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Gender and the Politics of Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Mary Ann Dzuback*
Affiliation:
Department of Education at Washington University
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Contentious public debates about women's rational and moral capacity circulated during the European Enlightenment at the same time that science was emerging as a dominant mode of inquiry. As historian Karen Offen argues in European Feminisms, these debates preoccupied both men and women intellectuals of the middling and upper classes and represented a pivotal moment in the three-century campaign to rearticulate a politics of knowledge proclaiming women as deserving as men of formal schooling at all levels. Disputes about women's capabilities emerged in the context of efforts to redefine the rights and privileges of men, of male intellectuals to reassert male dominance over and control of females’ access to intellectual participation as well as the craft guilds associated with women's work, and of men and women to consider the meaning and structure of social institutions and social systems. The German poet Philippine Engelhard captured women's frustrations with the limits imposed upon them in comparison to men in the context of the formation of the liberal state, the development of the middle class, and the growth of humanistic and scientific inquiry:

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Copyright © 2003 by the History of Education Society 

References

1 Offen, Karen European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), chapter 1; Engelhart quoted 41–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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18 The earliest was the University of Zurich, followed by the University of Paris; Thomas Neville Bonner, To the Ends of the Earth: Women's Search for Education in Medicine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 31–56.Google Scholar

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20 Pollard, Lucille Addison Women on College and University Faculties: A Historical Survey and a Study of Their Present Academic Status (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 152–53, on the growth of nineteenth-century women faculty. Newcomer, Mabel A Century of Higher Education for Women (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 165, on the proportion of women on the twenty-two largest women's college faculties; and A. Ellis, Caswell et al., “Preliminary Report of Committee W on Status of Women in College and University Faculties,” Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 7 (October 1921): 21–32. Susan Boslego Carter, “Academic Women Revisited: An Empirical Study of Changing Patterns in Women's Employment as College and University Faculty, 1890–1963,” Journal of Social History 14 (Summer 1981): 680, Table 2, presents slightly different percentages for those years. On women's colleges and women faculty, see Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women; Horowitz, Alma Mater; Kaufman, ed., The Search for Equity. On women faculty in coeducational institutions, see Clifford., ed. Lone Voyagers. On Wellesley, see also Palmieri, In Adamless Eden; Jean Glasscock, ed. Wellesley College, 1815–1915: A Century of Women (Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College, 1975); Converse, Florence Wellesley College: A Chronicle of the Years, 1875–1938 (Wellesley, MA.: Hathaway House Bookshop, 1939). On Vassar, see also Haight, Elizabeth Hazleton The Life and Letters of James Monroe Taylor: The Biography of an Educator (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1919); Monroe Taylor, James and Hazleton Haight, Elizabeth Vassar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1915); Rourke, Constance Mayfield ed., The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Opening of Vassar College, October 10 to 13, 1915: A Record (Poughkeepsie, NY: Vassar College, 1916); Plum, Dorothy A. and Dowell, George B. comps., and Constance Dimock Ellis, ed., The Magnificent Enterprise: A Chronicle of Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, NY: Vassar College, 1961).Google Scholar

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25 Lucy Salmon to Adelaide Underhill, 5 August 1900 and 23 August 1900, quoted in Louise Fargo Brown, Apostle of Democracy: The Life of Lucy Maynard Salmon (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943), 180, 176. Robinson, The Curriculum of the Woman's College. On Vassar's departments, see History and Economics “Reports,” Archive Files, Vassar College Archives.Google Scholar

26 Hoxie, R. Gordon et al., A History of the Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 6667. See also McCaughey, Robert A. “A Statistical Profile of the Barnard College Faculty, 1900–1974,” (typescript, Department of History, Barnard College, 1975), Barnard College Archives. I extrapolated the number from his figures in tables 1.4, II.1, and II.5, based on a decadenal analysis, which includes part-time appointments. My own count reveals only 6 in 1940, all full-time and most with voting privileges on the faculty. My search was less exhaustive because I was interested in women who remained long enough to have some impact on the institutional culture at Barnard; see White, Mary Churchill A History of Barnard College, ed. Eleanor S. Minitz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 117–126, and Dean's Office and Departmental Papers, Barnard College Archives (DODP, BCA). The practice of delaying election to the faculty existed at Columbia for junior faculty: Hoxie, et al., A History of the Faculty of Political Science, Appendix C. On deans, see Walton, Andrea “Achieving a Voice and Institutionalizing a Vision for Women: The Barnard Deanship at Columbia University, 1889–1947,” Historical Studies in Education 13:2 (Fall 2001): 113–46; Nidiffer, Jana Pioneering Deans of Women: More than Wise and Pious Matrons (New York: Teachers College Press, 2000).Google Scholar

