Learning to Be New Women: Campus Culture at the North Carolina Normal and Industrial College

North Carolina Office of Archives and History

Learning to Be New Women: Campus Culture at the North Carolina Normal and IndustrialCollegeAuthor(s): Pamela DeanSource: The North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 68, No. 3 (JULY 1991), pp. 286-306Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23519484 .

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Learning to Be New Women:

Campus Culture at the

North Carolina Normal and Industrial College

Pamela Dean

ÍÍTT7TTH0UT THE EDUCATED woman there can be no trained teachers.

VV Without trained teachers, there can be no effective schools. Without

these schools, there can be no progress in North Carolina," Annie G. Randall

proclaimed in 1901. Randall was the registrar and English teacher at the

state's Normal and Industrial College for white women, and if there were to be a New South, her students would make it.1 When the college opened in 1892, President Charles Mclver, Randall, and the rest of the faculty joined their students in an exciting endeavor; they were fashioning a "New Woman"

for the New South. The college's overt mission was to train teachers for public schools, women who would lead the battle for education and aggressively propagate the values and skills that southerners needed if they were to move from the rural, agricultural world of the Old South to the urban,

Ms. Dean is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director

of the oral history program at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. She wishes to thank

Jacquelyn Hall and Donald Mathews for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

1 Annie G. Randall, "Training of Teachers in North Carolina," State Normal Magazine, V (December, 1901), 59.

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW



Learning to Be New Women 287

entrepreneurial, industrial world of the New.2 But the fulfillment of that

mission demanded a new model of womanhood, one that would sanction

women's invasion of the public sphere. This is not to say that southern women had never been significant

participants in the world outside of the domestic realm to which nineteenth

century ideology consigned them. Numerous studies, from Anne Firor Scott's

pioneering work to Drew Gilpin Faust's recent assertion that the South lost the Civil War when southern women ceased to support the cause, have

suggested otherwise.3 Nonetheless, the women who would come out of schools like the Normal (as it was familiarly known) would differ from their mothers and grandmothers in fundamental ways. The cultural construct "New Woman"

would validate their public activities as antebellum ideals of southern

womanhood never could.4 Whether as belle (charming, flirtatious, and

frivolous), plantation mistress (gracious hostess and efficient supervisor of

the household and, if necessary, the plantation), or evangelical mother

2 Recent studies, most notably those of Stuart Blumin on the United States (The Emergence

of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1990 [Cambridge: Cambridge Uni versity Press, 1989]) and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall on E ngland (Family Fortunes:

Men and Women of the English Middle Class [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987]), have explored the complex processes by which a distinct middle class, self-consciously set

off from both the working class below and the elite, aristocratic upper class above, came into

being in the mid-nineteenth century. This class was made up primarily of urban white-collar

workers, professionals, and the owners and managers of businesses and industries. Until the

last decades of the century, no such group existed in the South, which remained predominantly rural and agricultural. Southern society was divided among slaves and free blacks; poor, landless

whites; yeomen, who owned small subsistence farms and few if any slaves; and planters, who

owned large plantations worked by slaves. Those who by occupation might have formed the

nucleus of a southern middle class were few in number and were often planters or farmers

as well as lawyers or shopkeepers. In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early

years of the twentieth, this economic system and the accompanying social stratification was

breaking down. Colleges like the Normal and the public schools in which its graduates would

teach were essential agents of middle-class formation and definition. A plurality of students

at the college were the daughters of either yeoman farmers or planters. Both groups found

their economic security threatened by the antebellum shift to commercial agriculture and

sought to provide their sons and daughters with educations that would prepare them to make

their way in a new South. For further discussion of Normal students' family backgrounds and the role of the college in the creation of the middle class, see Pamela Dean, "College

Women and Class Formation in the New South," paper presented at the Southern Conference

on Women's History, Chapel Hill, June, 1991, in the author's possession. For an excellent study of the development of the graded school system in North Carolina, see James Leloudis,

" 'A

More Certain Means of Grace': Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920"

(unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1989). 3 Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1970), especially chapter 1; Drew Gilpin Faust, "Altars of Sacrifice:

Confederate Women and the Narrative of War," Journal of American History, LXXVI (March,

1990), 1200-1228. See also Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots,

1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) for a provocative discussion of

the nineteenth-century woman's symbolic public presence. 4 The author does not mean to suggest that southern college women necessarily would have

laid claim to the title New Woman. In fact, many would have rejected it as a radical, Yankee

notion. Nonetheless, they were redefining gender norms in ways that coincided with those

generally associated with the term New Woman by contemporary observers.

VOLUME LXVIII • NUMBER 3 • JULY 1991



288 Pamela Dean

(pious and pure, dedicated to the service of her family and her church), the antebellum female ideal was domestic and dependent.5 By offering women an image of themselves as professionals and as participants in public affairs, the college experience posed an implicit challenge to nineteenth-century assumptions about separate spheres.

J. *

All the members of the Normal College's first graduating class, 1893, entered the teaching profession. Pictured are (first row) Minnie Hampton, Maude Broadaway, Zella McCulloch, (second row) Carrie Mullins, Annie Page, Mattie Bolton, Bertha Lee, (third row) Maggie Mclver, faculty member Edwin Alderman, Lizzie Lee Williams, college president Charles Mclver, and Maggie Burke. Photograph from the Archives, Jackson Library, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Within the walls of institutions like the Normal College, the ways in which middle-class girls learned to be women were changing as college presidents and single, career-oriented faculty women replaced parents as mentors and models. The process of redefining cultural norms, especially those of gender, is a delicate, complex, and often ambiguous one; even as they tried out the

heady possibilities of new roles, the young women of the Normal College also

5 Both the "belle" and the "plantation mistress" can be seen as variants of the "southern lady." All three terms have aristocratic connotations. The "evangelical mother," on the other hand, was an ideal type that could be as applicable to yeoman women as to planters' wives. A plurality of Normal students came from rural evangelical families that could be classified as either

rising yeoman or falling planter and thus collectively were likely to be familiar with all of these types. For explorations of the varieties of southern womanhood, see John Carl Ruoff, "Southern Womanhood, 1865-1920: An Intellectual and Cultural Study" (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois, 1976), and Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).





wrestled with the tensions and anxieties inherent in that process. In those

early decades when the college was a hotbed of pedagogical experimentation and (in the 1910s) prosuffrage sentiment, students turned to the faculty for

inspiration and support. Together they created a college culture that fostered

a sense of mission and a new image of womanhood.6 That process was not

limited to classrooms or formal speeches; it permeated the life of the college and was nurtured by close student-faculty relations and the extracurricular

and social activities they shared.

