Advancing Women in Education: Colorado State Normal School
and the University of Colorado, 1870-1920
By
Shawn W. Brackett, B.A.
A Thesis
In
HIGHER EDUCATION AND STUDENT AFFAIRS
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty
of Texas Tech University in
partial fulfillment of
the requirements for
the degree of
MASTER OF EDUCATION
Approved
Dr. Stacy A. Jacob
Chairperson
Dr. Gretchen Adams
Dr. Peggy Gordon Miller
Dean of the Graduate School
May, 2012
Copyright 2012, Shawn W. Brackett
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Acknowledgments
I would like to convey my most sincere thanks to those who made this thesis
possible: the professors, the archivists and librarians, the staff, and my colleagues.
Without their assistance and encouragement, this project would have been impossible.
To Shirley Soenksen, Jay Transk, Eve Measner, and Kay Lowell of the University
of Northern Colorado Archives: their service, conversation, and suggestions were
invaluable. Coming home to the UNC Archives was both a pleasure and an adventure.
To David Hays of the University of Colorado Archives: his enthusiastic welcome of a
visiting researcher ensured I would be able to complete this project. I am grateful to both
institutions for access and permission to use copyrighted materials.
My colleagues at Texas Tech University have endured nearly two years of my
animated (and sometimes lengthy) talk about normal schools—I greatly appreciate their
patience and support. Likewise, I am indebted to Stacy Jacob for her willingness to take
on and mentor a transfer student and to Gretchen Adams for her willingness to “cross the
disciplinary aisle.” This project would simply not have been possible without both of
these outstanding educators.
This work is dedicated to the women who have changed my life: Roberta Smith
for inspiring a love of history in a young high school student, Kaye Holman for guiding
the way of an inquisitive undergraduate student, Joan Clinefelter for challenging and
encouraging a nascent historian, and, most of all, Lisa Brackett for being the wisest and
most compassionate mom a son could ask for. May I live up to your example and make
you all proud.
ii
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... ii
Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv
I. Introduction: A “Narratio Vera” ...................................................................................... 1
II. Women and Society: “Genius and Inherent Endowments” ........................................ 19
III. American State Normal Schools: “The Heart of the Public School System” ............. 34
IV. Education in Colorado: “She Hath Many Nameless Virtues” .................................... 52
V. Conclusion: Not Just A “Twentieth Century Schoolmarm” ........................................ 73
Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 84
A. Academic Statement .................................................................................................... 95
B. Lens Statement ............................................................................................................. 96
C. Research Statement ...................................................................................................... 99
D. Implications for Practice ............................................................................................ 101
iii
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Abstract
State normal schools were sites of and contributors to a major shift in American
society from 1870 to 1920. At the beginning of the period, women’s role in society was
legally, socially, and educationally enforced to be separate from and subservient to men’s
role. The literature focuses on social movements, women’s roles, and histories of
women’s colleges and state universities. However, very little exists exploring state
normal schools, let alone the connections between state normal schools, women, and
society. This study, therefore, addresses to what extent state normal schools contributed
or reflected women’s advancement in education and society. Colorado State Normal
School and the University of Colorado provided a case for investigating the experiences
of women students and extrapolating larger patterns.
State normal schools, although established to address practical needs for
additional, better-prepared teachers across the country, fostered a growing challenge to
social mores by women students and faculty. Throughout the period, the state normal
schools provided the space and resources for women to learn, share, and connect with one
another. Compared to state universities, state normal schools provided more enrollment
and employment opportunities, developing a sense of group consciousness. Created to
enforce and continue the assumed role of women as teachers (and only that), state normal
schools significantly contributed to the overall advancement of women in education and
society.
iv
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Chapter I
Introduction: A “Narratio Vera”
The Lexington State Normal School in rural Massachusetts, founded in 1839,
quietly and unknowingly ushered in a new era of opportunity for women to participate in
further education. This change would eventually lead to significant advancement in
women’s rights and women’s self-determination. Social advancement requires a
powerful and continuous force. Sometimes sudden and overt and other times gradual and
unseen, this force manifested itself for women as an educational institution occupying a
seemingly ordinary place in the social structures of the nineteenth century. State normal
schools were far from ordinary teacher training institutions, however; their purposes,
their compositions, and, most importantly, their students and faculty challenged the
strictures placed on women. The study of these unique institutions brings together the
histories of women and higher education because it exists at their confluence.
Women, although present in and vital to many studies written in the latter-half of
the twentieth century, have long been depicted on the historical sidelines.1 The historical
community in the midst of the emergence of the “new” social history embraced the
experiences and motivations of women in history in the 1960s.2 Women’s history
emerged in the 1970s as a distinct subfield, with higher education history following in the
1980s and gender history in the late 1990s.3 As a newly accepted area for historical
research, women’s history has strengths in a few subjects and has tended to focus on
1
Susan D. Ware, “Century of Struggle: The History of Women’s History,” in A Century of American
Historiography, ed. James M. Banner, Jr. (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010), 103.
2
Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser, “More Than Great White Men: A Century of Scholarship on
American Social History,” in A Century of American Historiography, ed. James M. Banner, Jr. (Boston,
MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010), 15.
3
Rebecca Edwards, “Women’s and Gender History,” in American History Now, eds. Eric Foner and Lisa
McGirr (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011), 336.
1
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
temperance, abolition, suffrage, and reproductive rights. The place of women in
education is a niche filled by primary and secondary school histories, investigations of
curricula, and discussions of university admission. Yet among the work done in
education and women, very few works have focused on women at the institutions most
open to them: state normal schools.
American further and higher education includes a multitude of institutional
definitions, types, and histories. The current literature most often categorizes the
educational system into primary, secondary, and higher education, with a firm line
between childhood education (primary and secondary) and adult education (higher
education).4 The firm delineation between educational levels—delineation that continues
today—represented the extent to which the age of majority was accepted as an important
boundary. Institutions that cross this boundary between childhood and adulthood are not
easily described. Changes in society led to concomitant changes in this boundary. As the
age of compulsory of education rose and the number of youth attending state-funded
schools increased, the previously vast difference between a secondary and a university
education shrank.
State normal schools were difficult to fit into the emerging pattern of public
education because they inhabited the ever-shifting space between secondary and higher
education. State normal schools were a form of further education in that they admitted
students after secondary school but did not grant degrees or certificates of equal academic
rigor to those granted by colleges or universities (institutions of higher education).
Attendance at the normal schools was optional and limited by academic requirements,
4
James W. Fraser, Preparing America’s Teachers: A History (New York, NY: Teachers College Press,
2007), 81.
2
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
two features that distinguished them from secondary schools and aligned them with
higher education institutions. However, state normal schools’ standards and funding
never reached the level of colleges and universities. The modern community college is a
close but imperfect lens through which to understand the state normal school. Situated at
the boundary between high school and university, community colleges exhibit
characteristics of both. The modern two-year institutions fit uncomfortably into a
widespread dichotomous understanding of the American higher education system—a
situation oddly reminiscent of normal schools,
If the space occupied by the state normal schools was ambiguous, it is certainly
not for lack of diversity in the American education system. Privately controlled higher
education began in 1636 with Harvard College’s founding and publicly controlled
institutions debuted in 1785 with the University of Georgia.5 Women would be denied
admission to American institutions of higher education until 1837, when Oberlin College
opened its doors to women.6 This important achievement was tempered by the slow
progress of women’s participation in the state universities and colleges around the
country. It was during this period that state normal schools appeared. Far from being
revolutionary institutions to equalize education for women, the normal schools were a
pragmatic response to the national need for more and better-prepared teachers. American
expansion westward at a break-neck pace followed the idea that the “open” continent was
the country’s destiny made manifest.7 As settlements took hold in newly acquired
5
John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2004), 45.
6
Ibid., 55.
7
Ned Blackhawk, “American Indians and the Study of U.S. History,” in American History Now, eds. Eric
Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011), 385.
3
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
territories, the population shift required additional teachers—far more than the existing
teacher training institutes, generally situated on the east coast, could produce. The
operation of the state normal schools was a quiet affair, producing noise when the cities
competing for one did not receive the charter. They spread across the nation slowly at
first, gaining speed in the 1870s and saturating the country by the turn of the twentieth
century.8
As the dominant institution for formal preparation of teachers in the nineteenth
century, state normal schools had a profound impact on women and their entry into
higher education. Prior to the establishment of the Lexington State Normal School,
preparing teachers was a scattered and unorganized process handled largely by local
entities.9 Teacher institutes and short-term workshops provided a semblance of control
and planning for teacher education in the early nineteenth century. Paving the way for a
more structured approach to teacher preparation, teacher institutes demonstrated the
growing interest in teaching as a profession by the young republic. This interest
manifested itself in the states as support for numerous institutions, sponsorship of
municipal competitions for institutional placement, and inclusion in state constitutions,
laws, and boards of education. Clearly, the republic and individual states saw teacher
education as a critical venture to support. From the widespread support, we can surmise
that normal schools both reflected and affected the politics of education and society.
Studying normal schools necessitates studying their composition and, therefore,
the students, faculty, staff, and administration of the normal schools as a whole and of
8
James W. Fraser, Preparing America’s Teachers: A History (New York, NY: Teachers College Press,
2007), 117.
9
Christine A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 16.
4
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
individual institutions. Women dominated the normal schools’ ranks of students from
their foundation through the reformation into teachers colleges in the 1920s and played
an emerging role in the leadership of the institutions. Access came before equality and
paved the way for women to participate in higher education in increasingly integrated
ways. Women were admitted to coeducational normal schools on an equal basis with
men, participated in activities and academic life with men, and benefitted socially and
financially from degrees earned at the normal schools.
Understanding the background of the institutions is therefore critical to the
understanding how women experienced education. Normal schools began in the eastern
states and spread rapidly west, with particular concentrations in New York, Pennsylvania,
Wisconsin, and Missouri.10 The geographic dispersal and number of normal schools was
not accidental. By placing normal schools in largely rural areas across each state and
commonwealth, officials showed their understanding of the proper role of education—a
removed, ideal environment for republican values to be inculcated in the rising
generation.11 In addition, this placement would play positively in the political arena, as
the accompanying state funding for each institution would directly benefit the local
community. Normal schools addressed the demand for increasing numbers and improved
qualifications of teachers. The spread of the institutions would allow the institutions the
greatest reach to the areas that needed the biggest improvements—rural areas with oneroom schoolhouses and teachers who often lacked any formal training.
10
Christine Ogren, The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 213-235.
11
One of the most important aspects of republicanism was striving for honor; rural environments were seen
as protecting students from the negative influence of urban areas. See Charles Eliot, “Liberty in
Education,” in The History of Higher Education, Second Edition, eds. Lester F. Goodchild and Harold S.
Wechsler (Boston, MA: Pearson Custom Publishing, 1997), 372.
5
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Several characteristics of normal schools are worth particular attention. The sheer
number of normal schools is startling when compared to the state universities, land-grant
colleges, and women’s colleges. Two hundred and ten institutions were founded as
normal schools from 1839 to 1927.12 The placement of normal schools in forty-six states
and the remarkable geographic distribution within those states further shows the careful
expansion and widespread support of the institutions.
No other characteristic marks the normal schools’ distinctiveness as much as the
admissions standards. Many institutions required no formal proof of graduating high
school and at the beginning of the normal period, none granted the bachelor.13
Effectively open-access due to their ubiquity, entry requirements, and low cost of
attendance, state normal schools had a reach far greater than might otherwise be
expected. Their impact on the educational system, enrolled students, and society at large
has been tremendously under-estimated and under-researched.14 All of these factors
reflected the social and political realities of the time period, but the normal schools did
not simply react to conditions—their students and staff members were active participants
in shaping society and education.
Exploration of the change in appropriate gender roles is critical because normal
schools had such an unexpected impact on those roles. Historians have noted the gender
divide and argued over its reach, its strength, and its meaning. The differences in
expected and tolerated behavior resulted in the historical term “separate sphere,” into
12
Christine Ogren, The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 213.
13
Ibid., 2.
14
The noted historian of education, Lawrence Cremin, includes neither “women” nor “normal schools” in
his work on education in the Progressive Era. See Lawrence Cremin. The Transformation of the School:
Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York, NY: Alfred Knopf, 1961).
6
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
which men and women were placed.15 The public sphere was the domain of masculinity,
action, and power; men were expected to dominate and lead as the rational gender.
Women inhabited the private sphere, a world of femininity, passivity, and nurturing that
highlighted the understanding of gender in stark Victorian and Christian terms. These
appropriate roles underpinned what actions and ideas and guided most aspects of society,
including education. Higher education, from the beginning an elite activity, focused on
preparing ministers, lawyers, doctors, and other positions of influence—areas within the
masculine sphere.16 Although the spheres of activity have often been discussed as solid
constructs with no overlap or ambiguity, it is the very uncertainty of gender roles that
allowed change.
If women were supposed to apply their talents to children and domestic life,
where did education fit in? As the common school movement swept the country and an
increasing number of children enrolled, women extended their role as caring mothers to
that of caring teachers. In the image of “republican motherhood,” it became the duty of
women to oversee the proper education of children.17 As children’s education advanced,
so did women’s education, with the state normal schools as the vanguard. Normal
15
Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1982).
16
Harold Perkin, “History of Universities,” in The History of Higher Education, eds. Lester F. Goodchild
and Harold S. Wechsler (Boston, MA: Pearson Custom Publishing, 1997), 16.
17
Tyack, Hansot, and Palmieri noted the significance of a shift in cultural views on women’s nature. From
a place of containing women because of their inherent deficiencies, intellectual elites advocated a restricted
place for women because of their inherent strengths in taking care of hearth and home. Women who
upheld this model became “republican mothers” whose embrace of these limitations honored and advanced
the nation. See David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in
American Public Schools (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992), 15 and Patricia A. Palmieri,
“From Republican Motherhood to Race Suicide: Arguments on the Higher Education of Women in the
United States, 1820-1920” in The History of Higher Education, eds Lester F. Goodchild and Harold S.
Wechsler (Boston, MA: Pearson Custom Publishing, 1997), 205.
7
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
schools played an integral part in changing what society accepted as appropriate and in
doing so, made the so-called separate spheres porous.
Through the normal period, women moved from expected separation to tolerated
integration, eventually advancing the notion of a “new sphere” in which women would
learn and teach as recognized equals with men. These advancements occurred during the
Progressive Era of the 1870s-1920s, a period which ironically found increasing social
restriction on the basis of race and gender. Historian Robert Wiebe argued that the turnof-the-century period included significant legal and political steps to separate populations
based on race, curtail advances by women, and respond to increasing economic power of
minority groups.18 The state normal schools’ successful challenge to gender norms
indicates that they were not simply products of the nineteenth century; they flourished
and developed in a hostile environment. Women advanced in this period in tangible
ways—the rate of college attendance doubled, the number of coeducational institutions
jumped from twenty-nine percent to nearly seventy percent, and federal and state
governments finally recognized their civil rights.19 Normal schools not only innovated
new ways of bringing women into further and higher education, they did so at a time
when educational leaders in the United States fought against activity that would promote
inclusion of women. Participation in national honor societies, for example, was denied to
women students acting too far out of the norm for their gender.20 That was the
unintentional genius of the normal schools: they provided a means for women to
18
Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1967), 156-157.
Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in
America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 44 and 63.
20
Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1990), 42.
19
8
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
experience social freedom at a time when the limited freedoms they had were educational
in nature (and barely formed).21
One critical caveat is the issue of race; women of European descent experienced
social forces far differently than women of African and Caribbean descent. Histories of
women in education, few and far between as they are, almost exclusively focus on White
women—silencing and removing non-Caucasian women from the historical landscape in
the process. In general, normal schools had a positive effect for women of all races as
they provided upward social and economic mobility. And while segregated normal
schools existed and perpetuated larger patterns of racial discrimination, within racial
communities the positive effects of normal schools remained. African-American women
who attended normal schools earned more money than the average woman remaining in
the home and brought together those African-American women in fashions similar to
Caucasian women in other single-race institutions.22 The majority of normal schools
across the country were co-racial, bringing together women who might not otherwise
interact. The sharing of ideas and experiences was a powerful force for solidarity on the
basis of gender.
The closing decades of the nineteenth century and opening decades of the
twentieth century constitute a transitional period in American education history.
Understanding this period includes looking at the large systems: society, political
structures, higher education, primary and secondary education, religion, and gender.
How women advanced cannot only be seen through these formal measures; a holistic
21
David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York, NY: Oxford University Press,
2011), 106.
22
Christine Ogren, The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 68.
9
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
approach must also include the stories and experiences of local institutions, the
individuals related to those institutions, and the words and actions of individuals
attending the institutions. Newspaper editorials, yearbooks, curricula, and letters to the
editor serve as lenses through which to view the collective experiences of women at these
institutions. Normal schools serve as the primary unit of analysis for this study because
of their characteristics and their centrality to the relationship between women and society.
Scholarship on women and higher education has often focused on the issues that
separated them from full participation in civil society. The fight for suffrage, education,
and professional opportunities addressed the wall of divide between the public and
private aspects of American life in the late nineteenth century. The Progressive Era was a
transitional era from a newly industrializing country to a modern and highly connected
country. Ideologies and cultural developments such as widespread acceptance of women
in positions of authority and influence would take decades to mature from their
beginnings in this era. Therefore, this study focuses on access and women’s
circumstances and does not assume that access equals equity.
Rosalind Rosenberg, in Beyond Separate Spheres, confirms the reality of
separation and uses its presence to explicate the beginnings of a woman-centered
consciousness: feminism. As her investigation is into the origins of modern feminist
thought, Rosenberg seeks to uncover the changes in how women perceived themselves
and their place in society.23 The clarity wrought from her study amplifies the voices of
women at the time and allows this work to trace connections among women and men,
schools and society, and gender and politics. Although indirect, Beyond Separate
23
Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1982), xiv.
