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Title: The Story of Wellesley
Author: Florence Converse
Posting Date: March 1, 2009 [EBook #2362]
Release Date: October, 2000
Language: English
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THE STORY OF WELLESLEY
BY
FLORENCE CONVERSE
ALMA MATER
To Alma Mater, Wellesley's daughters,
All together join and sing.
Thro' all her wealth of woods and water
Let your happy voices ring;
In every changing mood we love her,
Love her towers and woods and lake;
Oh, changeful sky, bend blue above her,
Wake, ye birds, your chorus wake!
We'll sing her praises now and ever,
Blessed fount of truth and love.
Our heart's devotion, may it never
Faithless or unworthy prove,
We'll give our lives and hopes to serve her,
Humblest, highest, noblest--all;
A stainless name we will preserve her,
Answer to her every call.
Anne L. Barrett, '86
PREFACE
The day after the Wellesley fire, an eager young reporter on a
Boston paper came out to the college by appointment to interview
a group of Wellesley women, alumnae and teachers, grief-stricken
by the catastrophe which had befallen them. He came impetuously,
with that light-hearted breathlessness so characteristic of young
reporters in the plays of Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett. He
was charmingly in character, and he sent his voice out on the run
to meet the smallest alumna in the group:
"Now tell me some pranks!" he cried, with pencil poised.
What she did tell him need not be recorded here. Neither was it
set down in the courteous and sympathetic report which he afterwards
wrote for his paper.
And readers who come to this story of Wellesley for pranks will
be disappointed likewise. Not that the lighter side of the
Wellesley life is omitted; play-days and pageants, all the bright
revelry of the college year, belong to the story. Wellesley would
not be Wellesley if they were left out. But her alumnae, her
faculty, and her undergraduates all agree that the college was
not founded primarily for the sake of Tree Day, and that the
Senior Play is not the goal of the year's endeavor.
It is the story of the Wellesley her daughters and lovers know
that I have tried to tell: the Wellesley of serious purpose,
consecrated to the noble ideals of Christian Scholarship.
I am indebted for criticism, to President Pendleton who kindly
read certain parts of the manuscript, to Professor Katharine Lee
Bates, Professor Vida D. Scudder, and Mrs. Marian Pelton Guild;
for historical material, to Miss Charlotte Howard Conant's "Address
Delivered in Memory of Henry Fowle Durant in Wellesley College
Chapel", February 18, 1906, to Mrs. Louise McCoy North's Historical
Address, delivered at Wellesley's quarter centennial, in June 1900,
to Professor George Herbert Palmer's "Life of Alice Freeman Palmer,"
published by the Houghton Mifflin Co., to Professor Margarethe
Muller's "Carla Wenckebach, Pioneer," published by Ginn & Co.;
to Dean Waite, Miss Edith Souther Tufts, Professor Sarah F. Whiting,
Miss Louise Manning Hodgkins, Professor Emeritus Mary A. Willcox,
Mrs. Mary Gilman Ahlers; to Miss Candace C. Stimson, Miss Mary B.
Jenkins, the Secretary of the Alumnae Restoration and Endowment
Committee, and to the many others among alumnae and faculty, whose
letters and articles I quote. Last but not least in my grateful
memory are all those painstaking and accurate chroniclers, the
editors of the Wellesley Courant, Prelude, Magazine, News, and
Legenda, whose labors went so far to lighten mine.
F.C.
CONTENTS
I. THE FOUNDER AND HIS IDEALS
II. THE PRESIDENTS AND THEIR ACHIEVEMENT
III. THE FACULTY AND THEIR METHODS
IV. THE STUDENTS AT WORK AND PLAY
V. THE FIRE: AN INTERLUDE
VI. THE LOYAL ALUMNAE
INDEX [not included]
CHAPTER I
THE FOUNDER AND HIS IDEALS
I.
As the nineteenth century recedes into history and the essentially
romantic quality of its great adventures is confirmed by the
"beauty touched with strangeness" which illumines their true
perspective, we are discovering, what the adventurers themselves
always knew, that the movement for the higher education of women
was not the least romantic of those Victorian quests and stirrings,
and that its relation to the greatest adventure of all, Democracy,
was peculiarly vital and close.