From the beginning, President Mclver set the tone of the college. He was

dedicated not only to the proposition that the state needed female teachers

but also to the idea that women had the right to be "independent and self

supporting." To any "sensible woman," he asserted, dependence could only be "galling" and in fact was the worst kind of slavery.7 Fired by evangelical zeal to free both the state from its pervasive poverty and backwardness and

women from their limited sphere, Mclver approached his dual mission with

a boundless energy and a single-minded intensity that inspired all around

him.

Mclver's views were shared by a predominantly female faculty that, in both

educational background and feminist proclivities, was remarkable for its time

and place. Nearly all of the faculty were single women with degrees from

leading universities. Science professor Dixie Lee Bryant received her bachelor

of science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in

1891 and a doctorate from a German university in 1904. Her friend and MIT

classmate, school physician Anna M. Gove, a graduate of the Woman's Medical

College of New York Infirmary, also studied in Europe. Mathematics professor Gertrude Mendenhall was a Wellesley alumna, as was her friend Mary M.

Petty, who headed the chemistry department from 1893 to 1934. Petty and

many of her colleagues spent their summers pursuing graduate work at major

northern and western universities including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell,

Chicago, and Berkeley. For others vacations meant touring Europe or the

United States, often with a favorite student or colleague. The faculty's relatively

cosmopolitan experience and their dedication to careers rather than

domesticity must have suggested exciting new possibilities to young women

who had never before been far from their rural and small-town homes.8

6 For a discussion of a distinct women's culture as a breeding ground for group consciousness

and a precursor to feminism, see Ellen DuBois, Mari Jo Buhle, Temma Kaplan, Gerda Lerner,

and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Politics and Culture in Women's History: A Symposium,"

Feminist Studies, VI (Spring, 1980), 26-64, especially Gerda Lerner's contribution.

7 Charles Mclver to Lula Mclver, March, 1891, cited in Rose Howell Holder, Mclver of North

Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), 115-116, hereinafter cited

as Holder, Mclver, W. C. Smith, "Charles Duncan Mclver," State Normal Magazine, XI

(November, 1906), 73. 8 For other biographical information on the faculty, see Elisabeth Ann Bowles, A Good

Beginning: The First Four Decades of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 29-67, hereinafter cited as Bowles, A Good

Beginning. On summer travel, see for example Bertha M. Lee, "A Letter to the Class of '93,"

State Normal Magazine, VI (October, 1901), 29-39. See Annie Mclver Young's comments on

the broadening influence of Gove's tastefully decorated home in "Dr. Gove, the Person," Alumnae

News, XXV (July, 1936), 5.




290 Pamela Dean

The college community was a close-knit one. Members of the college shopped and attended local churches in Greensboro, and townspeople came to campus for plays and concerts. But the lives of both students and faculty revolved

around the activities of the fledgling institution. Indeed, the daily lives of

students and teachers were inextricably intertwined. They were united by a common cause, "trying to impress the North Carolina Legislature with

reasons for the necessity of our continued existence," as one alumna put it, and by a shared dedication to Mclver's vision.9 Even more important, perhaps, was the fact that the women and their students shared not only the classrooms

but the dormitories and dining halls as well. In the classroom, as first

generation professional women, female professors strove for an authoritative demeanor and maintained rigorous standards of academic performance; in the dormitories, however, they fell back on familiar domestic models, acting as nurturing mothers and older sisters to their young charges. There they helped create a homelike atmosphere in which conducting nightly bed checks and being available at all hours to deal with crises major or minor were

accepted parts of the job.10 Faculty women—but usually not men, who lived off campus with their

families—also took their meals with the students in the dining rooms, where

they were served family style. Rather than concentrating at a faculty table, each woman took her place at the head of a table of ten to twelve girls; there she corrected manners, set the tone for proper dinner conversation, and

occasionally treated her companions to some favored delicacy. Such treats, provided by the teacher, by a student who had received a box from home, or by the group in honor of a birthday, were special events that set the table mates off from the others in the huge, clamorous dining room. They reflected the need to create more intimate communities within the large school and served to strengthen bonds among students and between individual students and teachers.11 Students also sought out their favorite teacher during the

required afternoon walking period or called on her on Sunday evenings when the faculty were "at home" to the students, available to discuss classwork,

9 Evelina O. Wiggins, "Gertrude Mendenhall: An Appreciation," Alumnae News, XVI (July, 1926), 7, hereinafter cited as Wiggins, "Gertrude Mendenhall: An Appreciation." 10 On life for the faculty in the dormitories see [Clara Booth Byrd], "Miss Boddie," Alumnae News, XXIV (November, 1935), 12, and Annie Petty, "The New Library," Alumnae News, XII (October, 1923), 13. For student and alumnae comments on academic standards, see Eloise Whitaker to Lizzie [Whitaker], November 3,1895, Eloise Whitaker Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill, hereinafter cited as Whitaker Papers; "The Passing of Miss Boddie," Alumnae News, XXVIII (April, 1940), 10; Cornelia Deaton Hamilton, "Those Who Were Responsible for the Beginning," Alumnae News, XXXVII (October, 1955), 6; Betty Brown Jester, "A Tribute to Miss Boddie," Alumnae News, XXIV (November, 1935), 14; and Wiggins, "Gertrude Mendenhall: An Appreciation," 7. On pioneer career women's use of family models for professional relationships with both colleagues and students see Martha Vicinus,

" 'One Life to Stand beside Me': Emotional Conflicts of First

Generation College Women in England," Feminist Studies, VIII (Fall, 1982), 602-628. 11

Diary of Mary Wiley, November 6, 1892, April 16, 1893, Calvin Wiley Papers, Southern Historical Collection; Mary Alice Tennent Scrapbook, Special Collections, Jackson Library, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Fodie Buie Kenyon, "Little Pictures of Old Times," Part 2, Alumnae News, XXX (February, 1942), 4.





personal problems, or just to chat over tea and cakes.12 Within a short time

the students and faculty had created a network of close personal relationships and an elaborate social life of parties, plays, concerts, and receptions.

Extracurricular organizations also brought the various elements of the

campus community together. Most activities revolved around the two literary societies and the YWCA. In addition to students, those groups included faculty and administrators who were full members and active leaders of the YWCA

and honorary members of the two literary societies. Bertha Marvin Lee, head

of the German department, was a charter member of the YWCA, which she

had joined as a student in 1893. With her colleague, college secretary Laura

Coit, class of 1896, she was a mainstay of the organization for many years,

teaching Bible classes and leading vespers and daily chapel services.13 Faculty

members—and, in the case of male teachers, their wives as well—were regular

guests at the many literary society parties and banquets that were a vital

part of campus life, and they often appear in society minutes, serving on

committees and being consulted about important decisions.14 Every student

was invited to join one of the literary societies and nearly all did so.

