Abstract
One semester after University of Kansas dean of women Emily Taylor’s first rules convention with the Associated Women Students (AWS), Delta Tau Delta hosted its 1959 fall party at the fraternity house. Held in the public living areas of the home, members and their dates enjoyed a university-sanctioned evening of socializing. The men’s housemother, likely in her quarters on the main floor of the house, chaperoned. In the midst of the evening, one fraternity member and his date disappeared to the third-floor dormitory rooms. Rarely did a coed leave the public areas of men’s residences, and several reports quickly reached the dean of women’s office. The young woman, a first year student, soon found herself sitting across from the women students serving on the AWS board of standards and Assistant Dean of Women Pat Patterson in a disciplinary hearing. Facing expulsion, the young woman explained she had gone upstairs looking for her date and that she simply “sat on his bed until he was feeling better.” The AWS leaders “questioned the validity of her statements as they were contrary to many other reports.” AWS placed the woman on social probation and required her to write to her parents confessing that she had accompanied her date to his bedroom.1
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Notes
Kate Hevner Mueller, “The Role of the Counselor in Sex Behavior and Standards,” Journal of the National Association of Women Deans and Counselors 26, 2 (January 1963): 3.
AWS, “Board of Standards Minutes, October 1,” in RG 67/12, Folder: 1959–1960, UKL. Beth L. Bailey uses the phrase “student personnel therapeutic network” to describe how the field of student affairs approached handling student sexual activity. She is correct in this, however the trend came from the profession’s mostly male deans of students, not from feminist deaning: Beth L. Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Joyce Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 66, 116;
Stanford Mosaic: Reminiscences of the First Seventy Years at Stanford University, ed. Edith R. Mirrielees and Patricia F. Zelver (Stanford: Stanford University, 1962): 118–124;
Kathryn Nemeth Tuttle, “What Became of the Dean of Women? Changing Roles for Women Administrators in American Higher Education, 1940–1980” (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1996), 25, 27;
Sue Zschoche, “Dr. Clarke Revisited: Science, True Womanhood, and Female Collegiate Education,” History of Education Quarterly 29, 4 (1989): 545–569.
For a further discussion of sex education see Jeffrey P. Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Clelia Duel Mosher promoted her research about women and menstruation, arguing that data proved women would not be incapacitated monthly at work, an important conclusion for those interested in opening vocations to women. Mosher conducted the earliest known research on women’s sexuality, predating Alfred Kinsey by 40 years. She traced women’s sexual habits from her time as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1800s throughout her career. However, this research was so controversial that she never published it.
See Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Universities, 1870–1937 (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1989), 158–161.
Janice Gerda, “A History of the Conferences of Deans of Women, 1903– 1922” (PhD diss., Bowling Green State University, 2004), 91; Tuttle, “What Became of the Dean of Women,” 27; NADW, “Principles of Social Conduct.”
Lenore Fields, “Student Health,” National Association of Deans of Women (NADW) Twelfth Yearbook, Cincinnati, OH (1925): 175–178; Women’s Foundation for Health, A Handbook on Positive Health (Chicago: American Medical Association Press, 1922); Anna E. Pierce, “Report of the Health Committee,” NADW Sixteenth Yearbook, Cleveland, OH (1929); E. V. McCollum, Mary Swartz Rose, Lillian M. Gilbreth, Jane Bellows, E. C. Lindeman, Era Betzner, Walter B. Cannon, William A. White, and Jessie Taft, Handbook on Positive Health (New York: Women’s Foundation for Health, 1928), 157–163; NADW Thirteenth Yearbook, Washington, DC (1926).
Eunice Mae Acheson, The Effective Dean of Women: A Study of the Personal and Professional Characteristics of a Selected Group of Deans of Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), 159–160; Alma L. Binzel, “Mental Hygiene One Aspect of Education for Parenthood,” NADW Eleventh Yearbook, Chicago, IL (1924); Esther Allen Gaw, “Education for Healthy Family Relationships,” Journal of the American Association of University Women (January 1934), 92–95; Genevieve Taylor McMahon, Telephone Interview by Author, December 31, 2007; LeRoy A. Wilkes, “A Campus Health Program,” NADW Fourteenth Yearbook, Dallas, TX (1927), 132.
Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 7.
Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), 157–161.
Carole Joffe, Doctors of Conscience: The Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe V. Wade (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 35; Mueller, “Notes,” in Kate Hevner Mueller Papers, 1909–1981 (hereafter c170), Box 7, Folder: Marriage—College Age Notes, Resources, ca. 1950s, 1945 Research Notes, Indiana University Archives, Bloomington, IN (hereafter IUA); Tone, Devices and Desires, 70; Ware, Holding Their Own, 7. Conversely, the National Association of College Women [an organization of black collegiate alumnae established as a counterpoint to the racially limited American Association of University Women (AAUW)] added family planning and sex education to their human relations programs in the mid-1950s.
