principal after his death), he saw Science Hill as a place to prepare young southern women for more powerful roles in society. Under the Poynters, the curriculum, especially in the sciences, was expanded. The Poynters insisted that the regular course work be as rigorous as that at any boys’ school, and, thus, Dr. Poynter immodestly claimed: “A diploma conferred by Science Hill means something.”23
The school grew. The building was expanded. Poynter even got Science Hill included in the lyceum circuit, which meant a steady stream of visiting speakers in a chautauqua-like atmosphere. Science Hill became “one of the preeminent girls’ preparatory Institutions in America,” and Shelbyville became a cultural center that eventually featured an opera house at Seventh and Main.24
By the time Katherine Jackson arrived at Science Hill in 1891, the place was a palace. “A large covered court nearly one hundred feet long and thirty feet wide, with a gallery around it, affords all the conveniences of exercise at any time, and especially in bad weather,” boasted the 1890–1891 catalog. The gym included unladylike things like weights, clubs, and dumbbells. All eleven teachers were women, and all those teachers were graduates of northern universities and conservatories, including Smith, the University of Michigan, the New England Conservatory, and Wellesley.25
Jackson attended Science Hill for only her last two years of high school. It is uncertain whether that was due to her parents’ reticence to send her, the cost of the school ($252 without music lessons, the option the Jacksons took for their daughter), or the fact that she was not ready earlier. It speaks well of Jackson’s early education that she could dive into the difficult Science Hill curriculum at that late point and still excel. Setting a pattern for achievement, she was chosen to speak at commencement in 1892.26
Katherine Jackson and Friends, Science Hill Female Academy. Photograph by A. J. Bodnar. Courtesy of Kay Tolbert Buckland.
It took a special kind of young woman to attend Science Hill, a progressive, even radical school that hosted a steady stream of speakers from whom flowed a fountain of mind-opening ideas and prepared its students for a life, not just of the parlor and the nursery, but of the mind. It took an even more special set of parents to recognize the rightness of this opportunity for their daughter. William and Maria changed Katherine’s life by sending her to Science Hill. There is no doubt of this. There is no record of William and Maria’s conversations regarding Katherine’s education. In the end, however, while it was William’s money that sent Jackson to Science Hill, it was Maria to whom Jackson dedicated her doctoral dissertation in 1905.
2
Young Lady from London
Katherine Jackson and her sister Mamie Jackson Catching were hired as teachers at a mission school in Laredo, Texas, from 1895 to 1896.1 “We are all very sorry to see Miss Kittie leave,” mourned the Mountain Echo, “as she is one of the most pleasant and amiable of London’s young ladies and will be greatly missed by all.”2 At that time, a college degree was not needed to teach public school. Jackson took advantage of that, relocating to Texas, and acquiring a year’s worth of experience as a teacher. While home in London in March and June 1895, she prepared for college with tutors. This preparation proved effective; her academic record card indicates that she passed out of all her freshmen and sophomore courses when she entered Ohio Wesleyan University in 1897.3
It was not the norm for women to attend college in the 1890s, but it should be noted that at that time few men attended college either. In 1890, college attendance nationwide was 3 percent of the US population overall, and 20 percent of college attendees (0.6 percent of the overall population) were women.4 As there was little in the way of serious advanced study available to women at southern colleges, many southern women turned to northern schools for their education. The historian Rebecca Montgomery argues: “The lack of colleges in the South was an attempt to keep women in traditional roles. Instead, it propelled the brightest and best of Southern women into the seedbed of Women’s Rights and Progressive Movements.”5 This is, correct in effect, correct, but the causes are more complex.
By 1900, 2.8 percent of southern women attended college. While actually a much higher percentage than the overall figure for women nationwide, this is still quite a low. There were a number of reasons for this. For one thing, the pool of southern students from financially secure backgrounds was somewhat limited. According to Peter Temin, after the Civil War the American South faced three insurmountable financial problems: a reduced demand for cotton, the loss of slave labor, and the physical destruction left by the war. The cost of college tuition was out of reach for many families in the postbellum years. Further, while women’s colleges did exist in the South (Decatur Female Seminary, e.g., was founded in 1889), the curricula of most such schools tended toward grooming students for the traditional role of genteel woman and wife rather than for professional or academic life. This may have been a continuation of conservative southern cultural momentum or perhaps nostalgia for a social order that had come crashing down with the end of the war.6
For that minority desiring a serious education, few colleges in the South offered bachelor’s degrees in rigorous academic programs to women. The only remaining choice for those seeking such degrees was to go north. Katherine Jackson made that choice.7
The best of the southern preparatory schools for women (including Science Hill) had special relationships with and groomed their students for the Seven Sisters: Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard Colleges.8 Jackson, however, chose to attend Ohio Wesleyan University, passing its stringent entrance requirements in all subjects, including English, Greek, Roman and medieval history, mathematics, antiquities, natural sciences, and Latin.9
While not one of the Seven Sisters, Ohio Wesleyan was one of the earliest institutions of higher education in the country to educate women. Coeducation itself was in Jackson’s time a fairly recent innovation. As a result, the hostility of male undergraduates toward coeds was fairly widespread across the country. Roger Geiger notes that on many campuses women were resented, ostracized, and ridiculed, and Pamela Roby holds that this hostility was spurred in part by the fact that women with college degrees were marrying and having children at a lower rate than their noneducated counterparts, fueling racist hysteria about the engulfment of the white race by immigrants from Italy and Ireland and people of other undesirable ethnicities. This hysteria was soon to fuel anti-immigration laws, racially motivated violence, and a one-sided reinterpretation of the mountain people of Appalachia that played into one of the major endeavors of Jackson’s life.10
Jackson attended Ohio Wesleyan only from 1897 to 1898, according to her student record card. She graduated in one year and nine months.11 Nevertheless, a great deal is revealed about her from her time at the university. For one thing, she rejected the idea of a limited collegiate role for women. Instead of taking just the “ladies’” literary track course of study, she completed that track plus extra course work and earned a bachelor’s, completing the more rigorous “classical” course of study. She was not the only woman to do so. One-third of the graduates pursuing the classical track were women. Jackson even went beyond what was required for that track, taking three semesters of music courses that did not count toward either degree. This indicates a high personal motivation to better her music skills and knowledge, which were to come in handy within the next decade or so.12
Second, there is evidence that she thought outside the box. In March 1898, the senior women issued The Senior Girl’s Edition of The Transcript, for which Jackson served as business manager. It was not customary for women to work on college newspapers at that time (though at Ohio Wesleyan a few served in minor roles). This exclusion may have served to inculcate in the Ohio Wesleyan women a desire to seek outside validation. In a rebellious gesture, and in the kind of decision that might have come from an organization’s business manager, the editors sent a copy of The Senior Girl’s Edition to the apparently more open-minded DePauw University Palladium. Their bold move was rewarded. A critique from the Palladium reads: