Women's Equality Day, 2020, provides an opportunity to look back at the push for women's
equality at the University of Kentucky that has spanned nearly a century and a half. For example, gains made by women during World War II on the UK campus proved to be mostly temporary.
As the war ended
"normalcy" again prevailed at UK. By the late 1940s the
percentage of women pursuing higher education at UK actually dropped in
comparison to the men. The gains women had made in leadership roles on
campus were systematically reversed both by specific rulings and by
default. Women faculty members, hired to teach "for the
duration," found it necessary to find postwar teaching jobs
elsewhere.
Lydia Roberts Fischer,
who had been hired to teach mathematics during the war, knew that without a
Ph.D. degree she could not continue permanently. Single and with two
young children, she indicated that obtaining a Ph.D. seemed all but
impossible. After leaving UK and taking substitute teaching positions in
local public schools, Fischer subsequently obtained a full-time teaching
position at Lafayette High School, where she taught until her retirement.
Little evidence exists
that women on campus openly resisted the return to pre-war practices.
Only Dean of Women Sarah Bennett Holmes is on record as vocally opposing the most obvious
discrimination. Overall, little overt protests came from either the
students or the faculty. Thus, UK women once again experienced
discriminatory rules regarding social life, uncertain academic potential and
prospects, and steep challenges to remaining on the faculty.
Changes taking place in
the first half of the 1940s could have set the stage for fundamental shifts;
instead, they existed only "for the duration." The steps
towards equality that occurred during World War II would need to be fought
again, and again.
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