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11. Climbing the Hilltop: In Search of a New Negro Womanhood at Howard University
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271 Climbing the Hilltop: In Search of a New Negro Womanhood at Howard University TREVA LINDSEY 11 Regardless of the wish of many parents that their daughters become adjuncts of “man,” modern life forces them to be individuals in much the same sense as men are individuals. —Lucy Diggs Slowe In 1922, Lucy Diggs Slowe became the first official dean of women at Howard University in Washington, D.C.1 The newly created position, approved in 1920 by university president J. Stanley Durkee, mirrored the dean of men position that President Durkee had approved a year earlier. Prior to accepting this position, Slowe met with and wrote a detailed letter to Durkee to discuss her expectations regarding the offer to serve the university in an administrative capacity. In a letter dated May 31, 1922, Slowe listed the conditions under which she would accept the position. She requested a salary of thirty-two hundred dollars, a professorship in English through the School of Education, and a full-time office assistant.2 She also stated that “all policies pertaining to the women of the University shall emanate from my office with the approval of the President.”3 This particular point of negotiation specifically unveiled Slowe’s desire to become a primary figure in the shaping of women’s experiences at Howard University. Before accepting the dean position, Slowe recognized that Howard had institutionalized a relatively conservative view regarding “women’s place” through its policies. Consequently, Slowe understood that expansive administrative latitude was vital to her ability to prepare female students for modern life. This letter of negotiation established both a foundation on which a culture of New Negro womanhood could emerge at Howard and a figuration of modernity that developed among African American women. This article explores the challenges, setbacks, and achievements of Dean Slowe during her storied fifteen-year career at Howard.4 Furthermore, I discuss how her story connects to a broader cultural current that evolved among African 272 TREVA LINDSEY American women during the early to mid-twentieth century: New Negro womanhood . The combination and reimagination of ideas from rhetoric about the New Woman and the New Negro among black women communities resulted in the materialization of New Negro womanhood in the early twentieth century. The melding of cultural, social, and political currents captured the challenges black women faced in achieving both racial and gender equality. This amalgamation also arose out of a desire among some African American women to attain authorial control over their bodies, their identities, and their aspirations. The assertion of New Negro womanhood challenged black women’s exclusion from and/or limited participation in contemporaneous political and cultural currents. At the core of New Negro womanhood was the movement of black women into a wider array of economic, political, social, and cultural possibilities available in the public sphere. Within the public sphere, and in particular at Howard University during Slowe’s tenure, some African American women attempted to etch out the parameters of individual and collective aspirations and desires within a modern world in which they were treated as third-class citizens.5 Slowe embraced a form of New Negro womanhood as a conduit to the “modern world.” At an institution lauded for its progressive politics, its nurturing of black intellectuals, and its involvement in the black cultural explosion of the early twentieth century, Howard provided a distinct space in which African American women could strive to become full participants in the modern life that Slowe described in her writings. Michael Hanchard asserts that blacks “create[d] a form of relatively autonomous modernity distinct from its counterparts of Western Europe and North America.”6 During the New Negro era, blacks developed technologies, discourses, and institutions that expressed their perspectives, preferences, and desires. For African Americans, the path to the “modern world” significantly differed from the path for whites. Jim Crow laws, de facto segregation , employment and housing discrimination, and white supremacist ideology obstructed the passageway to the modern world. The obliteration of racist attitudes and practices was essential to blacks accessing the promises of the modern world. Black modernist sensibilities, therefore, included the political, economic, and social activism of African Americans attempting to achieve racial equality. Still, African American women formed autonomous modernities distinct not only from whites but also from African American men. At the core of New Negro womanhood is a specific understanding of the modern world. Slowe often discussed the necessity of preparing African American women for the modern world and imparted...