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Abstract
Fifty years after her death, the professional experiences of Roger Arliner Young (1899–1964), the first black woman to earn a doctorate in zoology, continue to resonate with many women of color in the academy. Young’s career trajectory was defined, in many ways, by the politics of respectability and its entanglements with other salient ideologies in the first half of the 20th century. Using several key moments in Young’s life as an illustration, I argue that the historical context in which black respectability emerged was shaped by at least three specific ideologies—individualist, eugenicist, and capitalist—which leave an imprint on the politics of respectability. Because Young’s career spanned multiple ideological contexts, from the racial uplift discourses in historically black colleges and universities, to the eugenicist nature/nurture debates within the biological sciences, to black capitalist economic separatism in Durham, her life demonstrates the diverse ways in which the politics of respectability regulated black women’s engagement with the racial uplift project.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Katherine Bell, Manoucheka Celeste, and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback.
Notes
Emma Azalia Hackley, The Colored Girl Beautiful (Kansas City, MO: Burton Publishing Company, 1916), 157.
Young signed many of her letters R. Arliner Young, thus I will refer to her as Arliner Young.
Wini Warren, “Roger Arliner Young: A Cautionary Tale,” Black Women Scientists in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 287–95.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Kevin Kelly Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Christina Greene, Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny After Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); E. Frances White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism & Politics of Respectability (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001); Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit, Gender and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 187.
Victoria W. Wolcott, “‘Bible, Bath, and Broom’: Nannie Helen Burroughs’s National Training School and African-American Racial Uplift,” Journal of Women’s History 9, no. 1 (1997): 88–110; Wolcott, Remaking Respectability.
Wolcott, Remaking Respectability; Mitchell, Righteous Propagation.
Sara Díaz, Rebecca Clark Mane, and Martha González, “Intersectionality in Context: Three Cases for the Specificity of Intersectionality from the Perspective of Feminists in the Americas,” in Vera Kallenberg, Jennifer Meyer, and Johanna M. Müller, eds., Intersectionality und Kritik (Berlin Heidelberg: Springer, 2013), 75–102.
Kenneth Manning, “Roger Arliner Young, Scientist,” Sage VI, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 3–7; Warren, “Roger Arliner Young.”
Manning, “Roger Arliner Young,” 4.
Young was second author on these, while her future advisor at the University of Pennsylvania, Lewis V. Heilbrunn, was first. Young was never acknowledged as a co-author on a paper with Just. Given the number of years they worked together and how much she assisted him with other work, it seems doubtful that they never collaborated scientifically.
L. V. Heilbrunn and R. A. Young, “Cell Hormones and X-Ray Effects on Arbacia Eggs,” Biological Bulletin (Program and Abstracts of Scientific Papers Presented at the Marine Biological Laboratory) 67, no. 2 (August 31, 1934): 331; D. P. Costello and R. A. Young, “The Mechanism of Membrane Elevation in the Egg of Nereis,” Biological Bulletin (Program and Abstracts of Scientific Papers Presented at the Marine Biological Laboratory) 77, no. 2 (August 29, 1939): 311; R. A. Young, “The Effects of Roentgen Irradiation on Cleavage and Early Development in the Annelid, Chaetopterus Pergamentaceus,” Biological Bulletin (Program and Abstracts of Scientific Papers Presented at the Marine Biological Laboratory) 75, no. 2 (August 30, 1938): 378.
Manning, “Roger Arliner Young,” 3.
Ibid., 4.
Manning and Warren note that Young earned her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1940, working with her colleague from Woods Hole, Lewis V. Heilbrunn. They report that she worked at North Carolina College for Negroes before moving to Texas in the 1950s and committing herself the Mississippi State Asylum.
Manning, “Roger Arliner Young,” 7.
“Under the Capitol Dome,” Chicago Defender, May 22, 1926.
“Dunbar Players Offer Three Plays Saturday,” Washington Post, March 11, 1934.
“First Lady Talks to Howard U. Club,” Chicago Defender (National Edition) (1921–1967), December 14, 1935.
