“This RIGHT TO GROW is sacred and inviolable, based on the solidarity and undeniable value of humanity itself, and linked with the universal value and inalienable rights of all individuals”
--Dr. Anna Julia Cooper, 1925
“[We must] make known our educational needs and rights, and contend for every educational privilege, vouchsafed to our children as the coming citizens of a free democracy.”
--Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, 1924
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Academic Reviews:
- American Historical Review
- American Library Association's CHOICE
- Gender and Education
- History of Education Quarterly
- H-Net, Society for History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (H-SHGAPE)
- H-Net, Southern Association for Women Historians (H-SAWH)
- International Journal of Women's Studies
- Journal of American History
- Journal of American Ethnic History
- National Education Association's THOUGHT & ACTION
- North Carolina Historical Review
- Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society
- Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
"Stephanie Y. Evans's book is a marvelous contribution to the scholarship on African American intellectual life. Evans's meticulous focus on a major blind spot in modern treatments of the life of mind is pioneering. Her highly impressive examinations of towering figures like Anna Julia Cooper and Mary McLeod Bethune yield rich and nuanced conceptions of engaged research, noble teaching and compassionate service. This text deserves serious attention." Cornel West, University Professor, Princeton University.
Features:
- Inside Higher Ed (Interview & blog)
- News at Princeton
- The Crisis Magazine (NAACP)
- Diverse Issues in Higher Education ("Book of Note")
- Feminist Teacher
- National Council for Research on Women
- FlaVour Magazine
- Gainesville Sun
- Inside UF
- University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Sites of Struggle
- University of North Carolina, Charlotte
- University of Maryland, BC Alliance for Graduate Education
- Florida Humanities Council Radio (Mary McLeod Bethune)
- Oklahoma State University Regents Radio (Ada Sipuel legacy)
- American Educational Research Journal
- *** BWIT #9 on LIBRARY JOURNAL'S BESTSELLER LIST ***
Introduction:
"This Right to Grow": Higher Education as both a Human and Civil Right |
Part One - Educational Attainment
1. "A Plea for the Oppressed": Educational Strivings, Pre-1865
2. "The Crown of Culture": Educational Attainment, 1865-1910
3. "Beating Onward, Ever Onward": A Critical Mass, 1910-54
4. "Reminiscences of School Life": Six College Memoirs
5. "I Make Myself Heard": Comparative Collegiate Experiences (HBCUs and PWIs)
6. "The Third Step": Doctoral Degrees |
Black Women in the Ivory Tower chronicles Black women's struggle for access to higher education and presents historic philosophies of influential scholars. Part One, an educational history, begins in 1850, when Oberlin conferred the first college diploma upon Lucy Stanton and continues through the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Part Two, an intellectual history, presents Black women's philosophies of higher education between Anna Cooper's 1892 A Voice from the South and Mary McLeod Bethune's 1955 "Last Will and Testament." This story reveals how Black women demanded space as students and asserted their voice as educators, contributing in significant ways to higher education in the United States.
The century between the Civil War and the 1950s civil rights movement was the most significant era in the development of American education. During this period, a critical increase in Black women's educational attainment mirrored unprecedented national growth. African American women's quest for educational, social, and political empowerment offers a germane site from which to measure the larger demographic shift. This history complicates historic debates over vocational and liberal arts education while exposing inconsistencies between democratic equity and aristocratic elitism.
Barriers to Black women's college participation included violence, discrimination, and oppressive campus policies; yet, they insisted on earning advanced degrees. Despite being born enslaved, Dr. Anna Julia Cooper graduated from Oberlin College and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Paris in 1925. She argued that all human beings have a "right to grow" and saw access to higher education is an essential part of this right. Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College and renowned educator, asserted that a university has three responsibilities: investigation, interpretation, and inspiration. Here, I investigate the history of collegiate Black women, interpret the relationship between cultural identity and knowledge production, and present a history to inspire transformation of today's Academy.
Though race and gender historiography has consistently grown since the mid-1980s, little scholarly work about Black women's educational history exists. In Black Women in the Ivory Tower, I carefully trace quantitative research, explore Black women's collegiate memoirs, and identify significant geographic patterns in America's institutional development. This research reveals unique perspectives of college life, historic patterns in higher education, and relevant educational philosophies offered by remarkable scholar-activists.
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"We desperately need a leadership of inclusiveness. May I say that this is possible in proportion as we are able to put our love of humanity above the love of self. Responsible leadership must be characterized by love. . . . We need desperately a leadership of intellectual integrity. We have to say this over and over again—for we are prone to want the world at too cheap a price, and nothing really worthy is ever achieved except by hard, intellectual effort, and the development of the power of straight thinking."
--Dr. Willa Player, 1959
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