Claiming their intellectual space: academic women at the University of New Zealand 1909–1941

ABSTRACT

The focus of this article is the first cohort of academic women who carved out an intellectual space for themselves in the Department of Home Science at the University of New Zealand. I begin with an overview of emerging appointment patterns of academic women against a backdrop of contemporary concerns about the higher education of women. I then turn my attention to ways in which women home scientists sought to define and develop their disciplinary expertise and professional knowledge. I trace the career trajectories of the first three women professors and highlight the extent to which these women worked to define their own intellectual boundaries, establish themselves as experts in a feminised scientific field while at the same time working within a gendered domain. I move beyond thinking about the factors and forces that inextricably linked women with domestic space of the home, and invite consideration of women’s work as scientists of the home, consumer educators, and experts in new fields of research.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic women
• expertise
• knowledge
• intellectual space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The University of New Zealand (1871–1961) was comprised of four constituent colleges: the University of Otago (established in 1869), Canterbury College (first established in Christchurch in 1873), Auckland College (1882), and Victoria College (established in Wellington in 1897).

² Katie Pickles, “Colonial Counterparts: The First Academic Women in Anglo-Canada, New Zealand and Australia,” Women’s History Review 10, no. 2 (2001): 273–97; and Marjorie Theobald, Knowing Women: Origins of Women’s Education in Nineteenth-Century Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

³ John C. Beaglehole, The University of New Zealand: An Historical Study (Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 1937); William Morrell, The University of Otago: A Centennial History (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1969); and Hugh Parton, The University of New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1979).

⁴ Jana Nidiffer reports that the private universities, such as the University of Chicago, were more likely to entertain the idea of co-education from its inception. Significantly, Nidiffer argues that the presence of women were a visible reminder to male students and male colleagues that the university was not Harvard or Yale or one of the other Ivy League universities. See Jana Nidiffer, Pioneering Deans of Women: More Than Wise and Pious Matrons (New York: Teachers College Columbia, 2000); Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities 1870–1939 (London: UCL Press, 1995).

⁵ The first woman graduate was Grace Annie Lockhart (Bachelor of Science and English Literature, Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada in 1875). See here Alison Prentice, “Bluestockings, Feminists, or Women Workers? A Preliminary Look at Women’s Early Employment at the University of Toronto,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 2, no. 1 (1991): 231–62.

⁶ Winifred Macdonald, Footprints of Kate Edger: A History of the New Zealand Federation of University Women 1921–1981 (Auckland: NZFUW, 1982), 24.

⁷ This equated to 30% of graduates: Register of Undergraduates 1872–1895, University of New Zealand, AAMJ, W3119/258, National Archives, Wellington, New Zealand (hereafter NA).

⁸ Melanie Nolan, Breadwinning: New Zealand Women and the State (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2000), 29.

⁹ Beryl Hughes and Sheila Ahern, Redbrick and Bluestockings: Women at Victoria 1899–1993 (Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 1993); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, ed., Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Judy Batson, Her Oxford (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008); Kay Morris Matthews, In Their Own Right: Women and Higher Education in New Zealand before 1945 (Wellington: NZCER Press, 2008); and Tanya Fitzgerald and Jenny Collins, Historical Portraits of Women Home Scientists: The University of New Zealand 1911–1947 (New York: Cambria Press, 2011).

¹⁰ Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, Vol. 2, H–1, xiv.

¹¹ For an overview of some of the debates on education and domesticity see Rima D. Apple, The Challenge of Constantly Changing Times: A History of the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison 1903–2003 (Madison, WI: Parallel Press, 2003); Rosemary Deem, Schooling for Women’s Work (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (New York: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Margaret Tennant, “Natural Directions: The New Zealand Movement for Sexual Differentiation in Education in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Women in History: Essays on European Women in New Zealand, ed. Barbara Brookes, Charlotte Macdonald, and Margaret Tennant (Wellington: Allen & Unwin/Port Nicholson Press, 1986), 87–100.