“Phyllis Wheatley YWCA (Committee List),” 1936, Reel 168, YWCA of the USA Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA [microform].
“Home Making Institute At Bennett To Begin,” Chicago Defender, February 3, 1940; “Consumers’ Institute Is Held At Bennett College,” Chicago Defender, March 2, 1940; “Home Making Institute To Be Held at Bennett,” n.d.; “Noted Economic Authorities to Visit Bennett,” Carolina Times, n.d.; “Bennett To Hold Home Making Institution,” Carolina Times, February 3, 1940; “Bennett Institute Starts February 18,” New Amsterdam News, February 11, 1940; “Series of Events Planned for Week at Bennett College,” Record, February 11, 1940; “Bennett Ready For Annual Home Making Institute,” Cape Fear Journal, February 17, 1940; “Bennett Institute Speakers,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, February 24, 1940 all in 1940, Bennett College Scrapbook, 1939–1940 DigitalNC Library. “Homemaking institutes such as this one had a long history in African American Communities. On black women’s domestic education efforts, see Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent; Mitchell, Righteous Propagation; Stephanie J. Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Deborah G. White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999); Wolcott, “Bible, Bath, and Broom”; Wolcott, Remaking Respectability.
“Dr. James Watson Speaks to College Women in Durham,” Carolina Times, May 17, 1941; Mitchell describes the role that public health and hygiene education campaigns played in relation to what she calls the “politics of racial destiny,” Righteous Propagation.
The concept of “scientific respectability” is typically used in relation to fields of knowledge and the scientists within them, that are viewed with skepticism by the scientific mainstream, such as alternative-medicine, pseudo-science, or cutting-edge/emerging fields. Here, I am not using the term in that way. Though Young’s field was cutting-edge at the time she was studying, it was also well-respected as an important new direction for the biological sciences. Frank R. Lillie’s engagement in the field likely lent it credibility as a properly scientific and legitimate field of study. Instead, I use “scientific respectability” to refer to the social norms which establish who can be seen as a credible scientist.
Leslie Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do; Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load; Wolcott, Remaking Respectability.
Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993); Steven Shapin, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England,” Isis, no. 79 (1988): 373–404; For philosophy of science and gender see: Donna J. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 575–99; Sandra G. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815–1817,” in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, edited by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 19–48; Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex?; Schiebinger, Nature’s Body.
Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, Feminist Epistemologies (New York: Routledge, 1993); Alison M. Jaggar and Susan Bordo, Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 1–3; Lynn Nelson, Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990).
María Lugones, “Purity, Impurity, and Separation,” Signs 19, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 458–79.
Harding, Whose Science?, 58; David Hess, Science and Technology in a Multicultural World: The Cultural Politics of Facts and Artifacts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 134–42.
Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”; Lugones, “Purity, Impurity, and Separation.”
Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 187.
Mitchell discusses the ways in which individuals were held responsible for collective racial uplift in conduct literature: Righteous Propagation, 109; Wolcott describes the expectations middle-class black Detroit natives had for the respectable behavior of individual Southern migrants to preserve their status as a group: Remaking Respectability, 85.
Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do, 2.
Kevin Gaines details various meanings of racial uplift in his book Uplifting the Race, 1–5; see also Wolcott who argues that uplift was as much a project of the working class as the middle class. Wolcott, “Bible, Bath, and Broom,” 89.
Robert Jefferson Norrell, Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Zachery R Williams, In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926–1970 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009).
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem, edited by Booker T. Washington (New York: James Pott, 1903), 31–75.
Williams, In Search of the Talented Tenth, 1–40.
Beckham quoted in Marouf A. Hasian, Jr., The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 65.
Du Bois directly and publicly confronted one such scientist, James Cattell, through his platform in Crisis. “Two Books,” Crisis, November 1914. In 1939, Du Bois published an extended defense of black scientists in American Scholar, in which he even cited discrimination experienced by Young’s mentor, Ernest Everett Just. Du Bois used pseudonyms for each of the scientists he described. But, the details of “D–—” are clearly reflected in Manning’s biography of Just. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro Scientist,” American Scholar 8, no. 3 (1939): 312; Kenneth Manning, Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Booker T. Washington, “Industrial Education for the Negro,” in The Negro Problem, edited by Booker T. Washington (New York: James Pott, 1903), 7–29.
“Howard Research Is Cited in Report,” Washington Post, January 31, 1932; Ernest Everett Just to W. C. Curtis, March 25, 1931, NAS-NRC Central Files Records Group, Administration: Fellowships: Rosenwald Fellowship: Fellow: Just E E: 1930–1931, National Academy of Sciences Archives. See also: Kenneth Manning, “Ernest Everett Just: The Role of Foundation Support for Black Scientists 1920–1929,” in The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future, edited by Sandra Harding (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 228–37; Williams, In Search of the Talented Tenth.
Kenneth Manning also elaborates on the relationship between science education in HBCUs, like Howard, and white foundations: “The Role of Foundation Support for Black Scientists.”
“Howard Professors Get Leave to Study,” Washington Post, June 9, 1929.
Frank R. Lillie to Roger Arliner Young, January 11, 1930, Frank R. Lillie Papers, Box 6, Folder 27, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
Lewis V. Heilbrunn to Frank R. Lillie, Telegram (January 12, 1930), Frank R. Lillie Papers, Box 6, Folder 27, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Libbie Hyman was the first white woman to earn a Ph.D. in zoology.
Lillie to Young, January 11, 1930.
Roger Arliner Young to Frank R. Lillie, n.d., Frank R. Lillie Papers, Box 6, Folder 27, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
Roger Arliner Young to H. J. Thorkelson, January 28, 1929, folder 271, box 29, series 1, General Education Board Archives, RAC.
Jackson Davis to H. J. Thorkelson, September 15, 1928, folder 271, box 29, series 1, General Education Board Archives, RAC, italics added for emphasis.
See especially chapter 3, “‘Women’s Work’ in Science,” in Rossiter, Women Scientists in America. It is worth noting that Rossiter indicates that feminist resurgence in the 1920s emboldened more women to demand equal treatment in both pay and title. However, in some cases this backfired and resulted in demotion to “clerk” (222). In some elite institutions, it was not until the 1940s that women with Ph.D.s in the sciences were appointed to ranked faculty positions.
John Lovell, Jr., “In Memoriam: The First Springarn Medalist,” Crisis, December 1942, 395.
Ernest Everett Just to Abraham Flexner, September 28, 1925, folder 7167, box 695, series 1, General Education Board Archives, RAC, italics added for emphasis.
Here, I borrowed W. E. B. Du Bois’s phrase in reference to the work of black pathologist, S. C. Fuller, whose work he presented in the crisis as a counter to white scientist Cattell’s charge that “there is not a single mulatto who has done creditable work in science.” “Two Books,” Crisis, November 1914, 45.
Lillie was married to Frances Crane who was a member of a wealthy family. Because of her marriage to Lillie, the Cranes provided extensive financial support to the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. Ray Leighton Watterson, “The Striking Influence of the Leadership, Research, and Teaching of Frank R. Lillie (1870–1947) in Zoology, Embryology and Other Biological Sciences,” American Zoologist 19, no. 4 (January 1, 1979): 1275–87.
Young to Lillie, n.d., italics added for emphasis.
Daylanne K. English, Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 2.
Daylanne English, “WEB DuBois’s Family Crisis,” American Literature 72, no. 2 (2000): 291–319; Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 237.
See Daniel Kevles on “mainline” eugenics, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985).
To gain a sense of the eugenic and racial ideologies to which Young may have been exposed in her biology courses, I surveyed several commonly used biology textbooks published between 1914 and 1922. These are available in electronic form through textbookhistory.com and books.google.com: James Frances Abbot, The Elementary Principles of General Biology (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914); William Martin Smallwood, A Textbook of Biology, 3rd ed. (New York: Lea & Febiger, 1918); Burlingame et al., General Biology; Edward John von Komorowski Menge, General and Professional Biology (Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1922); Lorande Loss Woodruff, Foundations of Biology (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922).
