1890s by a women’s club were turned

over to the board of education to manage in 1911. In Minnesota by
that same year, the school medical inspector and nurse were no longer
provided by the women’s clubs, but by the school system.34 In Cali-
fornia in 1916, clinics started by the California Congress of Mothers
were taken over by the schools.35 As reforms were taken over by pro-
fessionals, white PTAs declared success and sought new issues to ad-
dress. For instance, after health inspections were implemented in Mas-
sachusetts, the women “turned to other work, including vocational
training and vocational guidance, particularly of girls.”36
Inasmuch as PTA women attempted to remake society according
to white, middle-class standards—a well-established argument in the
history of education literature—they faced gender barriers due to a
growing hierarchical school administration that excluded them from
decision making and sought to place them under the watchful eye of
male principals, superintendents, and school board members. If these
male administrators clashed among themselves over control of the
schools, they were at least united on one issue: white women’s power
in matters of school decision making was threatening, even if their
efforts improved schools at the local level. The National PTA’s in-
volvement in legislation to support mothers’ pensions and the
Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act was a testament to their
potency and certainly made school administrators think twice about
giving them any license to enact school reforms independently.37
Mary Ritter Beard referred to this gender dynamic when she noted
that through parent-teacher associations “women participate on equal
terms with men, where they do not direct the aims and activities them-
selves.”38 This is evidenced in the NEA’s Department of National
Women’s Organizations, which represented approximately 900,000
members in 1908. As one clubwoman boasted, they were able to wield
power through “their standing committees [that] receive[d] impulse
and instruction quickly and systematically from center to circumfer-
ence.”39 This sizeable membership—representing white women’s ef-
forts on behalf of public education—dwarfed the nearly all-male mem-
bership of the NEA, which at that time stood at roughly five thousand.
If educational leaders had not recognized the ascendancy of women’s
associations in public education to this point, they surely could not
overlook their representation in the NEA. The potential of so many
women to influence matters in public education after they had been
subordinated so neatly in their roles as classroom teachers was ex-

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pressed by Elmer Ellsworth Brown, U.S. commissioner of education.

Speaking at a Department of Women’s Organizations meeting, Brown
complimented the clubwomen on the selfless work they had under-
taken, but suggested that they take direction from male educational
leaders through referenda.40
Educators’ concerns continued throughout the next several decades
as they sought to distinguish men’s authority and money-managing
duties from women’s voluntary contributions. In the 1920s, two schol-
ars studying the National PTA successfully created a division between
volunteer work and fundraising by making a distinction between the
educational functions of PTAs and volunteers’ monetary contributions.
Elmer Holbeck of Teachers College claimed that white women’s PTA
activities focused inappropriately on “the purchase of school equip-
ment, . . . the arrangement of [fundraising] entertainments, and . . .
other non-educational activities.”41 Julian Butterworth argued that the
PTA could endanger schools if the associations continued their policies
of raising and giving money as they saw fit. However, Butterworth
was careful not to completely advise white PTA women to cease all
philanthropic activities, lest the schools lose this important source of
support. He noted that his recommendation to focus on educational
endeavors did not “preclude the parent-teacher association from en-
gaging in certain types of activities to finance the school more ade-
quately.”42
Holbeck and Butterworth also represent the male administrators
who, by the 1920s, sought to regulate PTA activities by backing the
commonly held notion that philanthropy by women should not focus
on raising money. Proposing acceptable ways for PTAs to continue
their beneficence, Butterworth drew up parameters for raising funds
only “under special conditions”: PTAs should provide “the desired fa-
cilities” in the poorest school districts that did not have adequate tax
money to cover costs. Other than that, he explained “it is preferable
for the parent-teacher organization to create public recognition of the
need for better standards than to raise the money through its own
efforts.”43 When other acts of beneficence were pursued, such as in-
stituting hot lunches or building cafeterias, Butterworth suggested that
PTAs get superintendent or school board approval first. Other legiti-
mate activities, in his view, included raising money for an association’s
own operating expenses. The most egregious offense in parent-teacher
association philanthropy, according to Butterworth, was the use of
money to raise a teacher’s salary “contrary to the salary schedule of

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the school.”44 Additionally, fundraising that provided paid work for its
members was patently unacceptable. The reason for these reservations
is alluded to by Holbeck, who argued that fundraising strengthened
the association locally and nationally, thereby affording white PTA
women “a greater opportunity to influence policies, legislation, and
educational practice.”45
By the mid-1920s, white PTA women were accused of being out
of touch with the latest educational developments and contributing to
schools as though they were still “in the days of the ‘little red school-
house.’ ”46 While clubwomen’s philanthropy was painted as quaint and
obsolete, in truth PTA women’s contributions challenged the newly
institutionalized means of funding for public education. This tension
was reflected in comments by male principals and superintendents
concerned by the “meddling attitude” of the PTA women, and who
began to wonder whether it was easier to manage groups of women
or individual women volunteers.47 Nonetheless, by the end of the de-
cade, educational leaders had been successful in confining PTA women
to their own “legitimate field” of work, which did not emphasize rais-
ing and distributing funds.48
The women’s club movement also began to wane during this pe-
riod, and the political and economic upheavals of the late 1920s and
1930s brought with them a retreat from radical support of social wel-
fare legislation by white PTA women.49 Julia Grant notes that the
maternalist argument that fueled municipal housekeeping became out-
dated as an ideological framework, and more politically radical women
turned to other justifications for their work in the public arena.50 Sheila
Rothman speaks to this “broad disillusionment with reform activities
in the post–World War I period,” attributing it to a social emphasis
among white, middle-class women on romantic marriage over moth-
erhood as a uniting ideology and the fact that the reforms of the
Progressive Era did not “enhance opportunities for women in struc-
tural ways.”51 By 1930, the Department of National Women’s Orga-
nizations of the NEA had long been dissolved and the National PTA
became a public school auxiliary, as white women’s intrusive school
philanthropy finally was mitigated and controlled by educational ad-
ministrators. This next era of the white PTA was characterized by its
exponentially increasing membership through the post–World War II
years and its increasing visibility as a conservative lobby for the child,
home, and family. During this time, the well-established leadership of

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the white PTA expended considerable energy developing and moni-

toring its authority over the National Congress of Colored Parents
and Teachers, much as male administrators had scrutinized the white
PTA. The white organization’s attempts to control its black counter-
part after 1930 are the focus of the next section.

RACE AND PTA PHILANTHROPY

Black women’s school philanthropy experienced localized devel-
opment after the Civil War. As Darlene Clark Hine argues, “unlike
impersonal institutional forms [of white philanthropy], . . . black phi-
lanthropy and charitable giving usually assumed the form of small-
scale, personal assistance and involvement.”52 For black clubwomen,
social change—rather than social control—was an important goal, as
was individual improvement.53 If, according to Hine, the NACW rep-
resented “the institutionalization of black women’s voluntarism and
philanthropy . . . [that] mandated an end to all racial and gender dis-
crimination,”54 this work was carried into the public schools in large
part by a growing network of black parent-teacher associations. The
black PTA movement did not gain significant momentum nationally
until the late 1920s; PTA organizers in segregated schools wished to
maintain as much control as they could over black children and black
schools by having their own local associations instead of joining with
the white National PTA.55 As historian Gerda Lerner argues, “since
Reconstruction days the schoolteacher in her one-room schoolhouse
was sustained by the fund-raising committees of black church ladies’
auxiliaries long before she was the beneficiary of white philanthropy.”56
Lacking an organized system of schools in the South, black com-
munity members and educators worked to build schools during the
first third of the twentieth century.57 The establishment of schools for
African American children depended almost exclusively on the phi-
lanthropy of black school improvement associations, many of which
later became parent-teacher associations. For many southern blacks,
the “immediate problem in most communities . . . was to get some-
thing resembling a school.”58 Black schools were especially dependent
upon community resources, including the support of women’s clubs,
due to poor funding from state and local governments and the reluc-
tance of local white school boards to finance black education. A black
PTA worker from West Virginia reported that the “[m]ajor emphasis

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[of the black PTA in that state] was placed on securing the school
equipment and supplies that boards of education either would not or
could not provide.”59
As with the white PTA, the history of the black PTA’s organiza-
tional structure and activities can be parsed into two phases in the first
half of the twentieth century. In the first phase, roughly 1900 to 1930,
black PTA philanthropy remained localized, characterized by strong
local activism and weaker national ties. Local associations gave rise to
state associations in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
What national direction existed came not from the National PTA,
which proclaimed that it would not discriminate based on “race, color,
or condition,”60 but from the National Association of Colored Women,
whose membership during these years enjoyed a significant proportion
of teachers and which focused on public education. The National
Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, or black PTA, was offi-
cially organized in 1926 by women teachers and club leaders in the
black community. By this time, the appeal of allying with the nation-
ally known and politically powerful white PTA took precedence over
black educators’ local activism and desire for autonomy.61 Therefore,
from 1926 until 1970, the PTA was a segregated association. While
the two associations had the same goals and guidelines, each was man-
aged by separate local, state, and national officers.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the number of Af-
rican American parent-teacher groups and school improvement soci-
eties began to increase and the National PTA encouraged their de-
velopment, either from PTA headquarters in Washington, D.C., or
through representatives sent to attend organizational meetings.62 As
one black PTA historian observed, “The efforts of the National Con-
gress of Mothers to organize a congress of Negro mothers was [sic]
having its effect in the South. Parents, teachers, and welfare workers
of both races . . . set about to organize similar associations in a number
of Negro schools.”63 For example, the white PTA of Georgia donated
ten dollars in the early 1920s toward the founding of the Georgia
State [Black] Council of Parents and Teachers.64 However, a major
impetus to organize came from the Jeanes Foundation (also known as
the Negro Rural School Fund), which was established in 1907 and
sent supervisors to rural territories. A primary goal of Jeanes super-
visors was to organize school improvement leagues and enlist com-
munity members’ help in building and renovating schools.65

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Selena Sloan Butler, the founder of the National Congress of Col-

ored Parents and Teachers, had long been active in PTA work in
Atlanta and helped orchestrate the founding of the Georgia Colored
Parent-Teacher Association in 1921. An educator, clubwoman, and
graduate of Spelman Seminary, Butler convened the National Colored
Congress of Parents and Teachers in 1926 to “function only in those
states where separate schools for the races were maintained.”66 Deeply
committed to race work, Butler nonetheless dissented from the black
PTA’s focus on fundraising because she feared the “real spirit of the
work for children would be lost if the organization converted into a
purely money-raising machine.”67 In this apparent instance of capitu-
lation to the guidelines of the white PTA—despite the fact that “many
changes” to those very guidelines already had been made by the black
PTA leadership—Butler repeats the sentiments of Butterworth and
Holbeck: PTA work should not focus on fundraising, lest it detract
from more legitimate educational purposes.68 As in the white PTA,
black national leaders promoted educational goals (read: nonphilan-
thropic) while local units sought to respond to local needs through
significant fundraising work.
Ironically, black PTA national officers had few funds to work with
and little to give to members in need. One black PTA history sum-
marized years of financial struggles at the local, state, and national
levels:

The question of finance has long been a problem for the National
Congress [of Colored Parents and Teachers] as well as for its state
branches and local units. As is often the case with budding orga-
nizations, many local units were prone to borrow too much time
from their programs for children for fund-raising projects. Little of
the money they raised, however, was converted into parent-teacher
dues and often the expense of carrying out the work of the Congress
exceeded the dues forwarded to the national treasury by the state
congresses. Some local units, too, were poor and needed to look to
the National Congress for aid, financial and otherwise, which it was
not in a position to give. If the Congress had been better financed
it could have given more attention to the needy areas.69

Unlike the white PTA, which enjoyed financial solvency due to an

endowment fund established by its second president, Hannah Kent
Schoff, in the early 1900s, the black PTA struggled to secure funds

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that would enable it to provide leadership to its local units. Yet despite
such challenges—and much like the schools it supported—the black
PTA managed to remain a viable organization even on a lean budget.
Thus began the second phase of school-building and beneficence
after 1930, as an interstate network of black leaders and educators
generated political and moral support for their endeavors in public
education. Unlike white PTA women, black women were joined by
men in school philanthropy, making their beneficence more a function
of race than gender. Racial uplift was a major theme of educational
work, as black community members donated time, money, and ma-
terials for the education of their children. As Grant argues, African
American women “did not clearly distinguish between their educa-
tional and social-reform efforts and civil rights, which differentiated
them from most white female reformers.”70
During these years the black PTA faced the challenge of following
the white PTA’s program while attending to the specific needs of its
own constituency. In a 1929 report by the Extension among Colored
People Committee of the white PTA, chairperson Mrs. Fred Wessels
revealed the patronizing attitude of the white national leadership to-
ward its black counterpart. She expressed concern that black PTA
leaders could not be trusted to follow the program of the PTA: “The
work done by local colored parent-teacher associations should be along
the same lines as those pursued by our own parent-teacher associations
and in our capacity as advisors, we should see that nothing detrimental
to the welfare of home, school, community, and church be undertaken
by their associations.”71
By July 1932, the Extension committee was discontinued as other
issues during the Depression took on a greater significance for the
white PTA.72 Over the next several decades, however, different com-
mittees were created in an attempt to manage and monitor the efforts
of the black PTA. Mrs. Charles Center, chair of the Committee on
Cooperation with the Colored Congress, attended the black PTA’s
annual meeting in 1936. She noted, “In hearing their reports we found
the most urgent need for a simplified program material and a simpli-
fied outline for a health program.”73 From this point to the merger in
1970, an ambiguous relationship was established between the two
PTAs. White and black leaders periodically held interracial meetings
that seemed to serve two general purposes: white PTA leaders sought
to manage the black PTA program and black PTA leaders attempted
to work toward racial understanding in these groups.74 During this

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time, the white PTA adopted the argument made by white male school
administrators that fundraising was less desirable than and should be
separate from educational activities in PTAs.
This point is highlighted by a study undertaken in the early 1950s
in Missouri, which still had a segregated educational system. As part
of her master’s thesis, white state PTA officer Marguerite Taylor sur-
veyed Missouri’s seventy-five local units—representing roughly 3,400
members—affiliated with the black PTA. Taylor hoped to “propose or
recommend ways or means of improving the programs of the units of
the Colored Parent-Teacher Association.”75 She examined the activi-
ties of these local units and compared them to the approved activities
of the white PTA, noting in her conclusions that activities deemed
secondary by the white PTA were quite primary for black units, es-
pecially fundraising. Fundraising often was accomplished through en-
tertainment programs such as the popularity contests that Walker de-
scribes in her study of Caswell County High School in North
Carolina.76 Yet Taylor ultimately overlooked the centrality of fundrais-
ing activities to the very existence of schools for African Americans;
she concluded, “Although entertainments and money making devices
often contribute valuable and legitimate services to the school and the
community, care [should be] exercised to keep such activities in proper
relationship to the real purpose for which the organization is struc-
tured—the welfare of children.”77 By this time, white PTA women
had the luxury of holding fundraisers to purchase extra materials that
school boards could not or would not provide, while black commu-
nities knew that their own fundraising was crucial for necessities such
as buildings and books.78 For black PTA members, education and
monetary philanthropic efforts were inseparable.
The post–World War II era brought an increased radicalization
among African Americans and the concomitant rise of the civil rights
movement. This third and final phase of the black PTA involved more
aggressive race work as the association worked toward greater educa-
tional opportunities for black children, culminating in the demise of
the black PTA in 1970 when it integrated with the white PTA. In
sum, the early decades of the twentieth century were marked by the
extensive philanthropy of white and black parent-teacher associations,
which were largely responsible for the building and renovating of
schools and for the institution of health and educational programs. In
the segregated schools of the South, black PTA beneficence was con-
nected to racial uplift as community members funded their own

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schools and continued to support them through voluntary contribu-

tions.

In 1934, Elmer Holbeck wrote that the “efforts of the local [PTA]
units were directed into money-raising activities and other fields which
had no connection with the original need which had brought the or-
ganization into being.”79 The original need—child welfare—was in-
deed a rally point for the National Congress of Mothers and other
women’s associations of the Progressive Era. Holbeck, like other male
administrators, was hesitant to allow white women’s clubs power and
influence in schools through their philanthropy. If white women’s phi-
lanthropy were accepted as central to educational work, it might confer
power on women outside the school management hierarchy. To
counter this threat, male administrators successfully separated fund-
raising from what they considered to be true educational work, thereby
assuring male administrators control of public education. By 1930,
white women’s philanthropy was contained, as PTA women were rel-
egated to an auxiliary role in the public schools through local parent-
teacher associations that emphasized “cooperation.” Ironically, even as
the power of the PTA’s philanthropy was palliated, the association
grew exponentially and a thriving segregated association was orga-
nized. In submission, the white PTA found success, as well as a new
focus: supervision of its black counterpart.
The Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, like the white
PTA, considered child welfare a central goal that required significant
attention to fundraising and other forms of philanthropy. Just as the
power of white women’s philanthropy was contained by the ideological
separation of money from educational work, the white PTA applied a
similar line of reasoning to its oversight of black parent-teacher as-
sociations. However, white women’s power was not potent enough to
entirely control the philanthropy of black PTAs.
PTA women’s philanthropy resided within the charged political
context of schools and society; it challenged notions of responsibility
for public education materially and administratively. Butterworth’s
early admonitions regarding overreliance on fundraising and other
forms of beneficence are echoed by today’s historians, who often down-
play PTA women’s contributions to public education. On the one
hand, many scholars who examine the early PTA either focus on its
more radical contributions to social welfare reform or overlook its po-
litical efforts in education altogether.80 On the other hand, even his-

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torians of education have characterized the day-to-day contributions

of local PTAs as “mundane.”81 Yet the commonplace activities of the
PTA formed an unmistakable network of philanthropy that contrib-
uted to the advancement of popular education in tangible and signif-
icant ways. In short, emphasizing the more radical and overt acts per-
formed by women in public education has led historians to undervalue
the small, everyday, and seemingly ordinary philanthropy of women
in school associations. Their efforts, repeated time and again in schools
across the nation, were very much like waves lapping on the shore:
they produced long-term impacts more significant than those percep-
tible at first glance.

NOTES
This research was supported in part by Temple University and the Radcliffe Grant
for Graduate Women. While some of the research was conducted for the Civic En-
gagement Project at Harvard University, interpretations and any errors are my own.

1. Julian E. Butterworth, The Parent-Teacher Association and Its Work (New York:
Macmillan, 1928), 52.
2. David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 6–7, 14, 24, 146; William J.
Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements during the Pro-
gressive Era (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), xxi; and William W. Cutler
III, Parents and Schools: The 150-Year Struggle for Control in American Education (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 3–4.
3. William J. Reese, “Between Home and School: Organized Parents, Club-
women, and Urban Education in the Progressive Era,” School Review 87 (November
1978), 3.
4. Works on the women’s club movement that speak to education include Karen
J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New
York: Holmes and Meier, 1980); Anne Ruggles Gere, Intimate Practices: Literacy and
Cultural Work in U.S. Women’s Clubs, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1997); Anne Meis Knupfer, Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood:
African American Women’s Clubs in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New York: New York
University Press, 1996); and Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in
American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). Prior to the publication
of Natural Allies, Scott outlined phases of women’s philanthropy through clubs and
associations in “Women’s Voluntary Associations: From Charity to Reform,” in Lady
Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy, and Power, ed. Kathleen D. McCarthy (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 35–54.
5. Blair, Clubwoman, 34–35.
6. Mary Ritter Beard, Woman’s Work in Municipalities (New York: D. Appleton,
1915), 39. She further remarked that “[a]lmost every hamlet and town has felt the

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influence of women in that direction” (36–37). More recently, in his study of urban
women’s contributions to public education, William J. Reese has argued that club-
women influenced every important change in education from 1890 to 1920 (Power
and the Promise, 40).
7. While Reese describes these reforms as grassroots efforts, I argue that women’s
national networks played a strategic role in organizing local associations.
8. Kathleen D. McCarthy, “Parallel Power Structures: Women and the Voluntary
Sphere,” in Lady Bountiful Revisited, ed. McCarthy, 6.
9. In a 1934 study, Elmer Holbeck of Teachers College (Columbia) found that
on average 10 percent of the members of local white PTA associations were men
(Holbeck, An Analysis of the Activities and Potentialities for Achievement of the Parent-
Teacher Association with Recommendations [New York: Teachers College Bureau of
Publications, 1934], 58).
10. Civic Engagement Project, directed by Theda Skocpol and Marshall Ganz
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1998), data in possession of author.
11. For an examination of the parent education efforts of the PTA see Steven L.
Schlossman, “Before Home Start: Notes toward a History of Parent Education in
America, 1897–1929,” Harvard Educational Review 46 (August 1976): 436–67. For
a study that investigates philanthropy and parent education, see Steven L. Schlossman,
“Philanthropy and the Gospel of Child Development,” History of Education Quarterly
21 (fall 1981): 275–99.
12. Studies that focus on tensions between parents and teachers include Barbara
Finkelstein, “In Fear of Childhood: Relationships between Parents and Teachers in
Popular Primary Schools in the Nineteenth Century,” History of Childhood Quarterly
3 (winter 1976): 321–25; Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, “Home and School in
Nineteenth-Century America: Some Personal History Reports from the United
States,” History of Education Quarterly 18 (spring 1978): 3–34; Lawrence A. Cremin,
“Family-Community Linkages in American Education: Some Comments on the Re-
cent Historiography,” Teachers College Record 79 (May 1978): 683–704; and Cutler,
Parents and Schools.
13. For a discussion of the gender hierarchy in public education during this era,
see David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation
in American Schools (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).
14. Reese, “Between Home and School,” 13.
15. Christine Woyshner, “The PTA and the Origins of the National Congress of
Colored Parents and Teachers” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Amer-
ican Educational Research Association, New Orleans, La., 2000).
16. James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 183–84. Double taxation is the term
Anderson uses to describe the condition of southern blacks who, because their taxes
went to white schools, voluntarily contributed additional funds to support their own
local public schools from approximately 1900 to 1935.
17. Butterworth, Parent-Teacher Association, 1.
18. Ibid., 9–11.
19. This discussion synthesizes data from extensive primary sources such as PTA
minutes, histories, and state reports as well as archival materials of the General Fed-
eration of Women’s Clubs. All PTA data are located at the national PTA Historical

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Collection, Chicago, Ill. My analysis echoes the findings of historians of education

such as William J. Reese, James L. Leloudis, and Vanessa Siddle Walker, but builds
on these localized studies by demonstrating that PTA philanthropy was a widespread
national phenomenon.
20. Butterworth, Parent-Teacher Association, 15.
21. Ibid., 15–16. According to Butterworth, Virginia spent 74.4 percent of its
activities on providing money for schools, with North Carolina and Texas following
with figures of 64.4 percent and 60 percent, respectively (table 9, 126–27). Butter-
worth surveyed only white parent-teacher associations.
22. James L. Leloudis II, “School Reform in the New South: The Woman’s As-
sociation for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina, 1902–1919,”
Journal of American History 69 (March 1983): 903. See also chapter 5 of James L.
Leloudis, Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880–
1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). In 1919, the Woman’s
Association for the Betterment of Public Schools became the North Carolina PTA.
23. Beard, Woman’s Work, 36.
24. Dorothy Sparks, Strong Is the Current: History of the Illinois Congress of Parents
and Teachers, 1900–1947 (Chicago: Illinois Congress of Parents and Teachers, 1948),
18–19.
25. Leloudis, “School Reform,” 896.
26. Iowa Congress of Parents and Teachers, A History of the Iowa Congress of
Parents and Teachers, 1900–1941 (Des Moines: Iowa Congress of Parents and Teach-
ers, n.d.), 25.
27. Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School
Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1996), 36–38, 69.
28. Ibid., 72.
29. Ibid., 75.
30. Elisabeth S. Clemens, “Organizational Repertoires and Institutional Change:
Women’s Groups and the Transformation of American Politics, 1890–1920,” in Civic
Engagement in American Democracy, ed. Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 92.
31. Reese, Power and the Promise; see especially the discussion in chapter 6, “Va-
cation Schools, Playgrounds, and Educational Extension.” For PTA work in suburbia,
see Claudia Keenan, “P.T.A. Business: A Cultural History of How Suburban Women
Supported the Public Schools, 1920–1960” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2002).
32. Holbeck, Activities and Potentialities, 43.
33. Sheila M. Rothman, Woman’s Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideals and
Practices, 1870 to the Present (New York: Basic, 1978), 135.
34. “Summary of State Reports of Joint Committees and Affiliated Organizations
[to the Department of School Patrons], 1910–1911,” National Education Association
Proceedings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1911), 1098, 1101.
35. “Secretary’s Minutes, Department of School Patrons,” National Educational
Association Proceedings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916), 799.
36. “Summary of State Reports of Joint Committees and Affiliated Organizations
[to the Department of School Patrons], 1911–1912,” National Education Association
Proceedings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912), 1344. For women’s voca-

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tional education, see Jane Bernard Powers, The “Girl Question” in Education: Vocational
Education for Young Women in the Progressive Era (London: Falmer, 1992).
37. Also known as the Federal Act for the Promotion of the Welfare and Hygiene
of Maternity and Infancy, the Sheppard-Towner Act supported educational programs
and free clinics for mothers beginning in 1921. It was repealed in 1929. For fuller
discussions of these reforms, see Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The
Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 1992); Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in
American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Molly
Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1994).
38. Beard, Woman’s Work, 40.
39. Mrs. O. Shepard Barnum, “Women’s Work in the Socialization of the
Schools,” National Education Association Proceedings (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1908), 1236.
40. Elmer Ellsworth Brown, “The Work of Women’s Organizations in Education:
Suggestions for Effective Co-operation,” National Education Association Proceedings,
1908, 1220–21.
41. Holbeck’s study, published in 1934, relied on Butterworth’s data and replicated
his findings. Holbeck concluded that the energies of local white PTAs “were directed
into new and in many ways less important fields” (Holbeck, Activities and Potentialities,
14).
42. Butterworth, Parent-Teacher Association, 54.
43. Ibid., 64.
44. Ibid., 66.
45. Holbeck, Activities and Potentialities, 44.
46. Ibid., 28.
47. Butterworth, Parent-Teacher Association, 68–69. This interpretation challenges
Cutler’s argument that male school administrators found clubs and associations easier
to manage than individual parents or families. The fiscal power of PTA philanthropy
led some administrators to adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy when dealing with
women’s voluntary groups.
48. Ibid., 74.
49. See Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion, chapter 5.
50. Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 39. For sources on maternalism, see Seth
Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the
Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993); Lynn Y. Weiner, “Maternalism
as a Paradigm,” Journal of Women’s History 5 (winter 1993): 96–130; and Ladd-Taylor,
Mother-Work.
51. Rothman, Woman’s Proper Place, 187–88.
52. Darlene Clark Hine, “ ‘We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible’: The Phil-
anthropic Work of Black Women,” in Lady Bountiful, ed. McCarthy, 71.
53. See also Marybeth Gasman’s chapter on black sororities, this volume.
54. Hine, “Wholly Impossible,” 81.
55. The “white PTA” was the name used by the leaders of the National Congress
of Colored Parents and Teachers to refer to the National PTA.

234
 “VALUABLE AND LEGITIMATE SERVICES”

56. Gerda Lerner, “Community Work of Black Club Women,” in The Majority
Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (1979; reprint, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1981), 84. See also Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Doc-
umentary History (New York: Vintage, 1972), especially pages 435–37.
57. Anderson, Education of Blacks, 18. Many other works illustrate the importance
of education as a central theme in black history. For example, see Donald G. Nieman,
ed., African Americans and Education in the South, 1865–1900 (New York: Garland,
1994); and Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope:
The History of Black Women in America (New York: Broadway, 1998).
58. National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, Coral Anniversary History
(Dover, Del.: National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, 1961), 65.
59. National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, Coral Anniversary, 72–
73. See also Scott, Natural Allies, 150.
60. National Congress of Parents and Teachers, Golden Jubilee History, 1897–1947
(Chicago: National Congress of Parents and Teachers, 1947), 38.
61. Christine Woyshner, “Toward a History of a Black Parent-Teacher Move-
ment” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the History of Education Society,
San Antonio, Tex., October 2000).
62. This evidence challenges the claims of historians who have implied that black
parent-teacher associations did not form until the 1920s. For example, Ladd-Taylor
claims that “separate ‘colored’ mothers’ clubs and parent-teacher associations appeared
during the 1920s” (Mother-Work, 58). Similarly, Nancy Cott asserts that “[t]he found-
ing in 1926 of a National Colored Parent-Teachers Association indicated black
women’s similar concerns for their children’s welfare” (The Grounding of Modern Fem-
inism [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987], 87). Such claims are curious,
given the extensive efforts of the National Association of Colored Women’s clubs in
prior decades. Scott’s research on women’s organizations in U.S. history reveals that
black women “had been organized for many decades to deal with the social needs of
their own people” (Natural Allies, 90). See also Lerner, ed., Black Women in White
America.
63. National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, Coral Anniversary, 7.
64. Georgia Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, Golden Anniversary His-
tory (Atlanta: Georgia Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, 1969), 10. For
another study that analyzes black and white relations in the South, see the chapter by
Victoria-Marı́a MacDonald and Eleanore Lenington, this volume.
65. The Jeanes Foundation provided funds to hire field supervisors who worked
to maintain and improve school plants, provide parent and teacher education, address
health and curriculum concerns, and promote interracial solidarity. See National As-
sociation of Supervisors and Consultants Interim History Writing Committee, The
Jeanes Story: A Chapter in the History of American Education, 1908–1968 (Atlanta, Ga.:
Southern Education Foundation, 1979), 26; Anderson, Education of Blacks, 86, 153;
and Valinda Littlefield, “ ‘To Do the Next Needed Thing’: Jeanes Teachers in the
Southern United States, 1908–1934,” in Telling Women’s Lives: Narrative Inquiries in
the History of Women’s Education, ed. Kathleen Weiler and Sue Middleton (Philadel-
phia: Open University Press, 1999), 130–45.
66. National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, Coral Anniversary, 9.
67. Ibid., 10.

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68. National Congress historians do not detail any of the “many changes” made
to white PTA guidelines in order to adapt them to the needs of the black PTA
(National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, Coral Anniversary, 12).
69. Ibid., 83.
70. Grant, Raising Baby, 96.
71. National Congress of Parents and Teachers, Proceedings of the Thirty-Second
Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.: 1929), 177.
72. See Child-Welfare Magazine (official publication of the National Congress of
Parents and Teachers, Washington, D.C.), July 1932, inside back cover.
73. National Congress of Parents and Teachers, Proceedings of the Forty-First An-
nual Meeting (Washington, D.C.: 1937), 351.
74. A discussion of race relations in the PTA is beyond the scope of this chapter.
Certainly, there were white allies in the PTA who worked toward equality in the
organization and in education and society, just as there were black PTA members who
saw separatism as a worthwhile strategy.
75. Marguerite Smith Taylor, “Evaluation of the Program of the Colored Parent-
Teachers Association in Missouri” (master’s thesis, Lincoln University, 1954), 9.
76. Walker, Their Highest Potential, 76–77.
77. Taylor, “Evaluation,” 27–28.
78. See Walker’s extensive discussion of PTA fundraisers in Their Highest Poten-
tial, especially chapter 3.
79. Holbeck, Activities and Potentialities, 19.
80. Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work; Susan Crawford and Peggy Levitt, “Social Change
and Civic Engagement: The Case of the PTA,” in Civic Engagement, ed. Theda
Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina, 249–96; and Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The
Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
81. Cutler argues that while the National PTA leadership focused on child labor,
the local “affiliates focused on more mundane issues like lunchrooms, libraries, and
health clinics” (Parents and Schools, 73).

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10. Women’s Philanthropy for Women’s Art in
America, Past and Present
Karen J. Blair

This essay examines the efforts of American women who have

believed that women artists and audiences have been woefully under-
served by men’s philanthropic contributions to art museums—insti-
tutions largely administered by men and featuring works of art created
by men. Women donors past and present have taken issue with the
inference that viewers should revere this art exclusively as the best
representation of civilization’s creativity. Let us dissect two eras when
women’s rights activism ignited women’s enthusiasm to rectify the
gender imbalance they observed in the art world. The women donors
under our scrutiny are not individuals, but rather groups of women
who cooperated to create new arts venues for the exhibition of
women’s works of art. Beyond their obvious success in educating au-
diences to respect art made by women, these donors increased their
own knowledge, learning to evaluate the arts, create institutions, and
shape the values of their culture.
The feminist movement of the 1970s indisputably launched an era
of change in U.S. women’s political, economic, and social lives, pro-
viding opportunities and advancements for women in government, the
workplace, and their personal lives. This era also brought new gains
in the arts; notably, there was a blossoming of arts institutions created
for the work of women. Many of these facilities were founded by
women acting collectively—by donors who shared a respect for the
creativity of women, observed that resources for women in the arts
were meager, challenged the canon of white male worthies, and sought
to offer exposure and respect to women’s works of art. The impact of

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their efforts has been measurable, but not unique: modern goals and
gains resemble efforts of turn-of-the-century American women’s rights
activists. Despite the passage of over half a century, the parallels be-
tween women philanthropists of women’s creativity at the beginning
and the close of the twentieth century are striking.
Examples abound of contemporary women who founded facilities
to enhance arts opportunities for women and educate the broader pub-
lic to their value. One such benefactor is Wilhelmina Cole Holladay,
who in the 1980s founded the National Museum of Women in the
Arts in Washington, D.C. Wife of a self-made real estate developer
and publishing entrepreneur, Holladay contributed a collection of
paintings by women and refurbished a 1907 Masonic temple using
millions of her own money and that of her friends. Today, the museum
stands only a few city blocks from the Smithsonian museums and other
venerable arts institutions in the nation’s capital. Its exhibitions of
paintings by such artists as Angelica Kauffman, Anna Peale, Suzanne
Valadon, and Alice Neel challenge the male-dominated canon of art
on display down the street in such illustrious exhibition halls as the
National Gallery of Art. Holladay’s alliance with other donors provides
a useful case study of women’s philanthropic giving.
In addition, we can examine the success of contemporary quilt
museums created by women donors in cooperation with one another.
Perhaps in modern times no creative work by women has fared better
than quilting, a craft that has won the respect both of feminists who
applaud the long history of women’s work and expressive culture and
of traditionalists who continue to embrace productive work within the
home over efforts to establish women in male-dominated occupations.
In recent years, several museums dedicated to the exhibition of antique
and contemporary quilts have made their debuts. The oldest of these
is the American Museum of Quilts and Textiles in San Jose, Califor-
nia, founded in 1977 by members of the Santa Clara Valley Quilt
Association. In Golden, Colorado, a Denver suburb, Eugenia Mitchell
founded the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum and donated one hun-
dred quilts to its permanent collection. The museum opened its doors
to the public in 1990. The following year, Meredith Schroeder and
her husband Bill (a publisher of guides for hobbyists and collectors)
donated ninety-one quilts to the collection of their brand-new Amer-
ican Quilt Society Museum in Paducah, Kentucky. In 1988, Mennon-
ites Merle and Phyllis Good, with Merle’s in-laws Rachel and Kenneth
Pellman, established a quilt museum as one component of the People’s

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Place Cultural Center located in Intercourse, Pennsylvania, a center

point for Mennonite and Amish communities. Still another enterprise
is the New England Quilt Museum, opened in 1988 in Lowell, Mas-
sachusetts, under the ambitious sponsorship of local quilt guilds. In-
stitutions like these five museums have launched hundreds of exhibi-
tions of heirloom and recently created textile art, inspiring new quilters
and enlightening the general public.
It is not insignificant that the vision for these galleries has largely
come from women or that education for all participants has emerged
as a pattern in the process of institution-building. Clearly the donors
of these arts institutions have distinguished themselves as unusual nur-
turers of women’s creativity, who reject self-aggrandizement in favor
of broad transmission of knowledge. But their efforts also illustrate
another noteworthy phenomenon in philanthropy. These women sup-
porters are far removed from the traditional stereotype of the philan-
thropist as a rich industrialist who writes fat checks for a pet arts
project and proceeds to fashion an institution based on a personal
vision and intended to impress peers within an elite social circle. In-
stead, these donors reflect an impressive movement to create a sup-
portive environment for women artists in self-consciously collaborative
ways. They have sought to involve many individuals in their goals,
educating them about the possibilities of shaping culture through
museum-building. They have demonstrated considerable success in
developing a broad base of women funders for women’s arts institu-
tions, women willing to donate as part of founding efforts and as
ongoing partners in facility maintenance. Finally, they have prioritized
popular education as a goal, seeking to educate great numbers of
women and men about the value of previously overlooked forms of
expressive culture. One of my goals here is to examine the ways that
women’s forms of collaborative philanthropy have had both positive
and negative effects on two of the new institutions devoted to the
visual arts: the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the New
England Quilt Museum.
But if we imagine these modern founders have been groundbreak-
ing in their efforts to forge wide partnerships for giving, we are un-
aware of their antecedents from the turn of the twentieth century.
American women in the early nineteen hundreds likewise developed
philanthropy, arts, and education values in conjunction with a vital
women’s suffrage and temperance movement; furthermore, they em-
barked on a similar mission: to champion the creative work of women

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by seeking to sustain and promote it, using ingenious alliances to

achieve their collective goals. Accordingly, I also wish to review efforts
by women’s amateur arts societies in the Progressive Era to develop
an environment that would foster the creative work of women artists,
with the aim of providing delectation and education for a broad public.
This activity foreshadowed commitment to women’s art in the 1980s.
We can observe considerable similarities between recent and earlier
patterns of partnership for philanthropic activity, despite major differ-
ences over seventy years of history.

