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"SENTIMENTALISTS AND RADICALS”: THE ROLE OF GENDER IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION IN THE 1930s
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
The Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate
School of The Ohio State University
By
Diana K. Moyer, MA. ******
The Ohio State University 2001
Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Patti Lather, Adviser
Professor Mary Leach Adviser Professor Leigh Gilmore College of Education UMI Number 3011122
Copyright 2001 by Moyer, Diana K.
All rights reserved.
UMI
UMI Microform 3011122 Copyright 2001 by Beil & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.
Bell & Howell Information and team ing Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Copyright by Diana K. Moyer 2001 ABSTRACT
This dissertation uses the work o f Elsie Ripley Clapp, a female progressive educator, as a case study to address gaps in the existing literature on progressive education. The study explores two interrelated areas; I ) the limitations of traditional categorizations of the strands of progressive education and 2) the position of gender in the historical construction of the progressive education movement. Of particular interest is what historians describe as the philosophical split between “child-centered” and
“social-reconstructionist” progressives that occurred in the 1930s. A significant feature of this split is that it is often drawn along lines o f gender with female educators categorized as “child-centered.” In addition to questioning the assumed polarization of these approaches, the study highlights how untroubled binaries of progressive education obscure how these concepts were used in school practice.
The work of Elsie Ripley Clapp served as a site for exploring the implications of the narrative construction of progressive education in the secondary literature. Operating from a child-centered/social reconstructionist binary, many historians have classified
Clapp as child-centered and presented her as an oppositional force to social reconstruction. She serves as a useful illustration of the exclusions produced by a
11 reliance on these categories- Clapp’s practice, like that of many progressive educators, exceeded the boundaries of the philosophical divisions that existed within progressive education.
Based on the analysis of the secondary literature and the work of Clapp, the study identified four key points of significance: 1) Thinking of the categories of child-centered and social reconstructionist as useful, but unbounded categories, rather than two mutually exclusive poles, opens up new possibilities for understanding the diversity of progressive practices. 2) The research on Clapp contributes to recent attempts to treat progressive education with greater specificity. Clapp points to the frequent disconnect between how progressive education played out at the institutional level and the more pragmatic approaches used in its application. 3) Problematizing traditional categories of progressive education intervenes in versions of the history of progressive education that feature men as social reformers and women as apolitical nurturers of individual children. In doing so, the study provides an example of the role of historiography in the ongoing production of sexual difference as a form of power. 4) The dissertation explores the possibilities for using feminist theory and cultural studies to inform the use of biography in education.
By highlighting the multiple discourses and expectations that inform teaching, the study provides an example of biography that retains agency while attending to issues of contradiction in teacher narratives.
in ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my adviser, Patti Lather for her support. Her guidance and
insightful comments added immeasurably to the project. I thank Mary Leach for her encouragement of my work in this area and her contributions on the significance of Elsie
Ripley Clapp. I also would like to thank Leigh Gilmore for her assistance.
I am grateful for the assistance of my writing group, Jill Lynch and Lu Bailey, for reading many sections of the dissertation and providing thoughtful feedback. I also am indebted to Lisa Weems for her support and the contributions she provided throughout the course of the dissertation.
I am deeply grateful to my parents, Paul and Kay Moyer, for always being there for me with their love and support. Thank you also to Kevin Carroll for his support of my goals and his unflagging encouragement and enthusiasm that has sustained me throughout my graduate work.
1 would like to acknowledge the assistance of Bette Weneck and David Ment at
Specials Collections, Milbank Memorial Library at Teachers College and of Katie
Salzmann, the manuscripts curator at Morris Library, Southern Illinois University.
This research was supported by a Graduate Student Alumni Research Award from
The Ohio State University Graduate School.
IV VITA
December 30, 1969 ...... Bom- Daytona Beach, Florida
1991...... B.Ph. Interdisciplinary Studies, Miami University
1995 ...... M.A. Women’s Studies, University of Cincinnati
1996- present ...... Graduate Teaching and Administrative Associate, The Ohio State University
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: Education Cultural Studies in Education TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page Abstract...... ii
Acknowledgments...... iv
Vita...... V
Chapters:
1. The contemporary search for origins in progressive education...... I
1.1 Critical theory’s historical excavation: Progressive education and social reconstructionism...... 4 1.2 Elsie Ripley Clapp: A case study in constructing the history of progressive education...... 9 1.3 Overview of methodology...... 10
2. Constructions of progressive education: Situating child-centered and social reconstructionist educators...... 15
2.1 Progressive education:A ji overview ...... 16 2.2 Progressive education in the 1930s...... 17 2.3 Progressive education and American progressivism: Amelioration and social control...... 20 2.4 Gender and the historical understanding of progressive education...... 3 5
3. History and the linguistic turn: Possibilities for the history of progressive education...... 42
3.1 History and poststructuralism: The impact of the linguistic turn...... 44 3.2 Women’s history after the linguistic turn...... 51 3.3 Possibilities for feminist history: Bridging the women’s history/gender history divide...... 61 3.4 Progressive education: A discourse analysis...... 67 3.5 Challenges to biography: The subject after the linguistic turn...... 75
VI 4. Disrupting categories of progressive education: Rethinking the child-centered/ social reconstructionist opposition...... 79
4.1 The effects of the child-centered/social reconstructionist opposition...... 80 4.2 Outside the child-centered/ social-reconstructionist binary: Locating diverse practices...... 81 4.3 Freedom vs. imposition?: Power in the progressive classroom...... 84 4.4 Opposition and the construction of gender...... 87 4.5 “Sentimentalists” and “Radicals”...... 88 4.6 Defining a progressive educator Representations of Elsie Ripley Clapp 92 4.7 Child-Centered and social reconstructionism: “Leaky” categories?...... 96
5. Elsie Ripley Clapp and the progressive ideals of community...... 100
5.1 Clapp as the “dutiful daughter” of John Dewey: Representing agency in feminist research...... 101 5.2 Elsie Ripley Clapp: Educational background and relation to the PEA 108 5.3 The Ballard School, 1929-1934...... 112 5.4 Arthurdale, 1934-1936...... 116 5.5 Arthurdale and the exclusions of community...... 121 5.6 “The Lady principal from New York”: Negotiating community/school relations at Ballard...... 128
6. Conclusions and implications...... 135
6.1 Future directions...... 138 6.2 Categories of progressive education and contemporary educational theory...... 138 6.3 Fictions of reclamation...... 143 6.4 Biography, narrative, and discursive analysis...... 144 6.5 Biography and discontinuity...... 145 6.6 Biography and agency...... 147 6.7 A double(d) reading of the categories of progressive education...... 149
Bibliography...... 151
vn CHAPTER 1:
THE CONTEMPORARY SEARCH FOR ORIGINS IN PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION
This dissertation uses the work of Elsie Ripley Clapp, a female progressive educator, as a case study to address gaps in the existing literature on progressive education. The study explores two interrelated areas: 1) the limitations of traditional categorizations of the strands of progressive education and 2) the position of gender in the historical construction of the progressive education movement. O f particular interest is what historians describe as the philosophical split between “child-centered” and
“social-reconstructionist” progressives that occurred in the 1930s. A significant feature of this split is that it is often drawn along lines of gender with female educators categorized as “child-centered.”' The heart of what follows is a questioning of the assumed polarization of these two approaches. Additionally, the study highlights how untroubled binaries of progressive education obscure educational approaches that do not fit into traditional categories of “child-centered” and “social reconstructionist.”
* Petra Munro “Engendering Curriculum History” in Curriculum: Toward New Identities, ed. William Pinar (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998) brought to my attention the importance of the child- centered/social reconstructionist split for understanding the relationship between gender and progressive education.
1 The cyclical nature of many school reform efforts have renewed interest in the historical roots of educational initiatives. " Contemporary educational issues such as the negotiation of tensions between the community and the individual, successful school/community collaboration, and the meaning of education for democratic participation has highlighted the need for a more thorough understanding of past struggles with these same questions. In the countless cycles of educational reform movements, progressive education stands out as one of the most enduring in its appeal to educators and continued impact on classroom practices. From its philosophical roots in
Rousseau’s Emile to its varying incarnations in the 1920s, 1930s, 1960s, and in contemporary reform school efforts, progressive education has a long and often contradictory legacy in its zeal to replace formalistic education with a sprit of innovation and experimentalism.^
The numerous philosophical differences that distinguished the many strands of progressive education are often lost under the deceptively homogenous sounding label of progressive education. Intelligence testing, Freudian influenced child-centered schools, and those arguing for increased control of schooling by educational experts have all been categorized as progressive education. The range of people and movements subsumed
“ On school reform see Frederick M. Hess, Spinning Wheels: The Politics o f Urban School Reform (Washington, D.C.; Brookings Institution Press, 1999). Examples o f the renewed interest in progressive education include Ellen Durrigan Santora, “Historiographic Perspectives o f Context and Progress During a Half Century o f Progressive Educational Reforms,”Education and Culture: The Journal of the John Dewey Society, 16, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 1-15 and Susan Semel and Alan Sadovnik, Schoolseds.. o f Tomorrow, ” Schools o f Today: What Happened to Progressive Education? (New York: Peter Lang, 1999) and Arthur Zilversmit, Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930-1960 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993).
David Tyack and Larry Cuban,Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century o f Public School Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). under this broad label has contributed to progressive education being criticized and
applauded from both the political left and right Although historians disagree upon the
extent to which progressivism impacted the functioning of the majority of public schools,
the first two decades of the 20*^ century reflected a significant shift in what was regarded
as “modem” education/
The number of innovations which occurred in progressive education in the 1920s
and 1930s and its dramatic rhetoric make this period ripe for reclamation and
denunciation by contemporary educators. Semel and Sadovnik, for example, explore
progressive experiments such as the Dalton and City and Country Schools to inform
current attempts at educational reform. For them, the histories of these schools “teach us
significant lessons about school leadership, community, shared decision making, and the
forces that affect school change.”^ In contrast, Ravitch sees progressive education as
attacking the academic mission of the schools. Reviving 1950s criticisms that placed
responsibility for all educational problems on progressive education, Ravitch describes
progressive education as promoting ideas that questioned “the value of a solid academic education for anyone.”^
This chapter will provide examples of how contemporary educators have drawn on the history of progressive education to inform their practice. Special attention will be
In Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York; Simon & Schuster, 2000) Diane Ravitch stresses the linkage between larger efficiency movements and their application to education. By 1920, modem/scientific/progressive education was equated with practices such as curricular differentiation, intelligence testing, vocational education, and centralized control of schools.
^ Susan Semel and Alan Sadovnik, “Lessons From the Past; Individualism and Community in Three Progressive Schools,” Peabody Journal o f Education 70 (1995): 81.
6 Ravitch,Left Back, 60. paid to critical theory as one legacy of the social reconstructionist movement of the
1930s. It will be argued that critical theory’s use of social reconstructionism fails to question the exclusions on which the category of social reconstructionism is based. This chapter will also fiame the dissertation by providing an overview of the methodologies employed and introducing Elsie Ripley Clapp as a site for understanding tensions in the history of progressive education.
Critical Theory’s Historical Excavation: Progressive Education and Social Reconstructionism
One distinctive effort at “excavating” the lessons of progressive education has focused on the social critique and reform efforts of educators in the 1930s.^ Educators such as Stanley and Giroux have argued that understanding the history of progressive education, particularly its vision of radical social change through educational reform and its connections to other progressive political movements, offers an important context for contemporary discourses of critical pedagogy.* As Giroux notes, critical pedagogy is often marked by a “historical amnesia” that leaves contemporary efforts isolated from past struggles. The 1930s critiques of social inequities potentially strengthens present struggles by providing historical examples of educators’ concerns for social justice. A
’’ Excavate is a word employed by Henry Giroux, Schooling and Struggle for Public Life: Critical Pedagogy in the M odem Age (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 5 to describe his explorations of progressive education in the 1930s. Other examples of works that argue for the relevance of 1930s social reconstructionism to current educational problems include William Stanley,Curricidum for Utopia: Social Recotistruction and Critical Pedagogy in the Postmodern Era (Albany, NY ; SUNY Press, 1992), Susan Roberts and Darrol Bussler, eds.,Introducing Educational Reconstruction: The Philosophy and Practice of Tran^orming Society Through Education (San Francisco: Caddo Gap Press, 1997) and Michael James, ed..Social Reconstntction Through Education: The Philosophy, History, and Curricula of a Radical Ideal (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1995).
* Stanley, Curricidum fo r Utopia. historical understanding o f progressive education serves to legitimate “forgotten
traditions of moral and public discourses that were part of pedagogical and political
struggles of the past.”^
For critical theorists, the faction of progressive educators known as social
reconstuctionism offers historical roots and valuable lessons for the future of school
reform. Beginning in the late 1920s, Teachers College faculty associated with social reconstructionism, (e.g. George Counts, Harold Rugg and William Kilpatrick), stressed the role of teachers and the schools in achieving social transformation. Believing that the US tradition of “rugged individualism” as expressed in laissez-faire capitalism and social competition was at odds with a global trend toward collectivism, social reconstructionists argued for schools that emphasized cooperation, social interdependence, and the individual’s responsibility to the larger social collective. The economic and social crises of the depression underscored the group’s belief that the US economic system had failed and was destined to be replaced by a collective, planned economy.
One of the most significant venues for social reconstructionist thought was the journal The Social Frontier which was published from 1934-1943. The introduction to the first issue is indicative of the contributors’ sense that the nation faced crossroads that would determine the future economic and social viability o f the United States:
In the years and decades immediately ahead the American people will be called upon to undertake arduous, hazardous, and crucial tasks of social
’ Giroux, Schooling and the Struggle fo r Public Life ^5.
Joseph Rowan, “The Social Frontier (1934-1943): Journals of Educational Criticism and Social Reconstruction” (PhJD. diss.. Case Western Reserve University, 1969) and C.A. Bowers,The Progressive Educator and the Depression: The Radical Years (New York: Random House, 1969). reconstruction: they will be compelled to make some of the grand choices of history, to determine in which direction they are to move, to make decisions which will deeply affect the life of their country for generations and indeed for centuries—decisions concerning the incidence of economic and political power, the distribution of wealth and income, the relations of classes, races, and nationalities, and the ends for which men and women are to live.^^
The influence of this challenge on progressive education was abbreviated by the changing
political climate of the late thirties and early forties. Critics cited 77îeSocial Frontier's
early emphasis on social cooperation and criticisms of capitalism as evidence of the
subversive nature of progressive education. Many of its contributors including Dewey,
Rugg, and Counts were listed inThe Red Network, Elizabeth Dilling’s infamous 1934
publication of 1300 individuals and 460 groups accused of promoting communism. By
the 1940s, social reconstructionism and progressive education were associated by many
with an educational approach that, at best, failed to instill patriotic values and, at worst,
advocated the overthrow of the American government
Social reconstructionism’s dramatic rhetoric of social transformation and its
decline in the face of red-baiting attacks most likely contributed to its renewed popularity
with educators seeking to develop radical curriculum theory in the political conservative years of the Reagan and Bush Administrations. The movement’s insistence on the
politicized nature of schooling and its potential for bringing about a new, more just social order resonated with current efforts to link schools with issues of social justice. Drawing on this potential of social reconstructionism, Stanley identifies the following similarities between social reconstructionism and radical educational theory:
" “Orientation,”The Social Frontier 1, no. 1 (1934): 3-4. They explore the political nature of schooling and how it often serves dominant social interests, hold to a conception of schools not simply as forms of institutionalized protection for discourses of domination but rather as institutional sites that contain the promise of counterhegemonic struggle, refigure the role of teachers from that of technicians and clerks to transformative intellectuals working towards social change and the common good, hold that all forms o f knowledge are ideologically constituted, stress the importance of ethical imperatives guiding transformative practice and the rejection of the idea that schooling is a neutral or radically relativistic social practice, and appropriate from both theoretical variants of American pragmatism and indigenous radicalism.
Social reconstructionism’s critique of economic inequalities and the transformative role it envisioned for educators made it an appealing historical legacy for critical theorists. However, this appropriation has not been without reservation. Both
Stanley and Giroux note the reconstructionists’ tendency toward uncompromising social engineering. Other educators have also drawn on the legacy of social reconstructionism while recognizing the limitations of the enlightenment philosophical and political tradition from which it emerged. Carlson, for example, draws on social reconstructionism in his attempt to reclaim a progressivism transfigured by postmodern critiques of democracy and progress.
Unlike many other writers who draw on the history of progressive education to find inspiration or to pinpoint roots of academic decline, Giroux attends to the larger question of how the meanings of key educational concepts change over time. His search for predecessors of critical theory in progressive educators is not merely to identify educators who pursued innovative solutions to social problems but is an attempt to
*■ Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren, “Introduction,” inCurriculum fo r Utopia: Social Reconstructionism and Critical Pedagogy in the Postmodern Era ed. William Stanley (Albany, NY; State University o f New York Press, 1992), xiii.
See, for example, Dennis Carlson,Making Progress: Education and Culture in New Times (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997). develop a historical approach to questions of democracy and citizenship. Giroux’s
observation that some of the most revered and assumed fixed terms in education, such as
citizenship and democracy, are indeed shifting signifiers is one example of the
importance of using history to illustrate issues of power and representation in education.
Progressive education’s tumultuous history and utopian rhetoric contribute to its
enduring popularity among historians and curriculum theorists. This interest can be
unproductive, however, when it takes the form of a search for heroes to emulate or
villains to blame. While Stanley’s and Giroux’s attempts to place their work within a
historical context are noteworthy, it could exacerbate existing problems within critical
theory. Feminist scholars have long criticized critical theory’s tendency toward
“prescriptive universalizing.”^*^ The interest in social reconstructionism risks reinscribing
liberatory theory as social engineering.
While this renewed interest in progressive education is a valuable trend for adding to our understanding of this period of American educational history, important areas
remain unexamined. For example, Stanley’s and Giroux’s attention to issues of language
in progressive education is selectively applied. Their appropriation of social reconstructionism rejects its authoritarian tendencies but fails to explore the exclusions
upon which the category is based.
More attention is needed to the exclusions that give meaning to the category of social reconstructionism. Social reconstruction’s coherence as a category carmot be removed from its opposition to child-centered progressivism; an opposition infused with
*■* Patti Lather, “Critical Pedagogy and Its Complicities: A Praxis o f Stuck Places,”Educational Theory 48, no. 4 (1998): 488. See also Elizabeth Ellsworth, Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy,” Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 3(1989): 297-324. 8 gender politics. For Lather, the task facing critical pedagogy is a “move away from
legislating meaning and toward contradictory voices, counter narratives, and competing
understandings.”^^ Such a move would entail a more complex look at the construction of
progressive education rather than using historical exemplars to legitimate one’s existing
practices.
Elsie Ripley Clapp: A Case Study in Constructing the History of Progressive Education
I use the work of Elsie Ripley Clapp, a female progressive educator, as a case
study to investigate the limitations of the accepted categorizations of the strands of progressive education. Although commonly classified as child-centered, her work draws on themes within both the child-centered and social-reconstructionist categories. The
focus on Clapp points to new ways of framing tensions within the progressive education movement and highlights the role of gender in shaping historical descriptions of the conflicts and successes of progressive education in the 1930s.
Bom in 1879 in Brooklyn, New York, Clapp made significant contributions to the progressive education movement in the 1920s and 1930s. As editorProgressive o f
Education from 1936-1939 and head of the Arthurdale homestead community schools,
Clapp became a prominent advocate of schools as community centers. Despite her accomplishments as editor and innovator in progressive education, Clapp remains largely unknown in the history of education. As will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3,
Lather, “Critical Pedagogy and Its Complicities,” 488.
9 Clapp serves as a historical site for understanding the tensions within progressive
education and their depiction by historians/^ This project explores how she constructed
her notions of child-centered education in relation to the Progressive Education
Association’s (PEA) debates over the question of schools as sites of social reconstruction.
Overview of Methodology
The methodology for the study draws from cultural history, poststructural
feminism, and discourse analysis. One area in which these theoretical influences converge is in the use of gender as a category of analysis in the history of education. At a basic level this means attending to issues of gender in one’s analysis, recognizing the gaps created when gender is ignored as a category in education and history.’* Earlier work in women’s history addressed this task through compiling the accomplishments of notable women to add to the existing literature. Although such an approach drew attention to the relative invisibility of women in numerous fields, it tended to homogenize
“women” as a category and leave existing constructions of knowledge unchallenged. The past few decades have seen a shift toward documentingproduction the of gender as a system of unequal power relations. Historical research’s role in analyzing gender is
Joan Wallach Scott describes the distinctions between a biographical approach and seeing figures as historical sites in Only Paradoxes to Offer (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1996). This approach will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3.
Joan Wallach Scott articulates this approach in the chapter “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis” in her book Gender and the Politics o f History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
Jane Roland Martin,Changing the Educational Landscape: Philosophy, Women, and Curricidum (New York: Routledge, 1994).
10 two-fold. First, history can be used to challenge reified notions of sexual difference as natural and fixed through the documentation of its changes and discursive construction.
A second approach is to document the role of historiography in constructing gender.
Building “historically specific knowledge about sexual difference” adds to our understanding of gender and challenges the role of disciplinary norms and discourses in its construction.'^
In addition to drawing on the publications of Clapp, the Elsie Ripley Clapp papers at Southern Illinois University, and PEA records from the Teachers College archives, the dissertation includes a discourse analysis of key secondary writings on the period including Bowers’sThe Progressive Educator and the Depression and Cremin’s
Transformation o f the Schools. Discourse analysis emphasizes textuality and how meaning is constructed through opposition and contrast. Scott (drawing on Barbara
Johnson) describes the importance of textuality in exploring the significance of texts relying on oppositions as follows:
Fixed oppositions conceal the heterogeneity of either category, the extent to which terms presented as oppositional are interdependent—that is, derive their meaning from internally established contrast rather than from some inherent or pure antithesis. Furthermore, the interdependence is usually hierarchically, with one term dominant, prior, and visible, the opposite subordinate, secondary, and often absent or invisible.^”
This attention to exclusions and hierarchy is particularly useful in exploring the categories of child-centered and social reconstructionism. Historians’ focus on the
Scott, Gender and the Politics o f History, 9.
^ Scott, Gender and the Politics o f History, 7.
11 opposition between these categories is significant because it is a sex-segregated division.
Furthermore, untroubled binaries of progressive education obscure how the various philosophies of progressive education were used in school practice.
In addition to adding to our understanding of progressive education, this dissertation argues for greater reflexivity in educational historiography. Methodological alliances with perspectives such as cultural studies, critical race theory, and feminist post structuralism can add to understandings of how meaning is discursively constructed within historiography. Educational biography is one area that holds considerable potential for new developments. While autobiography has been subject to considerable theorizing, the field of biography has been less engaged in questions of subjectivity and identity."'
My discussions of Clapp attempt to give a sense of her life and work without reducing her to a one-dimensional figure. Miller, for example, discusses the dangers of
“cheerful teacher research stories”: biographical vignettes that rely on a strong unified self and a triumph over adversity." Such an approach ignores discourses that shape identity and the contradictions and multiplicity of subjectivity. Another area of interest in biography is how the writer chooses to construct the experiences o f another into a story.
How do we fill in the gaps in ways that obscure tensions, reduce complexity, and feature ourselves as the unstated protagonist? Miller recommends exploring biography and
On autobiography see Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographies: A Feminist Theory o f Women's Self- Representation (Ithaca; Cornell University Press, 1994) andAutobiography attdPostmodernism, eds. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters (Amherst: The University o f Massachusetts Press, 1994). For an example of new work on biography in education see Craig Kridel,Writing Educational Biography: Explorations in Qualitative Research (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
“ Janet Miller, “Methodological Issues in Telling Women’s Lives,” Symposium presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, Louisiana (April 28, 2000). 12 autobiography as “moving portraits,” pictures that do not reify a subjects’ position as unchanging. In approaching Clapp as a site that reflects larger tensions in progressive education, I attempted to experiment with a biographical portrait freed from the impossible goal of accurately capturing the whole of a person’s life.
The dissertation will address the construction of progressive education beginning with a brief history of progressive education and its multiple strands in chapter 2.
Particular emphasis will be placed on progressive education in the 1930s and the debates and issues specific to the time. In addition to providing an overview of the movement, chapter 2 will address the different ways historians have categorized the movement and interpreted its significance. Chapter 2 will conclude with a discussion of the previous work on gender and progressive education on which this dissertation builds.
Chapter 3 discusses the theoretical influences and methodologies employed in the study, including discourse analysis and gender history. The methodological choices for the study are contextualized within larger debates in history and gender history surrounding the disciplinary implications of the “linguistic turn.” Drawing on the work of Joan Scott, an alternative approach to biography is presented for analyzing the work of
Clapp. This approach attends to agency and the constitutive effects of discourse by looking at her work in relation to larger debates in progressive education. These issues include the role of educators in social reform and the relationship between child-centered and social reconstructionist approaches.
Chapter 4 explores how the secondary literature on progressive education relies on opposition in framing the relationship between child-centered and social- reconstructionism. Two specific points will be presented as consequences of the reliance
13 on opposition. First, a child-center/social reconstructionist opposition obscures the range of approaches contained under each category and contributes to the invisibility of approaches that do not fall into either category. Second, the child-centered/social- reconstructionist opposition contributes to constructing gender in particular ways. The second portion of the chapter will focus on historians’ representation of Elsie Ripley
Clapp as a site where these two consequences of opposition and categorization converge.
Situated within the larger context of feminist theorizing of teacher life narratives.
Chapter 5 examines how historians have depicted Clapp in relation to Dewey. Also discussed is Clapp’s work at the Ballard and Arthurdule Schools and the questions it raises about progressive efforts to develop democratic communities. In conclusion,
Clapp’s complex role as both insider and outsider at Ballard and Arthurdale will be analyzed in relation to the challenges of creating biographical vignettes.
Chapter 6 explores the key points of significance for the study and its methodological implications for the history of education. The chapter also identifies possibilities for alternative uses o f biography in the dealing with issues of agency, representation, and power.
14 CHAPTER 2:
CONSTRUCTIONS OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION: SITUATING CHILD-CENTERED AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTIONIST EDUCATORS
A review of the historiography on progressivism since the 1960s reflects some of the larger shifts in approaches to the history o f education.* From Cremin’s early departure from uncritical celebrations of the education profession, to more recent attempts to incorporate knowledge of classroom practices, progressive education has been seen through multiple historiographic lenses. One goal of this chapter is to familiarize the reader with the multiple histories of progressive education and their relation to social history and radical revisionism. While this overview highlights points of difference in how historians have categorized progressive education, it is still a traditional historical narrative. The purpose is to present key concepts and events that have influenced our understanding of progressive education rather than to suggest that the history of progressive education can be contained within a single narrative. In closing, this chapter will also review the existing work on gender in progressive education that undergirds the study.
