"Providing opportunity for closer acquaintance”: The Social Lives of Faculty Wives Organizations

• In Event: Centering Marginalized Voices in the History of Higher Education

Abstract

Throughout the 20th century the wives of male faculty members came together at the institutions where their husbands had been offered employment and established organizations in the spirit of mutual aid. Little has been written about the lives of these women, and even less has been written with attention paid to the labor they engaged in on behalf of the institution. This paper uses one organization, The Knox College Faculty Wives Organization, founded in 1922 at Knox College, a small private liberal arts college to pose several questions: What work did faculty wives engage in? In what ways might the work of faculty wives have generated value for their spouses and the institutions at which their spouses were employed?

Author

• Deirdre Mayer Dougherty, Knox College