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS

The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), opened
in 1988, has enjoyed considerable publicity as the first art museum in
the world to dedicate itself completely to the exhibition of women’s
work. The gallery’s founder, Wilhelmina Cole Holladay, has received
much (and deserved) attention for her ingenuity and generous financial
donations. Holladay contributed to the acquisition of a historic build-
ing in Washington, D.C., assembled and donated a collection of paint-
ings by European and North American women, and secured consid-
erable corporate support for a somewhat controversial enterprise. Some
critics, for instance, have argued that the pieces she shows—created
by women who have not generally enjoyed recognition in traditional
art museums—are not really “art.” Others have complained that her
institution smacks offensively of feminism, foisting assertions of
women’s equality on the arts-loving public. Additionally, some women
artists have been known to reject NMWA’s “ghettoization” of their
work, refusing to permit their paintings or sculpture to be exhibited
in a separate, all-women’s arts institution. Nevertheless, Holladay has
managed to attract funding from a healthy panel of corporate donors—
including Philip Morris, AT&T, Martin Marietta, and Dupont—in
order to create a formidable space for women’s art.
Let us examine a heretofore unexplored dimension of the NMWA:
the institution’s eagerness to attract support, financial and otherwise,
from a broad base of women. This brand of philanthropy has been
initiated by the institution’s leadership rather than emerging from the
grassroots, as it has in quilt museums. But part of Holladay’s genius
lies in her ability to link her institution with modern women’s con-
sciousness of women’s auxiliary status, past and present. Her strides
in winning support of the museum on these grounds are considerable.1

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For example, a visitor to the NMWA will immediately observe a large

book at the reception desk. This book—seen long before any painting
comes into view—holds the names of all charter members who con-
tributed $25 when the facility was only an idea. Holladay invited mul-
titudes of women to assist her in funding the museum, soliciting help
from women she located on five mailing lists (museum catalog buyers,
upscale catalog shoppers, female members of professional arts organ-
izations, supporters of cultural programs, and members of women’s
rights organizations). With persistence, she collected small checks
from eighty-five thousand women, enabling her to boast that the mu-
seum’s membership list trails behind only those of the revered and
established Metropolitan Museum of Art and Art Institute of Chi-
cago. Today, the bound list of charter NMWA members is fondly and
steadily perused by museum guests who have traveled from distant
places to view the results of their support. The prominent book re-
minds them that the effort to build this unique women’s arts institu-
tion was a shared one. They hunt for their names and those of their
friends, proud to see that they have made a mark on the institution
that has managed to dignify the creative work of women.
An intensive appeal for charter members was only one of Holla-
day’s innovative ways of building a foundation for her new institution.
One of the most successful strategies has been to invite each state to
form a committee of women that will generate a show of local con-
temporary women’s art and fund the show’s exhibition at the national
museum. The plan has had wide appeal, for it taps the pride of women
volunteers, artists, and individual and corporate sponsors even (and
perhaps especially) in states far from Washington, D.C. To date, nu-
merous states have formed committees, and several of these have as-
sembled shows for the NMWA.2
Let us examine the work of the women in the state of Washington,
who formed a committee in July 1987 and raised about $80,000 in
two years. The committee sent a juried show of forty-three pieces (oil,
watercolor, photography, glass, computer graphics, ceramics, and
sculpture) to the nation’s capital, representing fifteen women artists.3
It was an artist, Nellike Langout-Nix, who blended the interests
of women donors and women artists in Washington State. She or-
ganized a survey of women artists in the state and urged women to
submit their work. Over 668 artists responded. The fundraising chair-
person, Ruth Gerberding (whose husband was president of the Uni-
versity of Washington), arranged receptions for women who had been

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KAREN J. BLAIR

supporters of art in the Northwest and who were willing to associate

themselves with a woman-focused museum. Among the $500 donors
were Anne Gould Hauberg—founder of the Pilchuck School for Glass
and patron of Dale Chihuly—and Betty Hedreen, supporter of the
Seattle Art Museum. Still, only twenty donors offered five hundred
dollars; additional funds were needed to hold the competition, assem-
ble the show, crate and insure the exhibition pieces, transport the show
to and from Washington, D.C., print a catalog, and fly the artists to
a gala opening attended by their senators, congressmen, and governor.4
To raise more support, lecturers toured state universities, senior cen-
ters, women’s clubs, and other public forums with a slide show of
women’s art. Towns and cities in the state came forth with small
amounts of money after the exhibit was committed to tour in several
local communities.5 The Washington State Committee also won sup-
port from local businesses that did not generally support women or
the arts. They were attracted by the opportunity to champion north-
western contributions in the nation’s capital. Money came from such
improbable sources as the Deep Sea Fisherman’s Union, Olympia
Brewery, the Washington State Apple Commission, Arbor Crest Win-
ery, Puget Power and Light, Tree Top (apple juice) Cooperative,
Boeing Aircraft, Kaiser Aluminum, and Weyerhaeuser. The effort was
enormous, but it was successful. A museum in Washington, D.C., was
publicized throughout Washington State; fifteen Washington women
artists were featured in their home state and in the nation’s capital;
local sponsorship touted the Northwest on the East Coast; and local
women’s arts supporters expanded organizational skills they had de-
veloped in other voluntary church, civic, and social welfare projects.
This case illustrates a key element of donor cooperation: the in-
volvement of many sponsors bolstered the new institution, however
far away it might be. As in the nineteenth-century efforts of ladies’
aid societies, hospital guilds, and female auxiliaries of benevolent and
charitable enterprises, the National Museum of Women in the Arts
was strengthened by inviting women’s personal and financial invest-
ment in its success.
In addition to a broad base of financial support, the NMWA ex-
hibitions also enjoyed and encouraged a new and broader audience.
Here was a different audience than that enjoyed by traditional art
museums. Women supporters alerted their neighbors, their networks,
and members of other woman-centered voluntary organizations to the
project, encouraging them to see, enjoy, and absorb the artwork on

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display. Audiences arose from such constituencies as Girl Scouts,

women’s studies students, and members of the National Organization
for Women, extending women’s art well beyond the world of art his-
torians and collectors.

THE NEW ENGLAND QUILT MUSEUM

Perhaps the ultimate expression of women’s cooperative philan-
thropy lies in the creation of the New England Quilt Museum
(NEQM) in Lowell, Massachusetts. It opened its doors in June 1987
to exhibit traditional and contemporary quilts to visitors to the City
of Spindles. The historic mill town today attracts tourists by reflecting
on and representing its association with the textile industry.6
In 1991, the museum’s collection was much bolstered by a generous
contribution of thirty-five antique quilts by Crayola Crayon heiress
and quilter Gail Binney-Winslow. Also a collector of quilts, she had
circulated part of her collection nationally through the Smithsonian
Institution’s SITES program in 1985. The show, “Homage to
Amanda,” toured cities throughout the United States. Binney-
Winslow chose to make her gift—including some of the quilts that
had enjoyed national exposure—to a budding institution in her own
area.
For all her generosity, the new quilt museum was not bankrolled
by a major donor. Instead, it was funded by an ambitious alliance of
home quilters, united through the New England Quilter’s Guild
(NEQG). As a member of the Cranberry Quilters Guild of Cape Cod,
Binney-Winslow was also allied with the NEQG, which formed in
1976 to meet the needs of modern quilters. In 1981, eager to view as
many quilts as possible but stymied by the lack of attention that local
fine arts museums gave to quilts, officers of the NEQG voted to em-
bark on the founding of a quilt museum. Six years later, the organi-
zation’s membership had raised $45,000 and opened the doors to its
museum.
The story of the fundraising is complex. In the absence of a pri-
mary benefactor, the museum exists because many women believed it
was important. The membership of the New England Quilter’s
Guild—in the late 1980s, two thousand individual quilters and mem-
bers of fifty affiliated guilds—pooled their energies and finances. Doz-
ens of quilt clubs, with memberships ranging from a handful to a few
hundred, used their meetings not only to trade quilting techniques,

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sew crib quilts for AIDS babies and battered women’s shelters, and
attend instructional workshops, but also to devise methods for raising
museum contributions. Strategies were many and varied. The Narra-
gansett Bay Quilters sent $7,650 over ten years, money raised by auc-
tioning off donated quilts. Members of Hands across the Valley Quil-
ters Guild in Amherst, Massachusetts, sent profits from the quilt they
raffled at their own quilt show. Individual members simply wrote
checks. Some groups coaxed other women’s voluntary associations to
contribute, as when the Connecticut Federation of Women’s Clubs
was persuaded to contribute $25 by Connecticut quilters. Some guild
members preferred sending needlework over donating cash. They
crafted items for sale at the museum gift shop for the museum’s profit.
The guild’s work to pay museum bills was and continues to be
arduous. A flood from burst pipes in 1991 did not damage the col-
lection but necessitated considerable fundraising for a move to a more
reliable building, at 18 Shattuck Street, where the museum reopened
in July 1993. In addition to money, volunteers have provided time:
they give tours, hang exhibits, organize the library, sell admission tick-
ets, and entertain at openings. In return, volunteers expect to have a
voice in the operational decisions of the museum, a situation that has
contributed to the problem of turnover among museum directors over
the years. But the involvement of thousands of New England women
in the founding of the institution also provides a foundation of sup-
port, a sense of ownership, and a pool of creativity that is impressive.
The effort of so many women who insisted on bringing a traditional
but neglected art form to the attention of the public overcomes an
omission in the professional art world and dignifies the history of
women’s creative efforts. As in the case of the National Museum of
Women in the Arts, the New England Quilt Museum creators have
attracted and educated viewers through the dignity and accessibility
their institution has lent to quilting. Furthermore, their lectures, work-
shops, classes, and needlework contests have bolstered regional and
even national interest in the tradition that they practice and to which
they are utterly committed.

PROGRESSIVE ERA COLLABORATIONS IN BEHALF OF WOMEN’S ART

It is ahistorical to assume that collaborative efforts among phil-
anthropic women are a modern development, but few are aware that
a large network of women’s amateur arts societies began to form and

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flourish at the turn of the twentieth century. Members of these or-

ganizations were involved in many of the same patterns of philan-
thropy we have just observed in the 1980s. In hundreds of American
cities and towns, a dozen or more art-loving neighbors met monthly
or even weekly (except in summertime) to study art history for their
own edification, acquaint themselves with the work of contemporary
artists, and foster cultural development by creating cultural opportu-
nities in their communities. These groups were not composed of the
richest women—those traditionally associated with philanthropy in
America. Rather, they were made up of middle-class wives of suc-
cessful business and professional men in America’s big cities and small
towns. The women were generally Protestant, white, and economically
comfortable, with the time, taste, and background to pursue the arts.
They built and exhibited art collections, created arts centers, and be-
came the earliest supporters of municipal art commissions—the fore-
runners of today’s network of government arts supports, from the Na-
tional Endowment for the Arts to state, county, and city arts councils.
In each community, their achievements were small rather than extraor-
dinary, but as a whole, their efforts nationwide to deliver knowledge
of and access to women’s art were sizeable.7
Members of amateur arts associations felt entitled, even obliged,
to act as taste-makers in their communities. Their above-average levels
of education and their husbands’ stature and influence contributed to
this attitude. So did their gender, for nineteenth-century “ladies” were
thought to be especially sensitive to beauty. In fact, women preferred
to cultivate the arts in the company of other women, and they rou-
tinely declined opportunities to join coed arts societies. In mixed so-
cieties they did not hold executive offices and did not have the clout
they enjoyed in women-only arts groups. In addition, middle-class
American women justified their role as arts advocates by citing a long
tradition of service through voluntary effort. Members’ mothers and
grandmothers had joined women’s societies and auxiliaries for a wide
range of purposes, including guilds that supported benevolent insti-
tutions, church sewing circles, and ladies’ aid societies for war relief.8
Most women’s arts groups formed initially for the purpose of
studying art history. This was true of the Hartford Art Club in Con-
necticut, the Mankato Art History Club in Minnesota, the Decatur
Art Club in Illinois, and the Auburn Art Club in Maine. Sometimes
a handful of women met to exchange reviews of exhibitions they had
attended or to offer papers they had researched. Sometimes the art

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enthusiasts were actually a department of a larger women’s club that

also had sub-groups devoted to the study of literature, music, lan-
guages, current events, or social problems. The New England
Woman’s Club in Boston, for example, created an Arts and Crafts
Division in 1899, but the club had also formed groups devoted to
botany and political economy.9 Whether they formed independent
clubs or divisions of larger associations of women, women arts advo-
cates tended to concur with the general reverence for the Western
canon of Old Masters. However, they invariably widened their curric-
ulum to include the study of local artists—especially women—and
crafts, notably the art of pottery, in which women were excelling.
When the Hartford Art Club embarked on a study of American art,
they devoted separate meetings to the study of women illustrators,
women sculptors, women portrait painters, and women miniaturists.
They also included women in their examination of Connecticut art-
ists.10 Probably this catholicism arose for a variety of reasons, including
the members’ lack of access to the Old Masters, their local pride, a
sense of sisterhood, limited finances for collecting artworks, and taste
in home decoration.
It was not long before members of these groups observed the
dearth of opportunities for women in the arts and defined it as a
problem they should solve. This is hardly surprising, given the reform
impulse that had gripped many middle-class women of the day, who
routinely addressed social problems by creating parks, playgrounds, and
free health clinics and by lobbying for clean milk, mothers’ pensions,
and child labor laws.11 We can document club efforts to provide—as
a group, rather than individually—a wide range of support for women
artists. To women enrolled in art schools, clubs offered scholarships
and urban residences, such as the Three Arts Clubs in New York and
Cincinnati; to professional women artists, they offered jobs as instruc-
tors at club meetings and increased exposure through exhibitions, com-
missions, and donations of their art to their communities. Through
these efforts, women in arts clubs furthered the careers of women
artists of their day. Club members did the work that well-heeled phi-
lanthropists have done, but they accomplished their goals as a group
and learned how multitudinous were the results that their collabora-
tions could yield.
Women in turn-of-the-century clubs built a strong tradition of
publicizing the work of women artists by holding exhibitions, even if
limited budgets tempered their ambitions. The General Federation of

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Women’s Clubs (GFWC), claiming a membership of four million in

1926, displayed fifty sculptures by twenty American women at its bi-
ennial convention, including the work of Brenda Putnam, Edith Bar-
etto Parsons, Bessie Potter Vonnoh, Grace Mott Johnson, Laura Gar-
din Fraser, Anna Vaughn Hyatt-Huntington, Harriet Payne Bingham,
and Harriet Frishmuth.12 They also circulated an exhibition of art
pottery from studios in which women were noteworthy, including
Rookwood, Overbeck, Newcomb, and Grueby potteries.13 Such activ-
ities were logical services for member clubs, who had long supported
the arts with impressive zeal. In 1912, for example, two thousand clubs
in the GFWC reported that they had offered lectures on art that year,
and three hundred clubs had held their own exhibitions.
Many other networks of women art lovers also championed the
accomplishments of women. When the Friends of the Arts in Pitts-
burgh acquired 134 works of art to hang in public school classrooms,
forty-seven of those works were by women.14 The Woman’s Art Club
of Cincinnati bought a painting by Mary Spencer in 1912, a gift for
the Cincinnati Art Museum. In Richmond, Indiana, the woman-run
Art Association purchased Indiana art for the high school art gallery,
including sculpture by Janet Scudder and pottery by the Overbeck
sisters, which appeared alongside the work of male artists like William
Merrit Chase.15
Women supporters of women’s arts persuaded other clubwomen to
support the cause. Some women’s organizations that existed for other
purposes nevertheless became patrons of the arts in order to accom-
plish their work. Patriotic societies of women needed designers for
tablets, historical plaques, memorials, markers, and statues of heroes.
The Women’s Roosevelt Society, for example, wanted to issue a bronze
medal with the image of Theodore Roosevelt in 1919, and they com-
missioned Anna Hyatt to design it. She would also create a bronze
statue of Sybil Luddington, a Revolutionary War heroine, for the
Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR).16
Much of the work that women’s clubs commissioned for the dec-
oration of their clubrooms was created by women artists. The Daugh-
ters of the American Revolution purchased work by L. Pearl Sanders
for Continental Hall in Washington, D.C., and statuary by Gertrude
Vanderbilt Whitney, which in 1929 was placed in the courtyard at
DAR headquarters. Violet Oakley, renowned for her mural paintings
at the Pennsylvania State Capitol at Harrisburg, was revered by the
Philadelphia Republican Women’s Club. The club bought the home

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KAREN J. BLAIR

of Charlton Yarnall to save Oakley’s mural decorations inside it. A

bronze fountain by Janet Scudder was commissioned as a memorial
shrine to Mrs. E. J. Robinson, president and founder of the Woman’s
Department Club in Indianapolis, and was placed at the entrance to
the main hall of the clubhouse. The Junior Lounge of the American
Women’s Association building in Manhattan contained a series of mu-
rals by Lucile Howard and M. Elizabeth Price. The Wednesday Club
in San Diego hired Anna Valentien to produce all of the door plates,
hardware, and copper and glass lanterns for its clubhouse. The Daugh-
ters of the Republic of Texas commissioned Elisabet Ney to create
statues of Stephen Austin and Sam Houston; these never adorned
their clubrooms, but went instead to the United States Capitol.17
Club members honed the skills to press women’s arts before gen-
eral audiences. The GFWC’s art director, Rose Berry, urged all club-
women to study the work of American women painters Mary Cassatt,
Elizabeth Bourse, Cecilia Beaux, Helen Maria Turner, Lilian Westcott
Hale, Jean McLane, Gertrude Fiske, Lillian Genth, Anna Fisher, Fel-
icia W. Howell, M. DeNeale Morgan, Helen Dunlop, Marie Dan-
forth Page, Alice Kent Stoddard, Ellen Emmet Rand, Lydia Field
Emmet, Violet Oakley, Dorothy Ochtman, Evelyn Withrow, Pauline
Palmer, Mary Foote, Jane Peterson, Johanna K. Hailman, and Marie
Oberteufer, as well as American sculptors Harriet Frishmuth, Anna
Vaughn Hyatt-Huntington, Malvina Hoffman, Edith Barretto Par-
sons, Bessie Potter Vonnoh, Laura Gardin Fraser, Brenda Putnam,
Evelyn Beatrice Longman, Beatrice Fenton, Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney, Grace Talbot, Margaret French Cresson, Abastenia Eberle,
and Lucy Perkins Ripley.18 The Federation used its 1911 edition of
Handbook of Art in Our Own Country to recognize numerous examples
of women’s art in public spaces, including a statue called “Southern
Womanhood” by Belle Kinsey (Atlanta); statues of Lady Macbeth,
General Albert Sidney Johnston, Sam Houston, and Stephen Austin
by Elisabet Ney (Austin); “Leif Ericson” by Anne Whitney (Boston);
the “Inspiration” statue at the front of the Buffalo Historical Building
by Gertrude (Mrs. Harry Payne) Whitney; the “Mother Bickerdyke”
statue in Galesburg, Illinois, by Mrs. Theodore Ruggles Kitson; the
“Daniel Boone” statue in Louisville by Enid Yandell; “Soldiers’ Mon-
ument” in Newburyport, Massachusetts, by Sally James Farnsham; the
Carrie Brown Bagnotti Memorial Fountain in Providence, Rhode Is-
land, by Enid Yandell; a statue of Admiral Esek Hopkins by Mrs.

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 WOMEN’S PHILANTHROPY FOR WOMEN’S ART IN AMERICA

Theodore R. Kitson (Providence); “Beatrice Cenci” by Harriet Hos-

mer (St. Louis); “Awakening of Spring” by Clara Pfeiffer Garrett (St.
Louis); the Carnegie Library designed by Julia Morgan in Seminary
Park, California; the Hamilton S. White Memorial by Gail Sherman
Corbett in Syracuse; “Admiral David Farragut” by Mrs. V. R. Hoxie
in Washington, D.C.; a bust of Alice Freeman Palmer in Wellesley,
Massachusetts, by Anne Whitney; a bas relief portrait in the Wood-
stock, Vermont, courthouse by Mar Stickney; and the women’s club-
house designed by architect Josephine Wright Chapman in Worcester,
Massachusetts.19
Members of women’s groups ostentatiously furthered public fa-
miliarity with women’s art still more when they began, after World
War I, to build spacious and luxurious clubhouses with money from
government bonds they had acquired to support the war effort. Some
commissioned women architects. Julia Morgan shaped many Califor-
nia clubhouses; the Berkeley Woman’s City Club is probably the most
admired. Mrs. Minerva P. Nichols designed the New Century Club-
houses in Wilmington and Philadelphia. In both Worcester and Lynn,
Massachusetts, Josephine Wright Chapman designed the women’s
clubhouses. Hazel Wood Waterman designed the Wednesday Club’s
hall in San Diego, and Gertrude Sawyer designed the Junior League
Building in Washington, D.C. While these buildings provided space
for a variety of club functions, including meeting rooms for business,
kitchen and dining areas for luncheons, and auditoriums for speeches
and concerts, the new halls additionally offered high-ceilinged, elab-
orately furnished gallery spaces for women’s art, as well as reception
areas for gala gallery openings. The Des Moines Women’s Clubhouse,
for example, included a separate gallery. Sometimes the exhibits were
open only to club members, but frequently the club opened its shows
to the general public; club members thus educated their neighbors
about the strength, beauty, and value of women’s art. These new gal-
leries and reception halls, often elegant and splendid, lent a luster to
the art of women similar to that created by Wilhelmina Holladay in
her modern-day women’s art showplace.
The advantages of collectively supporting women’s art went beyond
the increased financial base available to a project supported by hun-
dreds of women. For instance, members shared a responsibility for
supporting the arts projects. (In one Pennsylvania town, no committee
was established to locate an appropriate clubhouse to meet the club’s

249
KAREN J. BLAIR

architectural needs and desires. Instead, everyone belonging to the

organization was expected to tour the spaces available!20) A sizeable
club also ensured wide publicity for an arts program and thus increased
an artist’s visibility. Furthermore, the work of funding, assembling,
hanging, and advertising art shows gave women in the sponsoring club
valuable lessons in arts administration, training not very available to
them elsewhere.
The disadvantages, however, were also apparent. A great number
of donors inevitably brought conflicting opinions to each issue and
practicality was sometimes lost in the ambitions of dreamers. In New
York City, the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors
gave up their showplace after five years, undone by the expense of and
debate over the details of clubhouse management.21 There were as
many project planners who were finally daunted by limits on time,
space, collections, and security as who succeeded.
One of the clubwomen’s strategies for supporting local artists was
unsurprising, given their willingness to democratize the canon,
broaden public access to the arts, and widen patterns of giving, all
goals destined to increase women’s role in the arts. They became early
champions of government aid to the arts, in the form of municipal
arts commissions. Women were not major players in the first city arts
committee in America—the privately funded New York City Munic-
ipal Arts Commission, chartered by the City of New York in 1897—
but they soon became major exponents of the idea. For example, the
Minnesota Commission, antecedent of the modern state arts council,
was formed in 1903, thanks in large part to pressure from Minnesota’s
State Federation of Women’s Clubs. Members of St. Cloud’s Art and
History Club, while studying the subject of France, embraced the
French government’s notion of support for the arts. Determined to
replicate this arrangement, the group’s officers introduced the concept
at their district convention in 1898 and won the support of the pres-
ident of Minnesota’s State Federation of Women’s Clubs, Mrs. Mar-
garet J. Evans. With the entire federation behind the proposal, Gov-
ernor Van Sant and the 1903 legislature agreed to establish a state arts
commission (also known as the State Art Society). The government
appropriated two thousand dollars per year for the endeavor. The com-
mission’s objects were ambitious: “to advance the interest of the fine
arts, to develop the influence of art in education and foster the intro-
duction of art in manufactures”—goals that incorporated the contri-
butions of women artists.22

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The modest budget of the Minnesota art commission, even sup-

plemented by memberships and donations, would not have permitted
appreciable activity had not women’s volunteer power fueled the
agency. Clubwomen on the State Art Society’s board delivered the
unpaid labor that established its lecture service, a traveling exhibition
program, the loan of photographs of Western art masterpieces, and
the beginnings of an original art collection. Through the cooperation
of the St. Cloud Reading Room Society, the organization initiated an
annual exhibition. In 1911, with an increased appropriation of $7,500,
the society hired Maurice Irwin Flagg as part-time director to expand
its services.23 This advance did not mean that clubwomen dropped
out, however. They lent funds for special projects, and when funding
for the Society collapsed, clubwomen soon revived it in 1921. It foun-
dered in 1927 and was again revived in the mid-1940s. Women’s col-
lective efforts to broaden American access to the arts in the early
twentieth century were tenacious, creative, and ambitious. Club-
women’s insistence on informing themselves about women artists of
the past and present, commissioning work by women artists, and
pressing government to enhance public access to art (including that
by women) was bold and invaluable. Furthermore, their interests and
influence awakened the general public to the existence and importance
of women’s creativity.
On the face of it, the contexts of the two eras under discussion
here are sufficiently dissimilar as to make their stories incomparable.
By the final decades of the twentieth century, the United States had
changed considerably from what it had been in the first decades of
that century. American economic, political, and social influence had
grown and woman’s piece of the pie had grown with it. Yet gender
inequity persisted in arts and in women’s access to resources that could
correct the imbalance. However, women’s determination to create a
more just society in both periods launched a collaborative effort to
push women’s art before the public for appreciation and recognition.
In both eras, women philanthropists supporting women artists suc-
cessfully worked together to assemble the resources necessary to es-
tablish venues for showcasing women’s art. However indifferent or
even hostile to women’s creative voice their world might be, they col-
lectively forged paths to reach a broad public that might otherwise
have remained ignorant of women’s artistic capabilities.

251
KAREN J. BLAIR

NOTES
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Wanda Corn, ed., Cultural Lead-
ership in America: Art Matronage and Patronage (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner
Museum, 1998).

1. NMWA Papers, National Museum of Women in the Arts Library, Wash-

ington, D.C.; Anne Higonnet, “Woman’s Place,” Art in America 76 (July 1988), 127–
49; Wilhelmina Cole Holladay, interview by author, 6 and 7 August 1991, Washing-
ton, D.C.; National Museum of Women in the Arts (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1987); and Eleanor Tufts, American Women Artists, 1830–1930 (Washington, D.C.:
International Exhibitions Foundation for the National Museum of Women in the
Arts, 1987).
2. In 1987, Kansas and Colorado sponsored the first state exhibitions; in 1994,
shows were produced by committees in northern and southern California. Texas sent
its first show in 1988, Washington State and North Carolina in 1989, upstate New
York in 1990, Arkansas in 1992, and Utah and Tennessee in 1993.
3. Twelve artists came from the Seattle area and three were from the eastern
part of the state. They were Sonja Blomdahl, Rachel Feferman, Lorna Pauley Jordan,
Francesca Lacagnina, Solveig Landa, Marilyn Lysohir, Janice Maher, Inge Norgaard,
Connie J. Ritchie, Jennifer Stabler-Holland, Sarah Jane Teofanov, Barbara E. Thomas,
Liza vonRosenstiel, Linda E. A. Wachtmeister, and Patti Warashina.
4. Ruth Gerberding, Beverly Criley Graham, Corinne Kramer, Nancy Lewis,
and Irish Nichols, interviews with author, January 1995, Seattle, Washington.
5. The show was exhibited in Pullman, Ellensburg, two sites in Seattle, Yakima,
Richland, Ilwaco, Pasco, Everett, and Walla Walla.
6. Carter Houck, “Museum Quilts,” Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine (April 1994),
22–23; Compass, the newsletter of the New England Quilter’s Guild, 1981–91; Marie
Geary, telephone conversation with author, February 1994; Janet Elwin, telephone
conversation with author, March 1994; Marjorie Dannis, telephone conversation with
author, December 1993; Susan Raban, interview by author, July 1992, Lowell, Mass.;
Gail Binney-Stiles and Una Baker, telephone conversation with author, July 1992; and
Papers of the New England Quilt Museum, New England Quilt Museum Library,
Lowell, Massachusetts.
7. See especially chapter 4 of Karen J. Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and Their
Amateur Arts Associations in America, 1890–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994).
8. Barbara J. Berg, The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism: The
Woman and the City, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and
Paula Baker, “Domestication in Politics: Women and American Political Society,
1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984), 620–47.
9. Massachusetts State Federation of Women’s Clubs, Progress and Achievement:
A History of the Massachusetts State Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1893–1962 (Lexing-
ton: Massachusetts State Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1962); and Jane Cunningham
Croly, The History of the Woman’s Club Movement in America (New York: Henry G.
Allen, 1898).

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 WOMEN’S PHILANTHROPY FOR WOMEN’S ART IN AMERICA

10. Yearbooks, 1921–23, Hartford Art Club, Stowe-Day Foundation, Hartford,

Conn.
11. Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–
1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980), especially chapter 6.
12. Rose V. S. Berry, “The Spirit of Art,” Eighteenth Biennial Proceedings, General
Federation of Women’s Clubs (1926): 270–73.
13. “Art Department,” General Federation Magazine 12 (April 1914), 9–10.
14. Catherine Kaiser, “Those One Hundred Friends,” Carnegie Magazine (Sep-
tember/October 1984), 22–24. In McPherson, Kans., the community featured Anna
Keener’s painting “Mountain Ranch” (“An Exhibition in a Kansas High School,”
American Magazine of Art 9 [January 1918]: 111–13).
15. Ellis Bond Johnson Papers, Richmond Art Museum, Richmond, Ind.
16. Beatrice G. Proske, Brookgreen Gardens Sculpture (Brookgreen, S.C.: Trustees,
1943).
17. American Art Annual 26 (1929): 18; American Art Annual 24 (1927): 17; Amer-
ican Art Annual 25 (1928): 18; American Art Annual 28 (1931): 18; Vernon Loggins,
“Ney, Elisabet,” in Notable American Women, vol. 2, ed. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson
James, and Paul S. Boyer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1971), 623–25; and Bride Neill Taylor, Elisabet Ney, Sculptor (Austin, Tex.:
Thomas F. Taylor, 1938), 75–78.
18. Scribner’s, June 1928, 792 g, h, and 76.
19. Mrs. Everett W. Pattison, Handbook of Art in Our Own Country, 2nd ed. (St.
Louis, Mo.: General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1911).
20. “Club Financing by the Extravagant Sex,” Woman Citizen 7 (26 August 1922):
8.
21. Ronald Pisano, One Hundred Years: The National Association of Women Artists
(New York: National Association of Women Artists, 1989), 15.
22. Mrs. E. W. Pattison, “Art and the Women’s Clubs,” Federation Bulletin 7
(May 1909), 38–40; General Federation of Women’s Clubs, Eighth Biennial Proceed-
ings (1906): 106; Minnesota State Art Society, Brief History of the Minnesota State Art
Society (St. Paul: Minnesota State Art Society, ca. 1949); and Minnesota State Art
Society, Report of the Minnesota State Art Society, 1903–4 (St. Paul: Minnesota State
Art Society, 1904).
23. Mrs. Phelps Wyman, “State Art Society of Minnesota,” American City 7 (Au-
gust 1912), 142–43.

