Educating the New Southern Woman: Speech, Writing, and Race at the Public Women's Colleges, 1884-1945

4. Useful Careers: Professional Training for Women of the New South

85 YZ 4 Useful Careers: Professional Training for Women of the New South “The growth of industrialism has favored women workers”: this finding came from a 1936 study sponsored by National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs in conjunction with the Alabama state chapter and Alabama College for Women (National Federation 15).1 How the study’s authors could arrive at these conclusions and how the southern public women’s colleges prepared women to succeed in available occupations in the region is this chapter’s theme. The eight colleges all offered vocational training in various business and industrial areas as well as teacher preparation in addition to general college work. Home economics, given federal funding in the second decade of the twentieth century, remained at the heart of the curriculum until after coeducation . The importance of such “practical” curricula at the public women’s colleges cannot be overstated. Though students at both public and private women’s colleges sought expanded educational and economic opportunity, significant demographic differences persisted between these types of institutions well into the twentieth century. In 1933, Doak Sheridan Campbell of George Peabody College for Teachers published a survey of approximately fifteen hundred women graduates of southern colleges from 1920 and 1925, including over five hundred from seven of the eight public colleges for women.2 He found that, compared to graduates of private women’s colleges, the graduates of the southern public women’s colleges were more likely to have worked after graduation, continued working after marriage, chosen a 86 Use f u l C a r ee r s vocation before entering college, and chosen coursework for practical homemaking or vocational value (see table 4.1). Table 4.1 Comparison of 1920 and 1925 graduates of southern public and private women’s colleges Percentage who Worked Chose vocation before entering Chose courses for* Postcollege Postmarriage Homemaking Vocation General culture Public 92.0 59.4 60.0 12.3 31.4 13.5 Private 81.3 52.1 46.6 1.6 27.1 18.6 Source: D. Campbell, Problems in the Education of College Women (25, 30, 67, 77). * Open-ended question; figures represent answer as percentage of total responses. This is not to say that students at the public women’s colleges did not value the liberal arts, or that private women’s college graduates disparaged homemaking . Indeed, they shared many cultural traits; both had similar literary tastes and were about equally as likely to marry, be politically engaged (about two-thirds were frequent voters), and take responsibility for housework. Campbell also asked graduates which courses they had not taken in college that they “have since felt the need of” (52); though he did not break down this question by institutional type, the answers suggest a wide-felt need among women for both practical and cultural education, with the most popular responses being courses in home economics, followed by English (60–61).3 Though it is not our primary focus here, this chapter also considers how women made use of their education in rhetoric and writing at the public women’s colleges and the relationship of writing and speaking to many of their career choices. We begin with historical background about how these colleges contributed to Progressive-era industrial education, before addressing three major areas of professional education—industrial and commercial, teaching, and home economics. Industrial Education for White Women If industrialism was good for women, it came slowly to the South and was just gaining ground by the late nineteenth century, when the earliest public women’s colleges opened. Although wood and textile industries and tobacco processing existed in the South before the Civil War and cotton mills were strong by the 1880s, industrial development itself was often viewed as an idea linked with northern values. The agrarian movement was suspicious of business and banking, yet some southerners felt industry could free their region from northern dependence (Fisher 144–45). Use f u l C a r ee r s 87 The argument between W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington over whether higher education should emphasize the training of a “talented tenth” or the broader population, leaders or workers, was not a controversy limited to African American education. Industrial education for ordinary workers was then a burgeoning movement in the North, seen by many as a democratic form of education as opposed to the old elitist classical...