Education and Marginality: Race and Gender in

Education and Marginality: Race and Gender in Higher Education, 1940–1955 Margaret Smith Crocco and Cally L. Waite Whether it be my religion, my aesthetic taste, my economic opportunity, my educational desire, whatever the craving is, I find a limitation because I suffer from the greatest known handicap, a NegroFa Negro woman. (Mary McLeod Bethune, ‘‘Closed Doors,’’ 1936).

Recent historiography has documented the singular contributions made by women to racial uplift and progress during the Jim Crow era.1 In these endeavors, women’s contributions were greatly shaped by race, gender, and class. Given the feminization of education in the United States during this time, it is not surprising that their ‘‘race work’’ was for a long time concentrated in the field of education. Although they operated within a predominantly female environment, they nevertheless encountered racism and sexism. Those with the most extensive formal education, that is, master and doctoral degrees, faced particular problems along with opportunities. Three dissertations written by black women who earned doctorates between 1940 and 1955 highlight the marginalization of women as a result of higher education. Many of these women understood their role of advancing the cause of racial progress to include expanding notions of the black woman’s ‘‘place.’’

Margaret Smith Crocco is professor and coordinator of the Program in Social Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. Cally L. Waite is associate professor and program coordinator of History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. 1

Jim Crow is another term for segregation. Jim Crow laws were those that outlined the parameters of black access. According to C. Vann Woodward, ‘‘The origin of the word ‘Jim Crow’ is lost in obscurity y The term had become an adjective by 1838,’’ in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 7. A few of the recent works documenting the contributions of women to racial uplift during this era are Vicki Crawford, Jacqueline Rouse and Barbara Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long: African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1998); Glenda Elizabeth 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); Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Anne Meis Knupfer, The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women’s Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). History of Education Quarterly

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History of Education Quarterly

The dissertations analyzed here provide insights into how black women college graduates perceived their ‘‘place’’ and the ways in which they challenged conventional role formulations. Marion Cuthbert, Ina Bolton, and Jeanne Noble all earned PhD degrees in education and went on to become professors of education. Their careers were marked by achievement and an abiding interest in women’s issues. To varying degrees, they found themselves at odds with prevailing notions of black middle-class womanhood; their research and activism provided opportunities for ‘‘talking back’’ to those who would limit women’s scope for racial uplift and recognition of those contributions.2 It should come as no surprise that the literature about black women who earned the PhD is sparse at best.3 Blending recent historiography about black women with data and analyses found in these three dissertations helps uncover the marginalization many welleducated middle-class black women experienced. Such an investigation, however, is by no means an attempt to paint such women as victims or suggest they are representative of all black women’s experiences during this period. As others have noted, ‘‘Too often the apparent powerlessness of a group obscures its real power.’’4 Without a doubt, black women were an integral part of racial uplift and progress during the Jim Crow era. African Americans saw education as a tool of racial uplift throughout this period. As W.E.B. DuBois wrote, ‘‘The very feeling of inferiority that slavery forced upon them fathered an intense desire to rise out of their condition by means of education y. Black folk connected knowledge with power [believing] that education was the stepping stone to wealth and respect.’’5 Black families invested in the 2

bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989). 3 Only a few publications have treated the black women doctorate, but recently an article was written about black women historians that touches on a few of such women. Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, ‘‘Black Women Historians from the Late 19th Century to the Dawning of the Civil Rights Movement,’’ The Journal of African American History 89, (Summer 2004): 241–261. Earlier articles may be found in an historical overview on black women’s impact on higher education in Journal of Negro Education 51 (Summer 1982). This special issue includes an article on Jane McAllister, one of the first black PhD’s in education, and first black doctorate at Teachers College. In 1929, McAllister became the first black female head of the department of education at Fisk, among other notable achievements during her career. See Winona Williams-Burns, ‘‘Jane Ellen McAllister: Black Pioneer in Teacher Education,’’ Journal of Negro Education 51, (Summer 1982): 342– 357. 4 Erlene Stetson. ‘‘Black Feminism in Indiana, 1893–1933.’’ Phylon: Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture 44, (1983): 292, as quoted in Stephanie Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 10. 5 W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 638.

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educations of both sons and daughters, expecting that both would use their learning to advance the race. Although access, opportunity, and funding were extremely limited, education and schooling remained high priorities within the black community into the twentieth century.6 By 1940, more black women than men earned bachelor and master degrees.7 Still, the number of black women pursuing doctorates in the 1940s and 1950s was smaller than the number of black male doctorates, even in education. Many reasons account for this disparity, including strictures associated with the vision of women’s proper role. Over the years, the scholarship in black women’s history has defined ever more fully what might be called the ‘‘sphere of black women.’’ While Jim Crow limited all aspects of black people’s lives, black women were expected to occupy certain spaces and fulfill narrowly prescribed roles and responsibilities, ones in which the opportunities for professional and communal leadership were circumscribed. A concern with propriety also pervaded these spaces due to a belief that ‘‘morality, thrift and hard work were essential to black progress.’’8

6

Many books have documented the important role of education in the African American community. A few of the classical works include Henry Allen Bullock, A History of Negro Education in the South, from 1619 to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); James Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Robert Margo, Race and Schooling in the South, 1880–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); James L. Leloudis, Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Random House, 1998); Adam Fairclough, Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001); and Henry N. Drewry and Humphrey Doermann, Stand and Prosper: Private Black Colleges and Their Students (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 7 Lynn D. Gordon, ‘‘Education and the Professions,’’ in Nancy A. Hewitt, ed., A Companion to American Women’s History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005): 227–249, 245. See also, Nancy E. Bertaux and M. Christine Anderson, ‘‘An Emerging Tradition of Educational Achievement: African American Women in College and the Professions, 1920–1950,’’ in Equity & Excellence in Education 34, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 16–21. In 1940, Ambrose Caliver reports that the total number of black undergraduates enrolled in arts and sciences nationwide was 29,152 students, in ‘‘The Education of Negro Leaders,’’ The Journal of Negro Education 17, no. 3 (Summer 1948): 240–248, 241. 8 Michele, Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 10. Darlene Clark Hine, in ‘‘Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West.’’ Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 912–920, has commented on the ways in which black women created a culture of dissemblance that masked their private lives: ‘‘in the face of the pervasive stereotypes and negative estimations of the sexuality of Black women’’ (p. 916). Deborah Gray White has concluded that this explains some of the difficulties of finding primary source materials about black women’s personal lives. See Deborah Gray White, ‘‘Mining the Forgotten: Manuscript Sources for Black Women’s History,’’ Journal of American History 74, (June 1987): 237–242.