10
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Spheres provides a new perspective on women and education. She highlights the “hope
and the dilemma” faced by women in the Progressive Era, women who inhabited a
contested role in this period of transition. The threat to traditional domestic roles for
women and public roles for men was seen in concert with emerging capitalistic
developments, radical political changes of Reconstruction after the Civil War, and
demands by women to attend state and private universities as equals. Normal schools
effectively fused previously accepted norms with the challenges brought by women
clamoring for equality and more opportunity.
Rosenberg presents the situation at research universities such as Chicago as a
method to understand social science and its forays into differences between the biological
sexes. She demonstrates the rising tide of modernism and its focus on scientific research
and defined ways of knowing through the studies of women social scientists on women,
men, and the physical basis for mental health and performance. It is in the unstated
implications for women at normal schools that Rosenberg’s work becomes particularly
helpful, in large part because the few studies that exist of women at normal schools are
tightly focused on those institutions. The focus provides depth, but viewing women as
parts of greater social movements and as forbearers to significant cultural change provide
breadth.
A leader in the field of women’s history, Patricia A. Graham, addressed the issue
of scholarship on women in further and higher education. Graham argued that the focus
on faculty at women’s colleges and prominent women at state universities obscured,
rather than illustrated, the real and significant obstacles women faced in advancing to
11
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
positions of leadership.24 Because the circumstances and experiences of women at
women’s colleges varied so much from those of women at state colleges and normal
schools—the vast majority of women in further education—studies of the prominent
women leaders need to be couched in terms of exception, not generalization. Graham
supported this claim by pointing to the dearth of literature on the large population of
ordinary women, especially students. Although written in the mid-1970s, her call for
research into the “collective” biography of women students has been answered but by a
few scholars.
In the tradition of social and gender history, Barbara Solomon offers “not a
history of institutions, but of generations of women” in higher education.25 By placing
women as central actors within her study, Solomon intentionally gives voice to their
experiences and their choices. She highlights the interplay between the decisions of
women of the time and the external forces of economy, society, and politics that led to
the advancement of women in all arenas with a focus on how that advancement played
out in education. The question of access to education is the focus of Solomon’s work and
leads to secondary questions of what women did while in higher education (e.g. join
societies), what they did after completing a course, and how they re-integrated
themselves into society. In addition, she explores how the struggle for educational
24
Patricia A. Graham, “So Much To Do: Guides for Historical Research on Women in Higher Education,”
Teachers College Record 76, no. 3 (February 1975): 422.
25
Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in
America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), xvii. In 1997, Linda Eisenmann reviewed the
impact Solomon’s work had on the field of women’s history and Solomon’s treatment of women in
education. Highlighting the limits of access to larger discussions about women and society, Eisenmann
suggests augmenting access with economics professional opportunities. I address some of these concerns
in Chapters III and IV. See “Reconsidering a Classic: Assessing the History of Women's Higher Education
a Dozen Years after Barbara Solomon,” Harvard Educational Review 67, no. 4 (1997): 689-717.
12
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
opportunity affected and was affected by the nascent feminist movement and political
consciousness.
Solomon shows the shifting definition of what it meant to be a “true woman” and
then a “new woman,” concepts covered extensively by Patricia A. Graham.26 The
women’s colleges of the mid and late nineteenth century attract particular attention for
their unique attributes and the fact that women would not face the imposter phenomenon
of seeking education in a male-dominated institution. Only at a single-gender institution
of education could women be accepted immediately as equals and not be required to
prove their worth, key components of feeling like an imposter. While Solomon mentions
state normal schools in the context of changing professional expectations and the growth
of women as teachers, Solomon does not investigate the experience of women at these
institutions. Focusing on external factors such as industrialization, effects of the Civil
War, and demographic changes, Solomon address women in higher education more
generally.
Gender is an important concept in education—not just in how masculine and
feminine roles are determined, but also in how gender impacts the delivery of education.
Single-gender education and coeducation are foundational to understanding gender,
authority, and social mores in this time period. Tyack and Hansot explore the
development of coeducation (especially in primary and secondary schools) from its
origins in the early nineteenth century to the present and the importance of such an
occurrence in Learning Together. Arguing that coeducation was an anomaly in a society
devoted to separate social roles, Tyack and Hansot investigate the factors that led to a
26
Patricia Albjerg Graham, “Expansion and Exclusion: A History of Women in American Higher
Education,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3 (1978): 759.
13
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
gradual inclusion of girls with an endeavor that had been previously open solely to boys.
The practices of gender integration play just as important a role as the policies in
understanding how and why a socially conservative nation would embrace coeducation as
a matter of fact. On the surface, Tyack and Hansot’s work may indicate the equity of
experience between men and women, but their research shows an uneasy coexistence of
the sexes in public schools.
In marked contrast to Solomon, Tyack and Hansot explore their questions through
the institutions and their structures, curricula, and role as implementer of policy and
law.27 This approach is a hybridization of political and social history, with the public
schools as vehicle for understanding long-term trends in socializing children with the
appropriate mores and behaviors. As other historians and educators have elucidated,
Tyack and Hansot use the framework of “separate spheres” to analyze the trends and
impacts of including girls in public schooling. Concluding that coeducation was a silent
trend and one fraught with unintended consequences, Tyack and Hansot argue
convincingly for the power of education in simultaneously reflecting and changing the
status of women.
Learning Together provides a useful background for studies of women and
normal schools because of the characteristics of the normal schools and the composition
of the public schools. As extensions of public schools, normal schools must be seen as
integral links from secondary to further and higher education. However, Tyack and
Hansot mention the normal schools only in passing and specifically in reference to the
normal departments of state universities and municipally controlled normal schools.
27
David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public
Schools (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), 3.
14
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Women in education and society have increasingly been studied by historians,
with a dramatic increase in publications in the 1980s.28 The field remains, however, a
niche. Mainstream historians neglected women and relegated them to positions of
subservience within history. Where Wiebe mentioned women in passing as he explored
the Progressive Era and Cremin omitted their contributions altogether, Kerber, Graham,
and Rosenberg brought to the fore women’s actions and perspectives.29 Solomon
published in the rush of women’s history in the 1980s a landmark work exploring women
and higher education. Gordon, Horowitz, and Tyack and Hansot focused on gender roles,
women’s colleges, and coeducation.30 These works addressed critical facets of the larger
story of women in higher education and society but failed to address the most widespread
vehicle for women’s integration into further and higher education: the state normal
school.
Of the works devoted to women’s educational history, only Christine Ogren’s The
American State Normal School gives normal schools more than a cursory glance.31 The
lack of substantial research into state normal schools is significant for what the histories
of higher education ignore: the most widespread and relatively coherent effort to offer
further education to a population that had been denied access for centuries. Normal
schools were not created to catalyze social change—they were pragmatic responses to a
28
Rebecca Edwards, “Women’s and Gender History,” in American History Now, eds. Eric Foner and Lisa
McGirr (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011), 336.
29
Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1967).
30
See Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1990); Helen L. Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges
from Their Nineteenth Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984); and
David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public
Schools (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990).
31
Even the noted historian Lawrence A. Cremin omitted women and normal schools in his seminal work
on progressive education, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 18761957.
15
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
need for more teachers—but their effects were profound. Created as institutions to train
teachers on the eastern seaboard, they spread quickly westward across the country. They
were generally small with enrollments of dozens to hundreds of students, never
approaching the size of the state universities in whose shadows they long operated. The
host cities were rarely bustling metropolises, perhaps owing to the philosophy of quality
learning taking place outside the influence of urban areas. Normal schools accepted
almost all applicants and rarely required a high school diploma. Women and men studied
together from the beginning. It is in these qualities we find that the normal schools,
named after Latin and French words for “standard,” reflected the common meaning of
their title.32
State normal schools were far more numerous than state colleges and universities
(given that most states had multiple normal schools). This represented an oncoming
storm of change in the place of women in society. Higher education was the first to
dramatically change, but the larger transformation happened to society. Normal schools
more fully opened the door of higher education to women and held that door open during
at time of social retrenchment. Normal schools capitalized on the existing notions of
separate spheres and made those impenetrable spheres porous, in the process creating a
new sphere. The new sphere commingled previously distinct roles and expectations,
leaving behind what Barbara Solomon termed “true womanhood” for something more
dangerous: self-determined womanhood.33
32
Christine Ogren, The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 15.
33
Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in
America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 25.
16
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Exploring the path of women entering and succeeding in higher education
involves many side journeys through the history of teachers, the history of institutions,
history of society, and the history of women. Placing state normal schools in the context
of the American education system requires an exploration of terms. In their initial form,
normal schools more properly represent an upward extension of the secondary school
than a downward extension of colleges or universities.34 Studies of common and
secondary schools, therefore, provide a useful framework for understanding normal
schools and gender roles of the time period.
Studying the connections among women, teaching, and society requires a more
generous view of traditional time periods. This study focuses on the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, specifically 1870-1920. The forces affecting women and
education did not begin in 1870, however, and therefore treatment of their origin is
essential to understand the important confluence represented by the post-Civil War and
Progressive Eras. In the years following the Civil War, normal schools, operating in the
shadows of their state universities, reached a critical mass. The 1870s was a decade filled
with new normal schools and consolidation of curricular standards. Women attended
these institutions in unprecedented numbers. The high water mark of normal schools was
at the turn of the century, as hundreds of institutions had been founded, admission
standards were increased, and universities had not yet begun concerted efforts to wrest
control of teacher education.
Ending the period of study with 1920 serves the dual purpose of recognizing the
importance of women earning the right to vote through passage of the Nineteenth
34
David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public
Schools (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), 121.
17
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Amendment and the increasing transformation of normal schools into teachers’ colleges.
In some ways, women’s advancement had reached a critical juncture in 1920, one that
would continue with new waves of feminist action.
State normal schools and state universities numbered in the dozens early in the
period and, with a nation just beginning to recover from a devastating conflict, comparing
institutions across regional boundaries would not be illustrative. Therefore, the first state
normal school and the first state university in Colorado were selected for investigation
and comparison. While Colorado State Normal School and the University of Colorado
do not formally represent the larger collection of similar institutions, characteristics and
actions of each likely represent general trends found across the nation.
More than any other type of further education institution, state normal schools
held open the door of advancement and integration for women in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. State universities were among the last educational institutions
to allow the entry of women students on an equal basis with men.35 Advancement of the
condition of women requires recognition that women and men had unequal opportunities.
Steps taken to advance women, either intentionally or accidentally, would thus begin with
access to opportunities previously afforded to men.
35
Notable exceptions to this are private institutions such as Columbia University, which did not admit
women students until 1983. See John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 184.
18
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Chapter II
Women and Society: “Genius and Inherent Endowments”
Mid- and late-nineteenth century American society saw separation of professions,
behaviors, and education by gender as inherent, appropriate, and beneficial to the nation.
Buttressed by “scientific” studies, xenophobia, and particular ideas of patriotism, the
roles of women were narrowly defined to include a domestic sphere of activity. Laws
were passed reflecting and promoting this unequal separation, although social
consequences were pervasive and influential in perpetuating the system.36 However, men
and society did not only act upon women—women took action to challenge the status quo
and took advantage of ambiguities in the dogmas of “true womanhood” and “new
womanhood” in the fight for advancement.37 Significant social movements aligning with
conservative ideas of women’s roles ironically provided the impetus for developments
leading to increased integration of women into public life. The exclusion of women from
legitimate action outside of the home rested on specific arguments of the nature of
women’s being. These arguments dramatically affected women’s place in education. As
the nexus of social, economic, and political forces, education was both a representation of
a nation’s ideals and a way to enact those ideals. Gender relations and roles underpin this
exploration of how women were conceived of by society at large, how they conceived of
themselves, and how education was vital to the changing status of women.
36
Arthur M. Cohen and Carrie B. Kisker, The Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence and
Growth of the Contemporary System (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 109. Social limits
intertwined with legal limits on domestic behavior, including courtship, marriage, contraception, and child
custody. See Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
37
Sue Zschoche, “Dr. Clarke Revisited: Science, True Womanhood, and Female Collegiate Education,”
History of Education Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 550.
19
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
The story of women's positions in society is a varied story—class, race, and
education all played critical roles in determining the freedom of women to act according
to the dictates of their thoughts. The nineteenth century was a time of contrasting
developments in the affairs of women, most notably in politics and education. Scholars
in women's history have long focused on the suffrage movement, the temperance
movement, and the abolition movement.38 Education was an arena in which women
could act with relative freedom and hold a measure of external legitimacy. Critically,
however, little has been written about this arena. Historians have explored the
development and meaning of women's colleges in a variety of accounts. The moststudied institutions were elite Northeastern liberal arts colleges designed to complement
existing male-only preserves of the Ivy League—hardly representative of the experiences
of a large part of the female population in the nineteenth century. State universities have
undergone a modicum of research, highlighting the access of women to the institutions
supposedly open for all.
Social movements of the mid-nineteenth century played a critical role in
determining the possible options for women’s futures. Three of the most-studied
movements were calls for the prohibition of alcohol and other features of “temperance,”
the abolition of slavery, and the right of women to vote in state and federal elections.
Fighting for the end of alcohol production and consumption conformed to and
perpetuated the Victorian concept of feminine duty. As women were the holders of
38
Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson cover the extensive extant literature up to the late 1980s.
Although the field has matured and widened it scope, much of the current work continues to focus on these
areas. See The Women’s West (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987).
20
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
virtue and loyalty; only they could truly care for the “soul of the nation.”39 On one end of
the gender role spectrum, the temperance movement represented the acceptance and
promotion of roles that constrained what women could do. Founded in 1874, the
Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was a women-only organization
dedicated to the elimination of alcohol from the nation as a way to salvation.40 The
WCTU was created late in the temperance movement’s history, but is representative of
how religion buttressed social conservatism. Christianity, in this case, took a social
movement and gave it seemingly divine purpose. The new perspective of purpose
allowed some women to see society’s ideas of their roles not as restricting, but fulfilling.
While the temperance movement was in the early stages of its development, the
cause célèbre of women’s active involvement in civil society was abolition. Advocating
for the abolition of slavery and the freedom of slaves both conformed to and challenged
women’s roles. By fighting for virtue and liberty (extending the promise of the republic
to oppressed people), this movement laid bare the contradictions of male-dominated
slavery. Its existence increasingly seen as a threat to a foundational unit of the republic,
slavery constituted the embodiment of domination and violence. It was not necessarily
the ownership of another human that so disgusted the abolitionists (although that was a
factor), it was the disruption of the family that encouraged action.41 By breaking apart
mothers from their children and husbands from their wives, the fabric of society was torn
apart. Beyond the issue of slavery itself, a few abolitionists took time to write of the
39
S. J. Kleinberg, Women in the United States, 1830-1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1999), 179.
40
Ibid., 179.
41
Ibid., 35.
21
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
importance of education to women with a special emphasis on domestic instruction.42
Catharine Beecher, an advocate for equality in co-education in the mid-nineteenth
century, opposed both abolition and the fight for the vote—seemingly contradictory
positions that underscore how divisive these issues were at the time.43 Confounding
generalizations, these letters point to a complex understanding of gender roles and how
women of the time did not represent a united front.
If the fight against drunkenness fit soundly within the structure of Victorian
understanding of gender and the abolition movement saw both confirmation of gender
roles and a burgeoning challenge to those roles, then suffrage represented the most
volatile and successful strike against gender roles determined by men. Developing in
waves, the fight for women’s right to vote paralleled a burgeoning consciousness in
1840s with the rise of abolitionism. This brought to light the importance of connection to
and participation in politics for women. As Dora Marsden, leader at the Seneca Falls
convention in 1848 wrote, women sought “to be themselves rather than complements to
someone else.”44 Marsden’s plainly worded letter indicated the then-radical notion that
women not only had roles determined by each individual, but also had the right to think
and act on their own accord. War would derail the suffrage movement and the fight for
the vote would next surface in the 1870s in the midst of Reconstruction, but throughout
the nineteenth century and until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, overt
challenges to men’s power would remain rare.
42
S. J. Kleinberg, Women in the United States, 1830-1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1999), 40.
43
June Edwards. Women in American Education, 1820-1955: The Female Force and Educational Reform,
Contributions to the Study of Education (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 9.
44
Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education in the United States, 2 vols., vol. 1, Science and
Education: A Series of Volumes for the Promotion of Scientific Research and Educational Progress (New
York, NY: The Science Press, 1929), 119.
22
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Struggling for access to politics was often linked to both gender identity and the
cause of education. The contest over what it meant to be a man and what it meant to be a
woman crossed boundaries among various issues, none more public than the suffrage
movement. As Anne B. Hamman wrote,
No one who understands the feminist movement, or who knows the soul of a real
new woman would make the mistake of supposing that the modern woman is
fighting for the vote, for education, and for economic freedom because she wants
to be a man…Woman is fighting today, as she has all the way up through the
ages, for freedom to be a woman.45
As a clear shot against the last vestiges of Victorian conceptions of gender, Hamman’s
letter shows the importance of women fighting for themselves and their own identities.
While her primary argument is for a concept of women fighting for freedom to be
themselves and define a future of their own making, Hamman’s letter is significant for
the explicit inclusion of education with the leading causes of voting and economic
freedom. At the very least, it shows the importance education played in the lives of
women to improve their situations.
Firmly established as historiographical trope, the “separate spheres” of men and
women during the nineteenth century is an oversimplified, but useful concept for
understanding gender relations. Exploration of how women and men interacted with,
related to, and viewed one another developed in parallel to the rising consciousness of
women in the mid-nineteenth period. Additional resources have been brought to bear on
45
Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education in the United States, 2 vols., vol. 1, Science and
Education: A Series of Volumes for the Promotion of Scientific Research and Educational Progress (New
York, NY: The Science Press, 1929), 119.