For a discussion of this and AAUW’s consideration of contraception, see Susan Levine, Degrees of Equality: The American Association of University Women and the Challenge of Twentieth-Century Feminism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 47–52, 167–168. The topic of contraception divided opinions in the white women’s groups where deans historically congregated. Those who did not accept contraception in the 1930s strongly opposed it, making it a controversial issue. When the AAUW supported contraception prescriptions by qualified physicians at a 1935 convention, many members protested vehemently. The AAUW reversed course on the position and did not change its stance again until the early 1970s. With the exception of Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League (later to become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942), most mainstream women’s organizations avoided the issue.
Mueller interview quoted in James H. Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 339.
Janice M. Irvine, Disorders of Desire: Sex and Gender in Modern American Sexology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 36; Mueller, Letter to Wells, September 27, 1939, in Herman Wells Records (hereafter c213), IUA.
Lynn Peril, College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-Eds, Then and Now (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006), 281.
Frances Strain, Love at the Threshold: A Book on Social Dating, Romance, and Marriage (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1952), 30–31.
Peril, College Girls, 278–317; Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 163.
Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing up Female in the Fifties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 125.
Regina G. Kunzel, “White Neurosis, Black Pathology: Constructing Out-of-Wedlock Pregnancy in the Wartime and Postwar United States,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 305, 312. Kunzel’s argument suggests that while American society handled white women’s pregnancy as “treatable” at the individual level, it defined unmarried black mothers as reflective of a systemic problem due to sexual promiscuity of the race. Such racist attitudes undergirded constructions like Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action which would underlie national policies on welfare.
Ibid. For the American Medical Association statistic, see: Rickie Solinger, “Extreme Danger: Women Abortionists and Their Clients before Roe V. Wade,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 335.
Dorothy Truex, “Education of Women, the Student Personnel Profession and the New Feminism,” Journal of the NAWDC 35 (Fall 1971), 19.
R. K. Greenbank, “Are Medical Students Learning Psychiatry?” Pennsylvania Medical Journal 64 (1961); H. I. Lief, “Sex Education in Medical Schools,” Journal of Medical Education 46, 4 (1971); Shavlik, Interview by Author, March 4, 2014 (New York, NY); Isadore Rubin, “Sex and the College Student: A Bibliography of New Findings and Insights,” Journal of the NAWDC 26, 2 (January 1963), 37.
UDK, November 4, 1966, quoted in Clifford S. Griffin, The University of Kansas: A History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974), 634.
Cornelia V. Christenson, “Premarital Pregnancies and Their Outcome,” Journal of the NAWDC 26, 2 (January 1963), 63; Taylor, Interview by Author, December 13–14, 2003.
Lawrence Lader, Abortion II: Making the Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 83.
The termination of a pregnancy due to medical danger for a mother was legally permitted in the early twentieth century and licensed physicians routinely referred women to clinics for medically approved contraindications like cardiovascular conditions, kidney problems, neurological conditions, toxemia, respiratory disease, blood diseases, diabetes, placental abruption, lupus, and psychiatric disorders. For more on this background see Rickie Solinger, “‘A Complete Disaster’: Abortion and the Politics of Hospital Abortion Committees, 1950–1970,” Feminist Studies 19, 2 (Summer 1993), 243.
Cynthia Gorney, Articles of Faith (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 45–48; Joffe, Doctors of Conscience, 132. New York, Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington repealed all criminal penalties for abortion provided that the procedure occurred early in the pregnancy by a licensed physician.
See Ruth Roemer, “Abortion Law Reform and Repeal: Legislative and Judicial Developments,” American Journal of Public Health 61, 3 (March 1971), 500.
Lader, Abortion II: Making the Revolution, 84; Photocopy, “Kansas Abortion Statute,” 1970, in Emily Taylor Women’s Resource Center Records (hereafter RG 76/3), Box 1, UKL; William R. Roy, “Abortion: A Physician’s View,” Washburn Law Journal 9, 3 (Spring 1970), 404.
In 1977, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission began to address incidents where women faced a hostile work environment, coining the phrase “sexual harassment”: Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Work Place (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press with Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 145.
The National Organization for Women established a task force on rape in 1973 and many local chapters followed suit in 1974. Frederika E. Schmitt and Patricia Yancey Martin, “The History of the Anti-Rape and Rape Crisis Center Movements,” in Encyclopedia of Interpersonal Violence, ed. Clarie M. Renezetti and Jeffery Edleson (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2006);
Susan Schechter, Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women’s Movement (Boston.: South End Press, 1982), 35;
Sara M. Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century’s End (New York: Free Press, 2003), 49.
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© 2014 Kelly C. Sartorius
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Sartorius, K.C. (2014). A World without Parietals. In: Deans of Women and the Feminist Movement. Historical Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137481344_5
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