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Traditionally, women have been the standard bearers for the moral stature of many communities. This was especially the case for black women professionals, given their visibility. As Darlene Clark Hine has noted, ‘‘The more educated they were, the greater the sense of being responsible, somehow, for the advance of the race and for the elevation of Black womanhood.’’9 Thus, the prescription for black womanhood was built, in part, upon the ideals of the aspiring black middle class, although evidence exists that black women of all socioeconomic strata contributed to the uplift of the race.10 ‘‘Proper homes had strong patriarchs, pure mothers and children schooled in race pride.’’ 11 Support for this position can be seen in the comments of black scholars of the early twentieth century. For example, in 1906 Thomas Baker, who held a doctorate in philosophy from Yale, wrote that black women ‘‘must not be educated away from being a mother y. The race is dependent upon her giving her best to her children.’’ He argued that women should be better educated than men because superior women would raise superior sons.12 Similar ideas were put forth by W.E.B. DuBois. In an address at Spelman College in 1902 he cautioned the graduates, ‘‘Unless the Negro women of today are prepared to assume the responsibility of healthy families, of two or three children y we are not going to keep progress with the virile races of the world.’’13 These ideas contrast markedly with the beliefs of early twentieth century black women leaders such as Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell who saw women as the leaders of racial progress. As Cooper so famously and eloquently stated, Only the BLACK WOMAN can say, ‘‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.’’14 [original italics]

9

Hine, 919. See, for example, Robin D.G. Kelley, ‘‘‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,’’ The Journal of American History 80, (June 1993): 75–112. Kelley describes the myriad forms of resistance of black workingclass women and men to Jim Crow. 11 Mitchell, 12. 12 Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 140. 13 W.E.B. DuBois, ‘‘The Work of Negro Women in Society,’’ Spelman Messenger 18, (February, 1902): 1–3. 14 Anna Julia Cooper, ‘‘Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration of a Race,’’ read before the convocation of colored clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Washington, DC. As quoted in Charles Lehmert and Esme Bahn, The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 63. 10


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Black women believed their role was to ameliorate the effects of racism, seeing the future of the race as residing squarely in the realm of women.15 Parents and the community prepared black women to take a position of ‘‘socially responsible individualism.’’16 This included faith in their own ability to succeed as wives and workers, but their decisions as individuals needed to be firmly rooted in community considerations and expectations. Too much professional success, specifically earning advanced degrees, challenged this balancing act between self and others, leaving black women caught between their responsibilities to others and their own desires for leadership and recognition. Regardless of a woman’s abilities and achievement, she was still subject to the scrutiny of ‘‘what a woman ought to be and to do.’’17 Thus, personal aspirations should be constrained by the parameters of the black woman’s sphereFmotherhood, teaching, and the helping professions. Mary Church Terrell, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, in her 1916 address entitled ‘‘The Modern Woman,’’ argued that there were aspects of racial uplift that only women could accomplish: We are daughters, sisters, mothers and wives. We must care for ourselves and rear our families like all women y. We have more to do than other women. Those of us fortunate enough to have education must share it with the less fortunate of our race. We must go into our communities and improve them; we must go into the nation and change it.18

From one vantage point, black women’s expectation of workforce participation may have made them freer to ‘‘go into the nation and change

15

A number of works support this contention. See in particular Elizabeth Higginbotham, Too Much to Ask: Black Women in the Era of Integration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow; Margaret Smith Crocco and O.L. Davis, eds. ‘‘Bending the Future to Their Will’’: Civic Women, Social Education and Democracy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Margaret Smith Crocco, Petra Munro and Kathleen Weiler, Pedagogies of Resistance: Women Educator Activists, 1880–1960 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999); Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation; Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves 1884–1994; Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do; Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race. 16 Shaw, 2. 17 Shaw coins this phrase to speak to the parameters that defined the role of the black woman. 18 As quoted in White, Too Heavy a Load, 22. Hine, in ‘‘Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,’’ notes that ‘‘At the core of essentially every activity of [National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs] individual members was a concern with creating positive images of Black women’s sexuality. To counter negative stereotypes, many black women felt compelled to downplay, even deny, sexual expression’’ (918). Maintaining a sense of propriety was paramount in the lives of many middle-class, black women.

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it’’ by contrast with middle-class, married white women for whom working outside the home was viewed negatively. Throughout the twentieth century, black women, married or single, participated in the labor force in far greater numbers than white women.19 From another vantage point, black women’s workforce opportunities were exceedingly constrained. Darlene Clark Hine notes that ‘‘Scholars of Black urban history and Black labor history agree that Black women faced greater economic discrimination and had fewer employment opportunities than did Black men.’’20 Despite the extraordinary progress blacks made in seeking education and earning diplomas, women with bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees represented a very small subset of all blacks in the 1940s and 1950s. This singularity created a paradox. On the one hand, these women’s educational attainment brought them respect due to their contributions; at the same time, these accomplishments distanced them from other black women and men, producing a sense of isolation and marginality, even within their own community. Despite these difficulties, women eagerly sought higher education. Perhaps the best evidence available to support this contention can be found in the enrollment and graduation rates at historically black institutions.21 For example, in 1920, 18.9 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded by historically black colleges were granted to women; by 1950 that percentage increased to 50.7 percent.22 In 1940, black women earned 61.8 percent of the master’s degrees awarded at these institutions, slipping a bit ten years later due to the GI Bill, to 56.4 percent.23 Looking at doctorates awarded in the field of education during the years 1928–1955, about 60 percent went to men and 40 percent to women.24 This contrasts sharply with the situation outside education. Horace Mann Bond’s study, Black American 19

