1 The core narrative of this paper is derived from Julia Bulkley's letters to William Rainey Harper from 1891 to 1900 in files 14 and 15, box 24 of the University Presidents' Papers, 1889–1925, Special Collections, University of Chicago Library [hereafter UC-UPP]. These letters will be cited by last names and date only. My thanks go to Richard Popp and his staff for their assistance through a necessarily sporadic research process. The Annual Registers of the University of Chicago indicate that from the opening of the department in fall quarter 1895 through winter quarter 1900, John Dewey taught five courses for the Department of Pedagogy, while Julia Bulkley taught thirty-two. Herbartian ideas, among them a close and dynamic interrelationship of pedagogical theory and practice and an interdisciplinary curriculum based on the child's interest, were brought to the U.S. in the late 1880s and early 1890s predominantly from the University of Jena (Germany) by American students, both male and female, in Wilhelm Rein's pedagogical seminar. Disseminated widely through journal articles, teacher institutes, and the teacher education texts of Charles McMurry, they achieved national attention from 1892 to 1900 through the publications of the National Herbart Society, organized as a protest against the domination of the national educational discourse by Harris, William Torrey, the U.S. Commissioner of Education. See Cruikshank, Kathleen A., “The Rise and Fall of American Herbartianism: Dynamics of an Educational Reform Movement” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993), 378–556.Google Scholar

2 The range of difficulties encountered by women academics at the turn of the century is vividly portrayed in the seven biographies collected in Clifford's, Geraldine Jonçich Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Institutions, 1870–1937 (New York, 1989). Dewey had lectured at Hull House before his arrival in Chicago and was lured to Chicago in part by his admiration for reformers such as Addams, Jane, with whom he sustained a long personal and intellectual relationship. For their relationship during his early days in Chicago, see Westbrook, Robert B., Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca and London, 1991), 80–81, 85, 88–89. Dewey's relationship with Young, Ella Flagg is documented in Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, “Experimenting with Education: Dewey, John and Young, Ella Flagg at the University of Chicago,” American Journal of Education 104 (May 1996): 171–185; and Smith, Joan K., Ella Flagg Young: Portrait of a Leader (Ames, Iowa, 1979), 62–70. A collective faculty goal of “conquering the ignorance of the country” was seen as essential by George Herbert Palmer, who turned down the head professorship in philosophy at the University of Chicago that eventually was offered to John Dewey; Palmer, George Herbert to Laughlin, J. Laurence, quoted in Storr, Richard J., Harper's University: The Beginnings (Chicago and London, 1966), 72. Harper's shifting loyalties were exemplified early on in the apparent dismissal of Bemis, Edward for his pro-labor sympathies. See Westbrook, , Dewey and American Democracy, 91; Storr, , Harper's University, 83–85.Google Scholar

3 Chautauqua, New York, in the 1880s became a renowned center for the pursuit of self-education through lectures and readings. Harper, a professor at Chicago's Union Theological Seminary, had begun teaching Hebrew in the Chautauqua Summer School of Languages in 1883 and, after two years of highly successful work, was made Principal of the Chautauqua College of Liberal Arts, which position he held in addition to his Seminary professorship until his appointment as president of the University of Chicago was settled in 1891. Bulkley served as secretary of the Chautauqua Teachers' Retreat and the Chautauqua School of Languages, a position she held while also principal of the high school and supervisor of teacher training in Plainfield, New Jersey, from which she came to the University of Chicago. Goodspeed, Thomas Wakefield, William Rainey Harper: First President of the University of Chicago (Chicago, 1928), 67, 118; Harrison, Harry P., Culture Under Canvas: The Story of Tent Chautauqua …as Told to Karl Detzer (New York, 1958), 41. On Chautauqua, see also Cremin, Lawrence A., American Education: The Metropolitan Experience 1876–1980 (New York, 1988), 432–36; Vincent, John H., The Chautauqua Movement (Boston, 1886). Devlin, William E., “The Indomitable Julia Bulkley,” The News-Times (Danbury, Connecticut), 4 June 1985. Bulkley to Harper, 27 Feb. 1892; 24 Nov. 1891. The Palmer quotation is from an undated letter to Harper, quoted in Storr, , Harper's University, 70; Storr's Chapter V documents the erratic pattern of Harper's negotiations with prospective faculty and some of the conflicts that ensued, 70–71, 82–83, 87–89, 340–341.Google Scholar

