The "New Woman"

1/24/06

I. The "New Woman"
        The "Gibson Girl"
        Clubs: National Federation of Women's Clubs (1890)
National Association of Colored Women (1896)
        Sports: Golf, tennis, bicycling, basketball

II. Opening the Colleges
        Barnard College – a case study

III. After College What?
The Club Movement 
        Professions
        Settlement Houses

IV. The "Boston Marriage"

        Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith of Hull House
        Virginia Gildersleeve and Caroline Spurgeon of Barnard College

I. The New Woman

The new woman grew out of the same economic transformation that produced the "working girl."

To recap my discussion of the “working girl”: As rapid industrialization in the United States in 19^th century led to urbanization and the growth of an industrial working class, unprecedented numbers of young women – mostly immigrant and African American daughters – were drawn into the paid labor force.

As of 1800, only 5 percent of all women worked for wages. By 1900 about 20 percent of all women were working for wages. The great majority were single women between the ages of 15 and 22. (2/3 single; 1/3 married or widowed).

The "working girl" produced goods that women had long made at home. EXAMPLE: [PPT] this anonymous black woman picking cotton in North Carolina – cotton that was the staple of the garment industry that employed Rose Schneiderman (shown at right) on the Lower East Side of New York City. These two so-called “working girls” helped create the wealth & leisure time that produced the "new woman" – the well-off, increasingly well-educated woman who is best known as the Gibson Girl – (PPT) who wore the newly fashionable “shirtwaists” – created from the cotton grown in the South (and increasingly elsewhere – but that’s another story), and sewn on the Lower East Side. [1899: Illustrator Charles Gibson introduced the Gibson Girl as a fashion and beauty ideal.] Both the “working girl” and the “new woman” undermined the “family claim”:

As I was saying last week – the conditions under which the “working girl” labored would not suggest that they would be able to challenge the status quo:

· Sex segregation: Most women worked in jobs that were overwhelmingly female, or on their way to being mostly female, as men fled those jobs.

· Unskilled: Because most women workers were young and untrained, and because they had few job opportunities, employers could get away with paying them half of what they paid men.

· Family Wage: And because male workers and male union leaders all agreed that women did not belong in the workforce beyond a few years, they fought to establish the idea of a “family wage” – that is a wage high enough for a man to support his wife and children. Of course, the family wage was more ideal than reality – a fact that accelerated women’s entry in the paid workforce.

And yet - the world of wage labor proved liberating in small but important ways.

· The heterogeneity of the city led women to question traditional values.  Mixing daily with other young women, they began to develop their own culture, one distinct from that of their mothers. 

· Mixing daily with men on the streets and in the offices, violating by their very presence the Victorian ideal of separate sexual spheres and the “respectable” working-class belief that unmarried women should be chaperoned, they set a new standard of female assertiveness.

· Their earnings, even if handed over to their mothers, made them less dependent, for they had contributed to the family support, and in doing so gained new power. 

· The explosion of commercial amusements at the turn of the century -- at places like Coney Island in Brooklyn -- separated young women and men even further from the older generation.  These experiences rendered their lives before marriage less distinct from those of men and helped them loosen the family claim.

One sees this independence most clearly in the lives of black women – for whom slavery had long weakened the family claim. Many of the most important cultural contributions of the 20^th century were made by black women, as you heard last week in the music of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey.

In statistical terms, the New Woman barely registered, when compared to the Working Girl – and one might quickly conclude that her small numbers alone would limit her ability to challenge traditional beliefs. A product of the emerging, upper middle-class, she constituted no more than 10 percent of the women her age. But her small numbers carried disproportionate influence. The labor performed by the “working girl” freed her more privileged sister for other activities, some of which challenged conventional assumptions about femininity and women’s proper place.

Clubs: One of those activities was joining clubs.  In 1890 the General Federation of Women’s Clubs [GFWC] formed, and by 1900 it claimed 150,000 members.  Six years later African-American women -- barred from the GFWC on account of their race -- formed the National Association of Colored Women. (PPT - NACW club) – In the beginning, these clubs tended to be book clubs – Dante, Shakespeare. Later, they turned to reform.

