By Gudrun Hutchins

 

From the very beginning in 1920, Vermont AAUW members followed through on their commitment to aiding young women in their college education by raising money for fellowships. But, in addition to their support for college women, they established a program that was unique in the national organization. In a state in which ninety percent of all elementary schools were in one- and two-room schoolhouses, they decided to focus their energies on the improvement of rural schools. The manner in which they accomplished their goals and their choice of projects illustrate how the women of their era were able to effect societal change and participate in the political process. 

Many of Vermont’s women college graduates had taken the traditional route for educated women and had become teachers. Others were married to educators. Early semi-annual state AAUW meetings were held in conjunction with the annual State Teachers’ Convention and the Federation of Women’s Clubs. The Vermont AAUW wanted to enhance the connections it had with Vermont educators and with other women’s groups. Those connections would be valuable to them in their drive for better rural schools. 

Many of the AAUW women belonged to the Vermont Women Teachers Club. This organization had been influential in the 1915 passage of landmark legislation that started Vermont education on the road toward greater state participation in the administration and funding of schools. It had also been responsible for the Legislature’s enactment of a teacher’s retirement fund in 1912. The activism of the Vermont Women Teachers Club in the teaching profession in Vermont thus preceded that of the AAUW, and it is likely that some of the early AAUW women were involved in these activities.

Some of Vermont’s prominent women and founding members of Vermont AAUW were already deeply involved in rural education. Among these were YWCA executive Marion Gary; Annadora Baer Tupper, wife of UVM English professor Frederick Tupper; educator Mary Jean Simpson; and, in particular, writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher. 

Fisher had become interested in elementary education when she met Maria Montessori in Rome in 1912. Her book, A Montessori Mother, helped to popularize the Montessori movement in this country. In 1921 Fisher was appointed to the State Board of Education. She was responsible for the appointment of teacher Rose Lucia to the position of Superintendent of Rural Schools. That year, Lucia and the Women Teachers Club inaugurated a program of standardization for Vermont rural schools.

The importance of that program becomes clear upon examining the condition of schools in Vermont at that time. Because many towns had declined in population over the previous century, they had lost enough of their tax base to make modernization of their schools beyond their resources. More than half of all Vermont children received their elementary education in one-room schools. As the literature produced to publicize the rural school program shows, Vermont’s rural schools were in great need of repair, many without the basic facilities: maps, teaching aids, a school library, adequate heat and lighting.

With the support of the Vermont State Board of Education, particularly Commissioner Clarence Dempsey, the standardization program caught on fast in Vermont communities. This was due in part to the rating system, which was based not only on the school building, its facilities, and the experience of its teacher, but on student achievement and community support. Thus receiving the “Standard School” or “Superior School” plaque became a status symbol and a point of pride for the town as well as the school.

Powerful people joined the campaign, undoubtedly influenced by their friends and relatives in the AAUW and the Women Teachers Club. For example: Emily Proctor, a member of the family that owned Vermont Marble Company, established the yearly Proctor Prize for the most improved schools in each county. Her sister-in-law, Mary Proctor, was the wife of Governor Redfield Proctor and a charter member of AAUW.

In 1921 the State Board of Education approved a yearly allotment of $10,000 for the repair and improvement of rural schools. In 1923 the state school board requested an allocation of $25,000 from the Legislature for the standardization program and was rebuffed. Due to a growing “back to the towns” movement, the session transferred control of superintendents from the state to the towns and forced the elimination of some state support staff, including Lucia’s position of Superintendent of Rural Schools. They also allocated only $3,000 for standardization, effectively gutting the program.

In 1922, Dorothy Canfield Fisher had threatened to resign from the State Board of Education to protest the Legislature’s miserly funding allocations for education. During the 1923 legislative session, the entire Board, including Fisher, was forced to resign. Members of the Legislature who had spearheaded the bill to transfer school administration back to the towns apparently felt that the Board was lobbying against their bill. The Vermont AAUW sent a letter to the governor protesting the passage of the bill. They decided that the time had come to take action in support of the rural schools.

At the June semi-annual AAUW meeting of 1924, Marion Gary held a seminar on the situation in Vermont rural schools. The Vermont AAUW decided to organize a state-wide campaign to increase the funding for rural school improvement in the next session of the Vermont Legislature.  

During the six month before the General Assembly, their campaign group, the Better District Schools Association, or BDSA, blanketed the state with 2000 posters urging support for the fund. A series of postcards depicting schools “before” and “after” standardization went to “representative citizens,” as Gary put it in her report. The AAUW enlisted the aid of local PTA’s, the Federation of Women’s Clubs, and other civic groups. And they had one of their own in the Legislature! AAUW member Mary Jane Simpson became one of Vermont’s first women legislators as the representative of Craftsbury in the election of 1924.

