How Deans of Women Became Men

Robert A. Schwartz

Introduction

In 1870, women accounted for only 21% of the undergraduate population. By 1890, the numbers had climbed to 35%. By 1920, women represented 47% of the undergraduate students enrolled in American colleges and universities (Graham, 1978, pp. 759-793). As the enrollment of women increased, many college presidents appointed female faculty members to advise, assist, and counsel female students. These women were given the title "dean of women" to reflect their new dual roles.

Deans of women were asked to serve a dual role on the college campuses from the 1890s till the 1930s. In that transitional period, the deans were to oversee the new "minority" population on campus--women. In this capacity, they would insulate the historically male campuses from the women and, in turn, protect and guide the women, a distinct social and cultural minority despite the rapid increase in their enrollment. On the other hand, most deans were first and foremost faculty. They were academics who had trained for the scholarly life and were eager for the opportunity to teach, write, and conduct research. They were concerned about the intellectual [End Page 419] and scholarly development of women, especially in competition with men. Then as now, women had to be better to be equal.

Coeducation and Regionalism

Prior to the turn of the century, few opportunities existed in which women could experience higher education in a coeducational setting, either as students or faculty. Although Oberlin College in Ohio had admitted four women as early as 1837, relatively few coeducational experiences existed prior to the Civil War (Rudolph, 1990). Even at Oberlin, women took a different, lesser curriculum than men and were assigned different college duties. While the men studied Greek, Latin, and rhetoric, women studied in a Female Department. While men prepared for the ministry, women cooked, washed, and cleaned (Solomon, 1985, pp. 21-22).

After the Civil War, the rationales both for and against the admission of women were as widespread as the institutions. Geography played a role; many colleges in the East and South steadfastly refused to admit women while, in the Middle West and West, new state colleges in Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, and California opened their doors as coeducational institutions (Rudolph, 1990, pp. 307-328). Economics and the prohibitive cost of operating two separate campuses, one for men and another for women, was an avoidable expense if coeducation was adopted at the outset. The need for more teachers in the "common schools" which had spread to the Midwest also encouraged the higher education of women, more and more often in state institutions such as teachers colleges and normal schools.

Yet college presidents and senior faculty on many campuses were unsettled by the presence of women. Even such ardent proponents of coeducation as President James Burrill Angell of Michigan, had been educated in a generation when students and faculty were exclusively male. Women in college raised concerns about propriety, delicate matters of health, and female "problems" as well as the institutional responsibility to families to protect the safety, sexual virtue, and reputations of daughters far from home. ¹ The deans of women were the perfect solution to the dilemma. They could not only attend to any "female" concerns but also could maintain an appropriate "woman's sphere" of domestic responsibility and tranquility, the image of which dominated respectable society in Victorian America. As president of Wellesley (1881-1887), Alice Freeman Palmer created the "cottage [End Page 420] system," a collection of small houses for group living, as a safe domus for Wellesley students. ²

The First Deans of Women

Alice Freeman Palmer became the nation's first dean of women in 1892. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Palmer had been a very popular president of Wellesley College until she resigned upon marrying Harvard philosopher George Herbert Palmer in 1887 (Solomon, 1980). Lobbied incessantly by William Rainey Harper, Palmer agreed to be dean of women and professor of history at the University of Chicago in 1892 only on condition that she serve part time. Palmer was reluctant to leave the sophistication of the Boston area and her husband of five years for more than a few months at a time. He refused an offered position that would have allowed him to accompany her. (Palmer, 1909). To share the work of her new office, Alice Palmer persuaded Harper to hire her good friend and protégée, Marion Talbot, as Dean of Women for the University College and assistant professor of domestic sciences. When Palmer resigned three years later, Harper promoted Talbot to the deanship (Talbot, 1925).

The appointment of other deans of women followed quickly, paralleling the increases in the enrollment of women. In 1903, Marion Talbot of Chicago called the first meeting of deans of women for which a record survives. ³ Seventeen deans of women, representing the Universities of Chicago, Illinois, Wisconsin, Colorado, Kansas, Iowa, Ohio State, and Michigan, Indiana University, and Northwestern, Ripon, Carleton, Lawrence, Barnard, Oberlin, Beloit, and Illinois College attended (NADW, 1927). The deans' agenda included the housing of women students, training in etiquette and social skills, women's self-government, leadership opportunities for women students, and women's intercollegiate athletics.