253
PART III.
THE POLITICS OF PHILANTHROPY
IN WOMEN’S EDUCATION:
RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER
11. “Nothing More for Men’s Colleges”: The
Educational Philanthropy of Mrs. Russell Sage
Ruth Crocker

I am sorry not to help you, but Mrs. Sage . . . has told me re-
peatedly that she was going to do nothing more for men’s colleges.
—Theodore C. Janeway to Rutgers president
William H. Demarest, 19161

Late in life, Margaret Olivia Slocum—a Syracuse-born school-

teacher and the wife of New York financier Russell Sage (business
partner to robber baron Jay Gould)—reinvented herself as “Mrs. Rus-
sell Sage,” a philanthropist, moral authority, and advocate for women.2
The Sages had no children, and it was rumored that she intended to
give away the entire fortune amassed over a lifetime by her husband
(equivalent to about one and one half billion dollars today).3 So long
as her miserly husband was alive, she had been unable to spend freely,
and so for years her philanthropy was confined to moral pronounce-
ments and good works.4 What causes would the philanthropic Mrs.
Sage now support? One sympathetic observer believed he had the an-
swer: “Women and education—there is the key.”5
Expectant college fundraisers had not long to wait. Russell Sage
died in July 1906, a few weeks short of his ninetieth birthday, leaving
everything to his widow. Olivia had encouraged her correspondents to
believe that her interests lay in women’s education above all. But as
she considered which schools and colleges to support she faced a be-
wildering array of choices. Should she found a single, great institution,
a Sage University for Women in the East, as the University of Chicago
was Mr. Rockefeller’s university in the West? Should she support the
coeducational universities like Syracuse and Cornell, limit her gifts to
women’s colleges like Vassar, or support coordinate colleges like Bar-
nard? And what about all the trade and professional schools for women
that were begging for her money? When the financial officer from

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Syracuse University called at her New York home in May 1906, he

found her anxiously pondering these questions. He reported to the
university president, “She inquired very minutely about the working
of coeducation with us.”6

CREATIVE AND COERCIVE SPENDING

Historian Margaret Rossiter has described how late-nineteenth-
century advocates of women’s advancement made their donations to
universities conditional on the admission of women or in other ways
attempted to leverage new opportunities for women in education.
Some examples of such “creative and coercive spending” will be fa-
miliar to readers.7 Female philanthropists funded the era’s most famous
reform institution, Hull House.8 Wealthy female donors also funded
fellowships to help younger women pursue careers in new fields—as
juvenile court officers, visiting nurses, and social workers.9 The As-
sociation of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA) supplies another example of
women’s creative philanthropy; it supported women scientists studying
for their Ph.D.s in Germany at a time when no American graduate
school would admit them.10 A striking example of how women’s phi-
lanthropy could serve as an “entering wedge” into higher education
occurred in Baltimore. Here a group of wealthy women gave $119,000
toward a medical school where “women should be admitted upon the
same terms which may be prescribed for men.” Mary Elizabeth Garrett
gave the Johns Hopkins Medical School an additional $306,977 in
1893.11
Olivia was aware of these attempts to use monetary donations to
force universities to admit women. Her ally, physician Mary Putnam
Jacobi, had recently tried unsuccessfully to leverage women’s entry to
Harvard Medical School.12 And her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
better known as a strong advocate of coeducation, also urged women
to financially support their own institutions. At the sixtieth anniversary
of the Troy Female Seminary in 1892, Stanton appealed passionately
for endowed college scholarships for girls. “This is the best work
women of wealth can do,” she declared, “and I hope in the future they
will endow scholarships for their own sex instead of giving millions
of dollars to institutions for boys.”13 At a parlor suffrage meeting in
New York City, Stanton sounded the same theme. If there were any
rich women present who were soon to make their wills, let them leave
their money for the advancement of their own sex, she declared. Yale

258
 “NOTHING MORE FOR MEN’S COLLEGES”

and Harvard “had received millions from women but very, very little
had been done for the education of deserving girls.”14 When Stanton
later learned that the president of Cornell was trying to interest Russell
Sage in endowing a civil engineering chair, she urged him to “help
the girls and not the boys.”15
But Stanton would die in 1902 and Jacobi a few years later. Sage
embarked on her educational philanthropy without the support of
these feminist friends and with the influence of her patrician lawyer
and advisor Robert de Forest (1848–1931) in the ascendant.16 Just how
ascendant is revealed in a memo from de Forest dated February 1907,
in which he advises her how to proceed with her philanthropy to
institutions. De Forest brushed aside the claims of most of the four
thousand institutions that had already applied to her, confidently as-
serting that the institutions to which she would want to donate were
those that had not applied.17

FIRST GIFTS
Within months of her husband’s death, Olivia made her first, great
donations to education. All of these were gifts that expressed senti-
ment, memorialized family ties, and rewarded long associations. Her
initial large gift was for a teachers’ college at Syracuse University; then,
in December 1906, she gave one million dollars to the Emma Willard
School (as the Troy Female Seminary was renamed), enabling it to
build an entirely new campus.18 Finally, in January 1907, she donated
half a million to Troy Polytechnic (now Rensselaer Polytechnic Insti-
tute, or RPI) as a memorial to her husband, subsequently doubling
the amount.19

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

At the same time, Sage was planning to endow a coordinate college
for women at New York University (NYU). Her interest in NYU had
developed in partnership with Helen Gould (1870–1938), for whom
she served as a kind of philanthropic mentor. Helen’s donations to
NYU expressed a passionately felt sense of stewardship, and they were
unconditional.20 In contrast, Olivia intended her donation to open the
doors to women. New York University would provide a test case of
coercive spending.
In New York University, Sage believed she had found a worthy

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RUTH CROCKER

recipient of her money: a progressive New York institution that was

friendly to women. Henry MacCracken, NYU’s chancellor since 1891,
was an imaginative and ruthless fundraiser. Though he pursued a mas-
culinist vision of undergraduate education, he was mindful of the need
to cultivate the goodwill of wealthy men and women who were po-
tential donors. In 1890 he admitted women as students to professional
programs in law and pedagogy at the university’s Washington Square
campus.21 A women’s law class was started, and a group of wealthy
women paid the salaries of instructors, notably Emily Kempin, a doc-
tor of law from the University of Zurich. As one of the attendees
explained, the class did not “aim to prepare students for the practice
of law, but to give to women who are likely to have responsibility for
the care of property or who . . . desire to have fuller knowledge of the
laws . . . the opportunity to study the fundamental of Modern Amer-
ican law.”22
MacCracken also appointed Olivia to a new Women’s Advisory
Committee, charged with preparing “plans and recommendations for
the advancement of the University’s work for women.” (She served
from 1896 to 1906.23) Coeducation was no part of MacCracken’s plan
for educational excellence, however. His new “up-town campus” at
University Heights was for male undergraduates only.

“NO BETTER PLACE EXISTS IN THE WORLD FOR A NEW WOMAN’S COLLEGE”
MacCracken had been trying for a decade to interest Russell Sage
in giving to NYU, but the Sages were not among fifty large donors
who contributed to the purchase of the University Heights property
for NYU between May 1891 and February 1898.24 Meanwhile, in
1897 a bold proposal landed on the desks of the University Council.
This was a petition from a Mrs. Vanderpoel “for leave to submit a
plan for the formation of a Woman’s College to be carried on at Uni-
versity Heights in connection with the university.”25 MacCracken saw
the plan as worth pursuing, if only a donor could be found to under-
write the new college. He again turned to Russell Sage in December
1898. “I remind you of your general promise to me, since 1892 to do
somewhat for New York University,” he wrote, adding, “No better
place exists in the world for a new woman’s college than University
Heights. If we use our plant and professors somewhat as Radcliffe
College uses Harvard or Barnard College uses Columbia you could

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tell Mrs. Sage to organize here the best woman’s college in the
world.”26 For Olivia, the proposal was irresistible.
The chancellor continued to lay careful siege to Olivia. He agreed
to include a bust of Emma Willard in NYU’s grandiose new Hall of
Fame, at her request. And in 1904, he persuaded the University Coun-
cil to grant Olivia an honorary master of letters degree. Her letter of
acceptance shows surprise and genuine delight. “With great diffidence
I take my pen in hand to reply to your letter of April 30th. . . . But
my loyalty to my own Alma Mater and to its Founder Mrs. Emma
Hart Willard, induces me to write my acceptance and to thank the
Corporation of New York University for the great honor they have
done me.”27
Just weeks after her husband’s death, Olivia agreed to give NYU
$294,250 on condition that “some part of the property at least will be
used by New York University as a center for women’s working and
living, for a women’s building, or for other University activities in
connection with women.”28 But this poorly drafted clause was vague
and unenforceable. The board of trustees insisted that the needs of
the engineering school came first, and when MacCracken retired in
1910 the terms of Olivia’s gift were still unfulfilled.29 His successor,
Elmer E. Brown, later admitted to Olivia’s brother Joseph Jermain
Slocum (“Jermain”) that he had heard about “the unfortunate situation
which had arisen, in which Mrs. Sage had expected a woman’s college
to be erected on the Schwab property and had been disappointed in
this expectation.” Although he had “the utmost sympathy with every-
thing which has to do with the higher education of women”—indeed,
he noted that the university had “not given up hope of having even-
tually a college for women on the magnificent property which Mrs.
Sage has made available”—nevertheless, he informed Slocum, the uni-
versity had decided to erect an engineering building on the land pur-
chased with her gift.30
The donor is generally seen as powerful in the philanthropic re-
lationship. Historian Kathryn Kish Sklar has written, “Women re-
formers of the Progressive era did indeed inhabit a separate political
culture—one that gave generously of its own resources in the process
of remaking the larger political society.”31 But the story of Olivia Sage’s
gift to NYU suggests it was not easy for women to retain control over
their gifts. Olivia’s gift to NYU was her most ambitious and its failure
was the most disappointing.32

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RUTH CROCKER

The shadow of the NYU fiasco hangs over the rest of Olivia Sage’s
philanthropy to education. Disappointed with the university’s broken
promises, Sage became suspicious of university fundraisers in general.
Even at Syracuse University, her favorite institution, she now custom-
arily inquired whether her conditions were being met—clearly a sign
of her increasing unease. In September 1912, she wrote to Chancellor
Day to inquire whether the scholarships she had endowed there five
years earlier were still open to women as she had specified. The chan-
cellor reassured her: “We intend to keep the doors open to both men
and women and to give scholarship assistance to any woman who
wishes to pursue agricultural instruction as they do at the State Uni-
versities like Wisconsin, Purdue, etc.”33

SOMETHING FOR WOMEN’S WORK

Olivia Sage’s philanthropy for women at Syracuse University, where
she had already donated land and a building for a teachers’ college in
1905, was more successful than her gifts to NYU.34 In 1909, Henry
de Forest, brother of and law partner to Robert de Forest, wrote in-
forming Chancellor Day that Olivia wanted to give the university
$50,000 on her birthday. He added, “Mrs. Sage’s interest, as you know,
particularly attaches to woman’s work and she asks me to write you to
inquire in connection with what special line of woman’s work such
gift would be the more acceptable.”35 Chancellor Day responded, in-
quiring whether Mrs. Sage would “be interested in a proposition of
segregation here at the University.” He suggested a women’s coordinate
college, “the College to be the Margaret Olivia Slocum College for
Women or Woman’s College.” He offered her the opportunity to
found a college that would be “more prominent and equally useful
with Radcliffe, Barnard, Wellesley, and Vassar.”36
The idea does not seem to have been taken up. Instead, President
Day sent Olivia encouraging updates on the progress of the teachers’
college, even as he continued to ask her for more funds. Another
Syracuse official, writing in June 1912, informed her that “[t]here are
over 400 students in the Teacher’s College, nearly all of whom are
women.” Syracuse was training three times as many teachers for the
public schools as any other institution in the state, he pointed out. Its
Teacher’s College “should be made one of the great factors in giving
an opportunity to women, and training them for service as educa-
tors.”37

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 “NOTHING MORE FOR MEN’S COLLEGES”

“A FEW STRATEGIC EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS OF NATIONAL SCOPE”

Gender was not the only factor motivating women donors. Helen
Gould and fellow Emma Willard alumna Nettie McCormick, Olivia’s
closest friends, were both spectacular philanthropists. Gould gave gen-
erously to all kinds of civic, religious, educational, and benevolent in-
stitutions. McCormick was a leading benefactor of the Presbyterian
Church and a major donor to dozens of colleges and universities, with
gifts to educational and religious institutions estimated at $8 million.
Neither of the women specified that their gifts should support
women’s causes or institutions.38
Philanthropists often prefer to give to the most prestigious, not
the most needy, entities.39 In the same year that Sage donated
$150,000 to Syracuse University Teachers’ College, she gave Yale over
half a million. Why did she consistently give more to men’s institutions
than to women’s?
Robert de Forest continued to play a vital role. He kept most
petitioners away while nudging her philanthropy toward institutions
that he favored. He suggested, reminded, cautioned, but never dic-
tated: he was the soul of tact. Olivia respected his opinion, sometimes
using it as an excuse for inaction. For example, in July 1910 her sec-
retary answered an appeal from Cornell, “She will have to postpone
the consideration of it . . . as Mr. de Forest is not here now, and she
would like to talk with him about the matter.”40 Occasionally, de Forest
suggested a dollar amount. In response to an appeal for a “Colored
Chatauqua” near Nashville “where they are gathering the different ig-
norant negro clergymen from different parts of the South for some
elementary and I imagine very useful instruction,” he advised Olivia,
“I would not give more than $5,000. I would not give less than $1,000.
I think $2,500 would be deemed a very liberal contribution.”41
De Forest’s role in guiding Sage philanthropy is well illustrated in
the maneuvering that produced the Sage donation to Yale. A Yale
alumnus, de Forest was strategically placed to direct a large chunk of
the Sage fortune toward his alma mater. The correspondence between
de Forest and Yale president Anson Phelps Stokes, Jr., reveals how the
latter played on Olivia’s pride in her family’s descent from Rev. Abra-
ham Pierson, Yale’s first rector. The elderly widow’s vulnerability seems
quite palpable as fundraisers conspired with her closest advisor.
Even before Russell Sage’s estate was settled, Stokes was writing
to Olivia about Yale’s needs, enclosing a photograph of a statue of her

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RUTH CROCKER

eminent ancestor. Intrigued, she wrote back, requesting a sample sig-

nature of Reverend Pierson. De Forest confided to Stokes, “I think
you have planted good seed, but . . . the harvest is not yet. She has
been giving very liberally of late, . . . and I know she does not wish to
give to Yale at the moment.”42 Stokes continued to correspond with
Olivia. He wanted her to purchase the thirty-acre Hillhouse Estate
for university expansion and to build new dormitories. In language
that captured well the conflicting purposes of the American university
in transition between older moral verities and the new social sciences,
he wrote, “The great need of our country today is the strengthening
of a few strategic educational institutions of national scope which
stand for scholarship and high Christian ideals.”43 De Forest urged
him on. “Why not write a line to the lady yourself at once, addressing
her at Sag Harbor, where she is and where she will be likely to read
any mail that comes to her?” he wrote. The timing was just right. In
December 1909, Olivia Sage agreed to give the university the huge
sum of $650,000, and the end of December found Stokes thanking
her for the “wonderful offer” which had “put a new spirit in us all and
a renewed determination to make the university stand truer than ever
to its ideals of democracy, public service, and Christian faith.”44

“START IN BY GIVING TO THOSE THAT ARE DISTINCTLY WOMEN’S COLLEGES”

By July 1910, the pressure on Olivia to start giving to women’s
colleges prompted Robert de Forest to remind her, “If you have in
mind to do something for women’s colleges, as you have several times
suggested, I think in your place I would start in by giving to those
that are distinctly women’s colleges, such as Wellesley, for instance.
. . . $100,000, $50,000, or even $25,000 apiece . . . would undoubtedly
be a great boon.” He named amounts significantly lower than she had
been giving to men’s colleges.45
Olivia made her first large donation to a women’s college in 1911.
(Her early donations to Vassar and Radcliffe had been modest and, in
some cases, anonymous.) In this year, she gave $150,000 to Vassar for
the Olivia Josselyn Hall—a dormitory named for her grandmother—
adding another $50,000 the following year.46 President James M. Tay-
lor’s letter of thanks was carefully crafted: “I have recently reviewed
Emma Willard’s ‘Address,’ ” he confided, “and more than ever I am
admiring her work, her ideals, and her progress beyond her age.”47

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 “NOTHING MORE FOR MEN’S COLLEGES”

“WELLESLEY IN TROUBLE IS LIKE A FRIEND IN DISTRESS”

Meanwhile, the administrators of the other women’s colleges, like
Wellesley, were on a roller-coaster of anticipation and disappointment.
In February 1908, Wellesley president Caroline Hazard had optimis-
tically hailed Mrs. Sage’s new wealth. “By the providence of God you
are placed in a position in which you can grant great things.”48 After
Wellesley lost its main building in a disastrous fire in 1913 Sage re-
ceived a request from the college for half a million dollars. She sent
only $25,000, and college official Anna Palen chided her for sending
so little, calling Wellesley “a friend in distress.”49 De Forest gently
reminded her again in 1914, “Has it possibly occurred to you to an-
ticipate your future intentions toward Wellesley by giving them some-
thing now when their main building has burned down?”50 She was
even receiving letters of complaint about the situation at Wellesley,
some of which have survived. “Shall we have our girl students un-
housed, scattered, and with imperfect supervision, or shall we be able
to place them in such a Hall as now rejoices the boys of Harvard?”
asked William Lawrence, bishop of Massachusetts, an officer of Har-
vard as well as a trustee of Wellesley. Referring to Standish Hall, the
dormitory recently completed with Sage money at Harvard, he asked
for “a girls’ Standish from you.” Wellesley mathematics instructor Eu-
phemia Worthington declared, “Now [after the fire] there is an op-
portunity for someone to give where there is really urgent need, in
fact almost to refound the college.” Finally, in 1914, Olivia gave
Wellesley $250,000.51
Why was Sage so slow to help Wellesley? Probably she was uneasy
about the direction the women’s colleges were taking. Wellesley aban-
doned compulsory chapel attendance in 1900 and by 1914 had become
a “secular liberal-arts college for women,” in the words of one scholar.52
A letter from Helen Gould to Mary Wooley of Mount Holyoke in
1903 expressed displeasure that an instructor in the Chair of Biblical
Study—which she, Gould, had endowed—was using critical analysis,
“being destructive in her criticism and sweeping away faith without
putting anything in its place.”53 Vassar, too, was changing. Helen
Gould was so dissatisfied that the college had become “too liberal”
that Vassar returned the money she had donated for four scholarships.
A $40,000 endowed chair at Mount Holyoke (set up in 1902) was
later transferred to the Department of Romance Languages, and a
$50,000 endowment of the Wellesley Biblical Department was with-

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RUTH CROCKER

drawn and reassigned to the Department of Mathematics!54 Ten years

before, Sage had seen Vassar, as a women’s college in New York State,
as her dreamed-of “Willard University,” upholding Christian ideals as
it prepared women to become teachers. Now she wasn’t so sure.
An additional explanation comes to light in a February 1914 letter
from Olivia’s secretary, E. Lilian Todd, to Barnard College president
Virginia Gildersleeve. In informing Barnard’s president why Mrs. Sage
refused to consider a gift to the college, Todd explained, “She feels
that her gift to the Emma Willard School is her contribution to
women’s education, and the few buildings given elsewhere were merely
special cases.”55

SCHOLARSHIPS FOR WOMEN

Disappointed by the NYU debacle and distracted by numerous
appeals, Olivia nevertheless continued to fund scholarships and fellow-
ships for girls. Her years as a struggling teacher and governess before
her marriage had convinced her that the best education for a young
woman was a practical course of training that led to paid work. Dozens
of examples of such donations are scattered throughout her corre-
spondence, from a gift in November 1909 of $10,000 to the New
York State Federation of Women’s Clubs girls’ college scholarship
fund, to a $125,000 donation to the New York School of Applied
Design for Women in 1916.56 In acknowledging a $2,500 donation to
the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women, its director as-
sured Sage, “Your name is so connected throughout the country with
projects for helping women to help themselves.”57 Sage also gave to
industrial high schools. She endowed the Margaret Sage Industrial
School at Lawrence, Long Island, with $150,000 in August 1907. The
Idaho Industrial School, a self-described “absolutely non-sectarian but
thoroughly Christian” school, received massive support after its prin-
cipal, E. A. Paddock, wore Sage down with solicitations and personal
visits over a period of several years. His school received $25,000 in
1910, $20,000 in 1916, and $200,000 in 1918.58
A lifelong interest in Protestant missions and admiration for evan-
gelist Dwight L. Moody prompted Olivia’s donations to Northfield
Training School. This Presbyterian missionary training center received
one of her first major gifts ($150,000) in 1907. She subsequently en-
dowed five scholarships for women at Northfield in 1912 at a cost of
$25,000.59

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TUSKEGEE AND HAMPTON

When it came to donating to educational institutions for African
Americans, Sage selected Hampton and Tuskegee, both of which rep-
resented themselves as institutions for industrial education. Personal
connections came into play here also. A well-placed word from her
friend Andrew Dickson White served to bring Booker T. Washing-
ton’s Tuskegee Institute to Sage’s attention, another word brought
Washington to a conference with Robert de Forest in New York City,
and Tuskegee received its first gift from Sage in May 1908. On her
death it received $800,000 more.60 Another friend, Robert Ogden,
managed to interest Sage in the cause of Hampton Institute. Ogden,
a nationally known spokesman for southern educational reform and
one of the original trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation, strongly
promoted the requests of President H. B. Frissell in his correspon-
dence with Sage, and she responded, giving $25,000 in February
1908.61 After Ogden’s death, Olivia’s secretary refused to send Frissell’s
letters on to Sage, even though his proposal for a training school for
nurses at Hampton would probably have appealed to her. “Mr. Car-
negie has promised $300,000,” Frissell wrote, but his blunt appeals
went nowhere. “I’m not going to give this to Mrs. Sage,” Lilian wrote
to Jermain. Fortunately for Hampton, the school already stood to ben-
efit from a change in her will. The new codicil of February 1908
assigned the college one part of her legacy, or approximately
$800,000.62
Another friend who influenced Sage’s philanthropy was Nettie
McCormick. In 1908, McCormick urged Olivia to join with McCor-
mick and three other friends in a donation to Wooster University.
Make some inquiries about the institution first, “and if the investi-
gation is satisfactory, . . . take an interest with us in this cause,” she
wrote.63 The women’s friendship continued into old age, sustained by
visits, letters, and gifts. Philanthropy and affectionate tokens were in-
tertwined. In 1913, Lilian wrote to McCormick on Olivia’s behalf,
sending thanks for “two beautiful shawls, and the slippers,” and con-
veying a promise from Olivia to send “the check for the fifteen hun-
dred dollars additional that is required for the scholarship [at Fowler
Theological Seminary] over the one thousand she gave you a few days
ago.”64

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RUTH CROCKER

“EXERCISING A DIRECT AND MOST HAPPY INFLUENCE UPON THEM”

The theme of many carefully crafted appeals was the need to pro-
tect the morals and improve the living standards of undergraduates in
these days of dancing, smoking, and other “new-woman” behaviors.
Colleges that invested in new dormitories, dining halls, and chapels
supported a paternalistic vision of supervising student morals as well
as improving their living conditions. For example, in appealing to Sage
for funds to build a dormitory at Cornell for female students, Andrew
Dickson White argued that the dormitory would allow them to benefit
from the care of “an excellent and accomplished Lady Dean exercising
a direct and most happy influence upon them.” White also successfully
invoked Emma Willard’s vision of civic womanhood. Writing to Olivia
in January 1911, he described Cornell as “a great educational center,
. . . sending out through the whole country young women unaccus-
tomed to luxury, but brought up in respectable families, under good
influences, instructed here under the advantages of a thoroughly
equipped University.”65 Two weeks after receiving this letter Olivia
gave Cornell the enormous sum of $300,000 for a women’s residence
hall.66
At a time when a backlash at Chicago and other universities
threatened to remove female students from the classroom, White was
defending the integrated classroom on the grounds that the presence
of women students was good for male undergraduates. Female stu-
dents helped to civilize their male counterparts; thus the admission of
women to Cornell had been “good—good for them, good for the
young men, good for the community at large,” he informed Olivia.
“[The] lecture rooms, laboratories, libraries, and public rooms of every
sort, are far more quiet and orderly and civilized than they would be
if only men were admitted.” She was pleased that the civilizing pres-
ence of women was at work, she replied, adding that their influence
would be even more effective once they had the vote.67

FRIENDS AND FAMILY: CORNELL AND AFTER

Olivia’s interest in Cornell points to the fact that her philanthropy
continued to be highly personal and idiosyncratic. Cornell president
Andrew Dickson White was, like her, a native of Syracuse and their
families had been close. White, who at seventy-seven was younger
than Olivia, appealed to her pointedly: “I can think of nothing which

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would be a greater satisfaction to me on leaving all earthly scenes than

the knowledge that these young women and those succeeding for hun-
dreds of years are to be suitably housed.” Naming decisions were dif-
ficult for Olivia; for us they are revealing. She named Cornell’s new
dormitory Prudence Risley Hall for her late husband’s mother, com-
memorating the women of her husband’s family as she had commem-
orated those of her own at Vassar. At Syracuse she chose the name
Caroline Longstreet College for Women Teachers over the objection
of Dean Jacob Street, who asked her to remove the word “women”
since 25 percent of the students training there were men!68
Other donations attempted to salvage her late husband’s reputa-
tion. What better way to rescue the name Russell Sage from public
opprobrium than to link it with some prestigious college or university?
And if her husband’s millions had been amassed by dubious means, if
he had been born in obscurity and received only a meager schooling,
at least his name would be linked after death with the nation’s finest
universities.

“MY ANCESTORS COULD WELL HOLD UP THEIR HEADS”

Other gifts confirm that Olivia wished to draw attention to her
descent from Mayflower ancestors. For example, in donating to Vassar
and naming the building she funded “Olivia Josselyn Hall,” she ad-
vertised her descent on her mother’s side through Josselyn from her
colonial ancestor Miles Standish.69 Correspondence in the papers of
Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell reveals how fundraisers per-
suaded Sage to donate to prestigious universities, all of which excluded
women. Princeton fundraiser John Cadwalader went to Sage “not
knowing her, and asked her if she would put up a building for the
students of Princeton.”70 To his surprise, she agreed to donate
$250,000 for a building that was then (after additional gifts totaling
over $165,000) named Holder Hall after Christopher Holder, a
seventeenth-century ancestor.71 Securing an additional amount was re-
markably easy, Cadwalader boasted to a friend. He “returned to her
and showed her what part of the building she had built, being one
side of a quadrangle. She asked: ‘Why not the whole?’, and he said,
‘Because the whole cost more money than you furnished,’ whereupon,
after consideration, she gave the rest.” She had no prior connection to
Princeton.72

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RUTH CROCKER

“MY FEMININE NAME DID NOT SEEM SUITABLE”

President Lowell of Harvard commented, “It is encouraging to
hear that Mrs. Sage has given money to a dormitory at Princeton, for
she may be willing to do the same for us.” He secured an interview
with Sage in March 1911.73 Then, in July, Henry de Forest informed
him that Mrs. Sage was “inclined, . . . if you so desire, to make do-
nation of say $225,000,” or half the cost of a dormitory.74 To J. P.
Morgan, Jr., a trustee and go-between, the Harvard president wrote,
“I suppose there is no use in trying to persuade Mrs. Sage further, and
as we have no claim upon her, I feel that her giving this amount is very
generous, and I am exceedingly grateful for it.”75
A year later, Henry de Forest informed Lowell that she had agreed
to give a further $125,000. He went on, “She suggests that it be called
the ‘Russell Dormitory,’ that being the first name of her late husband
and the middle name of Mr. James Russell Lowell.” The question of
the name gave Lowell an excuse to correspond with Olivia. Lonely
and isolated, the elderly philanthropist encouraged his visit: “My Sec-
retary is off on her vacation,” she wrote to the Harvard president. “Mr.
de Forest, too, is on vacation trip and in the south of France.”76 The
subsequent correspondence allows us to follow a curious discussion of
a name for the new building. Since Harvard already had a “Russell
Hall,” she should name the new building after herself, he suggested.77
Olivia recorded what came next. “I then told Mr. de Forest I would
give the new dormitory the name of ‘Standish Hall’ if there was no
other building with that name, for my feminine name did not seem
suitable for a boys’ building, the boys might resent being ‘womanized’
to coin a word in these ‘new woman’ days.” In choosing the alternative
“Standish,” she was naming the building “for my great Grandmother
‘Olivia Standish.’ ”78 This revealing letter shows Sage confused over
purpose and identity. Giving to a university that excluded women, she
refused even a female name for the building, while substituting another
name that appeared unmarked, but in fact commemorated a female
ancestor!
Standish Hall gave Olivia much satisfaction. She wrote to the Har-
vard president, “I am sure Captain Myles would say ‘Well done.’ An-
cestral names attract me, and with ‘Standish Hall’ in Cambridge, and
Holder Hall at Princeton, my ancestors could well hold up their heads
and be proud as I am of their works.” She signed the letter, “Margaret
(Olivia Standish) Sage.”79

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Other donations carried multiple meanings as this one did. Sage’s

gifts to RPI helped establish schools of electrical and mechanical en-
gineering, with postgraduate programs that were among the earliest in
the nation. Some of the monies were designated for a Russell Sage
Laboratory commemorating Russell Sage’s nephew and adopted heir,
Russell Sage, Jr., who had studied at the Institute from 1856 to 1859
and had died in 1892. A further donation to RPI of $100,000 for a
dining hall in 1915 was also a memorial to this nephew, as were two
fellowships at $15,000 each.80
Affection for the memory of her father Joseph Slocum (1800–
1863) prompted many gifts to Syracuse. Olivia donated over $250,000
for the Joseph Slocum College of Agriculture, commemorating the
clever inventor and promoter of agricultural improvement whose busi-
ness failures had made her childhood so uncertain.81 And each year
she gave another $25,000 or $50,000 to Syracuse University on her
birthday. In September 1912, she gave $83,000, to correspond to her
age, leaving its spending to the discretion of the university.82
Wealthy women clearly gave to educational institutions in order to
remake the culture, but they also did so for many other reasons. The
theme of “women’s work” is woven through all of Olivia’s correspon-
dence, but her other concerns sometimes took priority. Her will, drawn
up in October 1906, rewarded twenty-two schools, colleges, and uni-
versities with legacies amounting to $13 million. The list comprised
coeducational Syracuse and Cornell, women’s colleges (Vassar, Welles-
ley, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Smith), and also male-only research uni-
versities and colleges.
These women’s gifts were not able, however, to remake the culture.
It was certainly ironic that at the very moment when Sage and women
like her were poised to spend the fortunes reaped by their husbands
and fathers in the great free-for-all of late-nineteenth-century capi-
talism, the universities were being redesigned to keep women out or
to relegate them to special programs or units. University administra-
tors, even at Chicago, where there was an initial commitment to co-
education, were beginning to draw back and to talk about profession-
alism in ways that conflated rising academic standards with male-only
student bodies, constructing as “scientific” those disciplinary discourses
from which women’s voices were absent.83
The new colleges of engineering were the most obvious sign of
this transformation. University presidents like RPI’s Palmer Ricketts
measured progress by the distance their universities put between them-

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RUTH CROCKER

selves and the classically oriented universities of the nineteenth cen-

tury. By giving to RPI and to NYU, Sage was in effect sustaining
institutions that would exclude her sex until the mid-twentieth century
or even later.84

RUTGERS: “NOTHING MORE FOR MEN’S COLLEGES”

By 1912, Olivia was funding scholarships for girls while refusing
those for boys. When the principal of Pierson High School in Sag
Harbor, Long Island, wrote to inquire about scholarships, Jermain Slo-
cum responded, “Mrs. Sage directs me to say that boys have no schol-
arship in the ‘Pierson High School.”85 And when a fundraiser from
Rutgers (a male-only college connected with her own beloved Re-
formed denomination) approached her in 1916, he was told by her
physician, “I am sorry not to help you, but Mrs. Sage takes very little
interest now in helping the education of men, and has told me re-
peatedly that she was going to do nothing more for men’s colleges.”86
In the same year that she refused funds to Rutgers, Olivia founded
the Russell Sage College of Practical Arts, a women’s vocational col-
lege in Troy, New York. I have described elsewhere how the new
college came into existence through the concerted lobbying of two
extraordinary women, Eliza Kellas, principal of the Emma Willard
School, and E. Lilian Todd, a remarkable engineer and inventor, who
by 1911 had become Sage’s private secretary. In 1916, Sage gave
$250,000 to start the college, subsequently increasing her gift to
$500,000, and the combined institution became the “Emma Willard
School and Russell Sage College.”87 Olivia Sage was now nearing
ninety. Founding a brand-new women’s college in Troy was a belated
affirmation of her belief in women’s advancement.
Educational philanthropy can shore up elite institutions or fund
alternatives. It can effect transformations of curriculum, engineer a
more diverse faculty body, or support more varied student popula-
tions.88 Olivia Sage remained a believer in women’s advancement, but
she pursued this goal inconsistently. She found it hard to resist appeals
from colleges and universities when the connection seemed to flatter
her own family or offer national recognition, and many of these in-
stitutions were for men only. Her educational philanthropy has an air
of improvisation. In the end it was a scattershot affair that divided her
splendid inheritance into many small donations. It reflected not so
much any one philanthropic vision as it did the competing pressures

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 “NOTHING MORE FOR MEN’S COLLEGES”

of a number of determined fundraisers on an elderly donor made vul-

nerable by age and isolation.

APPENDIX: UNIVERSITIES, COLLEGES, AND SCHOOLS NAMED IN MARGARET OLIVIA SAGE’S WILL,
25 OCTOBER 190689
Each of the following was to receive one share, or approximately $800,000, unless
noted:
Schools: The Emma Willard School; Idaho Industrial Institute; the Northfield
Schools.
Colleges and universities: The Troy Polytechnic Institute (now RPI); Union College,
Schenectady, New York; Syracuse University; Hamilton College, New York; New York
University; Yale University; Amherst College; Williams College; Dartmouth College;
Middlebury College; Princeton University; Rutgers College; Bates College; Barnard
College; Bryn Mawr College; Vassar College; Smith College; Wellesley College; Tus-
kegee Normal and Industrial Institute.
An unusual clause in the will caused dismay among legatees when it was known.
It directed that payments made during her lifetime were to be considered advances,
and that the legacies would be adjusted accordingly.
First Codicil, 17 February 1908. Revoked legacies to Middlebury College, Bates
College, Rutgers College, and the Northfield Schools and gave one additional share
($800,000) to Syracuse University, as well as one to Hampton Institute.
Second Codicil, 19 July 1911. Added $5 million for Sage’s brother, Joseph Jermain
Slocum.

NOTES
This essay is adapted from my full-length work Mrs. Russell Sage: A Life, forth-
coming from Indiana University Press. I would like to thank the other participants at
the “Women, Philanthropy, and Education” workshop at the School of Education,
Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind., 7 December 2001, and especially editor An-
drea Walton and fellow participant Linda Eisenmann for suggestions and encourage-
ment.

1. Theodore C. Janeway, M.D., to Rev. William H. S. Demarest, president,

Rutgers College, 8 March 1916, Rutgers University Archives, New Brunswick, N.J.
2. Irvin Wyllie, “Sage, Margaret Olivia Slocum,” in Notable American Women,
1607–1950, vol. 3, ed. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 222–23; Ruth
Crocker, “From Widow’s Mite to Widow’s Might: The Philanthropy of Margaret
Olivia Sage,” Journal of Presbyterian History 74 (winter 1996): 253–64; idem, “ ‘I Only
Ask You Kindly to Divide Some of Your Fortune with Me’: Begging Letters and the
Transformation of Charity in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” Social Politics 6
(summer 1999): 131–60; idem, “Margaret Olivia Slocum, ‘Mrs. Russell Sage’: Private

273
RUTH CROCKER

Griefs and Public Duties,” in Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives: Women in Amer-
ican History, ed. Kriste Lindenmeyer (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2000),
147–59; and idem, “The History of Philanthropy as Life-History: A Biographer’s
View of Mrs. Russell Sage,” in Philanthropic Foundations: New Scholarship, New Pos-
sibilities, ed. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1999), 318–28.
3. Russell Sage left a fortune of over $75 million. For conversion of early-
twentieth-century currency, see John J. McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money?
A Historical Commodity Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy
of the United States, 2nd ed. (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society,
2001).
4. On Russell Sage’s stinginess, see “Mrs. Russell Sage on Marriage,” Syracuse
Sunday Herald, 21 June 1903, 29; “Russell Sage—A Man of Dollars: The Story of a
Life Devoted Solely to the Chill Satisfaction of Making Money for Its Own Sake,”
World’s Work 10 (May–October 1905), 6299; and “A Bashful Millionaire,” Brooklyn
Eagle, 17 January 1897, 6.
5. Arthur Huntington Gleason, “Mrs. Russell Sage and Her Interests,” World’s
Work 13 (November 1906), 8183.
6. James D. Phelps to Chancellor James Day, 11 May 1906, box 2, Day Cor-
respondence, Syracuse University Archives, Syracuse, N.Y. (hereafter cited as SUA);
Thomas Woody, A History of Women’s Education in the United States, 2 vols. (New
York: Science, 1929); Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A
History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1985); and Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Pro-
gressive Era (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).
7. Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to
1940 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 46–47.
8. Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Who Funded Hull House?” in Lady Bountiful Revisited:
Women, Philanthropy, and Power, ed. Kathleen D. McCarthy (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1990), 94–115. See also “Bowen, Louise de Koven (1859–
1953),” in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, ed. Barbara Sicherman and
Carol Hurd Green with Ilene Kantrov and Harriette Walker (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 99–101. In addition, a “fellowship
system” linked wealthy friends to the settlement house through regular monthly do-
nations.
9. Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 17–18; Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade:
Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990); Regina G. Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the
Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1993); and Penina Migdal Glazer and Miriam Slater, Unequal Colleagues: The
Entrance of Women into the Professions, 1890–1940 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1987).
10. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies, 42; and John D.
Rousmaniere, “Cultural Hybrid in the Slums: The College Woman and the Settle-
ment House, 1889–1894,” American Quarterly 22 (spring 1970), 45–66. The ACA
was the precursor to the American Association of University Women.

