Progress in the education of women
Pink light bounces off the western wall of the Pike-Fletcher-Terry house just before sunset on one of those clear, balmy February days that we’re blessed with here. If someone restores the house, I hope she will make it secure for another 180 years without erasing the patina.
The same rules apply to a human body and an old building: Secure the structure, but don’t erase the marks of age. That’s where character comes from.
Stabilize the foundation, make sure the roof’s not leaking, but maybe leave the peeling paint alone. On the exterior brick, that is. Brick’s not supposed to be painted anyway. Maybe the lawn could be left a little shabby. No need to pick up the Osage oranges that fall by the fence from the two bois d’arc trees.
The name of the house, Pike-Fletcher-Terry, omits a link. Lou Krause was a teacher at the Arkansas Female College. She bought the house from Albert Pike’s family in 1886 and sold it to her brotherin-law John Gould Fletcher Sr. for $18,000 in 1889 (equivalent to well over $500,000 today).
Her sister was Adolphine Krause Fletcher, mother and namesake of Adolphine Fletcher Terry, who convened the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools at the house in September 1958 when a state law closed Little Rock’s public high schools to prevent their integration.
Through her sister Adolphine, Lou Krause was also the aunt of John Gould Fletcher Jr., who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his “Selected Poems,” published in 1938. Literary talent is often hereditary, but it had never occurred to me to ask where John Gould Fletcher’s came from. His aunt Lou Krause appears to have been a formidable woman of letters and one possible source. (Fletcher’s sister Adolphine was no lightweight, either; she went to Vassar at age 15.)
The Arkansas Female College opened in 1874 with General L.M. Lewis as president. Fellow founder Myra McAlmont Warner took over in 1878 and remained with the college in one capacity or another until its end in 1899. Warner is still listed as principal (as well as professor of math and “The Higher English”) in the 188788 catalog, the only one that survives from Krause’s time (1886-1889), as owner of the Pike house and director of the school.
“The friction resulting from close contact of the various dispositions of teachers and pupils—hitherto strangers—is …. at its maximum” during a new school’s first year of operation, someone, most likely Lou Krause, wrote in the introduction to the 188788 catalog. “A vast amount of public criticism, some friendly and some the reverse—must be met,” and having survived all of the above, argues the catalog, the Arkansas Female College could congratulate itself on a successful first year “under a new arrangement”—which must refer to Krause’s takeover.
Yet the catalog names Krause only as a teacher of history and English literature. Julia McAlmont Warner, daughter of Myra Warner and an alumna of the school, is listed as teacher of French and German.
The catalog lists a vacancy for professor of Greek, Latin, and natural sciences for the coming year, but the required courses are still impressive.
The course of study for the freshman class in the Collegiate Course includes “Algebra, Roman History, Physiology, [and] Seven American Classics” for the fall term, and for the spring, “Algebra, Grecian History, Natural Philosophy, Seven British Classics, Elocutionary and Calesthenic Exercises, Penmanship, together with Latin, Greek, French, and German continued to the end of the course.”
Course offerings for the sophomore, junior, and senior years are equally rich, yet Myra Warner, Lou Krause, and Julia McAlmont Warner appear to be the only faculty teaching subjects other than music and art. Separate faculty are on hand for piano, violin, art, and “Art Needle Work.”
Some readers may be familiar with the 19th-century debates over what kind of studies were appropriate for young women (if they were to be educated at all). The older school of thought held that young women (the ones well-off enough to receive formal education) should learn music, sewing, and French or some other combination of light, pleasant subjects. (Some used literally incredible “medical” reasoning to justify this position.)
The newer school of thought held that young women should train their minds on the same hard subjects studied by young men: Greek, Latin, mathematics, natural science.
There were plenty of opinions in between, and I am delighted by the idea that some of the tension between old ways and new ways of educating young women was worked out over two decades in a place I walk by every day.
It’s unclear what happened to Miss Krause or how her direction of the Arkansas Female College ended. There is no mention of her in the next surviving catalogue, that of 1895-96, when the school was back under the leadership of the much-venerated Myra Warner. The 1910 obituary of Adolphine Krause Fletcher notes that her sister Lou Krause is a resident of Texas.
After Krause’s sale of the Pike house to John Gould Fletcher Sr., Myra Warner moved the Arkansas Female College to a new building at 1400 Rock St., just south of the gash cut through our city by I-630.
In the spirit of naming any African Americans who can be located at a site of historical significance, I will mention that the 1880 Federal Census lists the following people as permanent residents of the Pike House in addition to Myra and Julia Warner and a boarder named Maud: Jerry Smith, janitor, Black, age 35; Isabel Smith, cook, Black, age 28, and Julius Smith, Black, age 2. Jerry, according to the census taker, was able to read and write.