Later in the same decade, organizations representing state colleges, private colleges, and teachers colleges formed representative organizations. In 1915, Lois Kimball Mathews, dean of women and associate professor of history at [End Page 421] the University of Wisconsin, published the first book on The Dean of Women. Many deans of women were eager to pursue graduate degrees to advance their skills and credibility. In response, Teachers College of Columbia University established a graduate program in 1916 specifically to train deans of women. In 1917, the National Association of Deans of Women (NADW), was established as a branch of the National Education Association (NADW, 1927).

In the five decades from the 1890s through World War II, the deans of women established the foundations of professional practice for student affairs and higher education administration, including graduate study, the development of professional associations, research on students, college environments, and student guidance and counseling. They developed a body of professional literature which included journals, research reports, and books.

These deans worked hard to "professionalize" the position of dean and to legitimize their roles on the still predominantly male college campus. As women, they saw their role, profession, and gender as inextricably tied together (Cott, 1987; Chafe, 1972). The deans of women were early champions of the scientific methods of guidance for students. They often challenged each other and their campuses to "do the right thing" by women. At their first meeting in Chicago in 1903, they passed a resolution condemning "gender segregation" in higher education (NADW, 1927).

However, many of their significant accomplishments have been lost or ignored in compilations of the modern history of higher education. What remains is an unfortunate caricature of deans of women as "snooping battle axes" (Rhatighan, 1978)--prudish spinsters who bedeviled the harmless fun-seeking of their students.

In large part, in my opinion, this inaccurate view results from the male voice's domination of written and oral histories of American colleges and universities. Even to the present, the accomplishments of deans of women have rarely received honest evaluation, validation, or appreciation. Rather, they have been discounted, discredited, or ignored. In reality, the deans of women were consummate professionals who anchored much of their work to the academic principles of rigorous research and scholarly dissemination of their findings. Many of the significant and well-established practices of student affairs work and higher education administrations that exist today were first put in place through the work of the deans of women. This paper presents a closer examination of these deans, revealing a much different story than the stereotype which has survived.

Professional Development

As early as 1904, the deans of women began to organize professional associations. While the scope of many of the early associations was limited, it gave the deans an opportunity for professional contact and connections. [End Page 422] These associations were organized by institutional type: Deans of Women in State Universities, Deans of Women in Private Colleges, and so on. The NADW's History Committee reported that attendance at these early meetings often numbered only 12 or 14 women (NADW, 1927, pp. 214-217), but these meetings were still significant in that they represented a determined effort to share ideas and information and to support each other professionally and, in large measure, personally.

The deans of women diligently and rigorously built their profession on the bedrock of academic discipline, research, and publication. Many of the deans appointed in the late decades of the 19th century and early decades of the 20th already held advanced degrees in their own fields. Most held faculty rank and continued to teach despite the added responsibility of the deanship. As Lois Kimball Mathews (1915) noted in The Dean of Women, a dean "must win her spurs in the classroom. . . . There is no more effective place for inculcating respect for women's powers and equipment than on the teaching side of a desk in the college classroom" (pp. 32-33). In 1928, Jane Jones, a graduate student at Teachers College, published her research on 263 deans of women titled A Personnel Study of Women Deans in Colleges and Universities. In her sample, 91% (n = 238) of these women had earned at least a bachelor's degree, 57% (151) had also earned a master's degree, and 15% (40) had earned the doctorate. In response to the question "Do you hold academic rank?" 74.9% (197) did. Of those deans who held faculty positions, the breakdown of rank was: lecturer 0.9% (1); instructor 8.8% (23); assistant professor 12.9% (34); associate professor 12.9% (34); and professor 39.9% (105) (pp. 12-14).

They reported teaching in 36 academic areas; but most were grouped in traditional arts and sciences: English (57), history (21), hygiene (17), French (16), education (15), and home economics (10). Some, like Marion Talbot, were in pioneering disciplines like household sanitation and the domestic sciences that gave rise to ecological sciences later in the century (Rossiter, 1982). In short, the deans of women were not academic lightweights.

