Generations of Women Historians

Within and Beyond the Academy

Hilda L. Smith, Melinda S. Zook, Hilda L. Smith, Melinda S. Zook

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319775678
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319775685
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History of Education
• Index: History

This collection focuses on generations of early women historians, seeking to identify the intellectual milieu and professional realities that framed their lives. It moves beyond treating them as simply individuals and looks to the social and intellectual forces that encouraged them to study history and, at the same time, would often limit the reach and define the nature of their study.  

This collection of essays speaks to female practitioners of history over the past four centuries that published original histories, some within a university setting and some outside. By analysing the values these early women scholars faced, readers can understand the broader social values that led women historians to exist as a unit apart from the career path of their male colleagues.

© The Author(s) 2018

Hilda L. Smith and Melinda S. Zook (eds.)Generations of Women Historianshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77568-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Women’s Scholarship Within and Outside the Academy, 1870–1960

Hilda L. Smith¹

(1)

University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

Hilda L. Smith

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were periods that held conflicting messages for women who wished to pursue intellectual interests. In the United States, women’s colleges were expanding both to train and to offer positions to women faculty.¹ In addition, there was a vibrant women’s movement that offered encouragement to those who pursued advanced training or studied women’s past accomplishments and restrictions. The “new woman” symbolized the young woman who resisted family-directed marriages and economic dependence, and who could select her own clothing and, to a degree, her own career. Yet, very few women were admitted to degree-granting, co-educational institutions, and even fewer were encouraged to pursue advanced degrees. They held few faculty positions at state or private colleges that admitted men. In addition, society in general still did not recognize women as individuals who pursued careers, although those who never married and spent their time in women’s colleges were more acceptable. Many of the historians, and other professionals discussed in this collection, emerged from this conflicting context, which offered exceptional encouragement and a positive atmosphere while in more practical terms provided little training or employment beyond small numbers at limited institutions.

For readers of this collection, it may sometimes be difficult to grasp the professional context these early women historians and other scholars faced in pursuing their work both within and outside the academy. The world of higher education and scholarship following World War II is so fundamentally different from the one they faced, that while we think we can put ourselves in the place of women who pursued advanced training from 1880 to 1940, in many ways we cannot. First, they were part of a minute percentage of American and European youth. Second, they seldom pursued advanced degrees alongside men and almost never taught at colleges and universities with them. Third, they were considerably wealthier, and came from culturally more sophisticated backgrounds, than the vast majority of the population. And, finally, they were always thought of as outsiders and their careers as secondary to men’s successful positions as historians or academics broadly. Their great chance for success came in separate women’s colleges where they mingled with others like themselves. It is thus the purpose of this introduction to move beyond the individual biographies of those pursuing historical scholarship included in this volume to provide a broader picture of the intellectual, academic, and professional context in which they worked, were able to publish and gain recognition, but were never able to become leading scholars in their field among academic historians.

From 1870 to 1920, there was a significant increase in the number of women attending college, but the broader reality is that only a tiny percentage of American women ever pursued higher education. In 1870, 21 percent of those attending college were women, and by 1920 it was 47.3 percent, yet most young Americans never received a high school diploma. Among the female college-age population, only 0.7 percent women attended in 1870, and this had increased by 1920 to just 7.6 percent of those aged 18 through 21.² Women students even more clearly lacked educational opportunities in Britain and France in the late 1800s and early 1900s. British women were excluded from universities and were only slowly admitted through the early decades of the twentieth century; French women were encouraged to pursue learning but seldom for their own sake, but rather to create educated wives and mothers and to counteract the educational backwardness that had contributed to France’s loss in the Franco -Prussian war of 1870.³