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 “NOTHING MORE FOR MEN’S COLLEGES”

11. Sarah Knowles Bolton, Famous Givers and Their Gifts (New York: Thomas
Y. Crowell, 1896), 326–27; and Paul S. Boyer, “Garrett, Mary Elizabeth (1854–
1915),” Notable American Women, ed. James, James, and Boyer, vol. 2, 21–22.
12. Mary Roth Walsh, “Doctors Wanted, No Women Need Apply”: Sexual Barriers
in the Medical Profession, 1835–1975 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1977), 173–77.
13. Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton
As Revealed in Her Letters, Diary, and Reminiscences, vol. 1 (New York: Harper, 1922),
340–45. Stanton, like Sage, was a Troy alumna.
14. “Woman’s Debt to Woman,” New York World, 29 April 1894, in The Papers
of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ed. Patricia G. Holland and Ann D.
Gordon (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1991), microfilm, 700–701, reel 32,
CMS 8: 137.
15. Stanton and Blatch, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, vol. 2, 295 n. 1.
16. “Feminist” is my term; the label was not coined until the early twentieth
century. See Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1987). For Robert Weeks de Forest, see James A. Hijiya, “Four
Ways of Looking at a Philanthropist: A Study of Robert Weeks de Forest,” Proceedings
of the American Philosophical Society 124 (December 1980), 404–18.
17. Robert W. de Forest (RW de F) to Margaret Olivia Sage (MOS), 7 February
1907; Gertrude Rice to RW de F, 27 April 1907; both in folder 11, box 2, Russell
Sage Foundation Papers, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. (hereafter
cited as RSFP). For the begging letters from individuals, see Crocker, “I Only Ask
You.”
18. [William Gurley], press release, January 1907, 3; Robert W. de Forest, “Es-
timate of Cost—Emma Willard School, Troy, New York,” 18 December 1906; Wil-
liam Gurley to RW de F, 10 December 1906; RW de F to Gurley, 3 January 1907;
all four in Gurley Papers, Archives of the Emma Willard School, Troy, N.Y. (hereafter
cited as Gurley Papers).
19. Palmer Ricketts to MOS, 1 January 1907, 5 March 1908, 15 February 1909,
and 19 June 1909, all four in folder 896, box 92, RSFP. See also Paul Sarnoff, Russell
Sage, the Money King (New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1965), 279–80.
20. Theodore Francis Jones, New York University, 1832–1932 (New York: New
York University Press, 1933), 169–70, 323. Helen lost both her parents in the 1890s,
and Olivia fancied herself “like a mother” to the younger woman.
21. Phyllis Eckhaus, “Restless Women: The Pioneering Alumnae of New York
University,” New York University Law Review 66 (December 1991), 1996–2013; and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History
of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 (1881; reprint, New York: Arno, 1969), 871.
22. Martha Buell Plum (Mrs. John P.) Munn, “The Law and Liberal Culture,”
speech to Woman’s Law Class, New York University, n.d., Munn Papers, folder 7,
box 1, series 1/C, New York University Archives, New York, N.Y. (hereafter cited as
NYUA); and “Records of the Women’s Law Class and Women’s Legal Education
Society of New York University,” 1983, record group 22.1, NYUA. New York Uni-
versity, Law Lectures to Women (1 May 1897) lists the curriculum of four courses on
law, describes the Woman’s Legal Education Society and the Alumnae Association,
and lists the graduates of the 1897 class (folder 5, series 1/C, MC2, Munn Papers,

275
RUTH CROCKER

NYUA). See also Virginia Drachman, Sisters in Law: Women Lawyers in Modern
American History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
23. “Records of the Woman’s Law Class and Woman’s Legal Education Society,”
Finding Aid, record group 22.1, NYUA; Henry M. MacCracken to MOS, n.d., folder
851, box 88, RSFP; and Henry M. MacCracken, “University Heights South,” 31
October 1907, marked “Private and Confidential,” 1, folder 4, box 18, series III, record
group 3.0.3, Administrative Papers of Henry Mitchell MacCracken, University
Heights South, NYUA.
24. MacCracken to Russell Sage, 3 March 1893, folder 850, box 88, RSFP.
25. Minutes of the executive committee of the Council of New York University,
25 November 1895, quoted in Teresa R. Taylor, “No Extra Expense: The Education
of Women from New York University, 1870–1918,” NYU graduate seminar paper,
January 1988, 12–13.
26. MacCracken to Russell Sage, 19 December 1898, NYUA.
27. “Pick First Women for Fame’s Hall,” unidentified newspaper clipping, folder
850, box 88, RSFP; and MOS to MacCracken, 31 May 1904, Honorary Degrees file,
NYUA.
28. MacCracken, “University Heights South,” 1–3; RW de F to MacCracken, 15
October 1906; both in folder 850, box 88, RSFP.
29. MacCracken, “University Heights South,” 4; and Nancy M. Cricco, NYU
archivist, to the author, 12 December 1994.
30. Dr. Elmer E. Brown to J. J. Slocum, 20 November 1917, box 62, folder 1,
Dr. Elmer E. Brown Papers, NYUA.
31. Sklar, “Who Funded Hull House?” 111; and Susan A. Ostrander and Paul
G. Schervish, “Giving and Getting: Philanthropy as a Social Relation,” in John Van
Til et al., Critical Issues in American Philanthropy: Strengthening Theory and Practice
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990), 67–98.
32. Margaret Rossiter lists other failed attempts. The University of Michigan
accepted Dr. Elizabeth Bates’s large gift, but never carried out the terms of the gift.
And Joseph Bennett’s gift of $400,000 for an undergraduate College for Women at
the University of Pennsylvania met a similar fate. See Rossiter, Women Scientists in
America: Struggles and Strategies, 47, 88.
33. Day to Slocum, 18 September 1912, folder 940, box 94, RSFP. But the college
yearbooks show that at Syracuse, as elsewhere, female students were moving into
departments of home economics, leaving agriculture and most of the sciences to their
male peers.
34. Phelps to MOS, 29 July 1907, acknowledging “your great gift to Syracuse
University”; Dean Jacob Street to Slocum, 22 September 1908; both in folder 939,
box 94, RSFP.
35. Henry de Forest to Day, 3 September 1909, box 3, Day Correspondence,
SUA.
36. Day to Henry de Forest, 4 December 1909; Street to Slocum, 22 September
1908; RW de F to Day, 5 February 1910; all three in box 3, Day Correspondence,
SUA; Street to MOS, 10 October 1909, thanking Olivia for permission to use her
name, folder 939, box 96, RSFP.
37. Unsigned letter to MOS, 14 June 1912, box 4, Day Correspondence, SUA.
In The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education, Upton Sinclair viciously spoofs Day’s

276
 “NOTHING MORE FOR MEN’S COLLEGES”

narrow-minded evangelicalism, calling Syracuse “The University of Heaven” (Pasa-

dena, Calif.: published by the author, 1922), 277–81.
38. “Nettie Fowler McCormick,” in Emma Willard and Her Pupils, Or Fifty Years
of Troy Female Seminary, 1822–1872, comp. Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks (New York: pub-
lished by Mrs. Russell Sage, 1898), 814; and Charles O. Burgess, “McCormick, Nettie
Fowler (1835–1923),” Notable American Women, ed. James, James, and Boyer, vol. 2,
454–55.
39. On motivations for giving, see Paul G. Schervish, Platon E. Coutsoukis, and
Ethan Lewis, Gospels of Wealth: How the Rich Portray Their Lives (Westport, Conn.:
Praeger, 1994).
40. Catharine Hunter, secretary, to Hon. Andrew D. White, 14 July 1910, Cor-
nell University Archives, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. (hereafter cited as CUA).
41. RW de F to MOS, 1 February 1911, folder 894, box 92, RSFP.
42. RW de F to Anson Phelps Stokes, Jr., 4 May 1907, Robert de Forest file,
office of the secretary, YRG 4-A, series 11, Yale University Archives, Sterling Me-
morial Library, New Haven, Conn. (hereafter cited as YUA). The letter was marked
“Personal.” See also Stokes to RW de F, 13 June 1907; RW de F to Stokes, 14 June
1907; Stokes to RW de F, 19 December 1907; all three in Robert de Forest file,
YUA. The request for the Pierson signature is MOS to Stokes, 30 July 1907, folder
1001, box 98, RSFP.
43. Stokes to MOS, 7 April 1908, folder 1001, box 99, RSFP. See also David A.
Hollinger, “Inquiry and Uplift: Late Nineteenth-Century American Academics and
the Moral Efficacy of Scientific Practice,” in The Authority of Experts: Studies in History
and Theory, ed. Thomas L. Haskell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984),
142–56; George M. Marsden, “The Soul of the American University: An Historical
Overview,” in The Secularization of the Academy, ed. George M. Marsden and Bradley
J. Longfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 9–45; and Edwin E. Slosson,
Great American Universities (1910; reprint, New York: Arno, 1977).
44. RW de F to Stokes, 20 November 1909, YUA; Stokes to MOS, 31 December
1909, folder 1001, box 99, RSFP; and Yale Alumni Weekly, 7 January 1910.
45. RW de F to MOS, 18 July 1910, folder 690, box 75, RSFP.
46. Mrs. A. L. Hadley to MOS, 30 April 1904; President James M. Taylor to
MOS, 20 June 1904; Helen Hadley to MOS, 30 April 1910; Taylor to MOS, October
1910, 31 July 1911, and 24 August 1911; all six in folder 965, box 96, RSFP. See
also Henry Whittemore, History of the Sage and Slocum Families of England and Amer-
ica (New York, 1908); and Gordon, Gender and Higher Education, 121–64.
47. Taylor to MOS, 24 August 1911, folder 965, box 96, RSFP.
48. President Caroline Hazard to MOS, 24 February 1908, folder 970, box 96,
RSFP.
49. Anna Palen to MOS, 3 April 1914, folder 970, box 96, RSFP.
50. RW de F to MOS, 5 April 1911, folder 738, box 79, RSFP. In RW de F to
MOS, 25 March 1914, folder 970, box 96, RSFP, de Forest advised Mrs. Sage to
consider “balancing Harvard’s needs and resources as against the needs and resources
of other universities, notably women’s colleges, gifts to which you have been consid-
ering in the past.”
51. The decision is noted in her hand on the back of an envelope dated 10 April
1914, in folder 970, box 96, RSFP.

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RUTH CROCKER

52. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s
Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Knopf,
1984), 205, 213–14; and Patricia Ann Palmieri, In Adamless Eden: The Community of
Women Faculty at Wellesley (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 53–54,
74–76.
53. Helen Miller Gould to Mary Wooley, 16 May 1903, quoted in Glazer and
Slater, Unequal Colleagues, 39, 255 n. 21.
54. Hunter, secretary, to White, 14 July 1910, CUA; and Alice Northrop Snow
with Henry Nicholas Snow, The Story of Helen Gould, Daughter of Jay Gould, Great
American (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1943), 279–80.
55. E. Lilian Todd to G. A. Plimpton, 25 February 1914. I am grateful to Dr.
Nancy Slack, Russell Sage College, for this reference.
56. Memorandum, “Margaret Olivia Sage: Trustee 1907 to November 1918,”
typescript, folder 1, box 1, RSFP; and Frances Hamilton to MOS, 6 December 1915;
Daisy Allen Story, New York Federation of Women’s Clubs, to MOS, 8 November
1909; both in folder 3, box 1, RSFP.
57. Mary Rutherford Joy to MOS, 14 January 1914; Gertrude Ely, secretary,
Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women, to MOS, 15 February 1916; both
in folder 869, box 90, RSFP.
58. Five Towns Community House Collection, folder 1; Margaret Olivia Sage,
“To the Trustees of the Margaret Sage Industrial School, Lawrence, Long Island,” 16
June 1910, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota; and E. A.
Paddock, president, Idaho Industrial Institute, to Hunter, 5 March 1908; Paddock to
MOS, 5 May 1910; Mrs. S. B. Dudley to MOS, 30 March 1916; all three in folder
755, box 80, RSFP.
59. MOS to W. R. Moody, March 1907, folder 857, box 89, RSFP. See also
Patricia R. Hill, The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission
Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor: University of Mich-
igan Press, 1985), 127, 146–47; and James F. Findlay, Dwight L. Moody, American
Evangelist, 1837–1899 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). Northfield
Training School consisted of the Mount Hebron School for Boys and the Northfield
School for Girls.
60. Andrew Dickson White to unspecified recipient [letter of introduction for
Booker T. Washington], 13 November 1906; Booker T. Washington to MOS, 2 May
1908, acknowledging a donation of $20,000 for Tuskegee Institute; both in folder
952, box 95, RSFP.
61. Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., argue that scholars have been too
harsh on “Ogdenism,” which they characterize as an amalgam of belief in “the Baptist
faith, white supremacy, and industrial training for Negroes” (Dangerous Donations:
Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902–1930 [Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 1999], 57). See also Ralph E. Luker, The Social Gospel in Black and
White: American Racial Reform, 1885–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1991); and James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–
1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
62. H. B. Frissell to MOS, 1 May 1913; Frissell to MOS, 5 March 1914, with
attached response from Lilian Todd and J. J. Slocum; both in folder 737, box 79,
RSFP.

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 “NOTHING MORE FOR MEN’S COLLEGES”

63. Nettie McCormick to MOS, 7 February 1908, January–March 1908 file,

box 12, McC MSS 1B, Papers of Nettie Fowler McCormick (Mrs. Cyrus McCor-
mick, Sr.), State Historical Society of Wisconsin (hereafter cited as McCormick
MSS.)
64. Todd to McCormick, [1913], “Todd, E. Lilian” file, box 133, McC MSS 2B,
McCormick MSS; James G. K. McClure to MOS, 22 February 1916, 15 March
1916, both in folder 795, box 83, RSFP. In 1915, McCormick thanks Sage for “the
‘wireless apparatus,’ ” a birthday gift, along with another check for $1,000 “for Mis-
sions” (McCormick to “My dearest friend” [MOS], [1915], Foreign Missions file, box
15, McC MSS 1B, McCormick MSS).
65. White to Slocum, 21 January 1911, CUA.
66. Slocum to White, 2 February 1911, CUA; and White to MOS, 15 April
1910; “Mrs. Sage Guest at Dedication of Risley Hall,” newspaper clipping, n.d.;
White to Slocum, 4 February 1911; White to MOS, 4 February 1911; all four in
folder 690, box 75, RSFP.
67. Hunter, secretary, to White, 14 July 1910; White to MOS, 12 October 1910;
Slocum to White, 18 January 1911; White to Slocum, 21 January 1911; Slocum to
White, 2 February 1911; all five in CUA. On the resegregation of classes at the
University of Chicago, see Gordon, Gender and Higher Education, 112–17; and Ros-
alind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 51–53.
68. White to MOS, 8 July 1910, CUA; see also Henry de Forest to MOS, 25
October 1909, folder 939, box 94, RSFP. Olivia had lived at Yates Castle (now in-
corporated into the Teachers’ College) in the 1860s, when it belonged to the Long-
street family.
69. Taylor to MOS, October 1910, 21 November 1910, 31 July 1911, and 24
August 1911, all four in folder 965, box 96, RSFP. Kathleen McCarthy labels this
motive “tribalism.”
70. Henry Lee Higginson to President A. Lawrence Lowell, 16 December 1910,
Harvard University Archives, Nathan Marsh Pusey Library, Harvard University, Cam-
bridge, Mass. (hereafter cited as HUA).
71. MOS to trustees of Princeton University, 7 April 1908, 19 June 1911; W.
Wilson to MOS, 2 November 1908; MOS to John L. Cadwalader, 3 June 1910; RW
de F to MOS, 2 January 1912; all five in folder 1001, box 99, RSFP. Mrs. Sage
requested a copy of her ancestor’s signature.
72. Higginson to Lowell, 16 December 1910, HUA; and Cadwalader to MOS,
3 June 1910, folder 892, box 91, RSFP.
73. Lowell to Higginson, 19 December 1910; Higginson to Lowell, 21 January
1911; both in HUA.
74. “She has decided not to donate the $450,000 which she understands will cover
the cost of one dormitory.” Henry de Forest to Lowell, 19 July 1911, my italics. See
also Lowell to MOS, 28 March 1911; Lowell to Henry de Forest, 21 July 1911;
MOS to Lowell, 13 September 1911; Henry de Forest to Lowell, 13 September 1911;
all four in HUA.
75. Lowell to J. P. Morgan, Jr., 21 July 1911, HUA, my italics.
76. Henry de Forest to A. Lowell, 18 July 1912; MOS to Lowell, 26 August
1912; both in folder 379, box “Freshman Dormitories,” HUA.

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RUTH CROCKER

77. Henry de Forest to Lowell, 18 July 1912; and Lowell to Henry de Forest, 23
July 1912, HUA.
78. MOS to Lowell, 26 August 1912, HUA; and president and fellows of Har-
vard College to MOS, 24 April 1911; Lowell to MOS, 13 May 1911; RW de F to
Lowell, July 1912; Lowell to MOS, 3 September 1912; all four in folder 739, box
79, RSFP.
79. MOS to Lowell, 17 September 1912, HUA.
80. Sage’s gift to RPI is acknowledged in Ricketts to MOS, 1 January 1907, folder
896, box 92, RSFP; and Ricketts to MOS, 5 March 1908, folder 897, box 92, RSFP.
See also RPI board of trustees minutes, 5 May 1915, vol. 4, 101; RPI board of trustees
minutes, 24 September 1913, vol. 4, 73, 75; both in RPI Archives, Rensselaer Poly-
technic University, Troy, N.Y.
81. Chancellor James Day, “Report of Chancellor Day to the Honorable Board
of Trustees of Syracuse University, 13 June 1922,” SUA, 300. “Mrs. Sage Will Build
New College Building,” newspaper clipping, Onondaga Historical Society, Syracuse,
N.Y., estimated the cost of the Joseph Slocum College of Agriculture at between
$250,000 and $300,000.
82. Slocum to Day, [September 1912], box 4, Day Correspondence, SUA; Slocum
to Day, 6 September 1913, box 5, Day Correspondence, SUA.
83. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in
Modern America, 1860–1920 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
This prestigious anthology excludes women from its survey of “knowledge.” Compare
with Helene Silverberg, ed., Gender and American Social Science: The Formative Years
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
84. David Noble describes RPI as the first modern engineering school. See David
F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism
(New York: Knopf, 1977), 20–26; and idem, A World without Women: The Christian
Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York: Knopf, 1992).
85. Slocum to Grover C. Hart, 3 September 1912, box 4, Day Correspondence,
SUA, emphasis in original.
86. Janeway to Demarest, 8 March 1916, Rutgers University Archives.
87. [Margaret Olivia Sage], addendum to “Release of Restrictions upon Use of
Gifts,” 17 September 1917, n.p. (typescript); Paul Cook, treasurer, to MOS, 12 Jan-
uary 1918; both in Gurley Papers.
88. For a striking modern example, see Rosa Proietto, “The Ford Foundation and
Women’s Studies in American Higher Education: Seeds of Change?” in Philanthropic
Foundations, ed. Lagemann, 271–84.
89. “The Last Will and Testament of Margaret Olivia Sage,” 25 October 1906,
8–12, in the papers of the late Mrs. Florence Slocum Wilson, Pasadena, Calif.

280
12. The Texture of Benevolence: Northern
Philanthropy, Southern African American Women,
and Higher Education, 1930–1950
Jayne R. Beilke

From 1930 to 1950, higher educational opportunity for southern

African American women underwent dramatic changes. Motivated by
the desire to render service to black colleges and universities and to
contribute to racial advancement, an increasing number of black
women obtained master’s and doctoral degrees despite the constraints
of the southern caste system. Confident of their ability to succeed in
graduate school and convinced of their right to be there, they viewed
education as a path to upward mobility, occupational fulfillment, and
middle-class status. In pursuit of graduate and professional education,
hundreds of talented southern African Americans applied for presti-
gious fellowship awards from northern educational philanthropic funds
to defray the costs of attending northern institutions. But, as this
chapter explores, black women who used philanthropic fellowships to
surmount barriers to higher education were confronted by a more in-
sidious set of constraints, namely, prejudicial attitudes toward their
race and gender on the part of foundation officials and black college
administrators.
The number of African American men and women who graduated
from college each year increased steadily after 1920. From 1920 to
1933, the number of black graduates from northern colleges increased
by 181 percent (to 439), while the number of graduates from black
colleges and universities increased by 400 percent (to 2,486). At the
graduate and professional level, eighty-five doctorates were granted to
blacks between 1876 and 1933. Only ten of those, however, went to
black women.1 Studies of the occupational distribution of college grad-

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JAYNE R. BEILKE

uates prior to 1933 confirm low numbers of black female professionals:

for example, 2.5 percent (or 27) of 1,079 physicians and dentists were
women, and only two of 186 lawyers were women. Although 63 per-
cent of all black high school teachers and 71 percent of all black el-
ementary school teachers were women, they were largely absent from
educational leadership positions. Only one of every fifteen black high
school principals was a woman, as was one of every five black ele-
mentary school principals. Among twenty-one black college presi-
dents, there was only one woman as of 1936.2 This exception was
probably Mary E. Branch, who became president of Tillotson College
(Austin, Texas) in 1930 and served until her death in 1944.3 Tillotson
had been founded by the American Missionary Association as a
women’s college and remained so until 1935, when it began to admit
men.
By the mid-1940s, black women were attending colleges at a
higher rate than either white women or black men. Many of these
women were employed in traditional “women’s professions”: nursing,
teaching, and social work. Others, however, were seeking degrees in
nontraditional fields, such as mathematics, the natural and physical
sciences, and school administration. By the early 1950s, black women
were receiving 62.4 percent of all degrees from black colleges—this at
a time when the percentage of women graduates was 33.4 percent
across all colleges. The percentage of black women graduates was, in
fact, just slightly less than that of male graduates in all schools (66.4
percent) and substantially higher than that of black men (35.6 per-
cent).4 More African American women were also earning degrees be-
yond the baccalaureate. A 1956 report by Jeanne L. Noble notes that
73 percent of black women college graduates had studied beyond the
bachelor’s degree and 48 percent had received a master’s degree. The
consequence of this was a rise in the number of black professional
women (in areas such as teaching, medicine, law, and social work); by
1950 these women constituted 58 percent of all black professionals.
Although more black women than black men now held master’s de-
grees, few women had earned Ph.D. or medical (M.D.) degrees.5
Prior to the United States Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board
of Education (1954), southern blacks who desired postbaccalaureate
degrees had few options. Excluded from southern white institutions
by de jure segregation, African Americans had to choose among only
a few black colleges and universities in the South that offered course
work beyond the baccalaureate (primarily Fisk University in Nashville,

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Tennessee, and Howard University in Washington, D.C.). Faculty at

black colleges labored under heavy teaching loads and service respon-
sibilities that often prevented them from pursuing doctoral degrees.
And although blacks could legally enroll in advanced courses of study
at northern institutions, they encountered financial hardship, northern
de facto segregation, and the isolation of living apart from family and
friends. Black families, churches, social clubs, and other organizations
did provide some financial support, and African Americans drew upon
state scholarships and philanthropic fellowship programs. To offset the
financial burden of attending northern institutions, the large majority
of blacks who enrolled in northern graduate schools made do with
out-of-state tuition scholarships.
These scholarships had been established in nearly all southern
states in an effort to circumvent black demands for public support of
advanced education. Southern school officials argued that the provision
of state scholarships to northern schools meant that they did not have
to appropriate funds to build local facilities for black education or face
black demands to integrate white graduate and professional schools.
Many of these out-of-state scholarship programs dated from the 1930s
and were maintained in violation of the ruling in State of Missouri ex
rel. Gaines v. Canada et al. (1938). In rendering its decision in the
Gaines case, the U.S. Supreme Court essentially declared the practice
of awarding out-of-state scholarships as illegal on the basis of the
Fourteenth Amendment, ruling that “the payment of tuition fees in
another state does not remove the discrimination.” Generally admin-
istered by state departments of education or black colleges and uni-
versities located within individual southern states, the scholarships
awarded only meager amounts in any case, and the application and
distribution process was riddled with bureaucracy.6
A more lucrative and prestigious form of financial assistance was
available through fellowship programs established by northern edu-
cational philanthropic foundations. However, the fellowship programs
were highly competitive and fund officials often placed unrealistic de-
mands on fellowship recipients. For example, Ph.D. candidates were
frequently expected to finish all course work and dissertation require-
ments within one or two years. This accelerated pace was made still
more difficult by the fact that many northern institutions would not
accept credits earned at black colleges. Students were “conditionally”
admitted to northern schools with the stipulation that they enroll in
additional courses (often in the liberal arts) in preparation for graduate

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study. An added complication was fund officials’ insistence that fel-

lowship awards and out-of-state scholarships were to be mutually ex-
clusive: blacks had to choose either a state scholarship or a philan-
thropic fellowship. In some cases, the General Education Board
(GEB), a Rockefeller-founded organization intended to promote ed-
ucation, demanded reimbursement from GEB Fellows who had also
received state tuition funds.7
The most comprehensive philanthropic fellowship programs were
those of the General Education Board and the Julius Rosenwald Fund.
Under these programs, southern blacks were awarded fellowships to
study at prestigious northern institutions such as the University of
Chicago, Teachers College at Columbia, Harvard University, and the
University of Michigan. Fellowship grants generally covered tuition,
fees, and living expenses incurred while studying for master’s or doc-
toral degrees. From 1902 to 1954 (when the program was transferred
to the Council of Southern Universities), the GEB fellowship program
awarded nearly two thousand grants to black and white individuals.8
The GEB initially allocated funds in the South only to white public
school teachers who had been identified as possessing sufficient lead-
ership potential to exert political influence on the public school system.
In 1924, the GEB began to award fellowships to promising black
instructors in southern colleges and universities. By 1938, candidates
for fellowships were required to have earned a master’s degree.9 The
amount of the stipend granted to black Fellows ranged from $1000
for an unmarried man to $1500 for a married man, to be used for
expenses related to travel, living expenses, and other costs. Signifi-
cantly, no such accommodation based on marital status was made for
women.
The Julius Rosenwald Fellowship Program began with informal
requests made by petitioners to Julius Rosenwald personally. Clearly
reflecting Rosenwald’s educational and political alignment with black
leader Booker T. Washington, the fund’s early instrumentalist empha-
sis meant that program monies were targeted to develop leadership for
the areas in which the Fund had an interest (black schools, hospitals,
and library programs). The Rosenwald Fellowship Program initially
emphasized advanced training for black medical and nursing person-
nel, vocational and industrial teachers, and librarians. The relatively
large number of fellowships given for work in social science is directly
related to the influence of fellowship committee member Charles S.
Johnson, who used the program to identify talented students for Fisk

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University’s Department of Social Sciences. After Rosenwald’s death

in 1932, the program was administratively formalized and awards were
granted to “superior individuals” in the liberal arts, fine arts, and social
sciences. The program’s directive—“to identify a group of superior
mentalities”—reflected the influence of Yale-educated Edwin Embree,
who steered the course of the Rosenwald Fund from its date of in-
corporation (1928) to its close in 1948.10
The Rosenwald Fellowship Committee consisted of William C.
Haygood, director; Edwin Rogers Embree, president; and a core group
including Charles S. Johnson, Will W. Alexander, and Robert C.
Weaver. As the fellowship program director, Haygood played a largely
administrative role. As the president of the Rosenwald Fund and ex
officio chairperson of the fellowship committee, Embree had a pre-
eminent influence. The grandson of John G. Fee—white abolitionist
and founder of Berea College—Embree was a self-described “philan-
thropoid,” or fund manager, and had served as director of the Division
of Studies and vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation before
joining the Rosenwald Fund in 1927.
Committee member and sociologist Charles S. Johnson was a co-
founder of Opportunity, the official publication of the National Urban
League, and director of the nationally respected Department of Social
Sciences and Race Relations Institute at Fisk University. In 1947, he
became Fisk University’s first African American president. Will Al-
exander was a white southerner who had helped to establish the Com-
mission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta in 1919 and was a driv-
ing force behind the founding of historically black Dillard University
(New Orleans, La.). Robert Weaver, an African American and a
Harvard-educated economist, had worked for the United States De-
partment of the Interior (1933–1937) and the U.S. Housing Authority
(1937–1940) prior to his affiliation with the fellowship committee.
A total of 586 African Americans received fellowships from the
Rosenwald Fund. Of that number, 189 (or 32 percent) were women.
An analysis of the distribution of fellowship awards granted to women
between 1928 and 1948 reveals that most awards were meant to pre-
pare scholars for work in traditionally female occupations (table
12.1).11
In addition to the preponderance of women in teaching, by the
mid-1930s women accounted for 83 percent of the black librarians
and 70 percent of the black social workers in the South.12 While the
Rosenwald Fund undoubtedly helped to professionalize those areas

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JAYNE R. BEILKE

Table 12.1. Rosenwald Fellowship Awards to Women,

1928–1948
Field Number of awards

Domestic arts (home economics) 27

Social sciences 23
Library science 19
Public health/nursing/hospital administration 18
Liberal arts 18
Music performance 18
Rural education 18
Education 17
Fine arts 11
Music education 6
Other 14
Total 189

Source: Embree and Waxman, Investment in People, 238–52.

through the fellowship program, it also reinforced the pattern of plac-

ing black women in service occupations.
The cases of Rosenwald Fellows Florence Beatty Brown, Lillian
Burwell Lewis, and Georgia C. Poole, as well as GEB Fellow Carrie
Coleman Robinson, are representative of the constraints that accom-
panied philanthropic support of educational opportunity for black
women. In 1943, Florence Beatty Brown applied for a fellowship from
the Julius Rosenwald Fund for one year’s study at the University of
Illinois in order to develop study aids for rural social science programs.
Born in Cairo, Illinois, in 1912, she had received a bachelor of arts
degree from Fisk University in 1933 and a master of arts in history
from the University of Illinois in 1936. In 1939, she had earned a
master’s degree in sociology from the University of Illinois. In addi-
tion, she studied at Teachers College (Columbia) during 1940–1941
and had also served as a regional field worker in the North Carolina
rural school program. After finishing the proposed additional year of
study at Illinois, Brown intended to return to her current position as
a social science instructor at State Teachers College in Fayetteville,
North Carolina. Her previous applications for a Rosenwald Fellowship
(in 1938, 1940, 1941, and 1942) had been unsuccessful.13
One of Brown’s letters of recommendation in her 1943 application
came from Bruce Barton, whose father had been a circuit rider in

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Tennessee. When he was a child, his family had taken in “a mulatto

boy”—Webster Barton Beatty—who was “the son of a black woman
who had been a slave and of a worthless drunken white man.” Beatty
remained with the Barton family and graduated from Berea College.
Since that time, Barton had extended “some small help” to Webster
Beatty’s three children, including Florence Beatty Brown, the oldest
daughter. Barton continued, “Florence worked her way through Fisk
University and . . . earned an A.M. also. She married a Negro who, as
I recall it, was working for his doctor’s degree and subsequently became
principal of a normal school in one of the southern states.” Barton
had “no reservations whatever about Florence Beatty-Brown. She has
come up by her own character, hard work, and self-respect, and de-
serves to go further.”14
While good character and a laudable work ethic were valuable as-
sets, the fact that Brown was pregnant jeopardized her chances for a
fellowship. Haygood suggested that she defer the fellowship until she
could pursue her graduate studies full-time, without the distraction of
caring for a new baby. Brown responded that “My subsequent plans
for my career are to remain in the teaching field since I apparently
have been ‘called,’ my [institutional] President says, a born teacher,
and because I love to teach . . . especially misguided rural students who
have neither a fair chance nor good conscientious teachers who teach
for the love of it rather than for the money in it.” During negotiations
with the Rosenwald Fund, she changed the focus of her research. As
the result of her work in the North Carolina rural school program,
she had gained access to an extraordinarily complete set of records and
diaries kept by a black family, and she now wished to write a gener-
alized study of the middle-class black family. She intended to continue
teaching in Fayetteville while she sifted through the materials that
would be used in her thesis.15 Charles S. Johnson expressed his concern
to Director Haygood about Brown’s ability to continue teaching or
even residing at State Teachers College. Johnson believed that she
needed “close institutional supervision” and worried that “she will not
do justice to the fellowship and will set a rather questionable prece-
dent.” He suggested that a former Rosenwald Fellow, sociologist E.
Franklin Frazier (then at Howard University), undertake this “close
supervision.”16
At this latter stage of the Fellowship program (1942–1948), ap-
plicants were not as plentiful as they had been between 1936 and 1941.
The effects of World War II, in particular, had decreased the fellow-

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JAYNE R. BEILKE

ship applicant pool. Some potential applicants were serving in the

armed forces while others were taking advantage of employment op-
portunities offered by the United Service Organization (USO) and
wartime industries. The decline in student enrollments at many col-
leges and universities had caused retrenchment and faculty layoffs,
leading to bitter competition over a declining number of faculty po-
sitions, and thus limiting the placement opportunities for fellowship
recipients.17
It is difficult to know whether it was the relatively small number
of applicants that year, Barton’s reference to Berea College in his letter
of reference, or Brown’s persistence that finally influenced Embree to
cast the deciding vote in favor of Brown. Most likely, the decision
turned on Brown’s willingness to change her research topic. The fel-
lowship committee was very interested in research on “Negro prob-
lems” and deliberately steered applicants in the direction of problems
related to black history, sociology, literature, and culture. In any event,
Brown was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship for 1943–1944. The fol-
lowing year, Brown reported that she was an assistant professor of
sociology at historically black Lincoln University (Pennsylvania). By
1946, she had become acting head of the Department of Sociology at
Lincoln and reported that she was rewriting her thesis, “A Study of
the Middle Class Negro Family from 1870–1945,” for possible pub-
lication.18
Without doubt, state tuition grants and philanthropic fellowships
helped southern African American women surmount barriers to higher
education during this period. But the opportunity afforded by the fel-
lowship award was muted by the responsibilities undertaken by (and
expected of) black women, many of whom were the economic main-
stays of their families. Accepting the fellowship meant, at the least,
leaving those families while attending a northern university. And upon
returning to the southern institutions where they were employed after
completing graduate work, they often met with jealousy on the part
of colleagues or the indifference of administrators who considered ad-
vanced training or graduate study superfluous, particularly for women.
Not always commensurately rewarded or respected for their educa-
tional achievements, they returned to paternalistic institutions that re-
warded women on the basis of service to the institution and loyalty
to its president.
Lillian Burwell Lewis was teaching biology at Tillotson College

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when she applied for a Rosenwald Fund fellowship for doctoral studies
in zoology at the University of Chicago. She had received her high
school diploma from Tougaloo College in 1919 and the bachelor of
science degree in 1925 from Howard University, where she studied
with well-known biologist (and Rosenwald Fellow) Ernest E. Just.
With the assistance of a GEB fellowship, she had earned a master of
science degree from the University of Chicago in 1931 after three
summers and one semester of study. The next year, the Rosenwald
committee awarded her a fellowship of $1000 to study zoology at
Chicago during the 1932–1933 academic year. But when notified of
the award, Lewis responded that the grant would not cover all her
expenses. Besides being in debt from the financial burden of earning
the master’s degree, she wrote,
My mother was stricken with paralysis and is now an invalid. My
father is too old to support her and take care of her needs properly.
In rearing the thirteen children, my parents were unable to save very
much for a time of need like this and I am the only one of the
children without a family and able to contribute materially to their
needs. If I should stop [teaching at Tillotson] they would be reduced
to absolute want and so I must continue to make my monthly con-
tributions.19

Neither the Rosenwald Fund nor the University of Chicago was will-
ing to supplement the grant, and Lewis’s award was canceled.
She continued to teach at Tillotson and attend summer sessions
at the University of Chicago. It was not until 1946, however, that she
earned the doctor of philosophy degree. The next year, she and her
husband (a native of Winston-Salem, N.C.) left Tillotson when Lewis
accepted a position as head of the science department and professor
of biology at Winston-Salem Teachers College. The following letter
from Lewis to Francis L. Atkins, president of the college, suggests
that her hard-earned doctoral degree from Chicago was not entirely
appreciated:
A look at the salary scale for the Winston-Salem Teachers Col-
lege since the 1959 legislature provided 3.5 million dollars for faculty
salary increases, as “has been worked out by institutions and the
State Department of administration,” will show that the raise you
agreed to give me previous to this appropriation puts me in the rank
of an assistant.

