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Preserving and Strengthening Together: Collective Strategies of U.S. Women's College Presidents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Auden D. Thomas*
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University—Harrisburg

Extract

Women's colleges in the 1970s and 1980s faced highly uncertain futures. Soaring popularity of coeducation left them with serious enrollment downturns, and challenges from proposed equal rights legislation threatened to render illegal their single-sex admissions policies. These perilous external conditions drew together the presidents of U.S. women's colleges in new ways as they sought to preserve and strengthen their individual institutions and to secure a future for women's colleges as an institutional type.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 History of Education Society 

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References

1 The primary sources of evidence for this study include archival documents about the operations of the Women's College Coalition; reports published by the Coalition; newspaper articles about the Coalition; an interview with Sharp, Marcia K., executive director of the Coalition for its first two decades, from 1973 to 1993; and an interview with Jill Ker Conway, former Smith College president and a member of the Coalition's executive board from 1976 to 1985.Google Scholar

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33 The Women's College Coalition had a total annual budget in 1975 of just $28,000; that amount increased to a mere $33,000 in 1979. During the WCC's first years, the organization's director, Marcia Sharp, reported working more hours than the number specified in her contract. Sharp was partner in the small, women-owned firm Hager Sharp that the Association of American Colleges contracted to direct the Coalition's activities. Memorandum from Libby Scott to Conway, Jill K., February 13, 1979, Series XIV, Office of the President, Jill Ker Conway Files, SCA; Marcia K. Sharp to Samuel H. Magill, January 9, 1976, Series XIV, Office of the President, Jill Ker Conway Files, SCA.Google Scholar

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55 Landy, Thomas M., “The Colleges in Context,” in Catholic Women's Colleges in America, ed. Tracy Schier and Cynthia Russett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 5597.Google Scholar

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57 Memorandum from Jill K. Conway to Nancy Lange, June 23, 1980, Series V, Office of the President, Jill Ker Conway Files, SCA. Smith College development director John Detmold noted that Smith raised more money during the first five years of Conway's administration than “any other of the 548 colleges, single-sex and coed” included in the Council for Aid to Education survey. Wellesley College, led by Barbara Newell, had the next best record. Detmold, John H., “The Distinguished Record of Women in Fund Raising,” in Handbook for Educational Fund Raising: A Guide to Successful Principles and Practices for Colleges, Universities, and Schools, ed. Pray, Francis C. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1981), 154–57.Google Scholar

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71 Memorandum from Marcia Sharp to Rhoda Dorsey.Google Scholar

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76 Jeni Hart coined the term “prestige network” to describe the “establishing relationships, or networks, with individuals or groups who are considered elite, prestigious, and influential” as an organizational strategy used for the purpose of enhancing the legitimacy of an organization. <Jeni Hart, “Creating Networks as an Activist Strategy: Different Approaches among Academic Feminist Organizations” (paper presented at the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Portland, OR, November <2003).Google Scholar

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81 See Edelman, Murray, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). My thanks to Marybeth Gasman for pointing out the connection between Edelman's concept and the WCC's media efforts.Google Scholar

82 See Gasman, Marybeth, “Rhetoric Vs. Reality: The Fundraising Messages of the United Negro College Fund in the Immediate Aftermath of the Brown Decision.” History of Education Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2004), 7094.Google Scholar

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