The position of Dean of Women was created in response to novel exigencies rising from women’s acceptance to coeducational institutions of higher learning in the late nineteenth century. While these early women administrators had a profound impact on women’s higher education in the United States, their work has received relatively little attention. In response to this discriminatory erasure, this dissertation applies feminist historiographical approaches and qualitative methods that center these women and their rhetoric within the historical narrative. In particular, this dissertation explores, synthesizes, and analyzes the archived rhetorical documents produced by the National Association of Deans of Women (NADW) and Evelyn Jones Kirmse, an early University of Arizona dean of women, between 1922 and 1942. By privileging the rhetoric of these women and positioning them as authorities of their own experience within hegemonically masculine coeducational systems and administrations, this dissertation brings to light their own theories, debates, and arguments concerning how to best make room for women in higher education professionally, physically, and intellectually. While positing the complexity and efficacy of their rhetoric, this dissertation also marks critical ideological negotiations within the deans’ arguments in response to socio-cultural shifts and opportunities born of the Progressive Era. By locating paradoxical navigations of traditional essentialist values and burgeoning progressive ideas within the deans’ rhetoric, this dissertation provides an important illustration of the awkward stage of growth within feminism’s development. It provides insight to deans of women’s own rhetorical explorations on how their identity and success should be constructed, attained, and measured in the new academic territory of coeducation.

This dissertation proposes the concept of “the open hand” as a philosophy of openness. The need for a philosophy of openness is derived from the contemporary turn towards things that is anchored in continental thought, but is at work in a variety of disciplines. This current interest in things has stirred the critique that the normalized human grasp on things is deficient because it cannot suitably handle the reality that intangible depth inheres in all things human and nonhuman. From the pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 and its disease COVID-19 to issues of social justice, the need to make room for the abyssal side of things is as compelling as ever. However, accommodating the deep reality of all things is complicated by the fact that it requires an orientation not guided by self-centered insularity, but by a serviceable theory of self-emptying openness. Sketching a philosophy of openness with the open hand, this dissertation reveals that while openness to things is critical for solving the complex issues of the twenty-first century, its opposition not only has existential primacy, but also can be and has been exacerbated by humanity’s contemporary technological lifestyle.