The story of US higher education (and in distinct ways in Europe) was characterized by class, ethnic, and gender restrictions. Colleges and universities in the East were more apt to be private and to possess more elite students, while public universities were being established in the West. Native-born whites dominated student bodies and faculty until after World War II. Disciplines in the liberal arts such as history were even more apt to have traditional students and faculty, while women’s colleges were composed of the same class and ethnic background as their Ivy League counterparts.⁴ The Morrill Act, signed by President Lincoln in 1862, sought to increase the numbers who went to college and the practicality of the subjects they studied, especially focusing on agriculture. But these institutions were heavily located in the West and they were not the primary public university in a state; for instance, the land grant colleges established by the bill were Iowa State institutions while the more liberal arts programs were offered by the University of Iowa, which was the flagship university of that state. Yet, it was the elite private institutions that gained most of the attention from public media, and even the films of the 1930s portrayed young men clad in tennis gear without an economic care in the world, attending a college or university.⁵

Research into early twentieth-century higher education has recognized these distinctions, but has not often drawn attention to how different disciplines experienced these class and ethnic realities.⁶ Some of the most extensive research has centered on the faculty of sociology and social work at the University of Chicago and their settlement counterparts at Hull House and elsewhere. The University is credited with incorporating an independent institution established by leaders of the settlement house movement as the college of Social Service Administration to train social workers, and establishing an early, and highly influential, Department of Sociology, also influenced by settlement leaders. Mary Jo Deegan’s comprehensive study, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, reveals both the close cooperation between male faculty and the female social service and social scientists living at Hull House and the lack of recognition among university faculty of the women’s contributions in these areas. For instance, one of the earliest examples of modern sociological research were the Maps and Papers of Hull House which surveyed Chicago’s neighborhoods based on demographic and economic data. In addition, many settlement scholars took up residence at the University in the College of Social Service Administration.⁷

Sociology, unlike other fields, allowed women a greater space as it was in its infancy and less moored to long-term academic customs. Or, in Deegan’s words: “At that time, sociology was an amorphous area of study … A little bit of history, a dash of political economy, and a pinch of social amelioration comprised the general hodge-podge of the ‘field.’” Deegan thoroughly explores the mutual influence of Jane Addams and other Hull House residents on the development of sociology, especially at Chicago, and their exchange with sociology faculty members on issues of social reform. Not merely does this demonstrate the interactions among those originating social science methodology and social welfare, but it illustrates clearly the continual interactions among scholars, researchers, and activists both within and outside the academy at a time when both higher education and social action were establishing their current intellectual emphases and structure.⁸ In a separate example, the labor activist Hilda Worthington Smith established a summer school for working class women at Bryn Mawr College. Such interaction between scholars and activists in the community and academic faculty was not so evident in older liberal arts disciplines such as history.

Unlike sociology, however, the discipline of history, while organizing the goals and governance structure of the American Historical Association (AHA), had little space for women, and especially for women of independent ideas and organizations. The few women who were admitted into the circle of those establishing the goals for the field came from women’s colleges. The most prominent, Lucy Salmon from Vassar College, continually complained that no other women were included in the “Committee of Seven,” which organized the governing rules for the AHA and teaching standards for the discipline. At annual meetings, she protested, female members were expected to engage in social events and meals with socially prominent women or faculty wives rather than with their male colleagues. Most significantly, they were not hired as faculty at the institutions where their male counterparts taught.⁹

The percentage of the population in institutions of higher education remained quite small in the United States and European nations until the period following World War II. It is not until the 1960s that large numbers began to attend colleges. In the United States, men expanded their numbers through the auspices of the G.I. Bill (1944) following World War II, but only with the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 did significant numbers of women pursue higher education or advanced and professional degrees.¹⁰

The steady upward trend of women gaining college degrees in the United States began immediately following the passage of the NDEA ; while men had benefited from the G.I. Bill following the war their gains were less uniform over the broader period.