Research and Publications

The diligent Ruth Strang, professor of education at Teachers College at Columbia, headed the Research Committee of the National Association of Deans of Women through the 1930s. Strang and her colleagues at Teachers College, Sarah Sturtevant and later Esther Lloyd-Jones, oversaw many graduate research projects and regularly published their own work. In the preface to the report of the NADW Research Committee in 1934, Strang noted:

The position of dean of women has both artistic and scientific aspects. The artistic side is represented in the inspirational and philosophical articles; the [End Page 423] scientific aspect in the description survey and experimental study of plans and procedures of work with individuals. It has been the self-imposed task of the Research Committee to summarize the investigations relating to the work of dean of women, and to make available annually the more or less scientific body of professional subject-matter published during the year. (NADW, 1934, p. 56)

Responding to her own rhetorical question, "What lines and types of research are needed?" Strang editorialized:

Articles on guidance in educational magazines during the past five years have predominantly been descriptions of guidance programs and practices. Only 140 of the 461 articles analyzed involved some systematic investigation. Professors and directors of guidance emphasize the need for measures of the effects of guidance services and opportunities. Well-planned programs of guidance should be set up, groups of students followed through these programs, complete records kept at each step and the results carefully measured. (NADW, 1934, p. 129)

Under Strang's leadership, the Research Committee identified 115 articles in their bibliography for 1934 alone. Through Strang's influence, comparable reports and bibliographies were prepared by the Research Committees and published in the Yearbooks of the National Association of Deans of Women in 1935, 1936, and 1937.

In addition to the research effort, more books joined The Education of Women by Marion Talbot (1910) and The Dean of Women by Lois Kimball Mathews. Anna E. Pierce, dean of women at the New York State College for Teachers produced Deans and Advisers of Women and Girls in 1928. Jane Jones's research (1928) was published in Contributions to Education, a series sponsored by the Teachers College. Another graduate study, The Effective Dean of Women: A Study of the Personal and Professional Characteristics of a Selected Group of Deans of Women, appeared in 1932, written by another dean, Eunice Mae Acheson. Teachers College faculty members Sarah Sturtevant and Ruth Strang contributed their own research, A Personnel Study of Deans of Women in Teachers College and Normal Schools, in 1928, followed by A Personnel Study of Deans of Girls in High School in 1929. Their much larger 1940 study, A Personnel Study of Deans of Women in Colleges, Universities, and Normal Schools updated the earlier works.

By the mid-1930s, 40 years after the first deans of women were appointed and a mere 17 years after the national association was formed, deans of women had firmly established themselves in higher education administration. The first deans were well-respected academic women who had committed themselves to their disciplines. While they were determined to provide counsel and support to young women, they also focused on the prerequisites of scholarship as the road to respect in academe. Accordingly, the early [End Page 424] deans wrote books, conducted research, published articles, and established professional associations. In turn, the associations developed journals and held annual conferences for the further dissemination of knowledge and the advancement of the profession.

The deans of women also oversaw the establishment of graduate study and degrees for the training of new deans of women as well as the expansion of research related to the field. The faculty teaching in graduate programs, especially at Teachers College, represented some of the strongest researchers and practitioners in guidance and counseling which had emerged from the "personnel" movement initiated by Walter Dill Scott, a psychologist and later president of Northwestern University. When Esther Lloyd-Jones joined the faculty at Teachers College in New York, for example, she brought with her first-hand experience as a dean as well as strong research skills developed during her time at Northwestern under Scott's tutelage.

The Personnel Movement

Walter Dill Scott developed the concept of "personnel psychology" as a young psychology professor at Northwestern. Through a battery of tests, extensive interviews, and meticulous record-keeping, each individual in an organization was chronicled and categorized by family background, personnel interests, aptitude, and vocational and career aspirations. In the college setting, records on individual students allowed the trained observer to assess the student's developmental progress, not only toward a college degree but also a successful occupation and, ideally, a fulfilling life. The underlying hypothesis of this movement was that, rather than leaving vocation, personal satisfaction, and social efficiency to whimsy and chance, proper personnel and guidance techniques enabled personnel directors to direct and support student's energies towards constructive and useful ends.

Initially designed to complement the "efficiency movement" in industry, Scott's ideas were applied, first, to draftees in World War I and later to students at Northwestern. The concept spread to other institutions through Scott's protégés such as L. B. Hopkins who became president of Wabash College. Hopkins wrote his own version of Scott's personnel philosophy for higher education, Personnel Procedure in Education, published in 1926 by the American Council on Education (ACE). ⁴ When Esther Lloyd-Jones moved to Teachers College after graduate work and a faculty position at [End Page 425] Northwestern, she used "personnel" concepts with graduate students and deans of women. Her own book, Student Personnel Work at Northwestern University, was published in 1929.

