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Linda M. Perkins, To Advance the Race: Black Women’s Higher Education from the Antebellum Era to the 1960s

Jeanne Boiteux
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Linda M. Perkins, To Advance the Race: Black Women’s Higher Education from the Antebellum Era to the 1960s, Urbana: Chicago University Press, 2024, 392 pages, ISBN: 9780252087837, $27.95.

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1Linda M. Perkins is a professor at Claremont Graduate University, where she heads the Applied Gender Studies program, and a specialist of the history of Black women in higher education. To Advance the Race: Black Women’s Higher Education from the Antebellum Era to the 1960s presents a sweeping overview of the institutions of higher education that welcomed Black women students from roughly the 1820s to the late 1960s. The narrative begins with the earliest attempts at providing a female seminary education for Black girls and women, and ends with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The author chose the date for its symbolic weight, as the Act legally put an end to discrimination based on race, religion, gender, or national origin.

2Enlarging the biographical view that she took in her first book, Fanny Jackson Coppin and the Institute for Colored Youth, 1865-1902 (1987), Linda Perkins wrote a work of institutional history that makes room for the lived experiences of both college students and personnel. In fact, the focus is self-contained—while the connections between Black college students and professors and the larger Black community are mentioned repeatedly throughout the book, the analysis skips over community outreach and remains firmly planted on the campuses themselves. The student housing where Black women students stayed, or were not allowed to stay, the classrooms where they were taught, and the offices of Black faculty are the sites that Linda M. Perkins investigates.

3The nine chapters are structured both chronologically and thematically and grouped in four parts, looking at the increasingly varied roster of institutions that welcomed Black women students. Chapter 1 deals with the genesis of Black education in the antebellum period, both in the North and in the South. It shows that because Black women were not seen by the wider society as “women,” they were able to escape the restrictive mold of white women’s moral education. Chapter 2 explores the history of the abolitionist colleges that welcomed Black students in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, with a focus on McGrawville College (NY), Oberlin College (OH), and Berea College (KY). While Oberlin students were light-skinned daughters of the local Black elite or of white slaveowners, Berea College schooled poor, newly emancipated Black girls and women, whose social status was on par with the white Appalachians who also attended.

4In chapter 3, the author describes the experiences of Black female students at elite white women’s colleges in the North over the same period, from the 1860s to the 1880s, insisting on the extent of white women’s racism even compared with that of white men’s—a recurring theme in the book: “In contrast [to the Ivy League], the elite women’s colleges were extremely slow to admit Black women, and when they did, only in token numbers” (97). Chapter 4 shifts the focus west, onto the large co-ed land-grant institutions that were founded at the end of the nineteenth century. In Oklahoma and Texas, unlike in northern college towns, Black emigration created supportive communities for Black students, as the first Black sororities, like alpha Kappa Alpha, were founded in that fertile soil.

5In part 3, chapter 5 discusses the growth of Black colleges after 1890, when legislation barred Black students from attending the white state colleges established by the first Morrill Act (1862), effectively leading to the birth of “a dual-segregated public education system” (10). Auteur inconnu2024-09-24T23:45:00This chapter covers Black women’s gendered experiences in what are today known as HBCUs, and in particular the stringent rules that dictated students’ behavior in order for them to conform to a conservative, religious ideal. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on first Black dean of women Lucy Diggs Slowe (1883-1937) and the vocational work of later deans of women at HBCUs. They were active in organizations like the National Association of College Women (1923, NACW) and the National Association of Women Deans and Advisors of Colored Women (NAWDAC, 1929), which Slowe founded.

6Chapter 8 shifts the focus from student personnel to Black women professors. Perkins shows that while Black female PhD-holders found work more readily than white women, they had to face a significant gender pay gap and were barred from holding responsibilities outside of female-coded fields like teaching and home economics programs. This chapter also discusses academic couples at HBCUs and the strategies employed by Black husbands and wives to pursue careers together. In the final chapter, which doubles as a conclusion, the authors explores four dissertations on Black women students published by Black women in the 1940s and in 1950, whose findings were that college graduates were “marginal” within the community, despite efforts by the NACW and the NAWDAC to raise awareness about Black men’s sexism.