Burlingame et al., General Biology, 529.
Ibid., 526.
Ibid., 528.
Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth.”
Smallwood, A Textbook of Biology, 280.
Frank R. Lillie in Glenn E. Bugos, “Managing Cooperative Research and Borderland Science in the National Research Council, 1922–1942,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 20, no. 1 (January 1, 1989): 7.
Manning, “Roger Arliner Young,” 4.
Woodruff, Foundations of Biology, 297.
Gregory Michael Dorr, Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia (London: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 298–99.
Ibid., 104.
Ibid., 100, 104.
Ibid., 98–104; Hasian, Jr., The Rhetoric of Eugenics, 51–70.
Lamarckism postulated that changes in species over time occurred by the inheritance of the acquired characteristics of the previous generation. Mendelism traced heredity of specific unit traits, such as eye color, and was later supported by the discovery of chromosomes. Darwin’s theory of natural selection posited that individual organisms with random traits that lead to more successful breeding or survival would eventually outnumber less fit organisms.
Katharine Capshaw Smith, “Childhood, the Body, and Race Performance: Early Twentieth-Century Etiquette Books for Black Children,” African American Review 40, no. 4 (December 1, 2006): 807. Though Smith finds that the individualism that defined conduct literature in this period “chafes again the elite uplift ethos,” I would argue that through understanding their discursive connection to Lamarckism and eugenics we can see that the two are completely compatible ideologies. See also Michelle Mitchell’s Righteous Propagation.
Hackley, The Colored Girl Beautiful, 36–37 [footnote].
Ibid., 37 [footnote], italics added for emphasis.
Ibid., 47.
Heilbrunn to Lillie, January 12, 1930; W. C. Allee to Frank R. Lillie, January 28, 1930: Frank R. Lillie to Mordecai Johnson, January 15, 1930, both in Frank R. Lillie Papers, Box 6, Folder 27, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
Lillie to Johnson, January 15, 1930, italics added for emphasis.
Frank R. Lillie, Telephone Conversation (handwritten notes) (May 20, 1930), Frank R. Lillie Papers, Box 6, Folder 27, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
Frank R. Lillie to Roger Arliner Young, August 20, 1930, Frank R. Lillie Papers, Box 6, Folder 27, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, italics added for emphasis.
Ernest Everett Just to Roger Arliner Young, February 10, 1936; Roger Arliner Young to Ernest Everett Just, June 2, 1936; Ernest Everett Just to Roger Arliner Young, February 11, 1937; Ernest Everett Just to Roger Arliner Young, a, February 18, 1937; all in Box 125-9, Folder 158, Moorland Springarn Research Center, Howard University.
Young to Just, June 2, 1936; Ernest Everett Just to Roger Arliner Young, b (February 18, 1937), Box 125-9, Folder 158, Moorland Springarn Research Center, Howard University.
Roger Arliner Young to Ernest Everett Just, February 28, 1935; Roger Arliner Young to Ernest Everett Just, March 19, 1935; Roger Arliner Young to Ernest Everett Just, May 6, 1935; Roger Arliner Young to Ernest Everett Just, June 3, 1935; Ernest Everett Just to Roger Arliner Young, February 8, 1936; Young to Just, June 2, 1936; all in Box 125-9, Folder 158, Moorland Springarn Research Center, Howard University.
Just to Young, February 8, 1936.
Ernest Everett Just to Roger Arliner Young, February 5, 1935; Roger Arliner Young to Ernest Everett Just, February 5, 1935; both in Box 125-9, Folder 158, Moorland Springarn Research Center, Howard University.
Young to Just, May 6, 1935.
Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex?, 151.
Christina Greene documented some elements of Young’s life in her detailed study of black women’s leadership in the Civil Rights movement in Durham. Young’s scientific work, and its significance, was outside the scope of Greene’s book. Greene refers to Young as Arline. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that Arliner’s name was frequently misspelled in newspapers, census records, and other historical documents. Our Separate Ways, 18–41.
