Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant: To Live More Abundantly

Transcript

Marshall Poe:

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everybody, This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network and you're listening to an episode of Grinnell College's Authors and Artist podcast. And I'm delighted to say today that we have Tamara Beauboeuf also known as Dr. B on the show, and we'll be talking about her book To Live More Abundantly: Black Collegiate Women, Howard University, and the audacity of Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe. It's out from the University of Georgia Press, I believe. Thank you very much for being on the show, Dr. B, if I can call you that.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Yes, yes. And I'm really happy to be here.

Marshall Poe:

Great. Could you begin the interview by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Right. So I'm known as Dr. B on campus. I'm a qualitative sociologist and I'm a newish member of the Grinnell faculty. So I came here in fall of 2019 after spending almost 20 years at DePauw University in Central Indiana. And I'm the Louise Arnound professor in gender, women's and sexuality studies.

Marshall Poe:

Thank you for that. I want to be Dr. P, I got to get that going. I don't know how you did that. Nobody ever called me Dr. P. But anyway, can you begin by telling us why you wrote To Live More Abundantly and what you were hoping to accomplish with the book?

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Right. So I'm a qualitative sociologist, as I said, and in my research and in much of my teaching, I focus on gender projects. So we all have notions of what women and men and just people in general, the expectations placed on them. And I've always been interested in how people actually experience those expectations. And I call those experiences gender projects. So to what extent do we take in the norms around us? To what extent do we question them, rework them. And in this project, I came in this project on Lucy Diggs Slowe, I came across some evidence that really interested my sociology mind because I saw something going on that I didn't expect, and I can tell you a little bit more about it.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, tell me what that was. What didn't you expect?

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Yeah, so I didn't expect to see bold, cheeky behavior among Black women at Howard University in the 1920s. So I should maybe back up a little bit more and say that I mentioned being at DePauw University for 20 years because much of this project began through my teaching there. So when I started on campus on faculty in 2001, part of my appointment was in education. And DePauw had a teacher licensure program like we do at Grinnell College. And if you were to walk into a class, you would see that most of the students were women and most of their faculty were also women. And yet there was no course that drew any attention to the fact that teaching had gotten feminized in the late 19th century. So the first teachers in public education were men. And through some interesting machinations and misuses of gender, it became a profession for poorly trained women. Women who were poorly trained, largely because they were seen as lesser people because they were women, not because of what they were actually able to do.

And as I started to think about what our students might need in order to understand the profession they were going into, it also became very clear to me that for myself and a majority of my students, none of us were the intended people who were supposed to be at DePauw University or at Grinnell College. We were not white men, upper middle class white men. And so as I would build out that course each year, I would think more and more about how did we come to be here? And it was in asking that question and trying to figure out who our fore mothers in a sense were that I started to realize that there was a profession called deans of women. This is something that our campus archivers made me aware of and the deans of women were basically the architects of what we now call student affairs.

And so as I was reading more and more about this profession, as I was building out my course, I came across this name, Lucy Diggs Slowe and as often happens with Black women, they are pioneers and they're just a name. And I got curious about what else was going on with this name. And as I got into her archival materials, which are held at Howard University, I came across something in their alumni journal. And it's something that is the heart of this book. So it is a letter written on November 1st, 1922, and it goes like this:

"To the men of the university. The women of the university are having a dinner Friday night, November 3rd, in the new dining hall. One of the requirements for admittance to this dinner is that you be a member of the female sex. This naturally bars all men in the university with the possible exception of the waiters from the floor of the dining hall. We are indeed sorry that you must miss so much fun, but you may retaliate on us whenever you deserve, whenever you desire by having a men's dinner. If you had thought of this first, you could have had the laugh on us, but your thoughts are evidently concerned with more weighty matters than eating.

Just to show you how much fun we women can have when you men are not present, we are going to invite you to stand in the balcony of a dining hall to look down on us. From this, your vantage point, you can force us women to the usual thing, look up to you. This will more than compensate you for missing our dinner. Be this as it may, we cordially invite you to come to the balcony at any time after eight o'clock on Friday evening to see," and this is in quotes, "a 20th century wonder. Howard women enjoying themselves without the company of the men." Very truly yours, the Women's Committee on the first annual Howard Women's Dinner." So this is-

Marshall Poe:

That's that's cheeky as I'll get out.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Exactly. It's cheeky, it's confident, it's teasing. One of the aggrieved men... And we have to understand that Dean Slowe was hired in 1922, and that was under the tenure of the last white man to be president of the campus of this historically Black college in Washington DC, and he was one of the uninvited two. So all of the students and the other, and faculty and administrators, he had to stand in the balcony and look down on these women who had taken up prime retail space, you could say, on the campus. And so I was really trying to figure out what was going on here and what would it inspire a Black woman who was a 1908 graduate of Howard University to return 14 years later and do this. She's a Black woman who is working with other Black women. So the committee that put this letter together was a committee composed of students, alumni, and Dean Slowe.

