Funding Feminism by Joan Marie Johnson

Author:Joan Marie Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

Phoebe Apperson Hearst and University of California, Berkeley, president Benjamin Wheeler. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-B2- 2472-10.

Phoebe Hearst was one of the most significant and wealthy women to bring her agenda for women’s education to a coeducational university. Born in 1842, Phoebe Apperson was the daughter of farmers who struggled to make a living. She was educated at Reedville Academy in Steelville, Missouri; worked as a tutor for a wealthy family; and then, at age nineteen, married George Hearst, who made his fortune in the mining, oil, real estate, and publishing businesses. Their son, William, was born in 1863, and Phoebe traveled abroad extensively with him (while George remained in the United States, fostering Phoebe’s independence), educating herself and her son about art and culture. When George died in 1891, she inherited his estate, worth over $18 million (nearly $475 million in 2016).108 At age forty-eight, she began a philanthropic career in which she became personally involved in the organizations and institutions she supported.

Due to her belief in the power of education as a means of enabling social mobility, education became her primary area of philanthropy. She consistently tried to ensure that “those excluded or marginalized from America’s mainstream, especially women,” would benefit from her wealth.109 Hearst helped develop and fund the kindergarten movement in San Francisco and around the nation, including donating over $200,000 to the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association. Notably, Hearst extended her attention to African Americans as well. She paid for three kindergartens in Washington, D.C.—two for white children and one for black children—and, more importantly, funded the Phoebe Hearst Kindergarten Training School in Washington, D.C., for African American teachers. This suggests that she saw education not only as a means of mobility for children but also as a way for the black women who attended the school to get “respectable” jobs as teachers with the training they received, at a time when most African American women in the South worked in the fields or in white homes as domestic servants.110 In addition, Hearst provided kindergartens in the poor mining towns that enriched her family’s wealth.

Many of the educational institutions she funded were for girls and women. She gave $250,000 to start the National Cathedral School for Girls in Washington, D.C., and helped found the National Congress of Mothers (later known as the Parent Teacher Association), donating liberally to it in its earliest days. In the 1890s, Hearst donated money to the Association of Collegiate Alumnae to fund American women forced to seek a graduate education in Europe due to the lack of opportunity in the United States.111 She also supported San Francisco Homeopathic Hospital (like NEH, this hospital was staffed by women doctors who trained women to become doctors), trying to ensure it kept women in positions of power after it merged with Hahnemann Hospital, which was run by male doctors.112 She also donated to Mary Garrett’s Women’s Medical School Fund for Johns Hopkins. She was a longtime supporter of the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.