Dr. Susan May: a Life in Education

Dr. Susan May: A Life in Education

Nicole Hancock

HIST 321

December 1, 2011 Hancock 2

Dr. Susan May is currently an English professor at Longwood University. However, the journey to get to this place in her life was not easy and it involved many changes. Dr. May was influenced by many factors but most importantly her family. She has always loved education and has made a career out of it, and through education, she is involved in both schools and the community. Dr. May’s family has a strong background in education so she was always encouraged to attend school and have a career. For women to attend college or have a career was not always common or encouraged, but it was different for Dr. May. She came from a family of strong women and carried on the tradition by attending college and holding a full time job which was very different from other women in that era. Without her families influence, she may not have made the same choices, and her families background in education did have a major impact on her life and her career.

Susan May was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in the first half of the twentieth century.

She chooses to keep the year she was born private. Her father, Louis S. May, attended Franklin and Marshall College and then he attended the University of Michigan Law School. He became a lawyer and resided in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Frances Hartman May, went to

Wellesley College. Her mother had several majors at Wellesley before eventually settling on economics. After graduating, Frances had a job working as an investment counselor. However, the company made her sign all documents, F.A. Hartman, so that people would not know she was a woman. She always resented this because she felt it was unfair. After getting engaged to

Louis May, Frances moved to Baltimore to be closer to her fiancé and took a job teaching math.

Once married, the May’s resided in Lancaster where they had three children, two girls and a boy.i Hancock 3

Dr. May’s family has a strong background in education on both sides which has strongly influenced her life. Her maternal grandmother graduated from Wellesley College in 1894. ii Her father, Dr. May’s great grandfather, was the President of Franklin and Marshall College. After graduating from Wellesley College, Dr. May’s grandmother was “looking for something to do with her life, and what she began to realize was that there were very few opportunities for women to go to college in those days.”iii If they did go to college, she realized they were in no way prepared for it. So she started a school called Ms. Stahr’s School for girls to prepare them for college.iv

However eventually, Dr. May’s grandmother married Edward Hartman who was the

Headmaster of Franklin and Marshall Academy, a boy’s school. The two had children so she could no longer run her school because she was taking care of her family. Franklin and Marshall was a boarding school so she did help run the kitchens and other aspects of the school. However

Ms. Stahr’s School did not disappear, it was run by someone else and renamed the Shippen

School. Later during World War II, Edward Hartman had a heart attack and it was decided he was no longer capable of running Franklin and Marshall Academy. Also the school was taken over as barracks for the soldiers. So the best solution seemed to be that Franklin and Marshall

Academy and the Shippen School combined. They then became one school that was coeducational in 1943, and this school was renamed Lancaster County Day School. The school building remained where the Shippen School was.v

Along with her grandparents, Dr. May says on her mother’s side that “several people in each of these three generations went into college teaching.”vi Education was not just important on her mother’s side. On her father’s side, her grandfather went to Franklin and Marshall College and then seminary school. He was a minister in the Evangelical and Reformed Church. Her Hancock 4 grandmother did not go to college but studied music and learned to paint china. Her father’s sisters went to Mount Holyoke College while his brother went to Franklin and Marshall College.

In her family it was very common for women to attend Wellesley College in Massachusetts and for men to attend Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. vii

It’s apparent that Dr. May had a strong family background in education. So it is not surprising that education is a key theme in her life. As a child, she attended Lancaster County

Day School. She was very involved in her school and community. She was the President of the

Beta Sigma Society which was group that raised money for charities. After graduating from

Lancaster County Day School, she attended Wellesley College. She describes it as a family school because her grandmother, mother, and sister all went there as well. When asked about attending college in a time where many women were not attending college, she said it was “just assumed” she would attend college.viii Her father always told her “you can do anything you want.”ix She says she saw in other families where girls were not expected to go to college for a degree, but it was not that way in her family.

In 1950, only 17.9 percent of eighteen to twenty one year old women were attending college.x According to an article from Time Magazine from 1961, the percent of women of all ages in college went from 47 percent in the 1920s to 37 percent at that time, and only about half of those women actually got degrees.xi The President of Radcliffe College in 1961, Mary Bunting says that she believes women “grow up in ‘a climate of unexpectation,’ willing to be educated but convinced by ‘hidden dissuaders’ that they will not really use their education.”xii Bunting says that “adults ask little boys what they want to do when they grow up. They ask little girls where they got that pretty dress. We don't care what women do with their education."xiii

Essentially Bunting blames women not wanting an education on society and their family. The Hancock 5 environment the girls grow up in affected their decisions on what to do with their life. For Dr.

May, her family supported her receiving an undergraduate and graduate education, and so she never believed that she couldn’t do anything she wanted to do.

After graduating from Wellesley College, she had a degree in English, but since

Wellesley did not have a teacher preparation program she could not teach in public school. So she got a job at a private school in Minnesota teaching 7th and 8th grade English. She says “it was an adventure but scary at first.”xiv By “making her own way,” she gained a “sense of self confidence.”xv While in St. Paul, she volunteered to teach juveniles in the prison system how to read. After teaching in Minnesota for a short time, she decided while she enjoyed the school, she really wanted to teach “more mature subject matter.”xvi

She left Minnesota, and went to the University of Delaware to get her Masters Degree in

English. While she was there an English professor at Hood College passed away, and Hood

College asked the University of Delaware to suggest a replacement. They suggested Dr. May, but she turned them down because she wanted to finish her thesis. They seemed to respect this, and so when she finished her thesis, they offered her the job again. This time she accepted the job. So she went to teach English at Hood College, but this only lasted for a short time. xvii

While she loved teaching at Hood College, she left there to get her doctorate at the

University of Pennsylvania. While getting her masters at the University of Delaware, she described it as a “small program that was very receptive of women.”xviii However at the

University of Pennsylvania, they were not quite as accepting of women. This was the mid

-1960s, but the University had just hired only their second woman professor in the graduate program. This woman professor was well respected by the men and the university which is why they wanted her to have good students such as Dr. May in her class. However at the University, Hancock 6

“woman had hard time breaking in.”xix According to Dr. May, “women had to be really stellar to get hired” while the standards for men were not nearly as high.xx

Dr. May came to Farmville, Virginia in 1968 to teach at Longwood College. She came from the University of Pennsylvania as ABD, all but dissertation, but got her doctorate degree in

1974.xxi As a woman professor at an all girls school, she faced no discrimination. Longwood was a school with “high powered women scholars” who were “role models.”xxii In the English department at Longwood in 1968, there were seven female professors and eight male professors.xxiii There were several other departments that were very even in gender including business, math, psychology, and music, but some departments were very lopsided when it came to splitting by gender such as history, science, and physical education. There were seventeen male history professors and only two female professors. In physical education, there were thirteen female professors and no male professors.xxiv She said that she knows women in other departments faced more discrimination particularly in the male dominated ones like history, and that they were “slow to accept women.”xxv

At Longwood, there was another professor with the surname May. Dr. Robert D. May taught in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. She describes how most people thought they were related or married, and they had to always explain that they didn’t know each other before coming to Longwood College. They lived in the same apartment building, and their mail would often get mixed up. This became a problem on campus too. In 1984, the two got married, and Dr. Susan Harman May kept this name because she had the same last name as Dr.

Robert D. May. The average age of marriage for a white female in the 1950’s and 1960’s was twenty according to the Historical Statistics of the United States.xxvi Dr. May waited until she was much older to get married. This is most likely attributed to her amount of education. She had an Hancock 7

Undergraduate Degree, a Masters Degree, and her Doctorate before she got married. She was settled in a job at Longwood University that she would have for several decades before getting married.

As a professor at Longwood College, Dr. May was very involved in service to the school community. Much like her participation in her community at Lancaster County Day School and

St. Paul, she wanted to be involved and help others. At Longwood, she helped start the

Organization of Teaching Faculty. This organization was for the whole faculty to give them a place to discuss issues. They were able to have their “own voice in certain areas like curriculum and academic policies.”xxvii The problem with this group was that it met at night, and it became very difficult for the entire faculty to get together at the same time. So they changed meeting times and became a smaller group. Today, the organization is the Faculty Senate, and is still very active.xxviii

The women’s rights movement was fighting for equal rights for women during the 1960s and 1970s. In1970 when Betty Friedan retired from her post as the leader of the National

Organization for Women, she asked all women to strike on August 26th protesting working for men.xxix On the day of the strike, there were “parades and demonstrations in cities around the country.”xxx Protesting and fighting for women’s rights was quite common in this time period.

However when Dr. May describes the women’s rights movement, she says that not much happened in Farmville. As a small quiet town, there were not parades or demonstrations of women fighting for rights. This could be because as the home to an all girls school there was less feeling that women were discriminated against or because as a small town they felt it would not make a difference. Dr. May says that she supported the movement and felt women deserved Hancock 8 rights, and that if the movement had been active in Farmville she definitely would have supported it.xxxi

However once again, Dr. May’s family had a major influence on her view of the world.

Because her father and mother always believed she could do anything and supported her in getting an education and a career, she had a different view on the woman’s rights movement. She said “I was surprised it was even necessary because my own family culture was so different.”xxxii

She did not even think women’s rights movement was needed because she grew up in a family where women did have rights.

Dr. May’s life is greatly influenced by education. As a woman who attended three colleges, taught at two, and has her doctorate degree, she is very well educated. Her education is thanks to her family. By coming from a family with such a strong background in education, it is not hard to see why Dr. May was so confident in going to college and getting a degree. Not only is education important to her she has also been involved in her community. While her family has had a major influence on her education, they also influence her view on topics such as women’s rights. Dr. May is an example of a strong woman who never believed that she could not do anything she set her mind to. In a time where women were still seen as not as capable as men, she was able to get her college degree and a doctorate, and become a professor at a school for women. Her involvement in education and community has had a strong impact wherever she is, and she is a prime example of a woman who did what she set her mind to do. i Susan May, interview by author, conducted in Farmville, VA, November 17, 2011. ii Ibid. iii Ibid. iv Ibid. v Ibid. vi Susan May, email message to author, November 21, 2011. vii Ibid. viii May, Interview, November 17, 2011. ix Ibid. x Barbara Miller Solomon, In the company of educated women: a history of women and higher education in America, Yale University Press, 1986, Google Books. xi "One Woman, Two Lives." Time lxxviii, no. 21 (November 3, 1961): 68. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 29, 2011). xii Ibid. xiii Ibid. xiv May, Interview, November 17, 2011. xv Ibid. xvi Ibid. xvii Ibid. xviii Ibid. xix Ibid. xx Ibid. xxi May, email, November 21, 2011. xxii May, Interview, November 17, 2011. xxiii Longwood University Course Catalog, 1968, obtained from Susan May. xxiv Ibid. xxv May, Interview, November 17,2011. xxvi“Singulate mean age at first marriage, by sex, race, and nativity: 1880–1990”, Historical Statistics of the United States, (2006): http://hsus.cambridge.org/HSUSWeb/search/searchTable.do?id=Ae489-506 xxvii May, Interview, November 17, 2011. xxviii Ibid. xxix Gail Collins, When everything changed: the amazing journey of American women from 1960 to the present, New York: Little, Brown, and Co. 2009. xxx Ibid. p206. xxxi May, Interview, November 17, 2011. xxxii Ibid.

Works Cited

Collins, Gail. When everything changed: the amazing journey of American women from

1960 to the present. New York: Little, Brown, and Co. 2009.

May, Susan. Interview by author. Conducted in Farmville, VA. November 17, 2011.

May, Susan. Email message to author. November 21, 2011.

Longwood University Course Catalog. 1968. obtained from Susan May.

"One Woman, Two Lives." Time lxxviii, no. 21 (November 3, 1961): 68. Academic

Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 29, 2011).

Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the company of educated women: a history of women and

higher education in America. Yale University Press, 1986, Google Books.

“Singulate mean age at first marriage, by sex, race, and nativity: 1880–1990.” Historical Statistics of the United States. (2006): http://hsus.cambridge.org/HSUSWeb/search/searchTable.do?id=Ae489-506