Participation in the YWCA fluctuated over the years, but most students were

at least nominal members. Those three organizations thus integrated the entire

college community vertically, joining administrators, teachers, and all the

students from seniors down to the lowliest "prep." That social and extracurricular life, in both its formal aspects and informal

daily encounters, served to reinforce traditional norms of feminine behavior.

Teas, parties, concerts, and receptions offered a curriculum in the social graces, the skills of planning menus, decorations, and parlor games, gracious greetings and graceful dancing (with one's "best girl," no boys allowed)—accomplish ments that would ease the way of the young women as they took their places in the New South's emerging middle class.15 The YWCA had not yet taken

on the reformist, social-gospel thrust that would later make it one of the region's few voices for racial integration.16 Instead, the students heard sermons on

personal conversion, Christian motherhood, and the salvation of heathen souls,

topics long familiar to their mothers and grandmothers from countless women's

missionary society meetings.

12 For example, see Oeland Barnett Wray, "A Tribute to Miss Boddie," Alumnae News, XXIV

(November, 1935), 13-14. 13 Lee was head of the German department from 1895 to 1913. Coit taught at the college

from 1896 to 1901 and then served as college secretary for almost forty years. Bowles, A

Good Beginning, 41, 43-44. 14 For example, see Carrie Sparger, "Among Ourselves: Adelphian Initiation," State Normal

Magazine, V (December, 1900), 88-89, which describes how the wife of English professor James

Joyner won a prize in a parlor game that was part of the entertainment following the initiation

ceremony. The prize was presented by Dixie Lee Bryant "in a spicy little speech, while Mr.

Joyner chimed in ever and anon with a 'well-rounded English sentence.' "

See also Cornelian

Literary Society Minutes, Volume 1, p. 85, November 26, 1894; Volume 6, pp. 3-7,

November 24, 1917, pp. 21-25, March 1, 1918, UNC-G Special Collections, hereinafter cited

as Cornelian Literary Society Minutes.

15 On the importance of manners and etiquette in defining the middle class and defending

its perquisites, see John Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban

America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990). 16 Frances S. Taylor,

" 'On the Edge of Tomorrow': Southern Women, the Student YWCA,

and Race, 1920-1944" (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, 1984).




292 Pamela Dean

In one sense, such social interaction was a conservative force. At the same

time, however, the close bonds the faculty forged with their students in the

context of social activities lent weight to their words when, both explicitly and by example, they encouraged innovation. Urging students to be assertive

missionaries and lobbyists for school reform, the faculty helped the young women to see themselves as legitimate participants in the heretofore masculine

public domain. One wonders if the faculty realized the full significance of

what it was suggesting. To go among the "heathens" of another land clothed

in the certainty of racial and cultural superiority would be one thing. In such

a situation, outside the bounds of one's own civilization, gender norms might be suspended—or at least stretched—in the name of the mission. To go among one's own people, on the other hand, to conform outwardly in some aspects in order to subvert subtly in others, would require a delicate balance that

would challenge even the strongest and most mature personality. The young

"girl graduates" would need all the support and encouragement their beloved

mentors could provide. "The battle [against illiteracy] is being waged," Annie Randall told the

readers of the State Normal Magazine, the student magazine. "Victory is at

hand and our young women are the soldiers who will set us free."17 Education reformers among the friends and faculty of the Normal aimed to use the college's graduates as the "soldiers" in their battle to expand and rationalize the public school system. To achieve their goals, they had to train and motivate their students for the campaign and to persuade North Carolina voters that publicly financed schools under the direction of professional educators were the answer to the state's social and economic woes. The

reformers' messages were thus aimed at two audiences simultaneously: parents and taxpayers across the state, and students, whom they encouraged through innumerable campus sermons, commencement talks, guest lectures, and articles in the college magazine.18

The opposition that gave rise to the reformers' sense of embattlement came from numerous sources: the belief that education was the province of parents and churches; the resentment by independent yeomen of new taxes and the intrusion of distant bureaucracies into local issues; the belief that women were neither intelligent enough nor strong enough to control a classroom; and, perhaps even more pernicious, what the reformers perceived as widespread indifference bred by the very illiteracy, ignorance, and poverty they sought to eliminate. The strength of the resistance and the importance of the goal seemed to require female militancy. The martial metaphors in which reformers

phrased their exhortations were one strand of a complex rhetorical strategy that also drew on domestic and religious images to justify the entry of women into politics and the professions.

The first step in the crusade was to redefine education—traditionally considered a private matter, a luxury for all but the elite—as a public issue, something to which all citizens were entitled and from which all would benefit.

17 State Normal Magazine, V (October, 1900), 33. 18 Mclver was noted for recycling his speeches. A talk he had given at a teachers' training institute or to a national convention of professional educators might be repeated at daily chapel and reprinted in the State Normal Magazine.





The state was poor, reformers pointed out, a condition that was both cause and effect of a high rate of illiteracy—more than one third of the population over the age of ten could not read. Only public education, Mclver insisted, could end the "tyranny of ignorance and weakness and poverty" and make

North Carolina "great, intelligent, wealthy and powerful." To those who contended that the state was too poor to fund public schools, Mclver responded that public education was the "best investment that a free people can make," one that would "yield a hundredfold harvest." It would not come cheap, he

admitted, but "the only thing more expensive than education is ignorance."19 Walter Hines Page, North Carolina expatriate and editor of the Atlantic

