Читать книгу The Deans' Bible - Angie Klink - Страница 16

IT WAS DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION, as thousands of Americans were unemployed and a decade-long drought helped to create the Dust Bowl, when Dorothy Stratton, age thirty-four, received a phone call. She had just finished her PhD at Teachers College of Columbia University in New York City and was happily employed as dean and vice principal of girls at Sturges Senior High School in San Bernardino, California. The president of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, was on the line.

Edward C. Elliott invited Dorothy to interview for the position of Purdue’s first full-time dean of women. Soon after that fateful call, Dorothy journeyed by train across the parched countryside to Purdue where she was introduced to, as she said, “everybody from the president to the janitors.”

It is not clear how Elliott knew of Dorothy. One speculation is that Elliott obtained Dorothy’s name through mutual Columbia University connections. Elliott had received an honorary degree from Columbia in 1929. Dorothy received her PhD from that institution in 1932. Perhaps President Elliott asked his friends at Columbia to recommend someone for the position of dean of women to replace Carolyn Shoemaker.

Decades later, Dorothy said good-naturedly, “I came from California to be looked over.” She met with R. B. Stewart, vice president for finance, and Mary L. Matthews, the dean of home economics and the only female dean at Purdue. Dorothy accepted the offered position and became Purdue’s first full-time dean of women.

Dorothy was outdoorsy, easygoing, and attractive, with short, dark, wavy hair, thin lips that smiled pleasantly, and confident almond-shaped blue eyes. She wore the latest dresses or two-piece, knit business frocks with cowl necks and shin-length skirts or a herringbone wool blazer over a white blouse. To look at Dorothy was to see a woman comfortable in her own skin.

After Dorothy was offered the dean of women position, she purchased her first car, a $200 secondhand Dodge. Her parents, Reverend Richard Lee and Anna Troxler Stratton, lived with her. The three drove from California to Indiana in the used car, which sporadically lost its brakes during the cross-country trek. The trio discovered late in the trip that “a suction cup had been put in the wrong way.”

Dorothy was born on March 24, 1899, in Brookfield, Missouri. Her broad-minded father was a Baptist minister who had been born in Rothville, where Dorothy’s grandfather had a large plantation during the Civil War. Her mother was a homemaker from Louisville, Kentucky, who met her husband when he was attending a Baptist seminary there. When Dorothy was growing up with her brother, Richard, the family moved every three or four years to small communities throughout Missouri and Kansas as her father ministered from church to church.

Dorothy entered grade school a year earlier than the average child back then. She said, “I was always very fond of school. In fact, my father took me to visit when I was only five, and I was so crazy about it, they never could get me away. So the teacher finally gave up and let me enroll.” Dorothy was a bookworm, spending time in the library rather than with groups of friends who may have seen her as the minister’s daughter who would put a damper on their social lives.

Dorothy was a lifelong learner, and her love of reading and knowledge would continue as she lived into the twenty-first century. Her academic prowess was combined with a fervent independence likely fostered as she moved from town to town, school to school, always the new girl in the classroom.

Dorothy had a strong devotion to her parents. She said, “From my father I learned to have an abiding interest in people and to want to be of service to my fellow man. He taught me the importance of intangibles. From my mother I learned to make the most of simple things. She was able to create a happy home atmosphere and to make you physically comfortable on very little. Ours was a typical minister’s family. We actually received ‘missionary barrels’ in Kansas, although none of my friends will believe it. They were good barrels, too.”

The term “missionary barrel” is synonymous with used clothing and hand-me-downs. The contents were cast-offs from donors or even foodstuffs. The filled barrels or packages were gifts to help missionaries survive in their work that afforded them little money.

Dorothy was five years older than her brother. She said, “I had to look after him, iron his blouses, take care of him during church services, and final humiliation, occasionally take him out with me on dates!”

As an undergraduate, Dorothy had attended Ottawa University, a Baptist college in Ottawa, Kansas. Dorothy said, “Of course, nobody in (other parts) of the country ever heard of Ottawa University. They think it’s in Canada. I’ve just given up on trying to correct that impression.” Dorothy wanted to learn to dance, but dancing was not something that the daughter of a Baptist minister was allowed to do. She managed to pick up a few dance steps where she wasn’t supposed to—at her Baptist college. She would go on to chaperone so many dances during her career that she claimed dancing “lost its glamour.”

Known in her neighborhood as a tomboy, Dorothy loved to play ball and tennis, with no interest in cooking or sewing. At Ottawa, she played on the school basketball team and won the women’s tennis championship in the Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference. She served on the staff of the school newspaper, the yearbook, and as a member of the student council.

