2014 Theses Bachelor's

'A School for Problems': Gender and the Development of Citizenship Education at the Highlander Folk School During the Civil Rights Movement

Rosner, Hannah

By examining the role of women and gender in different stages of the development of the citizenship education program, I will show how the structure and mission of Highlander allowed Septima Clark and Bernice Robinson both to challenge and to manipulate gendered understandings of leadership to articulate and carry out an experience-based philosophy of
activism, education and leadership. Their work represented a major contribution to the goals and principles of the civil rights movement as a whole and created spaces in which women could exercise a model of leadership whose strength and significance is too little recognized.