Monthly, echoed Mclver's analysis of the value of public education in his speech at the college's 1897 commencement. He painted an unrelentingly dismal

portrait of what he called the "Forgotten Man"—and woman—from the isolated

farms and backcountry villages. Such people were the South's greatest underutilized resource, he charged, and the vital key to its moral and economic revival. Poverty and the lack of educational opportunities were driving hundreds of thousands of the region's best and brightest to emigrate; ignorance,

indolence, and the machinations of self-serving politicians encouraged those

who remained to resist and resent any change. Only public education could

break that age-old pattern. "This institution and your presence is proof that

the State has remembered the forgotten woman," Page concluded. "You in

turn will remember the forgotten child; and in this remembrance is laid the

foundation of a new social order. The neglected people will rise and with

them will rise all the people. Open wide to them the doors of opportunity."20

Drawing on images of women's traditional domestic and maternal roles, reformers stressed that, as both potential mothers and potential teachers, educated women like the Normal graduates were the key to this hoped-for transformation. "The wife and mother is the priestess in humanity's temple and presides at the fountain head of civilization," Mclver explained. Whether

at home with her own children or in the classroom, "she is the natural teacher

of the race." When he argued that "the cheapest, easiest, and surest way" to eliminate illiteracy and ignorance was "to educate those who are to be the mothers and teachers of future generations," he was not referring to the

fact that women teachers earned less than men; that was a given. Instead

his point was that, unlike men, women passed their education on to others—

to their own children if they did not work as teachers, to others' children

if they did. His most frequently repeated aphorism was "Educate a man and

you educate an individual; educate a woman and you educate a family."21 Mclver was a master at using traditionally sanctioned language to justify

innovation. Thus he called on his students to join in an educational revival,

to become missionaries in effect, "educational evangelists" "preach[ing] with

19 Charles Mclver, "Educational Statesmanship," State Normal Magazine, VI (February, 1902),

187-198, hereinafter cited as Mclver, "Educational Statesmanship"; Charles Mclver, "Two Open

Fields for Investment in the South," State Normal Magazine, VI (October, 1901), 18-28,

hereinafter cited as Mclver, "Two Open Fields."

20 Walter Hines Page, "The Forgotten Man," State Normal Magazine, I (June, 1897), 74-88.

21 Mclver, "Two Open Fields," 22, 23; Charles Mclver, "Our Next Educational Advance," State

Normal Magazine, I (March, 1898), 5.

VOLUME LXVIH • NUMBER 3 • JULY 1991



294 Pamela Dean

all the fervor of a crusader" on "civilization's march... from savagery to the

millennium."22 Words like salvation, mission, millennium fell easily from the

lips of men such as Mclver and Page, whose speeches echoed the cadences

of southern evangelical preachers. They fell as easily on the ears of students, who responded eagerly to their mentors' exhortations. More than sixty-five

years after her graduation, Emma Speight (Morris) recalled that P. P. Claxton,

professor of pedagogy, "had us all so concerned over the number of adult

illiterates that when I graduated I wanted to go to Buncombe County and

teach the moonshiners," an unsuitable plan vetoed by her mother, who

convinced her that teaching young children closer to home would serve the

cause as well.23 Another alumna, referring to Mclver, admitted, "We were ever in awe of him. He had a vision and we were following him."24

Bertha M. Donnelly also heard the call. In her graduation essay titled "The

Duty of the Class of '97 to the State," she encouraged her classmates to take

up the "work which God has given us to do," to lead "a great awakening among the people." To Donnelly, teaching was a sacred calling that "requires a strength and nobility of character which must be God given." In the classroom the teacher would "awaken the soul[s]" of children who were little better than "heathens from the dark continent." In using religious metaphors, reformers

sought to appropriate for their cause both the church's power and its sanctions, to convince people like Speight's mother of their mission's legitimacy and

respectability. In Donnelly's prose, however, both the efficacy and the

shortcomings of that strategy appeared. For her the power and resonance of missionary rhetoric obscured the goal; neither Speight's vision of literate moonshiners nor Mclver's promise of economic uplift is included.25

The equation of mothering with teaching and the evocation of evangelicalism repeated long-established arguments for female education.26 Mclver and his

colleagues added a new dimension when they suggested that it was but an extension of those hallowed maternal and religious roles for women to go

out into the masculine world of politics in support of public education. Although the reformers sought to minimize the revolutionary implications of such

actions, they were in fact urging their young students to become political organizers. Through the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses (WABPS), a statewide coalition established in 1902, the students would organize the community to clean, decorate, and improve the facilities of the often dirty, dilapidated, and ill-equipped schoolhouses. Home for the summer, they would lobby their families and neighbors, their community's leaders, even their state legislators to increase funding for the Normal College,

22 Mclver, "Educational Statesmanship," 188; Mclver, "Two Open Fields," 18.

23 Betty Anne Ragland Stanback, "The Early Years: Dr. Mclver and State Normal," Alumnae

News, LV (Fall, 1966), 6. 24

Quoted in Holder, Mclver, 173. 25 Bertha M. Donnelly, "The Duty of the Class of '97 to the State," State Normal Magazine, I (June, 1897), 43-46. 26 On educated women as mothers of future citizens, see Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1980), especially chapters 7 and 9. On evangelicalism and women's education, see Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 119-120.





raise local school taxes, and replace illiterate men on school boards with educated and refined women. Giving a qualified nod to traditional values, Annie Randall admitted that "the Southern woman abhors politics, for the

present." "But," she continued, "where her children's welfare is at stake, she is ready to do battle." Thus she contended that women should be appointed to school boards, which were deeply enmeshed in local political structures. Female participation was necessary in order to "give the schools the benefit of the counsel and aid of the women, who are their natural guardians."27

As teachers, Mclver told the women, they would have to lead the fight for better schools; they were the experts and must educate their communities as well as their students. They "must make themselves familiar with all the details of taxation and school revenue They ought to be able to address an audience... and give them a business statement in regard to the public schools of the community."28

Pressed to speak in public to mixed groups about the politically charged

subject of raising and spending public moneys, many southern women might have been "embarrassed and frightened," as was Leah Jones when she began

working with WABPS. Only after several meetings was she able to report, "I felt that I was certainly doing nothing unwomanly when I... discussed with

fathers as well as mothers the need to have the school attractive." The fact

that Jones felt called upon to deny the unfeminine implications of speaking on so benign a topic as the appearance of schools suggests the power of gender restrictions. Nonetheless, in the name of children she was able to do so, and

when she returned to the Normal College, where she was a supervising teacher

in the practice school, she was filled with a new sense of self-confidence that

she passed on to her students.29

Many aspects of their college experience contributed to the Normal students'

increasing ease in public. Not only were they told by their faculty mentors, like Jones and Mclver, that it was their duty to speak out for education, but

college life also offered many opportunities for them to practice the skills

they needed to carry out their mission. In their literary society debates and

27 See State Normal Magazine, I (March, 1897), 26, for an example of Mclver's urging students

to go home and promote better conditions for education. The Woman's Association for the

Betterment of Public School Houses (WABPS) was founded in 1902 at a meeting of juniors and seniors convened by Mclver. Members sought to create a network of local women's groups concerned with the physical conditions of school buildings to supplement the male-dominated

school boards that controlled employment and curriculum. The following summer, ten students

and several members of the faculty and staff fanned out across the state to visit school districts

and galvanize teachers, mothers, and other female leaders to improve the rural schools. See

James L. Leloudis II, "School Reform in the New South: The Woman's Association for the

Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina, 1902-1919," Journal of American History, LXIX (March, 1983), 886-909, hereinafter cited as Leloudis, "School Reform in the New South."