7The book’s overarching thesis is that, at the turn of the twentieth century, as Black leaders embraced more patriarchal views of women’s responsibilities that aligned with white norms of behavior, so did the rationales for Black women’s education shift. Up until the 1890s, it was commonly accepted that both men and women should pursue the same kind of higher education, for the same kind of ends: community uplift. This would later change as some Black men felt threatened and emasculated by the highly educated women who, unlike their white peers, made use of their degrees and kept working in large numbers even after marriage.

8The earliest Black women graduates had come from the Black bourgeoisie and rubbed shoulders with elite white women in northern colleges. By the early years of the twentieth century, however, the typical Black woman student in higher education was more likely to be training for a teaching position in a small southern school. The ideological shift towards deliberately funneling women into teaching positions following Reconstruction and the sprouting of segregated schools would have deserved to be mapped out and described in more detail. It is mentioned early in the book but only superficially discussed afterwards, despite evidence that would tend to undermine the author’s thesis. In the 1920s and 1930s, many of the older women working as student personnel and college instructors still forcefully defended the view that men and women alike should pursue an education for the twin purposes of proving the community’s respectability and securing more rights for African Americans.

9The very convincingly articulated observation is that there was a sizeable gap between a minority of Black women educated at prestigious, predominantly white institutions in the North, and the largest group of Black college-educated women, who received an education at southern state normal colleges and non-accredited institutions. As early as the 1910s and 1920s, the former could stake a claim to the professions and pursue ambitious “firsts,” like Jane Bolin, Wellesley class of 1928, who was “the first African American woman to be admitted and to graduate from Yale Law School” (73-74) and who was later appointed to a judgeship by New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. In the process of pursuing careers, these women balanced both their personal ambitions and the imperatives of race representation and “race uplift.” The majority of Black women college students, however, were imbued with a largely moral and religious view of their community responsibilities, which they brought to their work in Black public schools. Cross-class clashes could occur when the two categories of women came into contact, for instance when northern PhD-holders were hired as professors or deans of women in southern HBCUs. This dichotomy was echoed in the work of the NACW and the NAWDAC. While the membership of the two organizations overlapped, the former was led by northern professionals, who were perceived as out-of-touch by the deans of women working at small southern HBCUs. For Perkins, NACW women’s disconnection from the experiences of the majority of Black women in higher education ultimately explains the organization’s limited impact, which the author does not attempt to measure or quantify, as it would likely have been outside of the scope of this particular study. Instead, Linda Perkins focuses on specific attitudes and representations that she infers from oral testimonies.

10Where To Advance the Race shines is in its uncovering of the richness and variety of the experiences of Black female students. As the author points out in the introduction, “there is not a single narrative when it comes to the education and the experiences of Black women’s higher education” (4). While the book expectedly mentions figures like educator Fanny Jackson Coppin, feminist lawyer Pauli Murray and first Black dean of women Lucy Diggs Slowe, each chapter contains a good number of individual portraits which trace the careers of lesser known individuals. Whenever possible, Perkins complements her investigative work with testimonies from the women themselves, which makes it possible to juxtapose the archival record of events with the individual perspective. However, scholars should note that these portraits tend to be more on the descriptive side; they are used to illustrate an overarching argument. To the scholar, they offer a treasure trove of ideas for article- or book-length biographies or for more thematic studies.

11Perkins makes a skillful use of institutional records and the personal papers of graduates and faculty. She mined the alumnae files of institutions such as Oberlin, Mount Holyoke, Hunter College, Smith College, and Wellesley, among many others. While it is only briefly alluded to, the issue of sources and their availability looms large over the study. In chapter 5, Perkins notes that Black women in the South were overwhelmingly enrolled in state normal schools that were not of collegiate level, small institutions which until the 1930s made up for the large absence of Black public high schools. Unlike major HBCUs like Howard and Fisk, the likes of Hartshorn Memorial College (1883), Scotia Seminary (1867) or Bennett College (1873) did not maintain archival records of their activities, which explains why the historian had to rely on oral history projects, like the Radcliffe Black Women Oral History Project (late 1970s), interviews she or other historians conducted, and the content of Black educational publications, trade journals, and newspapers.

