American Heritage Center
University of Wyoming

Spring 1998 Heritage Highlights

  Schoolmarms and Scholars Focus of Seventh Annual History Symposium

"Schoolmarms and Scholars: Women Educators in the American West" will be the subject for the American Heritage Center’s seventh annual symposium. The conference will be held at the Center on September 17-19, 1998.

The symposium will highlight the work of women educators at all levels of education and underscore their contributions in shaping, preserving, and transmitting American culture. University of Wyoming faculty will discuss the roles women have played in teaching, researching, and administering the many programs at the university. Women’s roles in the education of Native Americans and in the West’s Americanization programs will also be explored.

 

June Etta Downey (1875-1932), who graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1895, received both her masters and doctorate from the University of Chicago before returning to UW to become an internationally known psychology faculty member. Photograph from AHC Collections

A dramatization about UW women faculty will kick-off the symposium on Thursday evening, September 17, followed by seven sessions on Friday including "Native American Education," "Normal Schools," "Private Influences on a Woman’s Teaching Career," and "Women Educators Teaching in a Rural Setting." The symposium will conclude on Saturday morning with two panel discussions. The first panel will focus on pioneer psychology scholar, June Etta Downey (1875-1932), who received a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1907 and returned to UW to become an internationally known faculty member. The second panel discussion, "What if Molly Had a Ph.D.? Women Professors and the Civilizing of Wyoming," will argue that unmarried women professors at UW enabled the establishment of a university, and in turn, the kind of college town culture that had wider geographical and political significance in transforming Wyoming from a politically and militarily contested frontier territory into a "civilized," regularized, and fully incorporated part of the continental United States.

During the conference a photographic exhibit about America’s country schools will be on display. The symposium is partially funded by a grant from the Wyoming Council for the Humanities and by the American Heritage Center Associates. To receive registration or further information about the symposium, contact Sally Sutherland at the Center at PO Box 3924, Laramie, Wyoming, 82071; telephone 307-766-4295; e-mail sallys@uwyo.edu.

  Letter from the Director, 1998 Bernard L. Majewski Fellow Named

  Return to the Spring 1998 Heritage Highlights Index

American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, P.O. Box 3924, Laramie, WY 82071.  Phone:  307.766.4114,  Fax:  307.766.5511, Email: shelstad@uwyo.edu.  Copyright © University of Wyoming, 1999.  Created on June 27, 1999.  Last modified on August 23, 2000.