LEONORA HOEING - WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH

 

        

        Four years after women first entered UK, eighteen-year-old Leonora Hoeing became the first woman recognized at commencement when she received her Normal Department certificate.  A newspaper reporter noted that the 1884 ceremony had a "new and extremely pleasant feature to it" in that, "one of the graduates wore a white dress and a blush that was as daintily pink as the inside of a sea-shell from the Indian Ocean.  Yes, one of the graduates was a young lady, and when his Excellency Governor Knott handed her diploma to her he looked as if he wanted to welcome her into the ranks of the wise with just a touch of his gray mustache to her velvet cheek."  Highlighting the greater access that UK offered to white women from the working class, the reporter added that Hoeing was "none of your bilious blue-stockings either…."

        This first generation of women students at UK were the daughters of some of central Kentucky’s most elite families, but most were the daughters of shopkeepers and trades people firmly rooted in an expanding middle class in Kentucky.  For example, Hoeing’s father, Joseph, and mother, Rebecca, both emigrated from Germany.  Joseph worked in Lexington as a silversmith and Rebecca was a hairdresser.  We may never know the multitude of factors that motivated these families to support their daughters’ educations, but we know the role their daughters played as educational pioneers and that their lives were changed.  But to dispel any notion of higher education’s negative impact on women, the correspondent concluded that Hoeing “was a fresh, healthy young woman, with an eye as full and bright as a dove’s, and the head of a Greek Venus on a neck like a lily-stalk” and was “a happy, wholesome, appetizing creature, with an expression of frank good-fellowship about her, well mingled with a becoming and maidenly modesty.”

         Finally addressing Hoeing’s academic accomplishments, the reporter wrote that she “had taken a double course of study this year, but it seemed to have agreed with her.”  He also noted, even though she was awarded a normal certificate and not a Bachelor’s degree “like they did the boys,” her accomplishments are “…all the same though, for she knows as much as the others, has taken the same course, won the first prize in mathematics over every rascal of them, and if she is not a ‘Mistress of Arts’ she is the first woman I ever saw that wasn't.  The boys didn't seem to be envious of her at all, but cheered her every chance they had with hearty good will."

From Our Rightful Place: Women at the University of Kentucky, 1880-1945 (University Press of Kentucky) 2020