Black Women and Higher Education: Spelman and Bennett Colleges Revisited

Abstract

No history of women's education in America would be complete without the Spelman and Bennett stories. However, the histories of higher education for women usually focus narrowly on the seven sisters. Such authoritative treatises as Thomas Woody's classic A History of Women's Education in the United States, Louise Shutz Boas' Women's Education Begins: The Rise of Women's Colleges, and Mabel Newcomer's A Century of Higher Education for American Women, are similar in their failure to include even a footnote on Spelman and Bennett Colleges, the nation's oldest and best-known colleges for Black women. Despite increased interest during the past decade in a number of topics relating to women, including women's education, the history of higher education for Black women has been grossly ignored by those documenting the history of education for women in America.1 Recently, however, Patricia Bell Scott, in a ground-breaking article entitled Schoolin' 'Respectable' Ladies of Color . . . , has analyzed in a cogent manner the most critical issues surrounding the history of Black women's higher education. She also traces the development of educational institutions for Black women from the early efforts of Myrtilla Miner, a white woman who established in 1851 in Washington, D.C., a teachers' training school for Black girls (later known as District of Columbia Teachers Colleges-Miner