Sports: At the same time growing numbers of women began engaging in sports -- working out in gyms, playing golf, tennis, basketball, and riding bicycles (4 PPT slides) -- activities that no refined woman could have imagined pursuing a generation before. [ 1900: Women were included in modern Olympic Games, in golf and tennis.]

Education: Growing numbers attended high school – 6 percent by 1900.  Some women made an even more dramatic break with the past. By 1900, a rapidly growing number of the daughters of the business and professional classes were attending college and pursuing careers. Their experience, together with that of the new young woman worker, was to have important consequences for all women's lives, as well as for the lives of men.

II. Opening Colleges – Barnard as a Case Study

It is difficult today to imagine how unusual it was to win a college degree in 1900.  Only 2 percent of all women of college age completed college then.  Men were only slightly more likely to do so; 3 percent of men graduated from college.  

Getting to 2 percent had taken half a century.  At the time Elizabeth Cady Stanton called the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 only Oberlin College admitted women. In the decades that followed, however, the growth of the economy drew young men with any education out of the teaching profession and into the expanding business world. The demand for teachers created opportunities for women and growing pressure to educate them for the task.

In the course of the Civil War, 600,000 men -- including a large portion of the next generation’s teachers -- lost their lives.  In response, state universities began accepting women to train as teachers.  Beginning in 1865 – with the opening of Vassar, women’s colleges began to be built.

At about the same time women's rights activists commenced simultaneous campaigns at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia to win admission for women.  All of these campaigns failed.  Unlike the newer state universities of the Midwest and West, these eastern men's colleges were old, handsomely endowed, and not eager to jeopardize their status by admitting women.  Women rights leaders came closest to success at Harvard and Columbia, both of which agreed to the opening of affiliated women's colleges - Radcliffe and Barnard.  

To give you a sense of how contentious the issue of higher education for women was at the time -- and how tied to issues of religious, ethnic, and racial difference -- I want to look at the debate that began in 1873 to open Columbia College to women.  In 1873, Lillie Devereux Blake, with the support of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, petitioned Columbia College to admit women.   (PPT – Blake)

If Columbia’s response had been left to Columbia President Frederick A. P. Barnard, Columbia would have been fully coeducational by 1874.  (PPT – Barnard) A Yale trained mathematician, who had taught at the Universities of Alabama and Mississippi before assuming the presidency of Columbia in 1864, Barnard had been a notorious drunk before his marriage to Margaret Barnard ( PPT – Margaret). Margaret Barnard inspired her husband to sober up and join the temperance movement.  In process, FAP Barnard came to regard women as a civilizing influence, and he began to argue that any great university would, sooner or later, want to include them.  But the decision was not Barnard’s alone to make.  Powerful men on the Board of Trustees objected strenuously to admitting women students.  Their leader was the Reverend Morgan Dix, the rector of Trinity Church (the Episcopal Church that had given King's College the land on which it was first built).  (PPT – Dix) The Reverend Dix complained in his diary that the unpleasant pressure was all due to a "persistent set of agitators" of "the Boston type." Not until a century later would outside agitators be so reviled as they were at Columbia University in the 1870s and 80s. These were not just outsiders, they were of the "Boston type." A Boston-type agitator was a woman who rejected conventional marriage for a so-called "Boston Marriage," in which two women lived as life-long partners. One did not speak of lesbianism in those days, but in the eyes of The Reverend Dix women who lived with other women were not natural. Moreover, women of this "Boston type" led the suffrage movement (Anthony lived with the Stantons), a campaign that in taking women out of the home seriously threatened the future of the American family and the stability of American society.

No less passionate in his opposition to the admission of women students was Professor of Political Science John W. Burgess. (PPT – Burgess) – You have already met Burgess – in my first lecture – one of the fathers of professional history in this country. Born in Tennessee, Burgess had fought on the Union side in the Civil War while just a teenager.  In 1865 he ventured North to Massachusetts, attended Amherst, studied law in nearby Springfield, taught briefly at Knox College in Illinois, and pursued graduate work in Germany, before accepting Columbia President Barnard’s offer in 1876 to help build Columbia into a great university.  Greatness, in Burgess’s mind, required the singleness of purpose possible only at such all-male, all-white, Anglo-European schools as Amherst, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the German universities, where he had trained.