“Faculty Record,” n.d. 1940, North Carolina Central University Archives.
Roger Arliner Young to Frank Blair Hanson, February 22, 1943; Roger Arliner Young to Frank Blair Hanson, May 10, 1944, both in folder 938, box 103, series 1, General Education Board Archives, RAC.
Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham; Wolcott, Remaking Respectability.
Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham, 117.
Greene, Our Separate Ways, 8–9.
The Hayti business leaders’ economic separatism might also seem to reflect Garveyism. However, Brown does not reference Garvey’s influence in Durham. Though Garveyism certainly shaped the broader African American cultural milieu in the early 20th century, the power of bourgeois respectability on capitalist respectability in Durham may have limited the influence of Garveyism in Durham. For interesting discussion of Garveyism see: Mitchell, Righteous Propagation; Wolcott, Remaking Respectability.
Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham, 110.
Ibid., 67–71.
Ibid., 114–15.
Ibid., 123.
Ibid., 110.
Ibid., 264.
Ibid., 241.
Ibid., 303–04.
Ibid., 328.
Hill’s Durham City Directory. Young is listed in the Durham city directory from 1941 to 1949.
Greene, Our Separate Ways, 18–21.
Ibid., 22.
Ibid., 242 (note 78).
Ibid., 22.
R. A. Young, “Weekly Report” (Tobacco Workers International Union, July 6, 1946), Series 2, Box 66, R.A. Young Reports, Tobacco Workers International Union #77-7, Special Collections, University of Maryland.
Roger Arliner Young to Josiah Bailey, Telegram (n.d. 1946), Box 370, 1946 Labor/Management Folder, The Josiah William Bailey Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
Josiah Bailey to Roger Arliner Young, May 30, 1946, Box 370, 1946 Labor/Management Folder, The Josiah William Bailey Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
Greene, Our Separate Ways, 24.
Ibid., 25.
Ibid., 244 (note 89).
Ibid., 41.
Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham, 113.
Greene, Our Separate Ways, 24.
Roger Arliner Young, transcripts (July 12, 1940), Collection UPB 7.62, Box 34, University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Student Records.
Roger Arliner Young to Peter Murray, March 1, 1955, Box 125-9, Folder 158, Moorland Springarn Research Center, Howard University.
Sara P. Díaz, “Gender, Race, and Science: A Feminista Analysis of Women of Color in Science” (PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 2012), https://digital.lib.washington.edu:443/researchworks/handle/1773/20506.
Peter Murray to Roger Arliner Young, April 5, 1955, Box 125-9, Folder 158, Moorland Springarn Research Center, Howard University.
Manning, “Roger Arliner Young,” 7.
“1709 St. Andrews St.,” Times-Picayune, January 22, 1963, sec. 3.
“Decisions, Judge Gonzales, Judge Wingerter, Acting,” Times-Picayune, September 19, 1964, sec. 3; “First City Court Suits Filed,” Times-Picayune, July 13, 1963, sec. 3; “First City Court Suits Filed Docket I,” Times-Picayune, June 20, 1964, sec. 3; “Decisions, Judge Gonzales, Judge Wingerter, Acting,” Times-Picayune, June 26, 1964, sec. 3; “First City Court Suits Filed Docket I,” Times-Picayune, September 15, 1964, sec. 3; “Decisions, Judge Gonzales, Judge Wingerter, Acting,” September 19, 1964.
“Deaths,” Times-Picayune, November 13, 1964, sec. 4.
Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham, 119.
Manning, “Roger Arliner Young, Scientist,” 6, italics added for emphasis.
Shapin, “The House of Experiment.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sara P. Díaz
Sara P. Díaz is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. Diaz’s work uses feminist cultural studies of science to illuminate the complex relationships between science, gender, race, and the politics of the body. Her current book project, Doing Science from the Back of the Bus, is a comprehensive study of Roger Arliner Young’s life and work.