One lifetime. Although Virginia Tech has helped educate, train, and mold the character of generations of women leaders, female students have been part of the university community for about one average life span, or 75 years. To put that time frame into perspective, one of the first five women to enroll as full-time students in the university — Ruth Louise Terrett (Earle) — died on November 28, 1995.
Those five women — transfer student Mary E. Brumfield, Billie Kent Kabrich, Lucy Lee Lancaster, Carrie T. Sibold, and Terrett — and another seven part-time coeds — Lucy Randolph Brown, Lucy Butler Groth, Sarah Gainor Kessler, Hattie Mays, Lena Willis McDonald, Josephine Phlegar, and Margaret Robinson Walker — enrolled at Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute, popularly called Virginia Polytechnic Institute or VPI, in 1921 after its president, Julian A. Burruss, achieved his goal of admitting women as regular students to the previously all-male institution. By that time, the college with the unwieldy name was in its 49th year of operation.
Burruss may have been influenced by his experiences in teaching at and heading schools for women. He taught for a time at the Searcy Female Institute in Arkansas and was the first president of Harrisonburg State Normal School (now James Madison University), then a state teachers’ college for women, for 11 years before coming to VPI in 1919. Perhaps the Virginia Tech alumnus had seen for himself during those years the ability of women to meet the same educational challenges as men.
Burruss took his arguments for admitting women to VPI to the Board of Visitors. The January 27, 1921, edition of The Virginia Tech, the student newspaper of the period, describes his presentation: "President Burruss emphasized strongly the need of educational advantages for the women who are to enter the new lines of work opened to them by the recent war [World War I]. He said that the achievements in research by women scientists were so well known that it was useless to mention any special cases. He remarked that the head of an important scientific department in one of Virginia’s medical colleges was a woman, and further stated that the University of Virginia, and William and Mary had found women students satisfactory."
According to D. Lyle Kinnear in The First Hundred Years, Burruss also stressed the point that excluding women from an institution supported by federal and state funds would probably be illegal since the extension of suffrage had made women full citizens. Burruss further noted that admitting women would be more economical than providing technical and agricultural training at another state school since VPI already provided many of the courses needed by women in the extension service, industry, and agricultural laboratories. And he said that providing living quarters would be easy since few women probably would enroll and, if necessary, the president’s home could be converted into a dormitory for them. His final argument was that the board had the authority to admit women, although he suggested that it might later want to ask the General Assembly to make special appropriations for this purpose.
Burruss’s arguments persuaded the board, and its members voted unanimously on January 13, 1921 (The Virginia Tech gives the date as January 16), to admit women to all courses, with the exception of military, for the next session--September 1921. It would be another 52 years before women were admitted to the corps of cadets. The school was one of the last five or six land-grant colleges and universities in the country to admit women as students. For the most part, these "hold-outs" were, like VPI, southern colleges with compulsory military components.
"The interests of the state and of this college make it advisable to extend to our women citizens the full privileges of instruction offered here. The Virginia Polytechnic Institute will thus no longer discriminate against a large part of the people of the state supporting it," Burruss said, adding, "It is clear that nothing will be left undone to provide satisfactory conditions for all earnest women who come seeking the instruction provided at this institution." The women did, indeed, have to come seeking instruction; little was done to attract them to the college.
The Virginia Tech reported on January 27, 1921, that "VPI is the only college maintained by Virginia which gives practical courses in agricultural subjects, and as the institution has received inquiries from women seeking instruction in horticulture, landscape gardening, and other branches of agriculture, it is expected that by next September there will be several young women matriculated in these courses."
The newspaper was wrong about the majors the women would select. Even though the college had added a special curriculum for the preparation of home demonstration agents with the women in mind, Brumfield, Sibold, and Lancaster enrolled in applied biology, Kabrich in applied chemistry, and Terrett in civil engineering.
The coeds did, however, enroll in the home economics classes that were first offered in 1921. Mary Moore Davis, one of the first women on the faculty, had initiated the resident program in home economics that year, and offerings included some classes to prepare students for home demonstration work (extension agents). A four-year home economics curriculum was first offered during the 1925-26 academic year, and the program’s first B.S. degrees were awarded in 1929. The department was suspended in 1933 during the depression years--the only program on campus that was cut--and was not reinstated until 1937, when Burruss asked Maude E. Wallace, for whom Wallace Hall is named, to serve temporarily as acting head of the department to get it reestablished as a department in the School of Agriculture.
Shortly after women enrolled as undergraduate students, the first women enrolled in graduate programs. Beginning in 1923 women, including Brumfield, comprised about 2 percent of the graduate students.
One of those early graduates was Ella Russell, who received her undergraduate and master’s degrees from VPI in 1926 and 1928, respectively. She joined the chemistry department, possibly becoming the first alumna on the faculty, and taught until her death in 1949. Another early non-Extension Division affiliated woman on the faculty was Anna Montgomery Campbell, an instructor in education in 1921.