According to Sara Jane Deutsch, ‘‘In 1920 five times more married black women than women of any other racial or ethnic group worked outside the home. More than 50 percent of adult black women earned wages.’’ In ‘‘From Ballots to Breadlines,’’ in Nancy F. Cott (ed.), No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 431. However, as Deutsch also points out, the vast majority of black women in 1920 earned their wages in domestic service. 20 Hine, ‘‘Rape and the Inner lives of Black Women in the Middle West,’’ 912–920. 21 We recognize that black men and women also attended predominantly white colleges in the North such as Oberlin, Amherst, and the seven sister colleges but the vast majority of blacks with college degrees attended historically black institutions. 22Bertaux and Anderson, ‘‘An Emerging Tradition of Educational Achievement,’’ 18. 23 Jeanne L Noble, ‘‘The Negro Woman Looks at Her College Education,’’ (PhD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 1955), 29. 24 Horace Mann Bond, Black American Scholars: A Study of Their Beginnings (Detroit, MI: Balamp Press, 1972), 80. We document the phenomenon of the black education doctorate more fully in Cally L. Waite and Margaret Smith Crocco, ‘‘Fighting Injustice through Education,’’ History of Education 33, no. 5 (September 2004): 573–583. This work owes a debt to James Anderson’s monograph, The Black Education Professoriate, SPF Monograph Series, 1984.


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Scholars, reveals that only about 16 percent of all doctorates in all disciplines were awarded to women between 1896 and 1960.25 Over 80 percent of college educated black women entered the field of education in the first half of the twentieth century.26 During the 1920s three black women earned doctorates in education.27 Jennie Porter received her PhD degree from the University of Cincinnati in 1928; Aletha Washington, from Ohio State in 1928; and Jane McAllister, from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1929. Studying and teaching education in colleges represented an investment of black intellectual and social capital critically important to improving elementary and secondary schooling for black children, a project on which many other aspects of racial progress depended. And it was an arena in which the black community, like the white, felt black women to have a special mission. In examining the problem of marginality among well-educated black women, the three authors all point to a set of pressures and limitations on black women’s sphere. They place their discussion into the context of women’s situation more broadly in the United States. They identify the factors of racism, sexism, and classism which shape black women’s unique position. They also place some responsibility on black women themselves. Each author argues that black women should expand their occupational horizons beyond the helping professions. Each author concludes her study with a set of recommendations for actions to help remedy the problems of isolation and marginality. The years 1940–1955 were ones of rising aspirations for many blacks due to a burgeoning civil rights movement and the effects of the Second World War. Historians Rayford W. Logan and John Hope Franklin, both with doctorates from Harvard, have described the racism as well as the loneliness they experienced in seeking positions and recognition commensurate with their talent.28 In 1948, Ambrose

25Horace 26

Mann Bond, Black American Scholars, 80. Bertaux and Anderson, 18. 27 Looking at doctorates produced outside of education, the picture is more uneven. Bond’s study, Black American Scholars, reveals that between 1896 and 1960 only about 16 percent of doctoral degrees across all disciplines went to black women. In 1921, three black women became the first in the United States to earn the PhD. Sadie Alexander took her degree in economics at the University of Pennsylvania; Eva Dykes pursued philology at Harvard; and Georgiana Simpson earned a degree in languages at the University of Chicago. 28See, for example, John Hope Franklin’s essay, ‘‘The Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar,’’ in his Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938–1988 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 295–308; John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005); and Keith Janken, Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African American Intellectual (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983).

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Caliver, ‘‘specialist in Negro education’’ at the United States Office of Education, captured the sense of hope in some quarters of the black community when he wrote that national ‘‘leaders are beginning to feel keenly the lack of harmony between our democratic theories and practices as evidenced by educational inequalities, social restrictions, economic limitations.’’29 But Caliver also acknowledged later in the essay the ‘‘social distance’’ produced by education between those ‘‘following intellectual pursuits’’ and their families.30 In the case of women, the circumstances were the same and yet somewhat different. Lucy Diggs Slowe, the first Dean of Women at Howard University, labored hard to loosen the strictures placed on women within a climate of paternalism and sexism under Howard University President Mordecai Johnson. In the years just before her premature death in 1936, she argued strongly for black women to make choices beyond teaching in selecting careers, both for their own good and the good of the race.31 During the Second World War, many women seized new employment opportunities due to the manpower shortage, but black women encountered resistance to their hiring by private companies as well as government agencies.32 After the war, the civil rights movement galvanized hundreds of African American men and women. The years 1954 and 1955 witnessed the historic Supreme Court decisions later known as Brown I and Brown II. Given the tumultuous nature of these years, it is perhaps not surprising that Cuthbert, Bolton, and Noble turned their attention to considering what these changes might mean for women. Black Women and Higher Education Although these three women undoubtedly recognized that racism and sexism were not necessarily on their way out, they must have felt a sense of possibility if not optimism in the rapid pace of social change. Their choice of subject matter may also have registered their frustration with the pace of change and the lack of recognition and reward black women’s educational achievement had brought. 29

Ambrose Caliver, ‘‘The Education of Negro Leaders,’’ Journal of Negro Education 17, no. 3 (Summer 1948): 240–248, 244. 30 Ibid., 247. 31 Linda M. Perkins, ‘‘Lucy Diggs Slowe: Champion of the Self-Determination of African-American Women in Higher Education,’’ Journal of Negro History 81, (AutumnWinter 1996): 89–104. 32 Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women during World War II (Greenwich, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981); Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982).


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In deciding to write about women’s issues for a doctoral dissertation, these three authors were making an unusual choice for this period. Moreover, many dissertation sponsors viewed writing about one’s own race and gender as highly suspect, considering it to create a problem with objectivity.33 Nevertheless, then as now, a few mentors could be found who were willing to support less orthodox approaches. Cuthbert, Bolton, and Noble were clearly fortunate to have found such support at their respective institutions: for Cuthbert and Noble, Teachers College, Columbia University; for Bolton, the University of Southern California.34 At Teachers College, in particular, the rural educator Mabel Carney advocated energetically for black students for several decades, including running interference with difficult advisors and sponsors.35 Surely, the fact that each woman earned her degree at a white research university put feelings of isolation into starker relief, contributing to the desire to investigate black women’s situation more generally as ‘‘outsiders’’ or ‘‘on the margins,’’ as it is often put these days. But their focus on black undergraduate education suggests that the problems they experienced in studying for their doctorates were simply the latest chapter in lives lived as outsiders, a theme implicated in Darlene Clark Hine’s famous notion of ‘‘dissemblance.’’ Dissemblance is the strategy adopted by black women of hiding their personal lives behind a mask of conventionality and propriety in order to shield themselves from allegations about black women’s sexuality.36 Written in 1942, 1949, and 1955, Cuthbert, Bolton, and Noble’s dissertations tackled pioneering subject matter with an urgency signaling the extraordinary nature of this period. These dissertations provide critical insights into the attitudes and experiences of a small yet significant cohort of black women whose efforts at racial uplift and 33