‘ Ellen Durrigan Santora, “Historiographic Perspective of Context and Progress During a Half Centurv of Progressive Educational Reform,”Education and Culture 16, no. I (1999): 1-15. 15 Progressive Education; An Overview
The progressive education movement was a diverse collection of people,
philosophical orientations, and agendas that began in the 1890s and continued in various
manifestations until the late 1940s and early 1950s. Certainly the influence of
progressive education extends beyond this time span. Some histories of education cite
Rousseau’s 1762 treatise on education, Emile, with its romantic conception of childhood
and emphasis on “natural” development as a beginning of progressive education.' Just as
one can find its roots reaching beyond the 19*^ century, variants of progressive education
continue to influence contemporary pedagogy and curriculum theory.
Cremin’s evocative 1961 categorization of progressive education as “scientists,
sentimentalists, and radicals,” continues to influence understandings of progressive
education." The progressive landscape for Cremin was dominated by 1) those who
wished to elevate education to a science through the use of testing; 2) child-centered
educators influenced by ideas of natural development of the child; and 3) social
reconstructionist educators. Despite the many differences that separated the various
strands of progressive education, some historians regard their opposition to the traditional
academic curriculum as a uniting feature. For example, Kliebard stresses the struggle of
three reform movements—child developmentalism, social reconstructionism, and social
efficiency—to gain dominance over each other and the traditional curriculum.'^
’ David Swift,Ideology and Change in the Public Schools: Latent Functions o f Progressive Education (Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, 1971).
^ Lawrence Cremin,The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961).
■* Herbert Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 (New York: Routledge, 1987).
16 Similarly, Ravitch’s dominant theme in her recent analysis of school reform is that
progressive education constituted an attack on the traditional subjects of learning and
intellectual rigor in the schools. Ravitch’s focus on the impact o f progressive education
on the curriculum leads her to group child-centered and social reconstructionist educators
together. Historians commonly highlight the social reconstructionists’ dismissal of child-
centered approaches as lacking a social philosophy. In contrast, Ravitch’s emphasis on
the decline of the traditional curriculum leads to a merging of these strands regarded by
Bowers and Graham as “oppositional camps.”^ At first glance, the collapse of these categories appears to be a promising challenge to a dichotomous representation of the
relationship between child-centered and social reconstructionist educators. Such a reading
is undermined, however, by the invisibility of female child-centered educators in
Ravitch’s book. No mention is made of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Caroline Pratt or
Margaret Naumburg. Child-centered education is discussed primarily in relation to the work of men who later identified as social reconstructionist (e.g. William Kilpatrick and
Harold Rugg). With women removed from the discussion, the debate becomes the internal struggle of social reconstructionists wrestling with potential contradictions between allowing “natural development” and educating for a new social order.
Progressive Education in the 1930s
For those interested in the PEA and progressive education, the 1930s represent an important p>eriod of transition. The 1930s also brought significant shifts in the leadership
^ C. A. Bowers, The Progressive Educator and the Depression: The Radical Years (New York; Random House, 1969) and Patricia Graham,Progressive Education: From Arcady to Academe (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967).
17 and philosophical orientation o f the organization and were the last years of widespread public support before the decline of progressive education in the 1940s. While some saw this time as a period of growth (for example, one scholar regarded 1932 as “the best year progressive education ever had; at least it was the most hopeful.’"^) others saw it as a time of divisive splintering of progressive education. It was during this period that social reconstructionism became an increasingly vocal element in the PEA.
Most historians locate the ideological differences that divided progressive educators in the 1930s within two key groups: child-centered progressives and social reconstructionist progressives. It is the tension between these groups that is the focus of this dissertation. Prior to the 1930s, child-centered progressives dominated the approach of the PEA since its founding in 1919. They were primarily educators at private schools who, although reluctant to endorse specific guidelines, promoted student self-expression and initiative, attention to theories of child-development, student-centered rather than subject-centered learning, and the schools as sites o f ongoing educational innovation.^
Innovations of child-centered educators targeted outmoded methods of instruction such as rote memorization that they saw as hindering natural development. Cobb describes the movement in 1928 as “a revolt of parents as well as o f educators against archaic forms which the new psychology is demonstrating to be unnatural to the child; and against the
* William Doll, “ A Re-visioning of Progressive Education,”Theory into Practice 22, no. 3 (Summer 1983): 166.
’ See Caroline Pratt,I Learn From Children (1948; reprint. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1970) and Agnes De Lima,The Little Red School House (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948) for descriptions of philosophies and curriculum in two progressive schools.
18 tyranny of a curriculum the content-value of which is as nothing in comparison with the
actual development of the child in ways wholesome, inspiring, and natural.”*
The hardships of the depression and growing criticism of the US economic and
political system impacted visions for what constituted progressive education. Promoting
the perspective of social reconstructionism, professors of education such as George
Counts and Harold Rugg challenged what they perceived as the individualistic, politically
noncommittal platform o f the PEA. Benne distinguishes the work of the social
reconstructionist from other depression era critics of the U.S socioeconomic system based on “their advocacy of a central role for programs and policies of educational institutions in achieving the deepening and extension of democratic values into the economic and social (ethnic, racial, and social class) relationships through participative planning.”^
Counts’ famous speech delivered at the 1932 PEA annual conference entitled “Dare
Progressive Education Be Progressive?” dramatically presented social reconstructionism as an issue with which the organization must contend. Counts urged the organization to abandon its fears of the “hogeys of imposition and indoctrination” in order to work toward a vision of social welfare. In addition to sparking new questions on the meaning
* Stanw ood Cobb, The New Leaven: Progressive Education and Its Effect upon the Child and Society (New York: The John Day Company, 1928), 25.
’ Kenneth Benne “Prologue: Social Reconstructionism Remembered” in Social Reconstructionism Through Education: The Philosophy, History, and Curricula of a Radical Ideal ed. Michael E. James (Norwood, NJ: Ablex E^iblishing Corporation, 1995), xxiii.
George Counts “Dare Progressive Education Be Progressive?” Progressive Education 9, no. 4 (1932): 259.
19 of progressive education, the role o f the scHrools in social change, and the future direction
of the organization, his challenge signaled tthe declining influence of the original child-
centered founders of the PEA.
Progressive Education amd American Progressivism: Amelioration asnd Social Control
The long history of progressive education, the range of its intellectual and
philosophical influences, and the dramaticaBly different forms it has taken all contribute to the difficulties in uniting it under a comprrehensive definition. As noted by one education scholar, “any discussion o f‘a provgressive education movement’ is a treacherous business, easily susceptible to false generalizations and misinterpretations.” ^ '
Realizing these difficulties, Cremin’s classic exploration of progressive education.The
Transformation o f the School, refuses the task. His preface states the following caveat for those desiring such unity: “The reader \will search these pages in vain for any capsule definition of progressive education. None esdsts, and none ever will; for throughout its history progressive education meant differennt things to different people, and these differences were only compounded by the resmarkable diversity of American education.”''
” William Wraga,Democracy's High School: The Co»mprehensive HighSchool and Educational Refonn in the United States (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 4.
Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation o f the Schocol: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), x.
2*0 Those more willing to attempt a definition of progressive education have
emphasized its focus on the pupil rather than the subject matter/'' Although this focus
captures progressive educators’ concern with the “whole child” rather than just
intellectual development, it presents progressive education as only a pedagogical
approach. Such a definition removes progressive education from the broader context of
changing social and economic conditions.
Cremin’s approach marks one of the earliest attempts to link educational reform with larger intellectual and social movements. By defining progressive education as
“Progressivism writ large,” Cremin situates progressive education within the context of pragmatism, political progressivism and urbanization. His goals were to add to understandings of this important period in American educational history and to counteract depictions of progressive education as a plot of educational professionals that was forced upon an unwilling and unsuspecting public. Writing in the early 1960s,
Cremin was not far removed from the vilification of progressive education that occurred in the late forties and fifties. Cremin’s focus on the inseparability of progressive education from the progressive movement challenges caricatures of progressive education as an abandonment of educational basics and allowing children to run wild based on pseudo-Freudian justifications. Cremin fully acknowledges the many faults of
David Swift,Ideology and Change in the Public Schools: Latent Functiom of Progressive Editcation (Columbus, OH: .A. Bell & Howell Company, 1971) and Susan Semel, “Introduction,” Schoolsin o f Tomorrow, Schools o f Today: What Happened to Progressive Education, eds. Susan Semel and Alan Sadovnik (New York: Peter Lang, 1999).
Cremin, Transformation o f the Schools, viil.
21 progressive education. He objects, however, to blaming Teachers College while ignoring the extent to which these educational reforms reflected broader social trends.'^
Progressive education is not simply an extension o f progressivism. Its advocates were not always part of larger progressive reforms, nor were political progressives always supportive of progressive education. There are strong connections, however, between these movements which speak to the larger longstanding American faith in schools as vehicles for social reform. Both progressive education and the progressive movement were part of a larger response to the dramatic changes in American life after the Civil War. An early example of the convergence of education with larger social reform efforts is Joseph Rice’s critical assessment of America’s schools that appeared in the Forum magazine from October, 1892 through June, 1893. Rice’s articles detailed the findings of his six month investigation which encompassed 36 cities and 1200 teachers.
Rice’s articles were a scathing indictment of America’s schools. Cremin summarizes
Rice’s findings as documenting a pervasive situation of “political hacks hiring untrained teachers who blindly led their innocent charges in singsong drill, rote repetition, and meaningless verbiage.” Rice’s bleak picture was not without exceptions, however. He noted the accomplishments of “progressive” schools that attempted to show the interconnections between subject areas and to incorporate the “new psychology” into their pedagogical practices. Cremin regards Rice’sForum series as a unifying catalyst for
Diane Ravitch,Left Back: A Century o f Failed School Reforms (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) is the most recent indictment of progressive education fora variety of educational problems.
Joel Spring, The American School, 1642-1996, 4"" ed. (New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 1997).
Cremin, Transformation o f the School, 5.
22 wide-reaching educational reform. “TThe progressive movement in education begins with
Rice precisely because he saw it as a «movement. It is this growing self-consciousness more than anything else that sets the progressivism of the nineties apart from its sources in previous decades.”'*
Rice’s attack on the existing stlate of education was propitiously timed with growing concerns with urbanization, iimmigration, and industrialization. The idealization of the yeoman farmer and the agrariam myth became increasingly incongruous with the emerging social and economic situaticDn.'^ Many saw the shift from small communities to industrialized urban centers as threateming social disintegration. Urban crime, poverty, conflicts between owners and workerss, and the growing heterogeneity o f the population due to a significant influx of immigramts signaled for some observers the need for direct intervention in the form of organized rreform efforts."” These reform efforts were characterized by an increased willingmess to use local and federal government as a source o f social regulation, a move away froran the language of natural rights to a more pragmatic approach, and an emphasis on educaticon as a solution to political issues."'
Cremin is fairly sympathetic to® reform efforts such as Rice’s call to separate the schools from politics. Reflecting broacfler concerns about control of civic life by self- interested politicians rather than the gr^owing class of professionals, educators called for
Cremin, Transformation o f the School 22.
Richard Hofstadter,The Age o f Reform (Newv York: Vintage Books, 1955).
Paul Violas, “Progressive Social Philosophy: Charles Horton Cooley and Edward AJsworth Ross,”in Roots o f Crisis, eds. Clarence Karier, Paul Vioolas and Joel Spring (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973.
Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in /America. 1889-1963: 'The Intellectual as Social Type (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1965. 23 the removal of politics from the schools.” Revisionist histories of education have
highlighted how this seemingly benign reform effort resulted in removing schools from
democratic control and into the hands of educational “experts.”
For example, one reform linked to Rice’s criticisms was the change in the size
and composition of school boards. Numerous cities reduced the size of their school boards from thirty to forty to boards comprised of seven or ten members. In addition to these reductions, election procedures and membership expectations shifted to exclude people who had previously been eligible for participation. The move from ward elections to city wide elections, for example, only allowed those with sufficient resources to get elected.^ The previously wide representation of all parts of cities narrowed to exclude those members from areas where people were regarded as “unsuccessful... intemperate...and who like weak and poor government.”'^ Those arguing for such changes did so in the name of efficiency and the elimination of personal and party politics from the schools. Cubberly asserted that “No surer means for perpetuating the personal and political evils in school control can be devised than the continuance o f the ward system of representation.”"^
In addition to excluding large blocks of the city from being granted representation, the expectations changed for a board member’s qualification. Rather than
“ Spring, The American School^ 1997.
^ David Tyack,The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974) and Spring, The American School.
Ellwood Cubberly, Publie School Administration, 3"* edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1929), 175.
^ Cubberly, Public School Administration, 175.
24 having citizens from a range o f occupations, it was argued that the board should only contain “men prominent throughout the city in business life...and in professional occupations.”'^ The open exclusion of “small shopkeepers, clerks, workmen at any trade” and persons from “undesirable” wards was ironically seen as freeing the schools from politics by placing decision making responsibilities in the hands of experts and business leaders. These changes not only dramatically narrowed community input into the schools but also strengthened the ties of business leaders to the schools. Reduced board sizes also increased the number of duties carried out by administrators and enhanced their status as professionals with specialized skills who would supposedly be free from political influence.
This strand of what was regarded as progressive reform in the schools was consistent with larger progressive attacks on the “ward boss” system of politics.
Progressive reformers saw local politics as corrupt, self-serving mechanisms that neglected the broader social welfare. Immigrants were targeted by reformers as making poor voting decisions and for perpetuating the power of local bosses.'^ Immigrants were stereotyped as unprepared for the responsibilities of democracy and as impeding progress.
Progressive era reformers’ efforts to “Americanize” recent immigrants intertwined their work inextricably with the schools. Schools became the key site for educating children in American language and culture. Urban schools were faced with the challenge of classrooms in which half a dozen languages were spoken. Although there
“ Spring, The American School, 256.
^ Hofstadter, The Age o f Reform.
2 5 are some cases o f systems employing bilingual teachers or, teaching in children’s first language (such as the German schools in Cincinnati), many schools enforced assimilation efforts by forbidding children to speak languages other than English. The schools also expanded their curriculum to include hygiene, manners, and other areas that reformers regarded as deficient in children’s home life. The school was seen as the institution that could address the perceived social problems of a diverse urban population.'*
The change in school boards and reforms aimed at immigrant populations reflected progressivism’s larger themes of efficient management by persons with specialized skills. Violas regards this as a feature o f the new liberalism, an ideological shift partially brought about by middle-class fears of poverty in the rapidly expanding cities and increasing immigration.'^ It was a form of democratic elitism which emphasized decision making and social plarming by experts or civic leaders for the benefit of society as a whole. Progress was no longer seen as inevitable but as the result of interventions such as government regulations and education. For Violas, the new liberalism was a mechanism of class interest and social control motivated by a distrust of
“the masses” to choose wisely within the freedoms of a democracy. Violas discussion of the new liberalism is consistent with the common assessment of progressive reform as an inherently conservative movement characterized by reformers’ attempts to foist middle- class values on those living in urban poverty.
Some education historians have dealt with the more disturbing social control aspects of progressivism by severing any connection between it and progressive
’* Spring, The American School.
Violas, “Progressive Social Philosophy.”
26 education. Zilversmit distinguishes the progressive education from the educational
reform groups and progressive movement reforms prior to World War Zilversmit
identifies three groups of reformers which he sees as contemporary to, but distinct from, progressive education: 1 ) those promoting vocational education to meet economic needs,
2) reformers interested in the assimilation of new immigrants and maintaining national unity, and 3) social efficiency reformers who were interested in centralization, standardization, and testing. He bases this division between progressive educators and other educational reformers on a contrast between individual as opposed to social needs:
While the movement to establish progressive schools, which developed at the same time [as other educational reform efforts], was also concerned with social goals, its focus was on meeting the needs of individual children. Dewey and his followers also wanted to accomplish social reform through schooling, but theirs was a distinct movement with its own agenda. Their first priority was to create schools in which children would find a nurturing environment that would allow them to develop their individual capacities.^ ^
I am sympathetic with Zilversmit's desire to separate progressive educators from educational reforms associated with the tracking of working class students into vocational rather than academic programs, testing being used to confirm racist beliefs of Anglo-
Saxon superiority, and using schools as tools of deculturalization. Unfortunately,
Zilversmit achieves this separation by de-emphasizing the larger social goals of progressive education. Ironically, the very strand of progressive education that is often belittled by historians, child-centered, is that which Zilversmit holds up as its central feature.
^ Arthur Zilversmit, Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930-1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 2.
27 Cremin is dismissive of child-centered varieties of progressive education that stressed individual rather than social needs. In contrast to Zilversmit, Cremin carefully documents Dewey’s protests of the individualistic tendencies of some varieties of child- centered progressivism. The above quote raises interesting questions about the extent to which one can divide progressive education from other educational reform movements.
If so, can this division only be made by erasing the extent to which some progressive educators identified their work with social change? Zilversmit’s distinction between social and individual needs is also relevant to the child-centered/social reconstructionism split within the Progressive Education Association during the 1930s. To what extent was the language of the child-centered strand of progressive education an attempt to distinguish themselves from earlier educational reforms? While I suspect this is a more recent development in historical accounts, one wonders whether a focus on the individual child was a conscious attempt on the part of child-centered educators in the 1920s to differentiate their goals from the more ominous forms of social engineering associated with their predecessors.
Zilversmit’s divisions between the reform movements remove progressive educators from the numerous other reform movements of the period. While an ethical advantage is gained by this separation, it seems to be only at the cost o f a division of social and individual that is inconsistent with the work of progressive educators such as
Dewey, Harold Rugg, and Elsie Ripley Clapp. It also neglects the shared philosophical and intellectual influences that united the many strands of educational and political reform.
28 Zilversmit’s efforts may be an attempt to ensure the relevancy of elements of progressive education to current schools by removing it from other, more problematic, reform movements. This effort contrast with works such as Roots o f Crisis in which the various reform efforts are united through the theme of oppressive social control. The volume contains important essays that seek to counter the work o f “liberal historians
[who] believed in the American dream of progress.”^" Rather than seeing educational history as one of progress, these authors believe educational history should begin with an assumption that this society is “not structured to enhance the dignity of man but rather fosters a dehumanizing quest for status, power, and wealth...and institutionally structured to protect vested interests.”^^ Written in 1973, this volume offered an important addition to histories that neglected the repressive features of schooling. However, distinctions between the different strands of educational reform appear inconsequential and often invisible in the face of the theme of unrelenting oppression. For example, the volume contains an essay on the sociologists Charles Horton Cooley and Edward Alsworth Ross immediately followed by one on Jane Addams. Both essays discuss the use of biological models for society that was common at the turn of the century. The essay on Addams and the one on Cooley and Ross stress how the belief in the organic society justified social control for the sake of social unity. It was in the name of an efficient social order that
Cooley and Ross argued for restricting immigration on the basis that the inferior intelligence and culture of Eastern and Southern Europeans would slow the progress of the nation. Cooley and Ross also argued for eugenics, and the use of schools to sort
Clarence Karier, Paul Violas and Joel Spring, eds.Roots o f Crisis (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973), 3.
“ Karier, Violas and Spring,Roots of Crisis, 5. 29 individuals into the social roles for which they would be “best suited.” The work of
Cooley and Ross serves as a chilling reminder of the potential consequences of efficiency and social planning.
The essay on Addams also connects her efforts at “social control” with her sense of society as an organic whole. It describes her racism and “fear” of immigrants. Section headings in the essay include “Manipulating the Masses” and “Diffusing Conflict”
Certainly, analyses of the settlement movement have shown that it was more than altruistic interventions into poverty. Settlement houses often ignored larger causes such as unfair labor practices and exploitative wages. Their solutions to structural problems were often individual one’s which stressed moral choices. “Charity” also served as a form of surveillance in which middle-class women assumed a right to access poor and working class homes and informed landlords and local officials of their observations.
Even so, these aspects of the settlement movement only give a sense of one portion of the range of practices that occurred.
One effect of the essays on Addams and Cooley/Ross is that their work seems to blur together as part of a larger “progressive” effort of social control based on fear and manipulation. Addams’ work is not faultless, it does seem, however, that meaningful distinctions can be drawn between her work and that of Cooley and Ross. This returns us to the original issue of how to distinguish the various strands of progressive and educational reform. Furthermore, how might such distinctions be made without losing the social dimension as Zilversmit did in his effort to extract progressive education from other educational reform movements? Lasch’s work on the rise of the new radicalism in
America and the emergence of the intellectual as “a social type” offers one way of
30 differentiating progressive reform.^ Lasch’s analysis describes the lives and work of
individuals such as Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, and Lincoln Steffens in his study of
the emergence of a specific relation of intellectuals to American society in connection
with early 20th century reform movements.
A helpful aspect of Lasch’s study is his illustration of the relations between the
new radicalism and the progressive movement without having the former subsumed by
the latter. Although he regards progressivism as being influenced by the new radicalism,
he sees it as a political movement. By contrast, the new radicals “were more interested in
the reform of education, culture, and sexual relations than they were in political issues in
the strict sense.Lasch uses the example of Jane Addams to illustrate this distinction:
Even those like Jane Addams who did not embrace socialism, and whose political position therefore has to be described, for lack of a better work, as “progressive” (or “liberal”), had more in common with socialists than with the kind of progressives one associates with the initiative and referendum, the campaign against the trusts and the crusade for “good government.
For Lascti, the new radicals were not a specific example of middle-class reform but a
reaction against it. The position of the new radicals was one of estrangement from middle-class American life. This alienation allowed them to try to look at social arrangements from other perspectives. It is this “radical reversal of perspective,” the attempt to align with those who had been marginalized, which Lasch sees as a distinguishing feature of the new radicalism.
^ Lasch,The New Radicalism in America.
Lasch, The Ne^’ Radicalism in America., xiv-xv.
^ Lasch,The New Radicalism in America, xv.
31 Lasch regards Addam’s efforts at Hull House as an attempt to connect the pursuit of knowledge with social engagement Rather than stressing the role of pragmatism in such an approach, Lasch sees this aspect of Addams’ work as indicative of a larger complaint of intellectuals against the isolation of education and middle class culture from the activities of daily life. Addams’ work in the settlement movement was motivated not merely by middle-class guilt or a desire to “reform” others but as an attempt to escape what she perceived as a suffocating middle-class isolation from life and social connection. Her writings reveal a profound sense of frustration at the cultural opportunities with which she was provided while simultaneously insulated from opportunities of engaging with the world on a level other than the aesthetic. Addams describes how “the altruistic tendencies of...daughters are persistently cultivated” but when she attempts to “right wrong and alleviate suffering” she is patronizingly dissuaded.^^ Although her writings contain a romanticization o f the poor as truly experiencing life rather than being mere observers, she also emphasizes a model of reciprocity for Hull House. Unlike many settlement reformers, Addams stressed Hull
House as a place in which people learned from one another regardless of social class. Her model of social action was based on workingwith community members rather than on an external imposition.’*
Pragmatism also plays an important role in distinguishing different strands of educational and social reform. Criticisms of Dewey and Addams that see them as part of
^ Jane Addams as quoted in Lasch,The New Radicalism in America, 36.
Regina Leffers, “Pragmatists Jane Addams and John Dewey Inform the Ethic of Care,”Signs 8, no. 2 (1993): 64-77 and Charlene Haddock Seigfned,Pragmatism and Feminism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
32 a larger middle-class effort to preserve the status quo often neglect the role of pragmatist
philosophy as an alternative to traditional liberalism. Gonzalez’s Marxist interpretation of
progressive education sees Addams and Dewey as serving to accommodate people to the
demands of monopoly capitalism. By working to reduce social conflict, Dewey and
Addams are regarded by some historians as preventing more radical economic and social
changes with essentially conservative, short-term interventions.^^
This reading is consistent with the tendency to see the shift from proprietary to
corporate capitalism that occurred between 1840 and 1940 as entailing a loss o f freedom
and increased alienation associated with the dramatic expansion of consumer culture.
Furthermore, this shift is also equated with the ascendance of American liberalism, a
tradition increasingly regarded in postmodern analyses as philosophically bankrupt.'*^
The current interest in historical alternatives to liberalism such as antimodemism or
socialism, are regarded by Livingston as reminders “of what might have been had not the
usurper appeared to steal their raiment and recast the genealogy of modem times.
Interpretations of Addams and Dewey that stress their role in furthering capitalist
exploitation by ameliorating conflict are consistent with these approaches concerned with
“what might have been.”
The above discussion illustrates the range of interpretations of the political and educational significance of progressive education. Parallel with the reinterpretation of
^ See for example Violas, “Progressive Social Philosophy,” and Gilbert Gonzalez,Progressive Education: A Marxist Interpretation (Minneapolis: Marxist Educational Press, 1982).
■” James Livingston,Pragmatism and the Political Economy o f Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (Chapel Hill: University o f North Carolina Press, 1994).
■“ Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 126.
33 political progressivism as an essentially conservative social movement, revisionist educational historians in the 1960s and 1970s regarded educational reforms during the progressive era as attempts to forcibly “Americanize” immigrants, impose increased social regulations on growing urban centers, and use educational experts to subvert community control of schools.^^ Their work interrupted narratives o f educational progress in which the schools ensured equal opportunity for all students/^ Unilaterally equating progressivism with social control fails to distinguish its multiple strands.
Progressive reformers addressed the conditions of tenements, child labor, monopolies, impure foods, dangerous working conditions, and collaboration of government and business interests. The leaders and writers associated with the movement included those sympathetic with socialist goals as well as more moderate and liberal progressives. The view of progressives as fearful o f the powerful interests that they were between—the seemingly uncontrolled power of the monopolies on the one side and the labor unions and poverty-stricken “masses” on the other— fails to distinguish the different goals and consequences of the movement
More recent scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s shows increased attempts to draw from both traditional and revisionist accounts of progressive education to acknowledge its complex and often contradictory influences, goals, and consequences. Recent scholarship attempts to treat the topic with greater specificity and to better “understand progressive non-uniformity in relation to location, place, and local social and cultural
Karier, Violas and Spring,Roots of Crisis.
