“Women Do Not Want to Vote”: Discussing Women’s Rights in the Shortridge High School Senate, 1895-1920

• In Event: Roundtable Session 18.
  In Roundtable Session: Citizenship and Social Norms in the Progressive Era

Abstract

The Shortridge High School Senate had established itself as the most popular extracurricular activity at the school by 1900. Starting in 1883, students from all over Indianapolis gathered every Friday afternoon, took the names of real senators, and debated the controversial issues of the day. The Shortridge Senate was initiated by the progressive-minded civil government teacher, Laura Donnan, as an extension of her civil government course. The Shortridge Senate imitated the United States Senate in all of its processes and content; however, the students who took on the names of the white male senators were in some cases not white, and in many cases not male, with female students often constituting a majority. This study draws upon data that includes student perspectives from 1895-1920 documented in the minutes of the Shortridge High School Senate hearings, articles from the Shortridge newspaper The Echo, and the Shortridge yearbook The Annual. The minutes of the Shortridge Senate provide detailed discussions between students about the most heated issues of the progressive era. The findings from this data suggest that even though the female students controlled the Shortridge Senate, their participation in the Shortridge Senate was simultaneously dominated by a discourse that marginalized them. This was especially true for female students in the discussion of woman’s suffrage, which was the most frequently discussed issue in the Shortridge Senate leading up to 1920.
The purpose of this study was to find out how civic education took shape inside and outside of classrooms during the progressive era. This paper examines specifically the extra-curriculum of Shortridge High School as an extension of the regular civics curriculum. The existing literature on the extra-curriculum of secondary schools focuses predominately on the development of non-academic activities, such as secret societies and athletics, from the 1880s through the first half of the twentieth century. This literature documents the shift in initiation and control of these activities from students to school personnel who saw the extra-curriculum as an additional means of achieving social control. This study contributes to these early examples that precede the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education of 1918, which scholars have noted as the impetus for a uniform shift toward a broader extra-curriculum controlled by the school from the 1920s through the 1940s. Although much of the research on the extra-curriculum describes a process of conflict and compromise between students and school administrators, this study examines an academic extracurricular activity that was teacher initiated, student-run, and seemingly a significant part of the school community. The importance of the Shortridge Senate in both the school and the greater community is that it fostered a discourse within the senate that perpetuated marginalizing societal forces, the same forces that the progressive goals of the extra-curriculum aimed to mitigate.

Author

• J. Spencer Clark, Utah State University