During the 1930s, "student personnel" programs became widespread and popular; using psychology and vocational guidance would become the dominant theme of the late 1940s and 1950s. Having embraced the concept in the early 1930s, the deans of women were far ahead of their time. Not only were the graduate faculty at Teachers College and other institutions promoting the very latest in psychological sciences for work with college students, but the deans of women through their national association also spread the word to their members on college campuses across the country.

When a new coordinating body, the Council of Guidance and Personnel Associations (CPGA), was initiated in 1934, members of the National Association of Deans of Women were immediately involved as officers. Through the leadership of women such as Thrysa Amos, Sarah Sturtevant, and Esther Lloyd-Jones, this council encouraged the further involvement of deans of women and women in other positions, such as appointment secretaries, in national associations promoting the personnel movement. By 1936, the CPGA represented the common interests of 12 member organizations. Other organizations in the new CGPA included the American of College Personnel Association, the Personnel Research Federation, and the Teachers College Personnel Association, to name only three. This coordinated effort consolidated the increasing interest in the personnel movement nationwide. ⁵

As early as 1931, a report on land-grant colleges by the U.S. Commissioner of Education had noted:

The term "personnel service" has been carried over into the colleges from industry, where it came into prominence just after the [first] World War. . . . Industry uses personnel work in selecting, teaching, lessening turnover, conserving health, and providing recreation for its workers. . . . When colleges took over this type of work . . . the fundamental aim . . . [was] service to the student as an individual. [However,] the colleges have for years been obtaining and filing away vast numbers of records, a source for limitless research, that, rightly used, might throw much light on many of their unsolved problems. (pp. 420-424)

In 1937, the ACE published a monograph reporting the work of a 17-member Subcommittee on Student Welfare which enthusiastically promoted the concept of "student personnel." It urged college and university presidents and faculty to guide students through courses, vocations, and even the extracurriculum with the aid of student personnel procedures. This subcommittee [End Page 426] included Esther Lloyd-Jones, and Thrysa Amos, both active in many of the activities of deans of women (ACE, 1937).

Over time, the student personnel concept won many supporters. The deans of women saw the new philosophy as sound theory put into practice and as a benefit to women students. By emphasizing social efficiency and tying vocation to skills and ability, not just physical attributes, the personnel concept was friendlier to women than other existing methods of selection and training.

What the deans could not know was that the personnel movement carried within it the seeds of destruction for their own profession as deans of women. At Northwestern, Walter Scott had encouraged the coordination of personnel offices and workers under a single director of personnel for greater efficiency. When records were kept in several offices or duplicated by several workers, much effort was wasted. While the logic of efficiency was irresistible, the social fact of American administrative hierarchy in the 1930s was also inescapable: Whether in the army, a factory, or a college, the administrative head of any large operation was almost certainly going to be a man.

Deans of Men

After the appointment of the deans of women at the University of Chicago, most colleges and universities in the United States slowly began adding the office of dean of men during the 1910s and 1920s. ⁶ After performing numerous tasks of a dean for several years, Thomas Arkle Clark, a professor of rhetoric and English at the University of Illinois, received the official title of dean of men in 1909. Clark's appointment was followed by others at Purdue, Iowa, and Wisconsin to name only a few other state coeducational institutions. While the admission of women created change on campus, demanding administrative response, male students were more often left to fend for themselves as they had traditionally been.

Given the concentration of deans of men in the Midwest, it is not surprising that the first recorded meeting of deans of men took place at a Big Ten institution. Scott Goodnight, dean of men at the University of Wisconsin, takes credit for arranging a meeting in Madison in 1919 "for a discussion of our problems" (NADM, 1934, p. 28). Goodnight, with some urging from Robert Rienow, dean of men at Iowa, called the meeting because of his concern for student disciplinary matters between the schools. He recalled:

Without authorization from anybody, I wired Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan to come on over. The idea of founding a permanent [End Page 427] organization or creating a professional association was the farthest thing from my mind when I invited the boys to come in for a weekend so that we might discuss our commons tribulations more intimately. It was after the first meeting had proved so pleasant and stimulating that the proposal was made to repeat it. (NADM, 1934, p. 32)

The session was a great success. Another meeting followed in 1920. In 1921, the gathering formally organized under the name of the National Association of Deans of Men and authorized the publication of the meeting's minutes.

