Читать книгу The Deans' Bible - Angie Klink - Страница 18

WHEN HELEN SCHLEMAN ARRIVED at Purdue University in 1933, a residence hall for women was under construction. Set in a peaceful, wooded parcel three blocks west of campus, the long-awaited building became a joyful reality because of a nation’s sorrow—the Great Depression. The Women’s Residence Hall was built with funds from the Federal Public Works Administration (PWA) and the sale of farmland donated to Purdue by Ophelia Fowler Duhme. Today, the dormitory is named Duhme and is part of an enclave of like residences, a quadrangle, known collectively as Windsor Halls.

The PWA was part of the New Deal, a series of economic programs designed to heal the effects of the Great Depression. The PWA was created through the National Industrial Recovery Act and fostered the building of large-scale public works, such as dams, bridges, hospitals, and schools. It created infrastructure that generated national and local pride in the 1930s and remains vital decades later. The PWA had a rival agency with a confusingly similar name, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which focused on smaller projects and hired unemployed skilled workers.

Frances Perkins first proposed the idea of a federally funded public works program to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Perkins was an economist and social worker who became the first female cabinet member in United States history when Roosevelt appointed her Secretary of Labor, a position she held throughout Roosevelt’s presidency. Perkins was avant-garde for her day, refusing to take her husband’s name when she married in 1913, and subsequently defending her right to her own name in court. As part of her social services career, Perkins surveyed appalling living and working conditions in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen and witnessed the horrific 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, where trapped young women leapt off window ledges into the streets below. She was appointed to the Committee on Safety of the City of New York and visited workplaces to expose hazardous practices and champion legislative reforms.

Frances’ PWA idea, in turn, advanced the realization of a women’s residence hall at Purdue University. When Purdue University’s Board of Trustees voted in October 1933, authorizing President Edward C. Elliott and board president David Ross to complete plans for the Women’s Residence Hall and to apply for financial assistance under the PWA, the vote was unanimously in favor. After thirteen years of striving for a women’s residence hall, Virginia C. Meredith, the sole woman on Purdue’s nine-member board, was very pleased. And after waiting all those years, work on the dormitory had to commence immediately to fulfill a PWA requirement. The Women’s Residence Hall would be built quickly in six months.

The new hall would need a capable and vibrant manager. Dean of Women Dorothy Stratton selected Helen Schleman as director. Dorothy had come to know Helen’s strengths and potential as Helen worked in the Office of the Dean of Women, heading up the National Youth Administration initiative. Dorothy said, “Helen lacked self-confidence. She didn’t know what she was capable of. If I made any contribution to Helen’s life, it was that I gave her some confidence. I helped her know that she could do what she set her mind to doing.”

Those who knew Helen throughout her life would not have guessed she ever lacked confidence. Even though she was shy, she became a candid powerhouse with a worldview of equality for all persons, male and female, all colors, races, nationalities, and disabilities. She hated discrimination of any kind, and she would battle against it all of her life.

The Women’s Residence Hall was slated to open in fall of 1934. During the preceding spring, an executive memorandum was sent from Elliott’s office to the officers and heads of departments of the University to explain the ins and outs of the hiring and overseeing of the director of the hall. The memorandum stated: “It will be appreciated if those interested in the welfare of the women students at Purdue University will cooperate to the fullest extent with the Dean of Women and the Controller in dealing with their respective problems arising from the operation of the new hall.”

The flowchart of Purdue’s hierarchy was compact in those days. A hand-drawn, updated version was included with the memorandum. The dean of women, dean of men, and controller were on equal ground and reported directly to the president, who reported to the Board of Trustees. Dorothy’s immediate and only boss was Elliott. Years later, Dorothy said of the order of command during her time: “The organization was very simple—I reported directly to the president. There were some advantages in those days. None of this going through this one and that one and the other one before you can get to the president. I reported directly to him, and I was an officer of the University.”

Helen, on the other hand, had two bosses: Dorothy and Robert Bruce (R. B.) Stewart, the controller and chief financial officer. Dorothy selected Helen as director and jointly, she and Stewart recommended her. Helen had just completed her master’s degree when she accepted the position. She would be responsible to Stewart for the business management of the hall and to Dorothy for its social and educational programs. Decades later, Helen spoke to a group of women at a Mortar Board leadership conference and said, “I had two bosses. I had the dean of women and I had the controller of the University, but don’t be afraid of that. You have to work a little harder, but you learn twice as much. If you have a chance to take two jobs or have two bosses on the job, take it.”