And instead of doing what I would have expected, which is to make Black women very mindful of their place in a racially segregated and patriarchal society, to make them respectable, she insisted that they should be bold, that they should be voiceful, that they should have fun, and that they should be individuals in, I would say, a dynamic community. And so the book is really trying to figure out what was her gender project and what did she do over the 15 years of her tenure at Howard University?

Marshall Poe:

Well, it's a nice segue because what did inspire her to do this? How did she get this moxie? How do I get some of it?

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Well, you know what I think we hear a lot about the politics of respectability when we think about Black women being raised to be very mindful that they are not men and they are not whites, and they are being seen from a deficit perspective. They've got to prove their intelligence, they have to prove their morality, they have to prove their worth. And Dean Slowe was part of a group of women who defined themselves very differently at the same time as respectability was going on. They saw themselves as new women, as new Negro women. And they believe that after the end of slavery, that the problem of their inferiority was not theirs, but was a problem with people looking at them.

They held themselves on par with everybody else. And so she is part of that lineage of women who refused to believe that they were lesser beings. They were second to none. And she educated these women at Howard University to have that same belief. And something that I found really remarkable was how quickly the women students took her up on this charge, that you belong and that you are capable of great things and to not allow the toxic ideas of their society to infiltrate their minds.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, this is great. There's a sentence and this is great. I'm glad the direction is going exactly like I was hoping it would. There's a sentence in the book early on that popped out at me, and it is this, I will read it. "Slowe's educational vision rejected outdated standards of respectability for women and racialized limits to campus belonging." I think most of the listeners and me understand the second part of that sentence. The racialized thing I get. But what standards of respectability. This is something... And my mother was a teacher, by the way. She was a junior high school teacher. What was this respectability? What inhibited people or women from becoming their best selves, I guess I would put it that way.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Yeah. Well, women and particularly Black women, the fact that Black women were seen as in a sense the cause of their own enslavement. That Black women were seen as lascivious, that Black women were seen as belonging to a group of people who perhaps weren't even human. And so it is white racism that in a sense said, maybe you can join in civil society if you can prove that you're not what we think you've been. And so racial respectability is really this racist burden placed on Black people to prove their worth in a system that they didn't create. And so yes, you had Black women who did try to defend themselves and defend their communities by being these paragons of virtue. Being very sort of demure in their physical appearance, doing work such as teaching and other things that would uplift their race, show that they are not the inferior beings that the white racist mind had created them to be.

But there were other women who said this was never true to begin with. And so they found that respectability was something you could never actually win because you were always being judged by people who never wanted to see you as an equal to begin with. And so people like Lucy Diggs Slowe said that the problem are external to us and our personhood is something that we don't have to prove to anyone. And I think one thing that made me really see her way of looking at things is that instead of raising Black women at Howard to be concerned about other people she said, I want them to have self respect. I want them to know themselves. I want them to know their talents, and I want them to bring that best self forward. And you can't do that if you're always concerned about what people who never saw you as human to begin with might be thinking about you.

Marshall Poe:

Well, was it not considered respectable for a Black woman to go to college in 1922? I mean, were there forces that work in the society that were like, no, you shouldn't do this, you should be something else.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Well, I think until about the 1960s, I think upwards of 70% of Black women were involved in manual labor and domestic work.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

All right. So in our occupational structure, Black women were very much limited. And those women who did go into professional work for the most part went into teaching, which is also true for white women. But at higher percentages for Black women. And for Lucy Diggs Slowe, I guess this is where you can see some of the work that she did as a dean of women. Most deans of women are seen as matrons if they're known at all at that profession. They're seen as people who are meddlesome, older women who are just trying to lock the women in, the women students, and keep them from having fun with the men.

In reality, and maybe I should say this, there's a historian who says that deans of women are the best kept secret in higher education. That the work that they did has been so erased that we really don't recognize what they contributed to higher education. Deans of women themselves were graduates from the first two generations of women to have access to higher ed. So women who were educated from about 1870 to 1910. And those women, when they became administrators on these campuses, they may have been hired to sort take care of the women. Because one thing that's true in higher education then, and perhaps now, is that you have lots of groups of students who are financially necessary, but who are not very welcome to the campus.