23
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
this way of differentiating and explaining the experiences of people in the nineteenth
centuries, with the rise of women's history in the late twentieth century providing an
historical “home” for the critical study. Linda Kerber, Rosalind Rosenberg, and a host of
other historians have led the investigation—did “separate spheres” exist as firmly as the
term implies?46 Assuming their existence, how did they arise and have they declined?
Women's experiences are central to this idea of different worlds existing as shadows of
one another (or, more accurately, women existing in the shadow of men). It is in the
expectations of women’s behavior, the expression of women’s thoughts, and the ability of
women to enact a future defined not by others, but by themselves that we find a history
more deserving the word.
Conceiving of gender roles requires an explanation of terms. While often
conflated in historical sources and the current literature, “sex” and “gender” refer to
different aspects of humanity. Sex is a biological characteristic, depending on
chromosomal makeup of an individual.47 Men have XY chromosomes, women have XX
chromosomes, and intersex individuals have any combination thereof (most commonly
XXY). As a biological concept, sex is inborn. Gender, on the other hand, is a social
construct and, as Joan Scott put it, is the “social organization of the relationship between
the sexes.”48 Gender is malleable and contested; individuals define masculinity and
femininity in different time periods to mean radically different things. In the nineteenth
century, writers to literary publications occasionally described women as “the sex,” an
46
Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1982).
47
Laurence D. Hurst, “Why Are There Only Two Sexes?,” Proceedings: Biological Sciences 263, no. 1369
(April 1996): 415.
48
Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91,
no. 5 (December 1986): 1053.
24
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
idea that at once eliminated any chance for individuality and reduced women to
reproductive machines.49 It is important to note that the modern concept of gender and
sex as described above illustrates the extent to which gender and sex have been separated.
In the nineteenth century, gender roles so completely defined the sexes that it was
inconceivable that they might vary from person to person. Therefore, the idea of
individuals breaking that connection was extremely disruptive to the social order.
Justification for separating men and women rested in the success of the republic
as argued for by the “cult of domesticity.” Predicated on inherent difference, the
argument held that women’s best and highest role was to assist men in furthering the
goals of the republic.50 Never in a central role that could imply power, women were most
often cast in peripheral roles that supported the dominant agenda of men at the time. This
agenda manifested itself as unfailing dedication to the idea of women as domestic
experts. Stemming from the earlier “Republican motherhood,” this new concept of the
“cult of domesticity,” built upon the role of mother and added educator.51 By combining
a nurturing private role and a nurturing public role, women effectively expanded their
purview while redefining what it meant to be private and what it meant to be public. As
the idea spread of women as educators in addition to mothers, various publications
argued that these new roles contributed to the elevation of women and their equality with
men. However, the use of “education for domesticity” as Patricia Smith Butcher put it,
49
Carl N. Degler, “What Ought To Be and What Was: Women's Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century” in
The American Historical Review 79, no. 5 (December 1974): 1468.
50
S. J. Kleinberg, Women in the United States, 1830-1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1999), 34.
51
Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1990), 14.
25
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
caused a divide among women’s rights activists of the mid-nineteenth century.52 Focused
on making a useful role and space for women, the cult of domesticity was never a true
cult in the sense that it did not require fervent religious belief. For the women who later
fought for independence from an existence based entirely on a world devised by men,
however, the movement earned that label.
The purported equality between the sexes relied in part of the separation, an
argument that reached its logical high point in the Supreme Court decision Plessy v.
Ferguson in 1896.53 Plessy permitted separation by race as long as such separation was
equal. Gender separation never faced such a test in court in part because of its
widespread acceptance but Plessy is a useful example of a high court case representative
of the social order of the time. However, separation was not as universal or rigid as it
might seem. Men encountered fewer formal barriers to the women's sphere and were
instead encouraged to breach the line between the spheres. In the domestic sphere,
arguably the one area of legitimate agency by women, men still held dominance as the
“heads of the household.”
The roots of women's contest for increased individuality in the late nineteenth
century lay in the formation of the early American republic, a country that forced
separation by gender through religious and political structures. As men in positions of
power often saw it, women were confined to the roles of housekeepers because that was
what they were suited for and best able to contribute to the American republic’s future.
Women sometimes embraced it, although by no means universally.
52
Patricia Smith Butcher, Education for Equality: Women's Rights Periodicals and Women's Higher
Education (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989), 29.
53
Plessy v. Ferguson, Judgment, Decided May 18, 1896; Records of the Supreme Court of the United
States; Record Group 267; Plessy v. Ferguson, 163, #15248, National Archives.
26
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Furthered as impenetrable and intractable, the arenas of gender roles were neither.
To promote the idea of rigid spheres is to ignore the reality of women in industry and
men in the home. Permeability of the spheres is vital to understanding the ways in which
women were truly subordinated. While the advocates of rightful separation argued that
women and men each had their own area of appropriate influence, it was rarely such a
neat construction; their entry into higher education would complicate matters
significantly. Women were legally, socially, and practically excluded in large numbers
for entering commerce, politics, and the public sphere. Participation in civic life was
therefore limited to those private roles that might be allowed in public—attendance at
religious services and forming auxiliaries to support men's activities, for example.
Consideration and treatment of women in the late nineteenth century and early
twentieth showed a distinct commingling of sex and gender. Being teacher to children
mixed with expectations of motherhood and caretaking, allowing the cracks in gender
roles to be exploited. Motherhood entailed not a giving up of responsibility, but of
transferring such responsibility from solely the husband to now include the children. The
children’s social and spiritual welfare depended on women’s actions, specifically their
manner of upbringing. As education within the home (initially agricultural and practical)
took on additional facets (reading the Bible), a question emerged about the appropriate
place for education and the appropriate instructor. The question would be answered with
the call of the “republican mother,” a figure of enlightened grace who shepherded the
children and the nation through learning.54
54
Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980),
25.
27
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
In the early nineteenth century, gender roles were ideologically distinct and
specific. They were also stratified. Underlying the assumptions of separation and
specification was the idea of the superiority of men and masculinity and the inferiority of
women and femininity. To be appropriately within one’s sphere of behavior entailed
acting as a complement to men—again, never as the person complemented.55 However,
this ideological and promoted separation was never as absolute as its proponents might
have wished. Throughout the period, women made inroads into traditionally male roles,
education being chief among them through women’s increasing presence in teaching
children and imparting morality on their households and communities. Attempts at
stratifying genders into greater and lesser levels of power and choice had legal, pseudoscientific, and, most powerfully, social bases, impacting women in most areas of life.
Politicians acted to protect the republic through its most treasured symbol: the
family. Laws circumscribing the right to marry, the power of individuals in the marriage
contract, and the role of children were to usher in a republican ideal of limited
government and increased individual choice.56 However, these laws merely reproduced
the power of individual choice of men and required a growing state bureaucracy to
enforce new legislation. As the power of the state through judicial action increased, the
status of men as patriarch was confirmed and modified. Changing legal frameworks
worked to reduce the primary unit of organization from the family to the individual, a
transition highlighting the continued dominance of men. Grossberg argues that
separation legally enhanced the status of men but was not powerful enough to sustain it
55
Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1990), 4.
56
Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 25.
28
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
over the long-term.57 In 1880, the leaders of the women’s suffrage movement decried the
continued legal support of masculine dominance as “contrary to Republican principles
and the fruitful source of rebellion and corruption.”58
The rise of modern scientific philosophy, methodology, and instrumentation at the
same time of increased social retrenchment paved the way for scientists to decry the
education of women as a threat to their biological health. By focusing attention on the
mind of women, teachers supposedly diverted blood away from the reproductive system
and endangered the reproductive health of women.59 Conceived as temple of virtues and
methods for ensuring the survival of the country, woman’s bodies were open for public
contest. The authors of the time often couched this threat not in terms of saving women
from themselves, but in saving the republic from the lack of childbearing. Race and
gender were brought together as the nation feared a “race suicide” if the rates of white
births did not cease its decline.60 This widespread fear over the racial composition of the
nation’s children climaxed after the Civil War in the waning years of the nineteenth
century, highlighting the effects of institutionalized racism.61
The most famous attack on women during this period is arguably Dr. Edward
Clarke’s speech in 1872. At a meeting of the New England Woman’s Club, Dr. Clarke
argued that women’s separation from men and impropriety of conducting certain tasks
57
Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 27.
58
Ibid., 296.
59
Roberta Frankfort, Collegiate Women: Domesticity and Career in Turn-of-the-Century America, New
York University Series in Education and Socialization in American History (New York, NY: New York
University Press, 1977), 87.
60
Patricia A. Palmieri, “From Republican Motherhood to Race Suicide: Arguments on the Higher
Education of Women in the United States, 1820-1920,” in The History of Higher Education, eds. Lester F.
Goodchild and Harold S. Wechsler (Boston, MA: Pearson, 1997), 204.
61
Ibid., 206.
29
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
was not a social restriction but a biological one.62 This argument fit in with the rising
sentiment of modernity in which society would be improved through science. Clarke
argued that education actually damaged women’s health by diverting blood from the
reproductive system.63 This created a firestorm of response but had little long-term
impact on the state normal schools and expansion of educational opportunities for
women.64 The so-called scientific arguments enfolded both a racialized concept of
reproduction and the subordination of women to the country as a whole.
Social control over gender roles represented the most damaging control over
women in that it pervaded the nation and influenced behaviors in the community, the
household, and the individual’s personal interactions. As suffrage activist Jessie Taft
claimed, no “fundamental change in woman’s social position” would occur until the traits
associated so strongly with each gender were universalized.65 Taft was particularly vocal
in her leadership of suffrage in the last years of the nineteenth century and early twentieth
century, seemingly illustrating the height of women’s conscious move toward integration
with society and the expansion of their rights to participate more fully in civil society and
education. However, Taft recalled that the world in which men lived was “hostile and
antagonistic in many respects to the world in which women reside.”66 This reference to
62
Sue Zschoche, “Dr. Clarke Revisited: Science, True Womanhood, and Female Collegiate Education,”
History of Education Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 549.
63
Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi published a rebuttal in 1877 demonstrating that while 19% of women reported
being in poorer health upon leaving further education, 21% reported being in improved health. See her
“The Question of Rest for Women during Menstruation” found in Barbara Solomon, In the Company of
Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1985), 57.
64
Sue Zschoche, “Dr. Clarke Revisited: Science, True Womanhood, and Female Collegiate Education,”
History of Education Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 548.
65
Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 141.
66
Jessie Taft, The Woman’s Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1916), 11.
30
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
worlds and their implied separation shows the depth of the socialization that promoted
the interests of men over women.
Public education, a nascent movement in the 1820s and promoted heavily by
Horace Mann, was a tool of socialization for the republic. Educating women was
fundamentally a useful tool. The crux of changing and challenging women's roles was to
position utility against idealism. Seen in the early entry as “entirely useless beings,”
women could become useful by providing a service to the country.67 This service, while
elevating the country once again over women, was another indicator of practicality
trumping ideals in the advancement of women. Normal schools did not change society's
views of women because they successfully challenged the idea of women in higher
education; rather, they changed society's views by challenging the utility of not including
women in higher education.
Women used education as an arena of contest, a space in which discussions could
take place and a space about which discussions could be held. For many, schools
generally promised intellectual emancipation.68 The world of commerce, politics, and
industry may have been closed to most women, but schools offered the opportunity not
only to air grievances of the existing situation, but also a chance to learn from others. It
is quite powerful to share experiences with another facing similar exclusion and the
education system brought together members of the largest group that was systematically
excluded from civil society—women. As Horace Mann’s push for common schools of
the 1820s was increasingly successful, laws on compulsory attendance at the publically
67
Thomas Branagan, The Excellency of the Female Character Vindicated (Philadelphia, PA: J. Rakestraw,
1808), 82.
68
John Mack Faragher and Florence Howe, eds. Women and Higher Education in American History (New
York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988), 108.
31
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
funded schools gained traction.69 Ironically, compulsory education laws increased the
speed with which women would enter further education. The ballooning population of
children attending public schools forced a concomitant rise in the number of teachers.
Ranks of educators that had once been dominated numerically by men were increasingly
the domain of women.
As the state government showed an increased interest in the affairs of the home, it
became clear that education was a central tool in the government's arsenal. Several states'
supreme courts made it clear that they saw a vested interest in promoting the welfare of
an “organized society,” in which the “education and maintenance of the child” was a
central tenant.70 These decisions bolster the idea that society was at its best when
ordered—forces that sought to change society in large ways would be countered.
Education was a way to inculcate social values (as it is today) and ensure the continuation
of the republic. Ironically, the same decision that promoted an organized society also
mentioned the importance of usefulness in raising and educating children. Practicality
and idealism came together to create a unique environment in the progressive era, as the
changing social mores led to increasingly public contests over where women fit in.
Would they obey the organized society and tend only to the needs of the children? If
they did so, they would need to be educated themselves. Such education would lead to
literacy, a larger body of written words that could be exchanged and so increase the flow
of idea exchange, the gathering of allies, and the knowledge that would allow for
advancement in commerce and industry.
69
David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public
Schools (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), 47.
70
Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 259.
32
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
As the status of women generally improved over the century, even under constant
threat from vocal and powerful forces, a key instrument allowed such progress to be
made and to be held. That instrument of change, as Massachusetts Governor Everett put
it, was also an “instrument of great good.”71 State normal schools, as widely established
and widely accepted means for teacher training, took advantage of the ambiguity of
gender roles, the conflicting goals of education, and provided a path for women to enter
further, and, later, higher education.
Therefore, if educating women was a threat to the rightful social order, a
detriment to the health of the nation, and a foolish endeavor, why was it successful? The
forces arrayed against women’s exercise of free thought and action were substantial and
distributed. Society, science, and religion were supposedly united in protection of the
country. Since the roles of women as passive, nurturing, and virtuous beings were
equally important to men as strong, independent, and intelligent beings in the cause of the
nation, it should follow that any challenge to this order would fail. But the order was not
as strong as the newspaper editors, the academic elite, and the politicians believed.
Neither the idea of separate spheres nor the roles associated with those spheres provided
the bulwark against change their were presumed to. Universal acceptance of women's
station as the mistress of the home must be questioned and the method in which this
change took place must be explored. Normal schools, as the institutions that catalyzed
the transformation of women’s roles, are significant for their reach and subtlety.
Although state-controlled teacher education was a path meant simply to increase the
numbers of teachers—its long-term effect was far more profound.
71
Christine A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 5.
33
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Chapter III
American State Normal Schools: “The Heart of the Public School System”72
Lest the importance of teaching to the American national interest be over-stated,
teaching in the nineteenth century represented more than passing knowledge from
generation to generation. It was increasingly an endeavor belonging with the state. 73 The
enthusiasm for teaching complemented society’s religious and industrial aspirations: the
creation of a republic based on Christian principles that would foster literacy, family, and
innovation. This message supported the drive for increasing governmental involvement
in those areas and simultaneously made each more important to the country. State
initiatives in education affected more people in more ways over the course of the closing
decades of the nineteenth century than ever before. Teaching, increasingly tied to
government, had a multitude of connections to gender roles and status. Opportunities for
employment, advancement, and roles in the public eye concentrated in education.74 The
systems and institutions of education would undergo substantial change from 1870 to
1920 as highlighted by the state normal school.
Education in the United States changed quite dramatically in the fifty-year period
following the Civil War. Before that conflict, education as a tool of public policy and
socialization was limited in both intent and impact. Elite institutions of private and
public control dominated the landscape and reached only 2% of the adult population.75
72
The Crucible, 20 April 1895, 2.
Arthur M. Cohen and Carrie B. Kisker, The Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence and
Growth of the Contemporary System (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 21.
74
Women’s colleges and normal schools employed most women faculty in the postsecondary education
landscape at this time. See Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in
Coeducational Universities, 1870-1937 (New York, NY: The Feminist Press, 1989), 2.
75
Arthur M. Cohen and Carrie B. Kisker, The Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence and
Growth of the Contemporary System (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 72.
73
34
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
From 1870 to 1920, the states and the federal government increased their investment and
control in further and higher education, participation rates rose significantly, and
women’s options broadened in ways representative of their advancement in society as a
whole.76
Education as a matter of governmental interest can trace its modern development
to the rise of normal schools. Normal schools, the major institutions for teacher
preparation in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century America, have roots in the
development of state-supported institutions in Europe in the late-eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries. Widespread in western and central Europe in the early nineteenth
century, normal schools reached their continental zenith in Germany and France. Henry
Barnard surveyed dozens of European nations in the 1830s, publishing National
Education in Europe.77 He accounted for governmental frameworks, administrative
procedures, and teacher preparation in the public school systems and provided a good
basis on which to understand the rise of normal schools in Europe. The first normal
school in the world was founded at Stettin, Prussia in 1735 and combined both
pedagogical and religious instruction.78 Connecting education and religion was common
at the time and especially in a geographic area so explicitly demarcated by religion and
state lines. As Barnard’s report illustrated, the fragmented Germanic states’ (including
76
John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2004), 156.
77
Henry Barnard, National Education in Europe; Being an Account of the Organization, Administration,
Instruction, and Statistics of Public Schools of Different Grades in the Principal States (Hartford, CT:
Frederick B. Perkins, 1854).
78
Samuel E. Staples, “Normal Schools and Their Origin: A Paper Read at a Regular Meeting of the
Worcester Society of Antiquity, June 5th, 1877” (Worcester, MA: Tyler and Seagrave, 1877), 3 and John
Albree, Charles Brooks and His Work for Normal Schools (Medford, MA: J.C. Miller Press, 1907), 19.
