Found Women: Pioneers in Southern Political Science. Hallie Farmer

Abstract

W ith this biography of Hallie Farmer, the Committee on the Status of Women of the Southern Political Science Association introduces a series entitled Found Women: Pioneers in Southern Political Science. The intent of each biography in the series is to recognize a woman whose contributions to the study of politics and government predate the contemporary women's movement and reflect the history of our profession. Hallie Farmer's career could only have been pursued by a woman and only in the South. Her goals and contributions were narrowly shaped by her sex, her time, and her place. Although a native of Indiana with a Ph.D. from Wisconsin, Farmer spent her entire career at one small women's college in Alabama. There, she dedicated her energies to the political awakening of Southern white women through her classes, speeches, research, and her own political campaigns and crusades. Her time, the thirties, forties and fifties, was a dead period for the American women's movement, between the suffrage amendment and The Feminine Mystique. Her place was the most Southern of societies where women and Blacks were legally segregated to their separate spheres. Dr. Farmer taught history and political science in Montevallo, Alabama at Alabama State College for Women, from 1927 until 1956. She was chair of her HALLIE FARMER Courtesy of AAUW Educational Foundation