4 Clifford, , Lone Voyagers, 35. Bulkley, to Harper, , 24 Nov.; 11, 24, 29, and 30 Dec. 1891.Google Scholar

5 Talbot, Marion, More Than Lore: Reminiscences of Marion Talbot, Dean of Women, the University of Chicago, 1892–1925 (Chicago, 1936), 2–3, 157. For the doubts that led George Herbart Palmer eventually to decline to join the University of Chicago faculty, see Storr, , Harper's University, 72. Bulkley to Harper, 11 Mar. 1895 and 27 Feb. 1892.Google Scholar

6 Bulkley, to Harper, , 16 Mar. and 11 May 1892.Google Scholar

7 Bulkley, to Harper, , 8 and 10 June 1892.Google Scholar

8 Bulkley, to Harper, , 25 Mar. and 4 July 1892.Google Scholar

9 Palmer's friendship with Talbot dated back to at least 1881, when Talbot's mother, Emily Talbot, had encouraged her newly graduated daughter and a small group of women college graduates, including Freeman, Alice, then president of Wellesley, to form the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, later to become the American Association of University Women. Marion Talbot continued her studies at MIT after earning her master's degree at Boston University in 1882 and through Freeman was appointed instructor in domestic science at Wellesley in 1890. According to Talbot, when the Palmers visited Chicago in April 1892 to make their decision, Mrs. Palmer wrote to her, “Remember, if I come West you must come, too—I mean it, my dear friend.” Talbot, , More Than Lore, 4, 157–158, 8.Google Scholar

10 Bulkley, to Harper, , 11 May 1892.Google Scholar

11 Ray Greene Huling was headmaster of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, high school and had served as president of the American Institute of Instruction in 1891 and the secondary education member of the Committee on Arrangements for the International Congress of Education held in connection with the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in summer 1893. DeGarmo, Charles, who became president of Swarthmore College in 1891, had established himself as a scholar in the new Herbartian “science of pedagogy” brought back from the German universities of Halle and Jena and had been the first professor of pedagogy at the University of Illinois in 1890–91. Wilhelm Rein was professor of pedagogy at the University of Jena and the driving force in the dissemination of Herbartian ideas internationally. Bulkley to Harper, 4 July and 26 Dec. 1892, 20 Mar. 1893.Google Scholar

12 Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz notes Zurich as an “educational mecca” for women in The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York, 1994), 148. Bulkley, to Harper, , 22 May and 2 Aug. 1893. Bulkley's stay in Europe coincided with the final years of German university resistance to the award of doctorates to women. Determined American academic women, bolstered by the fledgling Association of Collegiate Alumnae (later the American Association of University Women), pressured in particular the universities at Berlin and Göttingen, the latter of which became in 1896 the first German university to award a doctorate to a woman. See Rossiter, Margaret W., Women Scientists in America; Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore and London, 1982), 38–41.Google Scholar

13 Bulkley, to Harper, , 10 Jan. 1894, 20 Mar. 1893, 11 May and 23 June 1894.Google Scholar

14 The German term Pädagogik designated the complete historical and philosophical study of the development of educational thought, which is clearly what Bulkley was pursuing. Harper's usage reflects a narrowing of the term, which came to be associated pejoratively with the normal schools by their opponents during this period of competition in teacher education. Bulkley, to Harper, , 23 June 1894, 11 Mar. and 26 Apr. 1895.Google Scholar