We know that the "man in the street", in the sixties and seventies,
watching with perplexity and scornful amusement the endeavor of
his sisters and his daughters--or more probably other men's
daughters--to prove that the intellectual heritage must be a common
heritage if Democracy was to be a working theory, missed the beauty
of the picture. He saw the slim beginning of a procession of
young women, whose obstinate, dreaming eyes beheld the visions
hitherto relegated by scriptural prerogative and masculine commentary
to their brothers; inevitably his outraged conservatism missed
the beauty; and the strangeness he called queer. That he should
have missed the democratic significance of the movement is less
to his credit. But he did miss it, fifty years ago and for several
years thereafter, even as he is still missing the democratic
significance of other movements to-day. Processions still pass
him by,--for peace, for universal suffrage, May Day, Labor Day,
and those black days when the nations mobilize for war, they pass
him by,--and the last thing he seems to discover about them is
their democratic significance. But after a long while the meaning
of it all has begun to penetrate. To-day, his daughters go to
college as a matter of course, and he has forgotten that he ever
grudged them the opportunity.
They remind him of it, sometimes, with filial indirection, by
celebrating the benevolence, the intellectual acumen, the idealism
of the few men, exceptional in their day, who saw eye to eye with
Mary Lyon and her kind; the men who welcomed women to Oberlin
and Michigan, who founded Vassar and Wellesley and Bryn Mawr,
and so helped to organize the procession. Their reminders are even
beginning to take form as records of achievement; annals very far
from meager, for achievement piles up faster since Democracy set
the gate of opportunity on the crack, and we pack more into a half
century than we used to. And women, more obviously than men,
perhaps, have "speeded up" in response to the democratic stimulus;
their accomplishment along social, political, industrial, and above
all, educational lines, since the first woman's college was founded,
is not inconsiderable.
How much, or how little, would have been accomplished, industrially,
socially, and politically, without that first woman's college,
we shall never know, but the alumnae registers, with their statistics
concerning the occupations of graduates, are suggestive reading.
How little would have been accomplished educationally for women,
it is not so difficult to imagine: Vassar, Wellesley, Smith,
Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr,--with all the bright visions, the fullness
of life that they connote to American women, middle-aged and
young,--blotted out; coeducational institutions harassed by numbers
and inventing drastic legislation to keep out the women; man still
the almoner of education, and woman his dependent. From all these
hampering probabilities the women's colleges save us to-day. This
is what constitutes their negative value to education.
Their positive contribution cannot be summarized so briefly; its
scattered chronicle must be sought in the minutes of trustees'
meetings, where it modestly evades the public eye, in the academic
formalities of presidents' reports and the journalistic naivete of
college periodicals; in the diaries of early graduates; in newspaper
clippings and magazine "write-ups"; in historical sketches to
commemorate the decennial or the quarter-century; and from the
lips of the pioneers,--teacher and student. For, in the words of
the graduate thesis, "we are still in the period of the sources."
The would-be historian of a woman's college to-day is in much
the same relation to her material as the Venerable Bede was to
his when he set out to write his Ecclesiastical History. The thought
brings us its own inspiration. If we sift our miracles with as
much discrimination as he sifted his, we shall be doing well. We
shall discover, among other things, that in addition to the composite
influence which these colleges all together exert, each one also
brings to bear upon our educational problems her individual
experience and ideals. Wellesley, for example, with her
women-presidents, and the heads of her departments all women
but three,--the professors of Music, Education, and French,--has
her peculiar testimony to offer concerning the administrative and
executive powers of women as educators, their capacity for initiative
and organization.
This is why a general history of the movement for the higher
education of women, although of value, cannot tell us all we need
to know, since of necessity it approaches the subject from the
outside. The women's colleges must speak as individuals; each one
must tell her own story, and tell it soon. The bright, experimental
days are definitely past--except in the sense in which all education,
alike for men and women, is perennially an experiment--and if
the romance of those days is to quicken the imaginations of college
girls one hundred, two hundred, five hundred years hence, the women
who were the experiment and who lived the romance must write it down.
For Wellesley in particular this consciousness of standing at
the threshold of a new epoch is especially poignant. Inevitably
those forty years before the fire of 1914 will go down in her
history as a period apart. Already for her freshmen the old college
hall is a mythical labyrinth of memory and custom to which they
have no clue. New happiness will come to the hill above the lake,
new beauty will crown it, new memories will hallow it, but--they
will all be new. And if the coming generations of students are
to realize that the new Wellesley is what she is because her
ideals, though purged as by fire, are still the old ideals; if they
are to understand the continuity of Wellesley's tradition, we who
have come through the fire must tell them the story.