Milton Gaither, writing in American Educational History Revisited: A Critique of Progress (New York: Teachers College Press, 2003), notes that women educational scholars such as Marion Thompson Wright and Jeanne Noble ‘‘took positions that had not previously been considered by male historians’’ (125). Julie Des Jardins in Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 2003) describes the ‘‘womanist consciousness’’ among black female historians in response to difficulties encountered in trying to break into the field of the ‘‘New Negro History,’’ 145. 34Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982) suggests the importance of mentors in supporting students in pursuing topics that are considered to be novel. 35 For a description of some of the problems encountered by black students at Teachers College and the work of the white rural educator Mabel Carney in supporting them, especially women, see Kathleen Weiler, ‘‘Mabel Carney at Teachers College: From Home Missionary to White Ally,’’ Teachers College Record 107, (December 2005): 2599–2633. 36 Hine, ‘‘Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women,’’ 912.

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personal fulfillment sometimes pulled them in opposing directions. They were written within a shifting context marked by the absence of many traditional male undergraduates as well as new demands made on women for home front support. These conditions were followed by a period of social conservatism about women’s proper place in which they were admonished on many fronts to give up the nontraditional roles they took on during the war.

Cuthbert’s ‘‘Education and Marginality: A Study of the Negro Woman College Graduate,’’ 1942 Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and educated at the University of Minnesota and Boston University, Cuthbert began her career as an English teacher and assistant principal at the Burrell Normal School in Florence, Alabama, in 1920, becoming principal in 1925. Between 1927 and 1930, she served as dean of women at Talladega College in Alabama, one of the first to be named a dean to this position in the country. She is probably best known as a writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance, who published several volumes of biography, poetry, children’s stories, and essays. She is also known for her work with the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). Eventually, she served with the Leadership Division of its National Board. She also worked with the NAACP and the National Negro Congress. In the forties, she became the first black woman professor at Brooklyn College, where she remained until her retirement in 1961. Her views about the situation of women on campus as students, scholars, and administrators echoed the sentiments of others, finding widespread sexism and a lack of authority and respect for women serving as professors and administrators.37 Like many other black women seeking professional advancement, she came north over successive summers to pursue a master’s degree at Teachers College, awarded in 1931. Cuthbert’s experiences of moving back and forth between northern and southern states may have made her particularly sensitive to insider/outsider issues. Her chosen topic of ‘‘education and marginality’’ undoubtedly stems at least in part from her own challenges. At Talladega, she had been a black woman in a man’s world, and a well-educated black woman within a region of poorly educated whites and blacks. At Teachers College, she was a black woman 37

Marion Cuthbert, ‘‘The Dean of Women at Work,’’ Journal of the National Association of College Women 13–14 (April 1928): 39–44. Cuthbert concurs with Lucy Diggs Slowe, dean of women at Howard University in the 1920s, about the sexism shaping college women’s lives on campus.


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among mostly white students. At Brooklyn College, she was a black scholar working within a predominantly white male faculty. Her dissertation entitled ‘‘Education and Marginality: A Study of the Negro Woman College Graduate’’ examines the effects of college on black women. Cuthbert drew on the previously published work by Charles S. Johnson, Director of the Department of Social Science, and later president of Fisk University, whose book, The Negro College Graduate, provided a baseline of data concerning black graduates.38 Her research investigated whether black women college graduates were ‘‘more or less adrift, severed by new and different motives in its ways of living from the larger group of less highly educated Negroes or those little educated at all?’’39 Cuthbert asked forty-four women around the country to distribute questionnaires to black women in their communities, those with and without undergraduate degrees. One hundred seventy-two college women and fifty-eight noncollege educated women responded. After a brief history of black women and their entry into American higher education, Cuthbert analyzes black college women’s situation from a comparative sociological context, highlighting the occupational opportunities open to blacks in contrast to whites, and emphasizing the notion that combining marriage and work was a necessity for black women.40 Her dissertation documents the many forms of ‘‘maladjustment,’’ as she puts it, found among black female college graduates. She highlights the hostility these women faced among other blacks. According to Cuthbert, less educated black women sometimes saw college women as ‘‘snobbish and aloof,’’ or of being ‘‘selfish and clannish.’’41 Others criticized college educated black women for investing too little effort in advancing the race. Some black men harbored ‘‘antagonisms,’’ Cuthbert found, arising from economic competition with better educated black women. Given the precarious situation of black men economically ‘‘women had to assume, more than was customary for women in this country, the total responsibility for family groups.’’42 Many women felt frustrated in not being able to pursue certain occupations because they were black women. Cuthbert advised that black college women ‘‘should be particularly concerned for Negro men and the special social and psychological problems confronting them.’’43 Overall, Cuthbert found that the black 38

Charles S. Johnson, The Negro College Graduate (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938). 39 Marion T. Cuthbert, ‘‘Education and Marginality: A Study of the Negro Woman College Graduate,’’ (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1942), xiv. 40Ibid., 38. 41 Ibid., 76. 42 Ibid., 7. 43 Ibid., 119.