15 Bulkley, to Harper, , 26 Apr., 15 June, 12 Feb., and 25 July 1895.Google Scholar

16 Bulkley, to Harper, , 5 Aug. 1895. Horowitz, , M. Carey Thomas, 151–153, 161.Google Scholar

17 Bulkley, to Harper, , 30 Aug. 1895. Although DeGarmo, Charles and McMurry, Charles, the main disseminators of Herbartian ideas, had been writing for seven years in various journals, national attention was brought to them when, in February 1895, they challenged the subcommittee report on curriculum correlation authored by Harris, William Torrey as part of the National Education Association Department of Superintendence's Report of the Committee of Fifteen. Journalistic debates followed Harris' attempt to ignore the Herbartian notion of correlation, which the supporters of Herbartian ideas and many others regarded as a potentially fruitful organizing principle for the elementary school curriculum, and in July 1895 the National Herbart Society for the Scientific Study of Teaching was formed, holding its first meeting in conjunction with the National Education Association annual meeting that year. See Cruikshank, , “Rise and Fall of American Herbartianism,” 494–556; Drost, Walter H., “That Immortal Day in Cleveland—The Report of the Committee of Fifteen,” Educational Theory 17 (Apr. 1967): 178–191.Google Scholar

18 Bulkley, to Harper, , 2 Aug. 1893, 5 Apr., 25 July, and 30 Aug. 1895.Google Scholar

19 Dewey, to Harper, , 15 Feb. and 19 Mar. 1894, file 23, box 30, UC-UPP. Dewey to Alice Dewey, 16 July 1894, file 6, box 2, Dewey, John Papers, Series I: Correspondence, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale [hereafter SIU-JDP].Google Scholar

20 Dewey, to Dewey, Alice, 27 Oct., 25 Sept. and 9 Oct. 1894, files 8 and 9, box 2, SIU-JDP.Google Scholar

21 Dewey, to Dewey, Alice, 5 Aug., 13 and 25 Sept. 1894, files 7 and 8, box 2, SIU-JDP.Google Scholar

22 Harper's hopes for reaching teachers are described in Storr, , Harper's University, 200–201, and Smith, , Ella Flagg Young, 82. Dewey, to Dewey, Alice, 20, 22, 18, and 1 Nov. 1894, file 10, box 2, SIU-JDP. Dewey, to Harper, , 16 May 1895, file 23, box 30, UC-UPP.Google Scholar

23 Bulkley, to Harper, , 23 June 1894; 11 Mar., 7 and 26 Apr. 1895. The practice school was central to preparation of teachers in Herbartian pedagogy, as was the integration of theory and practice, maintained through an intimate relationship between philosophy and pedagogy; see Rein, Wilhelm, “Bericht über die Thätigkeit des Seminars,” Aus dem pädagogischen Universitäts-Seminar zu Jena, 1. Heft (Langensalza, 1888), 15–18. Presumably Bulkley was trying to assess the extent to which such preparation of teachers would be possible at the University of Chicago.Google Scholar

24 Bulkley, to Harper, , 25 July and 11 Mar. 1895. Dewey, to Harper, , 16 May 1895, file 23, box 30, UC-UPP. Dewey, to Dewey, Alice, 11 and 12 Sept. 1895, file 12, box 2, SIU-JDP.Google Scholar

25 Bulkley's attempt to confirm coordinate status is in her letter to Harper, 7 Nov. 1895. Parker, Francis W., with a national reputation for innovative teaching and teacher education in hand, had accepted the principalship of the Cook County Normal School in 1883 and proceeded to make it one of the outstanding normal schools in the country. Among his key ideas, many of them drawn from his study of German pedagogy in general and the Herbartians in particular, were freeing the child to develop in line with his/her deep interests and creating curriculum consonant with them; teaching directly from objects and experiences rather than textbooks; integrating the subjects around key ideas; and teaching reading, writing, and computation only instrumentally to the students' main pursuits. All of these ideas found their way into the “Dewey School.” Arrangements for the school are documented in Dewey's nearly daily letters to Clara Mitchell; see Dewey to Clara Mitchell, 6, 12, 14, 24, and 29 Nov., 14 and 22 Dec. 1895, file 12, box 2, SIU-JDP.Google Scholar

