The Deans' Bible. Angie Klink

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Engineering Administration Building. It would turn out to be not so “temporary.”

      The plan was that the women’s dormitory would be built on property on what is today called Russell Street. Purdue expected to acquire this land from owner Phillip Russell. Years before, Phillip’s parents had donated land to John Purdue for the construction of the University; however, Phillip was not as generous as his parents and did not want to donate the land. The Women’s Residence Hall project faced suits and countersuits as Purdue tried to gain control of the Russell property. Frank Cary grew tired of waiting and eventually found another project in which he memorialized his late wife. He built the Jessie Levering Cary Home for Children in Lafayette.

      Though Frank would not donate funds to build a women’s dormitory, he agreed to give money to build another men’s dormitory near Cary Hall. Not wanting to lose a chance at a donation, the Purdue board, including Virginia, agreed that the money would be accepted for the construction of another men’s dorm.

      The male administration did not place a high priority on bringing female students to Purdue. Virginia had spent nine years working for better housing for women with nothing to show for her efforts, and Purdue’s enrollment of women was in jeopardy. Why would women choose to attend Purdue if adequate and safe housing was unavailable? It appears excuses were made. Bids came in “too high,” the designated land was caught in a legal battle, and the men in administration wondered how many women would actually be able to afford and want to stay in the new dormitory. Virginia, Carolyn, and the female students they fostered were left in limbo.

      While Virginia spent much of her energy on women’s residential concerns, she also headed the effort to build Purdue’s Memorial Union. Just two months after she was appointed to the board, Virginia was named president of the Purdue Memorial Union Association Board of Governors. She was the principal figure in the design, construction, financing, and management of the building dedicated to the more than four thousand alumni who had served in the Civil War and World War I. Raising money to build the Memorial Union was an ongoing, agonizing process. She led the groundbreaking for the building in 1922, but it was not completed until 1930 when Virginia was eighty years old. This long gap was due to donors who were not honoring their commitments to pay their pledges to finance the construction; however, Carolyn made a handsome donation of $5,000 (the equivalent of $65,000 today), the largest contribution made by a woman.

       4

       FAR HORIZONS

      AFTER THE NINETEENTH AMENDMENT was passed and women received the right to vote, many suffragists “retired” from activism, but Alice Paul, the famed suffragist who organized the march on Washington in 1913, continued to toil for women’s equality. In 1923, Alice announced a new constitutional amendment she authored and named the Lucretia Mott Amendment. It stated. “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.”

      Like Alice, Lucretia Mott was a Quaker. She and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were the organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention in New York “to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” Lucretia was a fluent, moving speaker for human rights who remained composed even before hostile audiences. She was the consummate role model for Alice, and it was fitting that Alice named the amendment after her. In the decades to follow, Alice would work assiduously for the passage of the Lucretia Mott Amendment, which would be reworded and named the Alice Paul Amendment, before it would be termed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

      The ERA was introduced in every session of Congress from 1923 until 1972. After Congress passed the amendment nearly fifty years after Alice first introduced it, the ERA ultimately was not endorsed by enough states to be ratified. Every step of the way, each year the ERA was presented and debated in Congress and at statehouses, the National Association of Deans of Women steadfastly supported its ratification.

      During this time, female students in higher education sought equality with regard to honor societies. Since women were not considered for membership in most of the men’s honor societies, women began forming their own local groups. At Purdue, the Home Economics Society was renamed the Virginia C. Meredith Club in the spring of 1925 to esteem the revered first and only female trustee.

      Honor societies and other forms of recognition are vital for a woman’s development of ambition. In Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives, psychiatrist Anna Fels wrote of the two emotional engines of ambition: the mastery of chosen skills and the essential recognition of that mastery by others. In The Good Girls Revolt by Lynn Povich, Fels is quoted as saying that women are “subtly discouraged from pursing their goals by a pervasive lack of recognition for their accomplishments.” For centuries, women have feared that seeking recognition will open them up for ridicule about how they live their lives, with attacks on most anything, including their popularity, femininity, and motherhood.

      Povich states in her book, “But recognition in all its forms—admiration from peers, mentoring, institutional rewards, and societal approval—is something that makes us better at what we do.” Fels explained that without it, “people get demoralized and ambitions erode.” Thus, on college campuses, women’s honor societies were and are crucial to foster female ambition and success.

      Mortar Board was the first national organization honoring senior college women. It began with a chance meeting of two women from separate societies wearing identical pins. In the fall of 1915 on the campus of the University of Chicago, a member of the Ohio State University honor society, called Mortar Board, met a member of the Pi Sigma Chi honor society from Swarthmore College. Both women wore lapel pins in the shape of a mortarboard, the tasseled academic cap with a square, flat top worn at graduation ceremonies. The women remarked of their identical pins and realized each represented a different honor society for women with similar ideals and traditions. The main difference between the two honor societies was the name.

      Three years later, a founding meeting for the Mortar Board National College Senior Honor Society took place at Syracuse University. Female representatives at the meeting were from Cornell University, the University of Michigan, the Ohio State University, and Swarthmore College. Representatives from Syracuse University also were in attendance, but this university did not choose to join the national organization when it later became Mortar Board.

      Years later, Barbara Cook, who would become a Purdue University dean of students, gave her theory on why Mortar Board came to be: “My guess is that women in the early twentieth century were not taken very seriously as scholars or as leaders. In 1916, women were not yet allowed to vote. So perhaps Mortar Board originated from a feeling of being excluded and isolated as women in higher education.”

      Many of the traditions established for Mortar Board were taken from the original Ohio State Chapter, including the name, their initiation rituals, and the pin in the shape of a mortarboard with the insignia of three Greek letters—ΠΣΑ (Pi Sigma Alpha)—meaning service, scholarship, and leadership. Barbara Cook said:

      Service as a concept has always been familiar and appropriate to the feminine domain, but surely there was something adventuresome about suggesting to college women in 1916 that scholarship and leadership were achievable qualities for women.

      Although the collegiate fashion of the day was that of secret societies bathed in mysticism and meeting by the hoot of an owl at midnight, there is no evidence that Mortar Board was ever intended to be anything but open and available to both public and academic scrutiny.

      With Carolyn Shoemaker’s impetus, the thirty-sixth chapter of Mortar Board was chartered at Purdue University in November 1926. Carolyn became an honorary member. That year СКАЧАТЬ