Women's legacy

One of our favorite teaching moments in New School history is getting an audience to look with new eyes at the names on the Organization Committee of the earliest proposal for what would become the New School. At first you see a George, a Charles, a Henry, an Emory, another Charles, a Thomas, a Winston, a Joseph, a Herbert, a Felix, an Alvin, another George, a Raymond, another Charles, a Willard, yet another Charles, a Victor, and a lone woman's name - Ruth Standish Baldwin.

But look closer and you realize ten of the nineteen names begin with Mrs. Hidden in plain sight behind the names of their husbands: a committee of women. You just have to see - to want to see. At today's celebration of Women's Legacy at The New School, the highlight of my Festival of New, we saw and realized how much more we wanted to see.

I thought I knew. (Via a prerecorded interview about Sara Ruddick mine was the one male-identified voice in almost two hours of delight and discovery.) But I didn't know the half of it! We learned not just the names of the "founding mothers" Caroline, Charlotte, Cornelia, Dorothy, Emily, Frances, Katrina, Margaret, Mary and Ruth but something about their backgrounds and the array of other progressive causes they were involved in. The professors from all-male Columbia faded from view, and Columbia and the university question with them. The New School for Social Research instead took its place as part of a world of new projects and institutions, just at the moment of women's suffrage.

And this was just the start! We learned of Clara Mayer's decades of leadership as the School took shape, at the same time that Clara Mannes was director of the music school too quickly thought to be named after her husband (which joined the New School in 1989). Like the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (later called Parsons, merged with New School in 1970), Mannes students and teacher were mostly women, too.

The New School for Social Research seems always to have had a clear majority of women students, too, but faculty leaned male. In silent footage from a 1938 newsreel (supplied with a jaunty piano soundtrack) we saw Frieda Wunderlich, the lone woman among the University in Exile faculty, in the Benton Room. At one point she seems to try to speak but one of the men talks instead. Typisch! Video interviews with women who joined the faculty in the 1960s describe misogyny, too. One man apparently asked if Elizabeth Coleman, applying in 1965, had had a hysterectomy. Appalling, she reflected, but sometimes it's actually good to know what the people you're dealing with are thinking.

Along with a jazz interlude offered by jazz faculty superstar Jane Ira Bloom to images of scientific processes by photographer Berenice Abbott (who developed the first college pedagogy in photography at the New School in the 1930s) we saw images of work by Parsons students and heard tributes to New School women past and present. (One was Sally Ruddick, the upshot of whose ideas for thinking about the New School and its future were spelled by yours truly!)

The festivities ended with two rousing numbers from the 1972 musical revue "Don't bother me, I can't cope!" It was the first Broadway show to be directed by a black woman, Vinette Carroll, who was a student at the New School's Dramatic Workshop a quarter century before. The title song and another, called "I gotta keep movin'," spoke to African American realities half a century ago but resonated with the frustrations of all who are disrespected and marginalized. Talented students from AMDA, which has long had a partnership with our Bachelors Program for Adult and Transfer Students, brought down the house.



How Sally Ruddick would have loved this. Or Ann Snitow, to whose memory the event was dedicated and some of whose reflections on the New School's curious blindnesses on gender were read at the start! (I don't know about Frieda or the Claras.) But Ann would also remind us that moments of effervescence like this have been followed by institutional backsliding to the default patriarchy of this as of all institutions in our society. How do we make this seeing - and this wanting to see - an enduring feature of New School's next century?

Everyone seemed to think that all incoming administrators at the New School (we're getting a new president soon) should have to see this, indeed all new folks showing up, staff, faculty and students too! It's probably a more usable past than the Charleses and the Georges. But still, what would it mean to own this legacy, to keep it alive?