Stewart was Purdue’s chief financial officer from 1925 to 1961. He made a striking impact with his excellent management and unquestionable integrity in the handling of Purdue’s resources during a time of growth and evolution for the University. Stewart Center, formerly Memorial Center, was named in his honor after his retirement.

Karl H. Kettelhut, whose Lafayette construction company built many campus buildings, worked with architect Walter P. Scholer to design the Women’s Residence Hall, which cost approximately $250,000. Scholer visited several colleges and women’s schools before drawing up his plans, which used the latest ideas in dormitories to house 125 women.

An Exponent article described the hall:

Of English Tudor design in brick with Indiana limestone trim, the new residence hall will be of fireproof construction throughout and modern in every way.… All out-of-town freshman girls will be expected to live in the new girls’ residence hall, which will provide among other features, laundry, shampoo room, lounge and reception rooms.… The laundry is to be equipped with electric washers and driers.… The shampoo room will contain electric hair driers, and the sewing room is to be equipped with machines for those who wish to do their own sewing.

As the construction was underway for the Women’s Residence Hall, Stewart’s wife, Lillian, was in charge of the interior decorating and selection of furnishings. Lillian had studied interior design at the University of Wisconsin. Years later, R. B. said, “She really helped us. We couldn’t afford to hire a decorator.” Evidently, Lillian donated her services.

The couple met for five days in Chicago with D. Robertson Smith, a designer from the American Furniture Company of Batesville, Indiana. Smith was an Englishman who had designed the nursery furniture for the Prince of Wales (who became Edward VIII and later the Duke of Windsor, perhaps best known as the King of England, who abdicated the throne for the woman he loved in 1936). The Stewarts did not want the heavy blond furniture used in many public buildings, and instead they selected furnishings with a combination of Tudor and Jacobean design. It appears that Smith’s English heritage and the architect’s design influenced the Stewarts’ decorating choices.

Helen’s beginning salary was $1,750 per year. Dorothy arranged for her to have a suite of rooms on the first floor of the residence hall, and Helen paid $350 a year for room and board. Student residents paid about the same. Years later, Helen said, “I’ll always remember that R. B. said the reason that he and Dorothy could agree on me [for the position] was that Dorothy thought that I could do the job, and R. B. thought I didn’t know anything about it, so he could tell me how he wanted it done.”

Being a numbers man, Stewart was happy when Helen kept costs at bay. Helen said, “As long as I could report to R. B. that the daily food costs were less than $1.00 for three meals a day, I got along pretty well. The only difference that R.B. and I ever had on residence hall management was about how much had to be set up in reserve … after paying the expenses. My theory was that anything left over should go into social and educational programs within the hall. His theory was that you ought to save more of it. That was our only point of difference.”

The day before the semester was to begin in the fall of 1934, the Women’s Residence Hall was ready to open barring one detail: the furniture had not yet arrived. Helen, Lillian, and R. B. waited nervously for delivery trucks to appear outside the arched front door. The scent of newly hewn oak and fresh plaster permeated the air. Adding to their angst was the rain that pelted against the diamond-paned windows. Sidewalks had not yet been constructed, and mud surrounded the hall’s exterior. Finally, at 5 p.m., truckloads of furniture began to arrive.

Helen, the Stewarts, and a few others worked through the night to arrange the furnishings in nearly 100 rooms. For years, R. B. repeated a story that on that occasion at 4 a.m., he went into one of the rooms and stretched out on a bed. He claimed to be the “first man to sleep in a women’s residence hall at Purdue.” R. B. was joking, but just the next year another man would actually sleep several nights in the hall—George Palmer Putnam, the husband of Amelia Earhart. Amelia stayed in the Women’s Residence Hall when she spent time on campus as an advisor.

The hall was filled beyond capacity, so two small annexes were created to house the overflow, and twenty students had to be turned away. Female students were enthusiastically streaming to Purdue and staying in the hall that looked like a storybook English manor.

In 1937, through PWA funds and donations, a duplicated women’s dormitory was created near the first and referred to as “North Hall,” making the original building “South Hall.” A third women’s building was built two years later. By 1951, there were five identical women’s halls nestled together on the same plot of wooded land and connected with cave-like tunnels. Collectively, the stately five were named Windsor Halls. Individually, each hall was named after a woman or family who contributed money for construction: Duhme, Shealy, Warren, Wood, and Vawter.

Windsor was designed so that nearly every room in each hall received sunlight at some point during the day. Another distinctive architectural detail of four out of five of the Tudors is that they line up like soldiers. When the lobby doors of Duhme, Shealy, Warren, and Vawter are opened concurrently, one could, hypothetically, shoot an arrow in a straight line through them all.

