Dorcas Davis Bowles Oral History, 2007

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Dr. Dorcas Davis Bowles, SSW ’60, has had a distinguished career as an educational administrator, clinical teacher and author on ethnic identity. She served as Associate Dean and Acting Dean of the Smith School between 1981 and 1986. Subsequently, she became dean of the social work schools at the University of Texas at Arlington, TX, and Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, GA At the time of recording her memoir, Dr. Bowles was Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Clark Atlanta University.

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In this portion of the oral history, Bowles remembers her childhood in as part of a strong black family in Tuskegee, Alabama in the 1940s and 50s. She recounts how she became interested in social work while volunteering at a veterans hospital while attending Tuskegee Institute. She has a particularly long and compelling look at how she chose Smith School for Social Work and her experiences at the school and during her field internships. It is interesting to see the similarities and differences in her memories and those of Mary F. Hall, another black student who attended SSW just a few years after Bowles. 

This is only a small piece of her complete oral history, available from the Smith Special Collections. The rest of her oral history includes more of her memories about her family and her career after graduating from SSW.

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Dorcas Davis Bowles, in recorded interview by Vida S. Grayson, 2007, the Social Work Archives, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.

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