Predictive of the treatment the women would receive, the corps of cadets publicly protested their admittance. But their protestations were ignored, and the 12 (male student publications at the time say 10) women entered the heretofore male sanctuary--a small group among the 878 students. "The cadets continued to protest the invasion of VPI by the women," Kinnear writes, "and predicted dire consequences for school spirit, athletics, academic standards, and school traditions." The 1922 school yearbook, The Bugle, expresses a typical cadet reaction:
"The Co-Ed is here
She belongs all alone in a class of her own
At VPI she has caused a wretched condition
We only have ten, but curses, what a collection
I’m peeved and I’m mad, I favor Co-ed extradition,
The sooner the better,
Or we shall let her murder our very tradition."
But The Virginia Tech greeted the women more warmly, noting their presence in one sentence as part of a longer article on enrollment: "This year, for the first time in the history of the school, women are admitted to all courses of instruction, and the campus is now graced by the presence of ten co-eds." After that, the newspaper basically ignored them. The major area newspaper, The Roanoke Times, did not mention their presence in articles announcing the opening of the 1921 school year, although the paper had carried the news on January 18, 1921, about the Board of Visitors vote to admit them. "Virginia Tech to Open All Classes to Women in September," the headline read.
The women who enrolled at the land-grant college had a lot to prove. Rather than diminish school spirit, athletics, academic standards, and school traditions as predicted, the women enhanced school spirit, expanded athletics to include themselves, competed with the cadets for top academic honors, and established new school traditions.
Within a short time, one of the women walked off with the highest academic honors at a commencement exercise, an achievement greeted by the corps with mixed applause. "This applause quickly swelled into protest," Kinnear writes, "when Burruss undertook to use the occasion to congratulate the institution for having admitted women. This protest threatened to break into pandemonium when the surprised Burruss advanced to the front of the stage, and shaking his finger at the equally surprised cadets, accused them of being jealous of the coeds. This demonstration subsided as suddenly as it had erupted, when the cadets observed that the commandant not only was not amused but was raking the boisterous cadets with a steely eye. Following the restoration of quiet, the mood of the cadets changed; instead of booing at the mention of the coeds, they began to applaud."
Even though the cadets applauded the coeds’ academic achievements that day, they continued to battle those achievements in other ways, sometimes with faculty support. In 1932 Carol M. Newman, head of the Department of English and Foreign Languages and for whom Newman Library is named, wrote to Burruss to apprise him of the senior class’s election of its valedictorian and salutatorian. The class had elected the third- and fourth-ranked students, both males. The top student was Miss F. R. Aldrich, with the second spot held by transfer student H. H. Addlestone. Aldrich’s QCA was 2.84 (with 3.0 being the highest possible average), and the elected valedictorian’s, 2.62. Newman apparently felt compelled to defend the selection: "It is easy to see why the class made the selection it did, Miss Aldrich being a girl and Mr. Addlestone having been a student here for only two years. Personally, I have no inclination to question the right of the class to select its own salutatorian and valedictorian, but think it best to call to your attention the circumstances connected with the case."
Aldrich’s friends accused the college of discriminating against women, but Burruss told them that the top student had not always been selected valedictorian. According to Kinnear, the male student for the honor then announced "that he would serve only if public acknowledgment was made at the commencement exercises that the coed in question had achieved the highest academic standing. The senior class accepted this proposal and requested Dr. Burruss to make such an announcement at commencement time. Burruss agreed to do so, and the entire matter then passed off quietly as far as the public was concerned."
Even before that incident, the women knew that some of the professors did not approve of their admittance to the college. In 1928 one coed wrote in her diary: "Some of the professors didn’t appreciate us any more than the boys did, and we had a hectic time, especially with the wonderful science, chemistry. One of the professors was even so inconsiderate as to say that our class of co-eds was dumb. Doesn’t speak so well for him I should say, when we make plenty good grades in other things." And Sibold later said during an interview for a Virginia Tech Magazine article, published in 1988: "We were town girls and all of the professors knew us, and, part of the time, they treated us like children. They just couldn’t take us very seriously."
Lancaster, who began working in the Virginia Tech library as a student and continued working there until her retirement in 1975--she died on December 14, 1989--wrote about the treatment the coeds received from the cadets: "The students individually were not impolite to the women students, but as a whole they did not like the idea of co-education." The trouble came from the upperclassmen, she surmised, because they "were used to all male classes and thought that having women around spoiled the sacred traditions of Tech."
But at least one of the coeds was determined to give something back to the cadets. Terrett, the coed who started the basketball team, apparently dressed in a cadet uniform and climbed to the top of the school’s water tower, usurping a traditional test of cadet manhood. Her tactics succeeded. According to the 1925 Tin Horn, "After ‘Rat’ Terrett showed that she was determined to stick, her would-be tormentors fled."
Another problem the women faced was the logistics of buying books for their classes. They were not allowed to walk across the Upper Quadrangle where the cadets’ barracks were located; yet, the book store was in No. 1 Barracks (now Lane Hall). To get their books, the women had to send messengers; sometimes those messengers were their fathers.
