Southern Political Science Research Articles

Found Women: Pioneers in Southern Political Science. Hallie Farmer

Found Women: Pioneers in Southern Political Science. Hallie Farmer

Found Women: Pioneers in Southern Political Science. Hallie Farmer

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

Southern Political Science: Some Notes on Progress and Need

IN THE RECOLLECTION of those who founded the Political Science Association in 1929, there were only three political science departments in the region at that time. An attendance of 15 was thought good at the early meetings. This journal did not exist and little graduate training was offered anywhere in the South. In the years since, the profession has developed markedly. Separate political science departments are counted by the dozens across the South, 300 persons regularly make their way to the Association's convocation each fall, The Journal of Politics has long since won its place as a national scholarly publication, and the variety and volume of graduate and undergraduate offerings steadily increase. Much of the change has occurred since World War II in a time when higher education generally has been developing rapidly. Vital educational changes promise to continue with substantial consequences for political science everywhere. What has taken place and will take place within the South concerns not only those who inhabit it, but the rest of the nation as well. This is true not only because the South holds between one-fourth and one-third of the nation's population. The processes of governance in the South are uniquely important. From them springs in significant part the most important single element in the perception of the United States by the rest of the world-the ways southern whites and Negroes accept and bring about the changing status of the Negro. Evidence grows that education is a critical determinant in the formation of southern racial attitudes. Data also point to the ironic fact that in the present moments of stress the youngest members of the adult white population in the South show less adaptability to change in race relations than do those 20 and 30 years older.' political science either is or is not an important in*Based on the presidential address to the 34th annual meeting of the Political Science Association in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, November 9, 1962. 'Donald R. Matthews and James W. Prothro, Southern Racial Attitudes: Conffict, Awareness, and Political Change, The Annals, 344(1962), 108-21.