The term “missionary barrel” is synonymous with used clothing and hand-me-downs. The contents were cast-offs from donors or even foodstuffs. The filled barrels or packages were gifts to help missionaries survive in their work that afforded them little money.
Dorothy was five years older than her brother. She said, “I had to look after him, iron his blouses, take care of him during church services, and final humiliation, occasionally take him out with me on dates!”
As an undergraduate, Dorothy had attended Ottawa University, a Baptist college in Ottawa, Kansas. Dorothy said, “Of course, nobody in (other parts) of the country ever heard of Ottawa University. They think it’s in Canada. I’ve just given up on trying to correct that impression.” Dorothy wanted to learn to dance, but dancing was not something that the daughter of a Baptist minister was allowed to do. She managed to pick up a few dance steps where she wasn’t supposed to—at her Baptist college. She would go on to chaperone so many dances during her career that she claimed dancing “lost its glamour.”
Known in her neighborhood as a tomboy, Dorothy loved to play ball and tennis, with no interest in cooking or sewing. At Ottawa, she played on the school basketball team and won the women’s tennis championship in the Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference. She served on the staff of the school newspaper, the yearbook, and as a member of the student council.
Though most of her friends did not go to college, Dorothy always knew she would pursue higher education. “It was never a question,” she said. “I was very academically oriented.” After she graduated in 1920, Dorothy was offered a position on the Ottawa newspaper. As a young avid reader, she had dreamed of writing the proverbial great American novel. She said, “I don’t know what gave me the idea, but it was there. I don’t recall that I expected to go through any apprentice period. I just expected that said masterpiece would spring full-blown from the head of Zeus.”
Dorothy turned down the newspaper job in favor of the field of education and moved to Renton, Washington, to teach physical education. She said, “My reception there was a trifle sour. When I arrived, the principal took one look and told the superintendent, ‘We surely have picked a lemon this time.’”
During the Great Depression, Dorothy worked to pay off her parents’ debts and to put her brother through medical school. “Baptists ministers didn’t make much in those days,” she explained.
With her zest for learning and her abiding interest in others, Dorothy wanted to discover why people behaved the way they did. In 1923, she enrolled at the University of Chicago for a year of graduate study in psychology. She left with her master’s degree and the realization that not even psychology can explain all the “whys” of the human race. She recalled, “I found that employers wanted firstly, a man with a PhD degree; secondly, a man with a master’s degree; thirdly, a woman with a doctoral degree, and very fourthly, a woman with a master’s degree. Having no money to continue my studies, I went to San Bernardino, California, as dean of girls and vice principal of the high school. I was working under my former principal of the ‘lemon’ quotation.”
In California, Dorothy learned to love the outdoor life in a way that had never been possible before. She soaked in the desert, mountains, and seashore. She loved to look from her office window at Mount San Bernardino, gaining strength and serenity from the peaceful view.
After several years at San Bernardino, Dorothy traveled to Teachers College of Columbia University to study student personnel administration. During her year at the university, she stayed in the International House with students from fifty-seven countries. Early in 1933, she received her PhD and returned to San Bernardino. That’s when President Elliott called.
She came to Purdue not only as dean of women, but also as an associate professor of psychology. Her salary was $3,300 a year, about $100 more than she was paid in California.
Even before Dorothy became dean of women, she had accomplished much in a time when few females attended college, worked outside the home, or made a respectable living. Yet for Dorothy, still in her mid-thirties, the best was yet to come. Her life would be filled with accomplishments that inspired other women.
When Dorothy and her parents arrived at Purdue, they were lodged at the Fowler Hotel across the Wabash River in Lafayette. She said, “After having lived in beautiful California, I moved to a seared state [referring to drought-devastated Indiana]. I thought to myself, ‘I can’t stand it.’ The minute I got across to West Lafayette, the people were so nice—so really nice—I changed my mind.”
Dorothy was appointed dean in August 1933, and she was given what had been the office of the part-time dean of women located on the top floor of Fowler Hall.
Dorothy said, “The dean preceding me was Carolyn Shoemaker, who must have been a very fine person. I never met her. She had great respect from people on campus.”
Dorothy climbed to the top of Fowler Hall carrying a box of her workplace goods and discovered that the Office of the Dean of Women was more like the Closet of the Dean of Women. The room was about six-by-eight feet. Tucked away from the accesses of student life, it was a tiny room about to be inhabited by a world of a woman. Dorothy set about moving her files and papers into her new desk. Someone had been given the task of emptying the desk after Carolyn’s sudden death. As Dorothy began to arrange pens and paperclips, she opened a drawer and found in its shadowy recesses a book.
Dorothy pulled the book from the drawer, feeling the nubby texture of the cover; the scent of leather preceded the exhumation. It was a Bible. She thumbed through the soft, India paper. The title page indicated that the Bible was a 1901 standard edition, “Translated out of the original tongues.” Dorothy thought of her predecessor, whom she had never met but had heard mentioned with great reverence.
Was the Bible inadvertently left inside of Carolyn’s desk? Or did the person with the unpleasant task of clearing elect to leave the testaments for the next dean of women?
As the daughter of a Baptist minister, Dorothy was no stranger to the Holy Bible. An analytical thinker, she had her questions regarding its stance on such topics as women and their place. She wrote in 1971 letter, “Aside from the Adam and Eve story, Paul has done more to set back the progress of women than almost any other person. Many people are greatly influenced by Bible references. Probably, we all are, even though unconsciously.”
Dorothy placed the Bible back into the drawer and continued her task of cultivating the Office of the Dean of Women.
DOROTHY AND HER PARENTS obtained a house at 825 Salisbury in West Lafayette. Her father worked as a representative for the Equitable Life Assurance Society in the Lafayette Life Building on the courthouse square in Lafayette.
Dorothy’s first goal as dean of women was to campaign for a more accessible office. She said of her out-of-sight, out-of-mind alcove, “Students would really have to want to see me to find me.” She accomplished the relocation of her office by the “Elliott method,” which President Elliott himself described: “First, you ask the president for something, and he says, ‘no.’ Then you come back and ask again—and he says ‘no’ again. The third time you come back to ask, you pound on his desk, and he says, ‘Oh, go ahead and do it!’”
Dorothy explained that her experience was a bit different than Elliott’s take: “Well, it turned out just the other way; it was the president who yelled, and I was the one who went and did it. I was never much of a pounder, but I learned how to operate with Elliott.”
Apparently, Dorothy was, indeed, a quick study of the Elliott method, for her office was moved to the ground floor of the Engineering Administration Building, next to the office of the much-revered Dean of the Schools of Engineering Andrey A. Potter and across the hall from Dean of Men Martin L. Fisher, who had succeeded Stanley Coulter. Dorothy said she made