35
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Prussia, Baden, and Bavaria) approach to normal schools was cognizant of the
“Protestant and Romanist” character, paving the way for state control.79
American normal schools adopted several important characteristics of French and
German models as illustrated by Barnard’s 1854 study. From France and Germany the
tendency for the state to take the lead in establishing state-controlled normal schools was
followed fairly closely.80 Geographic dispersion as a method of extending state control to
remote areas of the country and a way to increase the number of teachers from rural
areas, begun in continental Europe, became a hallmark of the American normal school
system as it reached maturity in the early twentieth century.81 The relationship between
continental institutions and British institutions would alter the path of normal school
development in the United States.
Britain established many normal schools in the late eighteenth century, expanding
upon the continental trend. Significantly, however, all of these institutions were aligned
with various sects of the Protestant and Catholic churches. This alignment limited the
control of states and illustrates the lack of state investment and interest in teacher
education. As “there [were] no state normal schools, in the ordinary American sense of
the term,” the British model fell out of favor with educational reformers in the United
States desirous of state intervention and planning.82 Therefore, the clearest educational
79
Henry Barnard, National Education in Europe; Being an Account of the Organization, Administration,
Instruction, and Statistics of Public Schools of Different Grades in the Principal States (Hartford, CT:
Frederick B. Perkins, 1854), 100.
80
Ibid., 413.
81
James W. Fraser, Preparing America's Teachers: A History (New York, NY: Teachers College Press,
2007), 57; Henry Barnard, National Education in Europe; Being an Account of the Organization,
Administration, Instruction, and Statistics of Public Schools of Different Grades in the Principal States
(Hartford, CT: Frederick B. Perkins, 1854), 102.
82
National Educational Association Department of Normal Schools, “Report of Committee on Normal
Schools” (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1899), 57.
36
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
connection from Europe to North America is the French model of publically funded and
controlled teacher education institutions, the école normales.83 Literally translating to
“normal school,” the institutions’ titles did not refer to the expected but rather the
establishment of new, higher standards for preparing teachers. An integral part of the
idealistic French Revolution, école normales arose out of the state’s efforts to promote
the ideals of the French Republic. A dedicated corps of teachers would advance a literate
society and further the influence of the citizenry in France—a cause resonant with the
early American republicans.
The école normale arrived in the United States in a variety of forms, the most
important of which was the state normal school. Municipalities, county governments,
and state governments were also involved in the establishment of summer teacher
institutes, short courses, and county normal schools. However, these forms of teacher
education never achieved the geographical reach or social influence of state-supported
normal schools.84
As a result of their European heritage, American normal schools were
cosmopolitan from the very beginning. These institutions would foretell important
characteristics and developments in the United States, especially the place of religion in
public education and the influence of women. The normal school movement reflected a
desire to standardize and professionalize teacher preparation in concert with social
83
Samuel E. Staples, “Normal Schools and Their Origin: A Paper Read at a Regular Meeting of the
Worcester Society of Antiquity, June 5th, 1877” (Worcester, MA: Tyler and Seagrave, 1877), 3.
84
Christine A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 56.
37
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
movements to advance the nation; it was the first attempt to plan the education of
teachers on a large scale.85
Prior to the widespread adoption of normal schools as institutions for teacher
preparation, teaching as a field was neither organized nor perceived as legitimate. Men
from low-income and low-social status backgrounds filled the ranks of teachers in the
early nineteenth century; women were not welcome as members of the teaching ranks.86
Education was a last-ditch job for men in part because it did not require physical strength
or commercial ingenuity, traits most often associated at the time with the masculine and
external sphere. Struggling to fill the few roles available, existing schools transitioned to
recruiting women as the ideal choice.87 Recognized for their patience, virtue, and care,
women possessed an ability that men lacked, namely, the characteristics increasingly
sought-after for teachers of children. Women could move between the “spheres” of
adulthood and childhood, foreshadowing their movement between the spheres of
domesticity and civil society. From a position at the periphery of society in the early
nineteenth century, teaching moved toward the center by the 1840s as educational leaders
perceived teaching as vital to the development of the nation.88
Predating normal schools by about twenty years, the idea to establish a national
network of schools for children would be known as the “common school” movement.
Horace Mann, an educational leader in Massachusetts, led this movement as a way to
85
Christine A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 10.
86
James W. Fraser, Preparing America's Teachers: A History (New York, NY: Teachers College Press,
2007), 36.
87
Nancy Hoffman, Woman’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Education Press, 2003), 25.
88
Ibid., 31.
38
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
edify and serve the republic.89 With the institutionalization of schooling, the states began
to see education not simply a matter for private hands—government had an increasing
duty to provide education. Common schools led to a dramatic shift in how the public
perceived education. Millions of children began attending schools and the nation then
needed more teachers—largely women teachers—to educate those children. The number
of women teachers tripled from 1840, reaching 80% of teachers by 1880.90 Common
schools, both benefitting from and promoting the use of normal schools, were idealized in
the mid-nineteenth century as tools for “perfecting” the republic and building the
character of all involved.91
Leading educational historians such as Ogren and Herbst agree that the first
American state normal school was located at Lexington, Massachusetts and founded in
1839.92 However, an 1877 report indicated a possible earlier institution in Concord,
Vermont, founded by Samuel Reed Hall as the Teachers’ Seminary in 1823.93 Initially
private, this institution was later incorporated by the State of Vermont. The conflicting
evidence and standards for establishing a “first” normal school illustrate the larger issue
of historicity and the importance ascribed to being the first of a new kind of institution.
For this study, this importance lies in the representation of a shift in educational
philosophy. Whether the first normal school was in Vermont or Massachusetts, founded
89
June Edwards. Women in American Education, 1820-1955: The Female Force and Educational Reform.
Contributions to the Study of Education (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 7.
90
Nancy Hoffman, Woman’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Education Press, 2003), 24.
91
Ibid., 39.
92
Christine A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 220; Jurgen Herbst, And Sadly Teach: Teacher Education and
Professionalization in American Culture (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 65.
93
Samuel E. Staples, “Normal Schools and Their Origin: A Paper Read at a Regular Meeting of the
Worcester Society of Antiquity, June 5th, 1877” (Worcester, MA: Tyler and Seagrave, 1877), 4.
39
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
in 1823 or in 1837, or was public or private is immaterial to the exploration of normal
schools and women. As both institutions were located in New England and founded in
the same era, these normal schools share a common heritage and so mark the essential
beginning of teacher education.
Both institutions existed to train teachers of children and inhabited a fluid space
among postsecondary education institutions between further and higher education; this
space would shift as the nation's education system grew and matured, increasing
academic standards for millions of children. Regardless of the first normal school as
such, teacher preparation was primarily the remit of private religious organizations.94
Reading and writing, the two most practical skills at the time, were taught with an eye
toward the Bible. A largely Christian society needed an increasing number of people to
understand the written word of God as they went out to settle new lands.
Placing normal schools within the postsecondary education landscape is difficult
due to imprecise and changing terminology.95 At the time, normal schools represented a
unique type of educational institution. Common schools included elementary and
secondary schools but did not define the ending of the secondary school period, described
by Tyack and Hansot as an “institution in search of identity and coherent purpose.”96
Colleges and universities were clearly institutions of higher education: they conferred at a
minimum the bachelor’s degree, their curricula were rigorously determined by faculty
94
William S. Learned et al., The Professional Preparation of Teachers for American Public Schools: A
Study Based Upon an Examination of Tax-Supported Normal Schools in the State of Missouri (New York,
NY: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1920), 24.
95
As Geraldine Jonçich Clifford noted in Lone Voyagers, changing standards of data collection by the
predecessors to the U.S. Department of Education and the intermittent appearance of committees within
academic organizations dedicated to issues of gender in education make consistent units of analysis
difficult to obtain.
96
David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public
Schools (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), 117.
40
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
members with advanced degrees, and they enjoyed the support of successful alumni in
politics and business.97 Normal schools could claim none of those features. Given that
normal schools’ admission standards initially lacked a high school diploma requirement
and the inclusion of nascent articulation agreements with colleges and universities, it is
safe to identify normal schools as institutions of further education.98
The question of institutional definition appears on the periphery of many other
discussions of educational history. In attempting to categorize institutions and therefore
bring order to a chaotic system, the reality of malleable boundaries is obscured and
artificial constructs are brought to the forefront. As institutions occupying the space
between high school and higher education, normal schools of the nineteenth century may
be considered forerunners to the community or junior college of the twentieth century. In
both cases the institutions sought to expand opportunities for education—normal schools
focused on teaching and community colleges focused on technical skills and vocations.99
The open access policy of community colleges is analogous to the minimal admission
requirements of the normal schools, developing in parallel with the educational landscape
of their respective time periods. No national system of further and/or higher education
has ever existed in the United States, contributing to the highly variable nomenclature
and standard of academic rigor.100
97
National Educational Association Department of Normal Schools, “Report of Committee on Normal
Schools” (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1899), 27.
98
Catalogue and Announcements of the University of Colorado (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado,
1883), 42.
99
Arthur M. Cohen and Carrie B. Kisker, The Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence and
Growth of the Contemporary System (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 446.
100
John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2004), 42.
41
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
The relationship between high schools and normal schools is worthy of
examination largely due to the blurred lines of definition and the impact one institution
had on the other. As the common school movement ushered in a wave of students who
not only attended public elementary schools in large numbers but also went on to
secondary schools, normal schools both contributed to and benefitted from an increased
pool of increasingly educated students. From 1850 to 1860, the number of students in
elementary school increased from 3.5 million to 5 million.101 Normal schools existed
because of the need for additional teaching staff and so thrived on state financial and
philosophical support. They also thrived because more and more prospective students
met the requirements for entry to the institutions.102 This virtuous cycle eventually led to
near-universal requirement of the high school diploma and the gradual evolution of the
normal school into the teachers college—a true institution of higher education.
On the other end of the educational dichotomy was the relationship between
normal schools and colleges and universities. In the emerging academic hierarchy,
normal schools replicated features of both secondary and postsecondary institutions and
explicitly aspired to elevate teaching to a position of respect and authority. By
mimicking colleges and universities in increasingly important ways, normal schools
gradually transformed themselves from institutions of questionable status to ones viewed
by the academic world as “colleges.” At the heart of the differences between normal
schools and colleges and universities was the issue of academic quality and mission. A
101
Nancy Hoffman, Woman’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Education Press, 2003), 35.
102
Charles H. Judd and Samuel C. Parker, “Problems Involved in Standardizing State Normal Schools.”
United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 12 (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1916), 59.
42
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
contemporary report included an important distinction between the “academic” course
and the “normal” course, indicating a division of quality and a clear demarcation of what
was considered acceptable by the academic community.103
Normal schools were designed to complement colleges and universities in states'
mission to add teachers to the ranks of the civil service. It would seem, therefore, natural
that the institutions of higher education would support normal schools. This support
paralleled with pressure to maintain the normal school's mission. If normal schools
became colleges, they would compete with colleges and universities for funding and
students. Colleges and universities, desiring continued status as educational leaders, used
the widespread perception of the difference between higher education and normal schools
as a method to maintain their legitimacy. With the colleges and universities dominated
by men and so embodied the masculine (and normal schools designed by men to educate
[women] teachers), the idea that women could use the very model designed to perpetuate
separate spheres and male domination as tools to advance their own agenda and
integration into society is revolutionary.
Students at both normal schools and universities had inter-institutional mobility as
evidence by the basic articulation agreements of the time. Judd and Parker's 1916 report
recalls the desire of normal school graduates to transfer their credits and/or degree to the
university to complete a Bachelor of Arts or Science.104 As this study focuses on
Colorado institutions, addressing local practices is illustrative. Review of the catalogs of
both the University of Colorado and Colorado State Normal School shows a concerted
103
Charles H. Judd and Samuel C. Parker, “Problems Involved in Standardizing State Normal Schools.”
United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 12 (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1916), 10.
104
Ibid., 82.
43
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
effort on behalf of the institutions to address this need. From 1870 through the turn of the
century, requirements for credit increased and certainty of acceptance decreased.105 In
addition, Colorado State Normal School had detailed requirements for acceptance into its
programs from its establishment. Interestingly, Colorado State Normal School
guaranteed admission with diploma or certificate from an approved normal school
outside of Colorado, but did not guarantee admission for students from universities.106
Perhaps indicating the institutional self-confidence or reputation, this difference was
unusual for the time.
In the midst of an uncertain educational landscape, normal schools of the late
nineteenth century had a relatively stable connection to government in the form of
recognition and financial support. At the turn of the century, Albree provided a
philosophical basis for state intervention and regulation buttressing existing arguments
for social and governmental union.107 Through their statutory mission to prepare
teachers, normal schools executed the state's larger philosophical mission to progress the
republic and society. Normal schools were instruments of government, ideally a
centralized and highly-bureaucratic system in which merit and effort were highly
rewarded.108 Clearly, therefore, states invested and supported normal schools. Several
105
Catalogue and Announcements of the University of Colorado (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado,
1905), 122.
106
Massachusetts Board of Education, “Massachusetts State Normal Schools: Containing a Circular of
Information, a Circular of Advice to ‘One Who Wishes to Become a Teacher,’ and the Normal School
Admission Examination Papers from 1896 to 1901 Inclusive” (Boston, MA: Wright and Potter Printing,
1901), 9.
107
John Albree, Charles Brooks and His Work for Normal Schools (Medford, MA: J.C. Miller Press, 1907),
19.
108
Samuel E. Staples, “Normal Schools and Their Origin: A Paper Read at a Regular Meeting of the
Worcester Society of Antiquity, June 5th, 1877” (Worcester, MA: Tyler and Seagrave, 1877), 2.
44
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
states went so far as to include normal schools in their constitutions, while others used
lands donated by the federal government for establishing normal schools.109
Most normal schools in the United States were founded as public or stategoverned entities.110 Those founded as private institutions, often styled “teachers’
seminary,” tended to be clustered in New England and the eastern Great Lakes regions.
Many private normal schools often underwent a slow transformation into state normal
schools. Initially recognized by the states as bodies authorized to educate teachers, some
earned state subsidies, and then accepted administration and charter by the state.
Normal schools often conferred the degree Bachelor of Pedagogy (B.Pd.) and
with it a certification for teaching.111 While the B.Pd. included the title “Bachelor,” the
curriculum upon which it was based was not analogous to the Bachelor of Arts or
Bachelor of Science at contemporary colleges and universities; it was a purpose-built
degree for future teachers. That goes to the heart of the difference between normal
schools and institutions of higher education: liberal arts curriculum versus vocational
curriculum. A long-standing contest throughout the normal school period was one of
purpose. Leaders in education could rally around the identity of the normal school as the
flagship of teacher preparation, but they wrestled, quite publicly at times, with the
process of such preparation.112 Should normal schools focus on content or method?
109
Wisconsin Constitution, Article X, Section 2. “The residue shall be appropriated to the support and
maintenance of academies and normal schools, and suitable libraries and apparatus therefor.”
110
Samuel A. Rutledge, The Development of Guiding Principles for the Administration of Teachers
Colleges and Normal Schools (New York, NY: Teachers College, 1930), 2.
111
Albert F. Carter, Forty Years of Colorado State Teachers College, Formerly the State Normal School of
Colorado, 1890-1930 (Greeley, CO: Tribune-Republican Publishing Company, 1930), 147.
112
William F. Phelps, Normal Schools: Their Relations to the Primary and Higher Institutions of Learning
And to the Welfare and Progress of Society, Together with Their Future in the United States (Trenton, NJ:
True American Printing, 1857).
45
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
One wing of these institutional leaders supported normal schools acting as
downward extensions of colleges and universities.113 Teacher candidates would complete
liberal coursework designed to give them a strong background in several related fields,
providing them with subject expertise—a direct connection to collegiate education.
Teaching would be based on knowledge and was assumed to stem from mastery of
content. The other major wing of normal school leaders advocated a methods orientation
for teachers.114 Knowledge of a subject was useless if teachers could not communicate
the knowledge effectively. The close of the nineteenth century and opening of the
twentieth brought a new cultural focus on pragmatism. As the world became more
interconnected by increasing speed of transportation and communication methods, the
United States saw growth in widespread reform movements. Education was certainly a
part of this wave and so, in an era of the optimistic search for new social forms, the
leaders arguing for methods-based teacher preparation won out by the end of the normal
school period.115
Admission to normal schools, as with colleges and universities, was a highly
localized process. Various governing boards created admission standards or devolved the
responsibility to the institutions themselves, but several key features were consistent in
most normal schools of the late nineteenth century. Each prospective student was
examined by the faculty of the institution for academic rigor, good moral character, and
113
Jurgen Herbst, And Sadly Teach: Teacher Education and Professionalization in American Culture
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 222.
114
William F. Phelps, Normal Schools: Their Relations to the Primary and Higher Institutions of Learning
And to the Welfare and Progress of Society, Together with Their Future in the United States (Trenton, NJ:
True American Printing, 1857), 22.
115
Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1967), 151.
46
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
commitment to teaching.116 Evidence of meeting academic rigor in the mid-nineteenth
century referred to completion of a common school curriculum or graduation from high
school. By the 1890s, normal schools across the country increased their requirements to
mandate a high school diploma. The character of prospective students was of particular
concern for the normal school faculty because of the nature of teaching and the
commonly held view that teachers were moral guardians of the classroom.117 This
requirement supported dominant religious beliefs of the era, Protestant Christianity, as
students from these backgrounds would likely hold values congruent with the faculty.
Commitment to teaching was the final universal requirement for future teachers.
This ambiguous requirement impacted finances, as most institutions did not charge
tuition fees to students.118 For the state to invest “liberally” in the normal schools, as
contemporary reports often referred to operating grants, and for the institutions to fulfill
their philosophical and statutory requirements of providing adequate numbers of teachers,
the normal schools needed a mechanism to guarantee graduates would become teachers.