Near the end of his life, Burgess gave his reasons for opposing the admission of women to Columbia. 

First, admitting women would "distract the attention of the male students from their proper work." 

Second, he believed, women would depress the intellectual level at Columbia and ultimately debase the school’s reputation. On account of their "physical infirmities," women, Burgess contended, could match neither men’s "evenness of scholarship" nor their "constancy of attendance." On this point Burgess relied for scientific support on the work of Harvard Medical School Professor Dr. Edward Clarke who, following Herbert Spencer’s theory that the body is a closed energy system, maintained that women’s reproductive organs drained energy that might otherwise be available for mental development. Women would never be scholars without putting their future as mothers at risk. (Historical antecedent of Lawrence Summers comments last year – Spencerians also argued that there were more male geniuses as well as mentally impaired – issue still debated.)

Finally, Burgess laid out a demographic – and, to his mind, clinching – concern. Since New York City fathers usually sent their sons to colleges outside the city, while preferring to keep their daughters close to home, a decision to admit women to Columbia, he feared, would "make the college a female seminary." Not a female college, but a lesser school, a seminary.

That was not all. As early as the 1870s an accelerating immigration into New City was beginning to drive out the White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant population that had long governed the metropolis. This change meant that the daughter who came to a coeducational Columbia could not be guaranteed to be Episcopalian, or even Presbyterian.  If immigration continued its present course, Columbia’s fate might be worse than that of becoming a female seminary. It could well become, in Burgess’s words, a "Hebrew female seminary."

That did it. Feminization was one thing; Hebrew feminization was something else altogether. Visionary, idealistic, egalitarian President Barnard addressed the Board of Trustees eloquently in 1879 calling on them to recognize the justice of women’s claim on Columbia’s resources. He elaborated his plea again in 1880, and again in 1881, but the Board would not acquiesce. Not until a petition circulated by Caroline Sterling Choate (PPT – slide) -- the wife of one of New York's leading corporate lawyers - and signed by 1400 New Yorkers (eg, Ulysses S. Grant, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt – before he began to worry about race suicide) urging Columbia to make higher education available to women, did the Board form a Select Committee to investigate the matter.

In 1883 the Trustees struck a compromise. The faculty would draw up a detailed syllabus of instruction for any woman student who wished to pursue collegiate study. The young woman would be barred from Columbia classes, but she could enter the library in newly constructed Hamilton Hall – (2 PPT – slides of hall and library).  And if she were able to pass the exams given in the classes she could not attend, the trustees would award her an appropriate degree.  In 1887 the first of the young women to complete the collegiate course, Mary Hankey, presented herself for a bachelors degree, was awarded a Bachelor of Letters, and promptly died the following year of pneumonia.  Dr. Clarke seemed to have been vindicated.  College study was really too much for the female constitution.

But the movement to open Columbia to women would not die.  One of the young women who had undertaken the Collegiate Course was Annie Nathan Meyer – (PPT – slide).  Though she married after only one year of study – further confirming Burgess’s point that women lacked the scholarly dedication of male students -- Annie Nathan Meyer undertook a crusade to open Columbia to women.  Meyer was just the sort of threat Burgess most feared – female, determined, Jewish.  In 1889 -- working with Caroline Sterling Choate and others -- she achieved a compromise, Columbia would agree to an affiliation with a separate women’s college.  President Barnard, who had fought so hard to open Columbia to women, died before the new college opened.  The college’s founders honored his memory by giving the fledgling institution his name.

Barnard opened its doors in a brownstone on Madison Avenue (PPT – slide) and hired Columbia faculty to repeat their classes for the young women who won admission to Barnard.  Two problems quickly emerged.  

First, Burgess -- bent on building the graduate faculty -- refused to make his faculty available to teach at Barnard, so the women's college was hard pressed from the start to staff its curriculum.  

Second, Columbia professors were all male.  This fact rankled the female founders who looked on college as a training ground for future female professionals. Unlike Wellesley and Vassar (which had a number of female faculty), Barnard could not offer its graduates female role models or the prospect of future employment.  

In 1895 -- Columbia President Seth Low and his wife, Barnard trustee Annie Curtis Low, (2 PPT slides) hatched a two-part scheme.  

