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Vol. 30:3 ISSN 0160-8460 September 2002
Much More Than Southern Belles: Preserving the Student Records of Tulane University's Newcomb College
by Kate Weber and Susan Tucker
In 1911 Anne Delie Bancroft applied for admission to Newcomb College. A resident of Hot Springs, Arkansas, she obtained a scholarship thanks to the intervention of Dr. Parker, a friend of the family who had once lived in New Orleans. Dr. Parker was familiar with the College, a coordinate college for women within Tulane University. He certainly knew the President of the University, Dr. Craighead, who wrote to Newcomb President Dixon of Miss Bancroft that "it would pay you to" provide a scholarship to Bancroft, "provided" she "ranks high."
Besides his intervention on her behalf, Parker also gave Bancroft a letter of introduction to carry to her registration day at Newcomb. Miss Bancroft, Parker noted, "is a scholar, has a good voice, plays well, draws and above all is anxious for an education." Her application lists 16 books she has read-- Macbeth, Ivanhoe, Hero as Prophet, and The Life of Johnson, among others.
Bancroft's father also thanked the College in a letter written on his business stationery. According to its picturesque letterhead, he ran the Alhambra Bath House in "the heart of the rooming and boarding house district." In his letter to President Dixon, Dr. Craighead observed, in a message that now seems impossibly coded from another age, that Hot Springs was a "rather conspicuous place."
Bancroft proved an adequate student at first, and eventually the promised scholar. Correspondence in her files documents this transformation, as well as continuing friendships between her and a number of faculty members and fellow alumnae. Various administrators, later in life, also affectionately wrote to her. We learn of her studies, illnesses, and friends. We learn that it was considered unladylike to say that one was "hot," even if the temperature was 98 degrees.
The file tells us that Miss Bancroft was subsequently a graduate student at Stanford. We know her thesis subject (Poe), and that she had plans for future study in England and France. In 1927 she turned down a job offer at Newcomb. Her job teaching English at Southwestern Louisiana Institute paid more and did not require other duties, such as living in a dormitory. In short, in letters to and from her, plus notations on grades, standards, and ultimately information on graduate school and pay scales-- with certain restrictions about privacy and the passage of time-- a researcher can learn quite a bit about Anne Delie Bancroft.
Hers is one life told in the bits and pieces of the student records within the Newcomb College Archives. We know much more about her and some 3,500 other students who attended Newcomb College from 1887 to 1925 thanks to a grant from the NHPRC to microfilm and preserve the early archives of the College.
Newcomb was founded in 1886 through a generous donation by Josephine Louise Newcomb in memory of her daughter, Harriott Sophie, who died in 1870 at the age of 15. Mrs. Newcomb decided upon a college for other young girls and women, a "work of the spirit" that would look "to the practical side of life as well as to literary excellence," as a fitting memorial to her daughter.
Her funds assured Newcomb College a secure foundation for its early years. Newcomb's donation also brought about an unusual arrangement for the education of women with the creation of the first degree-granting college for women to be founded within a university in America. This model was later adopted by several colleges, including Barnard College at Columbia University. Newcomb's specifications for the College made available to young women the same opportunity for a liberal education as was being offered to young men through Tulane's College of Arts and Sciences and, at the same time, provided an environment in which men and women did not attend classes together.
The College flourished academically, gaining national and even international respect. In 1895, Clara Baer, chair of the Physical Education department, published "Basketball Rules for Women and Girls," in which she described two shots, the one-handed and the jump shot, which were not adopted in men's basketball until 1936. Perhaps even more noteworthy was the success of the Newcomb Pottery, an experiment, or model industry, to provide employment for women in a milieu where few opportunities existed.
Today, Clara Baer's memory lives in the Basketball Hall of Fame. Today, the Newcomb Pottery's products are favorites on "Antiques Road Show," fetching thousands of dollars. But until the late 1980s, Newcomb paper records themselves were spread over a number of offices throughout the Newcomb campus. Never regularly transferred to Tulane University Archives, they were brought together with the help of an NHPRC grant that ended in 1991, and are stored permanently within the Newcomb Archives, housed at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women. Funds for microfilming were not part of this grant, so Newcomb again turned to the NHPRC in 1999 with a request concerning our growth and the fragility of the early records, which cover the registration of the first students from 1887 to 1925.
The records cover both a time when young ladies exercised in long dresses and a time when their physical education teacher mandated a new garment-- bloomers! Hair was almost universally swept up in a Gibson girl bun until 1919, when, photographs show, not one young woman hesitated to bob her hair. The records tell of women who entered politics, law, medicine, community service, and almost every other profession at a time when many broke significant barriers to do so within the conservative South.
The records also tell what didn't change. The story of segregation in the South, with tentative letters asking about enrollment for Creoles of color, appears now and then in the records, providing glimpses of a sad aspect of the College's history that did not end until 1962. The letters of Newcomb administrators show changes in opinions and social mores that, despite segregation, made possible the diversity of the Newcomb population. There are also references to the yellow fever epidemics of the early years, and to hurricane threats nearly every year.
When the school was founded, its students came mostly from Louisiana. In time, the large number of scholarships awarded each year guaranteed that there were students from every economic background and from across the South, as well as always a handful of students from other parts of the United States and South America. Without a religious affiliation or quota, like some of the eastern women's colleges, Newcomb was always said to be 1/3 Catholic, 1/3 Jewish, and 1/3 Protestant. Included in the school population were married and single women, dorm dwellers and city dwellers, Northern and Southern girls and women, artists, athletes, scientists, and philosophers.
The records stand ready now for researchers interested in religious diversity in the American South, the lives of college and high school girls, family concerns, and much more. We have even found that through the letterheads and epistolary worries about money on the part of parents, one can learn much more about the history of business and agriculture in the South. And with such a diverse student body, the records tell more than just the history of traditional college women. They tell the story of a colorful spectrum of turn-of-the-century women.
The project included the photocopying of the student records, the microfilming of the records, and the creation of finding aids to make the records accessible to researchers. A microfilm copy is available for interlibrary loan, while within the library the photocopies are used for research. Finding aids include a database in Filemaker Pro, accessible only from the Women's Center, and information online, available through our web site (http://www.tulane.edu/~wc/). Descriptions of the records have also been sent to national databases.
The grant has allowed us to plan for future preservation efforts and public planning around student records. We have scheduled future microfilming in five-year increments, with records being opened to researchers in conformity with the release of census records. Privacy rules, of course, govern all student records and we have posted our policies about such rules. These records are closed for 75 years from the date the student graduates or withdraws from the University or upon death. Closed student records, however, may be used by the student herself; by a university official, when authorized to look for specific records; and by researchers whose work will only report on the overall student body, without the use of names, for a period of time at least 60 years before the current period. Requests for permission to examine any records in connection with cases at law or legal proceedings of any kind are referred to the Legal Counsel of the University.
At the same time we posted our statement about such policies, we celebrated the completion of the second NHPRC grant with a compilation of essays on the College for an anthology. These essays, to be published in 2004, were based on research conducted in our archives since our first NHPRC grant ended in 1991. Also in the works is a series of lectures on the history of Newcomb. Both events help us remember the historical value of the records of Newcomb College, particularly to researchers of the American South. Both events allow us to further one of the original goals of the Newcomb Center for Research on Women: to foster and promote research on women's lives and experiences.
Kate Weber is a library technician and Susan Tucker is Curator of Books and Records at Vorhoff Library, Newcomb College Center for Research on Women, Tulane University.
