As a highly endowed institution designed to serve wealthy White women, Smith was obligated to curate and uphold an according image of its student body. The recurring implicit (and often explicit) message behind many Spoken English department documents is one of needing to curate a type of speech among Smith students that would make them stand out as highly educated, “high-class” individuals. This type of speech would serve as a linguistic marker of social and financial success, therefore reflecting positively on Smith. These motives are among the reasons that the Spoken English department imposed a voice correction campaign. However, Smith’s concern for its image alone cannot explain the rapid rise and fall of the department’s voice correction campaign beginning in the late 1910s and ending in the early 1940s.  

One likely catalyst for the national surge of speech correction across colleges and universities is the popularization of radio and movies. These speech-heavy forms of media prompted a greater awareness of speech diversity, dialects, and accents. They also fostered the desire for a standard and “eloquent” style of speech, which prompted the creation of the Trans-Atlantic / Mid-Atlantic accent for use in radio and Hollywood. This accent was associated with White elite members of society and was used by prominent figures including Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, Katharine Hepburn, and Smith alumnus Julia Child. In fact, Julia Child's attendance at Smith from 1930-1934 coincided with some of the Spoken English department’s most active years in voice correction. That said, it is unclear whether the Spoken English department at Smith taught the Trans-Atlantic / Mid-Atlantic accent. What is clear is that the voice correction campaign at Smith rose and fell with the popularity of the Trans-Atlantic / Mid-Atlantic accent.  

It is possible that the shockingly high peak in number of students identified as having voice defects (~90%) in 1941 contributed to the subsequent decline in the department's popularity and credibility, along with the 1939 resignation of President William Allan Neilson and the elimination of Spoken English voice and speech exams in the early 1940s. Another potential reason for the Spoken English department’s decline in the early 1940s is the events of WWII and the Holocaust, which likely detracted attention from the speech fervor and the perceived need to sound “high-class.” These events also contributed to a rapid decline in the popularity of eugenics. Given the connections between the speech movement and eugenics, the department may have quietly moved away from voice correction to save face.