Deans of Women and the Feminist Movement: Emily Taylor's Activism by Kelly C. Sartorius (review)

As a historian of US women, when I think about higher education and advances for women, I think of the landmark legislation, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Kelly Sartorius's study introduces us to a cadre of women in higher education who worked decades earlier within a context of sex and race discrimination to open educational opportunities for women. Before Title IX, separate positions existed for the supervision of male and female students within colleges. Deans of women, she argues, used their positions to support the economic and political independence of college women. The network she has unearthed in this book contributes to the history of gender and higher education reform similarly to the way Susan Ware's Beyond Suffrage: Women of the New Deal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987) advanced policy history.

Sartorius does not argue that all deans of women acted as feminist mentors. Her story revolves around Emily Taylor, with whom she did oral history interviews for seven years. "I drove to her home after work once a week where we discussed AWS [Associated Women Students], feminist strategy, organizational politics, coeducation, the deans' profession, and the impact of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Title IX on women's education" (3). The interviews about Taylor's education, mentors, and advocacy revealed a network that began in the Progressive Era and continued into the 1970s. (Taylor's active professional life spanned the postwar decades into the 1970s.) The web of organizations that supported the development of women's autonomy included the National Association of Deans of Women, the US Women's Bureau, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council on Education and its Office of Women in Higher Education. The coordination among these national networks enhanced their ability to shape change. The book's chapters highlight the feminist deans' goals to develop economic and political citizenship and women's autonomy, and to address specific issues of concern to women students, such as combining marriage and career, sexual violence, and career choices.

The book offers a rich and deep collection of both primary and secondary sources, yet it is the interviews (Taylor's as well as others) that proved essential in uncovering this history. The type of records left in the archives of deans of women revealed very little about the inner workings of the job. This was particularly the case as her subjects discussed ways in which they sought to push the boundaries of women's roles. The narratives of Taylor and associates Donna Shavlik and Karla Stroup provided the roadmap, Sartorius writes, which she could use with archival sources.

The author embeds her subject in the context of the time and the historic literature. Some themes are familiar, such as the employment opportunities for women during the war years, retrenchment during the 1950s, and the elimination of women's positions as the postwar reorganization of student services gave jobs to men. Race and class biases were present in her subject's views, and professional organizations remained racially separated through 1954. Other themes raise new avenues for investigation. How did national organizations push back against job elimination in the postwar decades? How did some deans use the Associated Women Students organization as a forum to shape students' independent political views and gain leadership experience? How did deans of women at historically black colleges develop leadership for college women? Sartorius offers the example of Lucy Diggs Stowe, the first black dean of women at Howard, who built a community of women administrators to work with black women college students. All these questions provide avenues for fruitful research.

The question of whether this is an oral history or a very long set of personal interviews arises. Our professional guidelines define oral history as a primary document, an interview with a transcript that is deposited in a repository for the benefit of scholarship and preservation. It is...