The WABPS was also instrumental in getting local taxes passed to support the schools. For

instance, Lula Mclver, then a field worker for the association, credited the Raleigh chapter

with helping to carry a close election for a supplemental tax in 1909. Virginia T. Lathrop,

"Alumnae For 'School Betterment,' "

Alumnae News, LX (Spring, 1972), 22; Annie G. Randall,

"Editorials," State Normal Magazine, VII (December, 1902), 128-131.

28 Charles Mclver, "Local Taxation for Schools," State Normal Magazine, IX (November, 1904),

17-18. 29 Leah D. Jones, "Better School Houses," unidentified newspaper clipping, Records of the

Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina,

UNC-G Special Collections.




296 Pamela Dean

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meetings they had learned to speak persuasively, organize group projects, and run meetings according to parliamentary procedures. As part of the social life they shared with the faculty, they had mastered the social graces that would make them respectable and influential members of the South's

increasingly important middle class. The rhetoric of mission and maternity and the mastery of social graces

eased the tensions and anxieties that women's public activities raised for both advocates and opponents. Thus Donnelly focused on the missionary nature of teaching and Randall stressed that only in the name of children would

women become political activists. By cloaking public, political activities in

the language of religion and domesticity, by focusing on issues of nurturing and educating young children, on cleaning and decorating schoolhouses, the

reformers sought to deny the implications of their actions and to lay to rest

the fears raised by the specter of assertive women acting autonomously on

the public stage.30 Like their mentors, students struggled with the sometimes contradictory

implications of the gender and educational reforms they advocated. Their

need to resolve those tensions often found expression in the class essays and

short stories they published in the campus literary quarterly. In the pages of the journal the students' ambivalence and anxieties vied with their nascent

assertiveness and self-confidence. One example of this genre was Margaret

George's short story "Onions and Adaptation," published in her junior year, 1917. The heroine, Louise McGregor, after nine months in a "little backward

country town," despairs of ever turning it into the "clean, progressive, efficient,

free-thinking town" that she has been taught to expect as the result of her

efforts. Louise feels nothing but "unutterable loathing and disdain" for her

school board, "old men living yet in their reflected glory from the Civil War."

She views handsome Henry Gordon in much the same light. Henry could

do much to further her ends if he wished, Louise feels sure; but instead he

tells her to try to adapt to the community, to join the Ladies Self-Culture

Society, for instance, a suggestion she scorns. But one day she finds herself

urging one of her obstreperous students to adapt to the tastes and standards

of those around him rather than fighting them. Realizing that is precisely the advice Henry had given her, Louise finally concedes,

" 'I'll join the Ladies'

Self-Culture Society tomorrow.' 'And within a year,' "

Henry responds, " 'I'll

wager every member will be stumping the state for woman suffrage.' "31

George's story was certainly not one of triumphant feminism. The author's

anxiety about unwomanly aggressiveness, as well as her frustration with the

limits of traditional female behavior, was an underlying theme that refused

to remain in the background. In fact, by the time George was writing in

1917, those tensions, which twenty years earlier had been submerged in Bertha

Donnelly's evangelical language, were beginning to emerge as overt text rather

than subtext. Thus, Margaret George unequivocally affirmed Louise's

30 Anne Firor Scott pointed out the efficacy of this strategy in "The Ever Widening Circle:

The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822-1872," History of

Education Quarterly, XIX (Spring, 1979), 3-25. 31

Margaret H. George, "Onions and Adaptation," State Normal Magazine, XXI (May, 1917),

228-234.




298 Pamela Dean

progressive goals, including suffrage, but she accorded the knowledge of how best to achieve them to Henry. If Louise will conform to small-town, Old South

manners, Henry tells her, if she will refrain from head-on, headstrong attacks on her reactionary school board, if she will work through traditional women's

groups in women's traditional, indirect ways, she may be able to bring "progress" to the town. Moreover, in the figure of Henry the author suggested a new model southern man, one who, like the men on the college's faculty, would

support public roles for women. But, in order to win him, both to her cause and as a suitor, Louise had to cloak her feminist ends in feminine means.

It was on the old men—a safer target for a young marriage-minded woman— that the author and her heroine vented their frustrations with the obstructionist forces of southern patriarchy. The intensity of emotion packed into George's choice of words, "unutterable loathing and disdain," was striking, revealing a depth of anger truly unspeakable for a southern lady. While Margaret George was not prepared to overturn completely the prevailing gender hierarchy, her

outspoken attack on the Civil War generation still revered by adherents of the Lost Cause did suggest that she had thrown off the deference that was such a vital underpinning of Old South gender norms.

As Margaret George's story indicated, by the First World War the mission that Normal College women pursued had broadened to include woman suffrage, and the students were unequivocal in their support for that issue. Randall's earlier depiction of southern women's aversion to politics had been accurate for the most part. The antebellum equation of women's rights with abolition had made the former anathema to the region. However, like progressive reformers elsewhere, North Carolina women who had been involved in campaigns for increased funding for schools, for the right to sit on school boards, or for married women's property rights found the process both frustrating and enlightening. Many women concluded that, until they had the vote, male politicians would take neither them nor their causes seriously. Thus by 1913

the political climate was quite different from what it had been ten years earlier when Annie Randall had to disavow the feminist implications of her campaign. In December of that year a group met in Charlotte to form an equal suffrage association; three months later former Normal student Barbara Bynum Henderson was elected president of a statewide suffrage association representing seventeen local associations. The following year Henderson addressed the General Assembly in favor of an equal suffrage bill. Although the bill was summarily defeated, North Carolina suffragists were not deterred. In 1916 when Carrie Chapman Catt devised her "winning plan" of achieving enfranchisement through a federal amendment, they were ready to join the battle.32 And many of the suffragists, like Henderson, were Normal alumnae.33

32 A. Elizabeth Taylor, "The Woman Suffrage Movement in North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review, XXXVIII, Part I, (January, 1961), 45-62, Part II (April, 1961), 173-189. 33 Minna Curtis Bynum, as she was known in her school days, attended the Normal College for one year before transferring to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1899. She received Ph.B. and M.A. degrees from the university in 1902 and later married mathematics professor Archibald Henderson. Barbara Bynum Henderson file, Alumni Archives, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Greensboro.





