Search

During the 1930s and 1940s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) devoted much time trying to improve educational opportunities for African-Americans within the existing segregated school system. The teacher salary equalization movement began with a series of successful cases in Maryland. This paper examines how the NAACP used the lessons gained from the Maryland experience to advance the teacher salary equalization movement in Virginia from 1935 to 1941. The role of Thurgood Marshall is also described. By the end of the 1940s, the NAACP realized the impossibility of equal separate schools and decided to attack the entire system of school segregation. However, the teacher salary struggle produced the following gains: (1) teachers gradually received equal pay for equal work; (2) the equity of financial outlay between African-American and White schools was improved; and (3) the NAACP gained procedural knowledge, which aided salary fights in other states. Three tables are included. (LMI)

This paper presents a chronological description of the evolution of women's advancement in higher education, particularly in administrative capacities, and examines the establishment of the three types of institutions that came into being in order to meet women's educational needs: the single-sex college; the coordinate college; and the coeducational college. The paper begins with an account of the status of higher education for women in the United States in the 1820s and 1830s and goes on to describe how single-sex colleges began after the Civil War with Vassar (1865), Wellesley (1875), and Smith (1875). Bryn Mawr, founded in 1884, is credited with having the first feminist in higher education administration: Martha Carey Thomas, its dean and second president. The first coordinate colleges started with Columbia University's Barnard College in 1889, and Harvard's Radcliffe in 1894. Women deans and presidents of coordinate colleges, however, reported to male administrators. Oberlin College in Ohio is acknowledged as the first coeducational institution. Although all three types of colleges grew in the 20th century, the numerical growth of women administrators was limited. It is noted that until very recently, women administrators have had more opportunity to excel in women's colleges and coordinate institutions than in coeducational ones. Contains a 6-item bibliography. (GLR)

Although the first black organization chartered in the United States, the Free African Society, was chartered in 1787, education for free blacks was largely a 19th-century phenomenon. By the time the Civil War broke out, black adults outside the South had established social structures that offered them education in civic, intellectual, and spiritual forms. However, such education was accessible only to those who were economically secure enough to have the time and initiative to take advantage of it. From churches and other organizations such as clubs and societies, free black adults were able to improve their education, learn to take pride in their cultural heritage, enhance their confidence and self-image, and develop consensus on appropriate behavior and living standards. Many societies helped them develop self-protection as the groups provided a means for collective action against laws and acts of violence toward blacks. The history of free black adult education demonstrates steady growth and an increasing complexity of organization from the late 1700s to 1860. The organizations formed in this period offered a firm foundation for future development of black adult education in the latter half of the 19th century. (The document includes 17 references.) (CML)

A study on female graduates of Southern colleges and universities during the postwar period is presented. The focus is on how their experiences match the assertions of Betty Friedan in her book "The Feminine Mystique." Interviews were done with graduates of public and private, coeducational and women's, and black and white colleges. Factors examined to determine the variables explaining the degree to which the interviewees accepted the feminine mystique included the following: social class and race; parental education, employment, and expectations; choice of college and major; college experiences; role models; career expectations; and age of marriage. Role models and mentors played a major part in shaping many of the interviewees' lives. Some factors that caused college women during this time to ignore the calls of domesticity and pursue non-traditional graduate study are family support, socioeconomic background, desire to use education for social mobility, and sense of purpose instilled by the family. These interviews show several discrepancies with Friedan's study due to Friedan's perspective. For example, she tended to interview women from affluent and intellectual backgrounds who went to elite colleges. Though Friedan's book provides a rebuttal of the "sex is destiny" theme prevalent in the first two decades after World War II (thus reigniting the flames of feminism), many of its ideas that all women suffer from the feminine mystique (due to the bonds of domestic expectations) are grand generalizations according to this study. A copy of the interview questionnaire is provided along with statistical data. Contains 7 references. (SM)