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Educating Women for Art and Commerce: The Philadelphia School of Design, 1848–1932

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Nina de Angeli Walls*
Affiliation:
University of Delaware

Extract

No previous knowledge of drawing required

Keen competition characterized the American market for higher education in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Commercial design schools, normal institutes, business colleges, and four-year liberal arts colleges competed for overlapping pools of potential students. By the turn of the century, schools of commercial art and design, a major innovation in women's education in the 1850s, struggled to retain a small niche in the private education market. Aided by flexible admissions criteria exemplified by the 1919 catalog statement above, the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, a pioneer in the American design school movement, survived as a single-sex commercial art school from its founding in 1848 into the twentieth century. By 1932, when a merger with another women's school brought a name change that symbolized the end of an era, the School of Design had enrolled more than four thousand students. Familiar to Philadelphians today as Moore College of Art and Design, the school remains committed to its original mission of educating women for careers in the arts.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Philadelphia School of Design for Women (hereafter PSDW), Catalogue (Philadelphia, 1919), 22. Major primary sources for this article included: PSDW directors’ minutes, admissions records 1880–1932, and printed catalogs, all at Moore College of Art and Design, Archives, Philadelphia (hereafter MCAD); data on three sample sets of PSDW students, traced in the 1880, 1900, and 1920 manuscript population schedules, U.S. Bureau of the Census, microfilm, National Archives and Records Service, Washington, D.C.; personal interviews with five PSDW alumnae; and the Anna Wharton Morris Papers, Friends Historical Library (FHL), Swarthmore, Pa.Google Scholar

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15 On the Morris and Wharton families, see Morris Papers; also Morris, Harrison S. Confessions in Art (New York, 1930); and Wright, Catharine Morris The Color of Life (Boston, 1957), 7. PSDW, Catalogue (1887), 28–29, listed graduates from 1877 to 1886.Google Scholar

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18 Belcher, Gerald and Belcher, Margaret Collecting Souls, Gathering Dust: The Struggles of Two American Artists, Alice Neel and Rhoda Medary (New York, 1991); Rhoda Myers Medary also attended PSDW; on the Murdock family, see manuscript population schedules for 1920, Philadelphia e.d. 1635, U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2.Google Scholar

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30 PSDW, admissions records, give details on scholarship holders.Google Scholar

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35 McClelland, Dorcas Doolittle interview with the author, 9 Oct. 1991; Beatrice Hedley Kirkbride, interview with the author, 9 Mar. 1992. Belcher, and Belcher, Collecting Souls, 9, cite the hat rule also. On the Goodell family, see also Morris, Anna Wharton Journals, Jan. 1914, Jan. 1915, v. 10, pp. 60, 114, FHL; Anne Goodell's sister Margaret was a close friend of Catharine Morris.Google Scholar

36 Pettes, Alicia McCaffrey interview with the author, 11 Mar. 1992. “Miss Bowman” may refer to Emma J. Buckman, who taught lettering, ornament, and design from 1915 to 1946; Katherine Nassau van Roekens, interview with the author, 9 Mar. 1992.Google Scholar

37 Roekens, Van interview, 1992; Kirkbride, interview, 1992.Google Scholar

38 PSDW, directors’ minutes, 16 Jan. 1923, 71 (new rules); ibid., Nov. 1922, 51 (2 expelled); ibid., Dec. 1922, 67; ibid., 3 Feb. 1923; PSDW, “Student Records,” 1902–27, 199, 204, MCAD; McClelland interview, 1991.Google Scholar

39 Stahl, Louise Zimmerman interview with the author, 18 May 1993; Belcher, and Belcher, Collecting Souls, 10.Google Scholar

40 Kirkbride, interview, 1992; Kirkbride, Beatrice Hedley Autobiographical ms., c. 1987 (transcript in author's possession); on the Public Industrial Art School, see Lerman, “‘Useful Knowledge.’”Google Scholar

41 Solomon, Educated Women, 146 243, cites Reynolds, O. Edgar The Social and Economic Status of College Students (New York, 1927), on relatively high family incomes of women attending private colleges.Google Scholar

42 Blumin, Middle Class, 11.Google Scholar

43 Muncy, Robyn Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York, 1991), xiii.Google Scholar

44 Blumin, Middle Class, 191.Google Scholar