II.
On Wednesday, November 25, 1914, the workmen who were digging
among the fire-scarred ruins at the extreme northeast corner of
old College Hall unearthed a buried treasure. To the ordinary
treasure seeker it would have been a thing of little worth,--a rough
bowlder of irregular shape and commonplace proportions,--but
Wellesley eyes saw the symbol. It was the first stone laid in
the foundations of Wellesley College. There was no ceremony when
it was laid, and there were no guests. Mr. and Mrs. Henry Fowle
Durant came up the hill on a summer morning--Friday, August 18, 1871,
was the day--and with the help of the workmen set the stone in place.
A month later, on the afternoon of Thursday, September 14, 1871,
the corner stone was laid, by Mrs. Durant, at the northwest corner
of the building, under the dining-room wing; it is significant that
from the foundations up through the growth and expansion of all
the years, women have had a hand in the making of Wellesley.
In September, as in August, there were no guests invited, but at
the laying of the corner stone there was a simple ceremony; each
workman was given a Bible, by Mr. Durant, and a Bible was placed
in the corner stone. On December 18, 1914, this stone was uncovered,
and the Bible was found in a tin box in a hollow of the stone.
As most of the members of the college had scattered for the Christmas
vacation, only a little group of people gathered about the place
where, forty-three years before, Mrs. Durant had laid the stone.
Mrs. Durant was too ill to be present, but her cousin, Miss Fannie
Massie, lifted the tin box out of its hollow and handed it to
President Pendleton who opened the Bible and read aloud the
inscription:
"This building is humbly dedicated to our Heavenly Father with
the hope and prayer that He may always be first in everything
in this institution; that His word may be faithfully taught here;
and that He will use it as a means of leading precious souls to
the Lord Jesus Christ."
There followed, also in Mrs. Durant's handwriting, two passages
from the Scriptures: II Chronicles, 29: 11-16, and the phrase
from the one hundred twenty-seventh Psalm: "Except the Lord
build the house they labor in vain that build it."
This stone is now the corner stone of the new building which rises
on College Hill, and another, the keystone of the arch above the
north door of old College Hall, will be set above the doorway of
the new administration building, where its deep-graven I.H.S.
will daily remind those who pass beneath it of Wellesley's unbroken
tradition of Christian scholarship and service.
But we must go back to the days before one stone was laid upon
another, if we are to begin at the beginning of Wellesley's story.
It was in 1855, the year after his marriage, that Mr. Durant bought
land in Wellesley village, then a part of Needham, and planned
to make the place his summer home. Every one who knew him speaks
of his passion for beauty, and he gave that passion free play when
he chose, all unwittingly, the future site for his college. There
is no fairer region around Boston than this wooded, hilly country
near Natick--"the place of hills"--with its little lakes, its
tranquil, winding river, its hallowed memories of John Eliot and
his Christian Indian chieftains, Waban and Pegan, its treasured
literary associations with Harriet Beecher Stowe. Chief Waban
gave his name, "Wind" or "Breath", to the college lake; on
Pegan Hill, from which so many Wellesley girls have looked out
over the blue distances of Massachusetts, Chief Pegan's efficient
and time-saving squaw used to knit his stockings without heels,
because "He handsome foot, and he shapes it hisself"; and Natick
is the Old Town of Mrs. Stowe's "Old Town Folks."
In those first years after they began to spend their summers at
Wellesley, the family lived in a brown house near what is now the
college greenhouse, but Mr. Durant meant to build his new house
on the hill above the lake, or on the site of Stone Hall, and
to found a great estate for his little son. From time to time
he bought more land; he laid out avenues and planted them with
trees; and then, the little boy for whom all this joy and beauty
were destined fell ill of diphtheria and died, July 3, 1863,
after a short illness.
The effect upon the grief-stricken father was startling, and to
many who knew him and more who did not, it was incomprehensible.
In the quaint phraseology of one of his contemporaries, he had
"avoided the snares of infidelity" hitherto, but his religion had
been of a conventional type. During the child's illness he
underwent an old-fashioned religious conversion. The miracle
has happened before, to greater men, and the world has always
looked askance. Boston in 1863, and later, was no exception.
Mr. Durant's career as a lawyer had been brilliant and worldly;
he had rarely lost a case. In an article on "Anglo-American Memories"
which appeared in the New York Tribune in 1909, he is described
as having "a powerful head, chiseled features, black hair, which
he wore rather long, an olive complexion, and eyes which flashed
the lightnings of wrath and scorn and irony; then suddenly the
soft rays of sweetness and persuasion for the jury. He could
coax, intimidate, terrify; and his questions cut like knives."
The author of "Bench and Bar in Massachusetts", who was in college
with him, says of him: "During the five years of his practice
at the Middlesex Bar he underwent such an initiation into the
profession as no other county could furnish. Shrewdness, energy,
resource, strong nerves and mental muscles were needed to ward
off the blows which the trained gladiators of this bar were
accustomed to inflict. With the lessons learned at the Middlesex Bar
he removed to Boston in 1847, where he became associated with
the Honorable Joseph Bell, the brother-in-law of Rufus Choate,
and began a career almost phenomenal in its success. His management
of cases in court was artistic. So well taken were the preliminary
steps, so deeply laid was the foundation, so complete and
comprehensive was the preparation of evidence and so adroitly
was it brought out, so carefully studied and understood were the
characters of jurors,--with their whims and fancies and
prejudices,--that he won verdict after verdict in the face of
the ablest opponents and placed himself by general consent at
the head of the jury lawyers of the Suffolk Bar." Adjectives less
ambiguous and more uncomplimentary than "shrewd" were also applied
to him, and his manner of dominating his juries did not always
call forth praise from his contemporaries. In one of the newspaper
obituaries at the time of his death it is admitted that he had
been "charged with resorting to tricks unbecoming the dignity of
a lawyer," but the writer adds that it is an open question if
some, or indeed all of them were not legitimate enough, and might
not have been paralleled by the practices of some of the ablest
of British and Irish barristers. Both in law and in business--for
he had important commercial interests--he had prospered. He was
rich and a man of the world. Boston, although critical, had not
found it unnatural that he should make himself talked about in
his conduct of jury trials; but the conspicuousness of his conversion
was of another sort: it offended against good taste, and incurred
for him the suspicion of hypocrisy.
For, with that ardor and impetuosity which seem always to have
made half measures impossible to him, Mr. Durant declared that
so far as he was concerned, the Law and the Gospel were
irreconcilable, and gave up his legal practice. A case which
he had already undertaken for Edward Everett, and from which
Mr. Everett was unwilling to release him, is said to be the last
one he conducted; and he pleaded in public for the last time
in a hearing at the State House in Boston, some years later, when
he won for the college the right to confer degrees, a privilege
which had not been specifically included in the original charter.
His zeal in conducting religious meetings also offended conventional
people. It was unusual, and therefore unsuitable, for a layman
to preach sermons in public. St. Francis and his preaching friars
had established no precedent in Boston of the 'sixties and
'seventies, and indeed Mr. Durant's evangelical protestantism
might not have relished the parallel. Boston seems, for the most
part, to have averted its eyes from the spectacle of the brilliant,
possibly unscrupulous, some said tricky, lawyer bringing souls
to Christ. But he did bring them. We are told that "The halls
and churches where he spoke were crowded. The training and
experience which had made him so successful a pleader before
judge and jury, now, when he was fired with zeal for Christ's
cause, made him almost irresistible as a preacher. Very many
were led by him to confess the Christian faith. Henry Wilson,
then senator, afterwards vice president, was among them. The
influence of the meetings was wonderful and far-reaching." We
are assured that he "would go nowhere unless the Evangelical
Christians of the place united in an invitation and the ministers
were ready to cooperate." But the whole affair was of course
intensely distasteful to unemotional people; the very fact that
a man could be converted argued his instability; and it is
unquestionably true that Boston's attitude toward Mr. Durant was
reflected for many years in her attitude toward the college which
he founded.