289
JAYNE R. BEILKE

In view of the appropriation and the fact that you are trying to
qualify Teachers College for the Southern Association rating with
additional PhDs, I believe you will agree that it is fair that I receive
at least the salary of an associate, $7500, if not more.
As I stated to you previously, if I were just beginning to teach
I would have time to capitalize upon my advanced degree, but with
me it is now or never.
Because of the effort to pay teachers more, it is going to be
increasingly difficult to obtain a person with a doctorate for under
$7000. A. and T. [North Carolina Agricultural and Technical] still
has that vacancy in Biology for a PhD. Along with a need of several
others with a doctorate to qualify for the Southern Association rat-
ing.20

Interestingly, Atkins himself had received a GEB fellowship for

1923–1925 and was therefore thoroughly familiar with the limited
opportunities African American women had for graduate education.
The fact that Lewis’s husband was also employed as a faculty member
at Winston-Salem undoubtedly provided Atkins with leverage. It ap-
pears that the two arrived at a somewhat satisfactory solution, because
Lewis remained at Winston-Salem until her retirement in 1970.21
By the 1930s, new accreditation requirements for colleges and uni-
versities required faculty to earn advanced degrees in order to retain
their positions. But administrators of black colleges, coping with the
reality of scarce resources and increased institutional competition for
students, were often reluctant to institute a hierarchical reward system
of salary increases, faculty rank, or promotion to administrative posi-
tions. This is exemplified by Georgia Poole’s experience upon finishing
her Rosenwald fellowship year and returning to Georgia State Indus-
trial College.
Georgia Cowen Poole had received an A.B. from Talladega Col-
lege. She taught at Georgia State Industrial College (Savannah) for
four years prior to receiving a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1936. Poole
pursued a master’s degree in children’s literature, and she planned to
develop age- and grade-appropriate materials for rural children while
studying at the University of Chicago. Upon completion of her studies,
she requested an increase in salary. President Benjamin F. Hubert re-
sponded,
I realize that you have done your work well and have been loyal to
the institution, but I think you must agree that the institution has
provided for you an opportunity to show what you can do. It is also

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through the institution that you were able to receive a scholarship.

Other employees have asked for recommendations in order that they
might have scholarship awards permitting them to study. We feel
that when we excuse a person to study that we have favored them
as well as the institution which they have agreed to service.22
Disappointed with Hubert’s response, Poole discussed the situation
with L. M. Lester, associate director of the Division of Negro Edu-
cation of the Rosenwald Fund. Lester spoke with President Hubert
and found him to be “not inclined to offer [Poole] an increase in salary
next year. He feels that the opportunity for study meant more to you
than to the college.”23 Convinced that the situation was unlikely to
improve, in 1937 Poole accepted an offer to teach at Spelman, a his-
torically black women’s college in Atlanta, Georgia.
It is likely that Hubert’s reaction was intensified by his own pro-
fessional frustrations. Through the efforts of Will Alexander, Hubert
had received a scholarship to Harvard University to work on a Ph.D.
in agricultural economics. In 1929, he received a scholarship from the
Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Scholarship Program for Negro
Social Science and Social Work. Illness and the responsibilities of the
presidency of Georgia State College forced him to apply for extensions
from the LSRM through 1937. Although he was able to finish the
course work, he never completed his dissertation.24
Race and gender discrimination not only played a prominent role
in the fellowship selection process, they also affected fellowship recip-
ients during their terms of study at northern universities. Carrie Cole-
man Robinson was one of six children born to a Mississippi school-
teacher and a farmer. She earned a bachelor of arts degree at Tougaloo
College in 1931 and spent a year at Hampton Institute, earning a
bachelor’s degree in library science in 1932. She was employed as the
librarian at Western Kentucky Industrial College from 1932 to 1934.
From 1934 to 1940 she was employed by the American Missionary
Society and worked for several AMA-affiliated institutions (Barber
Scotia College, Tillotson College, and Avery Institute). After her mar-
riage to Thomas Robinson in 1940, she enrolled at Teachers College,
Columbia University. Like many others, Robinson was admitted on a
conditional basis and required to take additional courses as she worked
toward a master’s degree. She explained, “Tougaloo was not an A-
rated school when I graduated from it. So I took courses in humanities
[at Columbia]. I spent one year there, then I enrolled in the masters
program.”25 She remembered that “the racial animosity I encountered

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JAYNE R. BEILKE

on the part of one professor in English literature at Columbia was

liberally offset by the delight I derived from Willard Heaps’ course in
school library science administration and from courses taught by other
professors, especially in religion, philosophy and political science.”26
She left Teachers College in 1941 without a degree. In 1946, she was
recruited by H. Councill Trenholm—president of Alabama State Col-
lege and former Rosenwald Fellow—to build a library training pro-
gram at Alabama State.
Still without an advanced degree, Robinson was awarded a GEB
Fellowship to study at the Graduate Library School of the University
of Illinois in 1948, as preparation for teaching graduate courses in
library education at Alabama State Teachers College.27 To her, the
GEB scholarship “made a tremendous difference. When I came home
from Illinois I had a master’s degree in library science from one of the
Big Ten universities. The university to which I was denied entrance
[the University of Alabama] was offering only a minor in library sci-
ence. And all of those white librarians thought they had a master’s!
But the master’s was in education with a minor in library science. So
I had a degree that was accepted throughout this country.”28
In pursuit of her dream of earning a doctorate in school librari-
anship, she returned to the University of Illinois for the 1953–1954
academic year. While studying at Illinois, Robinson moved her family
to Chicago in order to care for them. After Robinson finished the
course work, however, her mother sustained a hip fracture in a fall.
Beyond these family responsibilities, a further complication for Rob-
inson was her academic advisor’s insistence that her dissertation focus
on a school program in Indianapolis, Indiana. Historically, like other
states on the North-South border, Indiana has exhibited an uneven
pattern of de facto segregation. Local school officials prevented Rob-
inson from pursuing the topic “because I was black. I [was not allowed
to] work for that school system.” Moreover, Robinson was convinced
that her academic advisor at Illinois had been fully cognizant of this
barrier from the very beginning. Burdened by the pressures of caring
for her family and discouraged by manifestations of northern racism,
she resumed her position at Alabama State. Years later, the failure to
obtain the doctorate in school librarianship remained a bitter disap-
pointment.29
In her study of black women who earned baccalaureate degrees
from the Seven Sister colleges between 1880 and 1960, Linda Perkins
concluded that the experience “gave them the freedom, exposure and

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opportunity to prove themselves intellectually on the same basis as

Whites, and opened to them opportunities for a wider range of ca-
reers.” But while the degrees did function as windows of opportunity,
they also brought with them a new set of constraints that prevented
black women from capitalizing on their improved occupational and
professional status. Like the subjects of Perkins’s study, southern black
women who obtained graduate degrees at northern institutions
through philanthropic fellowships “had little choice but to go South
to teach in segregated . . . schools.”30
In fact, the original application forms of both the Rosenwald and
GEB fellowship programs contained the query, “Do you intend to
return to the South?” The question was an important one for foun-
dation officers who had been charged with building the competence
of selected black institutions. Since the foundation officers relied heav-
ily upon the recommendations of institutional presidents in their
search for top candidates, the inclusion of that query may also have
been intended to reassure black college administrators that the fellow-
ships would not decimate their faculty ranks. Without doubt, it also
served to remind blacks of “their place” within the economic and po-
litical landscape. In regard to black women, who were valuable eco-
nomic contributors to the black community, there was certainly con-
cern that the opportunity for graduate study in the North might
educate them out of their sphere. Whatever their reasons, more black
women graduates of northern schools than men returned to the
South.31 This would remain the case as long as teaching was the largest
field of opportunity for black women.
Beyond race, gender stereotypes figured heavily into the valuation
of black women’s educational potential. A middle-class emphasis on
good character and work habits often overshadowed a recognition of
women’s intellectual abilities and potential. The dissertation study of
Marion Vera Cuthbert, a Rosenwald Fellow, focused on black women
college graduates. Cuthbert herself was nearly the victim of age dis-
crimination, but she met the standard for character. In a report to the
Rosenwald Trustees on the fellowship awards for 1941, the Rosenwald
Fellowship Committee noted that Cuthbert was “older than we usually
consider [but a] remarkably fine person with a brilliant record and
definite and timely topic.”32
When undertaken by women, the Ph.D. degree in particular was
often viewed as superfluous and self-indulgent. Like their white coun-
terparts, highly educated black women were accused of contributing

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JAYNE R. BEILKE

to race suicide by marrying later in life (after completing their edu-

cation) and bearing fewer children. Cuthbert’s study confirms that ed-
ucated women made different choices concerning marriage and child-
bearing than did women with less formal education. In “Education
and Marginality: A Study of the Negro Woman College Graduate”
(1942), she pointed out the escalating tensions between black men and
black college women that were beginning to manifest themselves. For
example, educated middle-class black women tended to marry later
(3–4 years after graduation) and to give birth to fewer than four chil-
dren.33 This is corroborated by Noble’s 1956 study, in which 38 percent
of the women college graduates she studied had one child, 15 percent
had two children, and 6 percent had between three and six children.
Significantly, 41 percent were childless.34
Black women were never exempt from rendering service to the
black college or university or to the larger community. In some cases,
highly qualified—and educated—women filled such positions as sec-
retary to black institutional presidents. While those positions carried
with them a certain amount of prestige (the “halo” effect of working
for an important man), the women who held them generally abdicated
any serious academic leadership role. While their male counterparts
often became institutional presidents, respected scholars, and research-
ers at black colleges and universities, African American women gen-
erally rose no higher than department chairs. Those who became de-
partment heads often had their careers attenuated by virtue of the
length of time necessary to finish the degree, leaving little time, as
Burwell Lewis observed, “to capitalize upon my advanced degree.”
Graduate and professional degrees were valued for more than eco-
nomic reasons. The degrees offered some measure of autonomy (if
only for their portability) as well as verifying intellectual competence
and self-worth. Graduate degrees also afforded black women options.
For example, obtaining a doctoral degree enabled Lillian Burwell
Lewis to negotiate more effectively with President Atkins by threat-
ening to leave Winston-Salem to “take the position at [North Caro-
lina] A. and T.” Beyond that, the graduate degrees earned by southern
black women between 1930 and 1950 ultimately contributed to the
development of a cadre of leadership that culminated during the Civil
Rights era. In 1960, Lewis became the first black woman to be elected
to the county school board in Forsyth County, North Carolina.35
Carrie Coleman Robinson provides another example. In 1969, the
Alabama State Department was reorganized and a white woman, a

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 THE TEXTURE OF BENEVOLENCE

recent graduate from Louisiana State University, was hired to supervise

the secondary school libraries. Although she was a secondary education
specialist, Robinson was relegated to the elementary education divi-
sion. A life member of the National Education Association, Robinson
and the NEA filed suit against the state of Alabama. In 1971, the
case was settled out of court in her favor. Robinson’s educational his-
tory would come full circle in 1972 when William Hug, the director
of the library media program at traditionally white Auburn University,
asked Robinson to teach in his program. She went to Auburn as an
associate professor and retired three years later.36
In the end, however, the relationship between northern philan-
thropy and southern African American women during this period was
hegemonic. While philanthropic fellowships expanded higher educa-
tional access and occupational opportunity, the gendered expectations
of male fund officials and institutional presidents prevented women
from fully realizing their academic potential. Torn between family ob-
ligations and institutional loyalty on the one hand and the desire for
educational attainment on the other, educated black women neverthe-
less remained convinced that, in the words used to describe Florence
Beatty Brown, they “deserved to go further.” Although their choice to
pursue higher education was often compromised, it laid the foundation
for educational leadership in the crucial decades preceding the decision
in Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights era.

NOTES
An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 1999 American Educational
Research Association Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada; my research was partially
supported by a Rockefeller Archive Center grant-in-aid.

1. Charles S. Johnson, The Negro College Graduate (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1938), 9–11, 92–130.
2. Ibid., 92–130. See also Fred McCuistion, Graduate Instruction for Negroes in
the United States (Nashville, Tenn.: George Peabody College for Teachers, 1939).
3. Elizabeth L. Ihle, ed., Black Women in Higher Education: An Anthology of
Essays, Studies, and Documents (New York: Garland, 1992), 177.
4. Jeanne L. Noble, The Negro Woman’s College Education (New York: Columbia
University Bureau of Publications, 1956), 29.
5. Ibid.
6. For a discussion of out-of-state (public) scholarships, see Mary B. Holmes
Pierson, Graduate Work in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

295
JAYNE R. BEILKE

1947); and Jayne R. Beilke, “The Politics of Opportunity: Philanthropic Fellowships,

Out-of-State Aid, and Higher Education for Blacks in the South,” History of Higher
Education Annual 17 (1997): 53–71.
7. For a history of the GEB, see Raymond B. Fosdick, Henry F. Pringle, and
Katharine D. Pringle, Adventure in Giving: The Story of the General Education Board
(New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
8. Ibid., 311.
9. Ibid., 309–14.
10. The papers of Edwin R. Embree are stored at the Sterling Memorial Library,
Yale University. The business diary he kept while at the Rockefeller Foundation is
located at the Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. (hereafter cited as
RAC).
11. The total number of awards made to African Americans by the Rosenwald
Fund is often listed as 800. That number, however, includes renewal awards to Fel-
lows. Awards were made to 586 individuals, and this chapter uses that number. See
Embree and Waxman, Investment in People, 238–52; and Jayne R. Beilke, “To Render
Better Service: The Role of the Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship Program in the
Development of Graduate and Professional Educational Opportunities for African-
Americans” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1994).
12. Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds.,
Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1993), 385–86.
13. Application digest of Florence Beatty Brown, folder 2, box 397, Julius Ro-
senwald Fund Papers, Fisk University Library Special Collections, Nashville, Tenn.
(hereafter cited as JRF Papers).
14. B. Barton to G. M. Reynolds, folder 2, box 397, JRF Papers.
15. Application digest of Florence Beatty Brown, folder 2, box 397, JRF Papers.
16. Ibid.
17. For a discussion of the evolution of the Rosenwald Fellowship Program, see
Jayne R. Beilke, “The Changing Emphasis of the Rosenwald Fellowship Program,
1928–1948,” Journal of Negro Education 66 (winter 1997): 3–15.
18. Application digest of Florence Beatty Brown, folder 2, box 397, JRF Papers.
19. Application digest of Lillian L. Burwell, 19 October 1932, folder 1, box 399,
JRF Papers.
20. Lillian Burwell Lewis to Francis L. Atkins, 31 July 1959, C. G. O’Kelley
Library, Winston-Salem State University Archives, Winston-Salem, N.C.
21. Carter B. Cue, archivist, C. G. O’Kelley Library, conversation with author,
18 August 1998, Winston-Salem, N.C.
22. Benjamin F. Hubert to Georgia Cowen Poole, 14 July 1937, folder 1, box
441, JRF Papers.
23. L. M. Lester to Poole, 15 July 1937, folder 1, box 441, JRF Papers.
24. John H. Stanfield, Philanthropy and Jim Crow in American Social Science (West-
port, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985), 83.
25. Carrie Coleman Robinson, interview by author, 9 May 1995, Montgomery,
Ala.
26. Carrie C. Robinson, “First by Circumstance,” in The Black Librarian in Amer-
ica, ed. E. J. Josey (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1970), 277.

296
 THE TEXTURE OF BENEVOLENCE

27. Application for Fellowship, folder 2354, box 233, General Education Board
Papers, RAC.
28. Robinson, interview.
29. Ibid.
30. Linda M. Perkins, “The African American Female Elite: The Early History
of African American Women in the Seven Sister Colleges, 1880–1960,” Harvard
Educational Review 67 (winter 1997), 718–56.
31. One study indicated that 31.9 percent of African American women and 28.1
percent of men returned to the South after attending northern schools (Johnson, Negro
College Graduate, 129).
32. Report to the Trustees, 1940 Awards to Negroes, box 374, JRF papers.
Awards were always made for the following year.
33. Marion V. Cuthbert, “Education and Marginality: A Study of the Negro
Woman College Graduate” (Ph.D. diss., Teachers College, Columbia University,
1942), 28. See also Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black
Women on Race and Sex in America (1984; reprint, New York: Bantam, 1988), 244–
48.
34. Noble, Negro Woman’s College Education, 20.
35. “Lillian Lewis Made Headway for Blacks,” Winston-Salem Journal, 10 March
1998, B2.
36. Robinson, interview.

297
 13. “Contributing to the Most Promising Peaceful
Revolution in Our Time”: The American Women’s
Scholarship for Japanese Women, 1893–1941
Linda L. Johnson

What Katharine McBride, president emeritus of Bryn Mawr Col-

lege, called a “peaceful revolution”1 was the work of the American
Women’s Scholarship for Japanese Women (AWSJW), which pro-
vided financial aid for Japanese students to attend Bryn Mawr College,
and the Committee for Miss Tsuda’s School for Girls, which endowed
Joshi Eigaku Juku, an elite school for educating women teachers.
These two committees (largely composed of the same members)
played a critical role in the development of Japanese women’s higher
education and the training of women teachers. The scholarship pro-
vided financial aid for eleven students to attend Bryn Mawr between
1893 and 1941. The first scholarship recipient, Tsuda Ume,2 became
Japan’s leading expert on English-language instruction and women’s
education. The most outstanding graduates of her school became the
later recipients of Bryn Mawr scholarships. In comparison to other
scholarship programs and gifts to colleges analyzed in this volume, the
endowments raised by the AWSJW and the Committee for Miss
Tsuda’s School for Girls were small; nevertheless, their impact on Jap-
anese women’s higher education was substantial. Tsuda’s school and
other women’s schools established by Bryn Mawr scholarship recipi-
ents prepared Japan’s leading female intellectuals and professionals, as
well as large numbers of the teachers who staffed girls’ primary and
secondary schools before World War II.
This study examines the factors that enabled Tsuda Ume to de-
velop American philanthropic support for Japanese women’s higher

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 “CONTRIBUTING TO THE MOST PROMISING PEACEFUL REVOLUTION IN OUR TIME”

education. The collaboration between Tsuda and her benefactors was

made possible by shared beliefs about gender, class, education, and
social change. They all believed that education was fundamental to
emancipating women from their dependence on men, and that women
had the same intellectual capacity as men and deserved the same rig-
orous educational opportunities. Their educational vision for women
was limited, however, by their implicit assumption that the privilege
of higher education was reserved for women of the middle and upper
classes.3 This study is divided into three parts: an examination of the
elements of Tsuda Ume’s education that enabled her to be the bene-
ficiary of American philanthropy, an analysis of the administration of
the scholarship program, and a study of the varied philanthropic efforts
that made Joshi Eigaku Juku possible.

A RESPECT FOR TRUE CULTURE: THE AMERICAN EDUCATION OF TSUDA UME

Tsuda Ume’s unique career in Japanese higher education was ini-
tially made possible by a Japanese government scholarship that fi-
nanced her precollegiate education in the United States. At the end
of the nineteenth century, the Japanese Ministry of Education sent
students to the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany to
be trained as teachers for the public school system then being created.
According to a government document, in Western countries students
could “master the character, government, customs, and nature of the
people. . . . This will help the Japanese people to advance and will aid
in the development of a civilized Japan, so that the country can pros-
per.”4 The plan to include females in overseas study was authorized by
the emperor, who acknowledged the lack of formal educational op-
portunities for women. “Due to the inadequate provisions for the ed-
ucation of women in our country, most of them are not able to un-
derstand the meaning of civilization,” he said.5
In order to study the foundations of Western power, a Japanese
delegation—led by Prince Iwakura Tomomi and including almost half
of Japan’s political leaders—was to set sail for the United States and
Europe at the end of 1871. Both female and male students were to
accompany the Iwakura Mission; they would study in the United
States for a ten-year period, financially supported with free tuition, a
travel allowance, room and board, and $800 spending money. In spite
of the lucrative offer, two recruiting efforts failed to identify female

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LINDA L. JOHNSON

applicants. Ultimately, however, five girls, ranging in age from six to

fourteen, were found. Tsuda Ume, daughter of Tsuda Sen, an educator
and Western enthusiast, was the youngest.6 Tsuda Ume’s strong sense
of an obligation to serve came from the imperial commission with
which the girls were sent to the United States. In a break with tra-
dition, the five girls were granted a private audience with Empress
Haruko and given a document sending them abroad “to study for the
good of our countrywomen.”7
Upon their arrival in the United States, the girls were placed with
American families so that they might become “fully acquainted with
the blessings of home life in the United States,” learning “all those
kinds of information which will make them true ladies” and developing
a “respect for what is called true culture.”8 Tsuda Ume was placed with
Charles Lanman, secretary to the Japanese legation, and his wife Ade-
line. Impressed by the young girl’s intelligence, dedication to study,
and refined manners (characteristics for which she was praised by her
American benefactors throughout her career), the Lanmans became
devoted to Tsuda, choosing to educate her in neighborhood academies
so that she might continue to live with them. She graduated from
Georgetown Collegiate Institute and the Archer Institute. Under-
standing their mandate in the broadest possible terms, the Lanmans
sought to educate Tsuda Ume about as many aspects of the United
States and American culture as possible.
While Tsuda Ume’s formal schooling was on a par with the best
precollegiate educations for women available in the United States, it
was the informal education she received as a member of the Lanman
family that ultimately enabled her to work effectively with American
mentors and patrons. Her American biographer, Barbara Rose, has
argued that Tsuda’s American education instilled in her the values of
domesticity then prevalent in American society, values that constrained
the version of women’s education that she developed upon her return
to Japan.9 I contend that the Lanmans sought not to prepare Tsuda
Ume for marriage, but rather to empower her to be a national leader
in Japan. The education directed by the Lanmans prepared Tsuda
Umeko for the public world of service to Japanese women.
A significant aspect of Tsuda’s informal education was the Lanman
house itself. Tsuda read widely in the Lanmans’ collection of three
thousand books and she observed walls covered with Charles Lanman’s
landscape watercolors (he was a noted amateur) as well as the original

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 “CONTRIBUTING TO THE MOST PROMISING PEACEFUL REVOLUTION IN OUR TIME”

works of British and American artists. A newspaper reporter described

the Lanman home as “a veritable museum” and “a little picture gal-
lery.”10 The school that Tsuda later established in the former house of
a Japanese aristocrat can be seen as her effort to replicate the Lanman
house—the residence of a Victorian couple of arts and letters. The
Lanman residence may have been influential in another aspect of
Tsuda’s thinking as well. When Charles Lanman became secretary of
the Japanese legation, he had begun adding Japanese books and objets
d’art to the collections that he displayed at home. This eclecticism
may have informed Tsuda Ume’s thinking about the viability and de-
sirability of combining things Japanese and American.
The decor of the Lanman home provided a backdrop for enter-
taining refined guests, enjoying elevated conversation, cultivating ar-
tistic talents, and learning social graces. In the company of the Lan-
mans, Tsuda Ume played piano, read for pleasure, painted watercolors,
wrote essays, and composed poems. In a memoir she later wrote for
Joshi Sekai (Women’s World), Tsuda recalled that at the age of eleven
or twelve she was reading Scott, Dickens, and the poems of Longfel-
low and Bryant, as well as enjoying the biographies of Caesar, Jose-
phine, and Darwin.11 The Lanmans’ circle of friends included Wash-
ington Irving, John Whittier, and other American men of letters.
When literary celebrities such as Dickens and Longfellow toured, they
were entertained in the Lanman home. Tsuda Ume’s talents were on
display when the Lanmans entertained their distinguished guests, and
it was during these social occasions, one might conclude, that she
developed her sense of propriety and maturity of thought. It was also
in the Lanman home that Tsuda Ume was introduced to Mary Morris,
a Philadelphia Quaker and philanthropist and the wife of a Philadel-
phia railroad baron, who was to become her personal benefactor as
well as the major patron of her school and scholarship fund.12 Addi-
tionally, Tsuda Ume learned to value education and appreciate the
value of domestic relations that were based on respect for the intellect.
Beyond the formal education for which the Japanese government paid,
the Lanmans provided Tsuda Ume with an invaluable informal edu-
cation that prepared her to charm the upper classes in the drawing
rooms of America, where she would later solicit the assistance of ben-
efactors for her mission of educating Japanese women and elevating
their status.

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LINDA L. JOHNSON

“A FREE GIFT FROM AMERICAN LADIES”: THE AMERICAN WOMEN’S

SCHOLARSHIP FOR JAPANESE WOMEN
After eleven years in the United States, Tsuda Ume returned to
Japan, which had become more conservative and less supportive of
women’s education. In correspondence to Adeline Lanman, Tsuda
Ume expressed her despair about the condition of women and their
lack of desire for change. “Oh women have the hardest part of life to
bear in more ways than one. Even in America I often wished I were
a man. Oh how much more so in Japan! Poor, poor women, how I
long to do something to better your position! Yet why should I, when
they are so well satisfied, and do not seem to know any better?”13 The
Japanese government had legally confirmed women’s traditional sub-
ordinate status. A wife was treated as a minor by law and could not
enter into a contract without her husband’s consent. Her property was
placed at the disposal of her husband and family property was inher-
ited by the eldest son. Not only were women denied the franchise, but
the Peace Preservation law prohibited them from attending political
meetings.14 Japan’s Ministry of Education had made little progress in
establishing secondary schools for girls or educating women teachers.
Foreign missionaries continued to educate girls, but anti-Western sen-
timent was frequently heard in Tokyo and educated women were de-
rided in the popular press. Writing to Adeline Lanman, Tsuda ex-
pressed her need to be circumspect. “We must not make enemies, or
offend their taste, but conform as much as possible, yet improve their
customs, and methods of dressing, of society, etc. in our own little
circles.”15 In spite of her frustrations, Tsuda asserted her desire to re-
main in her homeland, expressing, perhaps for the first time, the sense
of alienation she had experienced in the United States: “You know I
never want to be an American citizen. . . . Many times I have felt that
I was of different race and blood, and there were none whose blood
was kin to mine, who had the characteristics of our race.”16 Tsuda’s
sense of her Japanese identity appears to have been strengthened by
her encounters with Westerners in Japan. Unlike the cosmopolitan
guests in the Lanman household who were charmed by Japanese cul-
ture, Westerners such as American missionaries Tsuda met in Tokyo
were less enamored of the Japanese. Tsuda criticized “their excessive
narrow-mindedness, and their want of appreciation of anything what-
ever good in Japan or anywhere outside of America and American
ways.”17 Tsuda Ume felt more keenly that, as an educated Japanese

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 “CONTRIBUTING TO THE MOST PROMISING PEACEFUL REVOLUTION IN OUR TIME”

woman, she was uniquely qualified to improve the condition of Jap-

anese women.
Initially, Tsuda Ume did not receive the government-sponsored
teaching position that she anticipated upon her return. The govern-
ment agency that sponsored her study in the United States had dis-
banded and its girls’ school had closed after only four years. But in
1884, her English-language skills, knowledge of American culture, and
social skills with foreign dignitaries finally brought her to the attention
of Itō Hirobumi, who was to become Japan’s first prime minister. She
entered his private household as an English-language tutor and con-
sultant on Western style and customs. On Itō’s recommendation in
1885, Tsuda Ume was appointed a teacher of English in the Peeresses’
School, newly established to teach the daughters of Japanese nobility.
The empress was the school’s patron and Shimoda Utako—Japan’s
most venerated female intellectual, a poet who had received a classical
Japanese education—was its headmistress. The position was precisely
what she had hoped for; it offered Tsuda financial security, professional
standing, and the prestige of court rank. It appeared that Tsuda finally
had the opportunity to fulfill her mission of elevating the status of
Japanese women through education.
It was not long, however, before Tsuda became disillusioned with
teaching at the Peeresses’ School and fearful that her lack of a college
education would jeopardize her professional future. From the outset,
Tsuda was frustrated with the elementary level of English-language
instruction offered at the school and the time wasted with formalities
and court ritual.18 In addition, Tsuda began to feel personal limitations,
realizing that her unique experience in the United States would not
guarantee her professional status in Japan. With the development of
normal schools in Japan, a college degree would soon become the
necessary professional credential.19 In 1886, Tsuda wrote to Adeline
Lanman, “I sometimes wonder if it would be feasible for me to think
of, or hope for such a thing as trying to get to America for a little
further study and for examining the school methods, and ways of
teaching in the United States. I intend to be a teacher all my life, as
it is, but I should like to fit myself to be a first-rate teacher, and though
I may have enough education to carry me along through ordinary
paths, I want more than that. . . . I want to be well-fitted for my work,
and we need all our brains and ability in Japan.”20 Tsuda Ume’s wish
came to the attention of Mary Morris, who had met Tsuda earlier in
the Lanman home. Morris sought assistance for Tsuda through her

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LINDA L. JOHNSON

family connections at Bryn Mawr, the newly established women’s lib-

eral arts college. Bryn Mawr agreed to admit Tsuda as a special student
and waive the tuition; Morris offered to pay her personal expenses. In
1891, Tsuda was granted a two-year leave of absence from the Peer-
esses’ School in order to study instructional methods.
At Bryn Mawr, Tsuda Ume was introduced to the educational
vision of its academic dean, M. Carey Thomas. Tsuda later emulated
aspects of this vision in her own school. Thomas carefully shaped Bryn
Mawr as a female-centered learning community, offering undergrad-
uate women the highest standard of university training in the United
States: the equivalent of the finest men’s universities.21 As a language
teacher herself, Tsuda was drawn to Thomas’s view that language study
would “cultivate the taste [and] judgment” of the “girls and women of
the upper classes.”22 Tsuda flourished at Bryn Mawr, studying with
students, many of them former teachers like herself, who shared her
abiding sense of a duty to work for the advancement of women.23 She
studied English literature, philosophy, German, and biology. She ex-
celled in laboratory science; her paper entitled “Orientation of the
Frog’s Eggs” was published in the British Quarterly Journal of Micro-
scopial Science in 1894. Mindful of her obligation to study instructional
methods, however, in January 1891 Tsuda began a term at Oswego
Teacher’s College in New York, where she studied the language in-
struction methods of Johannes Pestalozzi, which had a following
among Japanese male educators who had studied in the United States.
When she finished her studies at Bryn Mawr, President James Rhoads
issued a certificate describing Tsuda’s course of study and testifying
that “Miss Tsuda has shown at this college all the virtues that grace
and adorn the womanly character, and bears with her the honour,
esteem, and kindly regard of all the officers and students of the col-
lege.”24 Anna Hartshorne, a Bryn Mawr classmate who later taught
with Tsuda in Japan, concluded that the “best qualities of Bryn Mawr,
broadmindedness, thoroughness, exact standards of scholarship, be-
came rooted in her and were an integral part of her educational
ideal.”25 Ultimately more valuable than the formal education that
Tsuda received at Bryn Mawr, however, were the “honour, esteem, and
kindly regard” afforded her by a valuable network of women educators
and advocates for the higher education of women.
While studying at Bryn Mawr, Tsuda received frequent invitations
to speak about the lives of Japanese women. Hartshorne recalled that
Tsuda “made a wonderful impression”; American audiences thought

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that she was “like a princess.”26 Tsuda’s experience in the Lanman

home enabled her to move comfortably in the homes of faculty and
friends of the college. Her “parlor talks” (as Hartshorne called them)
were of interest to a growing segment of a social elite, who, like Mary
Morris, were curious about Japanese culture and eager to offer hos-
pitality to Japanese visitors.27 During summers and school breaks,
Tsuda spoke throughout the eastern United States, retracing earlier
journeys she had made with Charles and Adeline Lanman as she
talked to audiences sympathetic to the cause of women’s higher edu-
cation.
Tsuda’s parlor talks were expanded into a book, Japanese Girls and
Women, which she co-wrote with Alice Mabel Bacon in the summer
of 1891.28 Bacon had grown up with Yamakawa Sutematsu, one of the
girls who accompanied Tsuda on her first trip to the United States;
further, she was a faculty member at Hampton Institute in Virginia
and founder of the Dixie Hospital. In Japanese Girls and Women, Tsuda
and Bacon described the life cycle of Japanese females and analyzed
their daily lives in terms of the productive labor carried out by women
of the nobility, the middle class, the peasantry, and the urban artisan
class. They cautioned readers to take account of cultural differences
when making value judgments, particularly with respect to matters of
Japanese women’s morality. Tsuda and Bacon identified arranged mar-
riages, limited opportunities for productive work, the misogynist ideas
of Buddhism and Confucianism, and the absence of formal educa-
tional opportunities as the chief obstacles Japanese women had to
overcome. They argued that educational opportunities (which would
enable women to become financially independent) and the spread of
Christian values would be the most effective means for elevating the
status of Japanese women. Middle-class women, they concluded, of-
fered the best hope for providing the leadership that would benefit all
Japanese women.
Recognizing a growing audience interested in the cause, Tsuda
initiated a project to raise money for Japanese women’s higher edu-
cation. With the assistance of her personal patron, Mary Morris,
Tsuda launched “The Scholarship for Japanese Women,” an effort to
build an endowment of $8,000 that would allow Japanese women to
attend college in the United States. In support of the scholarship pro-
gram, Tsuda began giving more formal lectures (written with the as-
sistance of M. Carey Thomas) to larger audiences in more public set-
tings, but she continued to proclaim, as she had in her parlor talks