Because they brought their campaign to the townspeople, without whose pressure the legislators of that time would probably have balked at increasing state funding for any local project, they succeeded. In 1925, the Legislature allocated the full $30,000 that Commissioner Dempsey had requested to the standardization program. In early 1926 Commissioner Dempsey let it be known that over half of the funds were still unused.

AAUW members became his sub rosa ambassadors, sending letters to 100 town and district school chairmen. Demands for the funds increased. In 1921, very few schools met the criteria for a standard school. By 1926, there were 162 standard schools and 80 superior schools.

Eventually, Vermont AAUW members realized that the state was placing too much emphasis on the school building and less on the skills of the teacher. The rating system for standard schools, for example, counted the teacher’s skills and experience as only 18 out of 100 points. In 1927 AAUW members began to raise funds for summer scholarships for rural teachers and by early 1928 had managed to collect money for six $200 scholarships.

The Vermont requirements for elementary teacher certification in the 1920’s were quite low. A high school education would allow temporary certification, which was renewable after a certain amount of experience. Many teachers had only one or two years of teacher training.  Salaries were abysmally low; the average rural teacher earned less than $600 in the 1920’s and early 1930’s. Towns preferred to hire young women as teachers because they could be hired for approximately half of the salary that male teachers required. AAUW helped to remedy that by stipulating that fellowship recipients remain teaching in a rural school for at least one year. They were also required to spend two days per month assisting other rural teachers.

One may question whether Vermont AAUW members would have better served Vermont education by concentrating on the consolidation of schools rather than by shoring up the already dying one-room school system. The reality at the time was that most rural students walked to school and the poor roads in Vermont would have made it difficult to transport students to larger schools. Not until New Deal funding for road construction reached Vermont was it feasible to consider seriously the consolidation of rural elementary schools in Vermont. At that time Vermont AAUW members strongly supported the consolidation of schools.

In assessing these women’s contribution to Vermont and to the advancement of women in America, one must take into account some seemingly contradictory qualities. They were activists, but worked in the traditional way that nineteenth-century women had worked in campaigns for social and moral causes and the improvement of society. They were probably successful because they worked within the system.

They all knew each other; furthermore, they were all members of Vermont’s upper-middle class and had the confidence of the members of that class who dominated the political and academic worlds of Vermont. In addition to women like Fisher, Simpson, and UVM professors Sara Holbrook and Bertha Terrill who were leaders in their own right, the Vermont AAUW membership included the wives of many Vermont politicians and educators.

They used their advantageous positions brilliantly. The Burlington Free Press wrote editorials in their favor. (AAUW charter member Mabel Southwick was the daughter of the editor.) Fisher used her enormous popularity as a writer to publicize their work. Mrs. Dempsey (wife of the Commissioner of Education, Clarence Dempsey) acted as unofficial liaison between the Department of Education and Vermont AAUW. They solicited donations from their well-to-do friends and the support of leaders in their communities. They bombarded legislators with information on rural school improvements.

There were no radicals in this group; in fact, they came out against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1930’s. The suffragist movement had concentrated on the single issue of voting rights. When the nineteenth-century amendment passed, some leaders of the movement, as well as men in the political arena, expected that women would organize along the issues of women’s equity and form a solid voting bloc. This did not happen. Instead, women remained for the most part in their traditional roles, following the general trend toward conservatism in America in the 1920’s.

The members of the early Vermont AAUW were highly intellectual and strongly committed to social action and better education for Vermont’s children. They were keenly aware of their unique position as educated women and of the obligation to foster the education of others that accompanied this privilege. However, these women were also pioneers of women’s active participation in the political process at all levels of the state. They proved that women could be effective political activists and, in doing so, set the stage for the fuller participation of women in Vermont government and in academia.

Acknowledgement

Most of the content in this article is taken from a paper written in 1990 by Vermont History Student Sylvia Bugbee. She received a grant from the University of Vermont to organize the archived records of the first 50 years of AAUW of Vermont. These records are now stored in 11 cartons in the Special Collections Section of the Bailey Howe Library of the University of Vermont. 

I received a copy of the paper in 1990 through the efforts of Mariafranca Morselli, a botany professor at the University of Vermont and active legislative chair of Vermont AAUW. The paper also includes a section on the efforts of Henry Perkins (leader of the Vermont Eugenics movement) to ingratiate himself with AAUW. In the words of one AAUW officer: “Perkins was there — on his own invitation. He gave a short presentation, and was asked to leave.”

 

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