Prospective students promised, through a signed contract or verbal agreement with
faculty, to teach in the state in which the normal school was located for a certain number
of years after graduation. Most often this time period matched the years of schooling
received.119 That so many normal schools required a commitment to teaching from their
prospective students indicates a substantial alignment of practice with philosophy and the
perception of education as a public good. These institutions were founded on a “spirit”
116
National Educational Association Department of Normal Schools, “Report of Committee on Normal
Schools” (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1899), 6.
117
Ibid., 7.
118
Ibid., 23.
119
Ibid., 24.
47
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
interwoven in the curriculum, student life, and mission. By including such requirements
for admission, the normal schools made clear their commitment to the professionalization
of teaching. Students at normal schools often paid no tuition to the institutions, receiving
a subsidized education.120 Widespread subsidies show how legislators viewed normal
schools as part of the vested interest of the state and the commensurate importance.
Normal schools spread quickly across the nation, opening the states to betterprepared teachers. Christine Ogren compiled the founding dates of all American state
normal schools and in the process illustrated a distinct northeast-to-southwest
movement.121 From their foundation in New England, normal schools found fertile
ground in New York, Pennsylvania, sweeping through Ohio and the mid-western states of
Illinois, Missouri, and Wisconsin. In these states normal schools became a de facto state
system for further education, although the legal realization of this concept would not
come until the twentieth century. In 1870, state normal schools numbered thirty-eight
separate institutions. Twenty years later, there were 102 institutions across the nation.122
As the normal school spread, the separation manifested itself as a split between eastern
and western traditions. New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts found their normal
schools fulfilling the teacher education mission and making little to no attempt to
advance their own status.123 Western normal schools in Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin,
120
Christine A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 80.
121
Ibid., 211.
122
Nancy Hoffman, Woman’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Education Press, 2003), 39.
123
Charles H. Judd and Samuel C. Parker, “Problems Involved in Standardizing State Normal Schools.”
United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 12 (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1916), 14.
48
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
through charismatic and influential leaders, made numerous attempts to compete with the
state universities and earn public recognition of elevated status.124
The rural nature of most normal schools continued as more states adopted the
institutional type. Intentional location of institutions in rural areas, clear from the
Missouri, New York, and Illinois normal schools represented a shift toward practicality
and away from idealism in educational philosophy. The dominance of Protestant
Christianity in the colonial United States inspired civic leaders to establish institutions of
further and higher education in remote locations.125 As the students were drawn to the
institutions away from the dangers and temptations of urban areas, colleges advanced
their moral agenda in tandem to their education agenda. The Judd and Parker report
shows that geographical placement of the normal school was vital to their mission—in
this case, removal from cities was not a good thing because of the feared reduction in
their influence for good.126 These locations impacted women’s social roles because rural
women were more likely to have mingled spheres for practical reasons of farm and
household management.127
Normal schools were predominantly coeducational and so opened hundreds of
pathways for women to earn further education. As one of the few opportunities for
women to earn an education beyond high school, normal schools’ populations skewed
124
Jurgen Herbst, And Sadly Teach: Teacher Education and Professionalization in American Culture
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 222.
125
John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2004), 25.
126
Charles H. Judd and Samuel C. Parker, “Problems Involved in Standardizing State Normal Schools.”
United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 12 (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1916), 23.
127
S. J. Kleinberg, Women in the United States, 1830-1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1999), 42.
49
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
heavily toward women.128 What followed was a complete reversal of dominance in
teaching by men. As one of the few opportunities open to women, normal schools were
one of the first bastions of male privilege to be equalized numerically. It would be
decades until women at normal schools could claim equality in terms of leadership
opportunities, but being the first type of institution that welcome women, normal schools
represented a critical stronghold for women.
The authors of laws establishing normal schools, the administrators of those
institutions, and many of the faculty were men. None of this would be have been
possible but for the presence and action of women. As the teachers of children, the
students at the normal schools, and the individuals who took risks to push the social
envelopes, women were instrumental to their own advancement. On the surface, normal
schools performed a practical function for women by providing a socially acceptable
means to exit the home while still remaining influential in domestic affairs. These
institutions continued the education of women when it would otherwise be potentially
wasteful. Courses at a university served as cultural status-makers and career advancers.
Such benefits would not have been appropriate or useful for women in the 1870s because
of limited resources and constricted paths for advancement. Normal schools, on the other
hand, capitalized on the assumptions of women’s proclivities and strengths. Providing
opportunities to learn pedagogy and exercise their academic talents increased the
potential income for women, changing the relationship between women and the men in
their lives. What is most interesting and important in the discussion of women’s
advancement, however, is the place of intangible and subterranean benefits of the normal
128
Nancy Hoffman, Woman’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Education Press, 2003), 2.
50
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
schools. Rather than serving a surface-level good for women, normal schools were a
conduit for women to advance themselves when other options were closed to them.
As Samuel Rutledge noted in his 1930 study of institutional administration,
normal schools occupied the unique space of being an instrument to standardize and
professionalize teacher preparation while lacking a standard method of establishment or
operation.129 Founded in numerous forms and operating with varied scopes, normal
schools benefitted from the social and political support for their democratic and
republican mission. Teaching was democratic in the sense that teachers would bolster
democracy through modern pedagogy and republican in that teachers represented the best
of a Christian society. One reinforced the other, building an ideal nexus between
philosophy and pragmatism.
State normal schools, initially a practical method of extending the state’s reach
and influence over teaching, quickly became a method of connecting the philosophical
drive to improve the country with the ideal gender roles given to men and women.130 At
the beginning of the 1870s, this idea began to lose out to the rapidly expanding normal
school “system.” As women increasingly joined educational institutions such as normal
schools, their influence over gender roles would be challenged and ultimately coopted as
a part of the larger trend toward liberalizing social perspectives on women.
129
Samuel A. Rutledge, The Development of Guiding Principles for the Administration of Teachers
Colleges and Normal Schools (New York, NY: Teachers College, 1930), 3.
130
Robert Wiebe discusses at length the connection between gender roles and the rising sense of
professionalism during this time period. See The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, NY: Hill and
Wang, 1967), 122.
51
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Chapter IV
Education in Colorado: “She Hath Many Nameless Virtues”
Elizabeth Kendel was raised in rural northeastern Colorado, attended Greeley
High School, and eventually enrolled at Colorado State Normal School—in other words,
she represented the archetypical “normalite.” Like many of her peers at normal schools,
Elizabeth was quite involved with campus life, eventually earning both her Bachelor and
Master of Pedagogy.131 She became a faculty member at CSNS in 1896 and earned a
reputation for quality of character; this reputation was later represented in 1907 with the
caption “She hath many nameless virtues” accompanying her photo in the annual
yearbook.132 Elizabeth Kendel used the opportunities from her further education to earn a
graduate degree at Teachers College, Columbia University and co-author an institutional
history. These opportunities stemmed, in part, from the institution she attended—
Colorado State Normal School.
State normal schools, widespread and innovative institutions for teacher
education, moved quickly across the United States. From their inception in
Massachusetts in 1839, state normal schools reached New York in 1848, Ohio in 1857,
and Missouri in 1867.133 In the twenty years after the Civil War, normal schools were
established in forty-six states and territories. These institutions were notable for their
admission of women students and inclusion of women into the ranks of faculty and staff.
Some of the greatest achievements of this type of institution can be found in comparison
to state universities because of the inherent differences in mission and power.
131
Cache La Poudre, 1907, n.p.
Ibid.
133
Christine A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 213.
132
52
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Women were most likely to enroll in state normal schools and single-gender
colleges from 1870 through 1920.134 Comparing the situations, experiences, and writings
of women at these types of institutions provides a picture of how coeducation and
gendered education interacted, if at all, and how the institutions affected or did not affect
women. However, the locations of women's colleges limit their utility on a national
scale, as they were concentrated in New England.135 State universities, found in every
state in the Union, provide a measure of consistency in comparison to the state normal
schools, also found across the nation. Clifford, Solomon, and Ogren all made a point of
mentioning the regional differences among institutions of the same type and thus care
must be taken to avoid sweeping statements that cannot be reasonably generalized.136
The selection of a university and a normal school in the same state provides an adequate
balance of specificity and generalizability.
Investigating women's advancement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries must include the political and social developments in addition to the educational
ones. Women’s status depended not only on socioeconomic status, but also on race,
134
Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Universities, 18701937 (New York, NY: The Feminist Press, 1989), 17.
135
The women’s colleges of this period came to be known as the “Seven Sisters.” Historian Helen
Lefkowitz Horowtiz explored the histories of Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, Bryn
Mawr, and Barnard Colleges in her seminal work, Alma Mater (1984).
136
Of particular interest is the divide among northeastern, southern, and Midwestern/western state normal
schools. Southern institutions replicated the racial segregation increasingly common at the time through
establishment of normal schools for “whites” and “coloreds.” Northeastern institutions tended to exist as
junior partners to state colleges and universities for much longer than their Midwestern and western peers.
Within the State University of New York (SUNY), former normal schools such as Cortland, New Paltz, and
Oswego were absorbed into SUNY as “colleges at [location]” while most normal schools in the Midwest
and west have become universities. For an in-depth exploration of the divides, see Christine A. Ogren, The
American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005),
59-60; Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Universities, 18701937 (New York, NY: The Feminist Press, 1989), 5-7; and Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated
Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1985), 53-56.
53
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
religion, and region. This study now turns to the west and Colorado—an area served by
concerted scholarly inquiry only recently.137 In the footsteps of Armitage and Jameson’s
The Women’s West, the diversity of women’s experiences must be acknowledged.138 The
one-dimensional pictures of men in the late nineteenth century, especially in the west and
Colorado, is made more complete by adding another dimension—that of women. Their
experiences in the economy and in society are explored in depth by Jameson in the essay
“Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West.”
Mentioned only in passing, teaching as work receives short shrift relative to its status as
one of the few activities open to women in this time period.
From the history of the west emerged the question of the frontier’s role as a
“liberating environment” for women.139 Armitage and Jameson articulated the primary
drive of women’s history as understanding what roles were ascribed to women. To these
traditions are added the history of education and its questions of how teachers,
institutions, and students impacted the society around them and how they, in turn, were
impacted by society. The strands of these subfields come together in the form of
educational institutions, especially normal schools, of the late-nineteenth century in
Colorado.
The Territory of Colorado was established in 1861 and attained statehood in 1876;
its still-malleable society and government an interesting case for study. The women's
suffrage movement, so often depicted in terms of the Seneca Falls convention and the
137
As Armitage and Jameson noted in The Women’s West, the first conference dedicated to western
women’s history took place in 1983, over one hundred years after Colorado statehood.
138
Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, eds., The Women’s West (Norman, OK: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1987), 4.
139
Ibid., 4.
54
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
eastern states, took on a unique patina in a state that would be the second to permit
women to vote in all elections.140 Victorian gender roles that held sway over educated
and elite society in the more populous and industrialized parts of the United States did
not coalesce into hardened spheres of activity in Colorado; gender space was far more
fluid in the west. Sparse population, economic focus on mining and agriculture, and the
confluence of a myriad of cultures created a place of divergent ideas and practices. 141
Need for additional teachers and workers influenced the relatively quick acceptance of
women into public education in the state, both enrolling as students and teaching in
schools. Colorado established a state university, an agricultural college, a school of
mines, and a normal school within fourteen years of achieving statehood—four major
institutional types for a state with only 400,000 residents in 1890.142
Billie Jensen argued in her work on women’s suffrage in Colorado that there was
a sense of “political liberality on the frontier” at the turn of the twentieth century.143
Institutions of public education fit into that sense and expression—not intentionally, but
in outcome. The women’s suffrage movement in Colorado was active at the same time as
the advocates for professionalized teacher education. Many residents wanted Colorado to
enter the Union “with an unsullied record.”144 Wyoming had been the first territory to
140
In 1869, Wyoming became the first territory or state to grant women the right to vote; Colorado
followed suit in 1893. See S. J. Kleinberg, Women in the United States, 1830-1945 (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1999), 194.
141
Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, eds., The Women’s West (Norman, OK: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1987), 150. As Jameson notes, both the economy and domestic activity relied on
interdependent gender roles—men and women’s assignment into certain areas of function was fluid and
largely based on practical needs of a frontier state.
142
U.S. Census Bureau. “Resident Population and Apportionment of the U.S. House of Representatives,”
2012. http://www.census.gov/dmd/www/resapport/states/colorado.pdf.
143
Billie B. Jensen, The Woman Suffrage Movement in Colorado (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado,
1955), preface.
144
Colorado Constitutional Convention proceedings, 112.
55
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
adopt women’s suffrage, but during the drive for statehood, Colorado had a chance to be
the first and only state to allow women the vote. This political liberality was by no
means universal; conservative elements remained in power and often led the institutions
of education themselves. Throughout the development of the Colorado system of
education, a consistent bent toward free expression emerged to challenge entrenched
social mores.
Influential Coloradans certainly valued education beyond high school; area
leaders successfully pressed for the establishment of a university within a year of the
territory's formation and several private institutions were opened shortly thereafter.
Further and higher education in Colorado began with the founding of the Colorado
Seminary in 1864.145 Predating Colorado statehood by twelve years, the Colorado
Seminary remained the only operational institution of either further or higher education
until 1874.146 The Agricultural College was designed to take advantage of the First
Morrill Act's grant of land to the states, but did not hold classes for nine years after its
legal foundation.147
The state’s flagship institution, the University of Colorado, was formally
incorporated on 7 November 1861 and was designated specifically to “promote and
encourage the diffusion of knowledge in all the branches of learning including the
145
Renamed the University of Denver in 1880, DU is the oldest private higher education institution in the
Rocky Mountain region. It is also home to the Women's College, a once-independent institution founded in
1882 with the mandate to educate women through a two-year curriculum.
146
Colorado College, a private non-denominational institution, opened that year in Colorado Springs.
147
Although founded in 1870, the institution required reauthorization by the legislature after the transition
from territory to state in 1876. The first classes were held in 1879 in Fort Collins. See Robert W. Larson,
Shaping Educational Change: The First Century of the University of Northern Colorado at Greeley
(Boulder, CO: Colorado Associated University Press, 1989), 22.
56
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
scientific, literary, theological, legal and medical departments of learning.”148 Known
colloquially as “Colorado University,” the “State University,” and “CU,” the institution
existed only in legal form for sixteen years. Political attention on local affairs, efforts to
attain statehood, and fund the university were secondary to the emerging Civil War.
Reconstruction that followed also diverted attention from the west, delaying the passage
of statehood until 1876. The promulgation of a new constitution required the
reauthorization and financing of the university.149 In 1877, Colorado's flagship institution
of higher education celebrated laying the cornerstone of its first building.
Located near Boulder at the base of the Flatirons Range of the Rocky Mountains,
CU attracted much fanfare from the state. It was a symbol of the state's progress to open
the institution so quickly after authorization.150 On 5 September 1877, President Sewall
addressed the first class of students at the university's first convocation.151 The state of
Colorado lacked a sufficient population to have major urban centers at this time and
lacked the means to teach the influx of migrants seeking economic opportunities in the
farms, gold and silver mines, and industry of Denver. Lacking any advanced teacher
preparation institutions, colleges, and universities, the territory recruited heavily in
neighboring Kansas. As a remedy to the lack of teachers and the lack of adequately
148
John W. Horner, Colorado University: The Austere Years (The Story of Its First Quarter-Century),
edited by William A Weber (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado, 2004), 3.
149
State of Colorado, “Article IX” in The Constitution of the State of Colorado, Adopted in Convention
(Denver, CO: Tribune Book and Job Printing House, 1876).
150
John W. Horner, Colorado University: The Austere Years (The Story of Its First Quarter-Century),
edited by William A Weber (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado, 2004), 17.
151
William E. Davis, Glory Colorado! A History of the University of Colorado: 1858-1963 (Boulder, CO:
Pruett Press, 1965), 23.
57
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
prepared students, CU's preparatory and normal departments quickly filled the academic
void in the frontier state.152
Establishing, funding, and promoting a normal department broke a path for
women. As no students in the first class to attend the University of Colorado were
eligible for collegiate coursework, all attended classwork in the preparatory and normal
programs.153 The preparatory department was closely aligned with and often overlapped
the normal department due to their shared status as sub-collegiate. Students in the
preparatory department shared coursework with students in the normal department, but
completed such courses anticipating enrolling in the collegiate department upon
finishing; normal department graduates would not ordinarily continue on.154 As
Geraldine Clifford noted, normal departments were pathways in part because of the
anticipated composition of the student body.155 Men’s assumptions of women’s
predisposition toward the caretaking roles of teacher and nurse gave women not only an
opening to education, but also a widely accepted justification to do so.
The state took further interest in the development of its teachers and expanding
the educational opportunities for citizens through the establishment of its first institution
dedicated solely to teacher preparation: the Colorado State Normal School (CSNS).
Founded on 1 April 1889 and located in Greeley (about sixty miles northeast of Boulder),
152
John W. Horner, Colorado University: The Austere Years (The Story of Its First Quarter-Century),
edited by William A Weber (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado, 2004), 57.
153
Catalogues and Announcements of the University of Colorado (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado,
1883), 48.
154
Ibid., 2.
155
Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Universities, 18701937 (New York, NY: The Feminist Press, 1989), 15.
