Women’s Role at Southwestern Through the Eyes of Laura Kuykendall
To Laura Kuykendall, a woman’s purpose at SU was to both embody certain qualities and expand certain possibilities.
In the early 20th Century, women students of Southwestern were molded to value and practice certain “feminine” qualities, to be a daughter of the institution, to be exposed a wider range of individuals, and to explore both academic subjects and future life-pathways that would be left shut otherwise. Although women’s role at Southwestern was, yes, to fill and perfect their “innate” qualities, in doing so, they also gained a broader sense of what was possible to achieve as a woman.
Since its beginning, Southwestern has prided itself on being more than solely a technical institution; Southwestern was, and still is, invested in providing a multifaceted educational experience for its students focused on establishing habits of lifelong learning. But, with the separation of women and men starting in 1878 and formally ending in 1903 (with the declaration of a single co-educational campus instead of a men’s college and a separate but not quite equal women’s “annex”), a woman’s educational experience served a vastly different purpose than both male students of the time and the female students of today.
The richest source pertaining to this in the early history of Southwestern was written by Laura Kuykendall, who served as Dean of Women from 1918-1935. In her Master’s Thesis, titled The Dean of Women and Her Problems as Found on a Small University Campus (1926), Laura Kuykendall specifies the intricacies of holding a Dean of Women’s position: what it entails, and most pertinent here, how one should interact with her female students.
A large part of Kuykendall’s insights revolve around the concept of “shaping” or “molding” women to have the core qualities that Southwestern upholds, because, as Kuykendall stated herself, “church institutions claim as their chief reason for existence the development of character."
Specifically, Kuykendall urges that when teaching women, "the golden rule is the 1st principle to be taught. Gentleness of a speech - almost along the lost arts - is one of women's chief charms. Respect for authority is another virtue that is needed to be instilled in every citizen in the land. If girls were taught deference to parents, teachers, the Government, many social problems would be settled." Furthermore, a main aspect of educating women is to shape them to have “sincere, loyal natures,” and be “disciplined in mind,” “superb in physique,” “gracious and courteous in manner,” “unselfish, honest, self-controlled, and tolerant.”
While Kuykendall does acknowledge that "a young girl cannot be molded in a set form that may be made for students at large,” she still notes that “each case must be taken as an individual.” So, even though each female student was seen as an individual, they were still being formed to, at the end of their education, become “a splendid product” all one and the same.
It is pertinent to recognize the purpose of Kuykendall’s thesis, and what audience it was written for. Kuykendall put forth the thesis in order to achieve her Master’s degree in Sociology and Economics, so this writing was likely read by individuals – male individuals – in the upper administration or faculty. And though Kuykendall did challenge some normative ideologies of women’s role (we’ll get there below), she largely had to adhere to the mission and vision of Southwestern at the time, and may have played into it within this document.
In tandem with female students being disciplined in a homogenous way, their role at the Institution also entailed being mothered. Frequently throughout Kuykendall’s thesis and other archival materials, Southwestern itself is referred to using the “she” pronoun. Even more, the institution is referenced as “Mother Dear,” and the students of the Ladies Annex are called “Southwestern’s daughters,” or “her daughters,” repeatedly. This occurs much more frequently than does “Southwestern’s sons,” leading me to believe that there was a higher level of discipline and watchfulness over the female students than the male students. This, then, was one facet of women’s role at Southwestern: to be surveilled.
Even with this surveillance, the female students of Southwestern were also encouraged to form relationships with each other, exposing themselves to other walks of life (of course, out of the already limited pool of students, in terms of racial or class diversity). One means of building this connection was through Kuykendall’s annual Dinner of the Golden Bowl. This event focused on friendships, specifically between female students, instructors, and alumnae. There was also encouragement for female students to connect year-round. The Annex facilitated a "big or little sister movement," where older and younger students were grouped together. This sorority-like practice worked to both foster community within the Annex as well as allow older students to discipline and enforce rules among the younger students.
Kuykendall advocated for more opportunities for institution-sponsored multi-gender socialization, in addition to female intermixing. In her thesis, she stated that "there must be places where young men and women will feel free to talk and not be driven to leave the campus to find ‘privacy’.” In this way, women were to utilize their educational experience to gain real-world interactions and connections.
Most radically, Kuykendall was an avid advocate for the expansion of what fields were “appropriate” for women to engage with. In his history of Southwestern, Jones found that “in addition to the traditional subjects, such as stenography, typewriting, and the various domestic science arts,” Kuykendall foresaw women taking up, in her words, “bench work, cabinet work, factory woodwork, wood turning and pattern making, forging, automobile mechanics, machine shop practice and printing, mechanical, architectural and engineering drawing.” To Kuykendall, this exposure was a crucial aspect of a women’s education.
Additionally, Kuykendall, herself a professional woman who had never married or had children, advocated that a professional life path is a valid option: "Only a few years ago a woman found two avenues open to her. One was the way of marriage. the other the path of the spinster aunt… But today a young girl has the choice of a profession as a third way out."
Being at a private Methodist Institution, one key aspect of becoming educated was to “discover for yourself a personal fellowship with God,” said President Bergin in The Megaphone in 1941. For some leaders in the institution, this meant performing a strict and rigid embodied religious practice. Kuykendall thought otherwise. She thought that there was “another lesson that is one of the greatest taught, - that is, the religion of service as taught through the Sociology, Education, Philosophy, Bible, and Theology Departments… In these departments one is taught tolerance, kindness, constructive charity, fair business principles, and Christianity as applied to every day living.” So, a woman’s role at Southwestern was to find religion and the traits surrounding it within their everyday courses, not solely at church or chapel alone. This somewhat radical deinstitutionalizing of religious practices from Kuykendall signifies a start to the lessening of rigidity within religious practices found at Southwestern. Still, for Kuykendall, religion maintained its pertinent place in women’s education at Southwestern, just now, in slightly varying forms.
Therefore, a women’s purpose for being a student of Southwestern, at this time, meant to be molded to certain (feminine) qualities and attributes, to be mothered, to meet a wider range of individuals, and to explore both academic subjects and future life-pathways that would be left shut otherwise.
Even with Kuykendall’s advocacy for the expansion of women’s societal roles, she still states that a Dean of Women “has neither trained [students] EXCLUSIVELY for marriage nor an independent career, but she has trained them for whatever places in life they may find they are called upon to fill.” Kuykendall ultimately wanted “these young women to take their places in the business world, in church, in state, in any and every place that women are called upon to fill.'' Although there still was (and in some ways still is) a long way to go for women’s discipline and the double standard to be equalized, Kuykendall imagined a more-progressive world in which the girls she shaped became leaders and independents. Their role at Southwestern was, yes, to fill and perfect their “innate” qualities, but in doing so, they also gained a broader sense of what is possible to achieve as a woman.