26 Bulkley, to Harper, , 28 Dec. 1895.Google Scholar

27 Dewey, to Harper, , 11 Jan. 1896, file 23, box 30, UC-UPP. Dewey's letters to Clara Mitchell make it clear that he was at this point only in the process of theorizing the practice that he had gleaned from Mrs. Aber's articles and from observation in the schools associated with Francis W. Parker's work. Dewey to Clara Mitchell, 14 and 29 Nov., 14, 22, and 24 Dec. 1895, file 12, Box 2, SIU-JDP. Dewey's subsequent acknowledgment of his reliance on Young, Ella Flagg, who began work with him in fall 1895, provides additional evidence for this. See Lagemann, , “Experimenting with Education,” 174; Smith, , Ella Flagg Young, 45, 63–64. For Bulkley's dissertation, see Bulkley, Julia Ellen, Der Einfluss Pestalozzis auf Herbart (Zurich, 1896); publication was a requisite part of the doctoral process in Germany-speaking universities. Bulkley, to Harper, , 4 Mar. and 1 May 1896.Google Scholar

28 Bulkley, to Harper, , 25 May 1896. Dewey, to Dewey, Alice, 13 Sept. 1894, file 8, box 2, SIU-JDP. The circumstances of the founding of the National Herbart Society, the immediate predecessor to the National Society for the Study of Education, in 1895 catapulted its members into the national limelight. (See note 17.) The NHS quickly became the main forum for genuine discussion of auricular and pedagogical issues at the national level, forming local branches for discussion of the same, based on the papers published in its annual Yearbooks. See Cruikshank, , “Rise and Fall of American Herbartianism,” 527–557; National Herbart Society Yearbooks 1–5, 1895–1899 (reprint New York, 1969).Google Scholar

29 Dewey, to Manny, , 15 Apr. [1896], box 3, Frank A. Manny Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor [hereafter UM-FAM]. Dewey, to Dewey, Alice, 22 Nov. 1894, file 10, box 2, SIU-JDP.Google Scholar

30 Dewey, to Manny, , 22 and 28 July 1896, 4, 9, and 14 Sept. 1896, box 1, UM-FAM.Google Scholar

31 Harper, to Bulkley, , 2 and 26 Sept. 1896, files 3 and 4, box 3, Harper, William Rainey Papers, Special Collections, University of Chicago Library [hereafter UC-WRH]. Bulkley to Harper, 8, 18, 22, and 27 September 1896.Google Scholar

32 Dewey, to Manny, , n.d. [Summer 1897], box 3, UM-FAM.Google Scholar

33 Dewey, to Harper, , 8 Jan. 1897, file 23, box 30, UC-UPP.Google Scholar

34 Dewey, to Harper, , 23 Feb. 1897, file 23, box 30, UC-UPP.Google Scholar

35 University of Chicago, Annual Register 1896–97, 172; ibid., 1897–98, 176; ibid., 1898–99, 184. Harper, to Rein, Wilhelm, 28 Jan. 1898, file 25, box 3, UC-WRH. Dewey, to Harper, , 2 Dec. 1903, file 25, box 30, UC-UPP.Google Scholar

36 Bulkley, to Harper, , 27 Sept. and 17 Oct. 1897.Google Scholar

37 Dewey, to Harper, , 6 Dec. 1897, file 23, box 30, UC-UPP. Harper, to Dewey, , 23 Dec. 1897, file 21, box 3, UC-WRH.Google Scholar

38 Bulkley, to Harper, , 5 Feb., 9 Mar., and 7 June 1898. Harper, to Bulkley, , 13 June 1898, file 2, box 4, UC-WRH. Bulkley, to Harper, , 1 July 1898. Dewey, to Manny, , 27 Feb. 1898, box 1, UM-FAM.Google Scholar

