Abstract
In 1936, Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards published The Dewey School, the study of the Laboratory School that was the result of their long association with John Dewey, his family, and his pedagogical ideas and projects. The sisters worked closely with Dewey and his daughter Evelyn Dewey Smith to complete the book, the kernel of which had started with his wife, Alice Chipman Dewey. They solicited remembrances from fellow teachers and from former students and their parents and included these remarks alongside selections from the teachers’ weekly reports and articles that were written during the school’s Dewey years. The book, then, reflects the collaborative nature of the school and its community and attempts to convey what Anna Camp Edwards called the school’s “adventurous atmosphere.”1
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Notes
Letter Missive, Anna Camp Edwards and Richard Edwards, 1950, box 44, in the Edwards Family Collection (1484), Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. In his introduction to The Dewey School, John Dewey wrote of the book that “the entire history of the school was marked by an unusual degree of cooperation among parents, teachers, and pupils. It is particularly gratifying to have this living evidence that the cooperative spirit still continues.” See Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards, The Dewey School: The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, 1896–1903 [1936] (New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transactions, 2007), xiii.
Letter Missive, Anna Camp Edwards and Richard Edwards, 1950, box 44, in the Edwards Family Collection (1484), Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. For compelling studies of the history of pragmatism, see Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001);
and Robert Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).
Laura Runyon to Katherine Camp Mayhew, July 14, 1930, box 44, Edwards Family Collection (1484), Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. University of Chicago graduate Laura Runyon was a teacher of history at the Laboratory School from 1898 to 1903, where she also served as editor of the Elementary School Record, a series of nine monographs on the Laboratory School. After leaving Chicago, she was an associate professor of history at the Warrensburg Normal Training School in Missouri. See Ewing Cockrell, History of Johnson County, Missouri (Topeka, KS: Historical Publishing Company, 1918).
Katherine Camp and Mary Hill also took part in efforts to improve instruction in “number work,” to be discussed in Ch. 4. And Hill did some instruction in handwork related to clay and pottery. See John Dewey and Laura Runyon, introductory materials, The Elementary School Record, I, 1 (February 1900), 1–2, for a list of the teachers and their degrees and institutions of higher education. On a related figure at the University of Chicago, Julia Bulkley,
see Kathleen Cruikshank, “In Dewey’s Shadow: Julia Bulkley and the University of Chicago Department of Pedagogy, 1895–1900,” History of Education Quarterly, 38, 4 (Winter 1998), 373–406.
On the benefits of biography in exploring the history of women in education, see Jane Martin, “The Hope of Biography: The Historical Recovery of Women Educator Activists,” History of Education, 32, 2 (2003), 226.
See also Peter Cunningham, “Innovators, Networks and Structures: Towards a Prosopography of Progressivism,” History of Education, 30, 5 (2001), 433–451;
Linda Eisenmann, “Creating a Framework for Interpreting US Women’s Educational History: Lessons from Historical Lexicography,” History of Education, 30, 5 (2001), 453–470;
and Joyce Goodman, “Troubling Histories and Theories: Gender and the History of Education,” History of Education, 32, 2 (2003), 219–232.
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986), 185. Some scholars credit author Henry James for naming the “New Woman”; the James brothers did have a knack for capturing a moment, or an idea, in words. Think of William James’s “stream of consciousness.”
On Henry James and the phrase, see Ruth Bordin, Alice Freeman Palmer: The Evolution of a New Woman (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 2.
On William James and coining phrases, see Robert Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 306. Scholar Lucy Bland claims that “feminist novelist Sarah Grand invented the term in an article in 1894” in England, and this seems to be the more commonly accepted view.
See Bland, “The Married Woman, the ‘New Woman’ and the Feminist: Sexual Politics of the 1890s,” in Jane Rendall, ed., Equal or Different: Women’s Politics, 1800–1914 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 143.
On the “New Woman,” see also Jean Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman: The Women’s Movement in America, 1875–1930 (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2003);
and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).
Sally G. McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 44–52.
Bordin, Alice Freeman Palmer, 30; and Margaret A. Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, 1780–1840 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 101.
See also Bordin, Women at Michigan: The ‘Dangerous Experiment,’ 1870s to the Present (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1999);
Karen LeRoux, “Veterans of the Schools: Women’s Work in the United States Public Education, 1865–1902,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University, 2005; Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman;
Dorothy Gies McGuigan, A Dangerous Experiment: 100 Years of Women at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1970);
and Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).
For an excellent discussion of the career of Alice Hamilton, see Barbara Sicherman, “Working It Out: Gender, Profession, and Reform in the Career of Alice Hamilton,” in Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye, eds., Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 127–147.
Bordin, Alice Freeman Palmer, 34–35. On the teaching profession in the late nineteenth century, see also Leroux, “Veterans of the Schools,” and Kate Rousmaniere, City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in Historical Perspective (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997). As the historian Carl Kaestle has shown, the common school reform movement of the mid-1800s, with its many costly improvements, paved the way for a growing acceptance of cheaper-to-employ women as teachers.
See Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).
Bordin, Alice Freeman Palmer, 34, 36. See also Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).
Gordon, Gender and Higher Education, 2. See also Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 26.
On Clarke, see Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres. On the fears engendered by the increase of women in higher education, see Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman. For a discussion of similar developments for women in science, see also Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Selections from the Author’s Autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” in The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings (London: Virago, 2009), 280–281.
On Woods Hole, see Frank R. Lillie, The Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944);
David Hapgood, Charles R. Crane: The Man Who Bet on People (USA: Institute of World Affairs, 2000), 26;
and Philip J. Pauly, Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 75. See also archival records at the Marine Biological Laboratory, and correspondence from Diane Rielinger, Records Manager/Archivist.
Edward D. McDonald and Edward M. Hinton, Drexel Institute of Technology, 1891–1941 (Philadelphia, PA: Drexel Institute of Technology, 1942), 15.
See Hoddeson and Daitch, True Genius, and the letters of Althea Harmer Bardeen and her husband, Charles Russell Bardeen, in the Charles Russell Collection at the Steenbock Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Harmer married Bardeen in 1905, after she spent a year in Chicago as an independent businesswoman, in interior decorating. See also the letters of Helen Castle Mead, held in the George Herbert Mead Collection, and the letters of Eva Watson-Schutze, held in the Martin Schutze Collection, both at the Special Collections, Regenstein Library, the University of Chicago. On Eva Watson-Schutze, see Jean Block, Eva Watson-Schutze: Chicago Photo-Secessionist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985);
and Tom Wolf, Eva Watson-Schutze: Photographer (New Paltz, NY: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York at New Paltz, 2009).
On M. Carey Thomas, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).
On Alice Hamilton, see Madeline P. Grant, Alice Hamilton: Pioneer Doctor in Industrial Medicine (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1967);
and Barbara Sicherman, Alice Hamilton: A Life in Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Anna Camp to Elizabeth Francis Camp, October 22, 1899, box 9, Camp Family Collection (891), Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. On the Noon-Day Rest, see Perry Duis, Challenging Chicago: Coping with Everyday Life, 1837–1920 (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 159.
On William James, see Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). On Prince Peter Kropotkin, see Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, 263, 264.
Professor Patrick Geddes of Edinburgh, Scotland, was a philosopher and urban planner. See Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Madeline Grant, Alice Hamilton: Pioneer Doctor in Industrial Medicine (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1967), 36.
See Jane Dewey, “Biography of John Dewey,” in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of John Dewey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1939).
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© 2010 Anne Durst
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Durst, A. (2010). “Venturing in Education”: Four Laboratory School Teachers. In: Women Educators in the Progressive Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109957_3
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