First, through an anonymous gift they enabled Barnard to offer Columbia three professorships in return for a promise that Columbia would lend the faculty (or their substitutes) to Barnard to staff Barnard courses.  Burgess, happy to get three distinguished professors readily agreed.  But even that gesture did not solve Barnard's problem.  

Second, Seth Low agreed to make a single exception to the rule that Barnard must hire only Columbia faculty.  He named Emily Gregory, one of the outstanding botanists of the day, to the position of professor at Barnard.  The Emily Gregory award for teaching -- given annually to this day -- is named in her honor. (2 PPT slides – Gregory and lab – also quotation on wall of 202 ALT)

Neither of these gestures, however, solved Barnard's problems -- the college still had too few faculty and offered virtually no prospects for future female faculty

In 1900 the Barnard and Columbia trustees reached a new -- and unique -- agreement.  Barnard would gain the right to hire its own faculty, while Columbia would agree to grant Barnard graduates the Columbia degree.  The three distinguished professors hired with the Lows's money moved permanently to Barnard and Barnard hired the first female instructors in the university. [Radcliffe never hired its own faculty; Harvard refused to give Radcliffe students a Harvard degree, although they were taught by Harvard faculty]. 

This unique agreement led to an unusual result.  Barnard College sent more women on to advanced training (mostly at Columbia) than any other school in the country -- save the much larger Berkeley and Hunter College -- thereby insuring that women trained at Columbia would have a disproportionate influence over the course of 20th century women's history.  

Barnard offered the usual classes: Latin, Greek, Mathematics, History, science, and English.  But it also required gym and an innovative class called “Freshman Hygiene” - which along with physical education was aimed specifically at proving Dr. Edward Clarke and John W. Burgess wrong - that developing a woman's mind need not destroy her physical health or render her infertile. (PPT – gym) [ Hough & Sedgwick & "The Hygiene Song"]

III. After College What?

College education could be inspiring, even mind altering.  But what use was it, in the end?  

About half of all women college graduates married.  In whatever free time they could steal away from family responsibilities, they formed the backbone of the women’s club movement and the emerging social reform movement of the early 20thc century that I’ll begin talking about next week.

Most of the women who graduated from college at the end of the 19^th century who did not marry went into high school teaching; indeed, even the women who married usually taught for 4-5 years first.  But to the more ambitious women of the day -- especially those who were white and did not have to face a segregated school system -- sought new challenges.  But what?  About 10 percent of all women college graduates went on to graduate school.

Admitting Women to Graduate Study – at Columbia

In 1880 Cornell awarded the first American Ph.D. to a woman.  Even before the founding of Barnard College women began knocking at Columbia’s door demanding advanced training.  In 1884 Winifred Edgerton, newly graduated from Wellesley, sought advanced training at Columbia in applied astronomy and pure mathematics.  (PPT – slide) Counseled by President Barnard, she visited trustees individually to plead her case and eventually won the favor of even the conservative Reverend Morgan Dix.  Her needs were unique, her talent and seriousness of purpose immediately apparent.  She needed a telescope; only Columbia had one.  (PPT – telescope) And besides, the Professor of Astronomy needed an assistant.  Believing that no precedent would thereby be set.  The trustees voted to allow Miss Edgerton to pursue her studies individually. Two years later, in 1886, she became the first woman ever to earn a Columbia Ph.D., and she earned it cum laude.

Winifred Edgerton was the first young woman to seek graduate training, but many others followed, and the founding of Barnard College insured an intensifying pressure on the Columbia administration to open graduate classes to women.  In a city expanding as quickly as New York, the demand for highly trained minds seemed inexhaustible.  Many faculty, including future Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler, agreed and quietly began admitting women to their classes. President Low, citing the examples of Yale, Harvard, and a growing number of European universities that had recently opened graduate classes to women, urged the Columbia University Council to do so also. As Low explained to the faculty, "Unless Columbia throws open to [women] her doors in the graduate courses, the City of New York must depend altogether for the influence of highly educated women, upon women who receive their training outside of the city." 

