Newcomb College 1886 2006

In 1886, Josephine Louise Newcomb donated funds to Tulane University for the founding of the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College. Her contribution created the nation's first degree-granting coordinate college for women. For more than a century, Newcomb College educated thousands of young women in the liberal arts and sciences, preparing them for positions in the civic and economic world of New Orleans and the South. Newcomb College, 1886--2006 explores the rich history and tradition of the college through a diverse and multidisciplinary collection of essays. Early chapters focus on the life of Josephine Louise Newcomb and her desire to memorialize her daughter Sophie, as well as the development of student culture in the Progressive Era. Several essays explore the staples of a Newcomb education, from its acclaimed pottery and junior year abroad programs to lesser-known but trailblazing work in physical education and chemistry. Concluding biographical and autobiographical chapters recount the lives of distinguished alumnae and the personal memories of Newcomb's influence on New Orleans. The essays offer insight into the work of artists Caroline Wogan Durieux and Ida Kohlmeyer, education reformer Sarah Towles Reed, U.S. representative Lindy Boggs, and other Newcomb leaders in various fields. Throughout the book, contributors reflect on the curriculum, pedagogy, and alliances that created paths for students, not only for advanced studies, but also for their roles as friends, wives, mothers, reformers, and professionals. Touching on three centuries, the book concludes in 2006 when Tulane University closed Newcomb College and Paul Tulane College, the arts and sciences college for men, and united the two as Newcomb-Tulane College. This absorbing collection offers both a scholarly history and an affectionate tribute to a Newcomb education.

Highlights the significant historical contributions of some of Louisiana's most noteworthy and also overlooked women from the eighteenth century to the present. This volume underscores the cultural, social, and political distinctiveness of the state and showcases how these women affected its history.

Originally published in 1928, this fascinating firsthand account of the early years of Tulane University's women's college reveals not only who founded it, but why.

Explores the College Equal Suffrage League’s work to advance the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment The woman suffrage movement is often portrayed as having been led and organized by middle-aged women and mothers in stuffy, formal settings. This dominant account grossly neglects a significant demographic within the movement—college women. Between 1870 and 1910, the proportion of college women in the United States rose from 21 to 40 percent. By 1880, there were 155 private colleges in the Northeast and the South for female students and numerous coeducational institutions in the West. The widespread extension of academic training for women helped spur a well-organized campaign for female voting rights on college campuses, where suffragists found a new audience and stage to earn respect and support. Votes for College Women examines archives from the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL), established in 1900 as an affiliate of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, to illustrate the outsize and dynamic role that young women played in the woman suffrage movement. The book vividly illustrates how the CESL’s campaigns served a dual purpose: not only did they invigorate the Nineteenth Amendment campaign at a crucial moment, but they also brought about a profound transformation in the culture of women’s organizing and higher education. Furthermore, Kelly L. Marino argues that the CESL’s campaigns set trends in youth activism and helped lay the groundwork for later and more well-known college protests against gender inequality. Fascinating and timely, Votes for College Women shows how these brave women solidified the campus and the classroom as arenas for civic and social activism.

This study, part of growing interest in the study of nineteenth-century medievalism and Anglo-Saxonism, closely examines the intersections of race, class, and gender in the teaching of Anglo-Saxon in the American women’s colleges before World War I, interrogating the ways that the positioning of Anglo-Saxon as the historical core of the collegiate English curriculum also silently perpetuated mythologies about Manifest Destiny, male superiority, and the primacy of northern European ancestry in United States culture at large. Analysis of college curricula and biographies of female professors demonstrates the ways that women used Anglo-Saxon as a means to professional opportunity and political expression, especially in the suffrage movement, even as that legitimacy and respectability was freighted with largely unarticulated assumptions of racist and sexist privilege. The study concludes by connecting this historical analysis with current charged discussions about the intersections of race, class, and gender on college campuses and throughout US culture.

Joan Marie Johnson examines an understudied dimension of women's history in the United States: how a group of affluent white women from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries advanced the status of all women through acts of philanthropy. This cadre of activists included Phoebe Hearst, the mother of William Randolph Hearst; Grace Dodge, granddaughter of Wall Street "Merchant Prince" William Earle Dodge; and Ava Belmont, who married into the Vanderbilt family fortune. Motivated by their own experiences with sexism, and focusing on women's need for economic independence, these benefactors sought to expand women's access to higher education, promote suffrage, and champion reproductive rights, as well as to provide assistance to working-class women. In a time when women still wielded limited political power, philanthropy was perhaps the most potent tool they had. But even as these wealthy women exercised considerable influence, their activism had significant limits. As Johnson argues, restrictions tied to their giving engendered resentment and jeopardized efforts to establish coalitions across racial and class lines. As the struggle for full economic and political power and self-determination for women continues today, this history reveals how generous women helped shape the movement. And Johnson shows us that tensions over wealth and power that persist in the modern movement have deep historical roots.

A guide to the famous Newcomb pottery, needlework, and handicrafts. Biographies of the craftsmen are provided.

Contributions by Carrie Bernhard, Scott Bernhard, Marilyn R. Brown, Richard Campanella, John P. Clark, Joel Dinerstein, Pableaux Johnson, John P. Klingman, Angel Adams Parham, Bruce Boyd Raeburn, Ruth Salvaggio, Christopher Schaberg, Teresa A. Toulouse, and Beth Willinger Much has been written about New Orleans's distinctive architecture and urban fabric, as well as the city's art, literature, and music. There is, however, little discussion connecting these features. Sweet Spots--a title drawn from jazz musicians' name for the space "in-between" performers and dancers where music best resonates--provides multiple connections between the city's spaces, its complex culture, and its future. Drawing on the late Tulane architect Malcolm Heard's ideas about "interstitial" spaces, this collection examines how a variety of literal and represented "in-between" spaces in New Orleans have addressed race, class, gender, community, and environment. As scholars of architecture, art, African American studies, English, history, jazz, philosophy, and sociology, the authors incorporate materials from architectural history and practice, literary texts, paintings, drawings, music, dance, and even statistical analyses. Interstitial space refers not only to functional elements inside and outside of many New Orleans houses--high ceilings, hidden staircases, galleries, and courtyards--but also to compelling spatial relations between the city's houses, streets, and neighborhoods. Rich with visual materials, Sweet Spots reveals the ways that diverse New Orleans spaces take on meanings and accrete stories that promote certain consequences both for those who live in them and for those who read such stories. The volume evokes, preserves, criticizes, and amends understanding of a powerful and often-missed feature of New Orleans's elusive reality.