Julia Strudwick Tutwiler was an advocate for education and prison reform in Alabama.
Background
Julia Tutwiler was born in Havana, Alabama to Julia (Ashe) Tutwiler and educator Henry Tutwiler on August 15, 1841. She grew up in the nearby community of Havana, where her father's Greene Springs School was located.
Her father had views of education far in advance of the practices of his day and in 1847 established at Greene Springs a boys' school in which to carry out his ideas. One of his convictions was that his daughters should be as well educated as his sons.
Education
Julia, who was the third girl in the family, responded eagerly to the teaching offered her and after receiving her early training from her father, was sent for two years of study in Philadelphia. In January 1866 she enrolled in Vassar College, where she remained for half a school year. She showed unusual ability in languages, and was subsequently permitted to spend a year in Lexington, Va. , studying Greek and Latin under the tuition of professors in Washington and Lee University.
After teaching for a time in the Tuscaloosa Female Seminary, she spent three years in advanced study in Germany and France at a time when such study was most unusual for a woman. At the end of this period she passed the government examinations required of teachers in the Prussian schools and received a teacher's certificate.
Career
She returned to Alabama in 1876 and devoted the rest of her life to education and social service there.
She introduced kindergarten methods which she had learned in Germany and taught for a time in her father's school at Greene Springs, but her primary interest was in the education of women.
In 1882, while she was co-principal of the Livingston Female Academy at Livingston, Ala. , she persuaded the state legislature to appropriate $2, 500 to establish a normal department in the school--the first gift, according to her own statement, which the women of Alabama had ever received from the state.
As a result, the Alabama Normal College was incorporated February 22, 1883, with Julia Tutwiler as co-principal. In 1888 she became sole principal, and later her title was changed to president.
The creation of a normal school was only the first step in her long struggle to secure vocational training for women in Alabama. Her paper, "The Technical Education of Women" (November 1882), attracted wide attention and had considerable influence.
In 1893, with the support of the women of the state and the agricultural interests, she secured a grant from the legislature for the Alabama Girls Industrial School, which was opened in October 1896 at Montevallo, Shelby County. She was offered the presidency of this school but declined.
In 1896 she persuaded officials of the University of Alabama to permit several young women prepared at the Alabama Normal College to enter the junior year in the University and to reside in a cottage on the campus. In this first year these women captured sixty percent of the honors awarded to the junior class, and in 1900, when the first women received degrees from the University, four of the six honors awarded to graduates went to "Miss Julia's" students. After that experiment the doors of the University were thrown open to women on equal terms with men.
Active also in prison reform in Alabama, she was for many years the superintendent of prison and jail work for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Her efforts were instrumental in securing the classification of prisoners and the separation of the sexes, the first juvenile reform school, and the first law providing for the inspection of jails and prisons. She labored to secure the establishment of night schools and vocational education in prisons, and fought the convict leasing system, although she never succeeded in driving it from the state.
She wrote many magazine articles on subjects relating to prison reform and the education of women, and composed poems for her own pleasure. One of these, "Alabama, " has become the state song.
She died on March 24, 1916 in Birmingham.
Membership
In 1910 she became president emeritus of the Alabama Normal College.