The meetings were social and club-like in contrast to the professionalism of the national conferences of the deans of women. The deans of men enjoyed the opportunity to converse, to enjoy local hospitalities and activities, and to regale each other with tales from their campuses. Over time, issues of professionalism, graduate study, and the role of the dean of men were topics of discussion, but they were addressed in a more affable, informal manner with less emphasis on scholarship and research than the deans of women demonstrated in their sessions.

For example, Stanley Coulter, dean of men at Purdue University, captured the informal and jovial tone of these early meetings:

What is a Dean of Men? I have tried to define him. When the Board of Trustees elected me Dean of Men, I wrote to them very respectfully and asked them to give me the duties of the Dean of Men. They wrote back that they did not know what they were but when I found out to let them know. I worked all the rest of the year trying to find out. I discovered that every unpleasant task that the president or the faculty did not want to do was my task. I was convinced that the Dean of Men's office was intended as the dumping ground of all unpleasant things. (NADM, 1928, p. 37).

Part of the deans of men's organizational task was to search for a campus persona with which they were comfortable. They were concerned that they not be perceived only as "disciplinarians" whose primary role was to punish young men who ran afoul of college or university rules and regulations. ⁷ As a group, they practiced a benevolent, pipe-smoking, older brother type of in loco parentis.

Change on Campus and the Deans

During the Roaring 1920s, college students became the first collective student population large enough to rewrite the rules, and they demanded life on their own terms. In the Ohio State Lantern in 1922, one coed declared: [End Page 428]

Are we as bad as we are painted? We are. We do all the things that our mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles do not sanction, and we do them knowingly. We are not young innocents--. . . We are . . . smoking, dancing like Voodoo devotees, dressing décolleté, "petting" and drinking. We do these things because we honestly enjoy the attendant physical sensations. . . . The college girl--particularly the girl in the co-educational institution--is a plucky, coolheaded individual who thinks naturally. . . . The girl does not stand aloof--she and the man meet on common ground. . . . (Qtd. in Fass, 1976, p. 307)

Fass (1976) has noted the importance of this shift in women's traditional roles:

The American woman had been the special stabilizer of nineteenth-century society. [Instead of the] stable mother secure in her morality and her home [was the] "giddy flapper, rouged and clipped, careening in a drunken stupor to the lewd strains of a jazz quartet" (pp. 23-25).

Some deans of women reacted with outrage and moral indignation. For example, Anna Pierce, dean at a state college in upstate New York, used her book, Deans and Advisers to Women and Girls (1928) to lament the abandonment of the moral codes which defined women's roles throughout the nineteenth century and to urge the familiar themes of separate spheres for men and women.

However, most deans appear to have taken many of these social changes in stride. Minutes from the national meetings of deans of women do not record a significant reaction or undue concern about the new "youth generation," a term employed by Life magazine to describe the campus scene. William J. Alderman, dean of men at Beloit College, wittily characterized the college campuses of the 1920s as a:

heterogony of monstrosities--bobbed haired daughters of Satan in their early nicotines; tardy sons of Hoyle who have an aversion for the hardy sons of toil; emulous coeds who indulge in such fatuous anachronisms as breaking the endurance record for the tango; . . . The daughters of culture have married the sons of prosperity and are sending their offspring to universities and colleges because it is fashionable, convenient and prudential. (NADM, 1928, p. 43).

Nonetheless, the deans of men more typically reacted to change on campus, in contrast to the participatory stance of the deans of women, who typically used their professional associations and their own research to guide their responses. The deans of men, like Thomas Clark and others, stood for a paternalistic, in loco parentis approach to these concerns. They often appealed to the "good" nature of their men and used discipline as a tool for social development. [End Page 429]

Further, the disciplinary records for the period indicate that women students were less likely to engage in behavior which resulted in disciplinary action. A 1932 survey of land-grant 31 colleges shows that 2,914 women (7% of all women enrolled) were disciplined, while men in 40 institutions who were disciplined during the same period numbered 11,683 (12.5% of those enrolled) Report of the U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1932). Far more students, male and female alike, were put on probation or suspended for "poor grades" than for "drinking", "sex," or "automobiles." Thus, deans of men were indeed busier than the deans of women when it came to campus discipline, but their primary source of concern was academic performance, not moral behavior. Robert Rienow, dean of men at the University of Iowa, admitted at the 1928 NADM meeting: "For thirteen years I kidded myself that I was not a disciplinarian. But in the last few years I have learned that I was [always] pulling the chestnuts out of the fire for someone" (NADM, 1928, p. 41).