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community held mixed reactions, from indifference and outright antagonism to being very appreciative, of the stature and contributions of black women.44 Cuthbert argued that the situation of black women was unique: ‘‘The status of Negro women in the Negro group makes them participate more often in higher education than the women of many of the other minority groups in the country. In spite of this fact, their status as Negroes and as women limits their opportunities to function.’’45 She described problems of segregation, discrimination, invisibility, and stereotyping, even in liberal white graduate schools such as Teachers College, Columbia University, where, ‘‘They eat in the same dining halls, attend the same classes, but only a small space in one, if any dormitory is reserved for Negro women.’’46 Cuthbert clearly believed that the college experience was valuable for black women, despite the limitations and frustrations associated with it. She identified black women’s motivation to attend college as largely a matter of personal desire. They also sought education, she found, to ensure their family’s future stability and raise their status. However, her respondents also talked about the strain of their education on relationships because their families did not understand them as well as they once had nor did they return home as much anymore. Cuthbert also highlighted the lower rate of marriage for black women college graduates, which she explained in terms of their economic independence and the fewer children they would bear, in both cases a pattern found for white female college graduates as well.47 Socially, these graduates had more white friends than other black women. But these interracial contacts brought black women face-toface with racial stereotypes, hostility, and tensions. They were not fully accepted by the white world but less satisfied with living exclusively in black society. Cuthbert concluded that their education made them more race conscious than their peers, commenting, ‘‘There is no complete returning to the world they have left; there is no complete entering into the new world.’’48 And she held the black community responsible along

44

Ibid., 74. Ibid., xvi. 46 Ibid., 68. 47 On the subject of black college women, marriage and motherhood during these years, see Hine, 919; for white women, see Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Geraldine Jonc¸ich Clifford, Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Institutions 1870–1937 (New York: Feminist Press, 1989); Patricia Palmieri, In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 48 Cuthbert, 117. 45


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with the white: ‘‘Perhaps no kind of difficulty encountered by the Negro college woman is more perplexing than the hostility she faces from within the Negro group itself.’’49 Toward the end of her dissertation, Cuthbert devoted an entire chapter to the issue of graduate women. She found more than half her respondents dissatisfied with their leadership opportunities, even though she argued that higher education was traditionally thought to confer leadership almost automatically. The barriers to greater community involvement her respondents identified related to race, family obligations, and a sense of their own personal shortcomings. In analyzing these responses, Cuthbert placed some responsibility on black college women themselves for their problems. Even though many of her subjects were active in politics and church activities, she found their involvement in leadership roles declining. She encouraged black women to become leaders both in racial and interracial work and ‘‘to press for recognition of [their] ability to help with the reordering of higher education generally and with the education of women particularly.’’50 To retreat from these responsibilities, Cuthbert suggested, only exacerbated the problem and ultimately undermined other women’s prospects in gaining recognition and leadership roles: Higher education acts as an isolation factor for all Negroes who through college training and experience become separated from the whole Negro group. Negro college women, in addition to being conscious of their isolation through education, are also aware that as women they are still somewhat limited in their functioning in many areas of culture.51

Her critique of the social order contributing to isolation for women does not name the underlying problem as patriarchy or sexism, as a scholar writing about this situation might today. Instead, Cuthbert viewed marginality as an unintended consequence of higher education for women, an experience in which ‘‘The individual sees himself (sic) better in relation to the whole of society, and consequently feels satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the nature of the relationship.’’52

Bolton’s ‘‘The Problems of Negro College Women,’’ 1949 Bolton studied at Prairie View State College, a historically black college, in Texas, and then earned her undergraduate degree at Washburn 49

Ibid., 75. Ibid., 86–90, 119. 51 Ibid., xiv. 52 Ibid., 116. 50

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College in Kansas, in 1930. In 1933, she completed a master’s degree at the University of Kansas and served for six years as dean of women at the Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes in Normal, Alabama. She then moved to Lincoln University, working as dean of women and professor of philosophy. Between 1941 and 1942, she was fourth president of the Deans of Women and Girls in Negro Schools, an organization to which Cuthbert also belonged. Later in life, Bolton helped establish the ‘‘Top Ladies of Distinction’’ a national humanitarian and professional organization in Texas. Cuthbert’s themes resonate in Bolton’s dissertation, perhaps because Bolton draws upon Teachers College professor Willystine Goodsell’s work, The Education of Women,53 and because both served as deans of women. Bolton does not cite Cuthbert, nor is there any other record indicating that Bolton knew Cuthbert’s work. Nevertheless, several features of her dissertation and conclusions struck similar chords.54 Bolton’s focus, however, was much narrower than Cuthbert’s as she examined the views of female graduates from only six southern black coeducational colleges. Her conclusions rest on two hundred seventy-eight questionnaires and fifty interviews with graduates who had left these colleges between two and ten years by 1947. Bolton examined the extent to which coeducational institutions attended to the needs of their female students. She started from the premise that men and women are inherently different and hold differentiated roles in society, which Cuthbert did not seem to take as a given. Bolton asked: ‘‘[H]aving shown that they [women] could compete with the opposite sex, should women continue to be subjected to the rigors of curricula which were designed for the masculine activities of life and which had little to do with preparing women for the professional, vocation, domestic, and social activities appropriate to their sex?’’55 In addressing what she called the ‘‘problems of Negro college women,’’she set up four categories: curricular, economic, social, and psychological, and then laid out her chapters along these lines. From a curricular standpoint, the graduates wished they had taken more practical courses related to marriage and the family, childrearing, business, and consumer education. Their educations were lacking in preparing them for lives as working women and mothers. Many complained that they were trained for vocations not open to them due

53

Willystine Goodsell, The Education of Women (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920). 54 Ina B. Bolton, ‘‘The Problems of Negro College Women’’ (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1949). Bolton asserts on page 8 that there have been no previous studies of Negro college women. 55 Ibid., 1.