39 Harper, to Dewey, , 26 Aug. 1898, file 12, box 4, UC-WRH. Harper, to Bulkley, , 3 Jan. 1899, file 20, box 4, UC-WRH. Bulkley, to Harper, , 9 Jan. 1899.Google Scholar

40 Harper, to Bulkley, , 10 and 13 Jan. 1899, file 20, box 4, UC-WRH. Bulkley, to Harper, , 11, 14, and 23 Jan. 1899. Bulkley's article was “Social Ethics in the Schools,” Forum 26 (Jan. 1899): 615–620.Google Scholar

41 Bulkley, to Harper, , 28 Jan., 11 Feb., 10 Aug., and 2 Dec. 1899.Google Scholar

42 Harper's negotiations with Young and Dewey's acknowledged indebtedness to her are detailed in Smith, , Ella Flagg Young, 63–67. See also Lagemann, , “Experimenting with Education,” 174, for Dewey's intellectual dependence on Young in this period. The transition from Bulkley to Young is documented in the University of Chicago, Annual Register, 1899–1900, 158; ibid., 1900–1901, 179. That transition is fraught with irony. Young, who had resigned on June 3 from the Chicago Public Schools, ostensibly in protest of administrative reorganization by the new superintendent, was just barely retrieved by Harper on the eve of departure for an extended trip to Europe, which her biographer speculates may have been to look into European doctoral study, upon Julia Bulkley's advice. The irony is, however, even greater than appears. Young's Ph.D., received less than one year after she began it, was awarded magna cum laude, to which she objected that it should have been summa cum laude. Smith, , Ella Flagg Young, 67, 70–71.Google Scholar

43 Mead's report of the planned transition is in George Herbert Mead to Dewey, 23 June 1899, file 12, box 2, SIU-JDP. Bulkley's resignation is in Bulkley to Harper, 9 Mar. 1900.Google Scholar

44 Bulkley's health concerns and their resolution before coming to Chicago are in Bulkley to Harper, 21 Dec. 1891. Harper's secretary reported her marriage in a letter to Harper in Paris, 20 Apr. 1900, file 17, box 5, UC-WRH. Bulkley's subsequent history is recounted in Devlin, , “The Indomitable Julia Bulkley” (note 3).Google Scholar

45 Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, “Looking at Gender: Women's History,” in Historical Inquiry in Education: A Research Agenda, ed. Hardin, John Best (Washington, D.C., 1983), 2 51. Storr, , Harper's University, 341.Google Scholar

46 Talbot was thirty-four when the university opened, thus fourteen years younger than Bulkley. She grew up with a lively social life, and she nurtured formal and informal gatherings in both private and professional circles, serving at Chicago as a key contact between the women of the university and the women of the city. Fitzpatrick, Ellen, “For the ‘Women of the University’: Marion Talbot, 1858–1948,” in Clifford, , Lone Voyagers, 87, 92; Rosenberg, Rosalind, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven and London, 1982), 34. Talbot's gregariousness may have been more the exception than the rule, as Clifford concludes from Rosenberg's work that “in achieving a modicum of success in the ‘man's world’ of the university, women graduate students and faculty cut themselves off from other women and their networks, without being able to establish new support systems.” Clifford, , Lone Voyagers, 3. That Talbot's position at the university was bolstered by a personal relationship is clear from her letters to her mother, as Harper visited her family upon occasion and she herself was occasionally fetched on short notice to play Harper's grand piano in order to help him relax. Harper to Marian Talbot, n.d. [14 Nov. 1897], file 1, box 1, Marion Talbot Papers, Special Collections, University of Chicago Library. Marian Talbot to Emily Talbot, 15 Mar. 1896, 15 Nov. 1897, files 1 and 2, box 2, ibid. Talbot's apprehensions about and impressions of Bulkley are in Marion Talbot to Emily Talbot, [Oct. and Nov. 1895], and Marion Talbot to Isaac Talbot, 14 Apr. [1895], file 1, box 2, ibid. Regarding Bulkley's true age, Devlin, in his “The Indomitable Julia Bulkley,” reports her birth date as 1844, presumably ascertained from local records. The report of her marriage is in Harper's secretary to Harper, 20 Apr. 1900, file 17, box 5, UC-WRH.Google Scholar