58
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
CSNS shared with CU a similar backing from its host city.156 Boosterism was quite
important to the success of the city in securing the normal school because the state
required the winning municipality to provide $25,000 to fund the construction of the
institution’s buildings.157 Upon the laying of the cornerstone in June 1890, President
Hale of CU spoke to the people of Greeley and CSNS. In a rather peculiar exhortation,
Hale urged the town and institution to never attempt “to fit in a common mold” those
people of “every nationality and kind.”158 Indicative of President Hale’s awareness of
how important migrants were to a growing society, his speech also conveyed the
importance of education in society. Institutions of the state could change society in
powerful ways and Hale argued that CSNS needed to respect that power. Classes at
Colorado State Normal School opened in October of 1890 to a cohort of fourteen
students, far smaller than the senior institution in Boulder.159
Despite the size difference, however, students at CSNS and CU faced similarly
nebulous requirements for entry. CU initially admitted students who were “thoroughly
qualified”—a measure determined by faculty and one that likely arose because of the
small population in the state.160 Students applying for admission to CSNS had to
demonstrate completion of grammar school or “similar proficiency” in 1890; this
requirement would increase to a high school diploma by 1897.161 As each institution
grew in number of students and academic reputation, admission requirements
156
Robert W. Larson, Shaping Educational Change: The First Century of the University of Northern
Colorado at Greeley (Boulder, CO: Colorado Associated University Press, 1989), 13.
157
Ibid., 24. A donation of thirty acres from the Cranford family supplemented the city’s cash bid,
ensuring the location of CSNS in Greeley.
158
Ibid., 31.
159
Ibid., 40.
160
Catalogues and Announcements of the University of Colorado (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado,
1878), 2.
161
“Section VII,” Educational Statistics of Colorado State Teachers College (Greeley, CO: 1921), 32.
59
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
consistently rose. While not lock step, CU and CSNS had parallel developments in
admission and degree-granting authority.
By the opening of the normal school in Greeley, the university in Boulder had
been preparing teachers through its normal department for thirteen years. CSNS took
responsibility for teacher education immediately, with CU ending its normal program one
year later.162 Therefore, the place of Colorado institutions in affecting women and their
advancement depended on time period. The University of Colorado educated women
from the start in the normal and preparatory departments and as full collegiate-level
students several years later. After transferring normal functions to CSNS, women
continued to enroll at CU. This initial commonality and later dichotomy provides a
unique lens through which to compare the experiences of students at each institution.
Understanding the impact of the institutions on those students requires exploration
of their admission requirements, curricula, student publications, and makeup of the
faculty. Catalogs of both institutions contain formal records of curriculum, representing
institutional philosophy, response to social pressure, and institutional leaders’ and faculty
member’s opinions of importance of women, teaching in general, and appropriate roles.
Early catalogs also included social, religious, and miscellaneous information useful to
ascertaining social status and inclusion.163 Student newspapers, literary magazines, and
yearbooks like The Silver and Gold, Cache La Poudre, and The Coloradan were written
accounts of contemporary news, local events, opinions of students about faculty and
162
Catalogues and Announcements of the University of Colorado (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado,
1892), 62.
163
The catalogs were often spelled “catalogues” and regularly referred to as “bulletins.”
60
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
administration, and jokes among class members.164 Extant source material on the
perspectives of women students and faculty of this time period is limited, although
available materials supports the formal records of both CU and CSNS.165
How institutions of education may have affected women’s place in society is not
entirely clear; the relationships between such institutions and how society viewed women
were indirect. Catalogs, student publications, and faculty records provide different
perspectives on the status of contemporary women. The concept of separate spheres is a
way to analyze the change in women’s status. On the other hand, realities of womanhood
in Colorado’s education system provide a critique of the idea of hardened spheres.
Integration of women into activities deemed “masculine,” even at the most basic level,
illustrates significant advancement. The presence or absence of women in various
aspects of further and higher education institutions is a way to gauge the level of such an
integration and what that might mean.
Both the university and normal school were staunchly democratic organizations in
that they were designed to educate for Colorado—the greater good was a central
motivating idea. CSNS, with its entry requirements being much more open than CU’s,
represented what Jurgen Herbst called “bringing education to the people” in tangible and
accessible ways.166 Admission depended only on a demonstration of the candidate’s high
164
The Silver and Gold [CU], University Portfolio [CU], and The Crucible [CSNS] were student-produced
newspapers with several features of magazines, such as poetry and humor columns. Cache La Poudre
[CSNS] was a yearbook.
165
According to the archives at the University of Northern Colorado (current name of CSNS), personal
materials were stored at Cranford Hall. This building caught fire in 1949 and was demolished in 1972.
166
Jurgen Herbst, And Sadly Teach: Teacher Education and Professionalization in American Culture
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 142.
61
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
moral character and the passage of a common school course.167 As CSNS was located in
a rural and agricultural area, this requirement would have allowed quite a number of
students from the surrounding area access to further education. The state was in dire
need of additional teachers and it does not appear that the requirements, which made no
mention of gender, were in any way designed to increase the number of women students.
However, CU’s catalog specifically addressed gender in admissions, declaring, “Both
sexes are admitted upon the same terms and with the same privileges.”168 Including such
a statement may indicate the pressure the institution felt to act otherwise and the
importance of such equal admission standards to an institution assumed to be open to
men and possibly closed to women. The University of Colorado’s first official
publication bragged about its normal department, “For supplying the Schools of our
rapidly developing State with competent teachers, [it] will afford unusually favorable
facilities.”169
In the 1880s, arguments in Colorado in favor of and against suffrage for women
were widely debated and appear in multiple issues of the local and campus newspapers.
Colorado State Normal School hosted a lecture from Judge Kingman of Cheyenne,
Wyoming in April 1882. Wyoming was the first state to grant women the right to vote in
all civil elections and the speaker echoed the more liberal sentiments of Greeley's
northern neighbors.170 In his lecture, Judge Kingman questioned, “Who shall be judge of
167
Albert F. Carter, Forty Years of Colorado State Teachers College, Formerly the State Normal School of
Colorado, 1890-1930 (Greeley, CO: Tribune-Republican Publishing Company, 1930), 243.
168
Catalogues and Announcements of the University of Colorado, 1878-1885 (Boulder, CO: University of
Colorado, 1878), 19.
169
Ibid., 2.
170
Having passed equal suffrage laws in 1869 as a territory and again in 1890 as a state, Wyoming became
known as the “Equality State.”
62
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
what is woman's sphere?”171 Early in the period, women writers to the Greeley Tribune
generally supported the notion of women being equal to, but separate, from men.172 In
doing so, the malleable nature of education in society became ever clearer—education
transforming from a gender-neutral process to one that supported women's equality. It
gained through this time period an importance it had lacked early in the period. Also,
education's contested nature showed how important the struggle for equal suffrage was to
both men and women. Extending voting to women would drastically alter society, and
people recognized that potentially disturbing outcome.
If the battle over equality in terms of socially accepted and supported behavior
and rights such as voting was the war, then the normal schools were the unintentional
battlegrounds. Begun as a practical way to address the shortage of teachers, extend the
reach of state influence, and buttress existing notions of women's gendered roles, normal
schools instead incubated a rebellion of sorts. The battlefield's advantages switched from
those who wished to conserve gendered roles and the dominance of men to those who
wished to prove the alternative was preferable and right. Rozene Meeker, a resident of
Greeley, highlighted the “importance of education and her twin sisters politics and
labor.”173 Meeker’s awareness of the situation that highlighted the continuing debate
over the place of women. In an existential question, the issue of voting became a flash
point for submerged feelings of uncertainty, ambiguity, and significant social change.
One month after Meeker’s letter to the Greeley Tribune, an anonymous editorial added
another facet to a struggle which was seen a debate or war between men and women:
171
“Colorado Equal Suffrage Association of 1881,” (Greeley, CO: Weld County Woman Suffrage
Association, 1882), located at Greeley Municipal Archives, no page.
172
The Greeley Tribune continues to be the largest daily newspaper in the city.
173
Rozene Meeker, “Editorial,” Greeley Tribune (Greeley, CO, 3 February 1876).
63
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
“Men should not feel they are sheltering or protecting women because women's work is
in the home and men's work is elsewhere. Her work is no less important and laborious
than yours.”174 This editorial represented a halfway step in the path taken toward social
equality—recognition of women's status as important contributors to society (yet another
reference to the Republican ideal of progress and utility). However, it did not argue for a
combination or crossover between the spheres of masculinity and femininity.
Lucy Stone argued that “men should stand side-by-side with women in education”
as if the battle should be turned from men against women to men with women against
ignorance.175 This argument can be seen in later references in the campaigns for women's
suffrage that were ultimately successful in 1893. Historian David Body argued this
transformation of the conflict into one useful for women was a brilliant stroke of political
genius.176 Changing the debate from appropriate roles to the arguably more important
task of advancing the nation as a whole and suddenly what women and men did
individually was less important than what they were able to accomplish as a whole.
Progressivism with the emergent populism of the turn of the century was an argument for
greater inclusion of women.
Colorado State Normal School, following the emerging tradition of western
educational institutions, permitted mixed-gender student societies from the beginning.177
At a time when separate institutions for men and women were common, several state
universities relegated women to secondary roles in the classroom, and the right of public
174
Greeley Tribune (Greeley, CO, 15 March 1876).
Lucy Stone, “Editorial,” Greeley Tribune (Greeley, CO, 3 October 1877).
176
David Body, A History: Greeley and the Union Colony of Colorado (Greeley, CO: Tribune Press, no
date), 281.
177
The Crucible was the first student publication at CSNS. The Crucible, October 1892, 12.
175
64
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
displays of authority were curtailed, this permissive environment was unusual.178 Period
evidence indicates that organizations such as the Platonian Society for debate and
Chrestomathea Society for literature elected both women and men to officer positions as
early at 1892.179 CU’s first association with women officers was the Women’s League,
established nineteen years after the institution opened.180
Women students at CSNS were idealistic, perhaps a quality owing to the small
community of students at the institution and perhaps owing to the shared vision of
becoming a teacher. Lulu Wright addressed the “power of the minority” in a literary
piece in April 1893. She wrote, “There comes a time in the history of every nation when
the religion, laws, and institutions which once seemed just and right are no longer
sufficient to meet the requirements of an advancing civilization.” 181 Later, Wright goes
on to connect the religious community from which many students came to the art of
teaching: “To us belongs the sacred duty of protecting that priceless heritage bequeathed
us by our fathers. To us belongs the privilege of fostering in every heart the immortal
principles of liberty and justice.” 182 Taken together, these elements of Wright’s work
illustrate the larger pattern of deep-seated passion for teaching found in many students at
CSNS.
The writings of students in societies and to editors shows an awareness of the
world around them far beyond what one might expect of a “lowly” teacher preparation
school. Preceding the referendum on women’s suffrage in 1893, writers frequently
178
Averil Evans McClelland, The Education of Women in the United States: A Guide to Theory, Teaching,
and Research (New York, NY: Garland Publishing, 1992), 131.
179
The Crucible, October 1892, 14.
180
Catalogue of the University of Colorado, 1903-1904 (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado, 1903), 49.
181
The Crucible, April 1893, 5.
182
Ibid., 7.
65
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
included letters to the editor about the propriety of allowing women to vote and the
possible impact of such a change.183 References to national and world events abound in
The Crucible and other publications.184 From coverage of Swedish educational trend
“sloyd” in 1893 to the Italian-Turkish War in 1911, CSNS students published materials
reflecting awareness of society and politics internationally.185 Amidst the evidence for an
engaged and highly connected student body at CSNS, there is no evidence that normal
schools as a whole were an intentional part of women's progress—they took on new ways
of influencing after addressing the primary consideration of the need for teachers.
While women earned additional formal political rights such as the right to vote
and the option to pursue a career in teaching, social freedoms did not advance as
quickly.186 Expectations to remain in the home or otherwise give the domestic sphere
priority continued. But the normal schools provided an important forum for discussion
and expression in the advancement of the women's rights movement. Students at CSNS
were well aware of the institution’s location in the former Union Colony. Founded by
Christian temperance movement and prohibiting alcohol, tobacco, and other social vices,
Greeley was a conservative place in the realm of behavior.187 Several accounts and jokes
found throughout The Crucible do not admonish young women students engaging in
183
The Crucible, September 1893 and October 1893.
Entire sections of The Crucible and Cache La Poudre, recurring with nearly every issue, included
national and world news. Of particular interest is the number of articles focused on women attending
college and their place in the working world.
185
“Sloyd” was a pedagogy of moving students from simple to complex concepts, easy to difficult tasks,
and concrete to abstract lessons using manual labor. See The Crucible, May 1893, 7 and October 1911, 37.
186
As Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson noted, scholarship of the 1980s began to question the
importance of suffrage because of the disconnection I illustrate here. See The Women’s West (Norman, OK:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 147.
187
The city of Greeley remained a “dry city” until 1969. See Robert W. Larson, Shaping Educational
Change: The First Century of the University of Northern Colorado at Greeley (Boulder, CO: Colorado
Associated University Press, 1989), 7.
184
66
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
taboo behavior—they make a mockery of enforcing such behavior. The “Normal Girl’s
Ditty” recounts the tale of two women students who reject a teacher’s admonition to
bring a man to school.188 A more refined reference to expectations of women’s behavior
appeared in January 1896:
1776: The Puritan maid / With manner staid / Spins the wheel
1896: The Bloomer girl / With a pretty curl / Also spins a wheel189
It is not clear from the context of this issue what the anonymous author might have been
thinking, but it does raise yet another instance of consciousness about the change (or lack
thereof) in gender roles.
Students at the University of Colorado also made fun of such strictures. Referring
to the Dean of Women, “She likes to take a mountain ride; And have a Prof close by her
side; For words with students are but few: ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’”190 Calling out the
then-inappropriate behavior of a faculty member was quite bold and shows, in a joking
manner, underlying tensions between faculty and students and possibly social
expectations of women. The preponderance of such accounts at both CU and CSNS
demonstrates a growing recognition of gendered differences in social expectation and a
subsequent reaction to that: the spheres were becoming more porous.
With the introduction of institutionalized teacher preparation, what once was a
field most appropriate for single men without career prospects shifted toward single
women. Women could choose between teaching and marriage, but dating and being seen
188
The Crucible, December 1892, 19.
The years appear in the original. The Crucible, January 1896, n.p.
190
Therese Stengel Westermeier, Women, Too at CU (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1976), 31.
189
67
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
with a man was cause for dismissal.191 At the conclusion of the period under study,
President Crabbe of CSNS wrote a letter to the community: “I make a plea for a definite
campaign for the Married Woman Teacher. A woman with a small child should be at
home, but aside from this situation, no real reason can be offered why a married woman
should be deprived of the privilege of teaching.”192 In this short quotation, Crabbe
illustrated an important crux of the increasing exposure of women to society: the question
of “what to do with them” remained unanswered for many men in power.
As the roles of gender became less rigid, exceptions of socially accepted norms
caused a reevaluation of those norms. That, coupled with the national campaign for
women's suffrage that would succeed a year after the publication of this letter,
demonstrates a clear connection between the personal and the political—a critical
undertone of the history of women and normal schools. Advancing women also included
elevating the status of teaching. Because teaching had become so identified with women
(even though it was a young profession by many standards) in the short 50 years since the
establishment of the first normal school and the beginning of American governmental
intervention, the cause of women paralleled the cause of normal schools.
As a way to understand the impact of the normal schools on society, tracking
alumni of the institutions is a relatively useful method. Both the University of Colorado
and the Colorado State Normal School kept extensive alumni registers made possible by
the small graduating classes in first fifty years of classes. The fifth president of Colorado
191
The following poem is illustrative: “She likes to take a mountain ride/And have a Prof close by her
side/For words with students are but few/‘Do as I say, not as I do.’” See Therese Stengel
Westermeier, Women, Too at CU (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1976), 31.
192
The Crucible, November 1919, 5.
68
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Agricultural College (“CAC”), Dr. Charles A. Lory, graduated from CSNS in 1898.193
Owing to the normal courses at both institutions, women at CU and CSNS overwhelming
became teachers. The largest single group of faculty members at CSNS as of 1921
earned their bachelor's degrees from the institution.194 Of all women graduates from the
University of Colorado between 1877 and 1921, 56.5% went on to teach at the primary,
secondary, or postsecondary levels; this number includes normal department graduates as
well as Bachelor of Arts graduates.195
Students have an impact upon institutions that is most often transitory because of
the nature of their time: they earn admission, complete a pre-determined curriculum, and
graduate. Faculty, on the other hand, represent in many ways the continuing essence of
an institution. Whether by teaching or researching, professors remain at institutions far
longer than students and their relationship with their employer is often a complicated one.
Women faced not only external pressures to conform to the expectations of domesticity;
they faced internal pressures. Earning a position as a faculty member was rare for an
academic woman in the eastern states and more common in the west.196 However, men
still dominated the ranks of faculty numerically and culturally.
While dominated by men in the early years, CU’s first professor was a woman.
193
CAC was the state's land-grant institution and would later become Colorado State University. See The
Crucible, October 1914, 103.
194
Thirteen of the women and five of the men faculty graduated from CSNS out of seventy-four faculty
members total. See “Section VII,” Educational Statistics of Colorado State Teachers College (Greeley,
CO: 1921), 21.
195
Directory of Officers and Graduates, 1877-1921 (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado, 1921), 368.
196
Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Universities, 18701937 (New York, NY: The Feminist Press, 1989), 10.
69
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Mary Rippon was appointed not in the normal department, but in the German and
Literature departments in 1876.197 This ran contrary to the common practice at
universities throughout the United States of allowing women entry to the fields more
identified with femininity: teaching, nursing, home economics and thus segregating
women in academia.198 Rippon served for over thirty years without having earned even a
bachelor’s degree. However, Rippon was one of few faculty members at the institution to
achieve recognition as a professor. It was far more common for academic women to
reach faculty status at a normal school and that general trend continued at Colorado State
Normal School.199 The gender balance in faculty came much closer to parity than CU,
but administration was still largely a male-dominated activity.
CSNS employed a variety of women in positions of influence and prestige, most
often as faculty. In an educational setting, one designed to prepare future teachers, and
one dominated by women students, this was not unusual. Elizabeth Hays Kendel’s story
is representative of the path many students took. Beginning as a child in Weld County
(the county containing Greeley), Kendel enrolled at Greeley High School and then
Colorado State Normal School.200 After earning her degree, she worked at Chicago
Normal School and Teachers College, Columbia University before returning as a faculty
member in 1896.201 Kendel was far from the only woman faculty member; many notable
197
John W. Horner, Colorado University: The Austere Years (The Story of Its First Quarter-Century),
edited by William A Weber (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado, 2004), 24.