But over against this picture we can set another, more intimate,
more pleasing, although possibly not more discriminating. When
the early graduates of Wellesley and the early teachers write of
Mr. Durant, they dip their pens in honey and sunshine. The result
is radiant, fiery even, but unconvincingly archangelic. We see
him, "a slight, well-knit figure of medium height in a suit of
gray, with a gray felt hat, the brim slightly turned down; beneath
one could see the beautiful gray hair slightly curling at the ends;
the fine, clear-cut features, the piercing dark eyes, the mouth
that could smile or be stern as occasion might demand. He seemed
to have the working power of half a dozen ordinary persons and
everything received his attention. He took the greatest pride
and delight in making things as beautiful as possible." Or he
is described as "A slight man--with eyes keen as a lawyer's should
be, but gentle and wise as a good man's are, and with a halo of
wavy silver hair. His step was alert, his whole form illuminate
with life." He is sketched for us addressing the college, in
chapel, one September morning of 1876, on the supremacy of Greek
literature, "urging in conclusion all who would venture upon
Hadley's Grammar as the first thorny stretch toward that celestial
mountain peak, to rise." It is Professor Katharine Lee Bates,
writing in 1892, who gives us the picture: "My next neighbor,
a valorous little mortal, now a member of the Smith faculty, was
the first upon her feet, pulling me after her by a tug at my
sleeve, coupled with a moral tug more efficacious still. Perhaps
a dozen of us freshmen, all told, filed into Professor Horton's
recitation room that morning." And again, "His prompt and vigorous
method of introducing a fresh subject to college notice was the
making it a required study for the senior class of the year.
'79 grappled with biology, '80 had a senior diet of geology and
astronomy." To these young women, as to his juries in earlier
days, he could use words "that burned and cut like the lash of
a scourge," and it is evident that they feared "the somber
lightnings of his eyes."
But he won their affection by his sympathy and humor perhaps,
quite as much as by his personal beauty, and his ideals of
scholarship, and despite his imperious desire to bring their souls
to Christ. They remember lovingly his little jokes. They tell of
how he came into College Hall one evening, and said that a mother
and daughter had just arrived, and he was perplexed to know where
to put them, but he thought they might stay under the staircase
leading up from the center. And students and teachers, puzzled
by this inhospitality but suspecting a joke somewhere, came out
into the center to find the great cast of Niobe and her daughter
under the stairway at the left, where it stayed through all the
years that followed, until College Hall burned down.
They tell also of the moral he pointed at the unveiling of
"The Reading Girl", by John Adams Jackson, which stood for many
years in the Browning Room. She was reading no light reading,
said Mr. Durant, as the twelve men who brought her in could testify.
"She is reading Greek, and observe--she doesn't wear bangs." They
saw him ardent in friendship as in all else. His devoted friend,
and Wellesley's, Professor Eben N. Horsford, has given us a picture
of him which it would be a pity to miss. The two men are standing
on the oak-crowned hill, overlooking the lake. "We wandered on,"
says Professor Horsford, "over the hill and future site of Norumbega,
till we came where now stands the monument to the munificence
of Valeria Stone. There in the shadow of the evergreens we lay
down on the carpet of pine foliage and talked,--I remember it
well,--talked long of the problems of life, of things worth
living for; of the hidden ways of Providence as well as of the
subtle ways of men; of the few who rule and are not always
recognized; of the many who are led and are not always conscious
of it; of the survival of the fittest in the battle of life, and
of the constant presence of the Infinite Pity; of the difficulties,
the resolution, the struggle, the conquest that make up the history
of every worthy achievement. I arose with the feeling that I had
been taken into the confidence of one of the most gifted of all
the men it had been my privilege to know. We had not talked of
friendship; we had been unconsciously sowing its seed. He loved
to illustrate its strength and its steadfastness to me; I have
lived to appreciate and reverence the grandeur of the work which
he accomplished here."
III.
If we set them over against each other, the hearsay that besmirches
and the reminiscence that canonizes, we evoke a very human, living
personality: a man of keen intellect, of ardent and emotional
temperament, autocratic, fanatical, fastidious, and beauty-loving;
a loyal friend; an unpleasant enemy. "He saw black black and
white white, for him there was no gray." He was impatient of
mediocrity. "He could not suffer fools gladly."
No archangel this, but unquestionably a man of genius, consecrated
to the fulfillment of a great vision. It is no wonder that the
early graduates living in the very presence of his high purpose,
his pure intention, his spendthrift selflessness, remember these
things best when they recall old days. After all, these are the
things most worth remembering.
The best and most carefully balanced study of him which we have
is by Miss Charlotte Howard Conant of the class of '84, in an
address delivered by her in the College Chapel, February 18, 1906,
to commemorate Mr. Durant's birthday. Miss Conant's use of the
biographical material available, and her careful and restrained
estimate of Mr. Durant's character cannot be bettered, and it is
a temptation to incorporate her entire pamphlet in this chapter,
but we shall have to content ourselves with cogent extracts.