WHEN DOROTHY BECAME DEAN OF WOMEN, she experienced the culture of sororities and fraternities for the first time. The effects of sorority rush on the female students were difficult for her to watch. “Rush” is a term that comes from a time when sorority and fraternities literally “rushed” to invite “desirable” incoming freshman to live in their houses before another organization got to them first. Dorothy said of sorority rush:

There are always those who are chosen and those who are not chosen, and I had to deal with those who were not chosen, and this, to put it simply, broke my heart. I just couldn’t take this. Here a student came to the University looking forward to it. It is terribly important what your peers think of you when you are seventeen. Either your skirt looks too short or your hair isn’t cut right or somebody didn’t like you, and you didn’t get in. I just didn’t think it was fair that a student would come to the University and be treated that way.

At the objection of the National Panhellenic Conference, Dorothy made the decision to establish deferred rush at Purdue. Rush would not take place until the second semester, allowing incoming freshman time to become acclimated to academic life, make friends, and get to know themselves to determine if being a member of a sorority really was something they wanted.

Members of the sororities saw Dorothy’s deferred rush plan as a tactic to fill the women’s residence halls, but this was not the case. Deferred rush was Dorothy’s way of limiting the number of women with bruised self-esteems and increasing the number who garnered self-knowledge. Deferred rush became an example that other universities followed and remained in practice at Purdue for more than seventy years until it ceased in the early 2000s.

Many of the social regulations at Purdue and on most campuses during the first half of the twentieth century were aimed at female students and stemmed directly from the “protectionist” concept, which implied subtlety that control of women meant control of men. One of the purposes of the Women’s Self-Government Association (WSGA) was the design and enforcement of regulations for women. All female students were automatically members of WSGA. There was no counterpart organization for the men. It appears that there were few rules for the male students and none regarding a curfew calling them in at night. In Cary Hall, The First Half Century, a history written in 1984, the first male dormitory of the early 1900s is described as “so despicable that residents ‘sneaked in after dark to sleep, and left as soon as possible in the morning.’”

The new Cary Hall was built in 1928, and Lloyd M. Vallely, the first manager, called a meeting of all residents the night before Orientation Week. The historical account conveys Vallely’s message to the male residents: “He spelled out his hopes that Cary would become a ‘free’ organization, with no restrictions placed on members except those necessary for the welfare of so many individuals living together.”

Conversely during the mid-1930s, the WSGA printed a handbook with regulations for females that included: “No woman student shall be permitted to leave town to be gone overnight unless given permission by the Dean of Women. Permission to stay away from residence houses overnight shall be limited to two nights per month unless further permission is granted by the Dean of Women. No daytime social engagements with men shall be permitted in residence houses except on Saturday or Sunday. Women students leaving residence houses to be gone after 7:00 p.m. shall be required to fill out in full a W.S.G.A. blank provided for that purpose.”

The booklet’s introductory sentence was an attempt of the association to pat itself on the back for its “leniency.” It stated, “Rather liberal are these rules by which you live, as you’ll find by comparison with regulations of other universities.” The words are laughable by today’s cultural standards. One may wonder what hard and fast rules beset the women at the “other universities.” The practice of “locking up” the women students in order to control the men students would continue into the 1960s, and Helen would be the one to voice the battle cry of change.

The book of regulations for women ended with this declaration: “Landladies and housemothers shall be responsible to WSGA for the enforcement of these rules.” Unfairly, one conjures an image of “the enforcer,” a matronly woman in a washed out floral cotton dress standing at the door of the residence hall, scowling at her wristwatch as the clock strikes 7 p.m.

In actuality, housemothers were often widows who had a strong desire to do something useful with the second half of their lives. Dorothy instituted “Housemother Training School” at Purdue in 1939, the only one of its kind in the United States. Helen helped organize and implement the training. It was for women in midlife, without family responsibilities, who were looking for a new direction and eager to train for a career to help others. Housemother Training School was directed particularly to women who were asking themselves, “What can I do with the rest of my life?” Women came to Purdue from across the country to learn how to become housemothers during two-week summer sessions. They lived in the Women’s Residence Hall while in training. The women would then be hired in sororities, fraternities, cooperative houses, and residence halls on campuses throughout the United States.

In the first half of the twentieth century, widows at the midpoint of their lives had few options for employment. Purdue’s Housemother Training School filled a much-needed void for women who had no working experience and were often frightened of where their lives would go next. Housemother Training School gave women confidence, a career, housing, and companionship. “The enforcer” was actually “the empathizer,” for the housemother was often like a student’s second mom far from home.