Diane Ravitch,The Revisionists Revised (New York: Basic Books, 1978) saw this issue of historical interpretation as a battle between public schooling as social progress, social mobility, and democratic promise or as promoting the interests o f an elite and reinforcing class differences. Ravitch regarded revisionists’ interpretations of schooling as an attack on the democratic-liberal tradition. 34 forces.”^ Such efforts contribute to an understanding of the history of educational reform that goes beyond stories of either unimpeded progress or pervasive social control. This movement toward greater specificity in the understanding of progressive education speaks not only to greater attention to the complexity of one of the most significant educational reform movements but also to its contemporary relevance.
Gender and the Historical Understanding of Progressive Education
There has been surprisingly little attention to issues of gender given the prodigious amount of historical analysis of progressive education. Numerous books and articles are available on significant women involved in progressive education (e.g.
Caroline Pratt, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, and Margaret Naumburg) but few works address how progressive education contributed to the construction of gender as a system of representation and power. The following discussion will address work that has explored the role of teachers in progressive pedagogy and challenged ideas of progressive education as “natural” development.
An early effort to include women in the discussion of progressive education is
Biklen’s work on the contradictions between progressive educators’ professed social commitments and their disregard for women’s struggles for suffrage and equal educational opportunities in the early 1900s. She also emphasizes the role of progressive education in the 1920s in reinforcing gender roles. In her discussion o f the curriculum in several progressive schools such as the Lincoln School and the City and Country School
Susan Semel and Alan Sadovnik, eds..Schools o f Tomorrow, Schools of Today: What Happened to Progressive Education? (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), xiii.
35 in New York, Biklen points out that while the schools were progressive in the greater
freedom allowed students and the absence of a strict subject-centered curriculum, the
activities in which the children engaged were fairly sex-stereotyped. For example, an
observer at the City and Country School in New York reported: “Two little ladies are
keeping house within a hand made wall. Boys are performing engineering stunts with a train at the other end of the room."^^ Given the progressive focus on child-directed activity, one might interpret this as a matter of student choice rather than teacher direction. As pointed out by Biklen, however, socialization goals were commonly tied to play activities in progressive schools, socialization which prepared children for traditional gender roles.
Biklen’s work is also significant in connecting the tensions between a child- directed and teacher-directed focus in progressive education to issues of gender. In this early article, Biklen begins to note the conflict between the progressive commitment to the development of each child’s potential and using play as a socialization tool for pre determined social roles. “Natural” development was frequently the subject of careful guidance and planning. Children would learn while thinking they were merely engaged in play.
The irony of “natural” development as the site of control and regulation is explored in Walkerdine’s work on education and gender. Drawing on Foucault,
Walkerdine explores the construction of femininity as a manufactured fiction that becomes inscribed as a reality of sexual difference. She juxtaposes femininity’s status as
Sari BCnopp Biklen, “The Progressive Education Movement and the Question of Women, "Teachers College Record 80, no. 2 ( 1978), 322-323.
36 a construct with its cultural power to naturalize hierarchical relations between men and women: “How can it be that femininity is a fiction and yet lived as though it were real, felt deeply, as though it were a universal truth of the psyche?”^ For Walkerdine, the answer to the question is not merely in gender role socialization. She turns to discourse as a means of engaging with the multiple systems of meaning that construct one’s subjectivity as a woman and which operate through such institutions as schools.
Institutions and social practices serve not only as regulatory mechanisms but also as linking mechanisms between fictional identities and “the materiality of the social world.
Another significant feature of Walkerdine’s work is her attention to how particular subject positions (e.g. teacher or woman) cannot be reduced to a set location in relationships of power. Critical studies of education often regard the teacher as holding all the power. Classroom dynamics are reduced to a struggle between the repressive power of the teacher and the students’ desire for expression. These static roles look differently, however, when one attends to the ways that progressive education reproduces male/female, active/passive dualisms. For Walkerdine, the child of progressive pedagogy is the male child whose “natural” development is inseparable from his opposition to the passive female teacher.
She presents a segment o f a transcribed interaction between a nursery school teacher and two four-year-old boys. One of the boys attempts to take a lego from a three year old girl. She resists and the boy calls her a “stupid cunt.” When the teacher
Valerie Walkerdine,Schoolgirl Fictions (London; Verso, 1990), xiii.
^Walkerdine,Schoolgirl Fictions, xiii. 37 intervenes the two boys tell her to “get out of it” and make numerous taunts about her
taking her clothes off: “Miss Baxter, show your knickers your bumoff” ‘Take all your
clothes off your braoff” When Walkerdine and Ms. Baxter later discussed the incident
the teacher provided the following explanation: “That kind of expressions are quite
normal for this age...As long as they’re not being too silly or bothering anybody, it’s just
natural and should be left., .coming out with that kind of expression is very natural.” The
boys’ language placed both their three year old class mate and the teacher in similar
positions as sexualized objects. Progressive education can place a teacher in an
impossible position in which she is either silenced or seen as repressing natural
development.
By seeing education as either permitting or preventing natural expression, the
focus remains on individual experience of children rather than on how different
discursive forces shape classroom practice. The disturbing language of the boys is
naturalized as mere playful resistance (and thereby affirmed within the progressive
tradition) and divorced from a larger social context of gender discourses.
Walkerdine’s analysis illustrates that the teacher and student cannot be placed in a
static power relation in which the teacher is always dominant. She states that
“understanding the individuals not as occupants of fixed, institutionally determined
positions of power, but as a multiplicity of subjectivities, allows us to understand that an
individual’s position is not uniquely determined by being ‘woman,’ ‘girl’ or ‘teacher.
Just as Walkerdine stresses the shifting nature of how one is positioned by various
discourses, she rejects linear or causal notions of determination. She does, however.
■”* Walkerdine,Schoolgirl Fictions, 14. 38 underscore the importance of economic and material factors. The female body does not determine a particular subjectivity but the body has come to signify particular things that limit discursive p>ossibilities- Certainly the link between discourse and the material can also be seen in the long-term economic discourses for girls positioned within the schools as less capable in math and science.
Walkerdine’s analysis of how progressive education contributes to the fiction of femininity is continued in Munro’s work on “engendering” curriculum history. Munro’s focus is on “how narrative structures of curriculum histories are implicated in the construction of gendered subjects.”^^ She calls for more work on progressive education that explores how the discourse of child-centered education served to reinforce gender norms. To Munro, educators’ and historians’ dismissal of child-centered educators as apolitical served as one means of maintaining gender boundaries. It this provocative analysis of the relationship between child-centered and social reconstructionist educators that served as the foundation for the dissertation.
One danger in analyzing the role of educational discourses in the construction of sexual difference is portraying women as victims of all-encompassing systems of oppression. For example, Walkerdine’s work contains tensions between her attempt to avoid deterministic, causal explanations for social inequities while not overstating the fluidity of subject positions. At times, Walkerdine refers to patriarchy, a system of oppression that seems incompatible with her focus of multiple subjectivities and more fluid relations of power. Her psychoanalytic readings also seem to rely on a male/female
■*’ Petra Munro, “Engendering Curriculum History ,” in Curriculum: Toward New Identities, ed. William Pinar (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 264.
39 opposition, a dualism that downplays differences among women and can reinforce heteronormativity/^ Similar problems arise in Munro’s reduction of progressive education as a means to control women; “How the discourse of ‘child-centered’ functioned to regulate gender norms to keep women in their place is revealed in the primary ‘battle’ of the progressive era between the child-centered and social reconstructionist factions.”^^ Such an interpretation raises questions about the dangers of substituting the child-centered/social reconstructionist opposition with an even more reductive “battle of the sexes.”
The work of Walkerdine and Munro shows the difficulty in challenging monolithic, oppressor/victim models while still retaining a sense of social inequality based on gender. The fiction o f woman seems elusive in its multiple and often contradictory discursive manifestations, yet, no less powerful. As posed by Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson the problem is one of developing a form o f social critique that “is robust enough to handle the tough job of analyzing sexism in all its endless variety and monotonous similarity.”^^ The relations between schools and the construction of gender as presented by Walkerdine are caught in this tension between monotony and difference.
At times, she depicts schools as sites of expanded possibilities for rewriting the “fiction” of narrowly regulated femininity/masculinity. Schools are also depicted by Walkerdine
See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Teresa de Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness,”Feminist Studies 16, no. I (1990): 115-150 on the problems associated with defining women in opposition to men.
Munro, “Engendering Curriculum History,” 281.
^ Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, “Social Criticism without Philosophy,” Feminismin Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 34. 4 0 as the location for the reproduction of girls as the irrational “other^ without regard to
specificity.
This dissertation attempts the task o f acknowledging the force o f normalizing
gender discourses without seeing them as determinative. The discourses of child-
centered education should not be read simply as a conscious effort to oppress women—a
reading that risks seeing gender as a “timeless binary opposition of sexual antagonism.”^"*
This does not, however, negate the fact that education histories are often highly gendered
narratives. The discussion in the following chapters attempts to analyze how the
categorizations of progressive education contribute to fixed notions of gender while also
recognizing the multiple and shifting significations o f “sexual difference.”
® Denise Riley, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category o f “Women" in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988), 7. 4 1 CHAPTER 3:
HISTORY AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN: POSSIBILITIES FOR THE HISTORY OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION
A detailed description of one’s methodology and theoretical influences is generally absent in a traditional history dissertation. Despite the contentious debates over objectivity, the impact of postmodernism, and compartmentalization based on ethnicity that have occurred over the past ten years, positioning one’s project and methodology within the context of these shifts is often neglected. While historians do not ignore all such issues and pursue their work according to Ranke’s exhortation to ‘‘simply show how it really was,” there continues to be a reluctance to discuss the impact of one’s theoretical assumptions and to engage with questions of representation and textuality. As noted by
McDonald, many historians are “more proficient at boundary maintenance—identifying what is ‘not history’—than at theorized reflection on their own practice.”'
A recent summary of the dominant themes at the Spencer Foundation conference on new directions in the history of education made no mention of the possibilities and challenges of poststructuralism and the “linguistic turn” for the field." Such an absence is a lost opportunity for increasing the methodological reflexivity of the history of education
' Terrence J. MacDonald, ed., “Introduction,” inThe Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor The University of Michigan Press, 1996), 7.
’ Ruben Donato and Marvin Lazerson, “New Directions in American Educational History: Problems and Prospects,” Educational Researcher 29, no. 8 (2000): 4-15. 42 and to attend to a sense of “historical epistemology” which explores the analytical
practices and the construction of theory in the discipline/ Until there is greater attention
to questions of the production of historical knowledge, “poststructuralism will appear
opaque, esoteric, and irrelevant”^ Additionally, more concrete applications of
poststructural analysis are needed in education to show its relevancy to the field.
In this chapter I will define the strands of thought that have influenced the
“linguistic turn,” their implications for both history and women’s history, and their
impact on the dissertation. The methodologies and theoretical influences for this project
include cultural studies of education, qualitative research, cultural history, and gender
studies. One advantage of this diverse range of influences is that newer, interdisciplinary
fields such as gender studies and cultural studies have allowed for more innovation and
eclecticism in their theorizing as compared to fields with more established disciplinary norms.^ After situating the dissertation within these more general theoretical debates, I will explore the specific methodological strategies used. This discussion of the specific methodological strategies employed will deal with the use of discourse analysis in exploring the existing historiography on progressive education and analyzing Elsie
Ripley Clapp as a “discursive site” rather than as a traditional biographical subject.
’ Margaret Somers as quoted in Terrence McDonald, “Introduction,” Thein Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terrence McDonald (Ann Arbor The University of Michigan Press, 1996), 7.
■* Mark Poster, Cultural History and Postmodeniity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges (New York; Columbia University Press, 1997), 6.
* Geoff Eley, “Is All the World a Text? Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later” in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terrence MacDonald (Ann Arbor TTie University of Michigan Press, 1996).
43 History and Poststructuralism: The Impact of the Linguistic Turn
History, like other disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, has been deeply affected by the shift in ideas of knowledge and social inquiry that have occurred in the past two decades. The questioning of meta-narratives, of foundational concepts of truth, and of the possibility of a “god’s eye view” of comprehensive, objective knowledge has raised new questions for historiography. Postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction are all terms that have been used to define the historical moment of these shifts or to identify a precipitating cause.
The scholarship surrounding the impact of poststructuralism on history has ranged from heralding the transformations it promises to regarding it as a nihilistic destruction of the discipline. While the full implications of post-structuralism for the writing of history remain to be seen, outright dismissal forgoes potential tools for analyzing issues of language and representation.^ O f particular interest are the consequences of the linguistic turn: “the conviction that all human cognition is inescapably verbal or textual,” for historiography.^ It has represented a challenge to notions of language as an uiunediated reflection of reality and presented new questions regarding the historian’s task.
A variety of strands of thought have influenced this concern with the constructive rather than reflective features o f language. The work of Lacan, Nietzsche, Derrida and
Foucault are just some of the philosophical influences that have shaped facets of what is
® Beverly Southgate, History: What and Why (London; Routledge, 1996).
’ John Patrick Diggins, The Promise o f Pragmatism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 435. 44 broadly regarded as the linguistic turn. In applying this shift to history, the discussion
will touch briefly on the strands of the linguist turn represented by Michel Foucault and
Jacques Derrida.
Derrida’s work challenges not only structuralist assumptions about language but
also the metaphysics of Western philosophy and epistemology. He explores the tensions
within this philosophical tradition by exploring the “ruptures” which defy structuralist
containment- InOf Grammatology, Derrida extends the implications of Saussure’s
assertion of the arbitrary connection between the signified and signifier. Saussure argues
that signifiers have meaning not because of a natural relationship to the signified but
because of the difference from other signifiers in the system of language: “Since one
vocal image is no better suited than the next for that it is commissioned to express, it is
evident, evena priori, that a segment of language can never in the final analysis be based
on anything except its noncoincidence with theArbitrary rest. anddifferential are two correlative qualities.”*
Derrida argues that Saussure is still contained within Western logocentrism: a faith in the possibility of language to definitively represent the world. To move beyond logocentrism is to abandon the possibility o f a “transcendental signified” (such as Truth,
God, etc.) that serves to stabilize meaning. It is this realization that meaning through language is continuously deferred, never grounded in a connection with the “real” that serves as a central feature of the linguistic turn. For Derrida, this release from the search for meaning outside of language opens possibilities for the “play” of language. He states:
* Ferdinand de Saussure, “Course in General Linguistics,” Criticalin Theory Since 1965, eds. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: State University o f Florida Press, 1986). 45 This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse—provided we can agree on this word— that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.^
For Derrida, there is no escaping language as mediating our experiences of the
world. This perspective is often equated with his (in)famous claim that “there is nothing
outside of the text” and has encountered resistance from historians on the political left
and right as a denial of material reality. As pointed out by Cornell, it makes more sense
to view this statement as recognizing that “everything is a text because everything
experienced by humans must be decoded and interpreted....all human interactions are
mediated by the pervasiveness of textuality.”"
The implications of this textualism for history are significant. It removes the
possibilities of grounding meaning in “authorial consciousness or context.”" Derrida’s
work raises questions about the hierarchies and suppressions used in historical narratives
in order to represent the past in a definitive way. Derrida’s work also challenges the
distinctions between text and context upon which traditional history and social theory has
^ Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,”Critical in Theory Since 1965, eds. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee; State University o f Florida Press, 1986), 84-85.
Saul Cornell, “Splitting the Difference: Textualism, Contextualism, and Postmodern History,”Américain Studies 36 (1995): 757-808.
" Cornell, “Splitting the Difference,” 58.
Cornell, “Splitting the Difference,” 58.
46 relied. For some, these challenges have belittled attempts to represent the past,
relativized knowledge, and erased the notions of cause and effect that give meaning to
history and social theory.
By contrast, Dominick LaCapra regards the blurring o f the text/context distinction
as addressing the reductionism he associates with empirical, archival research. “The notion of context may even serve as a way to get around texts and the problem of
interpreting or reading them other than in reductively documentary ways...it diverts attention from the way ‘documents’ are themselves texts that ‘process’ or rework
‘reality” and require a criticalreading.” As framed by LaCapra, the move away from situating the text within the real necessitates increased reflexivity and analytic skills rather than the escape from rigorous scholarship.
This move to what Rorty refers to as “strong textualism” is also characteristic of the work of Michel Foucault. Writings such as The Archaeology o f Knowledge represented a break with traditional history of ideas approaches and the work of the
Annales School. His genealogical approach highlights the discontinuities of history.
Rather than recovering origins within history, genealogy functions to “dispel the chimeras of the origin.”'^ Like Derrida, Foucault is interested in language’s constitutive relation to social relations and knowledge. Truth for Foucault is not a correspondence
Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob,Telling the Truth about History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994) and Cornell, “Splitting the Difference.”
Appleby, Hunt, Jacob, Telling the Truth about History.
LaCapra as quoted in Cornell, “Splitting the Difference,” 61.
** Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” inThe Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 80.
47 with reality but a “system o f ordered procedures for the production, regulation,
distribution, circulation, and operation of statements.”*^ This process of the production of
truth is inseparable from the operation of power. Consequently, the pursuit of objective
knowledge is not a protection against ideological imposition but a regulatory discourse.
Grenz describes the consequences for the historian as an undermining of claims of neutrality:
The historian’s seemingly neutral attempt to leam the truth about the past is merely a mask for the “will to knowledge.” This will to knowledge/power is evident in the way historical narratives invariably exclude certain objects while “privileging” (i.e., focusing on others), says Foucault. It shows itself likewise in the tendency of historians to smooth out heterogeneous elements in order to secure the appearance to homogeneity in history and to advance the semblance of historical progress.**
Joan Wallach Scott is a prominent example of a historian whose practice has been markedly changed by the work of Derrida and Foucault. Scott uses the work of poststructural theorists to explore questions about the historical creation of the past As described by Scott Foucault’s notion of the inseparability of power and knowledge and
Derrida’s method of deconstruction assist her in conceiving of a historiography which is reflective of its “paradoxical position of creating the objects it claims to discover.”*^ This involves abandoning a positivist project of objectively describing history as it “really happened” and attending to the ways that historiography is complicit in the legitimation
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 74.
** Stanley Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 131.
Scott as quoted in Avner Segall, “The ‘New’ History and the Educational Imagination” (Unpublished paper, 1997), 2.
48 of power differences. Scott calls for historical narratives that would simultaneously
provide knowledge about the past and highlight the processes by which historical
narratives are produced. Narratives would include recognition that historical knowledge
‘‘is conflictual, political, [and] that certain themes are constructed through the exclusion
and suppression of others.""^
Scott’s marked optimism in the theoretical and political possibilities provided by
poststructuralist theory does not characterize the discipline as a whole. The idea of the
indeterminacy of language and inherently political nature of historical construction has
for some historians marked a problematic shift in the discipline. Himmelfarb argues that
seeing history as a narrative construction has allowed historians to impose their own
political agenda on the people and events of the past. She states:
The assumption that race, gender, and class are, and always have been, the basic determinants of history deconstructs the past not only as historians have known it but, in many cases, as contemporaries knew it This is why the concept of “indeterminacy” is so useful. It is only by making the past indeterminate, making it atabula rasa, that historians can impose upon the past their own determinacy."^
Himmelfarb’s “reflections on the new history” does not adequately distinguish her criticisms of the use of literary theory and deconstruction from her concern with ideological imposition. She regards race, class, and gender as monolithic frames that are imposed on all readings of the past. Yet, the use of such monolithic categories in creating ahistorical narratives of social control is precisely what many “new historians” have
Elaine Abelson, David Abraham, and Maijorie Murphy, “Interview with Joan Scott,”Radical History Review 45 (1989); 50-51.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Some Reflections on the New History,”American Historical Review 94 (1989): 668. 4 9 utilized deconstruction to avoid. Ironically, Himmelfarb accuses historians employing
deconstruction of reifying the very social categories that critics on the left have criticized
them for abandoning.
Palmer’s Descent into Discourse is an oft-cited example of the Left’s criticisms of
poststructuralism. “Descent into discourse” is Palmer’s phrase for the linguistic turn.
Although he believes that attention to discourse and the influences of literary theory have
much to offer historians. Palmer argues that language has become an exclusive focus at
the expense of materialist analyses. He distinguishes his own position on the linguistic
turn as a refusal of “all that is lost in the tendency to reify language, objectifying it as
unmediated discourse, placing it beyond social, economic, and political relations.”^
Palmer, like Appleby, Hunt, and Jacobs, objects to the loss of foundational categories of social analysis such as class to give meaning to historical developments. To see class as a historian's creation rather than as an entity reflecting economic relations and a specific form of consciousness is to forfeit the explanatory potential of historical materialism.
Palmer also sees the “descent into discourse” as indicative of a larger retreat of academics— both from attempts to appeal to a mass audience, from the challenges of careful empirical work, and from political engagement.
Many of the debates concerning the implications of the linguistic turn for the practice of history take the same form in feminist and women’s history journals. Here too we see the concerns about the loss o f history as a study of facts and real events and objections to conceptualizing it as a narrative construction. Some argue that the very
Bryan Palmer,Descent into Discourse: Die Reification o f Language and the Writing ofSocial History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 5.
50 strengths history offers as a discipline are sacrificed in the flight to discourse. One
women’s historian states her concern that history as transfigured by postmodern theory
becomes “at best chaos and, at worst, does not exist at all in the sense that there is no
truth about human actions, human thought, or human experience to be revealed through
research.”^ These concerns are similar to the more general fear of what history has to
lose if the discipline continues to be influenced by poststructuralism.
Women’s History after the Linguistic Turn
Many of the debates surrounding poststructuralism are also key topics at women’s
history conferences and in women’s history journals. While some of these issues mirror
those in the larger discipline, many are specific to the field of women’s history.
Poststructuralism has served to highlight fundamental differences in the goals, methods,
and subject matter of feminist history. For some women’s historians the focus on
representation associated with the linguistic turn erases the possibility for historical
analysis to serve political ends and abdicates concerns for social justice."^ Not only are
those who incorporate poststructural insights seen as abandoning what might be loosely
termed feminist commitments but in some cases are regarded as misogynists and
Joan Hoff “Gender as a Postmodern Category o f Paralysis,”Women's History Review 3, no. 2 (1994); 149-168, 152.
Joan Hoff “A Reply to My Critics,” Women's History Review 5, no. 1 (1996): 25-30 and Caroline Ramazanoglu, “Unraveling Postmodern Paralysis: A Response to Joan Hoff”Women's History Review 5, no. 1(1996): 19-23.
5 1 racists.^ While the use of such language may be a more extreme example, it is representative of the strong feelings associated with the question of the relationship between poststructuralism and feminism.
One manifestation of these tensions is the split between gender history and women’s history. One author describes a “crucial juncture” in the development of women’s history and gender history; a realization of an impasse between women’s history and gender history which divides feminist historical work.'® She summarizes this distinction (with a bias towards women’s history) as follows:
Historians of women use the terms “experience,” “identity,” and “woman” and invest individuals—women and men—with the power to alter material conditions of oppression. Historians of gender, on the other hand, offer as substitutes the terms “representation,” “discourse,” and “gender.” In place of experience, historians of gender speak of representations that are either present or absent in texts; in place of identities, they speak of discourses constructing subjects; and in place of women’s experiences, they speak of “gender” as that which gives meaning to sexual differences.'^
To the contrary, I argue that the split between women’s history and gender history is significant not as a juncture at which those interested in feminist history must choose one path or the other but for the possibilities of mutual interrogation. At its best, the debate between women’s history and gender history generates the kind of difficult, self- reflective questions that contribute to the theoretical sophistication and political relevance of feminist history.'^ These productive exchanges focus on key issues relevant to
^ Hoff “Gender as a Postmodern Category of Paralysis.”
Louise Newman, “Critical Theory tmd the History of Women: What’s at Stake in Deconstructing Women’s History,” Journal o f Women's History 2, no. 3 (1991): 58-68.
^ Newman, “Critical Theory and the History o f Women,” 58-59.
Southgate, History: What and Why?
5 2 feminist history and theory. Questions of the nature of agency, the limits of “women” as a conceptual and political category, and the relationship between the cultural and the material are all productively explored by looking at how these issues are handled in the historiographical practices of feminist historians. At its worst, however, the split between those who reject poststructuralism and those who see it as an integral part of their historiographical approach has been reduced to mutual caricature. As one commentary notes: “the most distorted framings [of this split] appeared as Politics versus Theory from one point of view, and anti-intellectual posturing versus engaged cultural critique from another.”"^
The points of contention between women’s history and gender history are numerous. The difficulty in definitively capturing the divide between the two subfields is complicated by the existence of numerous varieties within each category. Keeping these limitations in mind, there are certain issues which predominant in the debates over women’s history and gender history. The analysis that follows will explore these issues and the ways that they serve to exacerbate the split in feminist history. My guiding assumption is that the idea of incommensurable divisions which demand one to state an allegiance merely fuel the often inflammatory nature of the debates rather than leading to better understandings of the issues at stake.
Drawing on writings which have appeared in theJournal o f Women's History,
Women’s History Review, andSigns, I will discuss two key issues involved in the discussions between gender and women’s historians: agency and experience. As
^ Lisa Duggan, “The Theory Wars, or. Who’s Afraid o f Judith Buder,”Journal o f Women's History 10, no. I (1998): 10.
53 described above, there are strong differences in how theese concepts are perceived by
feminist historians. Their use relates to larger questionss regarding the perceived
operation of language and power.
One of the most frequently invoked concepts in tthese debates is that of agency. A
common argument on the part of women’s historians is rthat in using a poststructuralist
methodology “historical agency—real people having an impact on real events— is both
impossible andirrelevant.The argument is that postsstructuralism’s inability to frame people as independent actors and initiators of changes pnrevents it from meaningfully contributing to understandings of women in the pastffbr or conceiving of social change.
Most women’s historians see agency as an inherent hum:;an trait that is essential to understandings of resistance and social change.
One of more useful articulations of the distinctionns between women’s history and gender history was published in the Summer 1990 issues: Signs.^o f The issue features a review of Linda Gordon’sHeroes o f Their Own Lives: TDie Politics and History o f Family
Violence written by Joan Scott, a review of Joan Scott’saGender and the Politics o f
History written by Linda Gordon, and responses to the reeviews by both authors. H ie value of this particular exchange lies not only in the fact rthat it involves key writers in each area but the opportunity for a more focused exchange on the merits and problems associated with each approach. The book review format r refocuses the debate from an abstract discussion of the ontological foundations of one’ s methodological approach to a more specific discussion of the dangers and possibilities oof each approach in the context o f a specific historical analysis.