The Bugle omitted most references to the coeds, with the exception of derisive short tales. It was 1939 before they were allowed even token representation in the yearbook, and then they were only allotted two pages for the Women’s Student Union in the extra-curricular club section. The following year, The Bugle published a section of women seniors and women senior officers. Finally, in 1941, 20 years after their arrival on campus, they received the same treatment as male students in the yearbook, with their photographs interspersed with those of the males in the civilian class sections.
Ignored by The Bugle, the early coeds printed their own yearbook and, with tongue in cheek, called it The Tin Horn. The first Tin Horn was printed in 1925, when the women who had entered as first-year students in 1921--with the exception of Kabrich, whose spot in the class was filled by Louise Jacobs--were seniors. It was dedicated "to the spirit of fun." The coeds called the yearbook, which was printed by hand and included photographs pasted onto the pages, the "[a]nnual publication of the CO-ED Regiment of the VPI," and although they also said it would be the "first and only volume," the yearbook was issued by the coeds that followed three more times: 1929, 1930, and 1931.
The four editions of The Tin Horn reflect the spirit of the women who enrolled at VPI. According to the class history in the 1925 yearbook, "Our co-eds soon found themselves and showed the faculty and the male students that they had a certain something that was bound to spell ‘success.’" That success was apparent in several areas of their college lives.
In 1923 Terrett "stirred up an enthusiasm for basketball," and the coeds formed their own team, which they dubbed the Sextettes, according to the 1925 Tin Horn, or the Turkey Hens, according to the 1929 Tin Horn. One student had her own ideas about how the women developed their athletic ability: "‘N’ funny thing, seemed like the boys always needed fresh air as we came by. Up went the windows and down came the water as they seemed to be in their chief indoor sport. Along with the water came squeaky voices yelling and saying silly things to us. We became exceedingly alert and quick movers, in fact we became so efficient in dodging water that we decided to extend our athletic ability even further, and as a consequence of this we had a basketball team. . . . Of course we weren’t in the Athletic Association, so we couldn’t expect support at our games. A few of the boys did come and always rooted for the opposing team. Not very sportsmanlike, but maybe some day it will be different." (Read more on women's basketball.)
The early coeds were also refused membership in most non-athletic organizations, although the 1924 Bugle lists Brumfield, the transfer student who was the first woman to graduate in 1923, as a member of Phi Kappa Phi, and the 1923 Bugle lists Terrett as a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Undaunted, the coeds formed a social organization that met in homes on a monthly basis. By 1929 they had their own drama group and organized the Coed Dramatics Club, probably in 1930, with Helen Holdaway as president. During the 1920s and 1930s they also organized special science, chemistry, business, and biology clubs and a glee club. By 1930 they had a Women’s Student Organization, with Sally Ann Linkous serving as president. In 1930 they were snubbed by the male civilian students, who formed a civilian student government known as the Civilian Student Union. The women countered in 1934 with their own Women’s Student Union. The two student unions finally combined into a single Civilian Student Union in 1939 in a move by the male civilians to counter the power of the cadets, who, the male students surmised, had too much control in the student government.
Another problem faced by the college’s early women was living space. Although Burruss had suggested abandoning The Grove as the president’s home and converting it to a coed dormitory, dormitories for the women were slow in coming. Four of the first five women students lived at home in Blacksburg, while the only out-of-towner--Terrett--boarded with a professor. Early women students were assigned to rooms in the private homes of officials and professors on the campus and in private homes in town. The first dormitory for women, according to Lancaster, was a large residence that had been the home of a family named Chrisman. It was demolished a few years before Tech’s centennial. The first dormitory built specifically for women was Hillcrest, which opened in the fall of 1940. Dubbed the "Skirt Barn" by the cadets, Hillcrest was converted to an athletic dorm around 1969. Beginning in 1966 several men’s dormitories were converted to women’s dorms, but it was 1972 before the second dormitory built for women opened--the high-rise Slusher Hall, named for longtime Virginia Tech registrar Clarice Slusher (Pritchard).
While the early women students were being treated as second-class citizens by their male counterparts, the college itself was recognizing the achievements of one of its Extension agents. Ella Graham Agnew, who became in 1910 the first woman appointed for field service to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the first female home demonstration agent, had begun working for the college in 1914, when home and farm demonstration work was placed under the Extension Division of Land Grant Universities. Agnew, for whom Agnew Hall is named, had continued to break new ground at VPI, developing a handbook for the use of county home demonstration agents, the first publication of its kind. When she retired from Extension in 1919, an organization she had founded to teach rural women and girls about growing, canning, and processing--initially called Tomato Clubs--had spread to 88 counties and 4 cities in Virginia, reaching nearly 321,000 women and girls. In 1926 VPI presented her with its Certificate of Merit, the first time it had been given to a woman, in recognition of her service to rural sections of Virginia.
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