27 Dzuback, Mary AnnWomen and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College, 1915–1940,“ History of Education Quarterly 33: 4 (Winter 1993): 579608.Google Scholar

28 Thomas, Knipp and The History of Goucher College, 569–82, lists all faculty to 1938. Both Bryn Mawr and Goucher had faculty in education as well. This was quite common at all the women's colleges, as most college graduates who worked went into teaching at least until they married, and often continued after marriage. Many women who eventually obtained Ph.D.s, hoping for academic employment, taught before entering graduate school and, when the academic job market constricted, returned to high school teaching after finishing advanced degrees.Google Scholar

29 See Fuller, Mary BreeseDevelopment of History and Government in Smith College, 1875–1920,“ Smith College Studies in History 5 (April 1920): 139173; Charles H. Page, Fifty Years in the Sociological Enterprise: A Lucky Journey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), ch. 4; Faculty Files, Smith College Archives (FF, SCA). On college curricula, see Robinson, “Curriculum of the Woman's College,” for Vassar, Wellesley, Barnard, Radcliffe, and Mount Holyoke.Google Scholar

30 Rossiter, Women Scientists, 168–69.Google Scholar

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32 Some black women, for example Sadie Tanner Mossell, who attained the Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in economics in 1921 and then a law degree, entered into law practice or fields other than academia. By the 1940s, when Merze Tate earned a Ph.D. in international relations from Radcliffe, academic positions were slowly beginning to open; Tate taught at Howard for thirty-five years. See Franklin, V.P.Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander,“ in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (hereinafter BWA), Vol. I, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 1719, and Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn “Merze Tate,” in BWA, Vol II, 114–15. On the colleges and student struggles, see McCandless, The Past in the Present, ch. 4; Jeanne L. Noble, The Negro Woman's College Education (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987 [1956]), 24; Bolton, Ina Alexander “The Problems of Negro College Women” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1949). Black parents wanted their daughters to be able to compete for the limited professional positions open to their educated daughters in the South; character was a critical qualification, particularly for black women; see Shaw, Stephanie J. What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), ch. 5. Special thanks to Faustine Jones-Wilson for pushing me to explore this further in my draft of the book manuscript.Google Scholar

33 Schmidt, George P. Douglass College: A History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1968). On Connecticut College, see Noyes, Gertrude A History of Connecticut College (New London: Connecticut College, 1982) and Ames, Oakes Connecticut College: Contributing to a Changing Society (New York: The Newcomen Society of the United States, 1986); Grunfeld, “Purpose and Ambiguity,” on Hunter; and Noyes, A History of Connecticut College. Google Scholar

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35 “Summary of the Conference on Research in the Social Sciences in Colleges,” 12 and 13 December 1931, file 1, Ethel B. Dietrich Papers, FF, MHCA, 14, 8, 10. Dartmouth was the twelfth institution, but no data from Dartmouth were included in the report.Google Scholar

36 Addams, Jane quoted in Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 116; on this tension women experienced between family and work demands, see same, 130–140; McKinnon, Alison Love and Freedom: Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Cott, Nancy The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 221–222. For a specific example of how these living arrangements worked in one institution, see Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, ch. 8. On southern colleges, see McCandless, The Past in the Present, ch. 4; Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do, ch. 5; Noble, The Negro Woman's College Education, 24.Google Scholar

37 I develop this further in a paper entitled “Passing the Torch: Academic Women and Professional Power,” initially presented at the History of Education Society annual meeting in 2000, and currently in revision for publication.Google Scholar

38 I develop this further in a paper entitled “Creative Financing in Social Science: Women Scholars and Early Research,” initially presented at the Social Science History Association annual meeting in 1999, and revised as a chapter in a forthcoming volume on the history of women and philanthropy.Google Scholar