And so deans of women are often hired by campus presidents to sort keep the women out of the men's way, to keep them respectable in their own communities, make sure they didn't spend too much time with the men, make sure they didn't have aspirations that weren't seen as feminine. But as graduates themselves from colleges and university deans of women wanted to really push against that. And so deans of women, including Dean Slowe, spent a lot of time counseling young women, encouraging them to think about professions beyond teaching because that was the path of least resistance for most women. And so you have someone like Dean Slowe who is meeting with almost every undergraduate woman at Howard, talking to her, asking her what she wants, and putting on vocational events so that these undergraduate women can come into contact with other women who are doing things in diverse fields. And so these deans of women are really transformative figures who are trying to make sure that college doesn't make women more narrow and smaller than they were when they came in. To make sure that it's a broadening experience.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, yeah. I see what you mean. Well, one of the things that amazed... I was sitting... I live near Smith College and I was in the student union with my kids, and I was looking through old yearbooks from the 1950s and sixties. And one thing I noticed is that the entering class was a couple thousand and the graduating class was under a thousand.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Lack of attrition.

Marshall Poe:

And I tried to figure out what the heck was going on, and I did. They were getting married, dropping out.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Yeah.

Marshall Poe:

Right. So was a similar sort of thing going on at Howard. And did Dean Slowe-

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

I don't think we have the same attrition because Black women, and this is where race makes a big difference. You do have Black families encouraging black women to go into education, but often in ways that are going to be safe. All right? So Black families want to keep Black women away from white households where they would be domestic servants and often abused on in different ways. But they also, and Dean Slowe was very critical of this, she was concerned that in too many Black Southern communities, there was still a sort of patriarchal thinking going on that was coming through in religion and also in family norms. And I think she said something like, Black women were encouraged to engage in patient waiting rather than enabling their active curiosity. So you have Black women sort of outstripping Black men, I believe starting in the thirties and forties in terms of their college attendance, but still they're being tracked into some very conventional fields. And Lucy Slowe felt very strongly that needed to be interrupted.

In fact, in one of her later papers, she wrote about, and she used some very bold language here, defects of the Negro College. And one of the defects of the Negro College with regard to Black women was that it didn't enabled them to do things that were broader than what was conventional and what was safe. So she felt it was a defect of the Negro college, that there weren't more robust vocational opportunities presented to the Black women, which is why she felt that her program was so important. So she really felt that that colleges that were serving Black women needed to prepare them not for the world that existed, but the world that was coming into being.

She really felt that higher ed was an engine, not just of democracy, but of I don't know, well, I guess of democracy. Of making this a society where everyone has a place and everyone can build themselves into the best version of themselves because that exactly is what makes for a robust community. It's not that you're all the same, you're all going to teaching is that you are bringing your unique qualities and you are finding, or maybe she would say it this way. The point of a college education is to discern your life's work. And if a college doesn't help you to do that, if it just reproduces an employee who is finding some easy work but is not really attuned to what that employee's capacities are, then this college has failed the student.

Marshall Poe:

I think, if I recall correctly, Ralph Ellison in the Invisible Man, he becomes a high school teacher. Is that right? I can't remember. [inaudible 00:17:32].

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Yeah. It's been many years since I've read. Yes.

Marshall Poe:

I think he [inaudible 00:17:35] we can go south at any event. It just occurred to me that he did that. I have to ask you this question.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

[inaudible 00:17:39] segregated schooling until the fifties and [inaudible 00:17:41] year we still do. And so it's ready work and it's good work. Her question was, is it the right work for you?

Marshall Poe:

Yeah.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

That was the distinction in her approach.

Marshall Poe:

That's a very modern message in 1922.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Exactly. And it was one that a lot of white women were hearing, even though there were pressures on them to marry and to follow men. But deans of women were sometimes the only... One thing we have to realize is that deans of women were the only cabinet level woman on these campuses. Right?

Marshall Poe:

Yeah.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

On these coed campuses. Of course not at Smith College. And so they were like the lone voice saying, there might be something more for you. So they're working a lot against a lot of cultural pressure that these women are feeling from home and other places to bow to the norms of their societies.

Marshall Poe:

I have to ask you this because it has a personal connection to me because my mom was a junior high school teacher and I never asked her. She's passed now. And you may not want to answer this, I don't know. How did teaching become gendered in this way? How is it the case that my kids don't have more male teachers, which they don't?