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and book, that education was the key to Japanese women’s emanci-
pation. Tsuda expressed her admiration for women’s position in the
United States, which she attributed to the power of education. “While
I have been in this country, the one thing which has struck me par-
ticularly, and filled me with admiration, is the position which Amer-
ican women hold, the great influence that they exercise for good, the
power given them by education and training, the congenial intercourse
between men and women, and the sympathy existing in the homes,
between brothers and sisters, husbands and wives.” Tsuda was confi-
dent that the same advances were possible in Japan, and she reassured
potential donors that “there has seemed to me no reason why this
should not be so in my own country, for in Japan there has never been
any great prejudice against women such as we find in so many coun-
tries of the East.” She acknowledged, however, that due to the influ-
ence of what she termed “foreign” religions—Buddhism from India
and Confucianism from China—Japanese women were subjugated by
men. But, she proclaimed, “happily, the influence of Buddha and Con-
fucius is growing, year by year, less powerful in Japan, and we are
hoping that Christianity will fill the void.” Tsuda boasted of the speed
with which Japan had moved from feudalism to a constitutional mon-
archy with a popularly elected parliament, but she lamented that “with
all these advances for the nation, and much progress for men, no
corresponding advantages have been given to the women.”29
From her perspective of having lived in an American home, Tsuda
explained that what struck her most when she returned to Japan was
“the great difference between men and women, and the absolute power
which men held.” Tsuda’s central concern was Japanese women’s lack
of autonomy. “The women were entirely dependent, having no means
of self-support, since no employment or occupation was open to them.
. . . A woman could hold no property in her own name and her iden-
tity was merged in that of her father, husband, or some male relative.
Hence, there was an utter lack of independent spirit.”30 Drawing on
her own convictions, and in a calculated appeal to the audiences she
addressed, Tsuda spoke to “the need of education for women of the
upper classes. We should expect them to have the greatest influence.”
She allied herself with “the advocates of the new education,” who
“believe that one has a more serious part to play in the world than to
be a mere ornament for the house, or plaything for the men.”31 In
Japan, she said, “Christian men and those who had been abroad
wished to marry cultivated women and desired that their daughters as

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well as their sons should be well educated.”32 Tsuda envisioned a so-

ciety in which relations between men and women, husbands and wives,
would be more harmonious and satisfying if women were the educated,
intellectual equals of men.
Having identified the reasons for optimism, Tsuda finally arrived
at the critical question: “Where are the teachers who are to train and
help the eager students?”33 She asserted that there were Japanese
women who were anxious to undertake the responsibility: “They are
willing to devote their lives to it, if only they were suitably prepared,
but few of them have opportunities of study such as men have, for
none of the higher institutions are open to women, still less have they
the means to come abroad for study.” While explaining the limitations
of foreign missionaries, Tsuda coyly described her own advantages,
asserting that “a well educated, cultivated, native woman, even though
she is herself not of high rank, can as a teacher find her way to the
homes of this exclusive class, and through education, the lesson of
Christianity could be taught.”34 Tsuda described the goal of the schol-
arship program as being to educate women like herself to undertake
the mission to which she, herself, was committed. Tsuda’s experience
in the Lanman household, her Bryn Mawr education, and her collab-
orations with Mary Morris, Alice Bacon, and M. Carey Thomas en-
abled her to craft a message to potential donors that appealed to their
deeply held reform commitments and beliefs that education and
Christianity were the means by which the status of women would be
elevated.35
Tsuda and Mary Morris envisioned a permanent scholarship fund,
making it possible for Japanese women to study for four years at an
American institution of higher learning. The idea was to institution-
alize the gift that Bryn Mawr College and Morris had bestowed upon
Tsuda and make the opportunity available to women throughout Ja-
pan. “It would be open to all Japanese women, as an incentive to them,
a free gift from American ladies, to show the interest which has been
taken in them, and the high value attached by American ladies to
education.”36 Competitive examinations, apparently modeled on Bryn
Mawr’s rigorous admission exams, would be used to select a student
who excelled not only in English-language study, but also in Japanese
language and literature. The selection of the candidate was to be made
by a committee of both men and women in Japan “anxious for the
spread of Christianity, and the elevation of women.” In a direct appeal
to members of her audience who were most clearly motivated by a

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desire to support foreign mission work, Tsuda concluded, “I feel that

such a scholarship offered in this way, directly to the Japanese would
have a very great influence, and would help to do away with the feel-
ing now so prevalent in Japan that higher education is antagonistic
to Christianity.” Through the AWSJW, Tsuda sought to multiply the
number of women in Japan who shared her expertise and her com-
mitment to elevating the status of Japanese women. “The great need,”
she saw, was “for teachers of the higher education, for Japanese
women fitted to enter, at once, into the government and private
schools, to educate the Japanese girls according to American meth-
ods, to teach them by example and precept the benefits of a Christian
civilization.”37
While a shared commitment to women’s higher education moti-
vated the members of both the Japanese and American committees
that administered the scholarship, disagreements over the administra-
tion of the program reflected cultural differences and the interests of
individuals. The early years of the program were characterized by ex-
plicit disagreement about authority and responsibilities and implicit
disagreement about the extent to which the scholarship was intended
to promote Christianity. Misunderstandings between the American
and Japanese committees were exacerbated by a dependence on written
communication, with infrequent face-to-face meetings between the
principals.38
The composition of the original American committee, which so-
licited money and supervised the education of scholarship recipients,
was mandated by a constitution. Mary Morris was the chair from the
establishment of the program in 1893 to her death in 1925, and M.
Carey Thomas served as the committee’s academic consultant. Mem-
bers were drawn from the social and economic elite of three Protestant
denominations in Philadelphia that were active in mission work in
Japan—Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Quaker. There were no set terms:
members served for the entirety of their lives, and their female de-
scendants or women who had teaching experience in Japan replaced
them. Noriko Araki and Louise Ward Demakis, who have studied the
backgrounds of the committee members, characterize them as active
in their churches and missionary societies. They were the wives and
daughters of railroad and industrial executives, many of whom served
on the board of Haverford College (a Quaker college for men). They
were Republicans, although not active politically; they were not in-
volved in women’s suffrage organizations. Finally, the original mem-

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bers, most of whom were married and began their families in the
1870s, had never attended college. They endeavored to bestow, then,
a privilege on Japanese women that they themselves had never re-
ceived.39
With the exception of M. Carey Thomas, members of the Amer-
ican committee were motivated by the desire to spread Christianity,
but scholarship recipients were not required to be Christian. Araki and
Demakis have speculated that the conscious omission of such a re-
quirement suggests that members of the American committee were
more concerned about educating than proselytizing. Pious themselves,
committee members began their meetings with a Bible reading, fol-
lowed by a prayer.40 Although AWSJW committee members chose
not to require a Christian commitment, they sought to provide the
students with the experience of a Christian home life. Bryn Mawr
College did not offer formal religious instruction, but the AWSJW
constitution stated that the committee members should offer schol-
arship recipients “the hospitality of their own Christian homes.”41
Committee members invited scholarship recipients to their homes,
included them in family vacations, and interceded on their behalf when
they experienced personal problems.
The awarding of scholarships to Japanese women was ground-
breaking. Tsuda Ume established the Japanese committee, charged
with the selection of the scholarship recipients, after her return to
Japan in 1892. She became its chair and appointed four men and three
women; in Japan at the time, a committee including both men and
women was virtually unprecedented. While Mary Morris had ap-
pointed members of the American committee on the basis of personal
acquaintance and social connections, Tsuda sought to establish the
prestige of the scholarship program in Japan by engaging the assistance
of national leaders in women’s higher education. The male members
of the committee were administrators of women’s schools, while the
female members had been educated in the United States. To ensure
that the committee members in Japan shared the American women’s
values, all Japanese members had to be approved by two Christian
ministers and were to “be such as are anxious for the spread of Chris-
tianity and the elevation of women in Japan.”42 Tsuda demonstrated
that she was politically astute by appointing committee members from
both public and private educational institutions, but, in keeping with
her reservation about missionaries, none of the committee members
was associated with a foreign mission school. The establishment of

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the scholarship program and the committee to administer it enabled

Tsuda to move into a position of leadership in women’s higher edu-
cation in Japan.
The most significant conflict between the Japanese and American
committees was the selection of scholarship recipients. The American
committee set the criteria for selection, but the Japanese committee
was responsible for advertising the scholarship, conducting competitive
examinations, and selecting the final candidate. An early conflict was
evident in the writing of the Japanese committee’s constitution, when
the American women required the deletion of the statement that the
scholarship was intended to train teachers.43 In general, the Americans
wanted the criteria for selection to be as general as possible, and the
recipient to have as wide a choice of studies as possible. Scholarship
recipients had the option to study at Bryn Mawr, a liberal arts college,
and they were also permitted to study at the Women’s Medical College
of Pennsylvania or Drexel Institute, a technical school. The Japanese
committee, on the other hand, sought to restrict the pool of potential
candidates and select only those applicants who would return to teach
in Japan.
While the wording of the scholarship advertisement sparked open
disagreement, in other instances the Japanese committee was able to
thwart the intentions of the Americans simply because the latter un-
derstood so little about the circumstances in which the selection pro-
cess was implemented. For example, while the Americans chose not
to limit the selection solely to Christians, the requirement that the
recipient be fluent in English meant that in all likelihood the most
successful candidate would have been educated in mission schools and
accustomed to conversing with native English speakers, most likely
missionaries. The competitive examination, lasting five days and mod-
eled on Bryn Mawr’s rigorous entrance examination, was designed to
establish an objective basis for selection, but personal tutoring, partic-
ularly by Tsuda herself, increased the likelihood that the successful
candidate would be a person known to members of the Japanese com-
mittee. Ultimately, the examination requirement was contested and
there were times when circumstances forced the American committee
to waive it.44 The Japanese committee was adamant that the scholar-
ship recipient literally come from Japan; one highly qualified candi-
date, already in the United States, was disqualified because she could
not be present in Tokyo for the selection process. It was consistent
with Japanese values to create a selection system that enabled the com-

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mittee members to exercise their judgment and select an individual

whose personal character they could guarantee.
Financial considerations also restricted the pool of eligible stu-
dents. While the scholarship funded tuition and living expenses in the
United States, the recipient’s family was required to pay transportation
costs from Tokyo to Philadelphia, as well as the costs of a Western
wardrobe. As a result, all but upper-middle-class women were elimi-
nated from the competition. For more than a year, Tsuda had devoted
time to soliciting funds for the scholarship, but they fell short of the
$8,000 endowment necessary to create sufficient annual interest in-
come. Moreover, even before the first scholarship recipient arrived in
Philadelphia, the American committee recognized the need to fund
one or two years of preparatory work, which was completed at Ivy
House, a school in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Over the years, the
American committee faced financial challenges, particularly following
recession in the national economy or special expenses associated with
unanticipated travel opportunities or emergency medical expenses for
students. To meet these needs, American committee members charged
themselves annual membership dues and the committee was expanded
to include contributors who did not participate in the program’s ad-
ministration.
In addition to its financial challenges, the American committee
faced unanticipated difficulties in providing personal assistance to and
supervision of the scholarship recipients. Members’ correspondence,
particularly in the early years of the scholarship program, reveals that
they had unrealistically high expectations of the scholarship recipients’
English skills and familiarity with American culture. Their expecta-
tions had been based on the standard of Tsuda Ume, who had been
raised in an American family and educated in the United States.
Over the years, committee members were advised by American
women who had taught in Japan, and some traveled to Japan them-
selves; however, particularly in the early years, members of the Amer-
ican committee were ill-prepared to understand how difficult it was to
bring the necessities of daily life from Japan or how unsuitable the
students’ personal possessions were for life in the United States. Mat-
suda Michi, the first of the scholarship recipients, carried the greatest
burden resulting from cultural misunderstanding. When her $12
monthly personal allowance proved insufficient for the purchase of
Western clothing and its repair, the American committee became par-
ticularly concerned about her “extravagance.” Matsuda’s most critical

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failing in the eyes of the American committee women was her inability
to mend her own clothing. The American women were unaware that
Japanese girls were taught to weave rather than sew because a kimono
is a garment that is wrapped—not seamed, hemmed, or held together
by buttons. During her first summer in the United States, the Amer-
ican committee enrolled Matsuda in a domestic course. They were
concerned, not because she was in their estimation ill-prepared for
marriage, but because she would not be able to take care of herself.
They valued the independence afforded by a skill that they considered
fundamental.45
While the early problems encountered by the American committee
reflected the cultural insularity of its members, later experience re-
flected increased sensitivity and a continuing commitment to hospi-
tality. For example, a scholarship recipient experiencing medical prob-
lems was brought to New York by a committee member so that she
could be treated by a Japanese doctor, and her medical expenses, first
covered by an emergency loan, were ultimately paid by the committee.
The administration of the AWSJW was characterized by intensely
close personal relationships between the scholarship recipients and
members of the committee—relationships that paralleled the family-
like ties between Tsuda Ume and the Lanmans, providing students
with a broader view of American culture.
From the scholarship’s establishment in 1893 to the beginning of
World War II, eleven Japanese women were AWSJW recipients. In-
ternational politics between the world wars created complications for
the scholarship recipients, who experienced increasing anti-Japanese
sentiment in the United States and charges of disloyalty when they
returned to Japan. During World War II, two scholarships were
awarded to Japanese-American students. Between 1949 and 1976,
twelve scholarships were awarded to students for graduate work, a
change that reflected the increased opportunities for women to attend
college in Japan following World War II. The scholarship committee
disbanded in 1976 and donated the remaining $20,000 to a Bryn
Mawr College scholarship fund for Japanese students.46

JOSHI EIGAKU JUKU AND THE COMMITTEE FOR MISS TSUDA’S SCHOOL
FOR GIRLS
The network of personal friends, professional contacts, and finan-
cial supporters Tsuda had developed in the United States made it

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 “CONTRIBUTING TO THE MOST PROMISING PEACEFUL REVOLUTION IN OUR TIME”

possible for her to establish her own school, Joshi Eigaku Juku, in
1900. The demands of administering her own school both increased
her dependence on members of the AWSJW American committee and
made their collaboration on the scholarship more problematic. How-
ever, it was with the establishment of her own school that Tsuda ul-
timately felt herself to have fulfilled the imperial commission with
which she had originally been sent to the United States: to educate
Japanese women and increase their opportunities.
Tsuda had long dreamed of establishing her own school, and had
prepared to do so by studying in the United States, developing a pa-
tronage network, and undertaking a fact-finding tour in which she
visited the newly developing women’s academies in England.47 At Bryn
Mawr, Tsuda had imbibed an elitist approach to women’s higher ed-
ucation that focused on serving upper-class women, maintaining rig-
orous entrance requirements, and demanding the same level of aca-
demic performance that was expected in the most prestigious men’s
schools. M. Carey Thomas, a pioneer administrator in women’s higher
education, communicated to Tsuda the value of developing rituals
(opening ceremonies, theatricals, commencement exercises) to define
the identity of the college, building a strong alumnae base to support
the college, and soliciting funds not only from individuals, but also
from foundations that favored projects in higher education.48 In the
classrooms and laboratories of Bryn Mawr, Tsuda had learned to ap-
preciate personal mentoring by faculty who expected their students to
think independently and express their opinions. Tsuda’s experience at
Oswego’s Teacher’s College gave her knowledge of cutting-edge
English-language instruction methods that, along with her fluency in
English, enabled her to become recognized as the leading authority
on English-language instruction in Japan. Her tour of women’s schools
in Britain reinforced Tsuda’s belief in the education of women in
women-only schools, as opposed to the men’s institutions that mar-
ginalized women in related but unequal “annex schools.” Perhaps most
importantly, the progress that some women’s schools had made in a
short period of time filled Tsuda with hope that her dream was a real
possibility.49
Tsuda timed the opening of her school to take advantage of both
her own professional preparation and national legislation. The Act of
Girls’ High Schools (1899) required every prefecture (state) to have at
least one public high school for girls. By 1900, fifty-two schools en-
rolled twelve thousand girls, but no institution existed to offer them

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broader educational opportunities after graduation. Moreover, no ed-

ucational institutions certified women to teach English at the girls’
schools. Tsuda developed Joshi Eigaku Juku to fill these needs. The
early national reputation of the school was secured by Tsuda’s associ-
ation with the AWSJW and by the texts and magazines she published
about teaching English. With the 1903 Act of Vocational Colleges,
Joshi Eigaku Juku became the only government-approved women’s
college in Japan. Graduates of the school had a reputation for being
able to converse easily in English, and in 1905, Joshi Eigaku Juku
became the first and only women’s institution whose graduates were
exempted from taking government examinations for teaching certifi-
cation. Thereafter, the two most prestigious men’s schools, the Tokyo
Higher Normal School and the Tokyo Foreign Language School, sent
their students to observe language instruction at Tsuda’s school.50 Re-
markably, this achievement was made possible in great part because of
the philanthropic efforts of American women benefactors.
Joshi Eigaku Juku was established with an endowment raised by
Tsuda’s longtime colleagues and benefactors. In March 1900, Alice
Mabel Bacon—co-author of Japanese Girls and Women—went to Phil-
adelphia to talk about plans for the school with a group of Tsuda’s old
friends. Bryn Mawr classmate Anna Hartshorne spoke of the practical
issues that she had discussed with Tsuda in Tokyo. M. Carey Thomas
presided over the meeting, speaking of the values that Tsuda and the
assembled women shared. Mary Morris, Tsuda’s benefactor, was
named chair of the Committee for Miss Tsuda’s School in Japan. She
contributed half of the two thousand dollars collected that summer to
provide the initial capital for the school.51
While the memberships of the American committee of the
AWSJW and the Committee for Miss Tsuda’s School for Girls over-
lapped significantly, the establishment of Tsuda’s own school compli-
cated the administration of the AWSJW. Contrary to the wishes of
the American committee, Tsuda wanted to use the scholarship, which
she had campaigned so hard to develop, exclusively for the benefit of
her school and its graduates. Seeking a well-qualified faculty for her
school, Tsuda also aimed to decrease the scholarship recipients’ period
of study in order to permit more women to receive funding. The
American committee was determined, however, that the scholarship
would remain open to all qualified applicants and that all recipients
would earn college degrees. At times there was a direct conflict of
interest; for example, in 1902 Tsuda offered to prepare scholarship

314
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recipients at her school for an annual payment of $500. Miss Stevens,

a member of the AWSJW committee and principal of the academy in
Philadelphia that prepared the first scholarship recipients, insisted that
a two-year period of preparation take place in the United States. In
1904, a member of the Japanese committee traveled to Philadelphia
to present Tsuda’s request that the AWSJW be awarded exclusively to
graduates of her own school. The American committee’s rejection of
the request offended Tsuda, and during a 1907 visit with the American
committee she requested release from her responsibilities as chair of
the Japanese committee, citing the hard feelings and criticism that
appeared when a scholarship recipient came from her own school. The
request was approved, but Tsuda remained on the Japanese committee,
serving in the capacity of secretary, and she continued to control the
committee’s decisions.52 While conflicts resulted from Tsuda’s efforts
to promote the interests of her school and the efforts of the American
committee to retain their original intent, the AWSJW was critical to
the success of Joshi Eigaku Juku. Scholarship recipients represented
their alma mater when they studied at Bryn Mawr and, like Tsuda
before them, they did extensive fundraising for the school. Upon re-
turning to Japan, they provided Joshi Eigaku Juku with a well-
qualified, loyal cadre of faculty.
In addition to the financial support of the AWSJW committee and
the Committee for Miss Tsuda’s School for Girls, Joshi Eigaku Juku
benefited from a variety of forms of philanthropic service. Foremost
was the willingness of women to teach as volunteers. Alice Mabel
Bacon took a two-year leave from her teaching position at Hampton
Institute to assist Tsuda when she opened the school. She accepted no
salary (Tsuda herself accepted only a half-salary) and even taught part-
time in other schools in Tokyo to contribute toward the operating
expenses of Joshi Eigaku Juku. Following Bacon’s departure in 1902,
Anna Hartshorne traveled to Japan and devoted her life to teaching
at the school, assisting Tsuda and also fundraising in the United States.
During the early decades of Joshi Eigaku Juku, Bryn Mawr alumnae
and daughters of members of the AWSJW American Committee also
supplemented the Japanese faculty. Like Tsuda herself, these American
women were uniquely qualified to provide the educational opportu-
nities that became the hallmark of the school. They developed stu-
dents’ capacities to speak English fluently, understand American and
British values through the study of literature, and think independently.
These women shared a sense of Christian calling to the mission field,

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and their presence enhanced the Christian influence in the school’s

curriculum and residential program. Like Tsuda, they believed that
educational opportunities and the spread of Christian values would
elevate the status of women.53
The dependence of Joshi Eigaku Juku on American philanthropy
took Tsuda out of the classroom, making her a full-time fundraiser.
Tsuda noted, ruefully, that the Japanese government supported the best
men’s universities, but higher educational opportunities for women
were dependent on donations. Tsuda made frequent trips to the
United States to maintain personal relationships with the Committee
for Miss Tsuda’s School and the AWSJW American committee. She
lectured and met with individual donors on American tours organized
largely by the affluent and socially well placed Bryn Mawr alumnae
and their husbands. When she was in Japan, her days were frequently
devoted to hosting American donors. Tsuda was constantly engaged
in correspondence as well, mostly with Bryn Mawr alumnae; she asked
for donations to capital projects and specific gifts of used items, such
as books for the library and a phonograph player for the music room.54
Perhaps because of the extent to which Joshi Eigaku Juku was
dependent on gifts of money and the work of volunteer teachers, and
because she often articulated her own project in terms of moral obli-
gation to the empress and the nation, Tsuda consistently reminded
students and alumnae about the importance of service. While enrolled,
students participated in raising funds for the school, often by pre-
senting theatricals much like those Tsuda had seen at Bryn Mawr.
Graduates were asked to volunteer at least once a week, using their
skills and talents to enrich the curriculum and program of residential
students. Ultimately, Tsuda asked her students to devote their lives to
service, to raise the status of Japanese women through their individual
actions. In 1915, she urged students, “Humbly strive to be worthy of
respect so that all must acknowledge the value of your training, and
bear in mind always that where much has been received, much must
be given to others. If you can succeed in these things even in part,
you will pave the way for privileges and the honor of Japanese
women.”55

NOTES
1. Katherine E. McBride, quoted in “Japanese Alumnae, 1973,” Bryn Mawr
Alumna Bulletin (1973), 8.

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 “CONTRIBUTING TO THE MOST PROMISING PEACEFUL REVOLUTION IN OUR TIME”

2. Tsuda is her family name and Ume is her given name. In adulthood, she
added the suffix “ko” to her given name, becoming Tsuda Umeko.
3. The values shared by these women have been identified as representative of
“Victorian liberal feminism”; see Joyce Senders Pedersen, “Education, Gender and
Social Change in Victorian Liberal Feminist Theory,” History of European Ideas 8
(1987): 503–19.
4. Quoted in James T. Conte, “Overseas Study in the Meiji Period: Japanese
Students in America, 1867–1902” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1977), 45.
5. Translated by and quoted in Michio Nagai, “Westernization and Japaniza-
tion,” in Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture, ed. Donald H. Shively
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 47.
6. The girls were Yoshimasu Ryoko (age fourteen), Ueda Teiko (fourteen), Ya-
makawa Sutematsu (eleven), Nagai Shigeko (seven), and Tsuda Ume (six).
7. Tsuda Umeko, “Japanese Women Emancipated,” reprinted in Tsuda Umeko
monjo (The writings of Tsuda Umeko), ed. Furuki Yoshiko (Kodaira, Japan: Tsuda
Juku Daigaku, 1984), 78–79.
8. Charles Lanman, The Japanese in America (New York: University Publishing
Company, 1872), 48.
9. Barbara Rose, Tsuda Umeko and Women’s Education in Japan (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 6–7. Rose does not cite specific sources in which
Tsuda articulated the values of domesticity. Rather, she assumes that popular figures
such as Catharine Beecher would have shaped Tsuda’s thinking (31–32).
10. Quoted in Yoshiko Furuki, The White Plum: A Biography of Ume Tsuda, Pi-
oneer in the Higher Education of Japanese Women (New York: Weatherhill, 1991), 20.
11. Tsuda Umeko, “Waga Knonode Yomishi Shomotsu” (Books I enjoyed read-
ing), in Tsuda Umeko monjo, 65–68.
12. Louise Ward Demakis, “No Madam Butterflies,” Journal of American and Ca-
nadian Studies 4 (1989): 5.
13. Yoshiko Furuki, ed., The Attic Letters: Ume Tsuda’s Correspondence to Her
American Mother (New York: Weatherhill, 1991), 23.
14. Sadako Ōgata, “Women’s Participation in the Modernization of Japan,” Studia
Diplomatica 30 (1977): 205.
15. Furuki, Attic Letters, 3.
16. Ibid., 82.
17. Ibid., 51.
18. Ibid., 223.
19. Rose, Tsuda Umeko, 79.
20. Furuki, Attic Letters, 250.
21. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s
Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s, 2nd ed. (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 115–16.
22. Ibid., 119.
23. Rose, Tsuda Umeko, 83.
24. Quoted in Furuki, The White Plum, 86. See also “The Years of Preparation:
A Memory of Miss Tsuda,” Alumnae Report (Bryn Mawr College), no. 35 (1930).
25. Hartshorne quoted in Furuki, The White Plum, 86.
26. Hartshorne quoted in Rose, Tsuda Umeko, 84.

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LINDA L. JOHNSON

27. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation

of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 148–49.
28. Alice Mabel Bacon, Japanese Girls and Women (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1891). Although the book was co-authored by Tsuda, it was published under Bacon’s
name in order to protect Tsuda from criticism in Japan.
29. Tsuda Umeko, “The Education of Japanese Women,” in Tsuda Umeko monjo,
19, 20, 21. Tsuda was a baptized Christian. Akiko Tokuza has observed, “As a social
philosophy, Confucianism emphasized a hierarchical order, upheld by loyalty and the
submission of inferiors to superiors. Women were seen as fundamentally inferior, this
subordination thus having philosophical justification. Moreover, Japanese Buddhism
tended to teach that ‘[women] by nature are covetous and sinful,’ and thus at a grave
disadvantage in seeking enlightenment. This criticism of women’s intelligence, auton-
omy, and moral worth was essential to the total subordination of women that society
demanded” (Akiko Tokuza, The Rise of the Feminist Movement in Japan [Tokyo: Keio
University Press, 1999], 40–41).
30. Tsuda, “The Education of Japanese Women,” 23.
31. Ibid., 22.
32. Ibid., 24.
33. Ibid., 25.
34. Ibid., 26.
35. Describing the women’s foreign mission movement, Patricia R. Hill has ob-
served, “Gradually, education of women in foreign lands became not so much a strat-
egy for evangelization as an instrument for social change. The ablest students were
selected for further education . . . not for marriage and maternity, but for positions of
leadership in their own societies” (Patricia R. Hill, The World Their Household: The
American Women’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920
[Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985], 134).
36. Tsuda, “The Education of Japanese Women,” 26.
37. Ibid., 27.
38. Noriko Araki and Louise Ward Demakis, “The Scholarship for Japanese
Women,” Japan Christian Quarterly 53 (1987): 30.
39. Ibid., 18.
40. Ibid., 18, 16.
41. AWSJW Constitution, Tsuda College Archive, in the library of Tsuda Juku
Daigaku, Kodaira, Tokyo (hereafter cited as TCA).
42. Japan Scholarship Committee Constitution, 3–4, TCA.
43. Minutes of the Japan Scholarship Committee Meeting, 9 April 1892, MSS,
TCA.
44. Minutes of the Japan Scholarship Committee Meeting, 29 January 1906,
MSS, TCA.
45. Mary E. Stevens to Juliana Wood and Mrs. Robert Haines, 15 May 1895,
MSS, TCA.
46. Araki and Demakis, “The Scholarship for Japanese Women,” 31.
47. Tsuda made the tour at the suggestion of her mentor, M. Carey Thomas,
who had made a similar tour of American women’s colleges before she began her
appointment as dean of Bryn Mawr College (Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power
and Passion of M. Carey Thomas [New York: Knopf, 1994]).

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48. Both Bryn Mawr College and Tsuda’s Joshi Eigaku Juku received lucrative
grants from the Rockefeller Foundation to fund capital projects. Following the Great
Earthquake of 1923, which destroyed the Joshi Eigaku Juku campus, the Laura Spel-
man Rockefeller Memorial pledged one hundred thousand dollars in matching funds.
See Furuki, The White Plum, 132.
49. Ibid., 96.
50. Ibid., 103, 108, 110–11, 121.
51. Ibid., 103.
52. Araki and Demakis, “The Scholarship for Japanese Women,” 24.
53. See Maude Whitmore Madden, Women of the Meiji Era (New York: Fleming
N. Revell, 1919), 28–45 for profiles of women who taught at Tsuda’s school.
54. Rose, Tsuda Umeko, 136–37.
55. “Miss Tsuda’s Address to the Graduates,” Alumnae Report of the Joshi Ei-
gaku Juku, July 1915, in Tsuda Umeko monjo, 151.

319
 14. Supporting Females in a Male Field: Philanthropy
for Women’s Engineering Education
Amy Sue Bix

Through most of the twentieth century in the United States, sci-

ence was commonly assumed to belong to men’s intellectual sphere
and workplace. Narrow assumptions about proper gender roles dis-
couraged many women from pursuing scientific studies, while many
science programs discouraged women’s applications or flatly denied
women access. For those women who chose to persist, moving ahead
in the scientific profession required fighting persistent employment
discrimination and institutional obstacles within academia, govern-
ment, and business. In the face of such structural barriers, the force
of “creative philanthropy” helped generate a few meaningful oppor-
tunities, as Margaret Rossiter has detailed. Endowments specifically
established for hiring female scholars brought women into new slots
on the faculties of both Harvard and the University of Michigan dur-
ing the post–World War II period, Rossiter explains. Radcliffe dean
Bernice Brown Cronkhite took one step toward remedying universi-
ties’ usually miserable treatment of female graduate students by raising
funds to open a dormitory and living center for those women in Cam-
bridge in 1957. Meanwhile, ever since the late 1800s, the American
Association of University Women had awarded fellowships to female
students. By the late 1960s, generous donations from members enabled
the AAUW to increase both the number and the size of its fellow-
ships; in cases where departments proved reluctant to support female
graduate students, AAUW assistance was especially valuable.1
Just as the organizers of such efforts strove to help women scien-
tists overcome some of the difficulties facing them in graduate school

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and in the professions, the same power of “female creative philan-

thropy” also played a role in shaping conditions facing women in
American engineering. Even more than in science, American engi-
neering has a gendered history, one which for decades prevented
women in any significant numbers from finding a comfortable place
in the predominantly male technical world. In the United States dur-
ing the 1950s, women studying or working in engineering defied tra-
ditional gender norms and were popularly perceived as oddities at best
and outcasts at worst. Overall, women made up less than 2 percent of
students in college and university engineering programs during those
years. Yet by century’s end, women’s presence in American engineering
had become accepted, even encouraged (at least officially). In 1996,
women made up roughly 18 percent of students earning bachelor’s
degrees in engineering. Such a substantial gain was no coincidence.
This dramatic change in the gender dimensions of this field reflects
in part a strategic use of philanthropy to counter barriers rooted in
the institutional culture of higher education and in the social culture
of engineering.
In the narrower sense of the word “philanthropy”—that is, in the
realm of financial donations—women supported other women by en-
dowing scholarships for female engineering students or by funding the
construction of women’s dormitories. But the true historical force of
philanthropy becomes clear when the more expansive sense of the
word is considered. Philanthropy as benevolence—doing good—was
crucial to expanding opportunities for women in engineering. Women
volunteered countless hours to assist other women and young girls in
pursuing the dream of an engineering education. In individual efforts,
female engineers mentored others, taught special classes, and offered
informal advice on both career and personal questions. At a group
level, female engineering students at dozens of colleges banded to-
gether to organize support networks and numerous activities. At an
institutional level, the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) estab-
lished many different support mechanisms that expanded over the
years.
This tradition of help extended across generations. Well into her
eighties, Lillian Gilbreth (whose family life was famously portrayed in
Cheaper by the Dozen) traveled around the country to meet with female
engineering undergraduates. In turn, these college students hosted
outreach programs for girls in high school, junior high, and elementary
school. The net effect contributed significantly toward making the

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intellectual, social, and personal atmosphere for women in engineering

far more welcoming during the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Phi-
lanthropy, of course, had its limitations; voluntary efforts could not
satisfy all needs, could not always overcome ingrained institutional
lethargy or individual resistance, and did not instantly turn the field
of engineering into a female paradise. Much work still remains to be
done to draw more women into engineering and enable them to ad-
vance in the profession. Across the United States today, many indi-
viduals and groups continue to develop outreach and support programs
for women in engineering. This article offers the background history
of such ongoing work, female creative philanthropy aimed at address-
ing the traditional gender limitations of engineering and at broadening
women’s opportunities in this avenue of education.

