"Integrating the Carol Kennicotts": Ethel Puffer Howes and the Institute for the Coordination of Women's Interests

Abstract

Dialogue: "Integrating the Carol Kennicotts": Ethel Puffer Howes and the Institute for the Coordination of Women's Interests C. Todd Stephenson In Sinclair Lewis's novel Main Street, the protagonist, Carol Kennicott, was at odds with the town of Gopher Prairie. At the beginning of the story, Carol made a fateful decision to abandon her career as a Ubrarian in order to marry. She foUowed her husband, a doctor, from Minneapolis to his home in Gopher Prairie. Carol wanted a job, but To the vülage doctor's wife it was taboo. She was a woman with a working brain and no work. There were only three things she could do: Have chüdren; start her career of reforming; or become so definitely part of the town that she would be fulfiUed by the activities of the church and study clubs and bridge-parties.1 Kennicott eventuaUy had a chüd, which fulfiUed some but not aU of her needs and aspirations. As the 1920s proceeded, Carol Kennicott characterized educated women forced to choose between a career and a traditional married life. In 1925, Eduard C. Lindeman, a lecturer at the New School for Social Research, wove several themes from Lewis's story into an article for the New Republic entitled "Integrating the Carol Kennicotts."2 Lindeman reported on a research institute established that year at Smith CoUege to examine whether women could successfuUy combine a career and a famüy after coUege. The Institute for the Coordination of Women's Interests, directed by Ethel Puffer Howes, became a focus for national debate on the role of women's higher education in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Howes and the institute attracted attention in many national pubUcations, including the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, the Woman's Home Companion, and The Independent. Historians William Chafe, Carl Degler, Peter FUene, Delores Hayden, and Barbara Solomon have since offered various interpretations of Ethel Howes's work at the Institute for the Coordination of Women's Interests.3 No detaUed study, however, has been made of Howes's life, the proceedings of the Institute for the Coordination of Women's Interests, or the debate they engendered.4 Both Howes and her institute serve as a barometer of attitudes toward women's education, careers, and domesticity in the first three decades of the twentieth-century.5 © 1992 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 4 No. ι (Spring) 90 Journal of Women's History Spring A study of Howes's education, professional work, and married Ufe indicates the sources of the frustration that Howes shared with other women over rigid gender roles. Howes was born Ethel Dench Puffer in 1872 in Framingham, Massachusetts. Puffer moved quickly through school, attending Smith in the late 1880s and graduating from coUege at age 18. Her tenure at Smith came at the end of a period of rapid change in women's advanced education. Between 1865 and 1885, several women's coUeges such as Vassar, Mills, Smith, WeUesley, and Bryn Mawr were founded on different premises from eartier women's seminaries, which had emphasized domestic training.6 In 1875 Smith became the first coUege with a course of study and admission requirements almost identical to those of the best coUeges for men. Those who objected to advanced education for women emphasized both physical and moral dangers. Many worried that the stress of elevated thought might actuaUy kül women. They also feared that traditional male/female roles would be threatened.7 Seeking to overcome these concerns, Ethel Puffer spent the 1890s following a variety of academic pursuits. Puffer was first a high school teacher in New Hampshire, then a math instructor at Smith. From 1895 to 1897, she studied psychology and phüosophy at the universities of Berlin and Freiburg in Germany. Puffer wrote to her mother in great detaü about social outings, travel plans, and seating arrangements at dinner parties, but she also discussed aspects of her studies. "Prof. M. [Munsterberg] found for me about a thousand pictures to test and measure for symmetry—on which my thesis is to be."8 Puffer also described some of the difficulties she experienced as a woman. "I am at...