198
Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Universities, 18701937 (New York, NY: The Feminist Press, 1989), 16.
199
Ibid., 5.
200
Faculty Biographical Data, Elizabeth Hays Kendel, University of Northern Colorado Archives, RG3
S17.
201
Ibid.
70
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
figures in CSNS history were women.202 Her legacy includes co-authoring the first
institutional history and having a residence hall named, in part, after her.203
The expression of what it meant to be a student at a normal school in the era
before women could vote is an understated and under-explored area of the women's
experience. For the women who attended a public institution of further or higher
education, it would not have been enough to advance their progress by admission alone.
Holding a minority position of power in the echelons of education ensured that many
women remained at the entry level (if admitted at all). Organizing as a group, associating
with like-minded individuals, and holding positions of authority were opportunities given
to women at CSNS in greater measure than women at CU. The exceptional woman at
CU was just that—an individual who broke through barriers at the institution attracting
the most attention from the capital and the politically powerful. Mary Rippon was the
first and only woman faculty member at CU for thirty years.204 CSNS had many women
faculty members and several had terminal degrees in the early 1880s—a percentage that
would steadily increase through the 1920s.
The confluence of educational reform in the normal schools, political activism
and the new government in Colorado, and the social makeup of a frontier state helped
202
See Dr. Grace Wilson, who earned her doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University and
became a faculty member in 1915 (see RG3 S17, Grace Wilson at the University of Northern Colorado
Archives). Other notable women from CSNS include Lucille Harrison (professor emeritus of elementary
education), Edith Gale Wiebking (associate dean of women), and Jean Cave (professor of physical
education). All were later honored with campus residence halls named for them. See RG3 S17, Elizabeth
Kendel at the University of Northern Colorado Archives.
203
Often credited under Albert Carter’s name only, see Forty Years of Colorado State Teachers College,
Formerly the State Normal School of Colorado, 1890-1930 (Greeley, CO: Tribune-Republican Publishing
Company, 1930). The residence hall is “Tobey-Kendel Hall” and was constructed in 1936 as a part of a
Public Works Administration project. See Robert W. Larson, Shaping Educational Change: The First
Century of the University of Northern Colorado at Greeley (Boulder, CO: Colorado Associated University
Press, 1989), 136.
204
John W. Horner, Colorado University: The Austere Years (The Story of Its First Quarter-Century),
edited by William A Weber (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado, 2004), 24.
71
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
create an environment more friendly to women’s advancement than previously thought.
Spheres, the intangible but very real representations of constraint on a woman’s agency
were clearly in the culture, even if not referred in such terminology. It is clear from the
records of both the Colorado State Normal School and the University of Colorado that
education integrated gender roles before politics and society and also clear that women at
CSNS enjoyed more freedom than their peers at CU to act in accordance with their
desires than the desires of society. In that way, postsecondary education was a vanguard
for larger changes occurring in society in the early twentieth century.
72
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Chapter V
Conclusion: Not Just A “Twentieth Century Schoolmarm”
In the past one hundred and fifty years of American educational history, no single
type of institution has had a more significant impact on women without an accompanying
body of research than state normal schools. Cast solely as teacher preparation institutions
that were neither high schools nor colleges or universities and ignoring their
contributions, the histories and impact of the state normal schools have gone largely
unknown outside of the narrow academic overlap between history and education. These
are institutions that opened the pathway to higher education for literally millions of
people: women. Distinct from state colleges and universities in a multitude of
characteristics and actions, normal schools were not designed to usher in an education
revolution. But the unique combination of expanded access, purported continuation of
existing social mores, and support for women students and faculty created an
environment that harbored and facilitated larger social change.
Women's experiences throughout the ages have been inherently varied. This
variation came to the fore in the age of industrialization and modernity of the 1870s1920s.205 Earlier in the nineteenth century, American culture and society witnessed
upheaval in the form of rapid territorial expansion, several cross-continental wars, racial
and ethnic conflict, and scientific and technological advancements. Three key issues
represented the changing nature of womanhood throughout the century: temperance,
abolition, and suffrage. The temperance movement found purchase in the Christian ideal
of women serving the republic and the peoples’ souls and abolition was a way to unite the
205
Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1967), 121.
73
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
idea of freedom (for men) with service to the nation. Both movements represented a
connection between religion and society on the restriction of women's individuality and
self-determination. Suffrage, however, was a much more volatile issue for society in that
it encouraged a clear break with traditions and what had been considered “right” for
many years. The rise of open debate and proponents paralleled the rise of normal schools
and women in professional roles (usually teaching).
Undergirding expression of womanhood was the implicit division of people along
gender lines. Activity and behavior were to be confined to the realm appropriate to one's
gender. Such restrictions on behavior followed and supported historical ideas of
masculinity and femininity, resolving into “separate spheres” of life. In the spheres,
women were to be the domestic experts and rejoice in living in the shadow of men as
their best and most useful purpose in life was service to others. The late nineteenth
century was a time of emerging cracks in the spheres and teaching took advantage of
those cracks. Increasingly educating children was tied to the future of the United States
and, as an activity that began in the home prior to widespread public schooling, was
acceptable as a women’s job. Thus, women and men both contributed to the changing
meaning of gender and action in society.
A vital conduit of change was the state normal school. Envisaged as the physical
manifestation of the republican ideal and the practical answer to the question of a
widespread teacher shortage, the institutions began expansion in earnest in the 1870s.
They were a curious type of institution—not easy to define or to place within the existing
education framework. Begun in the state famous for its educators and educational
innovation, Massachusetts, normal schools initially had limited admission standards.
74
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Centered on morality and passion, many state normal schools required only character
references and a commitment from the prospective student to serve the state as a teacher
for as many years as they were enrolled. Students needed to exude a special focus on
teaching as a personal calling to ensure they would align their personal goals and the
overarching objective of improving the nation.
From 1839 to 1920, approximately 200 state normal schools were established—
many in the last forty years of the period. Over this time period, normal schools moved
to require high school diplomas for entry and dropped the written commitment to teach
(but kept the social commitment). Courses leading to teaching certificates and the
Bachelor of Pedagogy were replaced by collegiate-level curricula leading to the Bachelor
of Arts and Bachelor of Science. These markers of maturation also signaled the end of
state normal schools, for the 1920s would herald the mass transformation into state
teachers colleges; Colorado State Normal School became Colorado State Teachers
College in 1911.206 Embracing collegiate tradition, teacher education would continue on
its path toward integration with state college and universities that exists today.
Therefore, the unique place of the normal school was a not a permanent one, it was a
temporary one that played a critical role in the path of women.
The story of further and higher education in the west provides a demonstration of
the unique qualities of state normal schools and the limitation of applying local
differences in broad strokes to all institutions. Colorado State Normal School and the
University of Colorado both admitted women from the first day of classes, both allowed
women to assemble and create student societies, both included women in coursework
206
Robert W. Larson, Shaping Educational Change: The First Century of the University of Northern
Colorado at Greeley (Boulder, CO: Colorado Associated University Press, 1989), 58.
75
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
similar to men, and both had at least one woman on staff throughout their histories.
Local conditions heavily influenced the educational landscape in Colorado; its status as
an underdeveloped frontier state necessitated a quick infusion of teachers, the agriculture
and mining-based economy required women to be involved with industry to a greater
extent than eastern states, and the subsequent visibility of women contributed to an
increased consciousness of being women.
Thus, it might be expected that the University of Colorado would have
opportunities and structures in place that would approximate its younger and smaller
sister institution, Colorado State Normal School, if only because the prevailing economic
and social environment was more friendly to women. The experiences of women at both
institutions, however, were demonstrably different. Participation in student societies
reflected additional opportunities and recognition of women through election to officer
positions. Women were taught far more often by other women and a number of the
instructors had received graduate degrees. Publications by students at CSNS reflect a
growing awareness of world affairs and challenge to the extant social climate and
perceived strictures on women's behavior. Academically, women and men at the
Colorado State Normal School completed nearly identical curricula, with women enrolled
in every department. Women at CSNS were far more integrated into the fabric of the
institution and its mission than their peers at CU, an integration that played a key role in
the larger advancement of women.
Education is significant in the process of change not just because of its position as
one of the few paths women could take toward personal advancement and social
integration; it is also significant for its openness to discussion, its role in reflecting and
76
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
creating culture, and its character as a gathering place. The realm of teaching and
learning involves exploration of the frontiers of knowledge—a push against the borders
of the known and the accepted. It involves the passage of culture and tradition from one
generation to the next. It entails bringing together people and the exchange of ideas—a
push against the conservation of the status quo. State normal schools provided the
structure and place for these things to happen.
State normal schools were critical to the development of opportunities for women
because of several interrelated actions. Admitting women to the institutions, even as
further education institutions, was a landmark change. This change is highlighted when
compared to the denial of admission to women by many state colleges and universities
into the early years of the twentieth century. Of the various types of publicly controlled
institution, normal schools were the first to admit women on a widespread basis (before
state liberal arts colleges, state universities, and agricultural and mechanical colleges).
As the number of students participating in primary and secondary education rose and the
number of states passing compulsory education laws increased, additional pathways for
students pursuing a further education were needed. At the time, state normal schools
were one of a limited range of options and accelerated increasing participation rates in
further education.
Opportunities for women did not cease upon admission—they continued
throughout the student and academic experience at the normal schools. The state normal
schools provided space and resources for women's societies and publications. Shown in
Colorado State Normal School's support of “The Crucible” (newspaper and magazine),
“The Mirror” (newspaper), and “Cache La Poudre” (yearbook), financial and logistical
77
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
support was implicit recognition of women’s abilities and independent thought. Through
these venues women students could interact with one other, exchange ideas amongst
themselves and peers at other institutions, and express their ideas in the tradition of
centuries of academia—not an opportunity to be taken for granted.
The state normal schools also encouraged women's advancement through the
employment of women faculty and, eventually, administrators of the institutions. Extent
of access to positions of influence demonstrates the importance of normal schools. The
chance for women to be hired as faculty, the symbolic heads of higher education, was
constrained at most institutions through the continued domination by men and unfriendly
policies toward women. The dearth of women faculty at state colleges and universities
undoubtedly impacted the few women students at those institutions—without guidance
from those who had gone before, who would support women students in positions of
numerical and influential minority? Women found a much more balanced environment at
state normal schools, where faculty members were often women. These positions of
influence and prestige contributed to the advancement of women through role modeling
and showing that women could effectively lead at institutions otherwise closed to them—
an argument that would take on added importance in the transition to teachers colleges.
Not only were state normal schools critical to women's progress because of their
actions, they were also instrumental because of their characteristics. As widely dispersed
institutions, state normal schools showed the states’ intentional placement and the
influence of geography.207 Placement in the rural areas of states increased the
207
Especially Illinois (Eastern, Western, Southern, and Northern Illinois Normal Schools) and Missouri
(Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, Northwestern and Central Missouri Normal Schools). Both states
located institutions in isolated areas, often connected to other towns via weekly rail service. See William
78
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
institutions' reach to populations previously unserved by any kind of further or higher
education. While women were no more likely to live in rural areas than men, the very
distribution of normal schools to places far from a state's flagship university increased the
odds women would be aware of further education opportunities and increased
community-institution connections.208 Establishing further education in rural areas meant
bringing education to life for millions more women.
State normal schools were also notable for their widespread implementation of
coeducation at the near-collegiate level. Not all normal schools were coeducational—
several of the first enrolled only women students—but universality is not required for a
major change to occur. Men and women studying together was an important milestone in
women's education because it ignored the “conventional” wisdom that adult men and
women should learn separately. Following and reinforcing the dogma of distinct areas of
life and action, single-sex education in many ways hindered the development of women
personally, politically, and socially because it furthered the argument that women were
inherently different from men. Difference, in this case, was almost always depicted as a
negative and as a deficiency. State normal schools' admission of men and women on
equal terms cracked the spheres that held so tightly onto gender roles.
Significantly, state normal schools throughout the period and throughout the
nation represented a major shift in thought about women and in embodying this shift also
embodied the accompanying contradictions. Teaching, as conceived in the common
Bagley and William Learned’s study of Missouri normal schools, The Professional Preparation of
Teachers for American Public Schools: A Study Based Upon an Examination of Tax-Supported Normal
Schools in Missouri (1920).
208
Robert W. Larson, Shaping Educational Change: The First Century of the University of Northern
Colorado at Greeley (Boulder, CO: Colorado Associated University Press, 1989), 24.
79
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
school movement of the 1820s and 1830s, was necessary for the improvement of society
and the refinement of the nation. The quality of teaching and of teachers needed to
increase to match the newly promoted ideal. No longer was it sufficient for men without
a career to teach as a last resort—dedicated teachers would be required. States and
schools recruited women to fill the role of teacher for the republic, utilizing their
feminine qualities and maternal instincts to instruct children. However, this movement
and the growth of normal schools did the opposite of its intention: it brought women out
of the household and into the public sphere. Women teachers were now part of the
domestic sphere from the perspective of care and work with children and a part of the
public sphere from the perspective of credentials and place of prominence. The reach of
women teachers had been extended from the hearth to the schoolhouse.
The importance of state normal schools is tied to the manner in which those
important actions of equal admission, opportunity for expression, and employment of
women were carried out. Normal schools were successful in part because of their
flexibility. As institutions of contradictory effect, they existed in a liminal space of
purpose and status. Neither high school nor college or university, state normal schools
created an educational niche. Women were welcome in this niche and while this was not
seen as a radical departure at the time—it was a “natural” continuation of domestic
affairs—promoting women as professionally educated teachers had an enormous impact
on women. After the establishment of normal schools, women had socially recognized
paths to advancement and realistic prospects for a career and income independent of men.
Although state normal schools were founded as a way to address teacher
shortages (caused by the adoption of common school model across the nation), a way to
80
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
tie teaching with the state and so progress the republic, and a way to buttress existing
gender roles (again fitting into the notions of an idea republic), the practical motivations
of state normal schools had a far greater impact than the idealistic motivations. Normal
schools did not change society’s views of women because they successfully challenged
the idea of women in higher education; rather, they changed society’s views by
challenging the utility of not including women in higher education.
The influence of state normal schools on women’s status in society was made
possible by the women students and faculty at the institutions themselves. It is clear from
the evidence at both the Colorado State Normal School and the University of Colorado
that women were conscious agents of their own advancement. Participation in current
events, literary discussions, and challenges to social and academic rules appear in
numerous publications throughout the period. The “separate spheres” of gender roles
arose out of cultural and social drive to improve the country. However, the intent of
enforcing distinct arenas of behavior was far different from its impact. Women used the
attempted separation to their advantage. By using the premise that women were suited to
the feminine, the domestic, and the educational, women wrested control of this path to
advancement from men; their claim for professionalization was a conscious effort.
It would be disingenuous to argue women advanced solely through their own
efforts. Just as women should not be defined by aspects of femininity in isolation and
comparison to men, women do not exist without men. The actions of men were also
important to women’s advancement, although in more structural than social ways.
Legislatures, comprised entirely of male delegates, voted to establish and fund state
normal schools. Presidents of institutions, again all male, hired women as faculty
81
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
members. Mayors of towns and cities, a position dominated by men, recognized the
benefits to economy and prestige of supporting a state normal school. Not all men
opposed women’s entrance into further education and not all men in positions of
leadership were vital to such progress. But men’s contributions worked with women’s
actions to advance the ideal of educational equality.
Education in many ways legitimized women’s steps toward integration into civic
life. By working in and promoting the benefits of education, women contributed to the
professionalization of a sector that provided a safe environment for them. Further
education was a foundation for richer social participation—through increased literacy
rates, increased personal income, and prestige. By themselves, state normal schools did
not change the status of women. They did, however, help establish a pathway for women
to advance in society, politics, and the professions. Passage of the Nineteenth
Amendment in 1920 guaranteeing the right to vote for all citizens, regardless of sex,
signaled a milestone in the United States: women finally had the political tools to
continue the journey toward equal participation in society.
From the post-Civil War recovery through the first decades of the twentieth
century, women became a force to be reckoned with. Normal schools provided a critical
tool for women to break a new path to advance themselves even as the institutions
purported to only prepare future teachers. Growing identity and awareness of the
differences in social expectations and gender roles contributed to women taking
leadership positions first in normal schools and women's colleges and increasingly in
state universities. Positions such as the Dean of Women and, later, the Dean of Students,
arose out of the state normal schools—positions that exist at nearly every institution of
82
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
higher education in the United States today.209 Too often in the margins of history
textbooks, the last century has seen the rise of women in many professions, in many
positions of influence, and in many facets of life—areas of activity that would have likely
been hindered without the normal school forerunners. The establishment of state normal
schools played a vital part in the advancement of women and society by providing
women the tools to break a path through educational, political, and social obstacles.
209
Most often, the Dean of Students position arose from a merger of the Dean of Women and Dean of Men
positions. See Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational
Universities, 1870-1937 (New York, NY: The Feminist Press, 1989), 15.
83
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Bibliography
Albree, John. Charles Brooks and His Work for Normal Schools. Medford, MA: J.C.
Miller Press, 1907.
Alexander, Carter, C. H. Johnston, William C. Ruediger, Harlan Updegraff, F. E.
Thompson, F. L. Clapp, and A. C. Boyce. “Work in Education in Colleges and
Universities.” Presentation at the Meeting of the Society of College Teachers of
Education, Cincinnati, OH, February 23, 1915.