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to race. Bolton also reported that the lack of curricular options at landgrant colleges, along with blacks’ inability to attend white state schools, restricted these women’s ability to gain the necessary academic preparation for desired jobs.56 She asserted that some of the economic problems they faced might be remedied by offering courses more suitable to their employment prospects as well as better advisement. Under the heading of social and psychological problems, Bolton reported that one-fifth of her respondents wished they were men. One quarter ‘‘felt fettered, restrained, and inhibited because they were women.’’57 A sizable minority felt restrained and subordinated by marriage. Bolton’s conclusions about marriage reinforce Cuthbert’s views: ‘‘College training had greatly decreased the desire of graduates to marry and to rear families.’’58 Her survey respondents suggested several social challenges colleges might address: grooming, training in social skills, building campus-wide social traditions, providing more interaction with faculty, assisting with feelings of inferiority, and selfconsciousness. These problems stemmed from the fact that ‘‘More than 35 percent of the interview group had been made, by social conditioning, to feel self-conscious because they were Negroes, and for various reasons a total of 39 percent in their own judgment tended to undervalue themselves.’’59 Bolton suggested that colleges needed to make a greater effort concerning female students’ ‘‘self-individuation and self-appreciation as women,’’60 a prominent theme, as we will see, in Noble’s study. Bolton called for curriculum reform, chiefly along ‘‘life adjustment’’ lines: ‘‘All colleges should offer women students a very practical down-to-earth course in marriage, child care, personality development, and consumer education.’’61 She also recommended expanding their extracurricular opportunities, especially access to sororities. While she explicitly identified inadequate treatment by coeducational colleges as the reason for black women’s dissatisfaction, Bolton’s expressions of concern are more muted, her analyses of the forces at work, less probing, than Cuthbert’s. Bolton emphasized the vocational and adaptive elements needed in improving black women’s education. To prepare women better for the futures they would face, ‘‘these land-grant colleges should reexamine and improve, if need be, their philosophy of education for

56

Ibid., 216. Ibid., 101. 58 Ibid., 218. 59 Ibid., 220. 60 Ibid., 219. 61 Ibid., 226. 57

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women.’’62 Nevertheless, Bolton also called on colleges to address ‘‘the problem of how women may emancipate themselves from fettering traditions.’’63

Noble’s ‘‘The Negro Woman Looks at Her College Education,’’1955 Jeanne Noble, a native of Albany, Georgia, graduated from Howard University in 1946, having studied with Alain Locke, E. Franklin Frazier, and Sterling Brown. In 1948 she completed a master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia University, and then returned south to teach at Albany State College, a historically black institution in Albany, Georgia. Between 1950 and 1952, she served as dean of women at Langston University. A biography indicates that she left Langston to pursue a doctorate so as ‘‘to obtain the respect she wanted’’; she completed her dissertation, ‘‘The Negro Woman Looks at Her College Education,’’ at Teachers College in 1955.64 Noble’s career was filled with leadership positions. She became dean of the Dorothy I. Height Leadership Institute of the National Council of Negro Women in Washington, DC, and, between 1958 and 1963, president of the black sorority, Delta Sigma Theta. She worked on US federal commissions dealing with civil rights and education for blacks and women during four presidential administrations (John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and Gerald Ford). In 1964, President Johnson asked her to help develop the Women’s Job Corps, a part of his Great Society program. She retired as a full professor from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, believing that she was the first black woman to become a tenured full professor at a major white university. Today she is perhaps best known for her work with black women’s organizations and her book, Beautiful Also Are the Souls of My Black Sisters. 65 Noble’s research posed the question to her research subjects about ‘‘what they wanted to get out of college, what college did for them, and what college failed to do.’’66 She collected surveys from 412 black female 62

Ibid., 226. Ibid., 183. 64 Jessie Carney Smith, ed., Notable Black American Women (Detroit: Gale Research, 1992); Jeanne Noble, ‘‘The Negro Woman College Graduate’’ (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1955). Noble’s dissertation was reissued by Teachers College Press in 1956, and again by Garland Publishing Company in 1987. 65 Jeanne Noble, Beautiful Also Are the Souls of my Black Sisters (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1978). See also, Burt Landry’s Black Working Wives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) for crediting Noble with highlighting this model of black womanhood. 66 Noble, 1. 63


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college graduates who had attended black or white, single sex or coeducational institutions, held membership in one of four black sororities, left college at least five years earlier; and lived in one of six major US cities. She also interviewed ten prominent black female leaders, including Cuthbert. Noble found many failures in meeting the black college women’s needs. First, the rules and regulations in black colleges governing female students were too restrictive. Second, a lack of opportunity existed on campus for black women to participate fully as citizens, especially in leadership capacities. Third, research subjects complained about poor relationships with male faculty members and little advisement about vocational preparation or what she characterizes as black women’s poor self-concept. Instead, the climate at too many campuses tended toward expression of concerns about black women’s ‘‘moral unfitness.’’ Noble argued for greater responsiveness to women’s educational needs. Like both Cuthbert and Bolton, she emphasized that ‘‘many negative factors in the culture y operate against Negroes and women.’’67 Like the other two authors, she also contended that black college women needed higher education as preparation for employment, whether they married or not. The majority of Noble’s respondents worked as teachers, although Noble found that more black women were moving into new lines of work. Almost three-fourths of her subjects studied beyond their baccalaureate degrees and half earned masters degrees.68 Many respondents expressed the hope that education would make them useful citizens who were better prepared for marriage, family, and career. Given the cultural glorification of home and family during the 1950s, it is not surprising that Noble commented with palpable relief that ‘‘recent reports seem to indicate that the number of college women who marry is increasing.’’69 She continued, ‘‘Over 75 percent of the graduates of this study are or have been married,’’ calling this statistic ‘‘admirable.’’70 Noble endorsed the black woman’s trinity of purposesF self, kin, and community. She praised the black community for its support of black women’s education, but placed greater emphasis than Cuthbert on the importance of marriage for college-educated women.

67

Ibid., 1, 4, 18. Noble’s belief echoes that of W.E.B. DuBois and others. Ibid., 51–66. 69 Eugenia Kaledin, Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s (Boston: Twayne, 1984). Kaledin notes that the fifties was a decade of progress for black women, who, as Noble reports, found new employment opportunities opening up (p. 149). Nevertheless, Noble’s emphasis on marriage and family can be read as a concern that such opportunities not be taken up at the expense of marriage and family. 70 Noble, 39. 68

