Time Not Ripe: Black Women’s Quest for Citizenship and the Battle for Full Inclusion at Ohio State University

On May 11, 1932, Doris Weaver submitted an application for reservation in the Grace Graham Walker House, a requirement for women enrolled in the home economics program at Ohio State University (OSU).¹ Just a year earlier, Wilhelmina Styles, then a junior, also had applied to live in the Grace Graham Walker House. The respective requests made by these Cleveland-bred, black women were not unusual. Residing in the home economics dormitory was a sine qua non for female students wishing to fulfill degree requirements for the bachelor of science in home economics. The rejection of the applications by Styles and Weaver, however, led to protests against OSU’s racial practices and eventually resulted in a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People–supported legal and political campaign that culminated in an Ohio Supreme Court case. This article offers a historical retelling of the Styles and Weaver cases. It documents the racial and gender injustice encountered by Doris Weaver and Wilhelmina Styles during their enrollment in the home economics program at OSU. In doing so, it refocuses the historical gaze on the North, where racial segregation was often just as pervasive and limiting as it was in the Southern jim crow system.

This article also chronicles black community resistance and the specific efforts by African American women to carve out paths to citizenship by gaining economic empowerment. My research enlarges the discourse examining black women’s political and social activism by scrutinizing their middle-class aspirations and connecting those aims to the larger goals of achieving economic justice within what historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has termed the “long Civil Rights Movement.”² The article highlights the Ohio Supreme Court case involving Doris Weaver v. Ohio State University to examine how the NAACP’s national campaign to redress racial discrimination played out at the local level. This case reveals the NAACP’s efforts to develop test cases—those cases that could be used to legally attack and remedy widespread racial injustices. The case also demonstrates the differential treatment that Weaver and Styles received from OSU and the NAACP. Weaver was light-skinned and could pass for white, while Styles was dark-skinned. Weaver’s complexion granted her a privileged status and made her a more attractive option as a client for the NAACP’s test case, exposing the significance of skin color in these interactions.

In examining these cases, I make three pivotal arguments. First, I contend that white and black women differed in their understandings of home economics. Viewed through a black feminist framework, the discipline of home economics, not typically known as a site of white feminist engagement, could be reinterpreted as an avenue for black women to seek what Alice Kessler-Harris terms “economic citizenship,” or “the independent status that provides the possibility of full participation in the polity.”³ For African Americans like Styles and Weaver, achieving educational success in home economics served as a tactical response to the political and social inequity that resulted from gender and racial exclusion. Second, I argue that the NAACP’s dependency on skin color as a part of its legal strategy undermined its objectives. Finally, I elucidate the unrealized potential of the Doris Weaver v. Ohio State University case to help African American students at OSU secure full equality and inclusion. By analyzing how black women’s educational aspirations were stymied by a gendered form of segregation and by examining how individual aspirations catalyzed community resistance and fostered innovations in legal strategies, this article seeks to contribute to a fuller understanding of how social hierarchies were constructed and challenged in the North.

African American Women and the Quest for Economic Citizenship

The belief that home economics should serve an essential role in preparing women to solve problems of both family and home hearkened back to the Progressive era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Progressive reformers—most of them middle-class, white, and native-born—perceived that the home provided the foundation for the material, mental, and moral...