For more than twenty years the faculty had worked to create a community that would not only offer young women an education that would enable them to be independent and self-supporting but that would also imbue them with the desire and confidence to improve their society. Seldom, however, had the

young women gone so far as to advocate woman suffrage. On that issue they had taken their cue from Mclver. He would not jeopardize his crusades for better schools and better opportunities for women by permitting them to be

associated with even more controversial, and to him peripheral, issues such as equal education for blacks or votes for women. When a WABPS organizer invited black women to join her group, Mclver was quick to chastise her.34

On the question of suffrage, one can only infer his position, for about that

he said not a word. Had he lived, his thinking might well have followed the

same progression as that of the female suffragists. Certainly his widow Lula

Martin Mclver (who continued to occupy the president's house on campus) carried her support for the franchise to what most of her colleagues in the

movement must have considered extremes; she advocated suffrage for black

as well as white women.35 Nonetheless, despite Mclver's and the faculty's

pioneering support of women's rights to greater independence and autonomy and to participation in the politics of school reform, they had manifested little

overt support for suffrage prior to the mid-teens.

But the years since Mclver's death in 1906 had brought change not only to the state but to the campus as well. Sixty years later, when former

Democratic National Committee vice-chair Gladys Avery Tillett (class of 1915) was asked to account for the remarkably progressive atmosphere at her alma

mater, she unhesitatingly cited two professors, Walter Clinton Jackson, who

had joined the faculty in 1909, and Harriet Elliott, who arrived in 1913.36

Unlike many of their predecessors, both Jackson and Elliott were willing to challenge explicitly the South's racial and gender norms, and they acted

as catalysts for their colleagues as well as their students. Jackson, a dynamic and charismatic history teacher who drew crowds to his lectures, was that

rare creature in the Jim Crow South—a liberal; he combined his abiding interest in women's education with an equal commitment to improved race

relations, serving as president of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation from 1928 to 1932 and as a trustee for the nearby black women's college, Bennett.37

Harriet Elliott, professor of history and government and later dean of women, was already a feminist and suffragist when she arrived on campus in 1913.

As a college student, Elliott had been befriended and greatly influenced by Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. After her arrival in North Carolina, Elliott maintained her legal residence in her home state of Illinois, where women could vote, and soon

34 Leloudis, "School Reform in the New South," 906.

35 Lula Martin Mclver to Senator Lee S. Overman, n.d., Charles D. Mclver Papers,

UNC-G Special Collections. 36 Gladys Avery Tillett interview by Jacquelyn Hall, March 20, 1974, Southern Oral History

Program, Southern Historical Collection, hereinafter cited as Tillett interview.

37 In 1934, Jackson became the third president of what is now the University of North Carolina

at Greensboro. Bowles, A Good Beginning, 54-55.




300 Pamela Dean

became a well-known worker for the cause, not only locally but nationally as well. In later years, President Franklin Roosevelt recognized both her

political and administrative skills by appointing her to posts in his administration.38

Elliott's influence on students like Tillett was profound. "That woman was a power," Tillett recalled. "There wasn't anybody who took her course who didn't go out and do something." Once she herself had become politically active, Tillett continued, she "simply called up people who were in her political science class and said, 'Won't you [get involved]? You know what Miss Elliott said.' "39

They did indeed, and, like Tillett, most students eagerly embraced the

suffrage movement. They marched in suffrage parades, and nearly three

quarters of the students signed a prosuffrage petition to their United States senators.40 When Governor Locke Craig, in his 1915 commencement speech, confidently asserted his belief that North Carolina women did not want the

vote, they greeted his words with stunned and incredulous silence, denying him the applause he so obviously expected until he grudgingly recanted.41

They welcomed to campus Jeanette Rankin, the first female member of

Congress, and Elliott's friend Anna Howard Shaw, whom they chose to be commencement speaker in 1919.42 As a lasting symbol of their enthusiasm for suffrage, the students themselves insisted on naming a dormitory for Shaw in 1921.43 That was a significant gesture at an institution funded and controlled by a state legislature that would refuse to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment until 1971. As committed suffragists, the students of the State Normal had

adopted a view of women's rights and responsibilities quite different from that normally associated with southern ladies, especially by men like their

representatives in Raleigh. Jeanette Rankin's visit provided hints of just what suffrage meant to the

young women. It inspired one student to compose a song that began with

a none-too-subtle allusion to Governor Craig and his ilk, asserting that while "some men [say]... women of the South don't want to vote," in fact "women... are very much like men." "0, give us the vote," the song continued, "and we'll row the boat and sail the ship of state."

... When we get the vote, you bet For President we want Jeanette...

Good-bye bondage—welcome rights, ... We're where we belong; Carolina's Old North State Is slow but sure you bet; We'll pull our legislature through, We're all in line behind Jeanette

38 Virginia Terrell Lathrop, "Harriet Elliott: An Inspiring Teacher Who Taught History and

Lived It," Alumnae Magazine, LV (Summer, 1967), 2-11. 39 "50 Years on the March: Charlotte's Gladys Tillett," Charlotte Observer, July 4,1974, clipping in the Gladys Avery Tillett Papers, Southern Historical Collection. 40

Bowles, A Good Beginning, 129-130. 41

High Point Enterprise, May 26,1915. 42

Bowles, A Good Beginning, 129-130. 43

Bowles, A Good Beginning, 130.





On the suffrage line, on the suffrage line, We're pulling into freedom on the suffrage line.

Whoever said that woman was a clinging vine

Watch Miss Rankin run the engine on the suffrage line.44

The words in a southern context were dramatic: "Good-bye bondage—welcome

rights." The suffragists' use of the trope of bondage was a familiar but

emotionally charged one. At a time when segregation was being institution

alized, whites often expressed the fear of falling to the debased status of their

African-American neighbors. For instance, lack of education, to Mclver, was

the "worst kind of slavery."45 Moreover, the suffrage debate itself was suffused

with racism. Only a few years earlier the men of their fathers' generation had disfranchised blacks in a campaign notorious for its use of images of

vulnerable white women—wives and daughters—crying out for protection from rapacious black men. Now the white daughters of the state were

repudiating that glorification of female dependence and saying that women

were in fact very much like men. Not only did they not need protection, not

only were they not clinging vines, they were even capable of running the

country. They would "sail the ship of state" led by Jeanette Rankin, who had

proved that women could be politicians. The women at State Normal could envision their political futures, not just

as informed voters on issues of particular interest to women, but as full

participants. However, in still another verse to the song honoring Rankin's

visit, the author suggested a way in which she and her fellow students might work for suffrage that was hardly in keeping with that vision. While Rankin

was in Congress "making the laws, we are here converting our dear papas. Three years we'll work and tease, then we'll vote as we please." They would

tease—use their feminine wiles on their fathers—to win the right to do what

they pleased—to act independently. Thus the song suggested not only the extent

to which the collegians were exploring the empowering implications of being New Women but also their recognition of the continuing effectiveness of

patterns of behavior—manipulation of men—that were intrinsic to the

stereotypical "southern belle." Searching for new opportunities and new fields

in which to try out their powers, southern college women perceived no conflict

in drawing on familiar skills. Prior to the arrival of Jackson and Elliott, the faculty's stance placed them

among what William O'Neill has called "social feminists," that is, those who

advocated women's involvement in reform—but not woman suffrage—as an

extension of and because of their maternal, nurturing characteristics.46 In

the southern context the faculty was in the forefront of reform efforts that

44 "In honor of Jeanette Rankin's visit," author unknown, Marjorie Craig Scrapbook, 1915