For many of the historians discussed in this volume, their scholarship and college attendance was a marker of elite social and cultural standing. In the United States, there was a close tie between women at Seven Sister institutions and men at Ivy League and other elite, private colleges and universities and among their wealthy families. In reading about the men (and students at prominent women’s colleges to a lesser extent) from this elite culture, one is struck by the easy assumptions of superiority and presumed success among an overwhelmingly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) group. The apex of these men’s expected career path is typified in the lives of two men whose papers are held at the Huntington Library. William Bennett Munro and Edwin Franc is Gay not merely attended the best schools but parlayed that attendance, and later employment as faculty, into connections with business and government leaders. Munro , who graduated from and became a faculty member and dean at Harvard University and Gay, who also taught at Harvard, and later became director of research at the Huntington Library, were more than prominent academics. They reflected the public ties and positions not available during this period for the most prominent faculty at women’s colleges.

Each of these men served on a range of corporate and professional boards, was consulted about major social and economic issues, and had close links to government agencies. Contemporary, and subsequent, views held that they could hardly fail in any endeavor they pursued. While students and faculty at elite women’s colleges shared their social standing, they never attained the same markers of success. Although as a Canadian Munro in that regard did not fit the normal pattern, in all other respects he met the stereotype of the “fair haired boy” who attained powerful positions (and reputations). His early years set the stage as outlined in the Canadian newspaper, The Daily British Whig; at the age of 46 the newspaper noted that when a boy, he was among those who “like all other young Almonters passed under the scholastic care of the late Dr. P.C. MacGregor.” He then attended in order: Queens, Edinburgh, Harvard, Berlin, and the Sorbonne; afterwards, he advanced from an instructor at Harvard to Chairman of the Division of History, Government, and Economics.¹¹ Munro was also president of the American Political Science Association, founded and served as president of the Harvard Coop, and belonged to exclusive clubs in Boston and Washington DC. After leaving his academic career, he moved to Pasadena and served on the boards of the Huntington Hospital, on four bank boards (one in Cambridge and three in Pasadena), and was chair of the board of Pasadena City College. Interestingly, he saw his greatest accomplishment for the latter portion of his career as furthering nursing education, especially at the College.¹²

Edwin Francis Gay followed a more typical academic career, but again one with wide outreach to important academic and public positions of power. He was an economic historian who taught at Harvard, held important roles in professional leadership, and consulted with the US Census and other agencies. He was born in 1867 to a rich family in Detroit, advanced at Harvard from an instructor to a chair in economic history, served as the first dean of Harvard Business School from 1908 to 1919, and published on profit sharing and The Rhythm of History; in addition, a collection of his graduate students’ writings was published.¹³ A pioneer in economic history, he studied the financial records of the Temple family and contributed to R. H. Tawney’s later work on the nature of the gentry. He came to the Huntington as a researcher in 1936 and then research director in 1941; he also lobbied the American government in 1940 to enter World War II on the side of Britain. Gay helped found the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Council on Foreign Relations after serving on several planning boards during World War I.¹⁴ He was called on for advice from the Census Bureau, on economic affairs in South America, and served for years on the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, with much of his correspondence relating to the University. He died in 1946. His daughter, Margaret Gay Davies (also an economic historian), published on gentry payments to London and falling gentry rents during the second half of the seventeenth century.¹⁵

The descriptions of, and correspondence about, these two important scholars identified few failings and combined praise and an assumption of perfection seldom found in those characterizing women’s lives. The web of connections they maintained, often built on seemingly unrelated scholarly interests, eluded those even within women’s colleges. And, while women at such colleges led a privileged life, theirs was a more insular existence, and they were not selected for the same kind of leadership roles as these WASP men.¹⁶ This altered only after World War II when prominent women academics (especially university presidents) were asked to serve on foundation and corporate boards, and to consult with government agencies.

The earlier quite small, and ec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Women’s Scholarship Within and Outside the Academy, 1870–1960
• Part I. Women and the Medieval and Early Modern Economy
• Part II. Politics and Citizenship in Early Modern Britain
• Part III. Women and Modern Politics
• Part IV. Alternate Paths to Historical Scholarship
• Part V. Conclusion
• Back Matter