Flora White: In the Vanguard of Gender Equity

by Linda C. Morice

Overview

This study examines the origins of the progressive education movement through the lens of the life of Flora White (1860–1948), an educator who worked to promote the physical and intellectual growth of girls and young women. It analyzes the role of women in the movement and how marginalized women dealt with powerful men to advance their own agency.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498542388
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	10/31/2016
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 16.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Linda C. Morice is professor emerita of educational leadership at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: A Good Name Chapter 2: Nature Weeps Chapter 3: Finding Her Voice Chapter 4: The New Education Chapter 5: Visionary Women Chapter 6: A Redeemer Chapter 7: Doing "Precisely As One Pleases" Chapter 8: The Best of Her Generation

Editorial Reviews

In Flora White: In the Vanguard of Gender Equity, Linda C. Morice uses biography to ‘reveal human agency’ though the story of Flora White. It is a story of struggle for voice and identity, punctuated by challenges to class, race, and gender norms of the day. Morice captures Flora White’s life as a form of lived experience shaped by pride, poverty, personal loss, and the love for education as a means for social and political change. It is also a journey for self-awareness, identity, and place for the author as she shares with the reader the advantages and difficulties of writing about a family member. Morice makes a valuable contribution documenting the significant impact of Flora White to American education and progressive education.

Sam F. Stack

Linda C. Morice has rendered a richly telling biography of Flora White, a little-known though fascinating and multi-faceted educational leader during the Progressive Era. By exploring the ongoing interplay between White's relentless agency and the ever-present strictures on gender throughout her long life, Morice offers a portrait as much about this uniquely powerful woman as about the social and cultural complexities of her time.

Jackie M. Blount

Serendipity for educational biographers might best be redefined as a quick right turn off of Highway 2 to Heath, Massachusetts; a nodding postal worker; a President of the Heath Historical Society; and a curious educational historian following leads about a distant relative. Linda C. Morice is that educational biographer and Flora White (1860-1948), her great grandaunt, was a child-centered Progressive-era educator brave enough to critique G. Stanley Hall, who stridently argued against educating women. White lived a life that others should learn about and Morice has produced an exquisite telling of that life.. .. [Before] you add it to your course book list, first make a cup of tea and enjoy a full read of this book. It is written so eloquently that you will be inspired both as a reader and writer of education biography. I feel enriched by coming to know Flora White and grateful for Linda Morice’s acumen for shaping such a compelling narrative.

Vitae Scholasticae: The Journal of Educational Biography

Flora White: In the Vanguard of Gender Equity is an absorbing approach to education history, wrapped in a biographical narrative that illuminates a slice of American history stretching from seventeenth-century Massachusetts to the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. Linda C. Morice’s account of Flora White’s quest to attain 'more life, and fuller' will offer some an engaging introduction to women’s social agency during the Progressive Era, and others new pockets of evidence and lines of thought regarding women’s educational leadership during that period. Readers will surely appreciate Morice’s literary stewardship of the precious resources that preserved access to White’s amazing life story for contemporary audiences.

Karen Graves

Flora White’s life as told by Morice is a forceful and persuasive study of human agency, in which a lesser-known but fascinating and multi-faceted individual serves as a lens for understanding larger social and cultural developments, informing both educational history and gender studies.... Linda Morice’s entertaining and easy-going narrative moves backwards and forwards across time...Productive encounters in local archives make unexpected connections, corroborating and amplifying the anecdotal evidence of family history.

History of Education: Journal of the History of Education Society