Henry Fowle Durant, or Henry Welles Smith as he was called in his
boyhood, was born February 20, 1822, in Hanover, New Hampshire.
His father, William Smith, "was a lawyer of limited means, but
versatile mind and genial disposition." His mother, Harriet Fowle
Smith of Watertown, Massachusetts, was one of five sisters renowned
for their beauty and amiability; she was, we are told, intelligent
as well as beautiful, "a great reader, and a devoted Christian
all her long life."
Young Henry went to school in Hanover, and in Peacham, Vermont,
but in his early boyhood the family moved to Lowell, Massachusetts,
and from there he was sent to the private school of Mr. and
Mrs. Samuel Ripley in Waltham, to complete his preparation for
Harvard. Miss Conant writes: "Mr. Ripley was pastor of the
Unitarian Church there (in Waltham) from 1809 to 1846, and during
most of that time supplemented the small salary of a country minister
by receiving twelve or fourteen boys into his family to fit for
college. From time to time youths rusticated from Harvard were
also sent there to keep up college work."
"Mrs. Ripley was one of the most remarkable women of her generation.
Born in 1793, she very early began to show unusual intellectual
ability, and before she was seventeen she had become a fine Latin
scholar and had read also all the Odyssey in the original." Her
life-long friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, writes in praise of her:
"The rare accomplishments and singular loveliness of her character
endeared her to all.... She became one of the best Greek
scholars in the country, and continued in her latest years the
habit of reading Homer, the tragedians, and Plato. But her studies
took a wide range in mathematics, natural philosophy, psychology,
theology, and ancient and modern literature. Her keen ear was
open to whatever new facts astronomy, chemistry, or the theories
of light and heat had to furnish. Absolutely without pedantry,
she had no desire to shine. She was faithful to all the duties
of wife and mother in a well-ordered and eminently hospitable
household wherein she was dearly loved. She was without appetite
for luxury or display or praise or influence, with entire
indifference to triffles.... As she advanced in life her
personal beauty, not remarked in youth, drew the notice of all."
There could have been no nobler, saner influence for an intellectual
boy than the companionship of this unusual woman, and if we are
to begin at the beginning of Wellesley's story, we must begin with
Mrs. Ripley, for Mr. Durant often said that she had great influence
in inclining his mind in later life to the higher education of women.
From Waltham the young man went in 1837 to Harvard, where we hear
of him as "not specially studious, and possessing refined and
luxurious tastes which interfered somewhat with his pursuit of
the regular studies of the college." But evidently he was no
ordinary idler, for he haunted the Harvard Library, and we know
that all his life he was a lover of books. In 1841 he was graduated
from Harvard, and went home to Lowell to read law in his father's
office, where Benjamin F. Butler was at that time a partner.
The dilettante attitude which characterized his college years is
now no longer in evidence. He writes to a friend, "I shall study
law for the present to oblige father; he is in some trouble, and
I wish to make him as happy as possible. The future course of
my life is undetermined, except that all shall yield to holy poetry.
Indeed it is a sacred duty. I have begun studying law; don't be
afraid, however, that I intend to give up poetry. I shall always
be a worshiper of that divinity, and I hope in a few years to be
able to give up everything and be a priest in her temple." After
a year he writes, "I have not written any poetry this whole summer.
Old Mrs. Themis says that I shall not visit any more at the
Miss Muses. I'll see the old catamaran hanged, though, but what
I will, and I'll write a sonnet to my old shoe directly, out of
mere desperation. Pity and sympathize with me." And on March 28,
1843, we find him writing to a college friend:
"I have been attending courts of all kinds and assisting as junior
counsel in trying cases and all the drudgery of a lawyer's life.
One end of my labor has been happily attained, for about three
weeks ago I arrived at the age of twenty-one, and last week I
mustered courage to stand an examination of my qualifications
for an attorney, and the result (unlike that of some examinations
during my college life) was fortunate, with compliments from the
judge. I feel a certain vanity (not unmixed, by the way, with
self-contempt) at my success, for I well remember I and a dear
friend of mine used to mourn over the impossibility of our ever
becoming business men, and lo, I am a lawyer.-- I have a right
to bestow my tediousness on any court of the Commonwealth, and
they are bound to hear me."