Training for Deans of Men

Beyond discipline and approaches to student conduct, the most obvious disparity between deans of men and deans of women was the on-going debate over professional training and graduate study. F. F. Bradshaw, dean of men at the University of North Carolina argued in 1931:

The deanship stands to some extent at a fork in the road . . . whether we are to be solely campus disciplinarians or whether we are to be administrative coordinators of the institution's work from the point of view of the whole individual student and the point of view of group life of students. (NADM, 1931, p. 108)

However, he was apparently a minority voice against a majority position of jocular but determined amateurism holding that graduate study was of little use to anyone seeking to be a dean. Speaking in the same 1931 conference of deans of men, Joseph Bursley, dean of men at the University of Michigan, countered Bradshaw's argument, not with evidence, but with the cheerful assertion: "I am afraid that I am not in sympathy with the idea of any course of training for the position of Dean of Men. . . . The best and most successful Deans of Men are born and not made" (p. 103). Bursley did offer a slight concession, although whether it can be taken seriously is another matter:

There is one place where I believe that preparedness is absolutely essential to the success of a dean of men--that is in the selection of a wife. The very best preparation he [the dean] can have for his work is to marry the right woman. If she is the right kind, a dean's wife does just as much to earn his [End Page 430] salary as he does, and if she is not, he might as well quit before he starts. (NADM, 1931, p. 104)

Five years later, Frederick R. Turner, successor to Thomas Arkle Clark as Dean of Men at the University of Illinois, repeated an identical assertion to the annual conference of the National Association of Deans of Women:

I am . . . chairman of a special committee [of the National Association of Deans of Men] to study and report on . . . the preparation [of the] dean of men. . . . The general opinion of those who have served long and successfully, and those who have observed successful deans of men, is that there is no satisfactory training [to be a dean], at least from the academic standpoint, for the simple reason that the best deans are born that way and not trained that way. (NADW, 1936, p. 104)

Part of his address was reporting the work of a committee he had chaired on "preparation for work as a dean of men" that had surveyed respondents. In response to a question about what practical training would be helpful, the top responses were "apprenticeship to a Dean of Men (n = 68)," "work with activities (43)," "administrative duties (30)," "counseling and interviewing (27)," "dormitory proctor (18)," and "business experience (16)." Other suggestions ranged from "Y.M.C.A. work" to "grade tests" to "speaking in public" (NADW, 1936, pp. 104-106).

There is no record of the reaction of the highly professionalized deans of women to this survey. However, in 1937, William H. Cowley got the attention of the deans of men with an address on "The Disappearing Dean of Men." Cowley, director of education research at Ohio State, spelled out the future for the assembled deans in a simple and straightforward thesis: As the need for student personnel services expanded within higher education, the office of the dean of men would cease to exist. While "deans for student relations" and "instructional" or academic deans had "grown out of the same tree"--Charles W. Eliot's administration at Harvard--both had changed significantly over time.

Cowley saw the existing distribution of student personnel functions as an obstacle to efficiency. For example, the student's application form is "replete with information of high value to the members of the personnel staff other than the admissions officer" (NADM, 1937, p. 94); however, probably no one else ever saw it and other campus offices collected the same information all over again, wasting their time and the students'. In essence, Cowley claimed:

All student personnel services are but different types of the same sort of activity. . . . A basic unity runs throughout them all. If the assumption is sound, then it follows, it seems to me, that somehow they should all be made to [End Page 431] work together in unison, that they should all move forward in step, that, in brief, they should all be coordinated. (p. 94).

Cowley sketched "three roads" to such coordination. In the first possibility, the dean of men would become this needed personnel coordinator. The second "road" made the dean subordinate to a coordinator of personnel services. The third option eliminated the positions of both dean of men and women, as Earlham, William and Mary, Iowa State, and Northwestern had already done. He found possible but improbable the idea that matters would remain much as they were.

