The Deans' Bible. Angie Klink
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a 1988 Mortar Board Leadership Conference, recorded on a videotape now stored in the Purdue Archives, Dorothy, then age eighty-nine, spoke to a group of students about her first days as dean of women:
When I came to Purdue in 1933, of course we didn’t have all the things that you have now. We were very simple, and we didn’t have very much of anything for women. No university housing, no placement service for women, no bachelor of arts degree in the University. So it was a lot of fun to start from scratch and see what could be done.
The Dean of Women’s Office consisted of me, period. No secretary, no staff, just me. I wanted to have the image of the dean of women not to be one of discipline. I thought no intelligent person would spend her life in a job that had discipline at its core, and I didn’t want students to say when they left, “I was never called into the dean’s office once while I was in the University” and be proud of that.
There were 500 female students at Purdue when Dorothy assumed her deanship. That was about one woman to seven men. She said of the campus, “It was like the old definition of an island—a small body of women completely surrounded by men.”
Years later, Dorothy reminisced about what she and her women students lacked, yet also what they possessed in abundance: “We didn’t have anything fancy like career counseling. We didn’t know what it meant. We didn’t have television, drip-dries, or power steering. What we did have was trust in each other, and that was very important.”
In Dorothy’s 1933 annual report, she shared her most frequently asked question, “Just what does the dean of women do?” Dorothy said her office had two main functions: the first was to ensure that the environment in which female students lived, worked, and played was conducive to development and growth. The second was to be of assistance to the individual student. In short, her office was a clearinghouse for matters pertaining to the welfare of female students. Her annual dean of women report was the first to refer to female students as “women” rather than “girls.”
In her leisure time, Dorothy enjoyed shooting baskets in the women’s gym. It was there that she befriended a newly arrived graduate student named Helen Blanche Schleman. Helen worked part-time in the Department of Physical Education, refereeing women’s basketball games at twenty-five cents an hour while she earned her master’s degree in psychology and education. The two women had a lot in common. They had both arrived at Purdue the same year and were well educated, brilliant, athletic—both golfers—and forethinkers. Maybe that’s why some people often mistook one for the other. Helen said, “I appeared on campus and everybody sort of bowed and scraped. They were nice and friendly to me. I soon found out that they were confusing me with Dorothy Stratton!”
The National Youth Administration (NYA) had just been established on Purdue’s campus. During the Great Depression, many young people could not afford the cost of even a high school education. Taking stock of these grim statistics, Eleanor Roosevelt remarked that she often had “moments of real terror when I think we might be losing this generation.” She persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to create the NYA, a New Deal program established by an executive order in June 1935.
The NYA created part-time jobs for high school and college students, and it provided relief and job training to unemployed young people. The goal was to prevent students from dropping out of high school and college due to financial hardship by providing grants in return for part-time work in such places as libraries and cafeterias.
For the female students at Purdue, the NYA initiative was assigned to the Office of the Dean of Women. Dorothy needed a part-time staff member to organize and administer the program. She hired her new acquaintance, Helen Schleman, for the position that paid seventy-five cents an hour. At the time, Dorothy had no idea she was mentoring the next dean of women and fashioning a friendship that would span six decades.
HELEN SCHLEMAN, BORN IN THE RIGHT MOMENT
HELEN B. SCHLEMAN said she was born fifty years before her time. What she meant was that she lived during an era when women were not given the same opportunities afforded to men. Yet Helen seemingly grabbed with gusto every life prospect that appeared before her, and her “progressive” thinking about what women could do arrived at the perfect time—when women needed her convictions most.
Helen was born in Francesville, Indiana, on June 21, 1902, to William and Blanche Hollett Schleman. In the summer of 1912 when she was ten, Helen moved with her parents and two brothers, Herbert and Delos, to Valparaiso, Indiana. Her father had been in the harness, buggy, and farm implement business and owned Gas-well Farm. He sold the business and purchased an eight-hundred-acre farm called Breyfogle Ranch. The Schlemans were active in the Methodist Church. Every Sunday morning from spring through fall, Helen’s mother brought one or two bouquets of flowers from her garden to adorn the church altar.
Helen’s father also owned a real estate and insurance business, the Schleman-Morton Company, and the Valparaiso Home Ice Company, but his real interest was in land development. In the 1920s, he opened several housing developments including, with great pride, Forest Park, a subdivision with several wooded homesites surrounded by a seven-hole golf course. Helen was essentially weaned on golf, and she would live near a golf course for most of her life. She was athletic, as was her younger brother, Delos, who died of a heart problem at age eighteen. Delos was described as a “tall, lanky boy, a good student, but a better golfer.”
The Schlemans donated Forest Park Golf Course to the city of Valparaiso in 1947, with the stipulation that it be restored and operated as a municipal facility. Two years later, the course was expanded from seven to nine holes with a clubhouse, and a dedication ceremony was held. William was asked to tee up the first ball. Thirty years later, land was purchased to create an additional nine holes. Another dedication ceremony was held, and among those teeing off that day in 1973 was Helen Schleman.
Helen had a broad, open face with blue eyes. She swept her brown hair away from her high forehead, and when she smiled broadly, her inner zest was unmistakable. To look at Helen was to see woman standing on solid ground.
In 1920, the year women won the right to vote, Helen entered Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, because it was relatively close to home and was easy to reach. She claimed that young people didn’t receive much guidance as to college selection back then. Helen said, “I had a marvelous four years—garnered two majors, one in English literature and one in philosophy—had a terrible time with organic chemistry—had plenty of time to play tennis, field hockey, baseball, basketball, and golf.” Helen was president of the Women’s Athletic Association, and she worked with the YWCA, student government, and Mortar Board. The organizations she enjoyed and believed in early on would continue to remain close to her heart throughout her life.
As student president of Northwestern’s Women’s Athletic Association in 1922, Helen, age twenty, attended the national Athletic Conference of American College Women, held at the University of California over Easter weekend, where she gave a “splendid report.” Her talk was on the successful launching of the official national publication of the Newsletter of the Athletic Conference of American College Women. Helen was an assistant editor of the student publication and would become the editor the following year.
A newspaper account of the convention tells of Helen’s future goals for the Women’s Athletic Association and foreshadows what would become her career philosophy for decades to come: “One of the highlights toward local progress, which Miss Schleman advocated for the association, was the taking of a bigger place in shaping campus ideals. ‘The WAA has a definite place in campus activities,’ she advised. ‘We must not only maintain our present standing, but show a marked development at the next national conference in 1927 at Cornell University.’”
Helen’s youthful vocal stance on increasing the visibility and power of the Women’s Athletic Association for every American college and “shaping campus ideals” occurred at the same synergistic moment when Virginia Meredith and