I’ve written several posts about my grandmother, Lucille Edna Mulder (married name Zuidweg), who was born April 17, 1912, and her high school graduation scrapbook. She graduated from Caledonia High School (Michigan) in 1929.
In those posts, I mentioned that Grandma’s best friend Blanche was class valedictorian, Grandma’s older sister Dorothy was salutatorian, and Grandma–with the 3rd highest GPA–was class historian.
Visiting Mom, I recently found this photograph of Grandma and Dorothy. It’s a tinted photo, and it appears to be the right age to have been taken around the time they graduated high school. It shows the girls with movie star hairstyles.
You can see from the list below (from the scrapbook) who else graduated from CHS in 1929. Look at the proportion of girls to boys! Why was that? Were the boys working the farms and no longer attending school? If so, that’s a shame. What else could account for so few boys graduating? I trust the list because Grandma was, after all, class historian and quite meticulous about recording information.
Maybe this list will help out someone else researching their own family. Good luck!
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https://thefamilykalamazoo.com/2013/01/08/who-put-the-ring-stain-on-the-scrapbook/
https://thefamilykalamazoo.com/2017/04/17/april-17-always-reminds-me-of-grandma/
https://thefamilykalamazoo.com/2015/08/05/grandmas-school-work-late-1920s/
The Family Kalamazoo 
My grandmother’s graduating class of 1907 also was disproportionately female: seventeen girls and ten boys. I think you might be right that the boys were already working. Thanks for sharing.
I was worried that might be the case, but I can see that the boys would be needed on the local farms, and that if they planned to be farmers that school would not be quite as necessary as it was to keep the farms going. But it has long lasting impact, of course. The idea in my grandmother’s family was that the girls would study to be nurses or teachers.
I was going to ask whether it was an all girls school when I saw that the top three were girls, but I guess not! And why, if Dorothy was older, were they in the same graduating class? Lovely photo!
Grandma really went all out with that hairstyle! I wonder if she did it herself or if a sister or friend did it for her. I assume they were the same class because it was convenient. Grandma would have just turned 17, so she was probably put ahead with Dorothy because she could do the work and it made things easier. And she was out of school a year earlier, thus started college a year earlier. After she graduated college she taught briefly to give the money to her family.
That makes sense. Obviously they were both very smart young women.
Yes, very smart. And nice, too.
Luanne
My grandmother was born in 1908. She graduated from eighth grade, and she did not continue with her education. She told me that girls usually only continued with their education if they wanted to be a teacher or in a rare circumstance wanted to attend college.
I loved your post and the picture!
Thanks so much, Ann Marie. I wonder how many boys and girls didn’t continue school beyond 8th grade in those years–especially rural teens. Did your grandmother grow up in the country or the city? My other grandmother, born 1893, didn’t go to school past 3rd grade, but that’s because her father wouldn’t let her. Said it wasn’t necessary for girls! Yet she lived into the 70s.
My grandmother lived in a small town in Colorado. My grandfather grew up on a ranch in Colorado and only went to 3rd grade. He helped with the ranch and eventually had his own working ranch. He would always amaze me because when we went shopping, he could figure up how much something would cost before the cashier was finished ringing up our items!
It must have been so wonderful to see how much he taught himself from life experiences!
You are your grandmother’s granddaughter for sure, Luanne. Class historian, indeed.
And that picture! omg…awesome…gorgeous…such a reflection of the era.
I agree with you on both counts, Sheila!
Beautiful portrait. It’s so good that your grandmother and her sister were able to graduate from school. My mother was born in the 1930s and still had to leave as soon as she was legally able; partly to bolster the family finances, but mainly because my grandfather didn’t believe women needed a school education to “get married and have kids.” Thank goodness attitudes are changing — at least in some parts of the world!
What a shame. Your mother was born around the same time as my mom, and living in the city (Kalamazoo, of course) I doubt that there would have been any question of her finishing high school and even starting college right after. Yes, you are right: in some parts of the world!
I guess it’s a class thing too. My grandparents were I guess what you’d call the urban poor. They needed the extra income their daughters brought in, and probably couldn’t imagine women having careers — as opposed to factory and shop jobs that they’d give up on marriage. 😦
You’re probably right. My dad’s family was different from my mom’s. Maybe more like yours. My dad’s mother had to quit school after 3rd grade and had to live in a boarding house with strangers, mostly men, and work in a sweatshop while her sisters did not! She was the one with the ability to make a buck with her needle!
That sounds awful. At least my mother and her sisters weren’t sent away to work!
Yeah, I think it had a profound effect on my grandmother.
I can imagine 😦
I love the photo. What an interesting question about the gender ratio. It is a really small school so maybe it is just a fluke? If the school were very large and the numbers were so off I think it would be more meaningful. I fear you are correct though that the young men were working…
I thought about the fluke aspect, but because there are SO few boys (something like 3 isn’t it?) I think there must be something else at work and believe it must be them working. A sad fact, but “back in the day” men could achieve a lot on their own, even without high school diplomas. Today, no longer true, of course.
So true.
I agree that the lads were probably farming. Or as some say, a gender fluke that year.
I can’t believe there would be a fluke that was that dramatic. And thinking of the time of year of graduation, too. How could the sons of farmers be in school? Sigh.