The turn towards student personnel services in higher education, Cowley told the deans, was irreversible and universal. While "sitting deans" might be named coordinator or director of personnel in the revamped organization, much would depend on the incumbent. Each dean would have to be evaluated on his own merits. A successful transition would depend on the dean of men's "training, his temperament, his intellectual range, his ability as an executive, and . . . his spirit" (p. 99).

Two of the many questions to which Cowley responded after the presentation of his paper was a particularly telling one: Would a dean of women also be "subordinate"? Would it be possible for a woman to be promoted to the top spot? Cowley responded, "It seems to me there isn't any reason deans of women shouldn't go up if they are equal to it. I think we can say that the deans of women are in exactly the same position as deans of men" (p. 99).

Cowley was a member of the Student Welfare Committee of the American Council on Education, which had just published The Student Personnel Point of View (ACE, 1937). He was simply reporting on the committee's work. But Cowley commanded a good bit of respect and his presentation forced the deans of men to reexamine their position on campus.

Still, nothing really changed for ten or fifteen years--not until deans of men and other male administrators accepted the inevitability of the "personnel movement" in the late 1940s and early 1950s. ⁸ As campuses adopted the "student personnel" philosophy as envisioned by the American Council on Education in 1937, it was the position of dean of women which systematically disappeared from most college and university campuses. As men swarmed to college campuses after World War II in response to the Serviceman's Readjustment Act (GI Bill), opportunities for women were diminished. Eventually, the dominance of men on college campuses defeated the need to recognize and maintain a role for women on campus. [End Page 432]

Post-World War II Developments

The position of dean of women was threatened after World War II both in numbers and as a symbol. Although women's representation on campuses had climbed steadily from 1870 through the 1920s, their inclusion on campus had never been easy. The Great Depression in the 1930s and national attention on World War II in the 1940s further redirected social energies away from education. When the country returned to domestic issues following World War II, the press for "normalcy" and rush to reward men for the "war effort" ignored the role women had played in achieving success. In many cases, this reaction galvanized attitudes which can best be described as "anti-women," including the slow but steady erosion of women's presence on college campuses (Chafe, 1972).

Barbara Solomon (1980) and Patricia Graham (1978) cite enrollment statistics from 1870 to 1950 that describe a slow but steady decline in the enrollment of women from 1930 through the 1950s. From representing 47% of undergraduates in 1920, women's enrollment dropped to only 21% of undergraduates by the mid-1950s (Graham, 1978), even though the raw numbers of women in higher education continued to rise. At first glance, this decline may not appear to be much of a problem since women who desired an education obviously had no trouble gaining admittance by the thousands. However, the culture of the campus became increasingly indifferent and even hostile towards women. The patronizing tone is captured by the universally prevalent joke that women were just in college to earn their "MRS" degree. Chafe (1972) and others have documented the determined effort to keep women in the home and out of the workplace in the post-war era. In simple terms, there was a social reconstruction of the 19th-century concept of "separate spheres," with women's place being located exclusively in the home. As evidence, we need look no further than the baby boom generation born in the late 1940s and 1950s.

The position of dean of women was an inevitable victim of the pervasive hostility that greeted women in general on campus, while the position of dean of men assumed new administrative importance. In 1951, the National Association of Deans of Men changed its name to the more contemporary National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. On individual campuses, the office of dean of men expanded to become dean for student personnel, dean of students, and vice-presidents for student personnel services during the 1950s. Meanwhile, deans of women were given lesser positions, dismissed, or allowed to retire quietly. In 1952, Louise Spenser reported that the number of deans of women reporting to a "coordinated" office or to a dean of students had risen to 12% as compared to 2% in 1936. Many of the deans of women who responded to Spenser's survey, based on responses from 472 colleges and universities, gave anecdotal evidence [End Page 433] that they could sense problems in the future. Spenser herself, analyzing her data, queried, "Shall the needs, and problems, and interests of women students be represented by a man who is generally far removed from the problems. . . ?" (p. 107). This status problem was not unique to deans of women. William Chafe (1972) documents that "women fell from 25% of all auto workers in 1944 to 7.5% in April 1946. Overall, females comprised 60% of all workers released from employment in the early months after the war [World War II] and were laid off at a rate 75% higher than men" (p. 180). Among deans of women, the trend would persist across the next several decades till the office was virtually extinct. The NADW, the professional association, became the National Association of Women Deans, Administrators, and Counselors (NAWDAC) in the 1960s, trying to reverse its declining membership with broader appeal.

