Education has been a long and enduring battle of contention in the lived experiences of blacks and women in the United States. To ensure that enslaved blacks would remain subservient, in many of the slaveholding states in the South it was illegal to teach the enslaved to read or write. However, during the Civil War and into the post–Civil War years, educational opportunities for blacks in the South proved to be a key defining moment in black education as the enslaved fought for universal state-supported public education. Also during this period, the majority of females were locked out of every aspect of systematized schooling due to the prevailing belief that females were intellectually underdeveloped. Still, advocates argued that expanded education for females would make them more effective in their female realm of influence.
The 1880s to the 1920s, the context of Sarah Case's study, was one of upheaval, dramatic transformation, and rapid expansion in American society—giving rise to the creation of a new nation, especially in the South. The economy was shifting from an agrarian to an industrial and urbanized one. There was the heightened materialism of a consumer culture, an influx of poor European immigrants, and a world war, among other sociopolitical issues. It was in this historical context that education for women, girls, and blacks was vastly expanded. Spelman Seminary (now Spelman College), a school for black females in Atlanta, Georgia, was established in 1881. Although Lucy Cobb Institute, a school for white females in Athens, Georgia, was founded in 1859, between the 1880s and the 1920s its curriculum expanded as it significantly refashioned its educational mission to meet the demands of a changing nation, especially in the South.
In Leaders of Their Race, Case examines the lives and schooling experiences of school administrators, school founders, teachers, students, and alumnae of Lucy Cobb Institute and Spelman Seminary between 1880 and 1925. Specifically, Case attempts to unpack the distinctive educational philosophies and pedagogical practices of Lucy Cobb administrators Mildred Rutherford and Mary Ann Lipscomb and Spelman founders Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles with regard to the ways in which these educators sought to teach their female students in the newly transformed South. As Case explains, “A close examination of these two private secondary schools … provides a way to explore beliefs about women's roles and duties, racial and class divisions between women, and changes in expectations of women's citizenship rights and duties” (p. 2).
In efforts to understand the educational perspectives of Lucy Cobb and Spelman's educational leaders as well as the schooling experiences of their students and alumnae, Case draws on rich and extensive archival materials as well as secondary sources. She utilizes a comparative approach to unpack “what female education indicates about the multiple and complex ways that racial and gender ideology functioned in the New South” (p. 2). Her analysis reveals extremely insightful information that brings to light how secondary-level female education, particularly in the South, refashioned women's identity at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and region and, in turn, shaped the type of education that southern society felt was important to molding the ideal black or white woman.
Lucy Cobb Institute was established by Thomas R. R. Cobb, a renowned Georgia attorney and a pro-slavery aristocrat. It was led by his nieces, Rutherford and Lipscomb, who promoted white southern gentility in efforts to prepare their students for a life of domesticity and motherhood. Though a defense of the “ideals of southern womanhood, white supremacy, and upper class hegemony” (p. 16) always remained the underlying mission of Lucy Cobb, over the years, in the changing political climate of the New South, the school prepared women for club work, religious activism, and employment. As Case explains, Rutherford and Lipscomb created a “new model of southern white womanhood, an ideal that preserved aspects of elite antebellum femininity while also borrowing from the Progressive Era ‘New Woman’”—women who would be involved in social and religious activism (pp. 15–16).
When Packard and Giles (two white women from Massachusetts) established Spelman Seminary, it provided basic literacy skills and religious instruction to formerly enslaved adult female students. By 1924, Spelman had become a college—a highly regarded institution that played a leading role in black higher education. Packard and Giles sought to educate black females who would be “sexually pure, community minded, Christian women whose behavior would be always above reproach” (p. 69). The school also prepared the women to be socially responsible educators and leaders who would transform the South and black civil society through education.
The comparison of the two schools reveals that while Lucy Cobb educated white females to help uphold their family's and white society's political power within the industrializing New South, Spelman Seminary aimed to prepare black women to educate rural black southerners for the uplift and empowerment of the overall black civil society (p. 68). As Case explains:
Students of the two schools differed not only in racial and class background but also in their educational goals and their vision of the South's future. Yet both of these private institutions viewed secondary schooling for young women as key to the region's future and development, and both offered an education that combined academics with training in Christianity and morality (p. 68).
Case also notes that one of the revolving themes of these two schools was the “preoccupation with feminine sexual modesty, viewing it as a crucial part of young women's education, and as key to defining racial and class identities” (p. 68).
What makes this book distinctive is that little consideration has been given to secondary private southern schools for black and white females in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Previous literature has focused on “public primary school systems and college-level education for women” (p. 4) during the said time frame; Leaders of Their Race fills a gap in the literature.
Case's book is painstakingly researched, ambitious, and rigorous. It reveals why scholars must continue to unearth and analyze the obscured and unheralded archival materials of historical women educators and their students’ subjugated intellectual voices and schooling experiences. This book is inspiring and informative and serves as a reminder that while the complex experiences of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women educators and their female students are often neglected, they have so much to reveal regarding the history of education of blacks and white females. Indeed, Case's research offers valuable insight into the history of US education, particularly for black and white women, and girls. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of US education and it should be a required text for courses in the history of education, African American education, women's education, African American studies, and gender studies, among others.
