Nebraska State Normal School

After adopting House Roll No.1 and an astounding $50,000 grant, the state of Nebraska was able to place the foundations for the Nebraska State Normal School. with over one hundred ballots, the Board of Education agreed on the notion to open the twenty acre campus on the west side in the city of Kearney. A year later the first steps were taken to creating the campus with completion coming the summer of 1905 allowing the first classes to be offered that fall semester. Only till 1921 the institution moved away from its headline title to Nebraska State Teachers College in Kearney to the State College in 1963 with the state wide institution changes and to what it is today.

In an effort to create a better facilities to improve those who would go on to teach the next generation through the sparse communities of the Great Plains.  In the first Blue and Gold Yearbook we are given clear direction as to how the school administration and prevalent female student body came to be over a hundred years ago.  Although the school was coed, the population of NSNS was heavily influenced in favor and lack respect for the women at the school.  With only a a short amount of staff and pupils, the ladies who were recruited to join in this venture for further education was a matter of state job creation and as well as demeanor for those to rise above for the occasion.  The reason for the schools opening in the first place was to produce greater numbers of schoolhouse teachers to ship out throughout the sparse communities of the relatively young state.  However, not only the curriculum would come to be difficult to grasp for the newly crafted campus, but also the women in particular had to be subjugated to wicked policies set by the board of directors in order to maintain control of their pupils.  Documents such as contracts reprimanding women from partaking in marriage or other acts deemed degenerate such as getting pregnant which would result in immediate expulsion from the university.

            Although the issuing of further education being a first step to equal learning rights, the ladies of the time had to endure through so much in the beginning just to receive a proper education and trade.  Being the one of the first in the nation to participate in the experimentation of coeducation, it was a constant struggle for administration to keep relations between male and female inhabitants from cohabitating.  In one issue from the Kearney Daily hub dated back to June 05, 1920, President George E. Martin asked for citizens within the Kearney are would open up their homes to students due to lack of available dorms.  Although these female students had to go through hell and back many would flourish in an ever-increasing populous growth for women’s enrollment in programs such as sciences, economics, engineering, and so much more.  By the hardships that these ladies endured, nowadays the University of Nebraska now constitutes for 53 percent of all students. Did these open opportunities for the entire population of women in higher education, this included Native American and African American women found opportunities in the Plains.  

, Blue And Gold Yearbook. Yearbook 1908, University Special Collections and Archives. December 1st 1908. Accessed December 8th 2020. https://library.unk.edu/archives/blue-gold/1908.pdf.