Hoff “Gender as a Postmodern Category of Paralysis,” 151. 54 Gordon’sHeroes o f Their Own Lives serves as one example of the use of agency
in women’s history. Gordon’s book focuses on the case records of three child welfare agencies in Boston from the 1880s to the 1960s. She explores the family violence documented in the case studies in relation to larger social and cultural understandings of family dynamics. Of particular interest is the often conflictual relationship between the women experiencing violence and the social service agencies from which they sought assistance. The relationship between clients and service providers, a relationship marked by multiple power differentials, offers insight into how differently the issue of violence is constructed depending on one’s social location.
In describing this relationship between female clients and social agencies, Gordon uses a conceptual frame in which social control and agency are in tension. She stresses the women’s role as subjects: “It strikes me as an insult to the humanity of women to suggest that they could have been totally resigned to helplessness.” She does not, however, believe that women’s choices were unconstrained. Gordon’s notion of agency is an attempt to attend to resistance without downplaying the systems of oppression that operated in the lives of the women she studied. Agency serves not as an alternative to discourses of determinative social systems but as an interruption. Gordon writes that she uses a social-control framework “because it has explanatory power; my interpretation seeks to complicate it, not to overthrow it, to transcend the opposition between social control and agency and to explain how they combine.”^ ^
In her review ofHeroes o f Their Own Lives, Scott disagrees that Gordon has achieved a balance between individual resistance and top-down theories of social control.
■'* Linda Gordon, “Response to Scott,”Signs 15, no. 4 (1990): 853. 55 What Gordon presents as a productive tension, Scott regards as a contradiction. She argues that Gordon is “at once critical of the social control framework and conceptually caught within it.”^“ Scott argues that these contradictions would have been avoided if
Gordon had not relied on a notion of agency as an inherent human property. In contrast,
Scott regards agency as discursively constructed. She states: “This conceptualization would see agency not as an attribute or trait inhering in the will of autonomous individual subjects, but as a discursive effect in this case the effect of social workers’ constructions of families, gender, and family violence.
In describing agency as a “discursive effect” Scott is not denying that people make purposeful choices that have consequences for the events in their lives. Nor does she see the clients that Gordon discusses as being solely determined by the professional discourses of the agencies with which they were involved. Instead, it situates agency as constructed from the multiple discourses one is embedded within rather than as a decontextualized individual trait Scott provides the example of a woman leaving an abusive relationship— this action could be motivated and made meaningful from a variety of available discourses, such as religion, feminism, or good mothering.
Gordon’s response to Scott’s reinterpretation of agency states that it empties the term of any meaning. In years since the 1990 publication of the exchange, Scott’s identification of agency as a “discursive effect” has inspired numerous commentaries and critiques. The phrase has been invoked frequently as evidence of poststructuralism’s incompatibility with feminist concerns and as an example of discursive determinism.
Joan Wallach Scott, “Review: Heroes of Their Own Lives,”Signs 15, no. 4 (1990): 850.
Scott, “Review,” 851. 56 Those sharing Scott’s ontological assumptions have received the term more positively,
with many writers drawing on Scott’s interpretation of agency in developing their
methodological approaches.
Commenting on theSigns exchange, Benhabib describes the positions represented
by Gordon and Scott as a “clash o f paradigms”— a clash that highlights race, class, and
gender struggles and the ways that power is “negotiated, subverted, as well as resisted by the so-called ‘victims’ ofhistory.She regards Scott’s framework as a “top-down” approach that overlooks subjects in favor of representations. She states: “Just as for
Foucault every act of resistance is but another manifestation of an omnipresent discourse- power complex, for Scott too, women who negotiate and resist power do not exist; the only struggles in history are between competing paradigms of discourses, power- knowledge complexes.”^^
The objections to Scott’s focus on discursive effects are part of a larger objection to the incorporation of poststructuralism into feminist theory and historical analysis. To many women’s historians the focus on discourse and representation threaten an erasure of women and agency. In describing the impact of poststructuralism on gender analysis,
Hoff states that:
Material experiences become abstract representations drawm almost exclusively from textual analysis; personal identities and all human agency become obsolete, and disembodied subjects are constructed by discourses. Flesh-and-blood women, of course, also become social
Seyla Benhabib , “Feminism and Postmodernism,” Feministin Contentions, ed. Seyla Behabib et al. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 113.
Benhabib, “Feminism and Postmodernism,” 113-114.
5 7 constructs, according to poststructuralists, with no ‘natural’ or physiological context except as a set of symbolic meanings constructing sexual difference.^^
This quote is indicative of larger feminist reservations about the implications of the linguistic turn. Hoff’s language, like that of Benhabib, juxtaposes the poststructuralist focus on discourse and representation with a concern with “real” women. To her agency has not been alternatively defined within poststructuralism but rejected.
Gordon’s and Scott’s differing conceptions of agency speak to a larger dilemma of how to represent dynamics of power and resistance. Scott argues that Gordon is caught within a frame in which domination and resistance are in opposition rather than presenting a “complex process that constructs possibilities for and puts limits on specific actions undertaken by individuals and groups.”^^ Scott too is caught in a similar dilemma in negotiating the relationship between subjects and discourse.
Poststructuralism has also radically refigured notions of how power and resistance operate. It has for many discredited Marxist models of centralized power emanating from relations of production. One could argue, however, that economic determinism has been replaced by linguistic determinism. Scholars who draw on poststructuralism face questions as to the distinctions between being “constituted by discourse” and “determined by discourse.” Poststructuralist critiques of the unconstrained rational Enlightenment subject as well as of totalizing systems of social control transform the terms and relationships between control and agency. As stated by Scott above, it is framed as a complex relation of limits and possibilities rather than an opposition of oppression and
Hoff “Gender as a Postmodern Category o f Paralysis,” 159.
Scott, “Review,” 851-852.
58 rebellion. The question remains, however, of how competing discourses are negotiated and how resistance occurs. One cannot simply dismiss the deterministic implications of the “prison house of language.” As Cmiel observes “As theory, poststructuralism perpetually swings between the poles of invention and fatalism, between liberating aestheticism and the power of discourse to control our lives.”^*
The second key area that reveals strong theoretical differences between women’s historians and gender historians is the concept of experience. As with agency, experience is a contested term that raises questions over the role of discourse in historical analysis.
Drawing again on Gordon and Scott as representatives of each field, one finds striking differences in the role of experience in their work. For Gordon experiences are central in the understanding of women and are able to be accuratelyrecovered.For many women’s historians the task of history is to uncover women’s experiences and to challenge historical constructions from which they have been excluded. This project has strong connections to approaches to social history in the 1970s. It offered an alternative to standard intellectual and political histories by developing a “history from below.”
Historical accounts were developed from the perspective of white women, men and women of color, and members of the working class. Although a variety of methodologies characterize such work, a common underlying goal is the recovery of experiences in order to expand, or challenge more traditional historical accounts.
For Scott, experiences cannot be captured as historical evidence. Historiography serves to construct experience rather than to convey it. Newman summarizes Scott’s
Kenneth Cmiel, “Poststructural Theory,”la. Encyclopedia o f American Social History, eds. Mary Kupiec Cayton et al. (New York: Maxwell McMillan, 1993), 431.
Newman, “Critical Theory and the History of Women.” 59 position as follows: “For Scott history is the representation that constructs experiences.
Historians write new histories not to relate existing experiences previously unknown but
to give new meanings to experiences never before understood in sucti a way.”^°
Scott is not interested in retrieving marginalized experiences but in understanding
how they become constructed in particular ways. She questions the use of experience as
an always already testimonial present. When experience is used as a foundational
category, Scott fears that “questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as different in the first place, about how one’s vision is structured—about language (or discourse) and history — are left aside.^”^^ Experience used as incontestable evidence holds the danger of reproducing categories o f representation
(such as homosexual/heterosexual, man/woman, black/white) rather ttian examining the processes of their construction. While she is sympathetic to the goal o f using the
“evidence of experience” to claim a space for people who have been traditionally excluded from historical accounts, she raises concerns that it will serv-e to reify difference.
This challenge to the “evidence of experience” has been a sonrewhat controversial move in women’s history. Many feminists see the concept of “women’s experience” as a means of underscoring oppression against women and as a basis for collective political action.^' Scott would counter that “women’s experience” obscures important differences
Newman, “Critical Theory and the History o f Women,” 62.
■*' Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,”Critical Theory' 17 (1991): 776.
Newman, “Critical Theory and the History o f Women.”
60 between women and perpetuates essentialized constructions of women’s “difference”
from men. She argues not for a rejection of experience but its use in ways that
acknowledge both its locatedness and its discursive construction.**^
The distinctions between how the concepts of agency and experience are
commonly used in women’s history and gender history illustrates tensions between the
role of the cultural versus the material, the status of categories such as women, class, and
the nature of power. Underlying theoretical differences such as between historical
materialism and poststructuralism are just one component of these differing
methodologies. Another issue is the well-documented diversity of opinion on the
relationship between feminism and postmodernism.^ When one compares a view of
history that stresses the “collective identity” of women and the representation of “real”
women and events'*^ with one that stresses the constructed nature of political categories
and history as a creation o f itself rather than a representation of the past**^ the possibilities
for cross influence seem improbable.
Possibilities for Feminist History: Bridging the Women's History/Gender History Divide
In observing the debates over the divergence in frameworks in feminist history the
use of language is as striking as the conceptual differences. Despite the numerous areas of contention that divide practitioners of feminist history there exists a potential for
^ Scott, “The Evidence of Experience.”
Linda Nicholson, ed. Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Hoff “Gender as a Postmodern Category of Paralysis.”
Joan Scott,Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia, 1988). 61 mutual interrogation. WaUcowitz^’sCity ofDreadful Delight: Narratives o f Sexual
Danger in Late-Victorian London is just one is an example of work that attempts to avoid
a polarization of women’s history and gender history that may be of particular use in
outlining future possibilities for feminist history. Her work has been positively received
for its attempt to “clear common ground between a progressive materialist history and
post-modern literary theory
Walkowitz describes her study as mapping out “a dense cultural grid through
which conflicting and overlapping representations of sexual danger circulated in late-
Victorian London.”^* Central to her study is the reporting of the Ripper murders and an early example of scandal journalism, “The Maiden Tribute of Modem Babylon,” a complex melodrama of the vulnerability of young girls to sexual exploitation. As implied by the title of her book (taken from Henry James’ description of London), Walkowitz is interested in the multiple discourses surrounding sexuality. It is neither a triumphant story of women forging new possibilities for themselves during a time of social change, not is it one of unrelenting class and gender exploitation. She “deconstructs the opposition between the creation and reception, and the production and consumption, of cultural texts” in order to show how people are constrained and enabled by discourses.^^
Walkowitz’s introduction illustrates a careful consideration of the debates of the points of contention within feminist history. In describing her framework, she states that
■*’ Jane Caplan et al., “Patrolling the Borden Feminist Historiography and the New Historicism,”Radical H istory Review 43 (1989): 24.
■** Judith Walkowitz:,City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives ofSextial Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 5.
Abelson et al., “Interview with Joan Scott,” 28.
6 2 her “study engages in a productive dialogue with poststructuralists, reformulating their
insights about cultural meanings to address analytic categories conventionally o f interest
to the historian: power, agency, and experience.”^” This sentence illustrates Walkowitz’s
additional and more ambitious project: to link poststructuralism with a concern with the
very issues some have charged it negates.
This idea of “productive dialogue” runs throughout her introduction. She
identifies numerous methodological and conceptual divisions within history and situates
her own work as an eclectic blend of approaches. For example, Walkowitz avoids the
division some make between social history and those utiliang Foucault by emphasizing
her ties to social history conventions as well as her departures (e.g. resisting narrative
closure, not emphasizing fixed polarities of gender and class). Similarly, she
acknowledges her debt to Foucauldian notions of power as “dispersed and decentered”
while also attending to differing levels of access to power.
Of particular interest is Walkowitz’s strategy for dealing with the question of agency. Her writing on this point is directly relevant to the concerns raised in the exchange between Gordon and Scott. Like others dealing with the problem of agency while also recognizing the subject as discursively determined,^' Walkowitz seeks to maintain historical figures as able to mobilize the cultural tools within which they are embedded. She describes how she shows this tension in her representation of the actions of the journalist W.T. Stead and the feminist Josephine Butler “[Stead and Butler] acted as catalysts who made things happen. They were important historical actors, if not
50 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 8.
See for example Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex” (New York; Routledge, 1993). 63 autonomous authors, even if the outcomes of their actions were not always or only what
they had intended.”^" Canning values this aspect of Walkowitz’s work as pointing to new ways “of dissolving the opposition between discourse and experience or agency; of
discerning the role of human agency in the production of texts” and for its attention to how texts signify differently depending on the social and cultural context
One such example of how people act as historical agents is presented by
Walkowitz in the case of Mrs. Georgina Weldon. The fascinating series of events involved in Weldon’s rise to celebrity status serve to illustrate Walkowitz’s larger theme of the “dangers and delights” offered by the shifting social boundaries of London in the
1880s. When her husband attempted to have her committed to an asylum because of her involvement in spiritualism, Weldon’s skillful use of mass media allowed her to not only command public support and avoid confinement but to gain legal retribution against those involved in the “plot” to confine her. Weldon’s success can partially be attributed to her ability to present herself in ways consistent with the complex expansion of the city’s possibilities for women. The dramatic growth of consumer culture during this time encouraged women to inhabit the city in more public ways. Yet these public outings were also seen as transgressing boundaries of class and gender; the conspicuous consumption role of middle class ladies did not fit neatly with taboos against public display.
Weldon actively sought out opportunities to make her story known to wide audiences. Walkowitz describes how Weldon published in spiritualist papers, gave
52 Walkowitz, City o f Dreadful Delight, 10.
Kathleen Canning, “German Particularities in Women’s History/Gender History,”Journal o f Women's History S\, no. 1 (1993): 108-109. 64 interviews, sued the doctor who signed the commitment papers, and presented public
lectures. Yet, in constructing this public presence she remained within the acceptable
boundaries of middle-class womanhood. Clearly, Weldon made choices to take control
of the situation in which she found herself. These choices cannot though be separated
from the discourses that made them possible. Weldon is a compelling example of the possibilities available at the site of conflicting and multiple discourses. The language of spiritualism, melodramatic conventions, true womanhood, and defender of justice all are interwoven in Weldon’s public campaign.
One of the key strengths of Walkowitz’s approach is her acknowledgment of the importance of the points raised by both gender historians and women’s historians.
Neither approach can argue that it alone provides the tools for feminist history.
Walkowitz, like many other feminists faced with the challenges of the linguistic turn for modernist political projects, embraces a refined Foucauldian approach, one that has been designed to specifically address issues of social inequality. Walkowitz is a key example of some feminists’ refusal of choosing among mutually exclusive perspectives and pursuing instead “an impure, eclectic, neopragmatist approach.”^'*
Walkowitz and the larger debates in feminist history are central influences in defining the framework for the dissertation. Like Walkowitz, I find aspects of both women’s history and gender history compelling. While I find gender historians' focus on the construction of gender and subjectivity important to destabilizing ahistorical and naturalized notions gender, the language of experience and agency often associated with
Nancy Fraser, “Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Linguistic Turn,"Feminist in Contentions, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1995), 158.
65 women’s history has an undeniable pull. Walkowitz has served as a useful model of an approach that moves beyond seeing gender and women’s history as mutually exclusive options that one must choose between.
More work is needed in exploring the possibilities and dangers involved in drawing from both women’s and gender history. Walkowitz illustrates how elements of gender and women’s history can be brought together. Yet, one should be wary of a too tidy resolution of existing theoretical tensions. There are many varieties of gender and women’s history, all of which are not equally compatible. An “eclectic” approach does not mean that any traditions can be combined— particularly when such a merger hides potentially productive conflicts.
For example, the difficult problems raised by poststructuralism for feminism as a modernist project tied to enlightenment notions of equality and justice cannot simply be erased by attempting to pick and choose from both traditions. However, attention to discourse associated with the linguistic turn does have tremendous potential for investigating the construction of racial and/or gender difference as an on-going, historically specificprocess.The current debates call for more work on integrative approaches that do not dismiss areas of conflict that are sources for new approaches and strategies.
The debates also highlight the need for more attention to the nature of the relationship between “the discursive” and “the material.” Too often the gender history/women’s history split is mapped onto a discourse/material divide. Palmer, for
Maiy Leach and Browyn Davies, “Crossing the Boundaries: Educational Thought and Gender Equity, Educational Theory 40, no. 3(1990): 321-332.
6 6 example, describes Walkowitz as “straddling the conceptual fence separating discourse
and materialism.”^^ Walkowitz should not be faulted for failing to “choose” from the
options of historical materialism and poststructuralism. Such a forced choice fails to
engage with work that attempts to explore the reciprocal shaping that occurs between
representations and social practices. Walkowitz’s presentation of her work seeks to
acknowledge the discursive and the material but one is left with the sense that she is
pulling from two separate spheres. It is necessary to explore further the relationship
between the material and discursive in a manner that cormects discourse with social
practices. While Walkowitz would argue that they exert mutual influence she does not
explore the specifics of their interaction.
Progressive Education: A Discourse Analysis
The discussion thus far has situated the dissertation within larger debates
surrounding the implications of the linguistic turn for feminist historical practice. I will
now turn to how these issues inform the analytic strategies employed in Chapter 4. A
dominant theme in the study of the construction of historical knowledge is the
constitutive power of language. The literature on progressive education, although
detailed and abundant, lacks attention to the language used to describe the movement.
The history of progressive education has been documented but not the constructions that
the historiography have brought into being—its narrative and rhetorical strategies and discursive productions and exclusions. Greater attention to how texts on progressive
Palmer,Descent into Discourse, 164. 67 education are organized as forms of knowledge contributes to the exploration of how “the formative issues in theory construction and analytical practice became what they are” in the discipline of history.^
Discourse analysis is used in the dissertation to analyze the rhetorical strategies and discursive mobilizations at work in various descriptions of progressive education. I explore how secondary sources depict the child-centered/social reform split of the PEA and the discursive strategies employed by Elsie Ripley Clapp in positioning herself in the progressive education movement. The goal of this analysis is first, to explore how the historiography on progressive education constructs gender, particularly as categories of oppositional sexual difference. Second, the discussion highlights the aspects of progressive education obscured by the exclusionary and dichotomous construction of child-centered and social reconstructionism.
The range of approaches described as discourse analysis warrants explanation of its many definitions as well as an explication o f the specific strands used in the dissertation. Discourse analysis can vary depending on the discipline in which it is being employed, the type of analysis being conducted, and what it is being opposed to, for example, text or ideology. In its widest sense in linguistics, discourse refers to communication, “every utterance assuming a speaker and a hearer.”^*
” Terrence J. MacDonald, ed., ‘Tntroduction,” inThe Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor The University of Michigan Press, 1996), 7.
Benveniste as quoted in Sara Mills,Discourse (London: Routledge, 1997), 5.
68 Gill’s classification of discourse analysis into three traditions assists in
distinguishing some of the major differences between approaches/^ She notes that
“discourse” and “discourse analysis” are highly contested terms. The debates over their
meaning and its inseparability from larger questions of the constitutive role of language
suggest that identifying one’s approach as discourse analysis often tells readers little
about one’s actual method.^” Gill identifies three categories, the first of which is
comprised of critical linguistics, social semiotics and critical language studies. An
example o f work within this category is the Critical Discourse Analysis of Norman
Fairclough. The second category is associated with speech act theory, ethnomethodology
and conversation analysis. This work looks primarily at the organization and goals o f
verbal exchanges. The third category of discourse analysis identified by Gill is that
associated with poststructuralism. Gill notes that while this association of discourse with
poststructuralism is useful for highlighting specific commonalities it fails to attend to the
diverse range of authors subsumed under the blanket term of poststructuralism. Because
the form of discourse analysis used in the dissertation is most closely tied to the work of
Michel Foucault, this discussion will be limited to his work and influence on discourse analysis.
Foucault has had a pivotal role in the broad category of work known as discourse theory. Flis work is significant not only in the role of language in the construction of meaning and the legitimation of truth claims but in methods of historical analysis.
Foucault’s use of discourse should be seen in relation to his methods of analysis and the
Rosalind Gill, “Ideology, Gender and Popular Radio: A Discourse Analytic Approach,”Innovation 6, no. 3 (1993): 323-339.
60 Gill, , “Ideology, Gender and Popular Radio.” 69 intellectual traditions which he was working againstThe Archaeology o f Knowledge
represents a break in thinking about how history is organized and to what it refers.
Archaeology as a methodology is significant in its divergence from other approaches,
specifically the history of ideas. It is this distinction between archaeological analysis and
the history of ideas that gives shape to many features of Foucault’s sense of discourse.
He states:
Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules. It does not treat discourse asdocument, as a sign of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it is held in reserve; it is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument. It is not an interpretative discipline: it does not seek another, better hidden discourse. It refuses to be ‘allegorical.’^*
I have quoted this passage at length because of its useftilness in unpacking the different
meanings of discourse. To stress discourse as an object of inquiry in its own right rather
than as “a sign of something else” distances it from hermeneutical endeavors. To explore
discourse is to study how meanings are limited, elaborated, and categorized. This differs sharply from a project in which language is investigated for the deeper significance or reality that it reveals. The former sees discourse as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak”^^ while the latter project interprets “discourse with a view to writing a history of thereferent.Using his work in Madness and Civilization,
Foucault uses the example of “madness” to distinguish his approach to discourse. Rather
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology o f Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheri den Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 138-139.
Foucault as quoted in Mills,Discourse, 17.
Foucault, The Archaeology o f Knowledge, 47. 70 than assuming the integrity of madness as a representational category, Foucault’s
approach looks at the practices, institutions and language that brought it into being. It is
in the context of this discussion that Foucault makes his often quoted call to “dispense
with ‘things.” He states:
To substitute for the enigmatic treasure o f‘things’ anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to theground, the foundation o f things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance.^
A great deal of debate has emerged in response to this call to “dispense with things.” This aspect of Foucault’s notion of discourse has been influential in the work of
Joan Scott. Her description of history as being in the “paradoxical position of creating the objects it claims to discover” and her exploration of how categories such as woman are constituted are due in part to the influence of Foucault For others however, this dispensing of things is a denial of material reality and of the urgency of such politically significant “things” as rape or low wages.^^
A second feature of the above quote from The Archaeology o f Knowledge is that of “discourses obeying certain rules.” Discourses are not simply statements that share some common theme such as a genre or the specialized language of a discipline.^^ They are regulated by internal rules that structure the boundaries of discourses, how objects are formed, and what constitutes a legitimate truth claim. Some have found Foucault's
^ Michel Foucault, The Archaeology o f Knowledge, 47-48.
See Michele Barrett,Destabilizing Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992) for an insightful discussion o f this passage in Foucault in relation to feminist analysis.
^ Mills, Discourse.
71 description of these internal rules and the seeming autonomy of discourse as more
structuralist than his later work and less able to account for how discourses change or the
relation of social practices to discourse.^^ Some of these issues are addressed in his later
work, specifically in the shift from archaeology to genealogy. The role of power in
discourses, rather than abstract structures of regulation, figure more prominently in the
method of genealogy.^
In The History o f Sexuality, Foucault attends more specifically to the role of
power in discourse. He states “What is said about sex must be analyzed simply as the surface of projection of these power mechanisms. Indeed, it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together.”®^ This relation between discourse and power assumes a notion of power distinct from what one might find in Marxist analyses.
Discourse does not operate as ideology, as a system of meaning that obscures true relations to serve the interests of the state. His exploration of sexuality does not presume sexuality to be a predetermined object in which he traces the history of its repression under discourses of power. Rather he describes power as omnipresent rather than emanating from a specific center of power. Once one sees power as detached from a specific center and not inherently repressive, strategies for resistance are multiplied. He describes how the nineteenth century literature labeling specific forms of sexuality as perversity also opened up discussions o f sexuality: “homosexuality began to speak in its
67 David Couzens Hoy, ed.. “Introduction,” inFoucault (Oxford; Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986).
Hoy, “Introduction” and Norman Fairclough,Discourse and Social Change (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1992).
Michel Foucault, The H istory o f Sexuality, Vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1980), 100.
72 own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the
same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.”™
Foucault’s articulation of power raises numerous possibilities for feminist work.
Judith Walkowitz’s work is compelling in the ways that she simultaneously incorporates
Foucault while resisting certain aspects of his work. For example, while she resists a top down model of power inThe City o f Dreadful Delight, she also is concerned that a too diffuse representation of power erases agency as well as a sense o f oppression.^ ^ This same concern is shared by Hartsock (who does not share Walkowitz’s interest in utilizing
Foucault for feminist projects): “Power is everywhere, and so ultimately nowhere.”^" For
Hartsock, Foucault’s work entails a destruction of the very categories of identity on which her politics are based. She describes how:
Foucault has made it very difficult to locate domination, including domination in gender relations. He has on the one hand claimed that individuals are constituted by power relations, but he has argued against their constitution by relations such as the domination of one group by another. That is, his account makes room only for abstract individuals, not women, men, workers.
Even outside of the standpoint epistemology frame from which Hartsock is speaking, she highlights the problems Foucault raises for politics based on group interests. Other scholars have seen this incompatibility between Foucault and identity politics as a theoretical resource in challenging essentialist assumptions about categories such as
™ Foucault, The History o f Sexuality, 101.
Caplan et al.. “Patrolling theBorder,” and Walkowitz,CityofDreadfiil Delight.
^ Nancy Hartsock, “Foucault on Power; A Theory for Women?” inFeminism/Postmodernism ed. Linda Nicholson (New York Routledge, 1990), 170.
^ Hartsock, “Foucault on Power,” 169.
73 “women” or“homosexual.The focus thereby shifts from how groups of people can challenge inequality to the processes by which the construction of “women” becomes significant in the first place.
The work of Joan Scott provides an example of how discourse has been used in historical analysis. Drawing on the work of Foucault, Scott sees discourse as “not a language or a text but a historically, socially, and institutionally specific structure of statements, terms, categories, and beliefs.”^^ This sense of discourse, like the other examples discussed that draw from Foucault, emphasizes its implication in institutions, social relationships, and its legitimizing function for truth claims.
Within the dissertation, discourse analysis becomes a way of examining what becomes intelligible and knowable, unintelligible and unknowable about progressive education due to the discourses employed in the historical construction of the field.
Discourse analysis as influenced by Foucault generated the following guiding questions:^^
• To what extent is “child-centered” constructed as an oppositional other by which
“social reconstructionism” gains meaning?
Denise Riley, Am I That Name?: Feminism and the Category o f “Women ”in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), Diana Fuss,Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989) and Judith Butler,Gender Trouble.
Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 35.
76 Lisa Weems, “Between Deficiency and Excess: Representations o f Substitute Teachers within Discourses of Professionalism,” (Ph D. diss.. The Ohio State University, 2000) provided helpful examples o f how discourse analysis can shape one’s research questions.
74 • What educational approaches are made invisible by constructing progressive
education as a child-centered/social reconstructionist opposition? What subject
positions are made possible by this opposition?
• What hierarchies are at work in progressive education in terms of male/female,
academic/practitioner?
• How is Clapp simultaneously constructed as an insider and outsider in her work at the
Ballard School?
• What are the linkages between social reconstructionism and discourses of
masculinity?
Challenges to Biography: The Subject after the Linguistic Turn
Poster notes that questions regarding the construction of the subject offer one of the most promising avenues for cultural history:
Cultural history might then be understood as the study of the construction of the subject, the extent to which and the mechanisms through which individuals are attached to identities, the shapes and characteristic of those identities, the role the process of self-constitution plays in the disruption or stabilization of political formations, and the relation of all these processes to distinctions of gender, ethnicity, and class/^
Such an approach, as noted earlier in the chapter, challenges traditional conceptions of the subject as agent and the authority of experience as a basis for knowledge.
The de-centering of the subject and the focus on discourse within this project brought challenges for how to approach the work and writings of Elsie Ripley Clapp.
Framed by the assumption that “we do not make ourselves from ourselves but are formed
^ Mark Poster, Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges (New York; Columbia University Press, 1997), 10. 15 in the significations of history, culture and discursive practices,” the project required
alternatives to traditional biographical accounts that highlight the accomplishments of the
neglected women in history/* Although biography is a valuable genre of history, its
tendency to encourage a focus on the autonomous subject decontextualized from larger
discursive forces made it a poor fit for this project
My focus in chapter Five is how Clapp is situated within the educational
discourses of the 1930s rather than creating linkages between her life experiences and her
contributions to education. I explore her work in relation to the different stands of
progressive education. More specifically, it seems significant to look at how she
constructed her notions of child-centered and social reconstructionist education in
relation to broader educational contexts. How did her work intersect with the debates
regarding indoctrination in the PEA? The analysis in chapter five is primarily based on
the Elsie Ripley Clapp papers at Southern Illinois University. The collection contains
correspondence between Clapp and Dewey, Clapp’s writing on her philosophy of
education, and writings on the development and leadership of the Arthurdale Schools.
Joan Scott’s approach inOnly Paradoxes to Offer served as a model for exploring
Clapp outside a biographical approach. In the book, Scott writes a history of feminism
that departs radically from a focus on individual women’s agency or totalizing notions of
male oppression. Her analysis looks at how feminism has been constituted— not as a
unified historical movement but as emerging from the inconsistencies of liberal political traditions. The book chapters seem to suggest a biographical approach to feminist
^ Robin LTsherand Richard Edwards,Postmodernism and Education (London: Routledge, 1994), 147. 76 movements. The book is organized around four key figures in the French suf&age
movement: Olympe de Gouges, Jeanne Deroin, Hubertine Auclert, and Madeleine
Pelletiers. Contrary to what the organization of the book might suggest, the analysis does
not see the achievement of suffrage as the result of the actions of exemplary women. Her
discussion of these women sees their contributions and strategies in the historical context.
They are regarded not just as individual actors but as sites of “political and cultural contests.”^^ It is both an historical account of feminist work in France and an argument for a feminist historiography that is primarily concerned with “the epistemologies, institutions, and practice that produce political subjects.”*®
Scott’s emphasis on women as discursive sites is a significant shift from a biographical approach that establishes connections between life experiences and individual action. Perhaps Scott also sees a biographical approach as reminiscent of the
“women’s worthies” approach to women’s history in the I970’s.*^ An advantage of
Scott’s approach is that it looks beyond the individual answer for social change.
Biographical approaches sometimes seek to illustrate the “specialness” of an individual actor and their life circumstances. Their achievement then appears to be the result of a unique combination of personality, life circumstance, and chance.
The focus on Clapp is designed to highlight both her often overlooked contributions to the field of education and to see her as a “site” at which multiple
^ Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer^ 16.
Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer, 16.
** Manuela Thumer, “Subject to Change: Theories and Paradigms of U.S. Feminist History,”Journal of Women’s History 9, (1997): 122-146.
77 discourses coaverge.*^ Clapp meaningfully contributed to progressive education and she provides insights into the tensions dividing the PEA. A traditional biographical approach, however, runs the risk of being an “add women and stir” approach to history by simply expanding the existing history by adding Clapp to the canon of “significant” figures in the history of education. In contrast, this project attempts to attend to agency and the constitutive effects of discourse by looking at her work in relation to larger debates in progressive education. These issues include the role of educators in social reform and the relationship between child-centered and social reconstructionist approaches.
Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer 78 CHAPTER 4:
DISRUPTING CATEGORIES OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION: RETHINKING THE CHILD-CENTERED/SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTIONIST OPPOSITION
The diversity of progressive education in the 1930s, its dramatic rise and fall has
left it open to varying interpretations and categorizations. The vitality of progressive
education in the 1930s, the spirit of mission for dramatically reshaping US education
makes this a rich period for historical interpretation. The secondary literature on
progressive education provides a good example of how historiography is not simply the
recounting of facts from the past but relies heavily on narrative, interpretation and rhetorical skill. Ironically, the very richness of progressive education that has made it open to multiple readings has often resulted in categorizations that rely on exclusions and omissions that do a disservice to progressive education.
Drawing on discourse analysis, this chapter will explore how the secondary literature on progressive education is shaped by opposition in framing the relationship between child-centered and social-reconstructionism. Two specific points will be presented as consequences of the reliance on opposition. First, a child-centered/social reconstructionist opposition obscures the range of approaches contained under each category and contributes to the invisibility of approaches that do not fall into either category. Second, the child-centered/social-reconstructionist opposition contributes to
79 constructing gender in particular ways. The second portion of the chapter will focus on
historians’ representation of Elsie Ripley Clapp as a site where these two consequences
of opposition converge.
The Effects of the Child-Centered/Social Reconstructionist Opposition
The literature on progressive education, although detailed and abundant, lacks
attention to the language used to describe the movement. The history of progressive
education has been documented but not the constructions that the historiographies have
brought into being—its narrative and rhetorical strategies and discursive productions and
exclusions. This research looks at the construction of progressive education as an object
of knowledge. Such an approach is consistent with Joan Scott’s call for historical
narratives that would simultaneously provide knowledge about the past and highlight the
processes by which historical narratives are produced. ^
Differentiating progressives in terms of the categories of child-centered and social
reconsjuctionist provides a meaningful distinction consistent with the time. The
categories of child-centered and social reconstructionist are helpful in distinguishing
some of the issues that divided progressive educators in the 1930s. The danger, however,
is in the pervasive characterization of the relation of these groups asone o f opposition. In much of the literature on progressive education, the relationship between these two groups is presented as dichotomous extremes and characterized as “warring factions” and
‘ Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
80 “oppositional camps.”“ Although more recent works on progressive education have attempted to break down a sharp division between child-centered and social
reconstructionist approaches, the underlying assumptions behind this division have yet to be explored. Joan Scott serves as a helpful resource in analyzing the historical construction of child-centered and social reconstructionist education as oppositional factions. She describes how “fixed oppositions conceal the heterogeneity of either category, the extent to which terms presented as oppositional are interdependent—that is, derive their meaning from internally established contrast rather than from some inherent or pure antithesis.”^ This attention to exclusions and hierarchy is particularly useful in exploring how the oppositional categories of child-centered and social reconstructionism suggest false homogeneity within each category and the absence of alternative approaches.
Outside the Child-Centered/ Social-Reconstructionist Binary: Locating Diverse Practices
Depicting child-centered and social reconstructionist educators as oppositional camps makes each category appear deceptively cohesive and unified. For example, while
Boyd Bode and George Counts had very different ideas for the role of schools in social reform, these differences are often minimized by being collapsed under the heading of social reconstructionism. This erasure of differences is even more striking in the case
* See, for example, Lawrence Cremin,The Tranrformation o f the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York; Vintage Books, 1964); Patricia Graham,Progressive Education: From Arcady to Academe (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967) and C.A. Bowers,The Progressive Ekiticator and the Depression: The Radical Years (New York: Random House, 1969).
^ Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 7. 81 child-centered approaches. While many child-centered schools shared common features,
they also differed depending on the specific philosophy of their founders.^ Caroline
Pratt’s “play school,” approach, for example, emphasized dramatic play “which would
reproduce the children’s experience with their own environment.”^ Lucy Sprague
Mitchell developed an approach of “relationship thinking” involving specially designed
maps and the use o f stories that illustrated cultural change for the teaching of history and
geography. She wrote, “If children can glimpse the world around them as a stage in the
world’s history and geography they become to that extent, geographers and historians.”^
Influenced by Freudianism and a rejection o f the repressive features of traditional
schools, Margaret Naumberg’s Walden School worked toward the “individual transformation” o f the student^
The construction of child-centered and social reconstructionist approaches as
“oppositional camps” is found in histories that focus on institutions and intellectual trends. A notable gap is in the lack of documentation of the day to day practices of teachers. While we know the stories of the well-known progressive schools, we know little of how progressivism impacted teachers’ practices in the 1930s. Contrary to the image of battling factions in which educators had to declare their allegiance, it is more likely that educators developed eclectic, pragmatic practices. Numerous factors
^ Susan Semel, ''Introduction." in ^Schools of Tomorrow, " Schools o f Today: What Happened to Progressive Education, eds. Susan Semel and Alan Sadov nik (New York; Peter Lang, 1999).
* Caroline Pratt,I Learn from Cldldren (1948; reprint. New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 20.
" Lucy Sprague Mitchell as quoted in Joyce Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 295.
^ Semel, “Introduction,” 13.
82 contributed to how individual classrooms were run: where the teacher was trained, the
school’s administration, the educational values of the surrounding community, financial support and available supplies. To remain entrenched in one educational philosophy in the face of the changing needs of students, administrators, and parents would be difficult indeed. A teacher from Bank Street College of Education noted:
For purposes of analysis the theoretical streams are visible and can be separated; but for those of us working in the schools, it was easy to be scientific, to be concerned with individual growth and development, and to look to the reform o f society at one and the same time. There was so much to be done that we didn’t look for neat consistencies; the children were there to be educated, and they seemed more important than logical niceties.*
Interestingly, this quote by Charlotte Winsor appearsTransformation in o f the School, a book focusing on the crippling factionalism within progressive education. The only commentary the teacher’s statement received was the following introductory sentence:
“■Apparently, while progressive theorists found themselves less and less able to live with one another, their theories did somehow converge in the life of the schools.”^
Unfortunately, the history of education lacks documentation of teachers’ practices and how the diverse interpretations of progressivism converged in the schools.C uban’s study of classroom practices suggests that selected progressive practices (e.g. groupwork
* Charlotte Winsor as quoted in Cremin,Transformation o f the School, 289.
’ Cremin, Transfonnation o f the School, 289.
See Richard Quantz, “The Complex Visions of Female Teachers and the Failure of Unionization in the 1930s: An Oral Histor\%”History o f Education Quarterly 25, no. 4 ( 1985): 439-458 for a critique of the portrayal of teachers as victims rather than as active agents.
83 field trips, project activities) were implemented in many elementary schools but that little substantive change was made in the dominance of teacher-centered instruction/^
Freedom vs. Imposition?: Power in the Progressive Classroom
Constructing child-centered and social reconstructionist approaches as opposite extremes on a continuum of absolute permissiveness on the one hand and indoctrination on the other leaves the linkage between child-centered education and “natural” development unchallenged. While histories of progressive education written in the sixties commonly associate child-centered education with a chaotic classroom environment and self-directed student development, more recent analysis has reinterpreted the seeming freedom of the child-centered progressive classroom. As noted in chapter two, Biklen regarded ‘play methods” common to many progressive classrooms as equally effective means of reinforcing gender norms as were found in traditional classrooms.
Discussions of progressive education are commonly structured by a “repression versus autonomy dichotomy” that identifies child freedom as the distinguishing feature of child-centered approaches.'" Many child-centered educators promoted their approach as the “new education” because its attention to child development and interest contrasted with the more autocratic, subject-centered versions of traditional educational methods.
" Larry Cuban,How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Oiange in American Classrooms, 1890-1980 (New York: Longman, 1984). Cuban estimates that child-centered progressive teaching practices rarely occurred in more than one-fourth of the classrooms in districts that tried to implement such changes (p. 135). Antdnio Ndvoa, “The Uses of Foucault in Studying History of Education and Comparative Education,” Paper Presented at New Trends in Qualitative Research: The Uses of Foucault, A Pre-Conference Session of the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Seattle, Washington, 2001.
84 Steeped in Rousseau’s idealized view of education as following a natural unfolding of the
child’s goals, child-centered education promoted freedom rather than teacher imposition.
This dichotomy begs the question of why such careful planning, training, and
curriculum development was necessary in order to sustain “natural” development. In
Rousseau’s Emile, for example, the pedagogical maxim followed by Emile’s tutor is to
“observe nature and follow the path it maps out for you.”^^ Rousseau’s project is more than allowing the unfolding o f “natural” development or he would not have dedicated over four hundred pages to the educational project. Indeed, the book speaks more about proper social and political arrangements and the necessary subjection of women to sustain those arrangements.
Derrida’s writings on Rousseau explore this connection between nature and education through the concept of supplementarity in relation to the status of writing.
Derrida critiques Rousseau’s characterization of writing as merely a supplement to the more authentic representation of thought through speech. Derrida uses the idea of the supplementarity of writing to deconstruct the privileging of speech as the sufficient and unmediated reflection of thought. The idea of supplementation highlights the supposed self-sufficiency lacking the original concept while it simultaneously defers realization of this lack. It is this supplementary relationship which “determines in a certain way all the conceptual oppositions within which Rousseau inscribes the notion of Nature to the extent that it should be self-sufficient.”^^ Although nature is presented as a foundation, it
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (Basic Books, 1979), 47.
" Jacques Derrida,Of Grammaiology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 145. 85 is one that requires repetition of its unmediated essential qualities through the function of the supplement. The supplement both preserves and threatens the integrity of the concept to which it refers.
Derrida illustrates this function in education as follows; “Childhood is first manifestation of the deficiency which, in Nature, calls for substitution[suppléance].
Pedagogy illuminates perhaps more crudely the paradoxes of the supplement. How is a natural weakness possible? How can Nature ask for forces that it does not fiimish?”^^
The care with which Rousseau outlines his pedagogical plan reveals the strained construction of nature as self-sufficient. Education serves as a supplement to nature; simultaneously a testament and challenge to its self-sufficiency.
Walkerdine’s and Biklen’s work illustrates how the contradictions inherent in a carefully planned pedagogy of “natural development,” obscure the conscious and unconscious role of the teacher. In its failure to acknowledge the interventions of educators, some forms of progressive pedagogy serve to underscore fictions of natural development. The dichotomy of repression vs. autonomy implicit in the construction of progressive education contributes further to the positioning of the teacher as mere observer. In contrast to traditional classrooms, the child-centered classroom appears exempt from the exercise o f power and the reproduction of social inequalities.
Foucault's discussion of the efficiency of internalized mechanisms of power as compared to overt coercion can be used to reframe the autonomy of progressive education as a more effective use of power rather than its absence. Contrary to the stereotype of the chaotic classroom lacking discipline, the tenets of child-centered
Derrida,Of Grammaiology, 146. 8 6 progressivism were based on sophisticated mechanisms of control. Cobb’s influential
1928 work on child-centered progressive education states: This is no longer the age of
autocracy. Children are best behaved when they leam to control themselves, and wish to
control themselves because of their ideals of what is proper and necessary for the sake of the social group.” Using Foucault, the supposed autonomy of the child-centered classroom can instead be read as an effective mobilization of self-surveillance.
It is ironic that what Cremin dismissed as a romantic, sentimental attachment to natural development would later be reinterpreted as a form of social engineering far subtler than that devised by social reconstructionists. While both are forms of control, the one is more openly coercive, and the other involves self-regulation and consent. The point is not to demonize child-centered education, but rather, to highlight the questions and concerns that are excluded within this oppositional framework.
Opposition and the Construction of Gender
Drawing on Foucault’s theory of sexuality as a “technology of sex,” Teresa de
Lauretis proposes gender as “a representation and as a self-representation” that “is the product of various social technologies, such as cinema, and of institutionalized discourses, epistemologies, and critical practices, as well as practices of daily life.”
These social technologies can include the family, medicine, literature, and, most p>ertinent to the discussion at hand, the history and historiographic representation of education.
Education has been permeated by gendered and assumptions such as women as “natural”
Stan wood Cobb, The New Leaven (New York: The John Day Company, 1928), 19.
Teresa de Lauretis,Technologies o f Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1987), 2. 87 teachers of young children and men as the abstract producer of knowledge/* Despite the
importance of recognizing “gender as a central organizing principle in nineteenth and
twentieth century education,” it continues to be an underutilized analytic tool in the
history of progressive education/^ This project seeks to add to this history by looking at
the role of the secondary literature on 1930s progressive education in the construction of
gender in the field of education.
“Sentimentalists” and Radicals”
Cremin’s description of the child-centered/social reconstructionist split as one between
“sentimentalists” and “radicals” endures as a gendered assessment of the legacy of progressive education. Using gender as a category of analysis brings several features of this division to the forefront For one, not only is it a division that predominantly falls along lines of gender, but is particularly rigid in defining the ranks of social reconstructionists. While occasionally men are included in the ranks of child-centered educators (e.g., Stanwood Cobb), 1 am unaware of any accounts that identify a woman as a social reconstructionist.
Consistent with Scott’s analysis of the operation of fixed oppositions, the child- centered/ social-reconstructionist split serves to maintain the borders of social reconstructionism through its opposition and repudiation of child-centeredness. The identity created through this opposition constituted a complex interplay of educational
** See for example, Jackie Blount,Destined to Ride the Schools: Women and the Superintendency, 1873- 1995 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998) and Lorraine Code,W/uzt Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction o f Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Mary Leach, “Toward Writing Feminist Scholarship into History of Education,”History o f Education Quarterly 40, no. 4 ( 1990): 455. 8 8 philosophy, political ideals, and masculinity. For example, the first page of Bowers’
discussion of progressive education during the depression establishes a linkage between
the language o f social reform and masculinity. He writes: “Unlike the popular image of
the educator as a supine and socially weak if not indifferent figure, these educators—led
by George Counts, John L. Childs, William K. Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg—were social
radicals who had a deep commitment to social planning and public ownership of the
means of production. The terms supine and socially weak suggest that the integrity of
social reconstructionism as a strand of progressive education is closely tied to
constructions of gender within education."^
Opposition and hierarchy in education historiography fimction to exclude women
from the category of social reconstructionism and its association with a commitment to
social welfare. Historians’ have depicted the issue of social reform as central to the division between these two groups. The assumed split between child-centered and social- reconstructionist approaches underscores the masculinization of social commitment by the association of the former with a narrow, individualist focus, and the latter with a larger commitment to social justice.” Bowers, for example, describes the two factions as
:o Bowers, The Progressive Educator and the Depression, ix.
This view is consistent with Nusser’s analysis of the masculinization of the organization beginning in the 1930s with the increased influence of the men cited by Bower.
“ Petra Munro, “Engendering Curriculum History,” inCurriculum: Toward New Identities ed. William Pinar (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 281.
89 holding ‘^opposing points of view on the school’s responsibility for social reform.”^
Similarly, Cremin describes social reformism as “virtually eclipsed by the rhetoric of child-centered pedagogy” after World War 1.“'^
Child-centered progressive education is often defined so that it appears to preclude social commitments extending beyond the individual child. Citing the tendency of historians to regard child-centered educators as “lack[ing] political vision,” Munro argues that the commitments to social change of educators such as Lucy Sprague Mitchell and
Caroline Pratt “have been obscured by gender assumptions embedded in the term child- centeredness.”^ Despite the strong political commitments of many child-centered educators, characterizations of their work often reflect gendered assumptions that deny their social convictions. Bode’s 1938 description of the common perception of child- centered educators continues as a strong theme in our understandings of child-centered progressive education:
The progressive movement draws its chief inspiration from a certain sentimentality about children. This sentimentality, so its appears, leads to a lot of unedifying fussiness, which is camouflaged as “respect for personality,” but is not intended to be really subversive. There is no intention of changing the established values of society beyond the point of spreading more sweetness and light. With respect to these values the teachers in our progressive schools are frequently as conventional as the buttons on the sleeve of a man’s coat.^^
This characterization of child-centered progressives as lacking a broader social vision is not isolated to the wave of secondary literature on progressive education
^ Bowers, The Progressive Educator and the Depression^ 4.
^ Cremin, Transfonnation of tfie Scfwol, 181.
“ Munro, “Engendering Curriculum History',” 281-282.
“ Boyd Bode, Progressive Education at the Crossroads (New York: Newson & Company, 1938), 10-11. 90 published in the 1960s. In a recent account of progressive education, Zilversmit
describes the social reconstructionists as helping “to restore a balance within the
progressive education movement. They led an effort to recover Dewey’s vision of the progressive school as an institutions concerned with social reform, a vision that had been all but lost in the individualistic, child-centered progressivism of the 1920s.”^^ This characterization o f the relation between the two groups of progressives reinscribes the split that associates social reconstructionists with social reform and child-centered educators with individualism. Interestingly, while some accounts fault both camps of progressive education for falling victim to extremism, this quote depicts the social reconstructionists as bringing much needed balance; restoring a vision of social reform almost lost due to the faulty ministrations of child-centered educators. Despite these differences, Zilversmit underscores the similarities of these progressives in comparisons to other, more politically conservative, educational reform movements of the time. He compares disagreements among child-centered and social progressives to “quarrels within a family in which the members share a core of common assumptions.””*
The family metaphor is an interesting choice that deserves to be pursued further.
If we see progressive education as a family, certainly John Dewey would be the grand patriarch. Dewey’s work is commonly held as the standard by which to evaluate the strands of progressive education. Historians commonly judge different factions of progressive education according to their adherence to Dewey’s conception of progressive education. As noted by Munro, women educators are often expected to be the “dutiful
Arthur Zilversmit, Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930-1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 18.
“ Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 18. 91 daughters” who were faithful to the work of their male mentors. Of the many who departed from Dewey’s often ambiguous discussions of educational philosophy it is often the child-centered female educators who were judged most harshly. For Munro, the dismissal of the child-centered educators is not only a judgment of the daughter who wanders from the work of the seminal father but a disavowal of the feminine features linked with child-centered education.^^
Defining a Progressive Educator: Representations of Elsie Ripley Clapp
My discussion of Clapp is informed by recent research on teacher identity.
Drawing on teachers’ narratives of their work and sense of self this scholarship highlights teachers as “subjects of fiction”: resisting and constrained by cultural representations such as the teacher as spinster, mother figure, and member of “women’s true profession.”^® This work assumes a non-unitary subject and brings to the forefront the multiple and often contradictory discourses shaping teaching identity.
In keeping with these more recent approaches to exploring teacher identity, my discussion of Clapp focuses on how educational historians represent her in the secondary literature. Often inadequately characterized by historians and limited in her own time by the parameters of the educational debates of the 1930s, Clapp provides an example of the
Munro, “Engendering Curriculum History.”
See Kathleen Casey, AAnswer With My Ufe: Life Histories of Women Teachers Working for Social Change (New York: Routledge Press, 1993); Petra Munro,Subject to Fiction: Women Teachers’ Ufe History Narratives and the Cultural Politics of Resistance (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1998); Valerie Walkerdine,School Girl Fictions (London: Verso, 1990) and BCathleen Weiler, “Reflections on Writing a History of Women Teachers,”Harvard Educational Review 67, no. 4 ( 1997).
92 female educator as “subject to fiction.” One such fiction is the reduction of the
complexity of her work under the gendered notion of “child-centered educator.”
Exploring the work of Elsie Ripley Clapp is one way of broadening our
understanding of the range of approaches to progressive education and the limitations of
the child-centered/social reconstructionist fiamework. Representing features of both
child-centered and social reconstructionist approaches, Clapp’s work does not fit easily
into existing historical frameworks for understanding progressive education. Rather than being an exception, Clapp’s use of aspects of both child-centered and social
reconstructionism is an important example of work that remains largely unexplored in the history o f progressive education.^^ Furthermore, exploring historians’ characterizations of
Clapp highlights the role of gender in shaping historical descriptions of the conflicts and successes of progressive education in the 1930s.
Clapp made significant contributions to the progressive education movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Clapp’s work as principal of the schools in Arthurdale, West
Virginia, a New Deal homestead community for displaced coal miners and their families, underscored a commitment to student initiated learning and the possibilities of schools as community centers and catalysts for social and economic progress. Despite her leadership of the Arthurdale educational experiment, her editorshipProgressive of
Education from 1937-1939, and her important approach to educational reform, educational histories overlook her work. Educational historians’ rare references to Clapp
Laura Zirbes, who started The Ohio State University’ laboratory’ school in 1930, is another example of a female educator whose work expands beyond the traditional limits of the child-centered categorization. See Tony Reid, “Laura Zirbes: Foreruimer of Restructuring,”Childhood Education, 68 ( 1991): 98-102. Munro, “Engendering Curriculum History ,” cites Margaret Naumburg, Marietta Johnson, Mary McCloud Bethune, and Alice Miel as other examples of female educators whose visions of social reform are neglected due to their characterization as child-centered. 93 are usually only in the context o f her collaboration with John Dewey at Columbia
University and the influence of his educational philosophy on her work/" Her name appears only twice in Cremin’s comprehensive study of progressive education and then only to direct the reader to Dewey’s introduction to her book.
In cases where historians discuss Clapp, they often describe her as embracing a child-centered approach and as an oppositional force to social reconstruction.^^ For example, in her discussion of the Progressive Education Association, Graham mentions
Clapp only briefly, using her name to represent the far end of the continuum of reactions to Counts’s controversial 1932 address to the PEA convention and describing her as being “categorically opposed” to any kind of “indoctrination.” Clapp’s name also appears in a listing of individuals described as “child-oriented” in opposition to the
“social-minded” group of PEA members.
Similarly, Bowers’s one mention of Clapp in his study of progressive educators during the Depression describes Clapp as “denouncing” Counts’s report from the PEA committee on Social and Economic problems as “too negative.”""* Bower omits, however, the remainder of Clapp’s comments in which she calls for economic criticisms
John Dewey's introduction to Clapp’s The Use o f Resources in Education was his last published essay on education before his death.