From 1843 to 1847 he practiced at the Middlesex Bar, and from
1847, when he went to live in Boston, until 1863, he was a member
of the Suffolk Bar. On November 25, 1851, he had his name changed
by act of the Legislature. There were eleven other lawyers by
the name of Smith, practicing in Boston, and two of them were
Henry Smiths. To avoid the inevitable confusion, Henry Welles Smith
became Henry Fowle Durant, both Fowle and Durant being family names.
In 1852 Mr. Durant was a member of the Boston City Council, but
did not again hold political office. On May 28, 1854, he married
his cousin, Pauline Adeline Fowle, of Virginia, daughter of the
late Lieutenant-colonel John Fowle of the United States Army and
Paulina Cazenove. On March 2, 1855, the little boy, Henry Fowle
Durant, Jr., was born, and on October 10, 1857, a little girl,
Pauline Cazenove Durant, who lived less than two months. On
June 21, 1862, we find the Boston Evening Courier saying of the
prominent lawyer: "What the future has in store for Mr. Durant
can of course be only predicted, but his past is secure, and if
he never rises higher, he can rest in the consciousness that no
man ever rose more rapidly at the Suffolk Bar than he has." And
within a year he had put it all behind him,--a sinful and unworthy
life,--and had set out to be a new man. That there was sin and
unworthiness in the old life we, who look into our own hearts,
need not doubt; but how much of sin, how much of unworthiness,
happily we need not determine. Mr. Durant was probably his own
severest critic.
Miss Conant's characterization of Mr. Durant, in his own words
describing James Otis, is particularly illuminating in its revelation
of his temperament. In February, 1860, he said of James Otis,
in an address delivered in the Boston Mercantile Library Lecture
course:
"One cannot study his writings and history and escape the conviction
that there were two natures in this great man. There was the
trained lawyer, man of action, prompt and brave in every emergency.
But there was in him another nature higher than this. In all times
men have entertained angels unawares, ministering spirits, whose
missions are not wholly known to themselves even, men living beyond
and in advance of their age.
"We call them prophets, inspired seers,--in the widest and largest
sense poets, for they come to create new empires of thought, new
realms in the history of the mind.... But more ample traditions
remain of his powers as an orator and of the astonishing effects
of his eloquence. He was eminently an orator of action in its
finest sense; his contemporaries speak of him as a flame of fire
and repeat the phrase as if it were the only one which could express
the intense passion of his eloquence, the electric flames which
his genius kindled, the magical power which swayed the great
assemblies with the irresistible sweep of the whirlwind."
Mr. Durant's attitude toward education is also elucidated for us
by Miss Conant in her apt quotations from his address on the
American Scholar, delivered at Bowdoin College, August, 1862:
"The cause of God's poor is the sublime gospel of American freedom.
It is our faith that national greatness has its only enduring
foundation in the intelligence and integrity of the whole people.
It is our faith that our institutions approach perfection only when
every child can be educated and elevated to the station of a free
and intelligent citizen, and we mourn for each one who goes astray
as a loss to the country that cannot be repaired.... From this
fundamental truth that the end of our Republic is to educate and
elevate all our people, you can deduce the future of the American
scholar.
"The great dangers in the future of America which we have to fear
are from our own neglect of our duty. Foes from within are the
most deadly enemies, and suicide is the great danger of our
Republic. With the increase of wealth and commerce comes the
growing power of gold, and it is a fearful truth for states as
well as for individual men that 'gold rusts deeper than iron.'
Wealth breeds sensuality, degradation, ignorance, and crime.
"The first object and duty of the true patriot should be to elevate
and educate the poor. Ignorance is the modern devil, and the
inkstand that Martin Luther hurled at his head in the Castle of
Wartburg is the true weapon to fight him with."
This helps us to understand his desire that Wellesley should
welcome poor girls and should give them every opportunity for
study. Despite his aristocratic tastes he was a true son of
democracy; the following, from an address on "The Influences of
Rural Life", delivered by him before the Norfolk Agricultural
Society, in September, 1859, might have been written in the
twentieth century, so modern is its animus:
"The age of iron is passed and the age of gold is passing away;
the age of labor is coming. Already we speak of the dignity of
labor, and that phrase is anything but an idle and unmeaning one.
It is a true gospel to the man who takes its full meaning; the
nation that understands it is free and independent and great.
