WE'VE COME A LONG WAY A retrospective exhibit earlier this year in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library marked a milestone in Emory history. Claire E. Sterk, the university's first woman president, welcomed guests at the opening event.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, it wasn’t uncommon to find women permitted to study at Emory under special circumstances. Teachers seeking professional development were allowed to enroll during the summer quarter, and many earned degrees that way. In 1922, Wesley Memorial Hospital, which had trained area nurses since 1905, moved to the Emory campus, bringing a new wave of female students. In 1944, the School of Nursing became official. Still, throughout the early half of the century, the idea of coeducation at Emory College was met with mixed feelings by administrators and trustees. In the end, economics may have swayed the decision. Faced with declining enrollment during the Korean War, rising tuition costs, and a growing outcry for coeducation, in 1953, Emory President Goodrich White finally told the Board of Trustees, “I am convinced that this action is inevitable, and that the present is a good time to take the initial steps.” By then, some two hundred bachelor’s degrees had been awarded to women through Emory College, as well as many advanced degrees from the graduate, law, medical, and theology schools.
Pushing for progress It was one thing to educate female students, but hiring women as educators was another hurdle.
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One of the earliest recorded hires was in 1929, when Evangeline Papageorge was employed as the first full-time female faculty member in the School of Medicine,
Breaking the final barrier
“It was a struggle being seen across higher education.” where she taught biochemistry and clinical chemistry for twenty-seven years, then served as its first dean of students for nineteen years. “It wasn’t just that Emory had problems integrating women, it was a struggle being seen across higher education,” says Martha Albertson Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law and founding director of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project. In 1968, Lore Metzger would become the first woman hired as a full professor in Emory College, where she taught English and comparative literature. Three years later, Delores Aldridge would become the first African American scholar to hold a tenure-track position in Emory College, going on to become the founding director
SUMMER 2017
The work of the Emory Women’s Caucus would lead to new practices in the hiring and treatment of faculty, tenure and promotion, sexual harassment protection, and the eventual creation of a President’s Commission on the Status of Women. As of fall 2016, women constituted 42.4 percent of regular full-time faculty and more than half of the student body. Not only can Emory students take classes dedicated to women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, the campus community finds an array of support and resources in the Emory Center for Women, now marking its twenty-fifth anniversary. Last summer, the university’s administrative glass ceiling was shattered when the Board of Trustees appointed acclaimed public health researcher Claire E. Sterk as Emory’s twentieth president. Fineman notes that when she arrived on campus in 2004, “one of the reasons I was brought here was specifically because of my work in feminist and legal theory.” And about half of today’s Emory Law scholars are women. Fineman imagines that Eléonore Raoul would approve.
P H O T O G R A P H Y E X H I B I T: A N N B O R D E N , S T E R K : B E C K Y S T E I N
Women who found a way
of what is now the Department of African American Studies. Metzger was also among four faculty members who called an open meeting of women interested in addressing issues of equity and justice for women at Emory. That gathering would lead to the formation of the Emory Women’s Caucus, a pivotal force for campus change. Carole Hahn, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Educational Studies Emerita, who came to Emory in 1973, recalls that first open meeting: “We had no idea who would come,” she says. “They wound up filling the room—women from Candler School of Theology, the School of Medicine, the college, from all over.”