“We have been doing a great deal in this city for the boys,” Young argued, “and I want to do something for the girls.” Young decided to name the school after famed reformer and Board of Education member, Lucy Flower (1837-1921). Young hoped to provide teenage girls throughout the city with practical training that would prepare them for professional life after high school. Young was the first female superintendent of schools in the city of Chicago. The four-story school building contains 40 classrooms, a library, gymnasium, lunchroom, assembly hall, and staff offices.įlower Tech was founded in 1911 by progressive educator and suffragist Dr. There are two thin gothic-arched windows separated by orange terra cotta mullions on each side of the square tower. The focal point of the exterior is a tower that extends one story above the flat roofline in the center of the north elevation. Flower Tech not only furthered career and college ambitions, but provided many students one of their only racially-integrated experiences in an otherwise segregated city.įlower Tech is a Gothic Revivalist school constructed of brown brick and clad in orange terra cotta. As Chicago's only open-enrollment high school for girls, Flower Tech created an unparalleled education experience for African American, Anglo-American, and immigrant female students to study alongside one another. By combining home economics with technical training for the female workforce, the curriculum at Flower Tech exposed the paradox of women's high school education in 20th century America by offering gendered coursework for work in the home and the factory. Flower Tech was the only high school in Chicago run by a female superintendent, principal, and all-female faculty that catered to an entirely female student body. The school, is located in the residential Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. Lucy Flower Technical High School for Girls (Flower Tech), constructed in 1927, is significant as the only all-girl public school and the only female vocational school in Chicago's history.
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