Alexander, William. The History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present
Time; Giving Some Account of Almost Every Interesting Particular Concerning
That Sex, among All Nations, Ancient and Modern. 2 vols. Vol. 2, London, UK:
W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1799.
American Normal School Association. "American Normal Schools: Their Theory, Their
Workings, and Their Results." Paper presented at the First Annual Convention of
the American Normal School Association, Trenton, NJ, 1859.
Armitage, Susan and Elizabeth Jameson, eds. The Women’s West. Norman, OK:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.
Barnard, Henry. National Education in Europe; Being an Account of the Organization,
Administration, Instruction, and Statistics of Public Schools of Different Grades
in the Principal States. Hartford, CT: Frederick B. Perkins, 1854.
. Normal Schools, and Other Institutions, Agencies, and Means Designed for the
Professional Education of Teachers. Hartford, CT: Case, Tiffany, and Co., 1851.
Bernard, Richard, and Maris A. Vinovskis. "The Female School Teacher in Antebellum
Massachusetts." Journal of Social History 10 (1977): 322-45.
84
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Bohan, Chara H, and J Wesley Null. "Gender and the Evolution of Normal School
Education: A Historical Analysis of Teacher Education Institutions." Educational
Foundations (2007).
Branagan, Thomas. The Excellency of the Female Character Vindicated. Philadelphia,
PA: J. Rakestraw, 1808.
Brickman, William W. Educational Historiography: Tradition, Theory, and Technique.
Cherry Hills, NJ: Emeritus, Inc., 1982.
Briscoe, Felecia M., and Linda C. Pacifici. "Teacher Education." In Women in Higher
Education: An Encyclopedia, edited by Ana M. Martínez and Kristen A. Renn,
189-191. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2002.
Brubacher, John S., and Willis Rudy. Higher Education in Transition. Fourth ed. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999.
Butcher, Patricia Smith. Education for Equality: Women's Rights Periodicals and
Women's Higher Education. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989.
Butts, R. Freeman and Lawrence A. Cremin. A History of Education in American
Culture. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1953.
Carter, Albert F. Forty Years of Colorado State Teachers College, Formerly the State
Normal School of Colorado, 1890-1930. Greeley, CO: Tribune-Republican
Publishing Company, 1930.
Clifford, Geraldine Jonçich. Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational
Universities, 1870-1937. New York: Feminist Press, 1989.
85
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Cohen, Arthur M., and Carrie B. Kisker. The Shaping of American Higher Education:
Emergence and Growth of the Contemporary System. San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass, 2010.
Coley, Robert E., and Cheryl T. Desmond. "Parallel Lives: The Relationship between the
Sexes at Millersville State Normal School, 1855-1927." Paper presented at the
Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montréal,
Québec, 1999.
Cremin, Lawrence A. The American Common School: An Historic Conception. New
York, NY: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1951.
. The Genius of American Education. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1965.
. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 18761957. New York, NY: Alfred Knopf, 1961.
Davis, William E. Glory Colorado! A History of the University of Colorado: 1858-1963.
Boulder, CO: Pruett Press, 1965.
Degler, Carl N. “What Ought To Be and What Was: Women's Sexuality in the
Nineteenth Century.” The American Historical Review 79, no. 5 (December
1974): 1467-1490.
Diener, David. “The Intellectual Climate of the Late Nineteenth Century and the Fate of
the American Normal Schools.” American Educational History Journal 35, no. 1
(2008): 61-79.
86
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Edwards, June. Women in American Education, 1820-1955: The Female Force and
Educational Reform. Contributions to the Study of Education. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2002.
Edwards, Rebecca. “Women’s and Gender History.” In American History Now, edited by
Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, 336-357. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press,
2011.
Eisenmann, Linda. “Reconsidering a Classic: Assessing the History of Women's Higher
Education a Dozen Years after Barbara Solomon.” Harvard Educational Review
67, no. 4 (1997): 689-717.
Faragher, John Mack, and Florence Howe, eds. Women and Higher Education in
American History. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988.
Frankfort, Roberta. Collegiate Women: Domesticity and Career in Turn-of-the-Century
America. New York University Series in Education and Socialization in American
History. New York, NY: New York University Press, 1977.
Fraser, James W. Preparing America's Teachers: A History. New York, NY: Teachers
College Press, 2007.
Gordon, Lynn D. Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1990.
Graham, Patricia A. "Expansion and Exclusion: A History of Women in American
Higher Education." Society 3, no. 4 (1978): 759-73.
. “So Much To Do: Guides for Historical Research on Women in Higher
Education.” Teachers College Record 76, no. 3 (February 1975): 421-429.
87
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Grossberg, Michael. Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century
America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.
Herbst, Jurgen. "Nineteenth-Century Normal Schools in the United States: A Fresh
Look." History of Education 9, no. 3 (1980): 219-27.
. And Sadly Teach: Teacher Education and Professionalization in American
Culture. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
Hill, Lawrence B. “The Legislative Control of State Normal Schools.” Doctoral
dissertation, Columbia University, 1921.
Hoffman, Nancy. Woman’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2003.
Horner, John W. Colorado University: The Austere Years (The Story of Its First QuarterCentury). Edited by William A Weber. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado,
2004.
Horowitz, Helen L. Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from
Their Nineteenth Century Beginnings to the 1930s. New York, NY: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1984.
Jencks, Christopher, and David Riesman. The Academic Revolution. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1977.
Jensen, Billie B. The Woman Suffrage Movement in Colorado. Boulder, CO: University
of Colorado, 1955.
Judd, Charles H. and Samuel C. Parker. “Problems Involved in Standardizing State
Normal Schools.” United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education,
Bulletin No. 12. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916.
88
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 1980.
. "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's
History." Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 9-39.
Kinkead, Joyce, ed. A Schoolmarm All My Life: Personal Narratives from Frontier Utah.
Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1996.
Kleinberg, S. J. Women in the United States, 1830-1945. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1999.
Landes, William M., and Lewis C. Solmon. "Compulsory Schooling Legislation: An
Economic Analysis of Law and Social Change in the Nineteenth Century."
Journal of Economic History 32, no. 1 (1972): 54-91.
Larson, Robert. Shaping Educational Change: The First Century of the University of
Northern Colorado at Greeley. Boulder, CO: Colorado Associated University
Press, 1989.
Learned, William S., William C. Bagley, Charles A. McMurry, George D. Strayer,
Walter F. Dearborn, Isaac L. Kandel, and Homer W. Josselyn. The Professional
Preparation of Teachers for American Public Schools: A Study Based Upon an
Examination of Tax-Supported Normal Schools in the State of Missouri. New
York, NY: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1920.
Lehrer, Margaret J., ed. Up the Hemline: Being a True Account of One Hundred Years of
Classroom Experiences in Colorado. Colorado Springs, CO: Williams and Field,
1975.
89
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Lemlech, Johanna, and Merle B. Marks. "The American Teacher: 1776-1976."
Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1976.
Le Rossignol, James E. “History of Higher Education in Colorado.” Contributions to
American Educational History, no. 34. Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1903.
Massachusetts Board of Education. “Massachusetts State Normal Schools: Containing a
Circular of Information, a Circular of Advice to ‘One Who Wishes to Become a
Teacher,’ and the Normal School Admission Examination Papers from 1896 to
1901 Inclusive.” Boston, MA: Wright and Potter Printing, 1901.
McClelland, Averil Evans. The Education of Women in the United States: A Guide to
Theory, Teaching, and Research. New York, NY: Garland Publishing, 1992.
Meyer, J.W., David Tyack, Joane Nagel, and Audri Gordon. "Public Education as
Nation-Building in America: Enrollments and Bureaucratization in the American
States, 1870-1930." American Journal of Sociology 85, no. 3 (1979): 591-613.
National Educational Association Department of Normal Schools. “Report of Committee
on Normal Schools.” Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1899.
Newcomer, Mabel. A Century of Higher Education for American Women. New York,
NY: Harper, 1959.
Ogren, Christine A. The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good.
New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
90
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Palmieri, Patricia A. ““From Republican Motherhood to Race Suicide: Arguments on the
Higher Education of Women in the United States, 1820-1920.” In The History of
Higher Education, edited by Lester F. Goodchild and Harold S. Wechsler, 173182. Boston, MA: Pearson, 1997.
Perkins, Linda M. "The African American Female Elite: The Early History of African
American Women in the Seven Sister Colleges, 1880-1960." In Racial and Ethnic
Diversity in Higher Education, edited by Shaun R. Harper and Sylvia Hurtado,
19-44. Boston, MA: Pearson Learning Solutions, 2011.
Phelps, William F. Normal Schools: Their Relations to the Primary and Higher
Institutions of Learning And to the Welfare and Progress of Society, Together
with Their Future in the United States. Trenton, NJ: True American Printing,
1857.
Quint, Alonzo H. “The Normal Schools of Massachusetts.” In Congregational Quarterly,
Volume III. Boston, MA: American Congregational Union, 1861.
Rakow, Lana F., and Cheris Kramarae, eds. The Revolution in Words: Righting Women,
1868-1871. 9 vols. Vol. 4, Women's Source Library. New York, NY: Routledge,
2001.
Rosenberg, Rosalind. Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982.
Rutledge, Samuel A. The Development of Guiding Principles for the Administration of
Teachers Colleges and Normal Schools and the Development of Administrative
Practices Consistent with These Principles. New York, NY: Teachers College,
1930.
91
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Schwager, Sally. "Educating Women in America." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society 12 (Winter 1987), 333-372.
Scott, Joan W. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” The American
Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053-1075.
Schrems, Suzanne H. “Teaching School on the Western Frontier: An Acceptable
Occupation for Nineteenth Century Women.” Montana: The Magazine of Western
History 37 (Summer 1987): 54-63.
Sehat, David. The Myth of American Religious Freedom. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 2011.
Solomon, Barbara. In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and
Higher Education in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.
Spearman, Melinda. “The Peripatetic Normal School”: Teachers’ Institutes in Five
Southwestern Cities (1880-1920)." University of Texas at Austin, 2006.
Staples, Samuel E. “Normal Schools and Their Origin: A Paper Read at a Regular
Meeting of the Worcester Society of Antiquity, June 5th, 1877.” Worcester, MA:
Tyler and Seagrave, 1877.
State of Colorado. The Constitution of the State of Colorado, Adopted in Convention.
Denver, CO: Tribune Book and Job Printing House, 1876.
Sturtevant, Sarah M, Ruth Strang, and Margaret McKim. Trends in Student Personnel
Work. New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 1940.
Taft, Jessie. The Woman’s Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1916.
92
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Thelin, John R. A History of American Higher Education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2004.
Tyack, David, and Elisabeth Hansot. Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in
American Public Schools. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990.
U.S. Census Bureau. “Resident Population and Apportionment of the U.S. House of
Representatives,” 2012.
http://www.census.gov/dmd/www/resapport/states/colorado.pdf.
Warren, Donald R. American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work. New York,
NY: Macmillan Publishing, 1989.
Weiler, K. “Reflections on Writing a History of Women Teachers.” Harvard Educational
Review 67 (1997): 635-57.
Westermeier, Therese S. Women Too at CU. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado, 1976.
Wiebe, Robert H. The Search for Order, 1877-1920. New York, NY: Hill and Wang,
1967.
Wilson, Lester M. “Training Departments in State Normal Schools.” Doctoral
dissertation, Columbia University, 1920.
Woody, Thomas. A History of Women's Education in the United States. Science and
Education: A Series of Volumes for the Promotion of Scientific Research and
Educational Progress. Edited by J. McKeen Cattell, 2 vols. Vol. 1, New York,
NY: The Science Press, 1929.
Woyshner, Christine A. and Holly S. Gelfond, eds. Minding Women: Reshaping the
Educational Realm. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review, 1998.
93
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Zschoche, Sue. “Dr. Clarke Revisited: Science, True Womanhood, and Female Collegiate
Education.” History of Education Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 545-569.
94
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Appendix A
Academic Statement
Research often stays within disciplinary boundaries as each discipline has
developed unique traditions and ways of working. When questions arise that can fit into
more than one discipline, researchers can choose to remain within their field and use that
set of lenses, tools, and approaches. I chose to research the topic of women and state
normal schools—inherently a cross-disciplinary topic—from the lens of an educator with
the tools of a historian. What follow are a lens statement explaining my reasons for
researching and my perspective on knowledge; a research statement explaining my
methodology, delimitations, and limitations; and a statement on implications for practice.
These statements reflect not only my degree program (Master of Education), but also my
professional experience in student affairs.
95
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Appendix B
Lens Statement
I come to the researcher's table with a map in my head and sunlight in my heart.
The course of my journey is perhaps related to the map in my head, but it is most
certainly illuminated by the sunlight in my heart. Working through the misty mountains
of doubt, I now find myself seated in hopes of encountering truth. Sublime work is not
reachable by scholars, educators, or historians and I understand the need inherent in this
enterprise to acknowledge such boundaries.
My research approach to this project has been heavily influenced by my
axiological and epistemological orientation. I acknowledge and support the idea that all
research reflects the values given to the subject by the researcher. Therefore, I must take
care to address worldview and explore the paths down which my values lead me.210
Teaching, that endeavor often called an art and yet treated as a science, led me to the
researcher's table. Without inspirational teachers in my life to guide my burgeoning love
of learning, I would not have opened my eyes to the journey of exploring knowledge,
making hypotheses, and expanding the frontiers of the known. For me, teachers matter in
a way that is so profound very few recognize it. Their impact is made in the moments of
inspiration and care; their impact is felt in the moments of reflection and wonder. My
deeply held love of teaching was awakened in me at my undergraduate institution. I
longed for a sense of place—something that had weight to it. The University of Northern
Colorado (UNC) was that place. Always excited to learn about who and what had gone
before, my coursework in history uncovered an institution founded with a special
210
John W. Creswell, Qualitative Inquiry & Research Design (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007), 18.
96
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
purpose: teaching. I was familiar with “Research I” institutions at a young age—they
roughly corresponded with Division I football teams and even I, the least athletically
inclined student at my high school, knew of those universities. Much had been written
about those universities: Michigan, California, Indiana, Washington, Missouri. But what
about those mid-sized institutions not famous for football? They were covered in the ivy
of higher education's ivory tower and kept far away from the well-trodden path to the
researcher's table.
So I ventured forth (or, rather, down) to the archives of my university. Not quite
as dreary as I hoped, I found a bounty of information about an institution whose qualities
held me captive. At UNC, I knew my professors and they knew me. At UNC, I was
being taught by people focused on students. All at once, those things which had been at
the edges of my awareness came together. I wanted to know more about these places
where teaching was admired and learning was supported. The normal schools, a name
that continues to beg explanation, were not just in Colorado or the West—they were in
almost every state in America and in many nations of Europe. My involvement with
Housing and Residence Life as a Resident Assistant opened my eyes to questions of
equity and history and I found the normal schools were at the forefront of women's entry
to higher education. A subject so important to me in my lifetime could be something I
studied in the lifetimes before me.
My research comes from a place of deep-seated values in teaching. If I did not
think teaching or the history of women were valuable, I would not have conducted this
research or written this work. Reading primary and secondary documents and reflecting
upon what actually occurred and what was actually meant continues to be a challenge for
97
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
me. I want to believe the best about the normal schools because in many ways, I see
myself reflected in them. Diligence is required to ensure I prevent my values from
impacting my writing.
Seeing myself in the normal schools establishes a close relationship between the
subject and the researcher. Epistemological assumptions in qualitative research lead the
researcher to "lessen [the] distance between himself or herself and that being researched."
211
Collaborating with participants is thankfully impossible due to chronological
limitations. I do, however, find myself referring often to memories of my time at an
institution founded as a normal school. Historical research preserves some measure of
distance because interviews with important figures occur only through asynchronous
questions of their journals and writings.
211
John W. Creswell, Qualitative Inquiry & Research Design (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007), 17.
98
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Appendix C
Research Statement
In researching the confluence of women, education, and the late nineteenth
century period, I needed to locate reliable data sources that could give me a glimpse into
the lives of women at normal schools. For me to understand documents, analyze the
situation, and synthesize new knowledge, a variety of sources would be required. I chose
to peruse two archives at an institution that was founded as a normal school and a state
university against which to compare the academic and social environment. The
comparative institution is the University of Colorado.
The nearest institution founded as a normal school is two hours north of
Lubbock.212 Given my familiarity with the archives and the staff at the University of
Northern Colorado (UNC) and knowing its history as the Colorado State Normal School
(CSNS), I decided to begin my research there and focus initially on the women students
at UNC. After discovering three important figures in institutional history had very few
surviving documents, I learned that the main administrative building had caught fire in
1949.213 Although the library and a good deal of its holdings had been moved to a new
building years before, it seemed the documents I was searching for had been
unfortunately located in the now-destroyed building. This shifted my approach from
using direct individual biography to using indirect group biography to define and support
my broader historical research. Conveying the experiences of Grace Wilson as an
exemplar of women’s advancement was no longer possible with the materials and
212
West Texas A&M University; the institution was founded as West Texas Normal College in 1909.
Cranford Hall was the first building on the UNC campus. Its cornerstone was laid on 13 June 1890 and
it would be torn down in 1972 after the institution declared it unfit for renovation.
213
99
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
timeline available to me. Therefore, I used extant UNC and CU catalogs from 18701920, selected every few years to make analysis manageable. I also used alumni
registers, institutional newspapers, and, most importantly, student publications as a way
to tell the story of women in Colorado education in the late nineteenth century.
100
Texas Tech University, Shawn W. Brackett, May 2012
Appendix D
Implications for Practice

Addressing a significant gap in the literature.

Reframing our understanding of the importance of state normal schools in higher
education history and women’s history.

Contributing to discussions on role of student societies and publications in the life of
a student.

Providing support for the teaching university amidst the trend toward
commercialization and research-focus.

Arguing for continued investment in and value placed on higher education as a tool
for social mobility.
101