Celeste Parrish and Educational Reform in the Progressive-Era South by Rebecca S. Montgomery

Abstract

Reviewed by: Celeste Parrish and Educational Reform in the Progressive-Era South by Rebecca S. Montgomery Sarah Case Celeste Parrish and Educational Reform in the Progressive-Era South. By Rebecca S. Montgomery. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 237. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7693-1; cloth, $47.50, ISBN 978-0-8071-6978-0.) In this well-researched book, Rebecca S. Montgomery employs the life of educator and reformer Celeste Parrish as a lens through which to analyze changes in gender relations, education, and politics in Virginia and Georgia between the Civil War and World War I. Montgomery makes a compelling case for Parrish's significance and her contribution to the education of southern women, as well as to expanding opportunities for women educators. Born in 1852 in southern Virginia into a family of tobacco growers and small-scale slaveholders, Parrish was orphaned by 1863 and began teaching a few years later. As Montgomery shows, the demographic and economic changes of Reconstruction pushed many white women of Parrish's background into paid employment, especially as teachers, and yet they found their own education inadequate to prepare them for this work. A new opportunity came in 1869 with the Republican-backed Virginia state constitution that included a provision for a universal public education system, a reform that Montgomery notes linked the expansion of education for Black women and men to that of white women. For Parrish and other single white women, it offered a chance to attend a public normal school and new possibilities for employment. Despite the opening of the normal school and her securement of a position at Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Parrish continued to face discrimination in education and professionally. Shut out of university-level education in her home state and with the need to remain employed in order to support an extended family, Parrish used summer breaks and semester leave to attend the University of Michigan and then Cornell University (from which she graduated in 1896). Despite the difficulties, Parrish found the academic rigor of these institutions thrilling and was especially drawn to the field of psychology. She then attended the University of Chicago for graduate work, studying with John Dewey and meeting the Progressive women associated with Hull House. Her years in Chicago solidified her commitment to the Social Gospel, the new social science, and Progressive reform. In 1901, increasingly resentful about the lower pay given to female faculty and other discriminatory practices, Parrish left Randolph-Macon Woman's College to take a position teaching psychology and pedagogy at the coeducational Georgia State Normal School in Athens. Although a popular mentor and an effective supervisor of an affiliated model school, Parrish continually clashed with male leadership, often over Parrish's support for Black education. The conflict entwined support for Black education and support for white women's professional opportunities. Montgomery astutely notes that although the hostile [End Page 579] racial climate of the early 1900s made even moderate support for interracial cooperation controversial, at heart the dispute was over Parrish's authority as a woman and her unwillingness to defer to male colleagues or otherwise conform to gender norms. Because of ongoing hostility from the leadership of the school for her assertion of authority, Parrish created an alternative network in women's clubs in Georgia, which proved essential in her later career. After she was dismissed from her teaching position in 1911, Governor Hoke Smith appointed her to a position overseeing rural schools. She stayed in that position until her death in 1918. Although attentive to the context of racial politics in Georgia, the book could more fully develop race as a theme; in particular, it might have engaged in a more nuanced analysis of Parrish's racial beliefs and her racialized gendered identity. On the whole clearly written and thoughtfully argued, the book makes a compelling case for the importance of Parrish and contributes to the history of southern education and especially white women's centrality to the expansion of post–Civil War education. Sarah Case University of California, Santa Barbara Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association