^ Examples o f work that interrupts such characterizations of Clapp’s work include Daniel Perlstein, ”Community and Democracy in American Schools; Arthurdale and the Fate of Progressive Education,” Teachers College Record 97, no. 1 ( 1996): 625-650 and Daniel Perlstein and Sam Stack, “Building a New Deal Community: Progressive Education at Arthurdale.” in“'Schools o f Tomorrow, ” Schools of Today eds. Susan Semel and Alan Sadovnik (New York: Peter Lang, 1999).
^ Bowers, The Progressive Educator and the Depression, 36.
9 4 to be tied to specific solutions. In Bowers’s account, Clapp serves as a foil to Counts’s
commitment to social change, an impediment to the realization of education’s radical
potential.
Clapp’s response to Counts’s speech at the 1932 PEA annual conference reveals
the inadequacy of a duahstic construction of progressive education. Her response does
not fall neatly into a readily identifiable “individualist” or “child-centered” position, nor
can one simply equate child-centered approaches with an abandonment of “social
conscience.Clapp, in fact, concurs with Counts that educators must not only serve the
individual needs of students but must also accept a responsibility “to participate in
changing the social conditions in which we live.”^^ Clapp’s objection to Counts’s use of
“indoctrination” is not a naive argument for the neutrality of the educator, she
acknowledges that “conscious and unconscious indoctrination, of course, indubitably
happens.” Rather, she argues that “revolutionizing is theprocess of living and learning and doing.”^^ Influenced by the guiding Deweyan principle of growth, Clapp argues that one cannot know in advance the final social goal. Unfortunately, Clapp’s nuanced perspective on the issue of indoctrination is remembered simply as “categorically opposed” due to the child-centered/social reconstructionist dichotomy.
Joseph Rowan, for example, in "The Social Frontier (1934-43): Journal of Educational Criticism and Social Reconstruction” (Ph.D. diss.. Case Western Reserv e University, 1969) regards a small group of male social reconstructionists as the seemingly sole voice of “social conscience” within progressive education.
^ Elsie Ripley Clapp, “Learning and Indoctrinating,”Progressive Education 9, no. 4 ( 1932): 269-272, quotation on 271.
^ Clapp, “Learning and Indoctrinating,” 270. 95 Child-Centered and Social Reconstructionism: “Leaky” Categories?^*
Bowers’s characterization of Clapp as an oppositional force to social
reconstructionism has been recirculated in more recent works on progressive education.
Semel and Sadovnik refer to the “the debates between Elsie Clapp and George Counts
over indoctrination” as an example of the historical tensions between social
reconstructionist and child-centered strands of progressive education.^^ Presenting Clapp
and Counts on opposite sides of the “indoctrination” appears to be an example of the
continued influence of the categories and descriptions of the 1960s secondary literature
on progressive education. As discussed above, Clapp’s own writings indicate
reservations regarding indoctrination but not a position diametrically opposed to using schools for social reconstruction. Interestingly, this repetition of the child-centered/ social reconstructionist division is made in a volume that is otherwise notable for its attempts to treat these categories with greater specificity. Semel, for example, notes the connection between the goals of these two strands of progressive education:
The relationship between the particular form of progressive education advocated by these female practitioners and social reconstructionism is a complex one. One the one hand, their child-centered schools tended to emphasize the individual development of the child and were often more concerned with individual growth than social change. One the other hand, given their emphasis on the Deweyan concept of democratic community, these schools attempted to connect individual growth to group life and had an implicit emphasis on the betterment of society through the schools. Although it is clear that they were not social reconstructionist in the strict sense, as they did not have an explicit agenda for social transformation, these child-centered progressive schools had a limited social reconstructionist agenda: to help create a more democratic society.
^ r would like to thank Handel Wright for his assistance in reconceptualizing the categories of progressive education. He recommended the term “leakv” as a descriptor (University of Termessee, March 14,2001).
Susan Semel and Alan Sadovnik, “Lessons from the Past and Present,”“Schools in of Tomorrow, ” Schools o f Today: What Happened to Progressive Education, eds. Susan Semel and Alan Sadovnik (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 363. 9 6 I quote the above passage at length because of the approach it takes to some of the
problems that have been raised in this dissertation. Semel acknowledges the difficulty
with dismissing the work of female progressives as failing to extend beyond a concern
with individual development. She seems to resolve the tension between child-centered and social reconstructionist approaches by focusing on how each approach, although different, represented a commitment to social change. The two groups are not presented as different but equal in their efforts to social change, however. The passage goes on to redefine the demarcation separating child-centered from social reconstructionism based on the population generally served by child-centered schools: white students from privileged backgrounds.
Such an approach shares many similarities with my own project. It disrupts the depoliticization of women progressives while acknowledging the limitations of many aspects of child-centered progressivism. A concern, however, is that this approach continues to rely on child-centered and social reconstructionism as discrete, bounded categories with the latter serving as the model. These categories are both reflections of the philosophical tensions within 1930s progressive education and a fictional narrative.
As such, they serve to illuminate and obscure our understandings of progressive education. The challenge for educational historians is the difficult task of both using and disassembling notions of child-centered and social reconstructionist education in looking at schools, teachers’ narratives, and the educational practices of the 1930s.'^°
Patti Lather, “Validitv' as an Incitement to Discourse: Qualitative Research and the Crisis of Legitimation,” inHandbook o f Research on Teaching, 4* edition, ed. Virginia Richardson (Washington, DC: AERA, 2001).
97 This chapter has attempted to contribute to the project of rethinking the categories of progressive education by focusing on how opposition has been used in the secondary
literature. Scott’s description of the rhetorical uses of opposition highlights the mutual interdependence of child-centered and social reconstructionism. The terms are interdependent with the contrast serving to give each its identity. Given Cremin’s enduring description of “sentimentalists” and “radicals,” the categories have served both groups equally poorly. The rise of social reconstructionism is often depicted as the reclamation o f social impulses lost to the child-centered dominated 1920s. The legacy of social reconstructionism as a strand of radical education that can potentially revitalize critical educators is one built on an oppositional and hierarchical relation to female progressive educators.
Social reconstructionism’s coherence as a category carmot be removed from its opposition to child-centered progressivism, an opposition infused with gender politics.
By more extensive work on how gendered assumptions shape our understanding of progressive education, we can enrich our knowledge of the diversity of practices contained under the broad term of progressive education and simultaneously document
“the production of knowledge about sexual difference.”^ ^
One possible formulation for trying to work with and against the categories of progressive education, is to approach them as “leaky” or unbounded categories and to employ them while recognizing the gaps, exclusions and hierarchies on which they are based. Clapp’s work is a helpful example of progressive practices that disrupt traditional categories. Drawing on a variety of influences, Clapp sought to address the specific
■'* Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 2. 98 needs of the communities in which she worked. Such an approach required a more
pragmatic acceptance of the fluidity of progressive categories. The successes and failures
of Clapp’s educational practice raise questions about the limitations of describing
progressive education in the 1930s in terms of a child-centered/social reconstructionist
opposition. In addition to her work in private, child-centered progressive schools, Clapp
attempted to put social reconstructionist commitments to democratic ideals into practice.
Clapp’s use of both child-centered and social reconstructionist thought was not an
isolated case. Based on the feedback of the organization’s membership, a 1941 report on
the PEA’s philosophy stressed the importance of avoiding the extremes of child-
centeredness and social reconstruction!sm in outlining future directions for the
organization.^^ Clapp’s work provides an important example of the diversity of
progressive education approaches in the 1930s—approaches obscured by the existing
historiography’s depiction of progressive education as choice between child-centered or
social reconstructionist views.
Harold ALberty et al. “Progressive Education: Its Philosophy and Challenge”Progressive Education 18 (1941), Special Supplement to the May Issue. 99 CHAPTER 5:
ELSIE RIPLEY CLAPP AND THE PROGRESSIVE IDEALS OF COMMUNITY
Descriptions of progressive education in the 1930s emphasize the philosophical divisions that split the movement. Consistent with this focus on opposing factions, histories of education feature most prominently educators at the poles of these divisions.
One finds little discussion of those who advocated for a philosophy of education that avoided the extremes of child-centered and social reconstructionist approaches. In fact, a number of leaders in the Progressive Education Association (PEA) found a choice between a curriculum based on either a child’s whim or a social engineer’s vision to be an untenable position. ' As one example of such an educator, Elsie Ripley Clapp offers insight into the range of approaches characterizing progressive education in the 1930s.
The preceding chapter illustrated how the historical construction of a child- centered/social reconstructionist opposition does a disservice to the diversity of progressive practices. Clapp was used as an example of an educator whose work is often overlooked or forced into a narrow conception of chi Id-centeredness due to the limitations of the existing categories. Overlooked or oversimplified by historians.
' In contrast to characterizations of the Progressive Education Association as dominated by an opposition between child-centered and social reconstructionist educators, a 1941 report stressed the need for a more moderate approach. Sec Harold Alberty,el al. “Progressive Education: Its Philosophy and Challenge” Progressive Education 18 (1941), Special Supplement to the May Issue.
1(X) Clapp’s work is a tempting site for writing the “perfect counter-hegemonic story”^ that
depicts Clapp as successfully combing the best features of progressivism and thus
resolving tensions between child-centered and social reconstructionist approaches/ The
aim, however, is to highlight the range of progressive approaches rather than to suggest
that Clapp’s work provided an ideal balance between child-centered and social
reconstructionist philosophies. In this chapter, I will first look at historians’
representation of Clapp’s relationship to Dewey in comparison to Clapp’s self
representation of his role in her work. This discussion will be situated within the larger
context of feminist theorizing of teacher life narratives. Second, I will discuss her work
at the Ballard School and Arthurdule and the questions it raises about progressive efforts
to develop democratic communities. In conclusion, Clapp’s complex role as both insider
and outsider at Ballard and Arthurdale will be analyzed in relation to the challenges of
creating biographical vignettes.
Clapp as the ‘^Dutiful Daughter’^ of John Dewey: Representing Agency in Feminist Research
Despite her accomplishments as editor and innovator in progressive education,
Clapp remains largely unknown in the history of education. Often the mention Clapp does receive serves as a means to another end—to point to Dewey’s introduction to her book or to depict Clapp as a critic of social reconstructionism. Clapp’s appearance in the progressive education historiography follows the pattern of the “dutiful daughter”:
’ S. Villenas as quoted in Elizabeth S l Pierre and Wanda Pillow, “Introduction: Inquiry among the Ruins,” in Working the Ruins: Feminist Poststructural Theory and Methods in Education, eds. Elizabeth St. Pienre and Wanda Pillow (New York: Routledge, 2000), 3.
^ I would like to thank Daniel Perlstein for his helpful comments on this point 101 women who appear in curriculum history as the good daughters who reproduce the ideas
o f their intellectual fathers/ As stated by Munro, “the dutiful daughter reproduces but is
never generative in her own right.
The “dutiful daughter’’ provides a useful frame for challenging assumptions about the working relationships of accomplished women and their better known male
colleagues. Historical representations of Clapp present her as a “dutiful daughter” to
John Dewey and minimize her independent contributions. For example, the University of
Illinois online philosophy guide describes Clapp as “a Dewey protégé who devoted her career to the promotion and application of her mentor’s educational theories.”^ While
Clapp was greatly influenced by John Dewey, her work provided more than the application of Dewey’s theories. Involved in the day to day work of creating a school as a community center, Clapp offered new insights on the development of schools as democratic institutions.
Initially it appears that Munro’s concept of the dutiful daughter accurately accounts for the erasure of Clapp’s significance from the history of education. There is a striking disconnect between her obvious contributions to progressive education and the little mention she received in the secondary literature. Clapp’s unpublished papers.
■* Petra Munro, “Engendering Curriculum History” inCurriculum: Toward New Identities ed., William Pinar (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998).
^ Munro, “Engendering Curriculum History,” 272. Munro’s examples of dutiful daughters include Catherine Beecher and Horace Mann, Anna Julia Cooperand Frederick Douglass and Jane Addams and John Dewey.
* University of Illinois Online Guide to Educational Philosophy, http://www.siu.edu/~dewevctr/wadsup.html.
102 however, suggest a more complex picture than a woman whose significance has been lost due to historians’ reliance on Dewey to frame her work and life. In her job applications and correspondence, Clapp herself, underscored the significance of Dewey in her work.
In a response to an author writing a book on Dewey, Clapp closed by saying, “He [John
Dewey] has always been my advisor in the work that I have done.”^
Unlike Clapp’s presentation of her work in her articles and books, many of her unpublished papers framed her educational initiatives as an elaboration of Dewey’s interests rather than her own. On a federal job application to head the Arthurdale schools, Dewey figured prominently in Clapp’s descriptions of her previous educational work. Clapp discussed her principalship at Ballard, work for which she gained national recognition, as an implementation of Dewey’s research interests rather than her own:
“Undertook this work because John Dewey wished to have worked out for educational use, plan of community education—cooperative enterprise of a community in and through a school.”* Similarly, Clapp depicted her work as principal at Rosemary Junior
School as motivated by Dewey: “Worked, at Dr. Dewey’s desire, on demonstration of modem methods with young children tested in formal college preparatory high school.”^
Ironically, while historians’ presentation of Clapp as Dewey’s “dutiful daughter” is based on unsupported assumptions about male/female mentoring relationships, Clapp’s papers appear to confirm these assumptions.
’ Joseph Ratner Papers, Special Collections, Morris Library', Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (The Special Collections at Morris Library will hereafter be abbreviated as ML/SIU).
8 Elsie Ripley Clapp Papers, ML/SIU, Box 1, folder 1.
’ Elsie Ripley Clapp Papers, ML/SIU, Box I, folder I. 103 Munro’s critique o f the “dutiful daughter” narrative in curriculum history
highlights the problems associated with depicting Clapp’s connection to Dewey as her
only distinguishing feature. However, a danger of the dutiful daughter analysis is that the
emphasis on Dewey is dismissed as a distorted historical construction. It directs attention
away from the likely possibility that some female educators capitalized upon these
cormections to create opportunities that might otherwise be closed to them. The quotes above could indicate the powerful influence that Dewey had on Clapp’ work and/or strategic use of Dewey’s name to gamer support for her educational projects.
Interpreting Clapp’s use of Dewey’s name raises larger theoretical questions for biographical and archival research. The question of interpreting Clapp’s self representation connects to larger issues of agency, power and resistance. Attending to the numerous power differentials by virtue of gender, experience, and reputation that mediated their relationship, the temptation is to interpret Clapp’s use of Dewey’s name as either evidence of self-erasure or overt manipulation.
My approach to Clapp’s representation of her connection to Dewey is influenced by larger shifts in feminist historiography. This shift is one that highlights the role of competing discourses in structuring available subject positions rather than an empirical search for facts. Previously, feminist history was dominated by the documentation of women’s oppression on the one hand and their capacity for resistance on the other. This latter, “teacher as hero” approach interrupts a victim narrative but often celebrates individual achievements decontextualized from social conditions. In reflecting on these
Maqorie Theobald, ‘Teachers, Memory and Oral History,” Tellingin Women's Lives: Narrative Inquiries in the History of Women’s Education eds. Kathleen Weiler and Sue Middleton (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999).
104 shifts in approaching women teachers’ narratives, Weiler discusses the multiple influences that have served to enrich the field: theorists such as Dominick LaCapra and
Hayden White in highlighting the constructed and rhetorical features of history; the work of poststructuralist feminists who have pointed out the gendered nature of these constructions; materialist feminists in maintaining the importance of material analysis in the face of the increasingly textual focus of the linguistic turn; and postcolonial critiques of the erasures created by the category of “women.” For Wefler, the intersections o f these theoretical influences have destabilized notions of a coherent and stable subject and suggest “the constant creation and negotiation of selves emerging fi-om competing and contradictory discourses within structures of material constraint.”
Although feminist historians such as Linda Gordon have argued that the historical focus on discursive construction erases women’s agency, Munro’s work on women teachers’ life history narratives provides an example of how resistance and agency remain meaningful concepts in post-structural narrative analysis. Initially interpreting the life histories of three women teachers within a neo-marxist frame, Munro found that traditional understandings of resistance as specific acts opposing repressive systems of power failed to encompass the experiences of the teachers she interviewed. This narrow definition of resistance, based on “grand theories and metanarratives of change,” obscured women teachers’ complex negotiations of the gender discourses operating in
“women’s true profession” and served to reinscribe teachers as passive victims of gender ideology. For Munro, poststructural feminist perspectives assisted her in “engendering
" Katheleen Weiler, “Rellections on Writing a History of Women Teachers,”Telling Women’s Lives: Narrative Inquiries in the History o f Women’s Education eds. Kathleen Weiler and Sue Middleton (Buckingham: Open Universitj' Press, 1999), 46-47.
105 resistance theory”: creating an analytic frame that acknowledged the resistance she saw
operating in the teachers’ narratives that was marginalized by traditional conceptions of
power.
Weiler’s and Munro’s work on women teachers’ narratives provides important
alternatives to the teacher as victim or teacher as hero models of historical analysis. In
the case of Clapp, this allows us to explore her work beyond the extreme options of
victim and hero. It seems unlikely that she wholly subscribed to gender discourses that
confined her identity as the “dutiful daughter” who merely applied the work of Dewey
without original theoretical contributions. Similarly, interpreting her use of Dewey’s
name as solely a calculated move designed to manipulate the gender politics of her time
unrealistically ascribes to Clapp the ability to step outside the gender politics that
permeated universities and educational organizations.
Two aspects of Munro’s project of “engendering resistance theory” are
particularly relevant to understanding Clapp. First, rejecting repressive models of power that emphasize acts of opposition allows for an expansion of definitions of resistance to
include the appropriation of hegemonic discourses. Second, Munro argues for resistance as a process that recognizes the ubiquitous and fluid operations of power. Discourses
“function simultaneously as liberatory and oppressive, as sites of contradiction in which acts of both resistance and compliance operate.”^" Such a model acknowledges the layers of historical meaning attached to the female teacher. Yet, despite being “subject to
Munro, Subject to Fiction, 34.
106 fiction” many teacher negotiate these discourses of spinster, professional, nurturer, and
“dutifui daughter”^^ in ways that acknowledge our complex functioning gender ideologies/^
Munro argues that many female educators are inaccurately placed in the role of dutiful daughter within histories of education. Clapp is not merely a victim of historical erasure nor is the role of “dutiful daughter” a static position of powerlessness. Clapp in many ways was the “dutiful daughter” to John Dewey. Her work as his teaching assistant, her role as friend, reviewer, and support in their frequent correspondence, her careful handwritten records of his lectures, and her description of her work in terms of Dewey’s goals all speak to the role of female helpmate rather than an independent contributor to educational theory and practice. The dutiful daughter is not, however a stable position.
While this role often served to keep her in Dewey’s shadow, it also allowed appropriation in order to gain access to professional opportunities that might otherwise be closed to her.
For some, the focus on fluidity of meaning and the subversive appropriation of dominant discourses that characterizes many feminist poststructuralist approaches to language seem to exaggerate the ability to remake oneself and underemphasize material constraints. In the discussion above, I do not suggest that Clapp consciously cast on and off particular social roles as they suited her purposes. Such a reading retains agency and resistance within a model of autonomous individuality, divorced from larger discursive constraints. Women often have created spaces of resistance at the sites of contradiction which inevitably emerge in discourses of gender. The struggle is not between competing
^ Munro, Subject to Fiction.
* Teresa de Lauretis,Teclmologies o f Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 107 roles, however, but plays out at the level of subjectivity. As noted by Butler, our very conditions of being, of identifying as a subject, is in a language that is not of our own making. Subjection is a dual process of the creation and erasure of the individual. For
Butler “subjection is the paradoxical effect of a regime of power in which the very
‘conditions of existence,’ the possibllify of continuing as a recognizable social being, requires the formation and maintenance of the subject in subordination.”^^ The paradoxes of subjection contribute to our understanding of mentoring between women educators and their more well-known male colleagues. In the case o f Clapp, it serves as a contradictory site where Dewey was both a key to her own unique identity as an educational scholar and an iconic figure under which she was subsumed.
Elsie Ripley Clapp: Educational Background and Relation to the PEA
Clapp’s work is particularly significant in relation to the changes that took place within the Progressive Education Association in the 1930s. While progressive education cannot be solely identified completely with the PEA, educators and lay persons in the
1930s widely regarded the organization as the leading promoter and clearinghouse on progressive education. Its local and national conferences, publications, teacher workshops, and journal popularized the organization as the official voice of progressive education.
As described in Chapter 2, the 1930s brought significant shifts in the leadership and philosophical orientation of the Progressive Education Organization. Social
^ Judith Butler, Jlie Psychic Ufe of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 27.
108 reconstructionist professors were increasingly critical of the failure o f the PEA to take a
stance on the social and economic challenges that faced the nation. The membership of
the executive committee shifted away from child-centered practitioners to university
professors, particularly those affiliated with Teachers College. This shift involved a
multi-faceted change in the organization. As pointed out by Nusser, the increased
prominence of education professors meant not only the decreased representation of K-12
educators and the pedagogical concerns of practitioners but decreased opportunities for
women given their notable absence from the circle of Teachers College progressives.
Clapp serves as an interesting deviation fi-om characterizations of the PEA’s
leaders that equated female/practitioner/child-centered on the one hand and
male/professor/social reconstructionist on the other. An appealing aspect of this
description of the shift in the organization is the simplicity of its divisions and the extent
to which it speaks to contemporary debates about splits between educational theory and practice and the under-representation of women in educational administration. Clapp’s disruption of this too tidy narrative of a male/theory usurpation of power within the organization is a particularly noteworthy aspect of her work.
Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Clapp crossed back and forth from school and university settings. Clapp’s educational and professional background combined child- centered progressivism with experiences traditionally associated with social
The increased influence of Teachers College faculty during this time are described also in Lawrence Cremin, The Trans/onnaiion of the School (New York; Vintage Books, 1964) and Patricia Graham, Progressive Education: From Arcady to Academe (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967) but without discussion of the role of gender.
Janie Nusser, “Gender’s Contribution to the Rise and E^l of the Progressive Education Association, 1919-1955. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York City (April 10, 1996). 109 reconstructionism. After leaving Vassar for health reasons, Clapp received her B.A. in
English from Barnard College in 1908. Clapp then entered Columbia University’s
Philosophy Department where she earned her M.A. in 1909. These studies occurred while
Clapp worked at the Brooklyn Heights Seminary and, later, at the Horace Mann School.
Clapp continued work at Columbia on a Ph.D. in English with a minor in Philosophy. She completed all required coursework but did not complete her qualifying exam or dissertation. Although Clapp did sit for the exam, she reported to Dewey that the faculty began to argue among themselves and that she left after an hour. In her diary Clapp wrote: ‘T felt outraged for I knew I had been baited—a fact which Trent did not deny, but also that I had allowed myself to be routed, and of this I was ashamed.”'*
It was while working on her doctorate that Clapp met Dewey and began assisting him in his classes and in the preparation of his lectures. Although Clapp stopped working on her doctorate in 1912, this working relationship which began in 1911 continued intermittently during the years of 1912, 1922, and the winter sessions of 1923-1927.'^
Clapp’s graduate work and experience with university teaching distinguished her from the majority of other women K-12 educators. Clapp, in fact, identified jealousy of her education and association with Dewey as a source of friction between herself and
Caroline Pratt while at the City and Country School.~° Because of Clapp’s work as a female educator in child-centered schools, her graduate work, teaching at Columbia
Excerpt from the Elsie Ripley Clapp Memoirs quoted in Sam Stack, “Elsie Ripley Clapp and the Arthurdale Schools.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Canada (April 23, 1999), 6.
Elsie Ripley Clapp Papers, ML/SIU, Box 1, folder 1., Box 1, Folder 1.
Sam Stack, “Elsie Ripley Clapp and the Arthurdale Schools.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Canada (April 23,1999). 110 University, and association with Dewey and social reconstructionist William Kilpatrick placed her between the categories of practitioner and academic that grew increasingly contentious in the PEA.
Much of Clapp’s professional career was consistent with those of the child- centered members of the PEA. She worked in several private progressive schools including Ashley Hall in South Carolina (1913-1914), Brooklyn Heights Seminary in
New York (1914-1921), and Milton Academy in Massachusetts (1921-1922). Clapp also spent a year teaching 7*^ grade at one of the most well known child-centered progressive schools, the City and Country School. These positions offered the opportunity to interact with key child-centered leaders such as Caroline Pratt and Lucy Sprague Mitchell and to introduce progressive curriculum into schools that had formally relied upon a traditional educational approach.’^ The schools’ provincial scope, however, limited possibilities for progressive education. Like most progressive schools on the east coast, the schools at which Clapp taught were private schools serving affluent white students—a profile similar to Clapp’s own educational background.
Clapp’s application of progressive principles outside the context of northeastern private schools also differentiated her from many other child-centered educators. It is the development of schools as community centers, particularly in rural areas, that is the heart of Clapp’s writings. Between 1929 to 1936 Clapp served as head of two rural public progressive schools, first the Ballard Memorial School and then the Arthurdale School in
Arthurdale, West Virginia. In her written work and as chair of the National Committee on
Sam Stack, “Elsie Ripley Clapp and the Arthurdale Schools.’ I l l Rural Education from 1932 to 1933, Clapp was instrumental in bringing attention to issues of public, rural education in the Progressive Education Association.
More importantly, this concern with rural education broadened the possibilities of locations and techniques for progressive education. Despite the growth in membership and in the range of educational issues addressed, the PEA had continued to reflect the schools of the original founders of the organization—private, urban and suburban experimental schools. This narrow context limited the types of issues explored by progressive educators. For example, Clapp brought attention to the issues of poverty and health within an educational discourse that assumed children entered the classroom rested, well fed and healthy. Her writings on rural education stressed the role of schools in addressing the health needs of students.
The Ballard School, 1929-1934
Clapp’s involvement in the Ballard School in Jefferson County, Kentucky began with a presentation to a parents’ committee that had traveled to New England in 1928 to find a new principal for their school. Evidently, Clapp’s ideas for using Ballard as the site for an “experiment in rural education” were persuasive." The committee appointed
Clapp principal and agreed to supplement the public school budget with an additional
$ 10,000 covered equally by local parents and the County Board of Education. Clapp expressed her appreciation for the community’s financial and emotional commitment to
Elsie Ripley Clapp, Community Schools in Action (New York: The Viking Press, 1939), 6.
