5.2 5.3 education  (Page 5/5)

The intense evangelical atmosphere at Baylor College caused one professor to call it

"a mission plant,”

BS , April 30, 1914, p. 2.

but women who answered that call had to leave Texas for post-graduate and specific mission training. In 1904 some of those women began attending classes in the Baptist seminary connected with Baylor University in Waco. When the seminary moved to Fort Worth in 1910, Texas Baptist Women Mission Workers determined to build a training school/dormitory for women on its campus. The facility was completed in 1915 and, appropriately, the gala celebration was presided over entirely by women.

BS , September 30, 1915 (several articles).

Its students took courses taught by the seminary faculty on the English Bible, church history, Sunday school pedagogy, and ethics; they had separate classes, taught by women, in missions, domestic science, piano, and education. Field work was assigned in a settlement house in the packing district of Fort Worth. ^{Ibid., p. 14.}

The two all-female institutions—Baylor College in Belton and the Training School at the Seminary in Fort Worth—were a particular source of pride and vicarious pleasure to the Baptist women in the state who donated money to build and sustain them. They visited the sites with a proprietary interest of "coming home" and took a keen interest in the students, with whom they shared the satisfying experience of women reaching out to women.

Wider opportunity for and acceptance of women in higher education in general provided career options beyond the menial, assisting tasks suggested as appropriate for them in the 1890s; but with the exception of the seminary and the education and music schools, few women availed themselves of the professional departments Baylor University added in the first three decades of the twentieth century. ^{The professional schools included medicine (1903), pharmacy (1904), dentistry (1915), education (1919), law (1920), business (1923), and music (1925).} Women sought better training in the fields in which they were already working—mission work, musicianship, and teaching—but they hesitated to develop new career areas for themselves. An article extolling the service a woman doctor could perform in the mission field indicated Baptists believed that women could handle medical education and practice elementary medicine (skillfully enough for foreign patients), but no Texas Baptist woman filled that role.

BS , January 18, 1912, pp. 14-15.

In another story, dated 1916, a girl defended going to college by explaining,

"'But, Dad, you know. . .I want to study law and be president of the United States some day!'"

When she stopped joking and

"continued seriously,"

she explained that a college education would help

"whether I teach or work in the store,"

the real possibilities she considered.

BS , January 13, 1916, p. 2.

Part of the reason women failed to move into new occupational areas was the practical restriction on combining a career with married life. There was no moral censure of a woman who chose to remain single and have a career, but if she married, it was assumed that making a home for her husband and children would fill the majority of her time. Dorothy Scarborough, a novelist, scholar, Baylor graduate, and professor at Columbia University, was admired for pursuing that life—almost a calling since it capitalized on her God-given intelligence—but the pursuit precluded marriage and motherhood.

The traditional choice of wife and mother was still upheld as the loftiest position to which girls could aspire, but they were encouraged to enhance that role with a well-developed intelligence. One woman wrote that the

"mental kingdom within"

expanded the boundaries imposed by the walls of her house.

"Escaping into the realm of books"

made her a better guide for her children and conversationalist/companion for her husband.

BS , July 30, 1914, p. 9.

Another woman, defensive about her old-fashioned life compared to a woman who had achieved success as a musician, was told,

"You are a queen. . . .You have a happy home, a thoughtful and intelligent husband, and bright-faced, sweet-voiced children. How can such blessings be even distantly compared with a life like mine? My pride, my ambitions, my aesthetic loves are always satiated, but ah, my dear friend, it is all empty here," and [the musician] laid her slender jeweled finger over her heart.

BS , November 20, 1913, p. 22.

At the end of the period of this study, 1920, Baptists were committed to women's education, provided that education had a strong moral dimension to supplement the mental and physical:

Educate the body alone, and you have an Amazon. Educate the mind alone and you have an atheist. Educate the soul alone and you have a fanatic. But combine these three in Christian culture and you have a symphony which will be "a joy forever."

BS , August 28, 1913, p. 15.

By 1920 Baptists acknowledged no theoretical limitations to a woman's intellectual possibilities—to her advancing her education and using it in any honorable field. But the practical restriction of her having to choose between that and marriage and motherhood was insurmountable for most. Sentiment and biology, if not moral conviction, still kept most firmly enthroned as "queens of the home."