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Noble also considered citizenship, its demands, and responsibilities more directly than the previous works. During this period of the Brown decisions, concerns over blacks’ legal, political, and social status must have served as an ever-present backdrop for her writing. She found the black woman ‘‘in need of techniques and training for achieving equality as a citizen. Her fight for equal citizenship has been a difficult one and is still evolving step by step. She seems conscious of this and accords it a place among important college concerns.’’71 Noble wrote at a time in which public opinion polling was on the rise. Published surveys allowed her to make comparisons of white women’s perspectives with her study’s responses on several measures. She contrasted her subjects’ opinions with those expressed by respondents to a survey administered by the American Association of University Women (AAUW). Both the AAUW sample and Noble’s subjects recommended more attention to vocational and personal counseling, more ‘‘functional’’ and ‘‘realistic’’ education, and coursework aimed at developing good human relations. But Noble also found demands for education that ‘‘promotes self-acceptance’’ far more pronounced among her participants than in the white group. She concluded that ‘‘Education must help to give the Negro girl a sense of individual worthiness.’’72 Noble’s work bears the imprint of the psychological and sociological literature of the day to a degree not found in the other two dissertations, especially regarding psycho-social adjustment.73 Although this theme surfaced in Bolton’s work, the emphasis on education for self-fulfillment, including aesthetic sensibility, emerged more prominently in Noble’s work: The subordination of these aspects raises a serious question as to whether these women lack confidence in their right to seek self-fulfillment y. Maybe to these women the concept of self-fulfillment seems a luxury. Yet it appears that the more doggedly they see themselves as breadwinners, so to speak, rather than as women who have a right to develop their personal interests and abilities, the more urgent is the need to encourage them to develop themselves as persons. Under the stark and grim necessities of life that they point out, there is something poignant about what they did not choose.74

71

Ibid., 66. Ibid., 87, 104. 73 Ibid., 101. Noble’s view is reminiscent of Lucy Diggs Slowe’s position on this issue. Ronald Butchart in his 1988 essay, ‘‘‘Outthinking and Outflanking the Owners of the World’: A Historiography of the African American Struggle for Education,’’ History of Education Quarterly 28, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 333–366, notes the importance of politics and power to the history of education and the contradictory ways in which education in a liberal culture affects individuals, moving them toward more private ends and away from communal ones. 74 Noble, 137. 72


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Noble’s dissertation described the serious impediments to black women’s ‘‘self-acceptance,’’ ‘‘self-fulfillment,’’ and ‘‘self-understanding,’’ because ‘‘they are women and they are Negroes, two groups labeled ‘different.’’’75 She acknowledged that ‘‘numerous physical and mental blocks y impede the development of a healthy conception of self.’’76 She discussed the ‘‘bed of stereotypes’’ which made black women’s becoming ‘‘effective individuals judged on their own merits’’ difficult.77 Noble also broke new ground in discussing the sexual exploitation of black women. In the end, Noble advised colleges to provide female students with ‘‘the development of the individual’s personal powers, giving her freedom to play a responsible role in contemporary society.’’78 Noble concluded that ‘‘the more education helps the Negro woman to realize her own identity as a woman, as a human being, the nearer she is to all people, to all women y This is the key to human growthFto strive, to seek, to struggle toward self-fulfillment.’’79

Special Case of the Black Woman Doctorate One can only imagine how magnified the experiences documented by Cuthbert, Bolton, and Noble must have been for black women pursuing the doctorate.80 Black students interested in the doctorate during the first half of the twentieth century attended white research universities in the North because they were not allowed to attend southern white universities and black institutions did not offer doctorates. Given the racism and sexism pervasive in white institutions, especially those intent upon building elite reputations by keeping women few in number and relatively invisible, the experiences of black females pursuing doctorates must have been intensified versions of what has just been described. Indeed, the marginalization of female academics throughout higher 75

Ibid., 101. Ibid., 114. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 112. 79 Ibid., 141. 80 Over a third of this group took their degrees at Teachers College, Columbia University. A fifth attended New York University (NYU). The institutions graduating more than one black female doctorate during this period, in order of numerical preponderance, are as follows: Columbia University Teachers College, NYU, Ohio State, University of Michigan, Cornell, University of Cincinnati, Indiana, Northwestern, University of Minnesota, and University of Chicago. Undoubtedly, the top two institutions’ locations in New York City, with opportunities for forging relationships within the thriving black community in Harlem and finding work among professional organizations headquartered there, such as the YWCA, NAACP, and Urban League, help explain, in part, their attraction to black female scholars. 76

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education during this time periodFand sinceFhas been well established.81 Little wonder, then, that these three authors felt drawn to the topic of black women and higher education as they experienced their own educational isolation. It is difficult to assess the marginality of the female doctorate in education in any precise fashion. During this time, no dissertations addressed this topic, for obvious reasons. Moreover, too little attention has been paid to black women’s education during this period even today, and the contributions black women made to the creation and growth of the historically black colleges and universities has been underappreciated, if the extant historical literature is any indication.82 The overwhelming majority of black women pursuing this degree worked full time except for a relatively brief period of residency over the course of their doctoral work. It is not clear from contemporary historical research to what extent they were more or less able to gain prestigious fellowships from the Rockefeller or Rosenwald Funds.83 But we do know that in 1940 black women were paid less than black men over all occupations, and significantly less than white women and men, especially in the South, as a result of discrimination based on both gender and race.84 Traveling north from their places of employment to attend northern research universities was time consuming and expensive. Finding a place to live, especially because procuring dormitory space was often difficult for blacks at white institutions, was an additional burden.

81

See, for example, Clifford, ed., Lone Voyagers; Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Nadya Aisenberg and Mona Harrington, Women of Academe: Outsiders in the Sacred Grove (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). The situation of the black male academic has also been characterized as marginal. See Janken, Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African American Intellectual; John Hope Franklin, ‘‘The Dilemma of the African American Intellectual,’’ in his Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938–1988 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). 82 For example, Marybeth Gasman’s recent review, ‘‘Education in Black and White: New Perspectives on the History of Historically Black Colleges and Universities,’’ Teachers College Record. Published January 25, 2006, http://www.tcrecord.org (accessed August 3, 2006), provides much evidence of the ‘‘great man’’ approach to historicizing this topic. 83 Jayne Beilke’s article, ‘‘The Changing Emphasis of the Rosenwald Fellowship Fund 1928–1948.’’ Journal of Negro Education 66 (Winter 1997): 3–15, mentions a number of women who received awards, but no systematic comparison of gender and receiving an award is given. As the Fund changed its emphasis, however, from a more practical/ technical to a liberal arts/social sciences orientation, it is quite possible that women’s chances for an award diminished. 84 James S. Cunningham and Nadja Zalokar, ‘‘The Economic Progress of Black Women, 1940–1980: Occupational Distribution and Relative Wages,’’ Industrial and Labor Relations Review 45, no. 3 (April 1992): 540–555.


