Small and the Sociology of Women 
Small and the Sociology of Women 
Small's attitude on women's place in society, especially in academia, was crucial for women sociologists' training and careers. He was central to job placement for the department's graduates. For in those days, people were "invited" to fill positions and these "calls" were first negotiated between the employer and Small. Students did not personally apply for them. [24] Such negotiations were extremely dependent on interpersonal relations, and Small was responsible for placing most male Chicago sociologists in academic positions from the 1890s until the early 1920s. He believed that women should be employed in "social settlements" and other types of "women's institutions." As sociology became increasingly academically defined and controlled, women were effectively barred from this vital job opportunity, particularly in sociology departments training graduate students. [25]
Small firmly believed in the separate domains of men and women. He repeatedly stated this in his writings on women. In 1902, he supported the still controversial belief that the intellectual capacity and "brain power" of men and women were equal [26] (thereby also reinforcing Thomas' conclusions in his dissertation). [27] Small believed that this equality was obvious and had been stressed. What needed to be addressed was the "separate but equal" nature of males and females:
we are aware that the mental output of the two persons [sexes], with reference to a given subject, is not the same. There is a subtle difference of quality, perhaps like that between the same musical note produced, for example, by a cornet and a violin. Each has the same relation to other notes higher and lower in the scale, but neither could supply the place of the other in its own series. [28]
Acknowledging that some "modern" women were trained like men, he felt that this was a transitory and possibly destructive phase of social change. Although Small was a sexist, he wanted to venture on a noncontroversial path toward more equality and rights for women. His contradictory ideas are evident in the following passage: "Equal pay for equal work is simple justice. But at best social ideals that train women to be competitors with men are like poisons administered as medicine." [29] Supporting the "complementary" roles of men and women exemplified in marriage, Small wrote that bachelorhood was a sign of maladjustment. In yet another contradictory statement, he noted the lack of high moral standards in society and given this "fact," remaining single could be a temporary "social sacrament." [30]
Small thought that women embodied humanness, emotional balance, harmony, and repose. (Since this was close to the image Addams projected, it is understandable that he admired her so much.) Simultaneously, he wrote that women were morally neither better nor worse than men. Women were cooperative and men competitive because of their social and sexual roles. Thus, when Park and Burgess developed their view of society as competitive, Small could have easily seen this as the "male sphere." but certainly not the female. [3l]
Although Small was sexist in his views that women's place was in the home, he simultaneously believed that the "home" needed academic study. Women, by their "nature" would be the best scholars here, so his hiring of Marion Talbot and other women to study "women's subjects" allowed for a certain freedom and flexibility for women faculty. This ideology also allowed him to think of Addams as a colleague and sociologist, when many of his male successors did not.
Like all sexist visions, Small's reality always resulted in women's loss of social power and control. Agreeing in the abstract that males and females had equal ability to vote, he opposed the extension of suffrage on the ground of social expediency. Women should not vote because it would alter the complementary divisions of labor wherein men should have "the representative functions in our political system." [32]
Women were also not expected to be breadwinners. If they worked in the marketplace they would become competitive and devote less time to their homes and families. Work was like a new religion, fulfilling obligations to the community and to God. Thus, women who worked would be choosing a "holy" mission in competition with their other "holy" mission.
In 1903, after the instigation of segregation in education at the University of Chicago. Small wrote an article advocating this policy. Holding that women matured more quickly than men, he felt that the consequence was male discrimination in the classroom. He elaborated:
The boy of seventeen or eighteen has grown up by the side of his younger, or even older, sisters and other boy's sisters, and has probably never wasted a minute on the purely academic question of their possible equality with himself. In the college environment the perspective changes. He is doggedly aware that the girls in his class are sophisticated beyond his years. He has always supposed himself at least as old as anyone of his age. Now, when he hears the girls of his class talk about "high school kids" he has a guilty feeling that it means him. While he is being guyed and hazed and, if lucky, "rushed," the chasm yawns wider between him and his girl classmate, who does not even shrink from the presence of the captain of the football team, and has already made a distinct impression upon some of the stars of the fraternities. Our freshman doesn't feel happy. These girls embarrass him. [33]
Sexually tempting, cold-hearted, competitive, and sophisticated, "college" women needed to be kept away from male freshmen. Keeping in mind Talbot's statistics on women's performance, it is clear that female students at Chicago did excel their male counterparts. This unexpected achievement lay beneath the subsequent attempt to "put women in their place."
Thus women sociologists were fairly welcome at the University of Chicago, if they knew, and kept, their place. Ironically, it was this extremely overt sexism which allowed a "place for women" to flourish. Subsequent policies toward women became increasingly restrictive and covert so that there were neither publicly sexist statements such as Small's, nor a place for women's control over a world where they were the "expert."
24. Interview of Ruth Shonle Cavan by the author, October 1978.
25. They were similarly limited in participation in the "men's" organization, the American Sociological Society. See Mary Jo Deegan, "Early Women Sociologists and the American Sociological Society," American Sociologist 16 (February 1981): 114-24.
26. Albion W. Small, "The Social Mission of College Women," The Independent 54 (30 January 1902):261-63.
27. W.I. Thomas, "On a Difference in the Metabolism of the Sexes," Ph.D. diss. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1897. The equal capacity of the "female brain" and the "male brain" was a common theme in Thomas' early writings. See extended discussion below.
28. Small, "The Social Mission of College Women," pp. 261-62.
29. Ibid., p. 262.
30. Ibid.
31. See discussion of Park below.
32. Small, "The Social Mission of College Women," p. 263.
33. Albion W. Small, "Coeducation at the University of Chicago," Proceedings of the National Education Association, 1903, pp. 295-96.
From Mary Jo Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Books, 1986, pp. 196-199.
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