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Job Market or Marriage Market? Life Choices for Southern Women Educated at Northern Colleges, 1875-1915

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Joan Marie Johnson*
Affiliation:
Northeastern Illinois University

Extract

Margaret Preston, a member of a prominent family from Lexington, Kentucky, attended Bryn Mawr College from 1904 to 1906, initially against her will. Letters between Margaret and her parents while she was away at school reveal a homesick young woman, at first uninterested in scholarship. She complained that the other girls were “ugly and look disagreeable” and that she had bags under her eyes because “Bryn Mawr is a warranted beauty-destroyer.” In her second year, however, as Margaret began to develop academically, she focused less on returning home, beauty, and boys and more on her classes. She ignored her mother's requests for her to leave Bryn Mawr early for Christmas vacation in order to attend a dance, because she would lose credit if she missed class. Although she had earlier told her mother that she would have preferred that her aunt fund a trip to Europe rather than her education at Bryn Mawr, she now suggested that if she stayed four years to complete her degree, she might have a chance to graduate with honors. Apparently, her aunt did not choose to extend her financial support because Margaret stayed only two years. However, she returned home to Lexington a more bold and self-confident woman.

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Copyright © 2007 History of Education Society 

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References

1 Preston, Margaret to Preston, Sarah, October 17, 1904; November 15, 1904; and n.d. (c. November 1904); Papers, Preston Family, Special Collections, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky.Google Scholar

2 Preston, Margaret to Preston, Sarah, January 20, 1905, January 27, 1905, February 16, 1906, and March 16, 1906, Preston Papers. Margaret's aunt was Jessie Preston Draper of Hopefale, Massachusetts. Margaret's cousins, Zelinda Neville, class of 1895, and Neville, Mary, class of 1894, were Bryn Mawr graduates, and her cousins Margaret Wickliffe Brown and Mary Brown Waite attended Bryn Mawr but did not graduate.Google Scholar

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5 This study is limited to white women, because so few African-American women from the South attended these schools at this time as to make comparison difficult. For an excellent study of the experiences of African American women at the Seven Sister college, see Perkins, Linda M., “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): 718756. For more on the effect that their Northern education had on their thinking regarding race, see Johnson, Joan Marie, Making Progressive Women in the South: Northern Colleges, Feminist Values, and Social Activism (manuscript in progress, in the possession of the author). For examples of women whose experiences influenced their decision to fight for civil rights, see Virginia Foster Durr, Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr (University of Alabama Press, 1985), 101, 116–120, 244–45, 255–260, 279, and Jacoway, Elizabeth, “Down from the Pedestal: Gender and Regional Culture in a Ladylike Assault on the Southern Way of Life,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 56, (Autumn 1997): 345–352, on Adolphine Terry, a Vassar graduate who worked to desegregate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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8 From archives throughout the South as well as college archives, I located more than a dozen extensive collections, as well as several smaller collections, of letters between students and parents, siblings, or other relatives. The vast majority of these letters are from 1880–1915, although a few collections extend back to 1875 or forward through 1920. I chose to focus on the five independent women's colleges in the Seven Sisters, with only cursory attention to the two coordinate colleges, Radcliffe and Barnard, because the women's colleges generally provided a fuller campus experience. The Seven Sisters colleges, with their rigorous academic requirements, attracted many of the brightest Southern students. See, Annie Elizabeth Lee Papers, Archives, Wellesley College, Library, Margaret Clapp, College, Wellesley; Mary Comer Correspondence, Class 1904, Box #1660, College Archives, Smith College; Jacob Florance Minis Papers, Theodore Richmond Papers, Josephine Simrall Papers, Thomas Perrin Harrison Papers, Eloise Whitaker Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Hall Family Papers, Correspondence, 1881–1901, Mary, B. and Louisa, B. Papers, Poppenheim, Special Collections, Perkins Library, Duke University; Raoul Family Papers, Special Collections, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University; Bryant Cumming Hammond Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina; Preston-Johnston Papers, Special Collections, University of Kentucky Library; The Breckinridge Family Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Gertrude Weil Papers, North Carolina State Archives; and Sophonisba Breckinridge Papers, Special Collections, University of Chicago.Google Scholar