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Perhaps one way of measuring the cumulative effect of these difficulties is to consider length of time to completion of the doctoral degree. Research into the situation of black scholars studying at Teachers College provides a few insights about the comparative situation of black men and black women. Among the fifty-four black doctoral students in the first half of the twentieth century for whom records can be verified, male students on average took eight years to complete their doctoral degrees; female students, twelve years. The writers of the three dissertations were all preoccupied with the issue of black women and leadership. Another way to consider black women’s status as professionals working within higher education is to contrast the careers of men and women earning doctorates. Of the fiftyfour black doctorates who became presidents of colleges, only two were women: Ruth M. Harris, who became president of Stowe Teachers College (MA, University of Chicago; PhD 1929, Columbia University), and Willa C. Player, who became president of Bennett College (MA, in 1930, Oberlin; PhD 1948, Columbia University). Player took the reins in 1955 as the first female president of a school established for women in 1873. Until Johnnetta Betsch Cole became Spelman’s first female president in 1987 (an institution founded as a school and normal school for women in 1881). Player was the only black woman to serve as president of a black women’s college.85 The purpose of this article, however, lies not in suggesting that black women’s experiences of marginality prohibited them from notable achievement during these years. Cuthbert’s, Bolton’s, and Noble’s careers all provide countervailing evidence to that notion, as do the accomplishments of numerous other women. Many women figured prominently in introducing into black higher education new programs in teacher education, psychology, counseling, and school administration, especially the role of dean of women. They wrote dissertations having to do with teachers, curriculum, counseling, teachers’ working conditions, career education, and teacher education across fields, levels of schooling, states, and selected institutions that helped shape education at all levels for the black community. In fact, it might be argued that their marginalization played a role in their success. They forged new pathways and expanded the notion of what black women could be and do. Many did not marry, and so enjoyed a significant amount of freedom to chart their own course, and to travel and change jobs as they pleased. In the end, however, their career

85

See Beverly Guy-Sheftall, ‘‘Black Women and Higher Education: Spelman and Bennett Colleges Revisited,’’ Journal of Negro Education 51 (Fall 1982): 278–87.

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achievements left many of them feeling they had not been accorded the recognition and leadership opportunities they would have received had they been men with comparable credentials.86 It is important to underscore the fact that throughout these years, many professors at historically black college and institutionsFin which most of these women spent their careersFdid not have doctoral degrees. Yet, such men were often promoted to department heads and deans more rapidly than women with these degrees. Women’s opportunities for advancement were largely confined to administrative positions in teacher education departments or as deans of women. Competing with black men for recognition more broadly was problematic. As Cuthbert so eloquently noted, black men carried burdens of their own; it was one of black women’s communal duties to support them. Their role lay in serving but not leading, unless, of course, they were leading other women. Black female professors, including those working within the feminized field of education, often found themselves operating within narrow, predetermined institutional and organizational spaces. These boundaries were shaped by assumptions about who black women were; what they were (and were not) capable of because of gender and race, and how they should fulfill their obligations to the community. Even in black colleges, where the ethos of service was etched into virtually every school motto and mission statement, the possibilities for making a contribution provided markedly different pathways for men and women. Such strictures amounted to an oppressive role prescription against which some female scholars clearly chafed. Those who dared to contest these boundaries sometimes found themselves feeling marginalized and isolated within their communities. Conclusion What can be surmised, then, about the situation of black women with college and advanced degrees during these years? First, they clearly represented an ‘‘aristocracy of the educated,’’ giving them a special social 86

The Black Women’s Oral History project provides testimonial evidence of these problems and includes women in this study as well as several others who took their degrees outside education but who ended up working in this field: Olivia Stokes, Eva Dykes, Hattie Kelly, and Inabel Lindsay. These women voiced frustration about the chauvinistic attitudes of black male superiors and colleagues at places of employment and within professional organizations. See Ruth Edmonds Hill and Patricia Miller King, eds., The Black Women Oral History Project: A Guide to the Transcripts (Cambridge, MA: Radcliffe College, 1987). See also Perkins, ‘‘Lucy Diggs Slowe: Champion of the SelfDetermination of African-American Women in Higher Education,’’ 89–104; Crocco, Munro, and Weiler, Pedagogies of Resistance.


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and economic status.87 Second, their educations often produced marginality and isolation. Earning a doctorate has always been a long, arduous, and lonely process for scholars, male and female, black and white. Doing so as a woman, it might be argued, served as a formula for life-long marginality, then and now, while also opening up singular opportunities for career achievement, professional and personal frustrations, and perhaps some measure of satisfaction and pleasure as well. Being black and female in the United States during these decades of social change was to bear the double burden of race and gender in a society being pushed to address its racist legacy. Confronting its traditions of patriarchy and sexism would largely wait for a later date. Faced with the problem of operating within the sphere of black womanhood, these women often hid their inner selves behind masks of distance and formality that rarely allowed for display of anything but measured and carefully framed positions, responses, and personae. These dissertations provide unique insights into the ways in which black women negotiated their understanding of these possibilities as members of an educational aristocracy. The concerns expressed in the dissertations with grooming, marriage and family relationships, lack of attention to their needs, and paucity of leadership opportunities are all compelling evidence of the subjects’ frustrations in accommodating to a gendered and racialized social system which made quite particularized demands on middle-class black women. The black female doctorate felt constrained by the gendered norms of conventionality within their communities while at the same time pressing against these boundaries, often by foregoing marriage and family, and thus gaining some degree of freedom to design their own lives. Most especially, the unique notion of a black female intellectual could be both alien and alienating.88 The authors of these dissertations can be seen as calling upon their sisters for help in beginning a difficult conversation, one in which well-educated black women would demand using their educations both to uplift the race and recalibrate their social status. The changes these authors called for would require frank talk leading to alteration in the distribution of power, authority, and public prominence among black men and women. Despite the ongoing challenges related to these issues, the history of black women during this period reflects considerable achievement on a variety of fronts. Although this progress involved great personal cost, the fruits of black women’s efforts to use education in service of self and race are more than evident today.

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Cuthbert, 14. Hine, ‘‘Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women,’’ 293.

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