06/11/2014

Educating the New Southern Woman: Speech, Writing, and Race at the Public Women's Colleges, 1884-1945

David Gold and Catherine L. Hobbs

Southern Illinois University Press (2014)

ISBN- 080933285X

Description : From the end of Reconstruction through World War II, a network of public colleges for white women flourished throughout the South. Founded primarily as vocational colleges to educate women of modest economic means for life in the emerging “new” South, these schools soon transformed themselves into comprehensive liberal arts–industrial institutions, proving so popular that they became among the largest women’s colleges in the nation, with a collective enrollment exceeding that of the Seven Sisters. This volume examines rhetorical education at all eight of these colleges, providing a better understanding of not only how women learned to read, write, and speak in American colleges but also how they used their education in their lives beyond college.