The Deans' Bible. Angie Klink

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СКАЧАТЬ them. Her speech was inspiring and roused the board to purchase a building to serve the community.

      The group found a home to purchase at 617 Ferry Street. Carolyn paid $800 into a fund to create the Community House. The Community House Association was formed, and with her large donation, Carolyn was made a life member of its board of directors.

      Eventually, the Industrial School and Free Kindergarten became a part of the public school system, and the Community House was used solely for women’s society meetings and rented sleeping rooms for women. The YWCA held its first meetings there. In subsequent years, Carolyn’s dean of women successors would also heed the call to help women and families of the Lafayette community and foster strong connections to the YWCA.

      AS EARLY AS 1913, Purdue’s female students were longing for a new residence hall and classroom building to replace the decaying Ladies Hall. Yet it would be years before they would see a new women’s residence hall built on Purdue’s campus. In the 1919 Debris yearbook, a poem called “The Coed’s Plea” was printed. In lighthearted rhyme, the women students lamented their need for a new building and how other new structures on campus, such as a new horse barn, received precedence over providing an adequate facility for women.

      Inside Ladies Hall, the walls were cracking and chunks of plaster fell into the bread dough the women mixed; the coeds were forced to work in dim light because many of the gaslights were inoperable; and dishpans were scattered around the building to catch leaks from the water pipes. The poem ended with these lines: “And now, Purdue, you wonder why / We’re sour and cross today. / It’s all because we coeds few / Are treated in this way.”

      Accompanying the poem printed in the 1919 Debris, Carolyn wrote an essay titled “Woman’s Building.” She said, “The number of girls enrolled in the University has been more than doubled in the past few years.” There were 247 women registered, and she attributed the increase to the fact that the women were offered courses that appealed to them, and “we have taken care of our girls.” Carolyn continued, “This, in fine, is the Purdue spirit. Progressive? Yes. And we have accomplished it all with no place that is peculiarly our own. But with a Woman’s Building with headquarters for our various activities,—well, just watch us and see!”

      In 1920, the women were still waiting for their new building, so Carolyn wrote another essay in the Debris, ending with words of empowerment: “With the advent of a Woman’s Building there will be a new order of things. And with a Dormitory we could beat the world.”

      Carolyn had established a rapport with the women students she affectionately called “my girls,” as is evident in a tribute they wrote to her: “She is sympathetic to the popular activities of the University and is ready to march across the levee at the head of the coeds whenever a college demonstration is to be made—and never is too weary to chaperone a campus dance, even into the ‘wee sma’ hours.’”

      In 1920, women gained the right to vote and Prohibition was instituted. The next year, the Indiana General Assembly passed a bill requiring the governor to select at least one woman among the six appointments to the Purdue University Board of Trustees. The women’s suffrage movement had put pressure on all public institutions to appoint qualified women when board positions became available. Indiana Governor Warren T. McCray selected Virginia Claypool Meredith, age seventy-two, as the first female member of the Purdue University Board of Trustees.

      Virginia had been a “lady farmer,” managing a 115-acre farm in Cambridge City, Indiana, after her husband passed away. She was a nationally known agricultural writer and speaker. At the age of forty, Virginia became a single mother when she adopted the children of her late best friend. Her adopted daughter was Mary L. Matthews, who would become Purdue’s first dean of home economics. Mary and her graduate students taught at the Industrial School and Free Kindergarten where Carolyn was a lifetime board member.

      During the Roaring Twenties, Virginia was the grand dame of Purdue. With so few women on campus and a rather small University population of approximately 3,200 students, her presence was noticeable at meetings and functions; photos show her with an understated regal air. Nearly always depicted as the only female standing with the other male trustees, she dressed in an ankle-length black dress, a cape, and a matching hat with plumes softly cascading over the brim. She wore black gloves and a scarf with a hefty tassel. Her layers of clothing seemed to weigh her down, for she stooped slightly with her head bowed; however, perhaps, rather than her strata of clothing, it was the enormity of being the first woman on the Purdue University Board of Trustees that pressed upon her. The first woman of any endeavor must set the pace and the example for those who follow in her stead.

      At her initial meeting as Purdue’s first female trustee, Virginia voted with the board to authorize the construction of the Home Economics Building, a structure that five decades later would be named after her adopted daughter. Once the Home Economics Building was completed, Virginia turned her attention to creating a much-needed women’s residence hall.

      Carolyn’s annual reports during the 1920s referred repeatedly to the need for scholarships, dormitory accommodations, and a women’s gymnasium. She continually expressed concern for the number of female students living in town for whom the University made no provision. In 1925, she urged the establishment of housing that would accommodate all freshmen women and thus do away with sorority rush, which she considered one of the worst aspects of college life. Often, women who were not selected for sorority membership withdrew from the University and returned home in humiliation and despair. Later, her successor, Dorothy Stratton, would share Carolyn’s aversion of rush and make a change in its structure.

      Because women students could not find housing close to campus, they often walked great distances, and in the winter, they walked in the dark in their high-top, heeled shoes. The women often were physically uncomfortable and vulnerable to exhaustion, especially in hot weather. The average outfit a woman wore back then, with its layers of garments, took nineteen yards of material and weighed almost twenty-five pounds.

      Virginia and a committee she established to study women’s housing recommended to the Purdue University Board of Trustees that Ladies Hall be renovated and used as a temporary dormitory until an adequate women’s hall could be erected. The board consented but put just enough money into the project to keep the building serviceable, and Ladies Hall housed fewer than fifty women.

      Five years later, the cost for more repairs exceeded what the board was willing to spend, and Ladies Hall was demolished. One of the last of Purdue’s five original buildings disappeared. Virginia thought that the demise of Ladies Hall would speed up the construction of a women’s dormitory. After all, fifty women had been displaced. She pointed out that most land-grant colleges in the Midwest already offered modern residence halls for women; however, Purdue administrators again leased rooms for female students in local homes, and even Dean of Women Carolyn Shoemaker had to follow suit.

      One of the homes was the George Dexter house on Marsteller Street where today’s Marsteller Parking Garage is located. This was where Carolyn made her office and home with some of her students.

      In 1928, Frank Cary offered $60,000 to build a residence hall for women, which was to be named in memory of his wife who had passed away. The Carys previously had given money for the building of a men’s dormitory in memory of their late son. Today, that building is named Cary East, part of Cary Quadrangle.

      Virginia was appreciative and thanked Frank Cary for his gift in a heartfelt resolution read to the board. The group assured Frank that they would borrow sufficient additional funds necessary to complete the construction of the women’s residence hall. With the go-ahead for the project, Virginia and the other trustees decided they would no longer lease the home for women students on Marsteller Street. СКАЧАТЬ