MIT, A PHILANTHROPY CASE STUDY: MONEY AND MUTUAL SUPPORT

For decades, Americans treated the professional study of technol-
ogy as men’s territory. Well into the twentieth century, preeminent
engineering schools remained largely closed to women. Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute only opened its doors to female students as a
World War II emergency measure. Other universities took even longer
to acknowledge women: Caltech, Georgia Tech, and Princeton did
not admit female undergraduates until the 1950s and 1960s, and then
only after extensive agonizing and argument. In each case, shifting
composition of the student body forced universities to rethink their
physical, social, and academic environments. Faculty, administrators,
and students faced the challenge of creating space for women in an
intellectual world and a campus climate assumed to be for men.2
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had actually been co-
educational since 1871. Its first female graduate, Ellen Swallow Rich-
ards, had created the Women’s Laboratory, a special program that she
hoped would keep MIT involved in training other women in chem-
istry. But school trustees resisted admitting “coeds” (as female students
were called, and as I will therefore refer to them here) to regular
courses, citing the lack of suitable accommodations. In 1882, alumnae
raised $8,000 to build women’s bathrooms, aiming to ensure that MIT
could no longer excuse its neglect by citing inadequate facilities. The
first women’s lounge was “a tiny cubbyhole with one rocking chair and
little else in the way of comfort”; the next contained “a sink, locker,

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some old sofas, and . . . numberless cockroaches.” A renovated Mar-

garet Cheney Suite opened in 1939; coeds called it “a feminine retreat
in the midst of a male environment,” a “refuge” where they could study,
relax, and eat lunch.3
Between the 1920s and the 1940s, MIT averaged fifty female stu-
dents on campus each year, amidst about five thousand men. In one
sense, coeds represented a curiosity. The student newspaper introduced
a 1940 class member as a New York “glamor girl” who wanted to work
on cancer research and won a hundred-dollar bet from fellow debu-
tantes by gaining admission.4 But officially, women students remained
invisible. President Karl Compton told incoming students, “In choos-
ing MIT, you’ve taken on a man-size job,” and campus traditions rep-
resented masculinity itself. As an official welcome, the institution held
a “smoker” for freshmen and their fathers; initiation took place at MIT
camp and featured water fights with the sophomores, baseball games
with faculty, and plenty of male bonding. Even curricular activities
seem to have presented problems for inclusion of coeds. For instance,
civil engineering students learned surveying and other field techniques
at a rough camp whose accommodations were judged unsuitable for
females. Mechanical engineering class required round-the-clock ob-
servations of engine performance; generations of male students turned
the “twenty-four-hour boiler tests” into beer parties. The prospect of
women hanging out with men overnight in the lab seemed inappro-
priate.5
World War II brought massive upheavals to campus routine, and
Compton seized the occasion to rethink policy. Contemplating the
postwar place of women at MIT, he wrote, “For reasons, some logical
and some traditional, technology has been predominantly of interest
to the male of the species. [Nevertheless] the female continues to
display both interest and effectiveness in technological pursuits, . . .
slowly but definitely increasing.” Compton noted that MIT had never
helped coeds find housing in Cambridge, a “serious” problem that
made parents nervous about letting their daughters attend. One
mother, “afraid that her daughter will develop into a queer sort of
person interested only in her work,” had wanted supervised housing
“as a good influence and balance wheel.” Compton recommended that
MIT rent or buy an old house to fix up as a women’s dorm, an idea
seconded by Florence Stiles, advisor to women students. Stiles noted
regretfully that while coeds entered MIT with records at least equal

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to their male counterparts, only one in twenty completed degrees. She

hoped a centralized residence could create “esprit de corps” among
female students and prevent so many from dropping out.6
In 1945, as “a small scale experiment,” MIT opened a women’s
house at 120 Bay State Road in Boston. The location—a half-hour
distant from campus by subway and trolley—proved inconvenient.
More unfortunately, since the Bay State house held only fourteen first-
year women, MIT capped female enrollment at that number (plus a
few married and commuter students). Admissions officers discouraged
many high school girls from applying and ultimately evaluated women
more selectively than men. Typically, MIT rejected four qualified
women each year due to lack of dorm space alone. Throughout the
foreseeable future, officials admitted, coeds would “continue to be
grossly outnumbered by men in classroom and lab.”7
This attitude summarized the postwar stance of the school: as long
as MIT could fit in a few women without much trouble, it would,
while generally ignoring the existence of this anomalous population.
In 1947, the dean of students defined MIT as an institution intended
“to prepare men for . . . engineering, . . . [and] educate . . . men for re-
sponsible citizenship.”8 As women’s advisor, Stiles explained, the sense
was that “women in general do not make acceptable engineers.”9 One
observer later wrote, “Before 1960, women entered MIT at their own
risk. If they succeeded, fine; if they failed—well, no one had expected
them to succeed.”10 The few coeds enrolled hesitated to rock the boat.
“I was very conscious of having to represent women in each class. If
I did anything wrong, . . . said anything stupid, it would be ammuni-
tion for all the men who didn’t want us there in the first place,” re-
called engineering graduate Christina Jansen. “Discriminatory events
were so common that it didn’t occur to us to object.” Besides, “other
engineering schools weren’t accepting women, . . . so even though
MIT was only accepting twenty a year . . . I felt MIT was doing us
an enormous favor to have us there at all.”11
Skeptics doubted it would ever prove “possible to provide a small
group of women . . . with a sound environment for study in an insti-
tution primarily designed for men.”12 The 1950s brought further
makeshift housing arrangements. MIT tried putting coeds in Boston
University dorms, but noise made studying impossible. Bexley Hall at
MIT, which housed the few women students who survived their first
year, had no dining hall or social areas to foster any sense of com-
munity. In addition, coed life offered few amenities: MIT’s gym barred

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women and granted swimming pool access only at rare, inconvenient

hours. In terms of facilities, administrators conceded, “Women are the
‘forgotten men’ at MIT.”13
The dean of students concluded that MIT faced a fundamental
choice: either “eliminate women students . . . ; or, decide we really
want women, plan an adequate set-up, and then deliberately go out
and get more good girls.”14 Many argued for eliminating coeducation,
noting that six of twenty-three new women had run into first-semester
academic trouble. Margaret Alvort, women’s-house supervisor, wrote
that her “doubt as to whether [coeds] belong . . . has grown into cer-
tainty that they do not.” If MIT wanted to serve the nation by turning
out as many excellent scientists and engineers as possible, then “there
is little in the records of the girls . . . to justify their continuance.”15
MIT’s medical director agreed: “[W]hen there is such a shortage of
engineers, one wonders if we are justified in taking positions away
from male students for female.” Coeds brought “pleasure and orna-
mentation” to campus, but could rarely hold their own against “high-
grade intellects.” Further, to try to do so would be self-detrimental:
while MIT men displayed healthy competitiveness, aggression in
women signified emotional “conflicts” and rejection of femininity. In
short, he declared, “except for the rare individual woman, [MIT] is
an unsuitable place.”16
Significantly, MIT president James Killian believed some women
could succeed and therefore deserved access. He wrote, “I do not see
how the Institute, having admitted women for so long, can now
change”—nor should it, considering that Cold War competition
against the Soviets demanded that the U.S. develop all professional
talent. Striving to “think more boldly . . . about recognizing [women’s]
presence,” Killian broached the idea of setting up a women’s college
inside MIT, similar to Oxford’s system or the Harvard-Radcliffe ar-
rangement. Women would attend classes with men but have a separate
dormitory with self-contained eating and recreation facilities. Plans for
a women’s college could attract support from private donors, Killian
predicted, and for the first time “really justify . . . admitting women
students.”17
In 1960, Katharine Dexter McCormick pledged $1.5 million to
build MIT’s first on-campus women’s dorm. At the turn of the cen-
tury, McCormick had attended MIT as a “special student” for three
years to prepare for qualifying exams, then earned a degree in biology
after four additional years. In her will, she wrote, “Since my graduation

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in 1904, I have wished to express my gratitude to the Institute for its

advanced policy of scientific education for women . . . , which has been
of inestimable value to me throughout my life.” McCormick knew
that in her day, MIT had enrolled forty-four women, a figure that had
risen only slightly five decades later. When announcing McCormick’s
donation, MIT president Julius Stratton observed that the gift “affords
us an unprecedented opportunity to improve [women students’] resi-
dential and social environment, advance the[ir] development . . . in the
scientific professions. . . . Indeed, woman’s potential for achievement
in these fields represents one of the great latent resources of the coun-
try.”18
The new building was conveniently located just one block away
from MIT’s main instructional complex. The architect took pains to
plan feminine amenities, such as bathroom space for hand laundry and
places downstairs for residents to receive male visitors. Dedication of
McCormick Hall in 1963 attracted national publicity. “Hardly anyone
imagines girls attending mighty MIT,” Time reported. “Yet last week
Tech . . . dedicated its first women’s dormitory to go with its first
women’s dean, an attractive blonde lured from nearby Radcliffe.”19
Seventeen touted MIT’s “luxurious new women’s dorm overlooking the
Charles River.”20
MIT used McCormick Hall’s opening to draw attention to its
female students. Noting that “opportunities for women in science
[and] engineering . . . are clearly increasing,” the 1963 catalog men-
tioned up front that MIT was coed. In 1964, women’s applications
jumped fifty percent. McCormick wrote to Stratton that she was
“happy to hear of the increase. . . . I have been so grateful for all I
received from the Institute that I realize how much Tech will mean
to them, and I am happy to think that perhaps the women’s dormitory
has been a factor in this increase.”21 Backers of coeducation hailed
McCormick Hall as a “vote of confidence,” “testimony . . . that women
are to remain a permanent part of MIT.”22 Now that the university
had finally created physical place on campus for female students,
women’s dean Jacquelyn Mattfeld called on MIT to integrate coeds
intellectually and socially. A “conservative . . . Wall Street attitude to-
ward women still runs through MIT’s veins,” she declared; many male
professors and students regarded female undergrads as “incompetent,
unnatural, and intruders.”23
McCormick initially provided beds for 120 coeds, more than ever
before. Yet with increased applications, deans forecast that MIT would

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soon run short of women’s housing again. Furthermore, Mattfeld con-

sidered the first phase of construction insufficient to improve women’s
living environment. McCormick residents had difficulties establishing
a healthy sense of community and creating a workable student gov-
ernment association. Coeds bemoaned “the drawn out struggles of
living with two girls known to be suicidal, the feeling of being trapped
in an elegant hotel with no place to get away to when one’s own room
felt oppressive, the sense that . . . ‘no faculty member really cares if you
ever get to be a scientist.’ ”24
To raise morale, Mattfeld looked to McCormick’s funding for the
second stage of construction, which could double women’s housing.
Admissions staff confirmed they could find another fifty good female
candidates each year, doubling the number per class.25 There was no
reason for “fear that MIT will suddenly be over-run by the Fair Sex,”
Mattfeld reassured doubters; raising female enrollment to four hun-
dred would only lift women from 3 to 8 percent of the total student
body. Moreover, she argued, improving “educational opportunities for
one portion of the population cannot help but be beneficial to the
whole.” Mattfeld wanted MIT to become a model academic com-
munity recognizing women’s scientific and engineering potential. She
emphasized that McCormick’s second tower should include not just
more beds, but also recreational facilities such as swimming pools and
music studios. Coeds would perform better, Mattfeld insisted, once
they felt at home.26
Even as Mattfeld pored over blueprints for expanded undergrad-
uate housing, McCormick instead suggested that the second tower
house female graduate students, whose greater professional commit-
ment seemed to make them better “investments.” MIT worked to
persuade her that female undergraduate enrollment had not yet
reached optimum size. Women would only continue on to graduate
study in science if they had a supportive undergraduate climate, offi-
cials stressed. Moreover, graduate women, especially married ones, did
not want dormitory life.
Administrators convinced McCormick that undergraduate
women’s housing remained essential, and indeed, her donation of dor-
mitory funds proved vital. In days when many factors discouraged girls
from pursuing professional interests, MIT presented positive pictures
of female science and engineering majors. Descriptions of McCormick
life suggested that coeds were not unwomanly freaks obsessed with
mathematics; one article observed that the “condition of floor kitch-

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enettes and . . . sewing machine[s] suggests that [coeds] cook and sew
as well as run computers.” Administrators made dorm activity part of
strategies encouraging women to succeed in male-dominated fields.
MIT brought female visiting professors, such as neurobiologist Rita
Levi-Montalcini, to spend weeks in residence at McCormick, talking
to coeds about their research and their experiences as female profes-
sionals.27
Even as they met with renowned women scholars, this new Mc-
Cormick generation of MIT coeds gained national visibility them-
selves as they began to confront frustrations more openly and band
together to consider remedies. After receiving degrees, numerous MIT
graduates encountered employment discrimination: companies ques-
tioned how long a woman engineer would remain on the job. To
address such issues, the newly invigorated Association of Women Stu-
dents (AWS) helped organize a “Symposium on American Women in
Science and Engineering” at MIT in 1964. Planners hoped to attract
widespread media coverage, teaching industry professionals and the
public that women could be good scientists and engineers. Organizers
also wanted to encourage young women to consider those careers,
aiming to describe “the mythical and actual difficulties they may . . .
encounter, to convey that these are not insurmountable, and to assure
that the satisfaction and rewards are high.” The symposium attracted
college faculty and administrators, high school students and guidance
counselors, and more than 250 delegates from Smith, Radcliffe,
Wellesley, the University of California, Georgia Tech, Northwestern,
Purdue, and other institutions. The novel coming together of such a
large group served an important purpose in itself; one mechanical en-
gineering major from Michigan State University said she found it “re-
assuring to see so many other women in the same situation.” Speakers
such as Radcliffe president Mary Bunting called on employers to pro-
vide day care and flexible schedules to help women balance mother-
hood and work. University of Chicago professor Alice Rossi urged
society to cultivate girls’ independence, curiosity, and reasoning. Psy-
chologist Erik Erikson encouraged women to stop depending on men
for approval, to envision a future beyond being a husband’s domestic
helpmate.28
In the early 1970s, MIT instituted an ad hoc committee “to review
the environment . . . for women students.” Co-chaired by engineering
professor Mildred Dresselhaus and engineering major Paula Stone, the
committee reflected fundamental feminist principles. It declared, “A

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discriminatory attitude against women is so institutionalized in Amer-

ican universities as to be out of the awareness of many of those con-
tributing to it.” Institute coeds faced both open hostility and more
subtle prejudice, the committee wrote.
If many people (professors, staff, male students) . . . persist in feeling
that women jeopardize the quality of MIT’s education, that women
do not belong in traditionally male engineering and management
fields, that women cannot be expected to make serious commitments
to scientific pursuits, that women lack academic motivation, that
women can only serve as distractions in a classroom, . . . then MIT
will never . . . be a coed institution with equal opportunities for all.29

The committee’s report represented a self-directed rallying cry, telling

MIT women that gender discrimination would change only when fe-
male students, faculty, and staff organized to demand improvement.
The early 1970s brought a burst of activism, as MIT women drew
strength from the national feminist movement to assert their presence
physically, intellectually, socially, and politically. Listing all the awards
coeds received, advocates documented that women could lead and suc-
ceed in difficult studies. AWS produced pamphlets encouraging high
school girls to apply, emphasizing that “there is an enormous pride in
being a ‘tech coed,’ . . . great satisfaction in having done something
difficult and worthwhile.”30
To help MIT women establish a positive sense of identity within
a male-dominated atmosphere, campus women’s groups initiated
monthly colloquia addressing wide-ranging feminist subjects such as
the nature of androgyny, sexism in popular culture, and the strengths
and difficulties of two-career marriages. Dresselhaus and Professor
Emily Wick created a new organization, the Women’s Forum, which
brought together undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, staff, and
wives of all of these to develop “consciousness-raising skits,” express
concerns about women’s health, athletic opportunities, day care, and
career planning, and otherwise raise gender awareness.31
MIT women continued worrying, especially about the question of
numbers. In the early 1970s the admissions office revised photographs
and text in the Institute’s catalog to highlight coeds and sent special
recruiting material to all female national merit and national achieve-
ment scholarship semifinalists. AWS feared that such measures would
not suffice to overcome social forces pushing girls away from science
and engineering. It would take “high-powered” efforts to increase fe-

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male enrollment, “to de-mythify incorrect assumptions about women

at MIT.”32 Women’s advocates worried that MIT’s “educational coun-
selors,” members of the male alumni network who spoke to potential
applicants, would not encourage high school girls to enter nontradi-
tional fields or address their concerns about coming to MIT. AWS
urged coeds to contact hometown seniors over Thanksgiving and
Christmas vacation. “The women in particular may just need an en-
couraging word from you before taking the plunge.”33 AWS members
also volunteered to sit in the admissions office during the peak inter-
view period, ready to chat with interested young women.
Mattfeld and her successor, Professor Wick, served as administra-
tive advocates for female students throughout the sixties. Wick wrote,
“As the number of women students increases (and it cannot fail to do
so if admissions criteria are the same for all applicants) it is essential
that MIT be sensitive to their needs . . . , prepared to assist women
students as they make their way through this very male institution.”34
Precisely because of their small numbers, “women are treated differ-
ently from men in MIT classes.”35 Mattfeld and Wick stepped in to
mediate when coeds encountered trouble dealing with advisors, pro-
fessors, or teaching assistants. Similarly, most of MIT’s few women
faculty considered it their responsibility, as successful professionals, to
lobby on behalf of other women on campus. Professor Sheila Widnall
complained, “Engineers may have a view of engineering which is
twenty years out-of-date, and they communicate that to other people.
Engineers have an image of engineering that is very masculine . . .
[and] takes a long time to change.” In 1976, she described women’s
activism as a “very exciting” force that could open wonderful oppor-
tunities for new generations of girls. “There’s obviously a direct con-
nection between militant feminism in the junior highs and the ulti-
mate enrollment of women in engineering. . . . Everybody, mothers in
particular . . . are much more aware of the importance of encouraging
their daughters to take life seriously.”36
Widnall and other female professors worked behind the scenes to
convince deans to back women’s education. In 1975, MIT’s Center
for Advanced Engineering Study produced a film entitled Engineering:
Women’s Work. It was one of the first movies aimed at combating the
field’s macho image. The film followed “real-life” female students and
professionals through their daily routines to show high school stu-
dents, parents, guidance counselors, and the public that affirmative
action had opened up interesting and lucrative opportunities. The

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film’s release drew national attention, and administrators considered it

a major contribution to promoting the cause of women in engineer-
ing.37
Earlier, in 1973, MIT had convened another workshop on women
in science and engineering, featuring panels on women’s professional
status and workshops on career planning. Organizers hoped to convert
parents, schools, and the national media into agents of change, helping
to break down outdated sex-role stereotypes that steered women into
low-paid, shrinking occupations such as teaching. “Enlarging oppor-
tunities for women must include not only opening all doors, but also
helping women to have the motivation and the courage as well as the
educational preparation for walking through them.” Embracing fem-
inist language, MIT president Jerome Wiesner spoke about a need “to
encourage women’s participation in every aspect of our technological
society. This is another front in the almost universal battle for equality
of opportunity.” Workshop leaders called for revising lower-school cur-
ricula in order to attract girls toward nontraditional fields, sensitize
parents to girls’ ambitions, and teach boys to “understand the impor-
tance of eliminating sex barriers.”38
Women’s advocates considered 1973 a year for celebration. In June,
the Association of MIT Alumnae (AMITA) commemorated the one
hundredth anniversary of MIT’s women graduates. AMITA hailed the
fact that female enrollment had tripled in just ten years, reaching 816
(roughly 13 percent of the total student body). In the freshman class,
the number of enrolled women went from 48 out of 958 students in
1965 (5 percent) to 211 out of 1036 in 1974 (20 percent). The evi-
dence seemed to validate supporters’ belief that women’s academic per-
formance would improve with more favorable living conditions now
available in McCormick Hall. The proportion of coeds completing
degrees on time rose from 33 to 64 percent (equivalent to male stu-
dents’ performance) during the early 1970s; women graduated with
higher GPAs than men, and a larger proportion moved on to graduate
studies.39
A number of activities sponsored by faculty and alumnae also
aimed to continue improving the lot of women engineers. By 1974,
female faculty and staff were getting together for monthly lunches,
hoping to multiply their impact on Institute policy. Pursuing an ac-
tivist stance inside the engineering school, Professors Dresselhaus and
Widnall inaugurated a freshman seminar entitled “What Is Engineer-
ing?” Though not restricted to coeds, the course was geared primarily

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toward them, starting from an assumption that women often avoided

technical subjects simply because they sounded unfamiliar. Researchers
in various engineering fields visited the class to explain their work. In
order to make women comfortable with manual skills, the syllabus also
included lab projects in electronics, welding, drafting, and building
Heath Kits (a popular brand of do-it-yourself electronics sets). Dres-
selhaus further helped organize meetings entitled “Let’s Talk about
Your Career”; at these gatherings, female students consulted faculty,
staff, and guest lecturers for advice about graduate school, employ-
ment, and the eternal question of combining marriage with work. Ar-
guing that male students’ familiarity with the business world gave them
a competitive advantage, AMITA started an annual seminar, “Getting
the Job You Want in Industry: A Woman’s Guerrilla Guide to the
Pin-Striped World.” By advising coeds on resume writing and inter-
view techniques, alumnae hoped to level the playing field.
Advocates drew heavily on their teamed strength as potential dif-
ficulties loomed. By 1976, budget cuts had prompted the admissions
office to limit targeted mailings and start skimping on other “extras”
needed to draw female applications. While MIT once led efforts to
recruit high school girls talented in math and science, other colleges,
such as Cornell, Caltech, and Purdue, had since launched campaigns
competing for that small pool. AWS undergraduates, faculty, and staff
redoubled efforts to welcome potential coeds. During a spring vacation
telethon in 1978, volunteers called 172 high school women who had
been accepted; two-thirds of those contacted ultimately chose to at-
tend the Institute. The sense that this personal touch made a differ-
ence in raising the “yield” convinced a few undergraduates to under-
take a more intensive project. Noticing that women made up just seven
out of forty-one students accepted from their home state of Michigan,
these coeds sent out hundreds of newsletters seeking to combat the
stubborn “perception among most . . . girls that science and technology
are not appropriate or desirable fields of study or work for them.” At
symposia in Southfield and Kalamazoo, Michigan, MIT professors
and recent graduates encouraged high school women to keep their
educational and career prospects open by staying in math and science
classes.40
By the late 1970s, female students made up 17 percent of MIT
undergraduates, 16 percent of the graduate body, and 12 percent of
engineering majors. The sheer increase in population mattered; as
women became more of a presence on campus, activists gained a

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critical mass for organization. Female graduate students formed their

own society, as did women in architecture, in chemistry, and at Lin-
coln Laboratory—a federally funded research center which was part
of MIT. Such groups kept women’s issues on the front burner,
providing a sense of visibility, an identity, and a cause for many
individuals. These societies proved especially valuable to female fac-
ulty and graduate students based in departments with few other
women.
Advocates had successfully established the principle that women’s
success in the classroom depended on providing both a literal and a
psychological home for them in the midst of a male-oriented, often
hostile landscape. For decades, MIT had used lack of housing as an
excuse to ignore coeds. Only with money from a powerful alumna did
the university finally decide that “girls” really “belonged.” Only with
the construction of McCormick Hall did MIT offer women viable,
visible space in the campus community.

THE SOCIETY OF WOMEN ENGINEERS: THE POWER OF

PHILANTHROPIC SUPPORT
In their battle to secure expansion and improvement of women’s
position at MIT, advocates volunteered their money, time, and effort.
Both their philosophical dedication and the particular strategies they
embraced were echoed at dozens of schools across the nation during
the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Such commitments owed much to the
Society of Women Engineers, which initiated, coordinated, and sup-
ported literally hundreds of undertakings—both small and large, local
and national—to help women pursue an engineering education and
career.
In 1946, about twenty female engineering students at Iowa State
University had organized a local group called the “Society of Women
Engineers” to assist “in orienting new women students in the division.”
That same year, female students at Syracuse and Cornell vented their
frustration at being either excluded from several major engineering
honor societies or else restricted to a “woman’s badge” instead of full
membership. Pi Omicron, the new honorary society they created, soon
had chapters at schools around the country. Members held orientations
for new female engineering majors and hosted speakers such as Lillian
Gilbreth. Its mission was “to encourage and reward scholarship and
accomplishment . . . among the women students of engineering . . .

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[and] to promote the advancement and spread of education in . . .

engineering among women.”41
In 1950, female engineers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and
Washington, D.C., began meeting with each other; in 1952 they offi-
cially incorporated as the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), a pro-
fessional, nonprofit educational service organization. According to an
early statement, SWE was organized around the following objectives:
To inform the public of the availability of qualified women for en-
gineering positions; to foster a favorable attitude in industry toward
women engineers; and to contribute to their professional advance-
ment. To encourage young women with suitable aptitudes and in-
terest to enter the engineering profession, and to guide them in their
educational programs.

In an effort to reach these young women (along with their parents,

teachers, and counselors), one of SWE’s first acts was to set up a
Professional Guidance and Education Committee, which would sup-
ply information on college programs and engineering in general.42
Volunteer efforts at disseminating information reflected one of
SWE’s primary beliefs: that girls often shied away from entering tech-
nical studies simply because they did not realize that women could
and did pursue engineering, or because they lacked a basic understand-
ing of engineering itself. Irene Carswell Peden, associate professor of
electrical engineering at the University of Washington in the 1960s
(its sole female engineering faculty member), wrote,
It is important to think of women engineers as real people doing
real jobs which the student could do, too. . . . A girl is not likely to
choose a career field disapproved by her parents, teachers, classmates,
and friends. All of these people . . . seem to be responding in part
to an erroneous but popular image of the woman engineer as a cold,
. . . aggressive female who trudges through life in her flat-heeled
shoes without a man in sight (away from the job). . . . Many women
engineers are very attractive; most represent a perfectly normal cross
section of femininity. The only way that this image can be brought
into line with reality, of course, is by way of personal contact. Few
women engineers would refuse an opportunity to talk with interested
girls and their parents and teachers. Society of Women Engineers
. . . members are their own best public relations experts.43

In 1954 and 1955, members of the Cleveland section of SWE ap-

peared on local television programs to personally illustrate women’s

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 SUPPORTING FEMALES IN A MALE FIELD

presence in the engineering profession. At a time when many Amer-

icans perceived female engineers as odd, manlike creatures, SWE
members took pains to offer a presentable feminine image, emphasiz-
ing how many of them were married and had children. In 1958, the
Boston SWE put out a pamphlet “for young women who might like
to enter the field of engineering, and for teachers who are helping
them to decide.” It contained biographical sketches of a few “typical”
women engineers and gave readers information about qualifications for
studying engineering and about potential career directions. SWE’s au-
thors concluded, “If this pamphlet shall have inspired one young
woman to consider an engineering career . . . and one parent to ‘en-
courage’ the daughter’s desire to enter the technical field, this pamphlet
will then have been a worthwhile venture.”44
Advocates believed that women engineers could gain greater ac-
ceptance in society simply by making themselves more visible, and thus
SWE soon expanded outreach efforts. In the mid-1950s, college cam-
puses began holding “Junior Engineer and Scientist Summer Institute”
(JESSI) programs, thirteen-day courses to let high school students
explore pure and applied science and also receive educational and ca-
reer guidance. Each year, SWE members volunteered to assist with
JESSI programs and to discuss women’s job opportunities in engi-
neering. For example, at Colorado State University’s JESSI program
in 1961, fifty-three girls listened to a five-woman panel discuss why
they chose an engineering career, supply information on engineering
colleges, and answer audience questions. On other occasions, women
engineers led JESSI students on visits to industry and gave the girls
(and boys) tours of their laboratories.45
In the heady rush of creating a new organization with a crusading
vision, SWE’s leaders dedicated enormous effort to the cause. They
poured personal attention into reaching potential converts; members
of SWE’s professional guidance and education committee wrote to
dozens of high school girls, sending pamphlets and replying to ques-
tions. In 1954, four SWE members had lunch with one William and
Mary first-year woman looking at engineering as a way of using her
talent for math. Elsie Eaves wrote, “Roslyn Gitlin, Althea Thornton
and myself . . . and Betty Mills . . . gave her a pretty well rounded pic-
ture of civil, chemical and mechanical engineering and suggestions of
how she could check with Columbia for planning her liberal arts work
so that she could transfer to engineering if she wishes.”46
By 1957, female engineering students at Drexel, Purdue, the Uni-

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versity of Colorado, CCNY, the University of Missouri, and several

schools in Boston had founded student sections of SWE, and the
parent organization enthusiastically welcomed its new junior counter-
parts. Many established SWE women vividly recalled their sense of
initial isolation; as Carnegie Mellon associate engineering dean Helen
O’Bannon later wrote, “being one of a small group following a path
that appears to violate society’s norms is lonely.” SWE members spoke
passionately about the anxieties and pressure facing a coed who found
herself the sole woman in class. Many wrestled with a lack of self-
confidence and a low self-image, factors worsened by teasing or hos-
tility. Coeds needed a chance “to see by example that women can ‘make
it’ in engineering,” wrote Mildred Dresselhaus in 1975; they needed
to receive advice and reassurance from older mentors. “Visibility of
successful role models often provides the necessary encouragement to
‘keep going when the going gets rough’ or when she begins to ask, ‘Is
it worth it?’ It is important for women students to see in some tangible
way that there are career opportunities ahead of them, and to find out
what it is like to be a professional woman engineer.”47
Older professionals especially sympathized with young women at
schools such as Georgia Tech, where many male classmates, faculty,
and alumni bluntly expressed their disapproval of the fact that the
institution had chosen to admit women at all. In 1958, the Atlanta
section of SWE sent members to participate in Georgia Tech’s start-
of-the-year camp for first-year women.
Usually these coeds are completely unaware of future tasks in in-
dustry, and we feel that the revealing of our experiences and the
impressing on them that they have a great responsibility as women
engineers is a basic necessity. They are also encouraged to consult
with members of SWE should they encounter any difficulties, even
tutoring. One must realize that there are this year approximately
1300 freshmen at Georgia Tech and only 19 freshman coeds. There
will be numerous problems and SWE Atlanta Section is proud to
play an integral part in the quite difficult assimilation of female
engineering students in an almost all male school.48
Through the 1960s, the number of SWE student chapters mul-
tiplied, reaching colleges and universities across the country. Estab-
lished members offered support; for instance, the Los Angeles section
of SWE provided speakers and counselors to student sections at USC,
UCLA, Loyola Marymount, Harvey Mudd, Cal State Long Beach,
Pomona, Fullerton, and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Overall, campus

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 SUPPORTING FEMALES IN A MALE FIELD

SWE groups offered vital intellectual, social, and psychological sup-

port for female engineering majors. Advocates stressed the value of
“critical mass,” having enough coeds for mutual encouragement and a
commitment to “stick together.” Karen Lafferty Instedt, a student at
Ohio State University in 1968–1971, later wrote that SWE gave her
“an opportunity to meet the other female engineers who, like me, were
isolated in their respective fields and classrooms. The SWE section
functioned as a refuge of sorts—where one could find an understand-
ing ear from a peer or a kindhearted, encouraging professor or dean.”49
By the end of the 1970s, student sections had been chartered in over
170 colleges, universities, and technical institutes. SWE held an an-
nual national student conference featuring technical sessions and ex-
hibits, professional workshops, industrial tours, and even sessions on
career planning, power dynamics, management, personal assertiveness
training, and how to “dress for success.”
By the late 1970s, SWE’s overall membership totaled over ten
thousand women and men. As SWE grew, its leaders not only were
able to draw on its own expanding membership resources, but also
mobilized the political clout necessary for drumming up outside sup-
port. In the most obvious manifestation of this kind of philanthropy,
SWE members donated and collected money to help young women
finance their higher education. Starting in 1958, SWE had instituted
the Lillian Moller Gilbreth scholarship for a woman in her junior or
senior year of engineering school. Local chapters in the Southwest, in
Kentucky, and elsewhere soon created their own scholarship funds.
The Pittsburgh section offered awards to women engineering students
who had finished freshman year in a Pennsylvania university or were
Pennsylvania residents. By the end of the 1970s, SWE administered
nineteen annual scholarship competitions worth more than $27,000 in
all. The RCA Company supported SWE scholarships for third- and
fourth-year women enrolled in electrical engineering, while the West-
inghouse Educational Foundation funded Bertha Lamme–Westing-
house Scholarships (named in honor of that company’s pioneering
woman engineer) for first-year women.50
SWE activities at the college, regional, and national levels exploded
during the 1970s, driven by members’ enthusiasm and dedication, by
the feminist movement, by government equal opportunity laws, and
by university public relations needs. One of the most energetic pro-
grams was at Purdue University’s engineering school, which had cre-
ated a special staff position in 1968 to increase its female enrollment

337
AMY SUE BIX

and promote retention. That intensive campaign paid off: Purdue’s

number of women engineering students rose from 46 in 1968 to 280
in 1974, and to more than one thousand in 1979, when the university
boasted the nation’s largest female engineering enrollment. The cam-
pus had one of the country’s most active student SWE chapters.
Among other activities, engineering coeds published their own news-
letter, ran a “big sister” program pairing entering women with upper-
class mentors, offered help in locating summer jobs, and produced an
annual members’ “resume book” for sale to potential employers. Each
weekday, SWE “hostesses” volunteered to talk to prospective engi-
neering students, take them to lunch, or offer a tour of residence
halls.51
The 1970s witnessed the organization of dozens of conferences,
open houses, and other public events in many states to celebrate and
assist women pursuing engineering. Some meetings were organized by
and for women already out in the work world, to give each other
encouragement and suggestions for promotion. For example, a 1974
“Women in Engineering” conference jointly sponsored by SWE, the
Engineering Foundation, and the Engineers’ Council for Professional
Development focused on advising women on how to update their skills
(especially after temporary child-rearing leave) and advance into other
areas, including management. Other conferences were designed for
women still in college. These meetings sought to bring collegiate
women together with each other and with older mentors who might
help undergraduates succeed in their studies and prepare to enter the
professional world. For instance, the University of Washington (with
230 women engineering students in 1975, and 445 in 1977) hosted
an annual conference where those coeds met with working profes-
sionals such as Bonnie Dunbar, a Rockwell ceramics engineer. The
SWE section at the University of North Dakota sponsored a 1979
conference entitled “Transitions: College to Careers,” which brought
in corporate representatives (many of them alumni) to talk about how
to project a professional image, how to have a successful interview,
how to handle postcollege finances, how to set career goals, and how
to balance work and marriage. Speakers offered practical advice; for
example, they suggested that women make an effort to communicate
with their bosses, making a point to describe their career goals and
suggest a schedule for accomplishing them.52
Other conferences were organized by women engineering students
themselves as a way of encouraging the potential interest of younger

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girls. SWE assumed that, in general, girls and boys possessed a similar
ability to excel in math and science, and that girls could be as inter-
ested as boys in technology. Activists blamed girls’ relative lack of
interest in engineering on socialization patterns that provided girls
with dolls and boys with toy tools, that directed girls to home eco-
nomics classes and boys to “shop.” SWE further attributed girls’ un-
derrepresentation in engineering to failures of the school system, and
especially to guidance counselors who didn’t take girls’ career ambi-
tions seriously and who let them drop math and science classes. To
counter such problems, the University of Iowa hosted a 1974 meeting
entitled “Women in Engineering: Why Not You?” A brochure dis-
tributed to high schoolers read,
Right now you’re probably going through the list of things you do
and don’t want to do with your life. College, teaching, the Peace
Corps, marriage, or just getting a job are a few of the things you
may have considered. Well, if you’re looking into a career, we’d like
you to think of one more possibility—engineering. While engineer-
ing has always been thought of as a man’s profession, it is no more
masculine than cooking is feminine. All you need to be a good
engineer is an interest in math and science, and the desire to plan
and solve problems. In fact, most engineering students are a lot like
you.
At the Iowa conference, current and former coeds spoke about “stu-
dent life: trials and tribulations, joys and expectations,” while industry
representatives and educators discussed course options and career op-
portunities.53
Similar events occurred across the country, with the aims of fa-
miliarizing young women with engineering, talking up employment
opportunities, showing the most exciting sides of technical work, and
allowing girls to meet role models. In 1976, the New Jersey Institute
of Technology hosted an all-day program for three hundred young
women; organizers had received more than six hundred attendance
requests, far beyond their capacity. Faculty member Marion Spector
said, “Typically women just let things happen, they float along with
the current, not making any effort to set career goals. What we are
trying to do is to give them an introduction to personal direction and
to introduce alternatives while they are young enough to make strong
changes.”54 A 1973 University of Illinois conference, “Women in En-
gineering: It’s Your Turn Now,” gave high school junior and senior
girls a chance to participate in “rap sessions”—informal conversations

339
AMY SUE BIX

with college SWE members and older women engineers. A 1974 sym-
posium sponsored by SWE sections at the Universities of Florida and
South Florida featured a tour of the Kennedy Space Center, plus dis-
cussions of student financial aid, co-op programs, career problems and
openings, and men’s reactions to women engineers. The promotional
material declared,
As an engineering student you’ll gain something most women don’t
get in college, a professional skill which can be used immediately
upon graduation . . . , [with] the highest starting salary bracket of
the major professional job categories for women holding a bachelor’s
degree. . . . You owe it to yourself to look into the possibilities and
opportunities offered by engineering.55

Other SWE chapters went directly into the high schools as self-
described “missionaries” seeking to spread the gospel of technical
study. Starting in 1976, Berkeley’s SWE section sent teams of three
or four students and engineers to visit local junior high classes; in
1980, members gave presentations to about one thousand students in
ten Bay Area schools. Presenters described how they became interested
in engineering and sought “to dispel myths about women in engi-
neering . . . and give special encouragement to girls who are interested
in math and science.” One mechanical engineering major prepared
posters showing how an engineer might design a pair of skis, another
team brought slides showing construction of a hydropower plant. An
organizer commented,
We discovered that women engineering students can be excellent
role-models for girls in grades 7–12. A practicing engineer or sci-
entist may be inspiring, but her achievement may seem unattainable
to students who have not even started college. Junior high students,
in particular, are more willing to take advice from those closer to
their own age. “I was happy to find out that there are women en-
gineers!” said one enthusiastic student. . . . “It showed me another
kind of work I might be interested in.”56

Berkeley section noted that running this community outreach program

benefited SWE members themselves: it gave them experience in public
speaking, led to useful professional contacts, and provided favorable
publicity. Berkeley members even compiled a handbook for other
SWE chapters that contained advice on how to start a similar outreach
program. Taking outreach even further in the 1980s, SWE’s San Fran-
cisco section hosted a program entitled “Tinker . . . Toys . . . Technol-

340
 SUPPORTING FEMALES IN A MALE FIELD

ogy,” in which seventy-one teenage Girl Scouts spent two weeks learn-
ing computer programming, running physics experiments, touring
Silicon Valley companies, and talking with women engineers and as-
tronauts.57
Other SWE members hoped to influence even younger girls, those
still in elementary school. In the 1970s, the Boston section sought to
“infuse a seven- or eight-year-old” with enthusiasm and curiosity about
how things worked. It wrote and published a coloring book entitled
Terry’s Trip, the story of a girl visiting her aunt, a mechanical engineer
who worked in a toy factory. The heroine, Terry, talked to industrial
engineers supervising the production line, chemical engineers mixing
polystyrene, electrical engineers with fancy calculators, and then an-
nounced, “Maybe some day I’ll be an engineer like Aunt Jennifer and
her friends at the factory.”58 The North Carolina section of SWE
prepared a 1983 booklet called Betsy and Robbie, which told of a girl
who visited her cousin at a university engineering fair and became
fascinated with Robbie, a computer-controlled robot designed by a
female student.59 Such material emphasized that women were fully
qualified for engineering, a discipline that required creativity and logic
more than physical strength. Illustrations and photos documented the
daily activities of women who worked in safety engineering for Gen-
eral Motors, as government environmental engineers, or as university
professors. By making such role models visible and attractive, SWE
strove to win young women’s interest and public confidence.