112 this educational experiment by acknowledging that the “dream” of progressive education at Ballard was made possible by the parents’ and Board’s “vision and efforts.”^
Even prior to its new beginning as a progressive school and community center in
1929, the Ballard School had a unique history in Jefferson County compared to other local schools. In 1909, Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Ballard donated the land and financial support for the establishment of the Roger Clark Ballard School in memory of their son.
The County Board of Education contributed to the new school by selling the land on which two smaller local schools had stood and giving the proceeds in support of this lager, consolidated school. The school opened with approximately 50 pupils primarily drawn from the schools sold by the County Board. Also attending the school were the children of the Ballard’s friends and neighbors—students’ whose class standing in
Kentucky would have normally dictated a private school education. Clapp described the student body as 75% children of small independent or tenant farmers and 25% children of
“prosperous old Kentucky families.”""* For Clapp, the diverse economic background of the students and the history of community support of the school made Ballard an ideal location for implementing her ideas on schools as democratic, community centers.
Experiments in rural progressive education were largely unexplored at the time
Clapp accepted the principalship at the Ballard School. Clapp’s willingness to take this position with no prior experience in rural education proved to be professionally advantageous. After only two years at Ballard, Clapp emerged as a key figure in rural education. The Child Welfare Organization of America and the National Education
^ Clapp,Community Schools in Action, 6.
^ Clapp,Community Schools in Action, 5.
113 Association invited Clapp to write an account for their annual year books, she delivered a
radio address on Ballard as a representative of the Progressive Education Association,
and she was invited by the New Era Organization to speak at its 1932 world conference.^
For Clapp, rural education meant more than simply showing the relevance of
progressive education beyond an urban/suburban setting. She saw rural schools as
offering unique possibilities for developing schools as community centers. She
envisioned teachers as members of the communities in which they taught and community
support in the daily activities of the school. The school would provide services such as
health care, cooperative food purchases, and recreational activities. Clapp saw the rural
setting as providing opportunities for school/community collaboration lacking in other
locations. Clapp wrote, “In a city the work of a school is supplemented by medical
centers, relief agencies, social centers, places of entertainment, theatres, museums,
concert, halls, etc. In a rural district where these other agencies are lacking, the school
necessarily performs a variety of functions
An innovative feature of Clapp’s conception of the school as community center
was the use of local resources. The Ballard School curriculum grew out of the social and
geographical environment in which it was located. In the first chapter Communityof
Schools in Action, Clapp discussed Kentucky’s landscape, economy, and agricultural
production. This knowledge of the state’s history and resources allowed Clapp to connect the school’s educational goals with the surroundings and activities of the
“ Elsie Ripley Clapp Papers, ML/SIU, Box 1, Folder 1.
“ Elsie Ripley Clapp, “A Rural Communitv School in Kentuckv,”Progressive Education (March, 1933), 126.
114 students’ daily lives. For example, drawing on the fact that many of the families in the community owned sheep, the school involved the younger students in a study of wool.
The children experimented with washing, carding, and spinning wool, observed shearing on local farms, and discussed modem processes of woolen manufacturing. Units of study also recognized local handicrafts such as weaving and fiddle making. Community members demonstrated their skills for students and discussed the processes involved in production. Students had the opportunity to create their own products and to discuss coimections with the crafts of the state’s pioneer settlers.'^
Clapp was particularly interested in the blending of the old and new in Kentucky.
The coexistence of tractors with hand plows and cars with horse drawn buggies offered rich opportunities for the study of history. In her surroundings, Clapp saw “existing side by side today illustrations of almost all the stages of Kentucky’s history.”"* Old cabins and country trails inspired discussion of Native American tribes in Kentucky and the experiences of European Americans settling the land. To further explore the daily life in a pioneer home, students furnished an abandoned cabin with a spinning wheel, woven rugs, pegged log-stools and homemade candles and soap. Later this cabin became the backdrop for a play the students wrote about Daniel Boone and a pioneer family.
Quoting from a teacher’s year end report, Clapp highlighted the role of these activities in the educational process: “Language has meaning to them [the students] because they have written when they had something they wanted to say, and I think history has a meaning to
^ Clapp’s source for this quote is Miss Sheffield’s year end teaching report Elsie Ripley Clapp Papers, ML7SIU, Box 4, Folder 1.
^ Elsie Ripley Clapp, Community Schools in Action (New York: The Viking Press, 1939), 16.
115 them. To them history means life. They think of the pioneers in terms of their own lives.”"^ Furnishing the pioneer cabin and taking part in the daily life activities of early
Kentucky settlers encouraged children to make connections between their immediate surroundings and a larger historical context. These local connections then served as a foundation for learning about other states and countries.
The exploration of local history and experiments in pioneer living were consistent with Clapp’s commitment to using local resources in the educational process and the progressive emphasis on hands-on activities. Clapp’s writings also contained a subtle indication that such projects were partially motivated by her belief in the children’s academic limitations. In her draft manuscript on Ballard Clapp wrote: “Inept in book- learning the group had used painting as an approach to their Indian studies.”^" Perhaps realizing that this presents painting as a strategy for dealing with learning deficits rather than valuable in its own right, the phrase “inept in book-leaming” has a line drawn through it.^^
A.rthurdale, 1934-1936
Clapp’s innovative work at Ballard made her a leading advocate of schools as community centers. Her ideas for revitalizing education through community involvement gained a national reputation though her articles Progressivein Education, the NEA yearbook, and her role as chair of the PEA Committee on School and Community
Clapp’s source for this quote is Miss Sheffield’s year end report. Elsie Ripley Clapp Papers, ML7SIU, Box 4, Folder 1, p. 18.
“ Elsie Ripley Clapp Papers, ML/SIU , Box 4, Folder I, typed p. 43/handwritten p. 27.
Given that the manuscript has other corrections in Clapp’s handwriting, it appears that Clapp, rather than an editor, deleted the phrase.
116 Relations. A recognized leader in this new area of progressive education, Clapp was invited to consult at the newly planned subsistence homestead community of Arthurdale for unemployed coal miners and their families in West Virginia. Clapp was soon appointed director of the Arthurdale schools, a position for which Clapp is most commonly remembered and which dominated her professional writings. Chosen by
Eleanor Roosevelt to head the schools, Clapp had the unique opportunity to implement her educational philosophy with the backing of Federal funds and the unflagging commitment and support of the First Lady.
Subsistence homesteads were one example of the range of New Deal approaches to addressing the economic and social problems of the Depression. Not just a social works program, the homestead approach reflected a back-to-the-land movement that rejected the wage dependence of cities and sought stability through a return to an agrarian existence. A complex movement with a diverse constituency, the influence of the back- to—the-land movement led to the introduction of three subsistence homestead bills in
1932. Infused with romanticized images of the independent yeoman farmer of pre industrial America, this movement influenced the conception of Arthurdale as a social and economic experiment.^"
The first experiment of the U.S. Division of Subsistence Homesteads and labeled a "pGt project” of Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthurdale received numerous visitors and national newspaper coverage. Arthurdale’s successes and failures were closely monitored and publicized as its critics and advocates used the fledging community to support larger
See Stephen Haid, “Arthurdale: An Experiment in Community Planning, 1933-1947.” (Ph.D diss.. West Virginia Universit\\ 1975) for a discussion of the history of back-to-the-land movements in the U.S and their relationship to the establishment of Arthurdale. 117 political agendas- As noted by Haid, “to New Deal critics, it was an extreme example of waste, bureaucratic bungling, and teary-eyed idealism that characterized much of the
Roosevelt Administration’s reform program. To defenders, Arthurdale was an innovation that would provide a prototype for fundamentally reorienting and reorganizing American life along more humane lines.”^ Although the position as head of Arthurdale Schools offered Clapp tremendous opportunities for implementing her ideas of schools as community centers, it embroiled her in the controversies that surrounded Arthurdale from its beginning.
Clapp, like many advocates of Arthurdale, saw the new community as a desperately needed intervention in an area profoundly affected by poverty. The families who came to live in Arthurdale moved from the mine camp of Scott’s Run in Monongalia
County, West Virginia. Already subject to fluctuations in job opportunities, Monongalia
County and its coal industry was hit hard by the Depression. In some camps, virtually all the miners were unemployed.^ Characterizing it as the worst place she had ever seen, reporter Lorena Hickok described the living conditions she witnessed during her 1933 visit to Scott’s Run:
In a gutter, along the main street though the town, there was stagnant filthy water, which the inhabitants used for drinking, cooking, washing and everything imaginable. On either side of the street were ramshackled houses, black with coal dust, which most Americans would not have considered fit for pigs. And in those houses every night children went to sleep hungry, on piles of bug infested rags, spread out on the floors.^^
^ Haid, “Arthurdale,” 1-2.
^ Haid, “Arthurdale.”
“ Lorena Hickok,Reluctant First Lady (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1962), 136-137. 118 After hearing of Lorena Hickok’s account and invited by the American Friends
Service Committee, Eleanor Roosevelt visited Scott’s Run in August, 1933. The level of
poverty at Scott’s Run left a lasting impression on Roosevelt, one that contributed to her personal investment in the success of Arthurdale.^ Identifying the Scott’s Run residents as the participants in the Division of Subsistence Homestead’s first homestead experiment was not solely motivated by the extreme poverty of the area. Eleanor
Roosevelt described fears that the situation would lead to a “people’s revolution.”^ In addition to chronic unemployment and exploitative working conditions, the area had a history of labor disputes that sporadically erupted into violent protests and gunfire. Not surprisingly. Communist supporters staged rallies at Scott’s Run and attempted to gain the backing of the miners.^ Concerns that the extreme conditions of Scott’s Run might lead to radical political critique of the U.S economic system contributed to its early identification as a site of Federal intervention. Despite numerous building problems and disputes over of building ownership, the first families began moving into the new
Arthurdale homes during the summer of 1934.^^ The first term of the Arthurdale school began as scheduled fall of 1934 but not without considerable effort on the part of Clapp
^ Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember (New York: Harper Press, 1949).
^ Roosevelt, This I Remember, 126.
^ Haid, “Arthurdale.”
Hastily ordered, the first pre-fabricated houses were too small to accommodate the average family size of the families moving to Arthurdale, were ill-suited for the weather, and did not fit the foundations. The houses had to be renovated at considerable expense and became the first target of critics who claimed the Arthurdale project was poorly planned and financially irresponsible. See, for example, Frank C. Waldrop, “Collapse of a New Deal Dream: Mrs. Roosevelt’s Subsistence Homestead Totters,”Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph, 28 Feb. 1935. Clapp notes inCommunity Schools in Action, (p. 71) that the houses were too small but, in keeping with her focus on the project’s successes, uses it as an example of the arehitects “ingenuity and resourcefulness” in completing the necessary enlargements.
119 and the homesteaders. Reahzing that the new school buildings would not be ready, they renovated the old mansion on the property to serve as a temporary elementary school.
Completing the renovation in time for the first day of school after considerable community effort was for Clapp an appropriate beginning for a school conceived as a community center “For two weeks we had all together—fathers, teachers, mothers, children—worked at everything. The School was a reality at last and it was ours—the community’s school.”*”
The school was a central component of the larger plan of Arthurdale as a successful, cohesive community. Clapp envisioned the school as reflecting the needs of the community and serving as its focal point. Health work, recreational activities, cooperative lunch programs, and Men’s and Women’s Clubs were integrated in the larger mission of the school as a community center. Community involvement in schools continues today as a much sought after goal. Unlike contemporary efforts, however, the
Arthurdale plan bears the imprint of the social reconstructionist focus on collectivity.
The school plan drafted by the West Virginia Advisory School Committee**' and approved by Eleanor Roosevelt and the homesteaders began with the following statement: “It is proposed that just as the organization of this community represents an
' Clapp,Community Schools in Action, 79.
*" Clapp describes the committee as being comprised of the County Superintendents of Preston County and Monongalia Count}', a supervising teaching, several members of the Department of Education of the Uaiversitv' of West Virginia, and a Relief Administrator.
120 experiment seeking to discover means of needed adjustment in our social and economic
life, likewise let this be a new school, providing for its citizens of all ages richer and
more adequate educational opportunities.”^”
Arthurdale and the Exclusions of Conununity
Ideals of community and democracy made the Arthurdale experiment an
innovative attempt to deal with the social, economic, and educational challenges of the
Depression- A significant aspect of Arthurdale’s legacy is that it attempted to wrestle with the tensions between commitments to the individual and to those of the larger community that became so contentious within progressive education. While Arthurdale stands as an important example of school/community collaboration, it also testifies to the inseparability of community and exclusion. Young describes the ideal of community as an "understandable dream” rendered problematic “because those motivated by it will tend to suppress differences among themselves or implicitly to exclude from their political groups persons with whom they do notidentifyWith its utopian ideals trusted only to carefully selected participants, Arthurdale embodied the contradictions inherent in notions of community.^
Clapp,Community Schools in Action, 72.
Iris Marion Young, “The Ideal of Commuait}' and the Politics of Difference,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990).
^See Daniel Perlstein, “Commuait}' and Democracy in American Schools: Arthurdale and the Fate of Progressive Education,” Teachers College Record 97no. 1 (summer 1996):625-650 and Daniel Perlstein and Sam Stack, “Building a New Deal Commuait}': Progressive Education at Arthurdale,”“Schools in o f Tomorrow, ” Schools o f Today: What Happened to Progressive Education, eds. Susan Semel and Alan Sadovoik (New York: Peter Lang, 1999) for discussion of the strengths of Arthurdale and the tensions within its ideal of democratic commuait}'. 121 The homesteaders were carefully selected in the belief that this would give
Arthurdale, an experiment being closely surveilled by critics and supporters, the best possible chance of success. The selection committee evaluated the over 600 applications in terms of farming knowledge, health history, work ethic, and moral character. The process also included an eight-page questionnaire and home interviews."*^ Aware of the often tenuous nature of community unity and the psychologically and physically demeaning conditions from which the families were being relocated, the selection process carefully screened out applicants who were perceived to be potentially divisive to the community. Applications from whites not bom in the U.S., African-Americans, and those suspected of being labor agitators were excluded immediately from the selection process."*® The decision to make Arthurdale an all-white community came from a number of pressures: racist assumptions about what ethnic groups make good workers, protests by the homesteaders, and fear that the added controversy of integration would destroy hopes for community unity ."*^
Active protests by many of the homesteaders underscored organizers' fears that
Arthurdale would only survive as a segregated community. The Homesteaders’ Club wrote Eleanor Roosevelt in order to express their commitment to preserving Arthurdale as an all-white community. They based this decision on the desire to maintain the respect of the surrounding communities, a concern about having to support two schools in order to comply with state segregation law, and a disdain for the "mixed blood Negroes” who
Clarence Pickelt,For More Than Bread (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953), 54.
See Haid, “Arthurdale,” Perlstein, “Community and Democracy in American Schools,” and Perlstein and Stack, “Building a New Deal Community.”
Haid, “Arthurdale.” 122 had applied to Arthurdale in contrast to “real Negroes” who respected racial
segregation."® The Roosevelt administration and Arthurdale leaders presented their
support of this segregationist policy, in part, as a show of support to local autonomy. A
letter to Clarence Pickett, the executive secretary of the American Friends Service
Committee, stated that “local sponsors are best situated to determine the type of project
with respect to racial makeup which should be established in any community
Arthurdale reflected a much larger tension between individual self-determination and social reconstruction with which progressive educators struggled. The first statement of the Arthurdale Plan philosophy expressed a 'Taith in democracy and confidence in the ability of an enlightened people to govern themselves in economic and political affairs.”*
This democratic vision, however, failed to acknowledge the larger problems that plagued
U.S. society. As noted by Perlstein and Stack: “In a complex society marked by fundamental racial and class relations of domination and subordination, rather than by superficial sectarian divisions, the community school could only incompletely achieve its pedagogical, social, and democratic work.”^^ Clapp, Dewey, and other progressive educators viewed more democratic, communal ties as a more just principle of social organization and a necessary response to the demands of industrialization. “Community,” like progressive education, was a concept that was deemed natural and inevitable, yet in need of careful construction and surveillance.
Letter from Claude Hitchcock to Eleanor Roosevelt, February' 16, 1934, as quoted in Haid, “Arthurdale.”
Letter from John P. Murchison to Clarence E. Pickett, October 23, 1934, as quoted in Haid, “Arthurdalc.’^
“ Clapp,Community Schools in Action, 72.
Perlstein and Stack, “Building a New Deal Community,” 235.
123 The Arthurdale curriculum reflected the same concern for unity that guided the exclusionary selection of the homesteaders. School discussions carefully avoided controversial subject matters that could be potentially divisive. For example, despite the presence of a plantation slave cabin on school property, the issue of slavery was not incorporated into the students’ studies of the history of their surroundings. The
Arthurdale schools also failed to address the economic reasons why the community was comprised of displaced coal miners. The students discussed coal, yet, the relationships between the miners and the coal companies, the history of strikes in the region and the level of poverty that motivated the establishment of the Arthurdale homestead remained untouched.
It is this lack of an explicit economic and social philosophy that separates Clapp’s writings from many other social reconstructionist educators. Bode, for example, criticized the schools’ role in obscuring the negative consequences of American economic individualism.^" He viewed American schools as encouraging a tolerance of contradiction in the interests of patriotism and corporate profits. To Bode, the tendency for millions of unemployed workers during the Depression to see their situation as personal misfortune reflected an “obtuseness” facilitated by public schools.^'’ It is this compartmentalization of community circumstances as separate from larger social issues that left Clapp vulnerable to criticism.
^ Boyd Bode, ‘The Confusion in Present-Day Education” in Tlie Educational Frontier ed. W. Kilpatrick (New York: D. Appleton-Centiny' Company, 1933).
^ Bode, “The Confusion in Present-Day Education,” 7.
124 A 1940 review of Clapp’s Community Schools in Action challenged her lack of
analysis of larger social problems: “Issues such as those of race, farm tenancy,
unionization, conservation of human and natural resources, unemployment, paternalism,
dictatorship, nationalism, the maldistribution of wealth and income—in a word, the
sickness of an acquisitive society—are noticeable for their almost entire absence.”^
For the reviewer, Samuel Everett, Clapp’s book illustrated a larger weakness in
community-school programs—the lack of an underlying social philosophy. This same
criticism was commonly leveled against the child-centered members of the Progressive
Education Association during the 1930s. In fact, the language of the review sounds
strikingly similar to Counts’ controversial speech of 1932 in which he identified the lack
of a theory of social welfare as the chief weakness of progressive education. Although
Clapp’s avoidence of controversial social issues was a significant failing in the
Arthurdale curriculum, Everett’s critique does not acknowledge the social and educational commitments that undergirded her work.
As the author of the introduction to Clapp’s book and her long time colleague,
John Dewey wrote Everett in response to his review. Although Dewey’s introduction was cited favorably by Everett, Dewey felt the need to clear up Everett’s
“misunderstanding.. .of either the point of my introduction or of the text of Miss Clapp’s report.”^ Dewey’s letter provided a clearly articulated defense of Clapp’s position, despite her avoidance of the explicit criticisms of economic individualism common to
^ Review by Samuel Everett, Elsie Ripley Clapp Papers, N/IL/'SIU, Box 2 file 28. Review published in Curriculum Journal 2, no. 3 ( 1940).
“ Letter from John Dewev to Samuel Everett, April 29, 1940. Elsie Riplev Clapp Papers, ML/SIU, Box 2 Ftle 28.
125 social reconstructionism. Dewey described Clapp’s focus on the problems and resources
of specific communities as a "concrete exemplification” of his own social philosophy.
He commended Clapp’s work at pursuing the "vital tasks” of education in contrast to the
prevalence of abstract discussions of philosophical tenets.
Dewey is often portrayed as supporting criticisms of the Progressive Education
Association as lacking a social vision.^^ His defense of Clapp, however, showed a
broader definition of what might constitute a social philosophy than that held by other
social reconstructionists. Challenging Everett’s characterization of Clapp’s approach,
Dewey saw the issue as a conflict in social philosophy rather than as Clapp’s failure to
have one. Dewey wrote:
That this social philosophy [in Community Schools in Actionl runs counter to a good deal of present talk and writing in educational cricles [5 /c] which begins—and too often ends—with an attempt to start from the larger political and economic problems of the country—and often of the whole world—or, if not that, to use the local community simply as a spring board to get over to these issues, I can see. But I think it is confusing to assume that because there is a conflict between two social philosophies there is an absence of social philosophy in one of them...
The above quote by Dewey has twofold significance. For one, Dewey challenged the
common depiction of social reconstructionism as the only educational approach with an
underlying social philosophy. He furthermore validated the importance of practitioners’ attempts to put into practice different strands of educational philosophy.
^ See, for example, Patricia Graham,Progressive Education: From Arcady to Academe (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967); Lawrence Cremin,The Transformation o f the Sclwol (New York: Vintage Books, 1964); C.A. Bowers, The Progressive Educator and the Depression: The Radical Years (New York: Random House, 1969) and Daniel Tarmer,Crusade for Democracy: Progressive Education at the Crossroads (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991).
^ Letter from John Dewev to Samuel Everett, April 29, 1940. Elsie Riplev Clapp Papers, ML/SIU, Box 2 File 28.
126 Dewey presented Clapp’s work as an alternative formulation of social
philosophy—one grounded in grassroots work rather than abstract generalities. While
Clapp’s work lacked an explicitly articulated socioeconomic framework, Dewey regarded
it as a necessary complement to the more abstract discussions foundEducational in
Frontier and in issues of the reconstructionist journal.Social Frontier.^^ Indeed, one is
struck by the extent to which many social reconstructionists avoided dealing with the
specifics of how their philosophies would look in day to day educational practice.
Counts, for example, offered scathing critiques of schools but only vague suggestions as
how to implement change. This limitation in the social reconstructionist scholarship
most likely played a part in Dewey’s defense of Clapp’s work. Dewey’s letter to Everett
was a rare acknowledgement that a commitment to social betterment was held by
educators outside of the walls of Teachers College.
Entering a community with a predetermined agenda would have been inconsistent with Clapp’s vision of schools as community centers. Clapp stressed school planning as a
process of ongoing development. Entering a school with aan priori social philosophy and strategy would have been at odds with Clapp’s more pragmatic perspective. Clapp’s social views were a backdrop to her discussions rather than the guiding frame for her work. Her commitment to schools as community centers was motivated by her belief in their possibilities for facilitating social change. She stated:
The school is, therefore an experiment in democratic living— It is influential because it belongs to its people. They share its ideas and ideals and its work. It takes from them as it gives to them. There are no bounds
* William Ki pa trick (Ed.),The Educational Frontier (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1933). Published from 1934-1938,The Social Frontier grew out of the William Kilpatrick Discussion Group at Teachers College (sec Daniel Tanner,Crusade for Democracy, for information on the journal’s founding.
127 so far as I can see to what it could accomplish in social reconstruction if it had enough wisdom and insight and devotion and energy/^
For Clapp, social reconstruction was not a general educational philosophy, but a commitment to engaging in the problems of a specific community.
“The Lady Principal From New York”: Negotiating Community/School Relations at Ballard
Progressive education, particularly the effort to develop schools as community centers, revealed the contradictions, and exclusions inherent in notions of community. A significant feature of these tensions was the relationship between progressive teachers and the communities they served. Clapp’s educational philosophy stressed the importance of teachers and the school being intimately connected to the larger community. Y et, given that the Ballard and Arthurdale schools were staffed primarily by northern progressive teachers, the boundaries of insider-outsider were complex and shifting. Clapp’s discussion of the Ballard School illustrates the challenges involved in developing a school as a community center. Clapp’s advocacy of her approach in
Community Schools in Action minimized the difficulties involved in simultaneously addressing diverse community opinions and the sometimes dissenting perspectives of school administrators, and progressive and traditional teachers.
Clapp’s discussions of the school as community center in both the Ballard School and in Arthurdale reveal difficulties in negotiating “working with others and guiding
^ Elsie Ripley Clapp, “A Rural Comm uni tv School in Kentucky,”Progressive Education 103 (March, 1933), 128.
128 them in that work.”^ An important tension was whether the school would reflect
concerns of community members or those identified by Clapp. While these interests are
not necessarily in conflict, Clapp’s writings indicated shifting descriptions of her role in
the community. Her language changes from one who is seeking to learn from the
community to a reformer seeking to save the community from itself. At one level,
Clapp’s description of rural education as having a ‘‘potency and a reach and an
effectiveness undreamed of in cities” spoke to her faith in the democratic potential of
schools as community centers. On another level, however, one might read this as a
description of the potential for social engineering on the part of progressive educators.
Clapp’s depiction of the local dialect and her descriptions of many families’ way of life
were often inconsistent with her vision of creating a school “by people, with people, for
people.”^ ^ At times, her language was that of a missionary rather than of a community
advocate. She described her efforts to teach “civilization” to the students: “how to eat,
and sleep, methods and means of cleanliness.”^^ Her culture shock at what she observed
is clearly evident. To show the conditions she confronted in her attempts to teach
“civilization” she quoted a young girl’s response to learning how to set a table: “It’s all
right for you-all to teach me about setdn’ a table and all that...but at my house we ain’t
so fancy, we just eats standin’ up.”®
“ Clapp as quoted in Perlstein, “Community and Democracy in American Schools.”
Clapp, “A Rural Community School in Kentucky,” 128.
“ Clapp, “A Rural Community School in Kentucky,” 127.
® Clapp, Community Schools in Action, 13.
129 The relationship between the teacher and the community was a key aspect of
Clapp's educational philosophy. She believed “a teacher who enters community
education surrenders prerogatives. His authority is the authority not of position, but of
usable knowledge confirmed by action and events.”^ A successful example of the school
as a community center featured teachers who lived in the community and took part in its
activities. Ideally, the community and school staff worked cooperatively to make the
school an integral part of community life and a reflection of community needs and goals.
Clapp’s contribution to this collaborative effort was her extensive experience as a
progressive educator and investment in the school as a community center. Although
Clapp’s expertise and educational attainments opened the door for her involvement in the
development of the school, they also served to identify her as an outsider (or as described
by one person, "the lady principal from New York”).^^ Clapp’s description of the educator’s role quoted above, creates a seemingly untenable position in which one is simultaneously forfeiting authority, but a member of the community based on one’s expertise as a progressive educator.
