Features

Celebrating Marquette women of the 1930s and 1940s

1930s

Nursing was a popular choice. Students lived across the street from St. Joseph’s Hospital and traveled through an underground tunnel to work eight-hour clinical shifts. Academics were rigorous and living standards strict. The students attended roll call each morning wearing starched white uniforms, stockings and caps. They celebrated Mass before changing clothes and taking the streetcar to Marquette for classes. A curfew left little time for fun, but some women found ways to cheat the clock. One student tied together bed sheets and hung them from a second-story window as a makeshift ladder to sneak back in after hours.

A Woman of the Times

Nina Polcyn Moore, Jour ’35, was a student when she visited the Catholic Worker house in New York’s Bowery. She journaled: “It was so bleak, so agonizing. Bed bugs, bread lines, dirt, drunks, narcotic addicts, senile old people, perpetual crises—and a demure young lady from Milwaukee.” Moore’s commitment to fight poverty and injustice connected her to the Catholic Worker movement and founder Dorothy Day. Moore helped establish Milwaukee’s Catholic Worker House of Hospitality in 1937, which fed 200 men daily and housed 50 men at night. She collaborated with Dean Jeremiah O’Sullivan and twice brought Day to campus to speak about poverty.

News of Note

• Few lay women reached leadership levels. That changed in 1935, when Mabel Mannix McElligott, Music ’31, Grad ’36, top left, became dean of women. She rallied Marquette’s women into addressing the lack of women’s housing. They borrowed $10,000 from the Jesuit community and leased and refurbished an apartment building that opened as Alumnae House in 1938. McElligott continued developing programs, including curriculum to prepare women for academic leadership.

• Student costs: Tuition $200; supplies $10; books $20–$35; rent $2–$4 a night.

• Sister Berenice Beck, OSF, broke through Marquette’s glass ceiling in 1936 when she was named dean of nursing, the first female academic dean.

1940s

Women lived in apartment houses and halls sprinkled around the neighborhood. At Merritty Hall, 60 residents shared three bathrooms. Lisette boasted the slightly better odds of eight to a bathroom. On the nights of big dances, women signed up for bathroom time. AMUW launched a campaign to build a new dormitory on land occupied by Rigge and Nicolas halls. To receive federal funding for construction through the Housing Act of 1950, AMUW deeded the property to Marquette. O’Donnell Hall opened in 1952 with accommodations for 350 women and was described in a coed housing book: “The building has sun decks on top and marble sills to minimize dusting.”

Women of the Times

Dr. Isabel Estrada, Med ’42, needed a reading knowledge of French or German to enter medical school. Her Latin I and II teacher in Puerto Rico, who was Pennsylvania Dutch, taught her German. With that skill, she was accepted to medical school at Syracuse University and Marquette. She bought passage on a banana boat to New York, hopped a train to Milwaukee and walked to Marquette. Neither the distance nor the fact that she was one of two women in the class of 90 dispelled her enthusiasm. Dr. Estrada graduated, became chief of obstetrics/gynecology at Fajardo District Hospital in Puerto Rico and later opened a practice in California. She maintained her medical license until 2008.

Dr. Mary Neville Bielefeld, Med ’31 and ’33, was a charter member of the Alumnae Association and she also served as a board member, president for two terms (1940-41 and 1941-42), chair of the committee that maintained association properties and a guiding voice when the Alumni and Alumnae associations merged in 1949. Beyond campus, Bielefelt also modeled extraordinary achievement, including as the first woman medical resident at Milwaukee County General Hospital. In honoring this record, the Association of Marquette University Women named an award for her. The Mary Neville Bielefeld Award is presented annually to someone who demonstrates “loyalty to the ideals of Marquette University.”

News of Note

• The College of Engineering enrolled its first woman student, Doris Weir, in 1943–44.

• In 1944 the Marquette Law Review had its first female editor, Merriem Luck.

• The Committee on Student Activities and Welfare modified the no-slacks rule for women on campus in 1945 to permit slacks for active sports.

• Marquette enrolled 1,500 women in 1949, more than were enrolled at any other U.S. Catholic institution.