12In addition to the lack of records, the biases in record-keeping worked against painting a more accurate picture of the experiences of Black women students in higher education. For instance, the academic studies conducted on Black college students in the 1940s and 1950s, which Linda Perkins uses as primary sources, “noted only the graduates—not the hundreds who never completed the degrees” (285)—even as it was common at that time for women students to drop out after a year or two in order to pursue positions as teachers. As one interviewee reminisced, teaching was often Black women’s only avenue for professional development: “In the little Mid-western town where I was born and reared, there was very little else for a Black girl to look forward to other than teaching or working in someone’s kitchen” (290).

13A third and final source bias is the difficulty of tracking down the earliest Black women graduates in the record. The first to attend predominantly-white colleges tended to be white-passing and would not have registered as Black students. In addition, as Perkins points out, white-passing students with Black ancestry would not necessarily have identified as Black, which is why she excluded those women from her analysis.

14From its very introduction, the book offers a clear timeline supported by didactic prose—which, however, tends to lack nuance in places. The many useful historical pointers will be very helpful to undergraduate students, making To Advance the Race a much-needed textbook on Black higher education. As Perkins herself notes, while authors like Kabria Baumgartner have served compelling narratives about Black educational activism in the antebellum period, Black women’s vocational and professional schooling, and even the experiences of women at specific institutions like Rutgers or Indiana University, none so far has produced a study that centers women’s higher education with the breadth of Linda Perkins’s volume, which calls to mind Barbara Solomon’s In the Company of Educated Women (1985).

15Perkins touches upon the issue of sexism and misogyny in HBCUs, alluding for instance to Pauli Murray’s conceptualizing of the “Jane Crow” problem and to the long-standing feud between dean of women Lucy Diggs Slowe and Howard president Mordecai Johnson (1926-1960). Likewise, she discusses the classism that was entrenched in the more prestigious Howard and Fisk Universities. In these bastions of the “talented tenth,” faculty sought to polish incoming students from the Black middle and upper classes and elevate them into the pinnacle of Black female respectability. Nonetheless, it is to be regretted that the intersections of class, race, and gender are not explored more theoretically or systematically in this volume, nor is the framework of respectability politics. As has been noted, To Advance the Race is more a work of institutional history than it is a cultural or an intellectual history. In that vein, closing remarks on the role that Black women lawyers and students played in the civil rights lawsuits of the 1950s and 1960s appear rather disconnected from the preceding chapters—even as they could have warranted a more in-depth treatment.

16Overall, the descriptive cast of the study is both an asset and a drawback. The race/gender/class nexus that the author identifies could have lended itself to a more analytical treatment, in the vein of Grace Sanders Johnson’s recent study of elite Black campaign for suffrage and women’s rights in American-occupied Haiti (2023). Still, as an authoritative sum, To Advance the Race fills a gap in the existing literature and should help scholars in the field formulate new questions for further studies. The connection between the public and private lives of Black power couples, to name one, would meaningfully contrast with the work of Hélène Quanquin on feminist-abolitionist marriages. To Advance the Race also opens up new space for further discussion of the interplay of classism and colorism as pertains to Black women specifically.

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Bibliographie

BAUMGARTNER, Kabria. In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America. New York: New York University Press, 2019

JOHNSON, Grace Sanders. White Gloves, Black Nation: Women, Citizenship, and Political Wayfaring in Haiti. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023.

QUANQUIN, Hélène. Men in the American Women’s Rights Movement, 1830-1890: Cumbersome Allies. New York: Routledge, 2020.

SOLOMON, Barbara Miller. In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.

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Jeanne Boiteux, « Linda M. Perkins, To Advance the Race: Black Women’s Higher Education from the Antebellum Era to the 1960s »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 09 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/23664 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/134ho

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Jeanne Boiteux

EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier III

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