1919, UNC-G Special Collections. 46 This image continued to be a powerful one long past the era of the suffrage debate. White

factory workers drew on it in 1930s labor disputes, charging that owners sought to reduce

them to bondage. See for example Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad,

Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly, Like a Family: The Making of a

Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987),

chapter 6. 46 William L. O'Neill, Everyone Was Brave: A History of Feminism in America (Chicago:

Quadrangle Books, 1969).




302 Pamela Dean

inspired students to participate in public activities to a degree previously unknown to southern women. Faculty members remained cautious moderates when compared to many northern suffragists, particularly those who considered suffrage the essential reform and put it before all others.

Nonetheless, once Elliott arrived with her forthright advocacy of full

citizenship and equal rights for women, her message fell on fertile ground.

m ' ■*

Even before the State Normal became the North Carolina College for Women, students there

eagerly embraced the woman suffrage movement. They held parades and rallies and signed

petitions demanding the vote. Photograph, ca. 1919, from the UNC-G Archives.

Elliott's views reflected what Nancy Cott has termed "civic maternity"—a commitment to woman suffrage combined with long-standing concerns for

education, child labor, and public health.47 While Gladys Tillett acknowledged that some conservative elements within the college community did not embrace

suffrage, she recalled that most teachers did, especially Quakers, such as Gertrude Mendenhall and the Petty sisters, Annie and Mary, all charter members of Mclver's faculty.48 For the women of the Normal College, support for suffrage in the late teens did not represent a break with the past but

simply the adoption of another tool to achieve the same ends they had pursued since 1893, better schools and greater opportunities for women. The double nature of the term "civic maternity" highlights the ironic impact of the college

47 Nancy Cott, "What's in a Name? The Limits of 'Social Feminism'; or, Expanding the

Vocabulary of Women's History," Journal of American History, LXXVI (December, 1989), 809-829, hereinafter cited as Cott, "What's in a Name?" 48 Tillett interview.





culture that students and faculty had created at the Normal. It was both

culturally conservative (teaching the social graces, encouraging ladylike behavior) and, potentially at least, politically radical.

The full extent of that radical potential was demonstrated in 1919, when alumna and former Latin professor Julia Dameron, backed by the Alumnae

Association, mounted a campaign for equal pay for equal work.49 She succeeded in having a bill to that effect introduced in the General Assembly, where it passed the state Senate.50 Its ultimate defeat was credited to the influence of state superintendent of schools James Joyner, Mclver's friend and a former member of the Normal College faculty. For college women, "civic maternity" had implications more far-reaching than their male colleagues were prepared to accept.

The equal suffrage and equal pay campaigns of the late 1910s were high

points of feminist activism on the campus. The next generation of students would pursue a different version of the New Woman, one that in many ways reversed the conservative/radical poles of previous decades. Abandoning the

precepts of civic maternity and the closer relations with faculty that had

nurtured them, students immersed themselves in the youth culture for which

the 1920s were known. A brief look at campus life in that decade offers some

revealing contrasts to the patterns that prevailed in the previous quarter

century. By the 1920s the college itself and the social context within which it existed

bore little resemblance to what they had been in Mclver's day. After the

passing of the crusading founder, his successor, Julius I. Foust, had

concentrated with remarkable success on building up the college. In 1900

the institution was a normal school of 490 students and 23 faculty. In 1921

it became a fully accredited college, which had been renamed the North

Carolina College for Women or NCCW in 1919; by 1930 it was the nation's

second largest woman's college with nearly 1,900 students and 170 faculty.51 Women had won the vote, and the graded school system, while still falling far short of those in other regions, was growing steadily. Eighty percent of

the state's teachers were female, and many Normal alumnae were school

principals and supervising teachers.52 Having won many of their battles,

49 Alumnae News, VI (November, 1918), passim, LXXV (Winter, 1987), 16-19.

50 Journal of the Senate of the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina, Session 1919,

274; Journal of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina,

1919, 434, 682. 51

Catalogue of the State Normal and Industrial College, Greensboro, 1900, 1910; Catalogue

of the North Carolina College for Women, 1920,1930. 62 Female domination of teaching did not necessarily constitute a feminist victory. There is

ample literature demonstrating that the terms of access are of more significance than the

mere fact of it and that the feminization of teaching resulted in increasing the power of male

administrators. See, for example, Michael W. Apple, "Teaching and 'Women's Work': A

Comparative Historical and Ideological Analysis," in Expressions of Power in Education: Studies

in Class, Gender, and Race, edited by Edgar B. Gumbert (Atlanta: Center for Cross-Cultural

Education, 1984), 29-49; Jill K. Conway, "Politics, Pedagogy, and Gender," Daedalus, CXVI

(Fall, 1987), 137-152; and Myra Strober and David B. Tyack, "Why Do Women Teach and

Men Manage?" Signs, V (Spring, 1980), 494-503.




304 Pamela Dean

students and faculty no longer saw themselves as isolated pioneers, united

by the need to defend their institution's existence or the role of its graduates in the life of the state.

At the same time that the women of NCCW were becoming increasingly confident about their place in the world, a new kind of female student was

making her presence known on the nation's campuses. By the 1920s, higher education had become an accepted activity for the daughters of the middle

and upper-middle classes. Compared to students of earlier generations, college women were less committed to careers and more interested in preparation for marriage. In NCCW student publications, stories about courtship and

marriage edged out those about crusading teachers. In 1922 a completely equipped house was built to enable domestic science majors to practice their skills.53 Rules were relaxed to allow evening engagements with young men

(chaperones were required for freshmen and sophomores), and nightly dancing (women only; dancing with men was not allowed on campus until 1930) was

encouraged to give the young women a chance to learn "the right kind" of dance.54

As the students turned from the women-centered, "homosocial" world they had shared with the faculty to a more "heterosocial" one, they also were

becoming enmeshed in the burgeoning youth culture, "the life" for which

colleges in the twenties were notorious.55 College activities retained elements of the campus culture of previous years but with important differences. The elaborate structure of campus organizations, rituals, and traditions remained. But while the earlier version of that complex social life had bound campus groups together and fostered a strong sense of community, the structures that had supported that pattern began to break down in the 1920s. Sheer

growth—especially dramatic in the twenties, when enrollment jumped 140

percent compared to 60 percent in the previous two decades—was a major factor.56 Such rapid expansion inevitably weakened faculty-student bonds, a

trend enhanced by the move of many female professors to off-campus homes.