In her description of speeches she made to the PTA and local meetings, Clapp emphasized her status as an intellectual among the local people. Her presentation to the
PTA primarily dealt with Clapp’s contributions to the PEA, speeches she delivered and invitations organizations offered her to speak or contribute written work. For Clapp, these "functions and honors” contributed to her prestige and spoke to the importance of the Ballard School in the development of education in the United States. Despite her
** Clapp,Community Schools in Action, 169.
“ Elsie Ripley Clapp Papers, ML/SIU, Box 4, Folder 1. 130 conviction that these honors reflected the importance of the school’s work, Clapp feared
that her speech was “absurdly pompous.” She believed, however, that this listing of
honors was not held against her by the audience. With some ambivalence, Clapp
concluded the reflection on her speech by stating: “Whatever the reasons for these
proclamations, it is a relief now to turn to more amusing anecdotes.^
These “amusing anecdotes” to which Clapp turned offer additional insight into
Clapp’s perception of her role in the community. Although in the above quote Clapp
expressed fear that the recitation of her professional honors might be “held against her,”
the anecdotes with which she continued presented her enactment of her role as
“prestigious educator” as a community expectation. She told a story of giving a speech
written to be “as simple as possible” to members of the community. Emphasizing the women’s apparent disappointment, Clapp reported that the wife of a school board
member said she and her husband had come out on a rainy night only to find that “there wasn’t one word [they] couldn’t understand.”^^ With this incident in mind, Clapp adopted a new strategy for the County Educational Rally: “I dressed in my best and, undeterred by the number of country people present, delivered a formal address on ‘The
Relations of the Progressive Movement to the Art and Science of Education,’ which could not have been understood by many in that audience but was mightily cheered.”^*
Clapp presented her next anecdote as an example that she had “not yet fully learned [her] lesson” on how to deliver speeches to the community. Chosen to deliver the
“ Elsie Ripley Clapp Papers, iVIL/SIU, Box 4, Folder 1,62.
Elsie Ripley Clapp Papers, ML/SIU, Box 4, Folder 1,63. [Emphasis in original]
Elsie Ripley Clapp Papers, ML/SIU, Box 4, Folder 1,63.
131 commencement address at a neighboring school, Clapp was last on a lengthy program of
speakers. A stifling hot night, she observed the crowd growing increasingly listless as the
hours passed. When Clapp was finally announced, she decided to forego her address in
favor of some brief comments to the graduating students. She reported that “as we left
the schoolhouse, the Chairman rebuked me.” “Yes,” he responded to Clapp's
explanation, “I know, but all this is what they came for, and they aimed to hear a lady
principal from New York. You should have given your speech, all of it.”^^
What was the “lesson” that Clapp had not fully learned? Was her position as a
member of the community contingent upon the extent to which she presented herself as
an outsider—the professional educator with specific skills to contribute? Was her role as
public speaker valued only in so far as she was an intriguing oddity, “a lady principal from New York”? While Clapp used these stories to bring humor to her description of her work in the Ballard School, they also served to highlight her difference from other community members. Despite Clapp’s emphasis on the importance of teachers’ integration into the community, her stories offered a narrow, “folksy” presentation of the people with whom she lived and worked. This presentation is compounded further by describing herself as an exotic other to be put proudly on display at community functions.
Clapp’s unpublished writings about her relationships with the people of Ballard are neither simply a story of condescension or assimilation. Drawing again on the notion of female teachers as “subject to fiction,” one can see how Clapp worked within a
' Elsie Ripley Clapp Papers, ML/SIU, Box 4, Folder 1,64.
132 sometimes impossible position of competing roles and expectations.™ Her
self-representation shifts, at times emphasizing her national reputation as an
accomplished educator, while also stressing examples of how she had been "accepted”
into the rural communities so different from her own background. Ironically, the very
status as an experienced educator that led to Clapp’s appointments at Ballard and
Arthurdale, served to distance her from the communities in which her educational
philosophy demanded she be a part.
This chapter has explored some of the tensions inherent in the democratic vision
of progressive education. Arthurdale was inspired by a utopian vision that families
disillusioned by poverty and their dependency on mining companies could remake their
lives. The new homes, landscaping, and progressive school were certainly a striking
contrast to the conditions at Scott’s Run. The central feature of the project, however, was
the plan to teach the residents to be active citizens in a democratic community. Built on
exclusions, Arthurdale reflected the larger contradictions in U.S. democracy.
In addition, the discussion has looked at the tensions within Clapp’s own life and
professional practice. Her link to Dewey illustrates some of the larger paradoxes of
identity: subjectivity as subjection. Dewey was both intimately tied to her sense of self
and to its erasure. The historical complexity of Clapp’s work and Arthurdale exceeds a
The newspaper coverage Arthurdale added another layer to the demands placed upon Clapp. Clapp kept a scrapbook of newspaper articles on Arthurdale and the schools. Many of the articles focused on the reckless spending o f federal funds and the poorly planned nature of the projecL One picture in the scrapbook contains a newspaper photo of a young boy investigating his cellar with a flashlighL The caption reads, “HE WONDERS—And well this young homesteader at Reedsville, W. Va., may wonder why there’s a fireplace in the coal bin of his new home. Nobody seems to know. The fireplace was left there in the whirl of architectural rearrangements last year. A dead end wall just four feet away forces his father to make a coal bin in that space.” Reporting o f errors was a common feature of much of the reporting on Arthurdale. Next to the photo and caption, Clapp wrote, “Reporters constantly sent in by newspapers to find som e flaw to exploit” Elsie Ripley Clapp papers, ML/SIU, Box 4. 133 binary of child-centered/social reconstructionism. Disrupting both categories, they add to our understanding of the range of progressive practices. Similarly, Clapp is a productive site for seeing the construction of the female educator as “subject to fiction.” Clapp’s unique approach to progressive education becomes lost in the highly gendered and falsely homogeneous notion of “child-centered” educator.
1 3 4 CHAPTER 6:
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
A central feature of this dissertation is a concern for the methodological and epistemological shifts occurring in educational history. New methods in cultural history emphasize the role of textual analysis in historical processes. Barrett describes textuality as “a movement within literary and cultural theory and in philosophy towards the revaluation and revalorisation of the textas text rather than as pale reflection o f some prior reality.^ Although traces of the crafting o f a text may at times be in the background rather than an immediate feature, language still serves as a producer of meaning rather than as a “medium for the transmission of content.”"
Hayden White’s work on narrative is one example of how concerns with textuality have impacted historical research. White’s attention to the narrative features of history highlights its constructed nature. For White, narrative serves a demand for closure and moral meaning. He states: “What I have sought to suggest is that this value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that
‘ Michéle Barrett, The Politics o f Truth (StsmSord: Stanford University Press, 1991), 124.
’ Barrett, The Politics o f Truth, 124. 1 3 5 is and can only be imaginary.”^ Furthermore, White describes how narrative is used in
historiography to confer legitimacy and the status of truth. He states:
Historians themselves have transformed narrativity from a manner of speaking into a paradigm of the form that reality itself displays to a “realistic” consciousness. It is they who have made narrativity into a value, the presence of which in a discourse having to do with “real” events signals at once its objectivity, its seriousness, and its realism."*
Narrative serves to impose an imaginary sense of closure and coherence on the
representation of history as well as signify truth. In so far as the narrative form appears
to be “speaking itself’ the form appears to grant a transparent view of past events.
Drawing on these shifts in historiography, this dissertation has examined the
narrative constructions of progressive education within the secondary literature. O f
particular interest was historians’ depiction of child-centered and social reconstructionist
strands of progressive education as oppositional camps. Significant consequences of this
binary construction are that they: obscure the range of approaches contained under each
category; limit what is knowable about progressive education by contributing to the
invisibility of approaches that do not fall into either category; and contribute to the
construction of sexual difference by drawing the division between these two groups along
lines of gender.
The work of Elsie Ripley Clapp served as a case study for exploring these
oppositions in more depth. Operating from a child-centered/social reconstructionist
binary, many historians have classified Clapp as child-centered and presented her as an
oppositional force to social reconstruction. She serves as a useful illustration of the
^ Hayden White, The Content o f the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 25.
■* White, The Content o f the Form, 24.
136 exclusions produced by a reliance on these categories. Clapp’s practice, like that of many
progressive educators, exceeded the boundaries of the philosophical divisions that existed
within progressive education.
Based on the analysis of the secondary literature and the work of Clapp, the study
identified four key points of significance. The study:
1. Formulates the categories of child-centered and social reconstructionist as useful, but
unbounded categories, rather than two mutually exclusive poles.
2. Contributes to recent attempts to treat progressive education with greater specificity.
As stated by Kincheloe, scholarship on progressive education needs to better
“understand progressive non-uniformity in relation to location, place, and local social
and cultural forces.”^ Clapp points to the frequent disconnect between how
progressive education played out at the institutional level and the more pragmatic
approaches used in its application.
3. Intervenes in versions of the history of progressive education that feature men as
social reformers and women as apolitical nurturers of individual children. In doing
so, the study provides an example of the role of historiography in the ongoing
production of sexual difference as a form of power.
4. Explores the possibilities for using feminist theory and cultural studies to inform the
use of biography in education. By highlighting the often contradictory discourses and
® Joe Kincheloe, “Foreword,” in“'Schools o f Tomorrow, ” Schools o f Today: What Happened to Progressive Education?, eds. Susan Semel and Alan Sadovnik (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), xiiv.
137 expectations that inform teaching, the study provides an example of biography that
retains agency yet runs counter to a tradition of “cheerful teacher research stories.”^
Future Directions
The dissertation findings point to new areas for research in progressive education.
One such area is the need for more work on how progressive practices were or were not implemented in classrooms. How did teachers negotiate the demands of administration, parents, and the professional obligations of “modem education”? What form did pressures to use or not use progressive methods take?
More work is also needed on 1920s and 1930s progressive schools that did not conform to the traditional profile: private, urban schools serving predominantly white, middle and upper-middle class students. Arthurdale is significant as an example of a public progressive school in a rural setting. In general, there has been little attention to how progressivism operated in small towns and in schools that served students of color.
How, if at all, did these different contexts change the meaning of progressive education?
Categories of Progressive Education and Contemporary Educational Theory
Chapter one discussed efforts to use social reconstructionism to inform contemporary efforts to create more democratic schools. Giroux, for example, saw the movement as an historical example of educators as public intellectuals and agents for social change. Building on the work o f Giroux, Stanley regards social reconstructionism
* Janet Miller, “Methodological Issues in Telling Women’s Lives,” Symposium presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, Louisiana (April 28, 2000).
138 as an example of “counter-memories to document and explain the deep roots of human
resistance to various forms of domination.”^ Dennis Carlson identifies the history of
social reconstructionism as a starting point for his democratic progressive approach to
education. Defining social reconstructionism as working on “transformative” and
“liberative” change in culture and education, Carlson regards it as an ongoing contributor
to attempts to firame education as a form o f social critique.* He links Kozol’s Death at an
Early Age (1967) and mid 1970s neo-Marxist critiques of schooling's reproductive role in
capitalist functioning as evidence of the continued influence of social reconstructionism.
Those who draw on social reconstructionism to inform new projects such as democratic progressivism or a reconceptualized reconstructionism are aware of the limitations of applying social reconstructionism to contemporary educational concerns.
Carlson, for example, interrupts notions of unbroken theoretical continuity by acknowledging social reconstructionism as a “diverse and changing tradition.”^
Furthermore, Carlson regards social reconstructionism’s sweeping views of social and economic change as tied to outmoded notions of power and social change. He calls for a refiguring of social reconstructionism to make it more compatible with his view of social change as consisting of pragmatic, localized reform efforts. William Stanley’s use of social reconstructionism also recognizes that it requires adaptation in order to
^ William Stanley,Curriculum for Utopia: Social Reconstructionism and Critical Pedagogy in the Postmodern Era (Albany: State University' of New York Press, 1992), 192.
* Dennis Carlson, Making Progress: Education and Culture in New Times (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997), 14.
’ Carlson,Making Progress, 15.
139 contribute to postmodern critical pedagogy. In fact, Stanley’s numerous
recommendations for addressing these limitations leave social reconstructionism barely
recognizable from its 1930s form.
Despite these recognized limits in the use of social reconstructionism, an
unresolved tension remains between its specificity to the historical context of the 1930s
and the desire to incorporate contemporary efforts within this tradition. Stanley’s,
Carlson’s, and Giroux’s criticisms of social reconstructionism’s limitations and their
recognition of its changing forms are belied by the desire to maintain defining parameters
that connect it to contemporary educational theory. Carlson, for example, ties social reconstructionism across different historical contexts through the themes of
‘“transformative change,’ cultural struggle, and the teacher as an engaged intellectual.
Similarly, Stanley attempts to maintain continuity through appeals to an authentic version of social reconstructionism. Criticizing the lack of support for social reconstructionism as well as its usage when it is employed, Stanley states: “often such support appears to be informed by little or no knowledge of the original reconstructionist position and history.”^ * Despite renovations, these discussions of social reconstructionism are characterized by a notable investment in maintaining a line of theoretical descendents that connect contemporary critical theory with 1930s social reconstructionists.
Social reconstruction has the potential for informing contemporary practice. This has primarily taken the form of a search for a “counter-memory” and the creation of a lineage establishing ties to the original social reconstructionism. Several problematic
Carlson, Making Progress, 15.
" Stanley, Curriculum for Utopia, 192. 140 consequences emerge, however, from such a search for origins. For one, the lineage from
Counts to Kozal to the present can be prescriptive in an effort to preserve the original
legacy. In addition, as noted in chapter four, women are too easily cast as the dutiful daughters in origin stories marked by the works and deeds of significant men. Second, it assumes this origin story will benefit all educators interested in ideas of social justice. It imagines a community of educators with whom this genealogy will resonate.
Providing connection, historical exemplars, and the legitimization o f existing practices, origin stories for progressive educational practices have an undeniable appeal.
Ironically, it was my initial identification with these goals that led to my critique of importing the categories of 1930s progressive education into current practice. I too, wanted to look to history for inspiration, yet, was struck by the absence of women. Are we to believe that no women worked for social change in the 1930s?
My reaction to the reclamation project described above contained both an awareness of the erasure of women as progressive theorists and social activists and an affinity for the resurrection of the utopian rhetoric of the social reconstructionists. Given this, the problem seemed to be the exclusion o f women rather than the project itself. It appeared that this problem could be addressed by enlarging the category of social reconstructionism to include women.
Elsie Ripley Clapp appeared to be a prime example of a woman who had been
“incorrectly” classified as child-centered. Operating within the strictly divided categories of child-centered and social reconstructionism, I wanted to move Clapp from one category to the other. Adding Clapp to the ranks of social reconstructionism runs the risk of creating an alternative origin story that simply adds an “exceptional” woman to the
141 male pantheon. This move also does not address the larger problems with the categories of social reconstructionism and child-centered. It leaves untouched the issue of who these categories do or do not include as well as the discursive interdependence of the categories. The current search for origins in social reconstructionism neglects the exclusions that give it coherence as a category and reinscribes a split that sees male social reconstructionist as the social conscience of progressive education.
One consequence of the above exclusions is the contemporary use of social reconstructionism to promote the ideal of the teacher as a transformative or engaged intellectual. Such a goal is undoubtedly an important alternative to models that idealize teachers as technicians of “best practices.” Unfortunately, social reconstructionism has too readily been imported without attention to the gender politics that permeated the maintenance of its boundaries. Social reconstructionism is invoked to promote the goal of the transformative teacher without discussion of the tensions that permeated these same efforts in the 1930s. No mention is made of the multiple factors that prevented most teachers from carrying out reconstructionists’ calls to action. Reconstructionist professors of education often depicted teachers as entrenched in the status quo without acknowledging the pressures teachers faced from administrators, community members and the financial stresses of the Depression. Such a reclamation of social reconstructionism risks a repetition of a theory/practice split and disregard for how teachers define transformation that characterized the 1930s.
142 Fictions of Reclamation
In investigating how Clapp was depicted in the secondary literature, the study drew on Munro’s notion of “subject to fiction.” Contained within the gendered fiction of female child-centered educator, Clapp is reduced to a foil of social reconstructionism.
Interestingly, this process can often be duplicated in the process of trying to “rescue” a person from obscurity. As is often the case in biographical work, the researcher has specific and often personal reasons for choosing a particular subject. These investments can cause the researcher to make the person’s life subject to their own fictions and desires. Just as 1 explore Clapp as subject to fiction during her own time and within the secondary literature, 1 have grappled with the fictions that 1 create in my use of her as a site. One such fiction is to depict Clapp as a reclaimed heroine of progressive education who has been ignored by historians of education.
Xin Liu Gale’s analysis of three historical studies of Aspasia of Mietus, a fifth century BCE Greek courtesan/rhetorician, deals with the issues raised by feminist histories that attempt to document women who have been ignored in history. Although
Gale is working in a different historical context, 1 believe the shift she encourages in feminist reclamation of women lost to the historical record is relevant beyond studies of antiquity. She calls for a shift in questions from “Who are those women whose voices were silenced by men in history?” to ‘Ts it at all possible to find out how all those historical women got lost in history?” Reframing the question entails a move from
See for example Lvnda Anderson Smith, The Biographer’s Relationship with her Subject,” inWriting Educational Biography: Explorations in Qualitative Research, ed. Craig Kridel (New York; Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998).
Xin Liu Gale, “Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus,”College English 62, no. 3 (2000): 378. 143 uncovering a suppressed truth to exploring how discourses create particular identities and
authorize particular historical narratives. It is a recognition that the “truth” of a historical
figure, particularly those about whom we know little, is “discourse-relative, perspective-
dependent, and historically contingent depending on whose story we take up as true.”^'^
Biography, Narrative, and Discursive Analysis
Historians such as Mark Poster and Joan Scott have illustrated the importance of
history in tracking the construction of “discourses of truth” and documenting the
discursive production of particular subject positions. In contrast to ahistorical categories
of race and gender, for example, they recommend describing how these identities are
constituted within specific social and historical contexts. A potential tool in such a
project is linking the analysis of the narrative strategies of historiography with new
approaches to biography. This study has linked a textual analysis of the progressive
education historiography with an alternative use of biography. The focus was on Clapp’s
location in the philosophical tensions of progressive education rather than a
documentation of her life events. In so doing, the dissertation explored the implications
of “constructed versus found worlds” for dealing with both historiographic narratives and
life narratives.'^
Ethnography, history, and other forms of qualitative research in education are
currently struggling with the role of narrative—including biography, teacher life history and interview data. These connections, particularly the debates over the use of narrative
Gale, “Historical Studies and Postmodernism," 380.
^ Patti Lather, “Critical Inquiry in Qualitative Research,”Exploring in Collaborative Research in Primary Care, eds. Ben Crabtreeet al. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 105.
144 in ethnography enlarge the possibilities for their use in history. Constas, for example,
argues that Lyotard’s call for the replacement of metanarratives with “little narratives”
(petits récits) has been used by some educational researchers to overstate the claims of
narrative. According to Constas, researchers such as Connelly and Clandinin have
raised narrative understanding to “the status of a privileged form of knowledge” in the
area of teacher thinking.*^ The danger is that narrative is celebrated as an authentic
expression, a giving of “voice” to participants. As with historical narratives, the very
features of its constructed nature are those that make it appear all the more real. Narrative
inquiry can contain the pull of seemingly contradictory goals. It is sometimes presented
as offering an alternative to claims to objectivity while simultaneously offering claims of
realism which rival those of positivist science.
Biography and Discontinuity
One way of troubling the seemingly authentic status of narrative is to use rupture
and discontinuity to interrupt the closure and coherence often associated with narrative.'^
In describing her own struggles with the “romance with narrative,” Munro states: “The
current ‘crisis of representation’ reminds us that all stories are partial, the teller always
‘in flux,’ and that the tales we tell are never mere descriptions.”*^ Janet Miller has explored the discontinuities and tensions in biographical, autobiographical and narrative
Mark Constas, ‘'The Changing Nature of Educational Research and a Critique o f Postmodernism,” Educational Researcher 27, no. 2 (1998): 26-33.
" Constas, “The Changing Nature of Educational Research,” 28.
See White, Content of the Form.
Petra Munro, Subject to Fiction (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1998), 6. 1 4 5 methods as a means of highlighting how these same issues inhabit studies of curriculum
and instruction. Critiques of linear and unified notions of knowledge and self permeate
both our discussions o f educators lives and our educational practices. Critical o f
celebratory life narratives that stress authenticity and continuity. Miller sees biography as
a means of calling attention to the tensions and multiplicity in ourselves and in our ways
of knowing. She states:
They [biography] can provide examples of how particular historical, cultural, economic and social forces helped to shape varying and changing conceptualizations of teacher, or student, or curriculum. They can provide insight into how educators, influenced by particular historical moments and contexts, constructed versions of themselves as educators. They can provide contexts for questioning how the biographer has constructed both herself and her subject through and in language.
Contrary to celebrations of “authenticity,” biography becomes a tool to complicate
unified notions of a teacher’s identity and to document the ways teachers incorporate,
resist and redeploy cultural representations of “the teacher.
The theme of discontinuity challenges unitary representations that reify subjects
along narrow lines of identity politics. Bergland, for example, calls for a questioning of
“any easy relationship between discourse and the speaking subject, particularly the assumption thatexperience produces avoice —that, for example, being woman means speaking in a woman's voice.~ Rousmaniere provides an example of disrupting such
Janet Miller, “Biography, Education and Questions o f the Private Voice,”Writing in Educational Biography: Explorations in Qualitative Research, ed. Craig Kridel (New York; Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998), 227.
See Miller, “Biography, Education and Questions of the Private Voice,” and Munro,Subject to Fiction.
“ Bett\' Bergland, “Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject: Reconstructing the ‘Other,’” in Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters (Amherst The University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 134 (italics in original).
146 categories in her discussion of Margaret Haley. She highlights Haley’s multiple
identities as worker, teacher, and social reformer—identities that defy singular categories.
The focus is on the “fault lines and inconsistencies of her life” rather than using her to
represent a static subject that embodies a specific identity."^
Biography and Agency
Biographical and narrative approaches can seem compelling because of the
personalization of the workings of history. They “strive to elicit from cold fact the
warmth of a life being lived.”"*^ Focusing on an individual life can also offer reassurance
of the significance o f individual actions in the face of seemingly determinative social and
institutional structures. This sense of agency that biography and life narrative offers can also tend to overemphasize individual will at the expense of the larger discourses by which those choices have become possible. Goodson raises the following concerns about the growing popularity of teachers’ personal stories as the subject of research:
To promote stories and narratives without analysis of structures and systems shows how the best of intentions can unwittingly complement the moves to uncouple the teacher from the wider picture. Stories and narratives can form an unintended coalition with those forces which would divorce the teacher from knowledge of political and micropolitical perspective, from theory, from broader cognitive maps of influence and power.
^ Kate Rousmaniere, “Where Haley Stood: Margaret Haley, Teacher’s Work, and the Problem of Teacher Identitv,” in Telling Women’s Lives: Narrative Inquiries in the History of Women’s Education, eds. Kathleen Weiler and Sue Middleton (Philadelphia: Open University' Press, 1999), 149.
^ Oates as quoted in Miller, “Biography, Education and Questions of the Private Voice,” 225.
^ Ivor Goodson, “Storying the Self: Life Politics and the Study o f the Teacher’s Life and Work,” in Curricidum: Toward Mew Identities, ed. William Pinar (New York: Routledge, 1998), 19.
147 Some historians have avoided biographical studies for reasons similar to those expressed
by Goodson. Many forms of revisionist history in the 1970s eschewed biography, feeling
that power differences became erased under the appealing veneer of individual
achievement.'^ Furthermore, an individualist focus seemed incompatible with structural
explanations. Both history and ethnography continue to struggle with incorporating life
history while attending to the social and political context in which those lives are
situated.
Historians face a challenge to create new spaces for biography in education
consistent with reconceptualizations of qualitative research, identity and narrative.
Indeed, both autobiography and biography bring new possibilities and challenges to the
search for new forms of representation. Contrary to notions that poststructuralist critiques of experience and agency diminish the importance of biographical vignettes and autobiographical narratives, they provide new questions to pursue. For Gilmore,
“autobiography gives postmodernism a test and a discourse through which to theorize human agency.”'^ One can make a similar argument for using biographical vignettes in education to deal with subjectivity in a way that is neither removed from social and economic contexts or simply a reflection of oppressive structures of power.
This study has engaged with the new possibilities for biography in educational history by drawing on multiple feminist resources. Scott’s work on subjects as historical
Barbara Finkelstein, “Revealing Human Agency: The Uses of Biography in the Study of Educational History.” in Writing Educational Biography: Explorations in Qualitative Research, ed. Craig Kridel (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998).
^ Leigh Gilmore, “The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography, and Genre,” in Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 8.
148 sites combined with Munro’s rethinking of resistance provided a frame for dealing with
issues of feminist “recovery,” the complexities of Clapp's relationship to Dewey and the
tensions between agency and discursive construction.
A Double(d) Reading of the Categories of Progressive Education
The history of progressive education in the 1930s provides a meaningful context
for contemporary practice. An alternative to creating origin stories is Lather’s concept of
double(d) practice.^* Drawing on Derrida, she describes the double move as one of
“affirmation and negation” that challenges mastery narratives of objective knowledge.
Engaging the endless deferral of meaning inherent in language, doubled practice recognizes the contingency of categories and their reliance on exclusions and omissions.
Doubled logic represents ‘“the double necessity of working from within the institutional constraints of a tradition while trying to expose what the tradition has ignored or forgotten. This concept provides a space for thinking about the categories of progressive education and the educators contained within these categories outside of origin stories. Rhetorically progressive education has served as an origin tale for democratic progressivism as well as conservative critics of the abandonment of
“traditional” education. It also has appeared as a cautionary tale of educational factionalism, and the consequence of a professionalism that isolates educational experts from the broader public. A doubled reading of progressive education has its own rhetorical investments and fictions, yet it seeks a liminal space where its boundaries are
^ Patti Lather, “Getting Lost; Feminist Efforts Toward a DoubIe(d) Science,” Symposium presented at the Annual Meeting o f the American Educational Research Association, Seattle, Washington (2001).
” Nealon as quoted in Patti Lather, “Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science.” 149 employed, disrupted and exceeded. Lather states, “Rather than essence or origin, the double(d) marks the trial of undecidability as dispersion, dissemination, groundless ground, the always already divided origin, that which can never be mastered, sublated or dialecticized.”^°
This challenge to mastery, the embracing of “getting lost” within our categories does not abandon knowledge claims. A doubled reading of progressive education continues to make use of the categories of child-centered and social reconstructionist while interrogating the absences upon which their coherence relies. It provides a space in which progressive education serves not as a warning or ideal but a contradictory site that reveals one piece of the scaffolding of contemporary educational concepts and investments.
“ Lather, “Getting Lost; Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science.’ 150 BIBLIOGRAPHY
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