Epilogue

As World War II ended, Frances Jewell McVey succumbed to cancer at age fifty-five. Reclaiming at least some of the identity she had lost in marriage, McVey arranged to be buried alongside her parents in the Jewell family plot rather than in the McVey plot, where President Frank McVey’s first wife was already interred. Ironically, as Jewell left the struggle, many of the gains made by women on the UK campus over the previous six decades began to dissipate. During the next two decades women would continue to make incremental progress toward greater equality. But it would take the beginning of the modern women’s movement and the rise of feminism to initiate a new and more successful push for women’s equality.

Economic Depression and an Uncertain Future

This chapter explores the impact of the Great Depression on women students at UK. To support financially strapped women students the university utilized several New Deal student work programs and established group houses where women students could live more frugally. Highlighted are the contradictions between women’s academic aspirations and successes and their vocational and educational opportunities after college, made even more problematic by the worsening economic conditions. Combining a career with marriage remained almost impossible for most women college graduates. Moreover, women students still had to endure both subtle and obvious sex discrimination in the classroom. Also discussed is the establishment of a women’s building on campus, where women students and faculty could gather and where women’s organizations could meet. By the end of the 1930s the Woman’s Building was closed with the opening of a new student union.

World War II and the Illusion of Equality

As new president Herman Lee Donovan began at UK in 1941, Dean Sarah Blanding left and Sarah Bennett Holmes became Dean of Women. World War II heavily influenced enrollment patterns on campus, and male students left for war while military units began training and living on campus. Women students and faculty obtained unprecedented status and influence on the campus. The number of women faculty increased, and women students, for the first time, fully participated in a coed student government and university marching band. But many, if not most, of the gains quickly disappeared in the postwar return to “normalcy.” Dean Holmes fought hard to keep women students from being pushed aside by returning veterans and continued to be concerned about employment opportunities for women graduates.

Introduction

The introduction places the story of women at UK in an overall historical context of the institution and the place of women in administrative leadership positions over time. Rather than simply tracing the evolution of women’s experiences at UK, this study examines how women’s roles were constructed for and by UK women students and faculty. It also compares the entrance of women at UK with other public universities, especially in the south. It also questions the possibility of sexual harassment of women students in the first decades of their attendance at UK.

First Will Women to Succeed and the

This chapter follows the first generation of women to attend UK, including the first women to earn degrees and women’s academic successes generally. It explains the impact of not having women’s housing on campus until the opening of Patterson Hall in 1904. It introduces the first women members of the UK faculty and examines the challenges they faced. The chapter also explores the first efforts by women to create women’s organizations, such as literary societies, women’s intercollegiate athletics, and social activities on the UK campus.

Frances Jewell McVey and the Refinement of Student Culture

This chapter introduces Frances Jewell McVey, a graduate of Vassar College and Columbia University, and illustrates her impact on UK women’s academics and social life and how she sought to instill aspects of student culture that she had known at Vassar into a southern public coeducational university. It explains Jewell’s difficult decision to marry the university president and abandon her professional career goals. It also explores the impact of World War I on both women faculty and students, and it discusses the entrance of women students into nontraditional academic areas, such as engineering.

Sarah Blanding and the Modern College Woman

This chapter highlights the changes in UK women students in a post–World War I environment during the 1920s. It introduces Dean of Women Sarah Blanding, a protégé of Frances Jewell McVey, who followed McVey as Dean of Women and would later become the first woman president of Vassar College. In response to an ever-expanding social culture on campus, Blanding introduced new rules and regulations for women students, both on the campus and beyond; and she enforced them vigorously. The chapter also examines the demise of women’s intercollegiate athletics and its impact on women students. This decade brought an even greater emphasis on social status and relationships between women and men students, and it saw the rise of the “beauty queen” as a fixture on the college campus.