Though most of her friends did not go to college, Dorothy always knew she would pursue higher education. “It was never a question,” she said. “I was very academically oriented.” After she graduated in 1920, Dorothy was offered a position on the Ottawa newspaper. As a young avid reader, she had dreamed of writing the proverbial great American novel. She said, “I don’t know what gave me the idea, but it was there. I don’t recall that I expected to go through any apprentice period. I just expected that said masterpiece would spring full-blown from the head of Zeus.”

Dorothy turned down the newspaper job in favor of the field of education and moved to Renton, Washington, to teach physical education. She said, “My reception there was a trifle sour. When I arrived, the principal took one look and told the superintendent, ‘We surely have picked a lemon this time.’”

During the Great Depression, Dorothy worked to pay off her parents’ debts and to put her brother through medical school. “Baptists ministers didn’t make much in those days,” she explained.

With her zest for learning and her abiding interest in others, Dorothy wanted to discover why people behaved the way they did. In 1923, she enrolled at the University of Chicago for a year of graduate study in psychology. She left with her master’s degree and the realization that not even psychology can explain all the “whys” of the human race. She recalled, “I found that employers wanted firstly, a man with a PhD degree; secondly, a man with a master’s degree; thirdly, a woman with a doctoral degree, and very fourthly, a woman with a master’s degree. Having no money to continue my studies, I went to San Bernardino, California, as dean of girls and vice principal of the high school. I was working under my former principal of the ‘lemon’ quotation.”

In California, Dorothy learned to love the outdoor life in a way that had never been possible before. She soaked in the desert, mountains, and seashore. She loved to look from her office window at Mount San Bernardino, gaining strength and serenity from the peaceful view.

After several years at San Bernardino, Dorothy traveled to Teachers College of Columbia University to study student personnel administration. During her year at the university, she stayed in the International House with students from fifty-seven countries. Early in 1933, she received her PhD and returned to San Bernardino. That’s when President Elliott called.

She came to Purdue not only as dean of women, but also as an associate professor of psychology. Her salary was $3,300 a year, about $100 more than she was paid in California.

Even before Dorothy became dean of women, she had accomplished much in a time when few females attended college, worked outside the home, or made a respectable living. Yet for Dorothy, still in her mid-thirties, the best was yet to come. Her life would be filled with accomplishments that inspired other women.

When Dorothy and her parents arrived at Purdue, they were lodged at the Fowler Hotel across the Wabash River in Lafayette. She said, “After having lived in beautiful California, I moved to a seared state [referring to drought-devastated Indiana]. I thought to myself, ‘I can’t stand it.’ The minute I got across to West Lafayette, the people were so nice—so really nice—I changed my mind.”

Dorothy was appointed dean in August 1933, and she was given what had been the office of the part-time dean of women located on the top floor of Fowler Hall.

Dorothy said, “The dean preceding me was Carolyn Shoemaker, who must have been a very fine person. I never met her. She had great respect from people on campus.”

Dorothy climbed to the top of Fowler Hall carrying a box of her workplace goods and discovered that the Office of the Dean of Women was more like the Closet of the Dean of Women. The room was about six-by-eight feet. Tucked away from the accesses of student life, it was a tiny room about to be inhabited by a world of a woman. Dorothy set about moving her files and papers into her new desk. Someone had been given the task of emptying the desk after Carolyn’s sudden death. As Dorothy began to arrange pens and paperclips, she opened a drawer and found in its shadowy recesses a book.

Dorothy pulled the book from the drawer, feeling the nubby texture of the cover; the scent of leather preceded the exhumation. It was a Bible. She thumbed through the soft, India paper. The title page indicated that the Bible was a 1901 standard edition, “Translated out of the original tongues.” Dorothy thought of her predecessor, whom she had never met but had heard mentioned with great reverence.

Was the Bible inadvertently left inside of Carolyn’s desk? Or did the person with the unpleasant task of clearing elect to leave the testaments for the next dean of women?

As the daughter of a Baptist minister, Dorothy was no stranger to the Holy Bible. An analytical thinker, she had her questions regarding its stance on such topics as women and their place. She wrote in 1971 letter, “Aside from the Adam and Eve story, Paul has done more to set back the progress of women than almost any other person. Many people are greatly influenced by Bible references. Probably, we all are, even though unconsciously.”

Dorothy placed the Bible back into the drawer and continued her task of cultivating the Office of the Dean of Women.

