The Joan Davis Years

Chapter 3
The Joan Davis Years 1976-79
Professional Administration, Expansion of Adult Programs,
Changing Roles for Women,
And the Coeducation Dilemma
Second President Joan Davis 1976-79

The next person who follows a long-term and highly regarded administrator often faces a challenge. When Joan Davis assumed the presidency of HCW in 1976, the college community was used to Laura Johnson’s highly personal administrative style. Joan Davis recalls her administration as a time of transition as the college moved from a closely held family business model toward a more modern style. These years also saw an expansion of offerings for adults, including programs for women who would later be called “displaced homemakers” - women returning to the workforce precipitously after being widowed or divorced. Some HCW programs were developed to attract members of minority groups. Additionally, Davis was faced with external challenges including changing roles for women and the opening of many traditionally all-male colleges to women.

Davis stayed at HCW for three years, departing to become assistant to the president of Mount Holyoke College in 1979. During this time, HCW revamped many academic administrative functions. The board of trustees was enhanced by a greater number of representatives from the corporate and business communities who brought a new perspective to the college. Many of these changes required significant adjustments on the part of the faculty and staff. Many courses were now more vocationally oriented, a real departure in a college traditionally dominated by the liberal and fine arts.

In an interview with Joan S. French of the New Britain Herald dated Oct. 26, 1977, Davis described her own career as “checkered.” Born in St. Cloud, Minnesota, Davis earned her BA in 1949 from the University of Minnesota. She received an MA from the University of Connecticut in 1955. She taught political science at the University of Connecticut beginning in 1954. During this time, she and her husband Irving G. Davis, Jr., a Hartford lawyer, lived in Storrs where they raised two sons. After her husband died in 1967, Davis resumed her education. She attended Yale where she received a PhD in 1974. She served as associate professor of political science and Chair of the Social Science Department at Keene State College beginning in 1971.

When she became president of HCW in 1976, Davis knew firsthand of the difficult transition many women faced when they had been in and out of academia or the workforce for a number of years while coping with family responsibilities. Davis’s own experience had taught her the importance of a supportive environment for women returning to school or to the workforce. She had been the only woman in her master’s degree program in public administration at the University of Connecticut in the late 1950s. During her years in Storrs when she first began commuting to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale was not very responsive to her situation as a woman pursuing a PhD. However, when she became a widow and returned to the program, Yale did allow her to start her dissertation again.

Davis inherited a relatively quiet campus in Hartford. The turmoil of the 1960s had run its course, and many innovations both large and small of that era had become mainstream. To choose one example, the dress code requiring skirts on campus was abolished in 1969, remarkably late compared to other colleges and even high schools at the time. Such a change may seem trivial today, but in 1969, the right to wear slacks with comfortable shoes rather than a skirt with stockings and dress shoes was a form of personal emancipation for many women.

In 1976, the sight of mature women continuing their education was no longer unusual. However, courses in business skills, computer operations, office management, and auto mechanics were still viewed by many as experimental or even radical. During these years, HCW’s Counseling Center became a force to reckon with, pioneering in the development of such courses under the supervision of its innovative director, Mary Merritt. The Counseling Center’s new non-traditional classes were indicative of new roles women were assuming in the world of work. Although the working woman was not a new phenomenon, what was new was a growing acceptance that many women aspired to achievement on their own account rather than as subordinates of male employers or helpmates to their husbands.

By the 1970s the movement sometimes referred to as “the second wave of feminism,” “the women’s movement,” or “women’s liberation” had helped change the character of American education. Developments in the status of women had evolved alongside many other social upheavals including the African American civil-rights movement, the sexual revolution, and the gay rights movement.

These changes had a particularly strong impact on developments at the Counseling Center during the late 1970s. Although the social changes of the 1960s and 1970s are often remembered as the province of the young, Counseling Center director Merritt knew that these changes were just as important for the mature woman. Merritt’s innovations of this period included the introduction of legal studies, a program that still exists today. When the legal assistant training program was instituted in the late 1970s, the college made it quite plain that this was a program for paraprofessionals to learn the basics of legal research and practice, not for legal secretaries to learn typing and shorthand.

In some respects, the feminist demands of the 1970s worked well for women’s colleges. At single-sex institutions, women were freed from intellectual competition with men. As Davis noted, in coeducational classes, female students often let the men do all the talking. At HCW and other women’s colleges, students were more likely to speak up. This phenomenon occurred in both the undergraduate programs and in those offered at the Counseling Center. Women’s studies became a legitimate scholarly discipline during the 1970s. Women were encouraged to enter medicine, law, engineering, and academic administration.

Davis and her colleagues were also concerned with the contributions of women to government and politics. In this quest HCW was abetted by trustee Dorothy Goodwin, who served in the state legislature. Davis recalled that in her own experience most government jobs for women involved sitting behind a typewriter. She felt that women’s colleges had an important role in educating women in economics, political science, and other fields necessary for greater responsibility. She hoped that HCW would help produce women who could model themselves on Goodwin.

During these same years, however, the Ivy League schools and other elite men’s schools were opened to women. Students at women’s colleges transferred in large numbers to the newly coed schools, leaving women’s colleges with depleted student ranks. However excellent a woman’s college might be, the men’s colleges carried more prestige. The right to earn a diploma from Yale, Harvard, or Princeton was considered a landmark achievement even among many feminists.

Another interview, called “Hartford College for Women, Led by Davis, Bucks Coed Trend.” provides a snapshot of the state of single-sex education for women in the late 1970s. Davis pointed out that she hoped HCW would remain a women’s college because women were going through a transitional period transforming old roles and starting new ones. An all-female environment was helpful to women spearheading these changes.

The population of HCW was changing in the late 1970s. Twenty percent of the students at HCW were women 35 to 40 years old. Additionally, fifteen percent of the students were members of a minority group, the highest percentage in the state among private colleges. In the 2000s, both adult students and minority students are represented in larger numbers on college campuses. Colleges and universities have realized that these students may need support services as they not only adjust to, but help transform, the campus environment. In the 1970s both adult students and minority groups often felt more isolated from the mainstream.

When Joan Davis left HCW for Mount Holyoke College, HCW was still firmly placed as a liberal arts college devoted to the liberal arts. The student body was changing, however, and the college was expanding its student base by creating flexible nondegree programs for both enrichment and vocational training. The Davis years also marked the creation of the College Sampler, a series of noncredit courses for adults, and expansion of courses at the Counseling Center This trend would continue during the next decades as the tiny college struggled to remain afloat. Before turning to the era of the 1980s, however, we will take a look at the Butterworth family, who played such an important role in the college right from the beginning.


Sources
Telephone Interview by Margaret Mair with Joan Davis, Oct. 23, 2009.
University of Hartford Archives, Hartford College for Women Collection, Administrators Series: Joan Davis files.

The next installment in this series will be:
The Butterworth family and Hartford College for Women
Acting President Miriam Butterworth 1979-80
Trustee Paul Butterworth
Oliver Butterworth, Professor of English