¹² Home Science was also called Home Economics (in the US), Household Science, Domestic Science (mostly in girls’ secondary schools in England and New Zealand), and more recently Consumer and Applied Science. See here Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti, eds., Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Jenny Collins, “Beyond the Domestic Sphere? A Home Science Education at the University of New Zealand, 1911–1936,” Journal of Educational Administration and History 41, no. 2 (2009): 115–30; and Carolyn M. Goldstein, Creating Consumers: Home Economists in Twentieth-century America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

¹³ The University of New Zealand: Its History and Its System (Wellington: National Archives). See also Ann Gilchrist Strong, History of the Development of University Education in Home Science in New Zealand 1911–1936 (Dunedin: University of Otago, 1937); and Alison Clarke, Otago: 150 Years of New Zealand’s First University (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2018).

¹⁴ New Zealand Herald, July 11, 1877. For an overview of the “woman” question in higher education see Ann Mari May, ed., The “Woman Question” and Higher Education: Perspectives on Gender and Knowledge Production in America (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2008).

¹⁵ Alison Mackinnon, Love and Freedom: Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also Rita McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Margaret A. Nash, ed., Women’s Higher Education in the United States: New Historical Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

¹⁶ Kim Tolley, The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003).

¹⁷ In the period 1907 to 1917, there were 14 women appointed to the University of New Zealand. The majority, 10 women, were at Victoria University College and there were 2 women at Canterbury University College and a further 2 at Otago University. See here Fitzgerald and Collins, Historical Portraits.

¹⁸ Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, ed., Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Co-educational Institutions 1870–1937 (New York: Feminist Press, 1989). See also Susan Carter, “Academic Women: An Empirical Study of Changing Patterns in Women’s Employment as College and University Faculty 1890–1963,” Journal of Social History 14 (1987): 675–99; and Mary Ann Dzuback, “Women Scholars, Social Science Expertise, and the State in the United States,” Women’s History Review 18, no. 1 (2009): 71–95.

¹⁹ Linda Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Pnina Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram, eds., Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science 1789–1979 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Penny Welts Kaufman, The Search for Equity: Women at Brown University 1891–1991 (Hanover, MA: University of New England Press, 1991); Marianne Ainley, “Gendered Careers: Women Science Educators at Anglo-Canadian Universities 1920–1980,” in Historical Identities: The Professoriate in Canada, ed. Paul Stortz and E. Lisa Panayotidis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 248–70; Linda Eisenmann, Higher Education for Women in Post-War America: 1945–1965 (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2007); and Ruth Watts, Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007).

²⁰ University of New Zealand, Calendar, AAMJ W3119, NA. See also Margherita Rendel, “How Many Women Academics 1912–1976?’: The Increase in Academic Women Between 1930 and 1960,” in Schooling for Women’s Work, ed. Rosemary Deem (London: Routledge, 1980), 142–61; Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1982); Fernanda H. Perrone, “Women Academics in England 1870–1930,” History of Universities 12 (1993): 339–67; Carter, “Academic Women”; Patricia Palmieri, In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); and Fitzgerald and Collins, Historical Portraits.

²¹ University of New Zealand, Calendar, AAMJ W3119, NA.

²² Initially a Department of Home Science and then a Faculty from 1921 onwards.

²³ Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies; and Maresi Nerad, The Academic Kitchen: A Social History of Gender Stratification at the University of California Berkley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).

²⁴ Pamela C. Swallow, The Remarkable Life and Career of Ellen Swallow Richards: Pioneer in Science and Technology (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2014).

²⁵ Erik Olssen, “Women, Work and Family 1880–1926,” in Women in New Zealand Society, ed. Phillida Bunkle and Beryl Hughes (Auckland: Allen & Unwin, 1980), 159–83.

²⁶ Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home, or Principles of Domestic Science (New York: J.B. Ford, 1869). See also Roberta Frankfort, Collegiate Women: Domesticity and Career in Turn-of-the-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1977).

²⁷ Rima D. Apple, “Liberal Arts or Vocational Training? Home Economics Education for Girls,” in Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, ed. Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 79–95; Nerad, Academic Kitchen; and Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action 1940–1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

²⁸ Sari Knoop Biklen, “The Progressive Movement and the Question of Women,” Teacher’s College Record 80, no. 2 (1978): 316–35; and Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies.

²⁹ Clarke, Otago, 326.