DOROTHY AND HER PARENTS obtained a house at 825 Salisbury in West Lafayette. Her father worked as a representative for the Equitable Life Assurance Society in the Lafayette Life Building on the courthouse square in Lafayette.

Dorothy’s first goal as dean of women was to campaign for a more accessible office. She said of her out-of-sight, out-of-mind alcove, “Students would really have to want to see me to find me.” She accomplished the relocation of her office by the “Elliott method,” which President Elliott himself described: “First, you ask the president for something, and he says, ‘no.’ Then you come back and ask again—and he says ‘no’ again. The third time you come back to ask, you pound on his desk, and he says, ‘Oh, go ahead and do it!’”

Dorothy explained that her experience was a bit different than Elliott’s take: “Well, it turned out just the other way; it was the president who yelled, and I was the one who went and did it. I was never much of a pounder, but I learned how to operate with Elliott.”

Apparently, Dorothy was, indeed, a quick study of the Elliott method, for her office was moved to the ground floor of the Engineering Administration Building, next to the office of the much-revered Dean of the Schools of Engineering Andrey A. Potter and across the hall from Dean of Men Martin L. Fisher, who had succeeded Stanley Coulter. Dorothy said she made every effort to furnish the Office of the Dean of Women to create a friendly, informal, and cheerful atmosphere.

At a 1988 Mortar Board Leadership Conference, recorded on a videotape now stored in the Purdue Archives, Dorothy, then age eighty-nine, spoke to a group of students about her first days as dean of women:

When I came to Purdue in 1933, of course we didn’t have all the things that you have now. We were very simple, and we didn’t have very much of anything for women. No university housing, no placement service for women, no bachelor of arts degree in the University. So it was a lot of fun to start from scratch and see what could be done.

The Dean of Women’s Office consisted of me, period. No secretary, no staff, just me. I wanted to have the image of the dean of women not to be one of discipline. I thought no intelligent person would spend her life in a job that had discipline at its core, and I didn’t want students to say when they left, “I was never called into the dean’s office once while I was in the University” and be proud of that.

There were 500 female students at Purdue when Dorothy assumed her deanship. That was about one woman to seven men. She said of the campus, “It was like the old definition of an island—a small body of women completely surrounded by men.”

Years later, Dorothy reminisced about what she and her women students lacked, yet also what they possessed in abundance: “We didn’t have anything fancy like career counseling. We didn’t know what it meant. We didn’t have television, drip-dries, or power steering. What we did have was trust in each other, and that was very important.”

In Dorothy’s 1933 annual report, she shared her most frequently asked question, “Just what does the dean of women do?” Dorothy said her office had two main functions: the first was to ensure that the environment in which female students lived, worked, and played was conducive to development and growth. The second was to be of assistance to the individual student. In short, her office was a clearinghouse for matters pertaining to the welfare of female students. Her annual dean of women report was the first to refer to female students as “women” rather than “girls.”

In her leisure time, Dorothy enjoyed shooting baskets in the women’s gym. It was there that she befriended a newly arrived graduate student named Helen Blanche Schleman. Helen worked part-time in the Department of Physical Education, refereeing women’s basketball games at twenty-five cents an hour while she earned her master’s degree in psychology and education. The two women had a lot in common. They had both arrived at Purdue the same year and were well educated, brilliant, athletic—both golfers—and forethinkers. Maybe that’s why some people often mistook one for the other. Helen said, “I appeared on campus and everybody sort of bowed and scraped. They were nice and friendly to me. I soon found out that they were confusing me with Dorothy Stratton!”

The National Youth Administration (NYA) had just been established on Purdue’s campus. During the Great Depression, many young people could not afford the cost of even a high school education. Taking stock of these grim statistics, Eleanor Roosevelt remarked that she often had “moments of real terror when I think we might be losing this generation.” She persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to create the NYA, a New Deal program established by an executive order in June 1935.

The NYA created part-time jobs for high school and college students, and it provided relief and job training to unemployed young people. The goal was to prevent students from dropping out of high school and college due to financial hardship by providing grants in return for part-time work in such places as libraries and cafeterias.

For the female students at Purdue, the NYA initiative was assigned to the Office of the Dean of Women. Dorothy needed a part-time staff member to organize and administer the program. She hired her new acquaintance, Helen Schleman, for the position that paid seventy-five cents an hour. At the time, Dorothy had no idea she was mentoring the next dean of women and fashioning a friendship that would span six decades.