Moreover, a generation gap separated the original faculty, most of whom remained at the college, from the young students; with forty years dividing them, the two groups could hardly continue to see themselves being youthful

53 Carolinian (North Carolina College for Women, Greensboro), October 14, 1922, hereinafter cited as Carolinian. 54 North Carolina College for Women Handbook, 1922-1923, 1925-1926; Carolinian, November 7, 1929. 55 Helen Horowitz and Paula Fass, among others, have described an autonomous student culture that flowered on coeducational campuses, one that was antithetical to the life of the mind so valued by the faculty. Both writers indicate that this culture was less evident and less oppositional in women's colleges, but it was nonetheless an increasingly important and, for incoming students, attractive part of campus life. Helen Horowitz, Campus Life (New York; Knopf, 1987); Paula Fass, The Beautiful and the Damned (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). On the new type of college woman of the 1920s, see David Allmendinger, "History and Usefulness of Women's Education," History of Education Quarterly, XIX (Spring, 1979), 117-123; Roberta Wein, "Women's Colleges and Domesticity, 1875-1918," History of Education Quarterly, XIV (Spring, 1974), 31-48; and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Knopf, 1984), especially chapter 17. 56

Catalogue of the State Normal and Industrial College, Greensboro, 1900, 1910; Catalogue of the North Carolina College for Women, 1920, 1930.





pioneers together.57 Equally significant was the declining role of the literary societies and the YWCA. Since all students belonged to one or the other of the societies, by the late teens the societies had become unwieldy. Two new societies were established in 1918 and 1922, but they enjoyed none of the traditions and loyalties of the older organizations. In addition, a variety of

clubs, catering to special academic and cultural interests, replaced many of the functions previously filled by the literary societies, further fragmenting campus life.68 Increasingly, the vertical structure of campus life reflected in

the societies was replaced by a horizontal orientation in which class

membership was the defining characteristic.59 Numerous rituals and activities reflected that focus. An institutionalized

big sister/little sister relationship began in the summer when rising juniors wrote to their assigned incoming freshmen welcoming them to college and

promising to meet them at the train station and help them get settled.60 It

was solemnized in the fall with a mock wedding ceremony complete with

veiled freshman bride, tuxedo-clad junior groom, and appropriately costumed

attendants.61 Athletic tournaments between class teams with distinct uniforms,

colors, and cheers replaced the earlier walking period, when one made a date

with one's "best girl" or favorite teacher and strolled through Peabody Park

for an hour before dinner.62 While competition on the field and in the stands

was fierce and cheers urged the players on, a favorite postgame song reminded

"dear sisters" that "who'er may win" made no "difference in the end" for

it was all "in the family."63

Gradually the peer-based campus culture supplanted that of Mclver's day, with its emphasis on contact between students and their faculty mentors. By the end of the twenties, one student would describe the distance between the

57 More than half of the original faculty were still teaching at the college in the twenties; most who left were men who tended to stay for only a few years before moving on to

administrative positions at other colleges or in the state and federal education bureaucracies.

See Bowles, A Good Beginning, 29-67. 68 The Carolinian, the student newspaper that in part replaced the State Normal Magazine

beginning in 1919, carried numerous stories and editorials on declining student participation in these organizations and even suggested abandoning them. "Why the Unwanted Change?"

Carolinian, May 10,1928; "A Real Problem," Carolinian, October 14,1929; "NCC's Sick Man,"

Carolinian, November 28, 1929. On the YWCA see the Carolinian, September 20, 1919,

November 6,1920, November 4,1921, October 6,1923, and October 20,1927. See also Cornelian

Literary Society Minutes, Volume 6, p. 9, October 20, 1920, for discussions on lack of

participation. On the proliferation of clubs and other groups, see Bowles, A Good Beginning, 143-156. 59 As early as 1919 the Carolinian reported that Red Cross Day would be conducted through

the classes rather than the societies because "class spirit was strongest." Quoted in Bowles,

A Good Beginning, 135. 60 "Social Items," Carolinian, September 23, 1926; "Class of '26 Meets with Little Sisters,"

Carolinian, October 6, 1926; "Little Sisters Honor Juniors and Seniors," Carolinian, May 5,

1927. 61 For photographs and descriptions of class weddings, see the Carolinian, October 25, 1919,

October 14,1925, October 13, 1927, and October 24,1929. 62 Bowles, A Good Beginning, 141. The Carolinian gave considerable coverage to interclass

athletics; for example, see Carolinian, May 19, 1919, September 9, October 2, 1920,

October 29, 1922, and May 12, 1927. On walking period "dates," see Berta Albright Moore

to J. I. Foust, March, 1935, Julius I. Foust Papers, UNC-G Special Collections.

63 College Song Book, 1914, p. 4, UNC-G Special Collections.




306 Pamela Dean

two groups as "a chasm to bridge."64 Those remarkable teachers like Charles

Mclver, Annie Randall, and Harriet Elliott embodied the strong sense of mission and the zeal for reform, progress, and innovation in education and woman's rights that so pervaded the college. They had nurtured the sense of righteousness that permitted Margaret George to envision challenging the "old men" of southern patriarchy. But such a challenge also provoked the ambivalence and anxiety evident in George's story and the student-athletes' assertions of sisterhood. As their predecessors had turned to the rhetoric of

religion and domesticity, later generations of students turned to their peers for support in resolving and defusing the tensions inherent in cultural change. In the process they lost much of the zeal and the heady sense of new possibilities with which those young women graduates in the first decades of the Normal

College had gone out to remake their state. Ironically, as the young women moved away from both the conservative personal style and radical political goals of the past, students created a college culture that allowed some to go further in their revision of feminine norms. Thus they would fashion an image of women that in terms of personal behavior, style, and self-image broke more

decisively with that of the "Southern Lady" than the more political ideal of the New Woman ever could.

64 "A Chasm to Bridge," Carolinian, December 20,1930.




Learning to Be New Women: Campus Culture at the North Carolina Normal and Industrial College

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