³⁰ Patricia Hummer, Decade of Elusive Promise: Professional Women in the United States 1920–1930 (Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1979); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from their Nineteenth Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984); and Tanya Fitzgerald, Outsiders or Equals: Women Professors at the University of New Zealand 1911–1961 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009); Collins, “Beyond the Domestic Sphere.”

³¹ In the period 1911 to 1961 there were 123 women employed at the University of Otago: University of New Zealand, Calendar, AAMJ W3119, NA.

³² Edith Morley, “Women at the Universities and University Teaching as a Profession,” in Women Workers in Seven Professions, ed. Edith Morley (London, 1914).

³³ Morrell, The University of Otago; Ruby Heap, “Training Women for a New ‘Women’s’ Profession: Physiotherapy Education at the University of Toronto 1917–40,” History of Education Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1995): 135–58; and Melanie Nolan, “Putting the State in Its Place: The Domestic Education Debate in New Zealand,” History of Education 30, no. 1 (2001): 13–33.

³⁴ The prestige of women-only colleges is also noted by Carol Dyhouse, “Troubled Identities: Gender and Status in the History of the Mixed College in English Universities since 1945,” Women’s History Review 12, no. 2 (2003): 169–93.

³⁵ Ruby Heap, “From the Science of Housekeeping to the Science of Nutrition: Pioneers in Canadian Nutrition and Dietetics at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Household Science 1900–1950,” in Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work, ed. Elizabeth M. Smyth et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 141–70; Miriam R. Levin, Defining Women’s Scientific Enterprise: Mount Holyoake Faculty and the Rise of American Science (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2006); Watts, Women in Science; and Eileen Janes Yeo, The Contest for Social Science: Relations and Representations of Gender and Class (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996).

³⁶ Tanya Fitzgerald, “An Absent Presence: Women Professors at the University of New Zealand 1911–1961,” Journal of Educational Administration and History 39, no. 2 (2007): 239–53; and Tanya Fitzgerald, “Academic Housework? Women Professors at the University of New Zealand 1911–1961,” New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies 42, no. 1/2 (2007): 115–28.

³⁷ Fitzgerald, Outsiders or Equals; Tanya Fitzgerald, “On the Margins? The Intellectual Community of Women Home Scientists at the University of New Zealand 1911–1961,” in Women in Higher Education 1850–1970: International Perspectives, ed. E. Lisa Panayotidis and Paul Storz (London: Routledge, 2015), 164–81. See also Nerad, The Academic Kitchen; and Carol Dyhouse, “Going to University in England Between the Wars: Access and Funding,” History of Education 14, no. 4 (2002): 325–36.

³⁸ Winifred Boys-Smith to Otago University Council, July 16, 1917, University of Otago, Records of Registry and Central Administration, 1917, AG–180–31/0018, Hocken Library, University of Otago (hereafter DU). In 1921 she resigned to take up a post as principal of a newly established private school for girls, but her tenure was short-lived. Later that year she returned to England and undertook voluntary social work among the unemployed during her retirement. She died in 1939 at the age of 74.

³⁹ Morrell, The University of Otago, 97.

⁴⁰ Winifred Boys-Smith to Ann String, August 6, 1920, University of Otago, Records of Registry and Central Administration, 1920, AG–180–31/0036, DU.

⁴¹ Winifred Boys-Smith, Interim report circa 1913, University of Otago, Records of Registry and Central Administration, Papers of John Studholme, AG–180–73/026, DU.

⁴² Winifred Boys-Smith to Lady Stout, June 20, 1913, Papers, Lady Anna Stout, MS–0260, DU.

⁴³ Winifred Boys-Smith to Otago University Council, February 6, 1920, University of Otago, Records of Registry and Central Administration, 1919, AG–180–31/0018, DU.

⁴⁴ Winifred Boys-Smith to Ann String, August 6, 1920, University of Otago, Records of Registry and Central Administration, 1920, AG–180–31/0036, DU.

