Tea Parties and Southern Womanhood at Madison College

Yours truly in vintage dress, holding Madison College silver tea pot and tray, engraved “Gift of Class of 1947.”

I recently gave a short talk to JMU alumni at a Women for Madison tea party. The topic was the history of tea parties on this campus, which were commonplace from the 1910s through the 1960s. The event was part of JMU’s annual Bluestone Reunion, which marks the 50th anniversary of each graduating class. This year’s honorees were members of the class of 1974, and several alums vividly remembered the welcome tea reception they attended at the President’s house, Hillcrest, in the fall of 1969. It turns out that that was the last welcome tea held at Madison College.

Tea parties have a long history at this institution–they are well documented through photos in yearbooks, napkins and favors pressed into alumni scrapbooks, and actual artifacts in the form of silver tea pots, serving trays, and china. These survivals, carefully recorded and preserved, tell us that tea parties served an important function and were an defining part of campus culture here.

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Alumnae Hall: By Women for Women

The idea for a building for alumnae emerged in 1920 as President Samuel Page Duke considered the needs of a growing campus. He became president in August 1919, as the first World War and global pandemic were still winding down and disruptions persisted. The Harrisonburg Normal School (formerly the State Normal and Industrial School for Women at Harrisonburg), which had closed temporarily during the pandemic, was bursting again with new students. The young women came from all over Virginia, eager to gain the kinds of skills and knowledge needed to join the workforce, which desperately sought women workers to replace men in all kinds of fields. Duke need funds for everything: dormitories, classrooms, offices, and even the social spaces so necessary for student life. The Alumnae Association quickly stepped in to help raise money.

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Yuri Nemoto: Madison’s First Asian American Student

Yuri Nemoto. Sophomore photo, the School Ma’am, 1944

A few years ago, I purchased a 1944 School Ma’am in a local antique store and was astounded to find inside two photographs of an Asian American Madison College student named Yuri Nemoto. A quick search of The Breeze turned up a brief 1943 interview that refers to her as the “first” student “of Japanese descent,” which means she is likely the first Asian American. Nemoto told the reporter, an unidentified fellow classmate, that she was from Los Angeles, had come to Virginia on a scholarship to Lynchburg College, and transferred to Madison that fall intending to study dietetics. Well. I had so many questions after reading that. How had she not been sent to a detention camp along with more than 110,000 to 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry? What had it been like for her to be a Japanese American attending a whites-only Southern school during World War II? My research revealed a compelling story of resistance and resilience.

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Page S. Mitchell, Chef and Kitchen Manager

Photo believed to be Page S. Mitchell. School Ma’am, 1914.

Page Mitchell was one of the most significant employees at the State Normal and Industrial School for Women, for he managed the kitchen that provided three meals a day to hundreds of white students and faculty. Hired as the school’s cook, he is shown in a 1914 image, at left, in chef’s whites. Like Walker Lee and the handful of other African Americans that worked on this campus in the early 20th century, Mitchell contributed to the school’s success, however, little information about him survives in school sources. In this post, I’ll piece together what I have learned about his work so far.

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Student Orgs, the Lost Cause, and Belongingness

NB: I started this post in 2019 but completed/updated it in response to JMU’s July 2020 decision to remove the names of Confederate officers from campus buildings. This post references historic examples of racist and oppressive imagery and language.

In 2019, some Kappa Alpha brothers from Ole Miss made headlines when they used Emmett Till’s memorial marker for target practice and reignited old debates about fraternities and other student orgs that invoke the Lost Cause. The Kappa Alpha Order, a fraternity established in 1865 at Washington College in Virginia, claims Confederate General Robert E. Lee as its “spiritual founder,” and is widely recognized by historians for its veneration of the Old South and its particular brand of white, Southern masculinity. Lee became their icon because he served as president of that college from 1865 to his death in 1870, when campus authorities renamed it Washington and Lee. KA chapters expanded over time, and by the 1950s and 1960s, were widely known for hosting elaborate “plantation” parties, flying Confederate flags, and actively opposing efforts to desegregate higher education. (Turner, Coski) JMU’s KA chapter dates to the 1994-95 academic year, when opposition to affirmative action admissions was nationally prominent, and this campus, like many others, struggled over its diversity initiatives (Breeze, 1990-2000). This post connects modern JMU student organizations’ Lost Cause activities to earlier forms, like the Lee Literary Society, and reflects on their impact on white and Black student belongingness and campus culture. [read more]

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Pandemic at the Normal, 1918

Everyone wants to draw lessons from the past right now. My Twitter TL is full of links to news articles comparing the COVID-19 crisis and the 1918 influenza pandemic. There’s even a #COVID19syllabus project that gathers recent articles and supplements them with scholarly books and articles. So I couldn’t ignore the fact that my campus closed in 1918, just as it closed in March 2020. Sitting in Webex meetings with other administrators, I wondered what happened back then, what decisions those administrators made, and what impact influenza had had on the State Normal School at Harrisonburg. [read more]

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Author Talk, “Black Powder, White Lace: The Irish Community at Hagley”

In 2014, I gave an invited lecture at Hagley Museum and Library, the nation’s leading center for the history of business and technology. The topic was based on my 2002 book, Black Powder, White Lace: the du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in 19th Century America. A videorecording can be found here: https://www.hagley.org/librarynews/video-black-powder-white-lace-du-pont-irish-and-cultural-identity-nineteenth-century