"the Woman Peril in American Education": June Rose Colby and the Sapphonian Society at the Illinois State Normal University, 1905-1909 (PART III: Before) (Report‪)‬

In an August 2009 London Times editorial, Libby Purves complains that "earnest' women teachers" are letting their male students down ("Neeeow !"). Purves suggests that "as fewer and fewer primary teachers are men [...], a feminised culture rises" where boys "suffer punitive assaults on their whole sex as they are forced to study feminist dystopianism like The Handmaid's Tale alongside smugly pious girls" ("Neeeow !"). Such rhetoric is not new to our conversations about public education. Indeed, a hundred years before Purves' polemic, educational leaders addressed similar fears about the feminization of education and effeminization of the nation's boys. Respected educational journals--among them The School Review, Educational Review, The American School Board Journal, the Wisconsin Journal of Education, and The Journal of Educational Psychology--featured articles whose urgent and vituperative rhetoric bemoaned a national school system that, as one writer describes, subjected "young males to the psychics of the woman, until we have a result in a feminized manhood, emotional, illogical, non-combative against public evils" (Chadwick 115). Such misogynistic rhetoric was not uncommon for the time; indeed, some historians suggest that the reforms advanced by male Progressive educators "can be understood as an attempt to masculinize the schools" (Tyack and Hansot 38). In this article, I analyze how the members of a women's literary society at the Illinois State Normal University (ISNU) reacted to attempts to masculinize education in the early twentieth century. As the historically coeducational character of this Midwestern teachers' university was threatened by a new university president committed to "correcting" the feminization of the teaching profession, the women's literary organization on campus reached out to women at colleges around the country, and began, for the first time in their group's 20-year history, to discuss the place of women in education. Given the tenor of the national conversation about women in education, this outreach is not surprising. Women at normal college campuses around the country would have been acutely aware of the issues being discussed in popular publications such as The Arena, The New York Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. A 1906 article in The Arena, for example, decries high schools that employ women of "advanced ideas" and "undeveloped maternal instincts," which, the author claims, force boys to choose between becoming "indifferent" towards education and dropping out or remaining in school where they "risk...becoming feminized" (Howard 595). A 1911 New York Times article observes in its lead that "boys [are] too effeminate [...] when they haven't male instructors" ("Appeal" 12). And a 1912 Atlantic Monthly article, titled "The Feminization of Culture" employs the language of war to illustrate how women have "invade[d] fields of activity where formerly only men were found" (770). The article's author, Earl Barnes, observes that women have "carried [liberal culture] by storm and have compelled capitulation," and while Barnes suggests women may have had a humanizing influence on both liberal culture and education, the images of battle used throughout this article make it clear that he believed educated women and men were engaged in a war for the very soul of American culture (772).