Notes
145 Notes Introduction: Peculiar Institutions 1. As each of these schools went through several name changes, we use these designations throughout for ease of reference. Dates in parentheses are those of the state charters for each institution and typically used by the schools as their founding dates; in some cases, campuses opened a year or more after chartering (for a complete list of name changes of all the public women’s colleges over time, see the appendix). 2. The last extensive examination was Milton Lee Orr’s 1930 The State-Supported Colleges for Women, although Amy Thompson McCandless does treat them helpfully in her 1999 The Past in the Present: Women’s Higher Education in the Twentieth-Century American South. 3. A proposed change to a gender-neutral name at Mississippi, led by president Claudia Limbert (2002–10), eventually stalled in the state legislature and as of writing appears to be on hold. When asked about the name change in December 2011, incoming president Jim Borsig stated, “I think the conversation is essential. It’s not necessarily the most important thing to me at this moment” (qtd. in Young). 4. C. Vann Woodward has suggested that the South’s experience of “frustration, failure, and defeat” are more in line with the general human condition than our national myths of prosperity, progress, and innocence (Burden of Southern History 19). 5. Kinard’s dissertation in philology was on the rhetoric of Bishop Wulfstan’s homilies. 6. In 1973, Liddell testified in favor of the ERA before a committee of the Florida House of Representatives. In answer to the argument that women could rely on their mates for support, she noted, “I’ve never had a husband—not mine nor anyone else’s” (qtd. in Stern 50). 7. Black students had been segregated in coeducational normal and A&M colleges, and the newly created A&M system for white men in the South did not generally welcome women. This pattern held throughout the region, where Jim Crow laws dominated, and ideals for white southern women discouraged them from attending A&M schools for men even where they were nominally allowed. 8. See Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory.” 1. Making Modern Girls: The Ideals of the Southern Public Colleges for Women 1. Locals would have recognized the setting as the Grove, the 1830s family home of an antebellum Florida governor and a local landmark. 2. Marshall Field in Chicago banned the bob from its sales floor in 1921, and business and educational leaders frequently opined that they would not hire a young woman with one, dismissing the haircut as evidence of immodesty, frivolity, and vanity. The vociferous debates featured in news items and editorial pages of the day suggest that both detractors and defenders understood the haircut was as much a declaration of liberation as of style. 3. Though by the turn of the twentieth century, the “new woman” of America was a subject of national discourse (see Patterson), in the South, the new woman could not be easily separated from the new South. Beginning in the 1880s, new South 146 N otes to P ages 1 0 – 2 0 boosters began promoting economic development and a refashioned cultural identity for the region while still holding on to old South ideals; likewise, the ideal “new woman of the South,” as described by one Louisiana clubwoman, was “progressive, while still holding to a safe conservatism” (Nobles 377). The new South era, roughly concomitant with the Progressive era—and the establishment of the public women’s colleges—was a time of general optimism in the white South, before the economic downturn of the Depression and the somewhat more somber self-reflection of the Southern Renaissance and Civil Rights eras. The term “new South” was most closely associated with Atlanta Constitution managing editor and part-owner Henry W. Grady, who popularized it in speeches and essays; see in particular “The New South,” first delivered in New York in 1886 (Grady 7–22). 4. Women across the South also worked early on in textile mills and entrepreneurial ventures in ways we are just beginning to understand. See Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie’s edited collection, Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South, which includes chapters on black and Native American women as well as white working women. 5. In an extended passage in chapter 46 of 1883’s Life on the Mississippi, Twain blames the “Sir Walter disease” for the continuing admixture of the medieval and the modern in the contemporary South...
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