⁴⁵ For a history of the IFUW and its activities see Edith Batho, A Lamp of Friendship: International Federation of University Women (England: Sunfield & Day, 1968); Macdonald, Footprints of Kate Edger; Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Joyce Goodman, “International Citizenship and the International Federation of University Women before 1939,” History of Education 40, no. 6 (2011): 701–21; and Christine van Oertzen, Science, Gender and Internationalism: Women’s Academic Networks 1917–1955 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

⁴⁶ Although Professor Rawson is listed variously as Mrs Noel Benson or Mrs G.H. Benson on the university lists.

⁴⁷ Helen Thomson and Sylvia Thomson, Ann Gilchrist Strong: Scientist in the House (Christchurch: Pegasus Press, 1963).

⁴⁸ Ann Strong to Registrar, May 21, 1929, University of Otago, Records of Registry and Central Administration, 1929, AG–180–31/0140, DU.

⁴⁹ Ann Strong, School of Home Science History 1911–1961 (Dunedin: University of Otago, 1962). See also Home Science and Association of Home Science Alumnae Records, 1885–1991, 1/1, Box 1, 94–036, DU.

⁵⁰ Ann Gilchrist Strong, n.d., Association of Home Science Alumnae of New Zealand: Records, MS–1516/014, DU.

⁵¹ Testimonial, J.H. Turner, Lutherville Seminary, University of Otago, Records of Registry and Central Administration, 1920, AG–180–31/0036 DU.

⁵² Testimonial, Edith Elizabeth Ingalls, Abbott Academy Andover, University of Otago, Records of Registry and Central Administration, 1920, AG–180–31/0036 DU.

⁵³ Ann Strong to Chancellor, December 1, 1924, Report of the Home Science Department, University of Otago, Consumer and Applied Sciences Records 1909–1990, Box 6, 90–163, DU.

⁵⁴ Ann Strong to Registrar, May 23, 1925, Malcolm Family Papers, MS–2640/035, DU.

⁵⁵ Joyce Goodman, “Their Market Value Must Be Greater for the Experience They Had Gained: Secondary School Headmistresses and Empire, 1897–1914,” in Gender, Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Experience, ed. Joyce Goodman and Jane Martin (London: Woburn Press, 2002), 175–98; Pickles, “Colonial Counterparts”; and Kay Whitehead, “Contextualising and Contesting National Identities: Lillian De Lissa, 1885–1967,” Vitae Scholasticae 26, no. 1 (2009): 41–60.

⁵⁶ Elizabeth Gregory was Dean of the Faculty of Home Science from 1941–1961. Between 1924 and 1961, 33 Home Science graduates from New Zealand gained higher degrees at overseas colleges and universities. Jenny Collins, “Glorified Housekeepers or Pioneering Professionals? The Professional Lives of Home Science Graduates from the University of New Zealand, 1911–1935,” History of Education Review 37, no. 2 (2008): 40–51; Jenny Collins, “In Search of Scholarly Expertise: Transnational Connections and Women Graduates at the University of New Zealand 1911–1961,” History of Education Review 39, no. 2 (2010): 52–66; and Fitzgerald and Collins, Historical Portraits.

⁵⁷ Heap, “Training Women for a New ‘Women’s’ Profession”; and Fitzgerald and Collins, Historical Portraits.

⁵⁸ The University of New Zealand: Its History and Its System.

⁵⁹ Roberta Hall and Bernice Sandler, The Classroom Climate: A Chilly One for Women? (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges, 1982). This point is also illustrated in the work of Anne Rochon Ford, A Path Not Strewn with Roses: One Hundred Years of Women at the University of Toronto 1884–1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).

⁶⁰ Jill Ker Conway, “Perspectives on the History of Women’s Education in the US,” History of Education Quarterly 14 (1974): 1–12.

⁶¹ Elizabeth M. Smyth and others, eds., Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Morris Matthews, In Their Own Right; and Tanya Fitzgerald and Elizabeth M. Smyth, eds., Women Educators, Leaders and Activists: Educational Lives and Networks 1900–1960 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

⁶² Fitzgerald, Outsiders or Equals; and Fitzgerald and Collins, Historical Portraits.

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Tanya Fitzgerald

Tanya Fitzgerald is Professor of Higher Education and Dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests span the history of women’s higher education, and higher education policy and leadership.