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Right, right. Well, Americans have never wanted to put a lot of money into taxes and public school is funded through taxes. And so when the idea of public education came in, a lot of communities were willing to buy into it if they could do it on the cheap. And the way to do it on the cheap was to hire women at one half and sometimes one third of what they were willing to pay men. And so really women were turned to as cheap labor relative to men's labor, completely overlooking the strengths that women brought to teaching and then also their own aspirations. So a lot of women went into teaching wanted to do much bigger things, and they tried their best to use it as a stepping stone. One thing that I've encountered, and I don't know if you have with your mother or women of her generation, how many of them would say, I could have been this, I would've really been great at that.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, definitely. And she encouraged my sister not to become a teacher and to do something else.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Very interesting. Right, right.

Marshall Poe:

She was like, don't do this. It's a grind and it doesn't pay well and you don't get any respect.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

And it might not be, and this is like I have admiration for teaching, but I don't think every woman graduating college. And this was something that really, I think weighed on Dean Slowe. As much as she worked against cultural norms, pushing Black women into the safe work of teaching, the honorable work of teaching, teaching wasn't seen as perhaps as much of a leadership role as some other fields like medicine. As much as she pushed against that, up until the time that she passed away, I think still about 90% of her graduates went into teaching. So it's not an easy ship to turn, but she thought it was still important to try.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, I see. I should have asked my mom about that. More regrets. So there's something called the New Negro womanhood that fits into this picture. What is the new Negro womanhood

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

That is the kind of Black femininity that I believe Dean slow represented. And that actually was more visible in the early 20th century than I think we have realized. So I think a lot of historians have emphasized respectability the fact that Black women had to manage themselves through white racism and Black male chauvinism. But at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, in I think 1893, you had a group of Black women who stood up and said, we are women. We are members of this coming century, and we believe that our needs are very much consistent with the needs of everybody else. They weren't going to take a back step. And I think what my book tries to do is to pick up on that discourse, which I think has been under examined in a lot of historical work. To look at how Black women did not necessarily take in the sense that they were coming from an inferior space, but they actually pushed against it and refused to see themselves as having to prove their worth or their humanity. So it's as an alternative gender project that hasn't gotten enough attention.

Marshall Poe:

Well, I certainly didn't know anything about it in my own life. The first really, I don't know exactly how to put this and not step on people's toes, but when I encountered Shirley Chisholm, I was like, wow, Shirley Chisholm.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Yeah, Yeah. No, no. And I think there's a wow-ness to me reading about Dean Slowe and this dinner. And I should say something else about the dinner. It happened annually every first Friday of November for the 15 years she was dean and it continued for another 30 years after she had passed. So it was a tradition at Howard University for almost 50 years.

And so I think there are a lot of experiences of gender that we can get surprised by. But I think that's something to... I find that really interesting. When we encounter, as one person might say earlier, examples of the things that we think we're doing for the first time. So one of the most powerful moments in my thinking and writing about this book is when I encountered a contemporary scholar and then she said, "I knew I wasn't the first to do this work."

And it makes me think about how the things that we celebrate now, they might have been somebody doing it in another time, in another place. And that might be part of what makes us able to do it now. So when I think about Dean Slowe, when I think about New Negro women who are standing up and they're beauticians and they are school founders and they're in African American sororities and they're encouraging high school girls to think about new fields. They're coming up with monies to send girls to college or to send them abroad for training.

When you have these women doing all these things, to me, that's a 20th century version of what we might call now Black girl magic. Where Black women are defining themselves in ways that are unique to them and that showcase their individual talents as well as their respect for a community of other Black women. So I think there are very few things that are happening for the first time. And to me, part of being an academic is to see of origins for the things that we see happening in the current moment.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, I mean, I think this is true of almost every historian is that we think we have the origin of something and if you look hard at it, you didn't have the origin of it. You find some earlier tendril or thread.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Yeah, yeah.

Marshall Poe:

And I mean, her story is incredibly, I mean, it's very impressive and it's an inspiration really. I mean, an absolutely remarkable person. I want to shift gears just a little bit, and this is... Well, let me just ask the question. Would you say it's fair to say that Slowe's vision has been realized, or at least that significant progress has been made? And the reason I ask this is that if you look at the rates of college going among African Americans, and particularly among African American women, they're actually not too far off the white equivalents. At least that's my impression.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Yeah, no. The Black women are doing not badly. I think I would answer the question this way. As a person who's been in higher ed for 25 years, I'm still stunned by her vision because she defined belonging not just in terms of you do well in school and you get a good job. She defined belonging as having a core and joy. So when I reread, every time I read that invitation to the... Actually the dis-invitation, if you want to call it to the men about women's dinner. And that's the whole thing, It was women only for all of its 45 years. There were a couple years where they invited some men, but they were resolute in the sense that this was something that they owned. At some time it became a whole weekend event and not just an evening dinner and sort of dance.