Some SWE experts admitted that in the end it was virtually im-
possible to find a direct causal correlation between advocacy efforts
and changing patterns of women’s engineering education. Taken in
isolation, a child’s coloring book, a conference for high school girls,
or even a new dormitory seemed to do little to affect such momentous
decisions as where to attend college, what major to choose, or which
career to follow. Yet as a whole, the multidimensional actions under-
taken after 1950 by the national Society of Women Engineers, local
chapters, student sections, and individual women add up to a sub-
stantial force. It was Katherine McCormick’s funding that made it
physically possible for MIT to expand female enrollment, paving the
way for advocates who pushed for broader changes in campus intel-
lectual and social culture. Donations by other women established
scholarships and awards for female technical students, giving them
vital financial assistance and recognition. Philanthropy in a broader

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sense—contributions of time and service—played an equally crucial

role. Pioneering female engineers poured immense effort into nurtur-
ing their successors, offering advice and encouragement. SWE set up
a social and professional bridge between generations that was rich with
meaning both for those giving and for those receiving support. College
women benefited from the guidance of older members even as they
themselves volunteered as outreach ambassadors to younger girls. Such
philanthropy helped transform educational trends: by 1980, the num-
ber of female engineering students had skyrocketed. Today, high
school girls take for granted that they have a right to study engineering
if their interests lie in that direction. Philanthropists of the postwar
decades have achieved their vision, creating a space for women in the
traditionally masculine world of engineering education.

NOTES
1. For a discussion of women’s use of “creative” and “coercive philanthropy” to
pressure institutions to accept women graduate students and appoint women faculty,
see Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 39; and Mary Ann Dzu-
back’s chapter in this volume. For information on the AAUW, see Marion Talbot
and Lois Kimball Mathews Rosenberry, The History of the American Association of
University Women, 1881–1931 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931).
2. For background, see Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before
Affirmative Action, 1940–1972 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1995); idem, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies; Marilyn Bailey Ogil-
vie, Women in Science: Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century: A Biographical
Dictionary with Annotated Bibliography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986); and
Amy Bix, “ ‘Engineeresses’ Invade Campus: Four Decades of Debate over Technical
Coeducation,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 19 (spring 2000): 20–26.
3. Mrs. Frederick T. Lord to Karl Compton, 11 January 1938; Louise P. Hor-
wood to Mrs. Lord, 5 January 1938; both in file 12, box 240, AC 4, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Archives, Cambridge, Mass. (hereafter cited as MITA). For
background, see Amy Bix, “Feminism Where Men Predominate: The History of
Women’s Science and Engineering Education at MIT,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 28
(spring/summer 2000): 24–45.
4. “Glamor Girl MIT,” The Tech, 8 October 1940, 1.
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Handbook, 1941, MIT.
6. Report of the President, MIT, 1944; Florence Ward Stiles to Compton, 3 Feb-
ruary 1945; memo from Stiles, 22 February 1945; all three in file 18, box 210, AC4,
MITA.
7. Memo from L. F. Hamilton to Julius A. Stratton, 24 October 1956; memo
from Stratton, “A Statement of Policy on Women Students,” 24 January 1957; Roland

342
 SUPPORTING FEMALES IN A MALE FIELD

B. Greeley to Devrie Shapiro, 4 October 1961; all three in “Women Students,” box
116, AC134, MITA.
8. Memo from Everett Baker, 26 January 1947, file 12, box 26, AC4, MITA.
9. Stiles to Carroll Webber, Jr., 28 March 1946, file 2, box 2, AC220, MITA.
10. Emily L. Wick, “Proposal for a New Policy for Admission of Women Un-
dergraduate Students at MIT,” 9 March 1970, box 9, MC86, MITA.
11. Christina Jansen, interview by Shirlee Shirkow, 1977, box 9, MC86,
MITA.
12. Stratton, “A Statement of Policy on Women Students,” 24 January 1957,
“Women Students,” box 116, AC134, MITA.
13. Greeley to Shapiro, 4 October 1961, “Women Students,” box 116, AC134,
MITA.
14. Hamilton to Stratton, 14 November 1956, box 2, AC220, MITA.
15. Margaret Alvort to Hamilton, 21 June 1956, box 2, AC220, MITA.
16. Herbert I. Harris to Hamilton, 31 July 1956, quoted in Evelyn Fox Keller,
“New Faces in Science and Technology: A Study of Women Students at MIT,” August
1981, file “MIT-women,” box 17, AC220, MITA.
17. Memo from J. R. Killian, Jr., to Stratton, 22 October 1956, file 7, box 1,
AC4, MITA.
18. Press release, 12 April 1960, MITA; see also press release, “Residence for
Women Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” n.d. (ca. 1963); and
“A Tribute to Katharine Dexter McCormick,” 1 March 1908; all three in file “women
students,” box 116, AC134, MITA.
19. “Where the Brains Are,” Time, 18 October 1963, 51.
20. Joan Hawkes, “Looking Ahead to College and Careers,” Seventeen, October
1964, 44, 46.
21. Katharine McCormick to Stratton, 15 January 1965, file 2, box 4, AC220,
MITA.
22. This Is MIT, 1963–64, file 2, box 4, AC220, MITA.
23. Memo from Jacquelyn A. Mattfeld to Malcolm G. Kispert et al., 21 January
1964, file 2, box 4, AC220, MITA.
24. Memo from Mattfeld, “Information on Women’s Program, MIT, 1964–65,”
1 July 1965, file 2, box 4, AC220, MITA.
25. Academic council, minutes of 2 March 1965, box 1, AC134, MITA.
26. Notes of Mattfeld, in “Academic Council 6/64–6/65,” box 1, AC134, MITA.
27. Association of Women Students, This Is MIT for Women, 1963–64, file 16,
box 85, AC118, MITA.
28. “Female Scientist Image Blasted,” Michigan State News, 4 November 1964;
Marilyn S. Swartz to Joann Miller et al., 8 August 1972; both in file 1, box 57, AC12,
MITA. See also Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 366–
68.
29. Ad Hoc Committee on the Role of Women at MIT, report, n.d. (ca. 1972),
box 13, MC485, MITA.
30. Association of Women Students, This Is MIT for Women, 1969–70, file 16,
box 85, AC118, MITA.
31. Mildred Dresselhaus, interview by Shirlee Shirkow, 1976, box 8, MC86,
MITA.

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AMY SUE BIX

32. Ad Hoc Committee on the Role of Women at MIT, report, n.d. (ca. 1972),
box 13, MC485, MITA.
33. Association of Women Students, flyer, November 1974, file 14, box 1,
AC220, MITA.
34. Emily Wick to Paul Gray, 16 November 1971, “MIT,” box 13, MC485,
MITA.
35. Ad Hoc Committee on the Role of Women at MIT to J. Daniel Nyhart, 28
February 1972, “MIT,” box 13, MC485, MITA.
36. Sheila Widnall, interview by Shirlee Shirkow, 1976, box 8, MC86, MITA.
37. Walter McKay to Greeley, 4 May 1972; “Women in Engineering,” film draft
proposal, 27 June 1974; both in “Films—Women in Engineering,” box 57, AC12,
MITA.
38. Swartz to Miller et al., 8 August 1972; Women in Science and Technology: A
Report on the Workshop on Women in Science and Technology, 2–4, file “1973 workshop”;
both in box 57, AC112, MITA.
39. Association of MIT Alumnae, report, n.d. (ca. 1973), file 12, box 1, AC220,
MITA.
40. Holliday Heine to James Mar, 14 November 1979, “Ad Hoc Committee on
Women’s Admission,” box 13, MC485, MITA.
41. “New Society Organizes,” Iowa Engineer, May 1946, 222.
42. Pamphlet, “Facts about the Society of Women Engineers,” n.d. (ca. 1980),
“Student Affairs,” box 86, Society of Women Engineers Collection, Wayne State
University Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Detroit, Michigan (hereafter cited as
SWEC).
43. Irene Carswell Peden, “Women in Engineering Careers,” 1965 SWE booklet,
in “Women in Engineering,” box “SWE bio/subj.,” SWEC; and “Career Opportu-
nities for Women in Engineering: Engineering Can Be Your Future,” in “Career
Guidance 1958,” box 118, SWEC. See also Joy Miller, “Women Engineers: They’re
Feminine and So Bright,” Perth Amboy (N.J.) News, 30 July 1964, unpaginated clip-
ping, MITA.
44. Pamphlet, 1958, in “Women in Engineering,” box “SWE bio/subj.,” SWEC.
45. Alta Rutherford, “Women Engineers in Redlands Spotlight,” Detroit News,
19 April 1954; “JESSI Panels Hailed a Success,” SWE Newsletter, November 1961,
2; and “JESSI Program,” SWE Newsletter, November 1965, 5.
46. Elsie Eaves to Rose Mankofsky, 22 April 1954, “Misc. Corr. Eaves, 1942,
1946, 1951–57,” box 187, SWEC.
47. Helen O’Bannon, “The Social Scene: Isolation and Frustration”; Mildred S.
Dresselhaus, “A Constructive Approach to the Education of Women Engineers”; both
in “Women in Engineering—Beyond Recruitment Conference Proceedings, June 22–
25, 1975,” box 128, SWEC. See also Mildred S. Dresselhaus, “Some Personal Views
on Engineering Education for Women,” IEEE Transactions on Education 18 (February
1975), 30–34.
48. “Orientation Program for Georgia Tech Coeds Initiated by Atlanta Section,”
SWE Newsletter, March 1962, 4.
49. Karen Lafferty Instedt, “How Should SWE Serve Undergraduates?” SWE
Newsletter, June/July 1978.
50. Starting in the 1960s, SWE also presented financial prizes and certificates of

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merit to high school girls who had demonstrated excellence in math or science or
who had presented outstanding technical exhibits at local or national science fairs. As
a separate example of women’s engineering philanthropy, it is worth noting that Zonta
International, a service organization of executive and professional women, in 1938
began awarding annual Amelia Earhart Fellowships to women for graduate study in
aeronautical engineering or aerospace science (SWE Newsletter, March 1978).
51. Purdue flyer, n.d. (ca. 1970s), “Student Activities 1974–75,” box 70, SWEC;
and “Progress Report: Women in Engineering at Purdue Univ.,” n.d. (ca. 1978),
“Women Engineering Students,” box “SWE bio/subj.,” SWEC. Many other univer-
sities established programs with similar elements; for example, SWE chapters at Ohio
State and Lehigh ran “big and little sisters” programs during the 1970s.
52. Press release, 29 May 1974, “Henniker IV,” box 129, SWEC; and booklet
“Women in Engineering: Role Models from Henniker 3,” “Role Models,” box 119,
SWEC.
53. “Women in Engineering: Why Not You?” n.d. (ca. 1974), “Iowa, Univ. of,”
box 139, SWEC.
54. New Jersey Institute of Technology press release, n.d. (ca. April 1976), “New-
ark College of Engineering,” box 140, SWEC.
55. “A Symposium on the Opportunities for Today’s Woman,” n.d. (ca. 1974),
“Florida,” box 138, SWEC.
56. SWE student section, University of California at Berkeley, Junior High School
Outreach: A Practical Guide, 1980, “Junior High School Outreach 1980,” box 118,
SWEC.
57. “Tinker . . . Toys . . . Technology,” brochure, n.d. (ca. fall 1982), “A-V mate-
rial,” box 133, SWEC. See also Deborah S. Franzblau, “Have You Considered Out-
reach?” U.S. Woman Engineer, December 1980, 15. To note two similar examples
among many, the SWE section of the Lawrence Institute of Technology made pres-
entations to Detroit girls, while the University of Michigan’s SWE worked with the
Ann Arbor school system’s career planning office to give talks at elementary schools
and at junior and senior high schools.
58. Terry’s Trip, n.d. (ca. 1979), “Terry’s Trip,” box 131, SWEC. See also Sarah
Sloan, “Terry’s Trip,” SWE Newsletter, November/December 1979.
59. Betsy and Robbie, n.d. (ca. 1983), “Betsy and Robbie,” box 119, SWEC.

345
CONTRIBUTORS

Marybeth Gasman is Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the Uni-

versity of Pennsylvania and co-author (with Patrick Gilpin) of Charles
S. Johnson: Leadership beyond the Veil in the Era of Jim Crow.

Frances Huehls is Assistant Librarian of the Joseph and Matthew Payton

Philanthropic Studies Library at Indiana University–Purdue University
Indianapolis.

Linda L. Johnson is Professor and Chair of History at Concordia College,

Moorhead, Minnesota. Her research on cross-cultural women’s history
includes articles in Women’s Studies Quarterly and Women’s Studies In-
ternational Forum.

Sarah Henry Lederman teaches history at the Dalton School in New York
City.

Eleanore Lenington is a doctoral candidate at Florida State University and

co-author (with Victoria-Marı́a MacDonald) of a public history proj-
ect, A History of Kate Sullivan Elementary School, 1948–1998: Access
and Achievement in the Last Half of the Twentieth Century.

Victoria-Marı́a MacDonald is Associate Professor of History and Philosophy

of Education at Florida State University. Most recently, she has edited
Latino Education in U.S. History, 1513–2000.

Amy E. Wells is Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the University

of New Orleans. Her work has appeared in the History of Higher
Education Annual.

Roberta Wollons is Professor of History at Indiana University–Northwest

and editor of Children at Risk in America: History, Concepts, and Public
Policy and Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea.

Christine Woyshner is Assistant Professor of Education at Temple Univer-

sity and co-editor (with Holly S. Gelfond) of Minding Women: Re-
shaping the Educational Realm. Her work has appeared in Teachers Col-
lege Record and History of Education Quarterly.

348
 CONTRIBUTORS

Andrea Walton is Assistant Professor of Education at Indiana University,

Bloomington, where she teaches in the Higher Education and Foun-
dations of Education programs and is also a member of the Philan-
thropic Studies faculty. She has published articles on women’s philan-
thropy, women’s higher education, and the history of universities and
voluntary associations in such venues as History of Education, Historical
Studies in Education, and History of Education Quarterly. She is cur-
rently completing a book on the history of women at Columbia Uni-
versity from the founding of Barnard College in 1889 to the admission
of women to Columbia College in 1983.

349
 CONTRIBUTORS

Jayne R. Beilke is Associate Professor of Educational Studies at Ball State

University. Her publications have focused on philanthropy and black
education and include articles in the History of Higher Education An-
nual and the Journal of Negro Education.

Amy Sue Bix is Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University

and author of Inventing Ourselves out of Jobs? America’s Debate over
Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981.

Karen J. Blair is Professor and Chair of History at Central Washington

University. She is author of The Torchbearers: Women and Their Ama-
teur Arts Associations in America, 1890–1930 and The Clubwoman as
Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914, as well as a reference
book and several articles on women in the Pacific Northwest.

Ruth Crocker is Professor of History at Auburn University and author of

Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Indus-
trial Cities, 1889–1930 and Mrs. Russell Sage: A Life (forthcoming).

Mary Ann Dzuback is Associate Professor of Education and History at

Washington University in St. Louis and a past president of the History
of Education Society. She is author of Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of
an Educator as well as articles on women scholars in social sciences.

Linda Eisenmann is Associate Professor of Education at the University of

Massachusetts and currently Vice President of Division F (History and
Historiography) of the American Educational Research Association
and Vice-President of the History of Education Society. She will be-
come Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at John Carroll Uni-
versity in 2005. She is editor of A Historical Dictionary of Women’s
Education in the United States.

347
 INDEX

academies, 15, 39, 45, 81. See also schools; American Women’s Scholarship for Japanese
seminaries Women, 21, 298–319
Addams, Jane, 3, 8, 11, 71, 74 Anderson, Florence, 19, 155, 159
African American education: black colleges Anglo-Saxon ethos, 91, 92, 95–96
and their graduates, 194–236, 281–297; Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA),
foundation support of, 13, 281–297; 106, 109, 151, 161, 258, 320. See also
ideal of race uplift, 196, 229; ideal of American Association of University
service, 19, 194–236; in the South, 81; Women (AAUW)
women’s involvement in, 194–214, 215–
236
African American women: and civil rights Bailyn, Bernard, 15, 16
activism, 195; club movement, 215–236; Baltimore Charity Organization Society, 66,
and gender discrimination, 194, 293, 67, 68
294; parent-teacher associations, 215– Beard, Mary Ritter, 126, 219, 222
236; as philanthropists, 194–214; in the Beecher, Catharine, 6, 39–59; conceptualiza-
professions, 194, 285; scholarship on, tion of ties between philanthropy and
292; sororities, 194–214 education, 54; definition of benevo-
African Americans: and desegregation, 19, lence, 49; view of charity, 51; view of
206; fellowships for, 281–297; net- teaching as philanthropic activity, 50
works, 228; as philanthropists, 225; in benevolence: and charity, 2, 41; definition of,
the professions, 201, 205; racial dis- 34, 40, 49; in nineteenth-century
crimination, 194, 291; as recipients of America, 6, 7, 41; and Protestant the-
philanthropy, 201, 281–297; and self- ology, 41, 172, 180, 182, 188; and so-
help, 194–211 cial control, 13; and teaching, 50; and
agricultural education, 86 voluntary societies and associations, 6,
Alpha Kappa Alpha, 197–205 40, 41
American Association of University Women bequests, 142
(AAUW), 106, 109–111, 151, 320 Berkeley, University of California, 110, 111–
American Board of Commissioners for For- 115
eign Missions (ABCFM), 169–193 Berry, Martha McChesney, 17, 81–104
American Council on Education (ACE), Berry College, 85, 99
Commission on the Education of Berry schools, 64, 84–86; connections to re-
Women, 151 gional pride, 86
American exceptionalism, 181 biography, as a lens, 128
American Missionary Association, 81, 282 Bremner, Robert, 9, 12. See also American
American Philanthropy, 7, 12. See also Brem- Philanthropy
ner, Robert Brown v. Board, 23, 203, 282, 295

351
INDEX

Bryn Mawr College, 21, 109, 117, 271, 304, donations: as the giving of “time, talent, and
310 treasure,” 12; small but significant, 4; of
Bunting, Mary, 150, 159, 328 time, 82, 219. See also volunteerism
donor motivation, 13, 263. See also specific
Calvinist tenets, 17, 40, 54; and conversion, names of donors
43, 47, 51 donor networks, 89, 93
Carnegie, Andrew, 3, 90, 91 donor-recipient relationship, 13, 17, 109, 136–
Carnegie Corporation, 148, 151, 153–159 139, 261
caseworkers: education for, 60–80; relation- Du Bois, W. E. B., 198
ship to aid recipient, 66
Catholic nuns, 2 education: access to, 23; administration, 230;
charities, voluntarism in, 6 and agency, 9; and cultural pride, 86;
Charities, 69, 70 decentralized government educational
charity, defined, 1, 52, 56 policy, 15, 23; definition of, 14, 16; and
Charity Organization Movement, 60, 64–68; elites, 45; endowments for, 10; as im-
“retail” versus “wholesale method of re- position, 13; narrowing of term, 3–4,
form,” 69, 70–71. See also Baltimore 14; public responsibility for, 11, 224;
Charity Organization Society; Russell and reform, 1, 7, 22; and religion, 1, 8,
Sage Foundation, Charity Department 40, 42; as targeted beneficiary of phi-
of lanthropy, 22. See also educational insti-
Charity Organization Society, 2, 17, 60 tutions
civil rights movement, 9, 15, 295 educational institutions, 1–2
Civil War, 81, 148–166 educational opportunity, 42, 281
Clifford, Geraldine Joncich, 15, 23 educational philanthropy: absence of women
clubwomen, 7, 216–217, 219 in scholarly literature on, 2, 8–14, 23;
Cold War era, 12, 148–166, 325 to build institutions, 272; as cultural
colonial era, 5 phenomenon, 5; and elitism, 197, 207–
colleges and universities: all-female, 169, 259, 209; endowments, 298; to fund re-
271; alumnae networks, 194–214; search, 2, 105–126, 127–146; funding
alumnae philanthropic contributions, decisions, 139–140; historiography of,
149, 161, 322; and coeducation, 257, 9, 81; as legacy building, 20; limitations
322–345; foundation support of, 127– of current scholarship on, 4, 8; to
168; male-dominated, 320–346; as re- maintain exclusionary gender or racial
cipients of philanthropy, 22. See also status quo, 6; to promote access, 2,
individual institutions 105, 259, 320–345; to promote new
Columbia University, 18, 60, 117, 131, 134, ideas, 23; to promote social reform, 105;
260, 286, 291, 292 variety of, 1–2, 5
continuing education, 148–166 Elements of Mental and Moral Philosophy
Cornell University, 268–269 Founded upon Experience, Reason, and
creative financing, 18, 105, 122n1 the Bible, 48, 52, 53
Cremin, Lawrence A., 15, 16 Embree, Edwin Roger, 285
cultural imperialism, 169, 179 “entering wedge,” 258
Curti, Merle, 9, 11–12 “epic saga,” 84
evangelicalism, 19, 169–170
Day, Edmund E., 131, 134
de Forest, Henry, 262, 270 “family claim,” 6
de Forest, Robert, 69, 70, 73, 259, 263, 264, fellowships, 106, 107, 109, 281–297
265, 267 Fisk University, 282, 285, 286
Delta Sigma Theta, 195, 198–205 Flexner, Abraham, 72, 75, 132
Devine, Edward, 60 Ford, Henry, 96–99
doctorates, for women, 149, 281. See also Ford Foundation, 151
women, access to education foundations: activities of, 3, 12–13; and Afri-

352
 INDEX

can American education, 281–297; cov- Jeanes Foundation (Negro Rural School
erage in historical literature, 10, 13, 61; Fund), 110, 226
female personnel, 13, 19, 60–80, 127– Jewish women, 2, 108
147, 155, 159; history of, 61, 127; lack Jim Crow era, 21
of interest in women’s issues, 151; limi- Johnson, Charles S., 285, 287
tations of influence, 76; and the pro-
motion of ideas, 75; relationship to Kellogg Foundation, 151
grant recipients, 128–129, 155–156;
support of women’s education, 141, 148– Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, 9, 13, 14, 15
166; support of women’s research, 108, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial
119–122 (LSRM), 18, 107, 127, 163
Frazier, Franklin E., 207–208, 287 liberal education, 43
“friendly visitors,” 2 literacy, 39
funding decisions, 139–140; regarding re- Literature of Philanthropy, 1, 9, 24
search, 105–147; in support of men’s Lyon, Mary, 6, 171, 180
education, 107, 272
fundraising: appeals to elites, 42, 64; begging McCarthy, Kathleen D., 3, 6, 14
letters and trips, 69–71; networks, 19, McCormick, Katharine Dexter, 21, 325
42, 91 McCormick, Nettie, 267
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 322–
345
Gardner, John, 4, 155, 165n33 matching grants, 128
Garrett, Mary, 105, 258 Mellon Foundation, 151
Goodale, Frances Abigail, 1, 7–8, 23, 24. See Miss Tsuda’s School for Girls, 298
also Literature of Philanthropy missionary work, 19, 169–193; as bicultural,
gender: discrimination, 291; equity, 148–168; 184; as cultural imperialism, 167, 179;
social construction of, 5 and Mt. Holyoke model of education,
General Education Board, 90, 92, 110, 141, 155, 170, 171
284, 290 moral education, 47
gifts, importance of small but timely support, moral philosophy, 39, 48–54. See also Bee-
4, 10, 60 cher, Catharine; Elements of Mental and
Ginzberg, Lori, 3, 14 Moral Philosophy Founded upon Experi-
Grimké, Angelina, 46, 53, 54 ence, Reason, and the Bible
Mt. Holyoke College, 19, 117, 154, 155,
171, 172, 174, 176, 178; in Bilitis,
Hall, Peter Dobkin, 11
179
Hartford Female Seminary, 39–59
municipal housekeeping, 216, 217, 221, 224
Height, Dorothy, 206
museums, as educational institutions, 237–
Heller, Clara Hellman, 111–115
253
Hine, Darlene Clark, 3, 14, 196, 205, 225
Historically Black Colleges and Universities
(HBCUs), 203 National Association for the Advancement of
history of education, as a field of study, 11 Colored People (NAACP), 194
Howard University, 197 National Association of Colored Women
humanitarianism, 8, 41 (NACW), 206
Hull House, 258 National Association of Women Deans and
Counselors (NAWDC), 151
National Conference of Charities and Cor-
industrial education, 1, 17, 18, 86–88, 94, rections, 60, 65, 71
95, 266. See also vocational education National Congress of Colored Parents and
institutions of education, 1, 4 Teachers, 216, 226, 227
institution-builders, 23, 169 National Congress of Mothers. See parent-
institution-building, 6, 17, 127, 143, 239 teacher associations

353
INDEX

National Education Association (NEA), 295; oriented, 105–126. See also educational
Department of National Women’s As- philanthropy; philanthropic studies
sociation, 216, 222–224; Elizabeth Philanthropic Foundations and Higher Educa-
Koontz (first African American presi- tion, 10
dent of), 206 Philanthropy and the Shaping of American
National Museum of Women in the Arts Higher Education, 12
(NMWA), 238, 239, 240–243 Philanthropy in the History of American Higher
New England Quilt Museum (NEQM), 239, Education, 10
243 program officers. See Anderson, Florence;
“new women’s history,” 15 foundations, female personnel; Walker,
nineteenth-century women’s rights move- Sydnor Harbison
ment, 20 Progressive Era, 20, 81, 165, 173, 230; arts
normal schools, 15, 90 in, 240, 244–251
“public good,” 14
Odum, Harold, 135
racial uplift, 21
Ogden, Robert, 90, 267
racism, 194, 291
Radcliffe College, 148, 150, 160, 264
parent-teacher associations (PTAs, formerly Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Co-
National Congress of Mothers), 2, 9, lumbia University, 13
20, 23, 215–236 Raushenbach, Esther, 156–157, 159
patronage, 3, 18, 107 Reconstruction, 82, 225
Payton, Robert, 14 reform movements. See specific movements
Peixotto, Jessica, 111–115 religious revivals, 42, 47, 170
Perkins, Linda, 292 Research on Social Trends, 133
philanthropic studies, 13 “retail” versus “wholesale method of reform,”
philanthropoid, 285 69, 70–71
philanthropy: absence of women in literature Richmond, Mary E., 17, 22, 60–80; figure
on, 2, 4, 8, 23; and class loyalties, 20; absent in literature on philanthropy, 61;
as a collaborative enterprise, 239; con- power to shape ideas in social work ed-
nections to education, 1, 7, 11, 21–22; ucation, 62, 76, 110; on retail method
as a cultural phenomenon, 5; and de- of reform, 69–71
centralized government, 21; definition Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 3, 91, 110
of, 9, 14, 321; emphasis on largesse in Rockefeller Archive Center, 13
scholarly literature on, 3; as exchange, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, 158
105, 149; by families, 107, 110; as a Rockefeller Foundation, 18, 127, 151, 153
field of research, 11; as a form of elite Rosenwald fellowships, 286 (Table 12.1), 296
power, 3; and government action, 2; Rosenwald Fund, 110, 284, 285, 286, 289,
historiography of, 2, 9–14; history of, 1– 291
15; to honor family legacy, 20, 269; lo- Rossiter, Margaret, 15, 121n1, 128, 156,
cal, 2, 22, 175, 215, 216, 218, 221, 258, 320
222, 231; narrowing of definition, 1, 3, Ruml, Beardsley, 129, 130, 131
8, 9; nineteenth-century, 1–2, 7; phil- Russell Sage Foundation, 12, 17, 60, 61, 62,
anthropic traditions, 2; and prestige, 70, 72, 74, 75, 105, 110, 151; Charity
263; relationship between donor and Department of, 17, 70–80
recipient, 17; religious roots of, 2, 169– Ruth Lilly Special Collections and Archives,
192; scientific, 60–80; as social control, 13
13, 225; social reform and, 6, 68–70,
170, 225; and social welfare, 132–133, Sage, Olivia Slocum (Mrs. Russell Sage), 22,
136; in the South, 81; twentieth- 70, 105, 257–280
century, 9; variety of, 2, 24; women Sarah Lawrence College, 148, 157, 160
helping women, 105, 162; women- scholarships: for out-of-state tuition (black

354
 INDEX

education), 283; for women, 266–267, Texas Bureau of Research in the Social Sci-
298–319 ences, 135
schools, 5, 15; administration, 15, 23, 216, Thomas, M. Carey, 105, 305, 307, 309, 314
223; gender-segregated, 85, 92, 312– Training School in Applied Philanthropy, 60
316; philanthropic support of, 215–235; Tsume Ume, 21, 298–319
racially segregated, 19, 215, 218, 220; Tuskegee Institute, 81, 92–95; donors to, 94,
in the South, 17 267
Sears, Jesse Brundage, 10. See also Philan- twentieth-century feminist movement, 20,
thropy in the History of American Higher 198, 237
Education
Second Great Awakening, 170 United Negro College Fund (UNCF), 202–
seminaries, 2, 17, 39–59 203
separatism, 6 universities: coverage in scholarly literature,
service, as an ideal, 65, 76, 172, 195, 197 10; as recipients of philanthropy, 4; in
settlement house workers, 3, 60, 71 the South, 81
sexism, 194 university builders, 15
Sigma Gamma Rho, 198 University of Chicago, 135, 257, 268, 271,
Sklar, Kathryn Kish, 3, 14, 261 289, 328, 119–122
Slowe, Lucy Diggs, 202 University of Michigan, 149, 160–163
Smith College, 110, 115, 174, 271 University of Minnesota, 148, 154–155, 157,
Social Diagnosis, 72, 73 160
social science research, 18, 106; Rockefeller University of North Carolina, 135, 137
funding of, 108
Social Science Research Council, 106 Vassar College, 18, 109, 129, 142, 264, 271
social work, 11; casework mode, 60–80; edu- vocational education, 2, 18, 200, 219, 272
cation for, 60–89; foundation involve- voluntary association, 3
ment in, 60–80; professionalizing influ- volunteerism, 1, 321
ences in, 62, 67, 73, 132, 133
Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Walker, Sydnor Harbison, 18, 24, 81; rela-
Small Children, 5, 42 tionship to grant recipients, 136–139
Society of Women Engineers (SWE), 21, Washington, Booker T., 18, 81, 92–95, 200,
321, 333–342 267, 284
socioeconomic classes, 6, 42, 207; education wealth, 4, 10, 22; emphasis on in scholarship
and, 42, 45, 86, 87 on philanthropy, 22; and women, 3, 4,
sororities, African American (black), 15, 19, 5
194–215; lifelong commitment, 196; widows’ pensions, 71–72
motivation for joining, 199; support for Womanpower, 153
equal rights, 204 women: abolitionism and, 7; academics, 107,
Southern Education Board (SEB), 90 108; access to education, 11, 23, 39,
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 20, 258–259 105, 149, 281, 320–345; access to
stewardship, 259 wealth, 3, 5; age discrimination, 293;
suffrage, 23, 55, 196, 199, 239 belief in inherent morality of, 5, 6, 42,
Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Educa- 217; benevolence of, 5–6; cultural phi-
tion, 44 lanthropy and, 2–3; domesticity and,
Sunday schools, 41, 85 41, 149; as donors, 10, 237, 253, 259,
Syracuse University, 262 263; education of, 6, 16; elites, 84, 207;
exclusion from educational institutions,
6; fellowships for, 158; in labor force,
teaching: as philanthropy, 17, 34, 40, 50, 62; 150; as leaders in education, 1, 5, 206;
training for, 19, 202; as women’s do- as leaders in philanthropy, 1–2, 23; lei-
main, 44 sure class, 6; life-cycle of, 6, 18, 152;
Terrell, Mary Church, 206 and literacy, 6, 19, 173; networks, 16,

355
INDEX

women (continued ) women’s club movement, 20, 23, 173, 216,

109, 215, 244; political culture of, 3, 6; 224, 246
prescribed gender roles, 5; in profes- women’s movement, 8
sions, 282, 285, 321; recipients of phi- women’s rights activism, 237, 238
lanthropy, 10, 16, 21; scholarship on, 8, women’s studies, 8, 19
9–14, 149; in science, 320–345; social World War I, 73, 92, 201, 249
status of, 5; southern, 81, 99–100; spe- World War II era, 148–168, 229, 287, 323
cial qualities of, 6, 217; suffrage, 19; “worthy poor,” 65
volunteers, 1, 6; work with the poor, 6,
7, 17; working-class, 24, 41 Young Women’s Christian Association
Women’s Board, 172, 323 (YWCA), 117, 194
Women’s Christian Temperance Union
(WCTU), 173 Zeta Phi Beta, 198, 200, 203, 204, 205, 208

356