Will the Slowe-Burrill House become a National Landmark?
On Oct. 5, 2020, the Slowe-Burrill House was put on the National Register for Historic Places for its association with Lucy Diggs Slowe, most recognized for her work as the first Dean of Women at Howard University, where she served from 1922 until her death in 1937.
Even before her appointment at Howard, she boasted an extraordinary vitae. As an undergraduate at Howard, she was a founding member of the first sorority for African-American women.
After graduating valedictorian of her class, and earning her master’s at Columbia University, Slowe took a position teaching at the Armstrong Manual High School in D.C., where she so impressed the school board that they appointed her to found the first-ever junior high school for African Americans in the national capital region.
As Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant describes in her book-length study of Slowe’s deanship, “To Live More Abundantly,” Slowe’s tenure at Howard was defined by her advocacy for what she called the “New Howard Woman” in her inaugural address to the students, a woman who was “of extreme culture and refinement.” She worked tirelessly, often at odds with the administration, to encourage the women of Howard to pursue the social sciences, not just the liberal arts thought to befit future mothers, and to explore careers outside of teaching, which was, as Slowe described, “the only occupation which is open to them with few handicaps.” Slowe was unsatisfied with the absence of women’s housing on campus, which she argued was necessary as a “laboratory for practical education in human relationships,” and orchestrated funding from Congress to build three new dormitories for a Women’s Campus.