9 This article is part of a larger study of Southern students at Vassar, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, and Wellesley colleges at the turn of the century. Using college catalogues, which listed students and their hometowns (with the exception of Wellesley, where I used the 1891 and 1922 student and alumnae registers), I created a database of Southern students. I then used college alumnae directories to trace the students, collecting data on marriage, number of children, wage work, volunteer work, and primary place of residence. The database currently includes 1,015 names. Of these students, 555 graduated. A small number were considered “specials” or nondegree students, usually teachers and common in the 1870s and 1880s. The students were primarily drawn from the classes of 1875–1915, though access to information for each school varied slightly. Exact numbers are as follows: 318 students from Wellesley, classes of 1875–1915; 141 from Bryn Mawr, 1886–1910 (Bryn Mawr did not open until 1885); 357 from Vassar, 1875–1915; 67 from Mount Holyoke, 1875–1915; and 132 from Smith, 1875–1915. Smith College Official Circular (Northampton, MA); Wellesley College Calendar (Wellesley College); Catalogue of Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA: Mount Holyoke College); Vassar College Catalogue (Poughkeepsie, NY: Vassar College); and Bryn Mawr College Program (Philadelphia, PA: Sherman and Company). Because of these slightly different dates, I analyzed the data by decade. I chose to frame the study within these decades, after the opening of Smith and Wellesley in 1875, and before World War I, because students in the 1920s had somewhat different social lives and experiences, due both to the fact that they were no longer the “pioneers” of women's colleges and changing mores of the decade. This allowed me to determine if there were changes between the 1880s, when Southerners were few and far between, through the early 1910s, when they made up from 11 to 14 percent of their classes at Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley. For periodization of the first generations of college students, and changes in the 1920s, see Solomon, , In the Company of Educated Women, 95, and chapter nine; Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, 199–200; Gordon, Gender and Higher Education, 4–5. Furthermore, this period coincided with the Progressive social reform era, when students would have been likely to be influenced by professors caught up in the reform fervor of the time. Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, 149–154.Google Scholar

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11 Lynn Gordon found that most southern college students were daughters of professionals rather than farmers. Gender and Higher Education, 48–49. See also Pamela Dean, who points out that normal and industrial schools had higher percentages of farmers’ daughters in, “Covert Curriculum: Class, Gender, and Student Culture at a New South Woman's College, 1892–1910,” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1994): 103. Most women college students seeking a classical education rather than vocational training were middle-class daughters of professionals. Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 64.Google Scholar

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24 Hall, Sue to Hall, Maggie, November 2, 1896, Hall Family Papers.Google Scholar

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26 Quotation from Margaret Mitchell's letter to Harvey Smith, 1927, quoted in Dareden Pyron, Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 74.Google Scholar

27 Raoul, Agnes to Raoul, Mary., September, 26, 1899, Papers, Raoul Family, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.Google Scholar

28 Poppenheim, Mary to Poppenheim, Mary Elinor, in Johnson, Joan Marie, Southern Women at Vassar: The Poppenheim Family Letters, 1881–1916 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 63.Google Scholar

29 Breckinridge, William to Breckinridge, Sophonisba, December 17, 1884, Papers, Breckinridge, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.Google Scholar

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32 In 1885 the Association of College Alumnae (ACA) released a study which found that only 27.8 percent of college graduates married. This number was so low because it included very recent graduates, women who eventually married. The numbers probably also reflect the fact that marriage rates in general for women from the Northeast were lower than the rest of the country (ranging from 60 to 70 percent). Goodsell, Willystine, The Education of Women: Its Social Background and Its Problems (New York: MacMillan Co., 1923), 42.Google Scholar

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36 Solomon, , In the Company of Educated Women, 119–122. At least 22 of 138 (15.9 percent) Southern Wellesley graduates, 15 of 128 (12.5 percent) Vassar graduates, and 5 of 44 (11.4 percent) Mount Holyoke graduates married more than ten years after graduation. Alumnae Register, 1942 Record Number of the Wellesley College Bulletin (Wellesley College, 1942); Vassar College Alumnae Register (Poughkeepsie, NY: Vassar College 1939); and Mount Holyoke College Biographical Directory, 1837–1937 (Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College, 1937).Google Scholar

37 In comparison, at North Carolina Normal and Industrial College, principally a training ground for teachers, the rate was 68 percent. Dean, “Covert Curriculum,” 248.Google Scholar

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45 My appreciation to Joan Cashin for pointing out the significance of these phrases.Google Scholar

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