47 The relevant birth dates here are John Dewey 1859, Jane Addams 1860, and Ella Flagg Young 1845. What triggered the conflict over the laboratory school was Dewey's appointment of his wife as principal of the reconstituted elementary school combining his school and Francis W. Parker's elementary school, with its endowment by Anita McCormick Blaine. Young appears to have supported the Parker teachers in their desire for protection against possible arbitrary firings. Lagemann, , “Experimenting with Education,” 180; a more detailed account appears in Smith, , Ella Flagg Young, 88–100.Google Scholar

48 Talbot, Marion to Talbot, Emily, [Oct. 1895], file 1, box 2, Talbot, Marion Papers, Special Collections, University of Chicago Library. It is worth noting that Talbot was a founding member of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, among whose primary purposes was the quest for European doctorates for women, in which Julia Bulkley was a successful pioneer, yet Bulkley appears only in two chronological references in Talbot's memoirs. Talbot, , More Than Lore, 130, 156. Clifford, , Lone Voyagers, 7.Google Scholar

49 The most obvious curricular connection with Herbartianism was the progression of the lab school curriculum through the stages of human technological development, based on increasing sophistication in what Dewey called the basic human “occupations,” which carried strong traces of the Herbartian “cultural-historical epochs theory.” That theory asserted that the child's psychic development retraced the steps in the cultural-historical development of the human species as a whole and that the curriculum should be structured in a progression which would take advantage of that parallel. For an exploration of this theme, see Kliebard, Herbert M., “Dewey and the Herbartians: The Genesis of a Theory of Curriculum,” in Forging the American Curriculum (New York and London, 1992), 68–82. See also note 25 with regard to Herbartian ideas coming to the lab school through the work of Parker, Francis W. The lack of support for Bulkley's classes was reflected in Harper's letter to her of Jan. 10, 1899: “I agree with you that the teachers employed in the Elementary School should be actively interested in the work offered by the Department of Pedagogy, but we cannot force them to take what they do not like or do not think they need.” Harper to Bulkley, 10 Jan. 1899, file 20, box 4, UC-WRH. On Dewey's teaching, adjectives such as “dull,” “bumbling,” and “inarticulate” are among the descriptions offered by his students; Smith, , Ella Flagg Young, 72–74. Bulkley's complaint about her students' attitudes toward German pedagogy is in Bulkley to Harper, 25 May 1896. With regard to women in the National Herbart Society, while there appear to be no extant lists of the original members, Sarah Brooks of St. Paul is recorded as an active discussant during the first meeting, the papers for which included Lida McMurry's “Plan of Concentration.” See First Supplement to the Year Book of the National Herbart Society , ed. McMurry, Charles A. (Bloomington, Illinois, 1895), 147–149, 173–187.Google Scholar

50 Turf was an issue virtually from the beginning, and Harper himself was by 1896 suffering for the existence of departments without divisions, having to field increasing numbers of irate letters regarding interdepartmental conflicts. Storr, , Harper's University, 93–94. Herrick's story is summarized in Storr, ibid., 83.Google Scholar

51 Dewey too eventually found himself foundering on the financial practice of living on expectations rather than realities, however. Regarding Dewey's break with Harper, Storr points to a May 1904 overdraft of $120,000 in which the School of Education budget was implicated; in Harper's University, 334.Google Scholar

52 Robert Westbrook, in his examination of Dewey's affair with Yezierska, Anzia, suggests that, while Dewey may be faulted with failing to make the “messiness” of life essential to his philosophy, those who have studied him are perhaps also to be faulted with allowing him less humanity—and presumably then less fallibility—than is his due. Westbrook, Robert, “On the Private Life of a Public Philosopher: Dewey, John in Love,” Teachers College Record 96:2 (Winter 1994): 185, 194.Google Scholar