Low’s recommendation brought forth a howl of outrage from Burgess, who insisted that such a grave step required extended debate. Bitter discussions followed.  The Faculty of Philosophy voted to admit women, with the permission of the instructor, in 1895. The Faculty of Pure Science did so in 1897. But Burgess’s Faculty of Political Science held out until 1898 - and Burgess himself never admitted a female student to his course in Constitutional Law.

One could say that Burgess had the last laugh in the graduate training battle. Women won the right to take the PH.D. – but that did not get them the right to a job.  Women’s colleges, like Barnard, hired women – the men’s colleges and universities did not for many years.

Discouraged by the prospects in academe – women sought entry into the professions. But the prospects were even worse in the professions into which Columbia men were then gravitating:

Medicine: 5 percent of all doctors were women (down from the previous generation – explain impact of professionalization on midwives, herbalists, homeopaths)

Law: only one percent of all lawyers were women

Women in the Professional Schools at Columbia

No one did more to breach the professional school barriers to women than the young woman who took over the helm of Barnard College the year of Burgess’s retirement: Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve – an 1899 graduate of Barnard, who earned a Ph.D. in English from Columbia in 1908, and became Dean of Barnard College in 1911. (PPT – Gildersleeve) During Gildersleeve’s deanship, and in large part due to her efforts, women gradually gained entrance to all of Columbia’s professional schools. The Schools of Journalism admitted women when it opened in 1912 and the School of Business did the same when it opened in 1916. Winning access to the medical school required a more concerted campaign, but Gildersleeve succeeded in 1917 with the promise that she would hand-pick the first female students and guarantee their success. And she did. (PPT – Gulli Lindh) In 1924 Gildersleeve lay the cornerstone for a graduate women’s dormitory at Columbia and pointed out in an address to the university that women by then had come to outnumber men at Columbia by a substantial margin.  In 1927 Gildersleeve won women the right of admission to the Columbia Law School, and once again the first females admitted were Barnard graduates, hand-picked by Gildersleeve.  (PPT – Helen Robinson) One of the first graduates was Harriet Pilpel – who became counsel to Planned Parenthood and worked on the legal theory that eventually led to Roe v. Wade. In 1942, the last hold-out, the School of Engineering School, succumbed to the Gildersleeve treatment in the midst of World War II and admitted women. Five years later, Gildersleeve retired.

The Helping Careers: Limited by convention, discrimination, and family pressure in their pursuit of the careers that attracted their brothers, educated women often forged their own careers. Statistics suggest that many of the women who might have become lawyers or doctors became writers and journalists (usually writing for the women's page of a local newspaper), or turned to the new helping professions of librarianship, clinical psychology, and, especially, social work.  When Addams founded Hull House in 1889, less than three per cent of all social workers were women.  By 1910 women were a majority, and more college graduates were entering social work than any other occupation besides teaching.

IV. The "Boston Marriage": The new careers on which women embarked usually precluded marriage, and, as a consequence, an extraordinarily high proportion of women graduates -- roughly half -- never wed. Among those who went on to earn a Ph.D. the figures were even more dramatic: three-quarters never wed.

Women's decision not to marry did not mean that they necessarily were lonely. Many of the leading women of the early twentieth century formed so-called "Boston marriages."  Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith of Hull House were just one example.  (PPT - Addams and Smith) Virginia Gildersleeve and British-born English Professor Caroline Spurgeon were another.  Like their mothers, these women spent most of their time in a separate, overwhelmingly female sphere.  In relinquishing the bonds of matrimony, however, they created a fundamentally new experience for women, that of living and working independently of men.

When compared to the thousands of women who were graduating from colleges and universities at the turn of the century, the number of women who spent their lives together remained small. Yet, their ability to sustain each other emotionally enabled them to act as leaders in the movement of women into positions of political, social, and cultural leadership.

Deep divisions of region, race, ethnicity, religion, and class would make any common action among women in that public life difficult, but the shared experiences of womanhood, which the family claim so effectively enforced, offered a means for transcending those divisions, as the first years of the new century would demonstrate.

Because of their education and growing affluence these women leaders were able to mount a campaign that would do two important things in the years ahead:

1) challenge prevailing gender roles in America and the low status of women that those roles enforced, and

2) demand a reform of American politics that would lead eventually to the development of the modern welfare state and the provision of benefits – Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare -- on which women more than men have come to rely.