Summary and Conclusion

Many explanations can be offered, but the simplest are probably the most accurate. In brief, women were not welcome on college campuses during the period, a trend which reached its zenith in the 1950s. As a lightning rod for women's involvement on campus, the dean of women was no longer a positive force for change but a pariah. The caricature of spinsterly, "snooping battle axes" (Rhatigan, 1978) gained credence in the 1950s, allowing the final denigration of a proud, respected, and pioneering professional--the dean of women. Instead of the recognition and respect which many of the deans of women deserved for the establishment of graduate study, research, professional associations, and a significant body of professional literature, the deans of women saw their roles and offices erode and eventually disappear.

The new personnel directors suggested by Cowley and the Student Personnel Point of View in 1937 were finally appointed in the late 1940s and during the 1950s. While many of the deans of men were realigned into such positions as dean for student personnel, dean of students, and vice presidents for student personnel services, deans of women were given lesser positions, dismissed, or allowed to retire quietly. To insure their new roles, in 1951, the National Association of Deans of Men changed its name to the more contemporary National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. The deans of men finally got the message. The ideas, theories, concepts, research, and goals of the deans of women went forward, but the deans of women did not. The deans of women became men.

From the 1950s to the 1990s, men assumed the primary roles as deans, vice presidents, leading authors, and national spokespersons for higher education and student affairs issues, research, and policy. In truth, they were simply advancing the ideology of the women who had preceded them in earlier decades. Ironically, higher education administration and student affairs [End Page 434] continue to attract more women than men to graduate preparation programs. And following the pattern described above, most of the top administrative positions still go to men.

Robert A. Schwartz is currently an Assistant Professor in the College of Education at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. His research interests include the history of higher education, women, and student services. He has recently completed research on women in higher education and also African American women in graduate study.

Notes

1. One of the most pronounced diatribes against higher education for women came in a 1873 book, Sex in Education; Or a Fair Chance for Girls, by Edward H. Clarke, a Boston physician specializing in diseases of the eye and nerves. Clarke argued that women were incapable of both serious intellectual work and child-rearing. Too much study would atrophy the womb. His book went into 17 printings before 1885.

2. Palmer herself moved from the president's house to a cottage. During the 1890s at the University of Chicago, Palmer and Marian Talbot attempted, through the Beatrice Hotel and later a women's residence hall on campus, to recreate the "cottage system" for women students (Talbot, 1925).

3. Marion Talbot was following the example of her mother, who in 1888 had organized the charter session of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, a meeting attended by both Marion Talbot and Alice Freeman. There is a mention of an earlier meeting in 1902 but no minutes have survived. This association did some of the earliest research on women in American colleges, a function that the National Association of Deans of Women picked up with enthusiasm and carried out with impressive professionalism.

4. George Zook, U.S. Commissioner of Education and later president of ACE, became an early and zealous convert to the concepts of the personnel movement. Zook, Hopkins, and Lloyd-Jones all served on an ACE committee in 1937 credited with drawing greater attention to the new philosophy of student personnel in higher education through publishing the Student Personnel Point of View (SPPV), a monograph still published and studied today.

5. The CPGA was later renamed the American Guidance and Personnel Association (APGA).

6. Le Baron Russell Briggs, an English professor at Harvard, was appointed "dean for students" in 1890 by Charles William Eliot, who was attempting to delegate some of his administrative tasks. Briggs thus preceded Alice Palmer and Marion Talbot at Chicago. Eliot simultaneously appointed another faculty member as academic dean (Eliot, 1908; Brown, 1936).

7. Among Thomas Clark's publications is a collection of tales dealing with miscreant students, aptly titled, Discipline and the Derelict: Being a Series of Essays on Some of Those Who Tread the Green Carpet (1921).

8. This same "personnel movement" was the subject of Lloyd-Jones's book in 1929 and had been embraced by the leadership of the National Association of Deans of Women in the 1930s. In this aspect, they were at least a decade in advance of their male counterparts.

References

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