I worry that you have Black women going to college, but how much do they feel that they really belong and how much they feel that they really have an advocate. And how often are they encouraged to feel joy in their college years? I still think there are a lot of Black women who suffer through college, who struggle, who feel isolated. And that was not her vision at all. And so I think we have to look beyond the numbers to think about what is the actual experience.

And there was one woman... Actually, not just one woman. Alumni would often pay the way for current Howard women to attend this dinner. And I think it was a nominal fee, but there were showing their support when they couldn't attend in person. And there were few who said, I did not forget to remember the dinner. And while I read that, I think about these enduring connections to not just a person, but to a whole movement. And I don't know what percentage of Black women feel that when they go to college. Whether it's historically Black college or a persistently white one. I think sometimes the affect is a harsh one that they graduate with.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. Yeah. I have to ask, I think listeners will be interested to know. You say that the dinner ceased being put on. That's a terrible sentence, man. That it stopped in the 1950. Why did it stop?

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

In 1967.

Marshall Poe:

In '67. Okay.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

I don't know. So this is where I had to put an end to the book somewhere. But up until my work, most people had just briefly mentioned the dinner. Very few people had realized that it was such a foundation to the work that she did and that it lasted, it was carried on for another 30 years. So I don't know what brought it to an end. I suspect a lot of the people who were most shaped by her had passed away and that there were sort of new actors.

So I don't think this was necessarily cult of personality, but I do think there was a sense of calling her name when she would be recalled. You got the sense in these gatherings that were including more and more alumni as well as undergraduates, that they were people who were personally shaped by Dean Slowe, who were introducing her to younger generations. And I think at some point that just thinned out and people didn't know who she was. Now I will say about six years ago, Howard University in its alumni journal had a whole issue devoted to the Howard Woman, and there's no mention of Dean Slowe.

Marshall Poe:

Really? Wow.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

There was something really interesting a friend of mine said, "We can't trust institutions to tell our stories." And I think that happens over and over that someone who can be very powerful if the memory and if her significance is not continually sort of brought forward and brought into our current narrative understandings of self and institution, how quickly that can fall away.

Marshall Poe:

She needs a statue.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Well she has a street that was just named for her at Howard in October. But yes, we do need to remember these people.

Marshall Poe:

A statue, yeah.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

A statue.

Marshall Poe:

Shouting up on my peeps at Howard. Build a statue.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

It could be a statue, probably a center I think too. When I look at our vice president, Kamala Harris, I see her as one of Lucy's girls.

Marshall Poe:

There you go.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

I do think that Kamala Harris has some of that moxie and some of that big vision of why not? Why not me that Lucy Slowe try to instill in her students.

Marshall Poe:

Well, super inspirational. We have a traditional final question on the New Books Network, and that is what are you working on now?

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

In some ways, continuing this project, but bringing it to Grinnell in the sense that I said, I started here in fall of 2019, and just a few months before a really important Black woman was awarded an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters. Mrs. Edith Renfro Smith, who was the first African American woman to graduate from Grinnell College. She was born and raised in the town of Grinnell. And so when I heard her name, I had a couple feelings about that. One that it felt very late in Grinnell's history to have this alumna. And two, just being in awe that she was still alive at 103.

And so my current project is something that I began last summer with an extraordinary undergraduate Feven Getachew and basically we did some archival work to recover as much as we could. Mrs. Smith's undergraduate experiences at Grinnell College, and we got to interview her a couple times. We got to bring her back to campus. We built a website that talks about her life story, her 107 years. Much of which is spent very much invested in the town and the campus of Grinnell.

And what I'd like to do is to continue that because Edith Smith has made us aware of some of the traditions that were very critical to 1930s and 1940s Grinnell College. So South Quad was the women's quad. It had its own gym, it had its own tennis courts. There was a rich intramurals program. There was a dean of women who served here from 1933 to 1963. There are letters. Three binders filled of letters, handwritten and typed of women who were impacted by Dean Evelyn Gardner. So I think there's a lot work, a lot of sleuthing to be done to remind us of what education looked and felt like in the 1930s here.

Marshall Poe:

Well, that sounds terrific. We'll have you on when you're done with that research.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Okay. Thank you. I'd be happy to.

Marshall Poe:

Okay. All right. Well Tamara, thank you very much for being on the show. We really appreciate it.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

All right. Thank you for the opportunity.

Marshall Poe:

Sure, absolutely. Bye bye.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant:

Bye.

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