"The dignity of labor is but another name for liberty. The chivalry
of labor is now the battle cry of the old world and the new. Ask
your cornfields to what mysterious power they do homage and pay
tribute, and they will answer--to labor. In a thousand forms
nature repeats the truth, that the laborer alone is what is called
respectable, is alone worthy of praise and honor and reward."
IV.
In a letter accompanying his will, in 1867, Mr. Durant wrote:
"The great object we both have in view is the appropriation and
consecration of our country place and other property to the
service of the Lord Jesus Christ, by erecting a seminary on the
plan (modified by circumstances) of South Hadley, and by having
an Orphan Asylum, not only for orphans, but for those who are
more forlorn than orphans in having wicked parents. Did our
property suffice I would prefer both, as the care (Christian and
charitable) of the children would be blessed work for the pupils
of the seminary." The orphanage was, indeed, their first idea,
and was, obviously, the more natural and conventional memorial
for a little eight-year-old lad, but the idea of the seminary
gradually superseded it as Mr. and Mrs. Durant came to take a
greater and greater interest in educational problems as distinguished
from mere philanthropy. Miss Conant wisely reminds us that,
"Just at this time new conditions confronted the common schools
of the country. The effects of the Civil War were felt in education
as in everything else. During the war the business of teaching
had fallen into women's hands, and the close of the war found
a great multitude of new and often very incompetent women teachers
filling positions previously held by men. The opportunities for
the higher education of women were entirely inadequate. Mt. Holyoke
was turning away hundreds of girls every year, and there were few
or no other advanced schools for girls of limited means."
In 1867 Mr. Durant was elected a trustee of Mt. Holyoke. In 1868
Mrs. Durant gave to Mt. Holyoke ten thousand dollars, which enabled
the seminary to build its first library building. We are told that
Mr. and Mrs. Durant used to say that there could not be too many
Mt. Holyokes. And in 1870, on March 17, the charter of Wellesley
Female Seminary was signed by Governor William Claflin.
On April 16, 1870, the first meeting of the Board of Trustees was
held, at Mr. Durant's Marlborough Street house in Boston, and the
Reverend Edward N. Kirk, pastor of the Mt. Vernon Church in Boston,
was elected president of the board. Mr. Durant arranged that both
men and women should constitute the Board of Trustees, but that
women should constitute the faculty; and by his choice the first
and second presidents of the college were women. The continuance
of this tradition by the trustees has in every respect justified
the ideal and the vision of the founder. The trustees were to be
members of Evangelical churches, but no denomination was to have
a majority upon the board. On March 7, 1873, the name of the
institution was changed by legislative act to Wellesley College.
Possibly visits to Vassar had had something to do with the change,
for Mr. and Mrs. Durant studied Vassar when they were making
their own plans.
And meanwhile, since the summer of 1871, the great house on the
hill above Lake Waban had been rising, story on story.
Miss Martha Hale Shackford, Wellesley, 1896, in her valuable
little pamphlet, "College Hall", written immediately after the fire,
to preserve for future generations of Wellesley women the traditions
of the vanished building, tells us with what intentness Mr. Durant
studied other colleges, and how, working with the architect,
Mr. Hammatt Billings of Boston, "details of line and contour
were determined before ground was broken, and the symmetry of
the huge building was assured from the beginning."
"Reminiscences of those days are given by residents of Wellesley,
who recall the intense interest of the whole countryside in this
experiment. From Natick came many high-school girls, on Saturday
afternoons, to watch the work and to make plans for attending the
college. As the brick-work advanced and the scaffolding rose
higher and higher, the building assumed gigantic proportions,
impressive in the extreme. The bricks were brought from Cambridge
in small cars, which ran as far as the north lodge and were then
drawn, on a roughly laid switch track, to the side of the building
by a team of eight mules. Other building materials were unloaded
in the meadow and then transferred by cars. As eighteen loads
of bricks arrived daily the pre-academic aspect of the campus was
one of noise and excitement. At certain periods during the
finishing of the interior, there were almost three hundred workmen."
A pretty story has come down to us of one of these workmen who
fell ill, and when he found that he could not complete his work,
begged that he might lay one more brick before he was taken away,
and was lifted up by his comrades that he might set the brick
in its place.
Mr. Durant's eye was upon every detail. He was at hand every day
and sometimes all day, for he often took his lunch up to the campus
with him, and ate it with the workmen in their noon hour. In 1874
he writes: "The work is very hard and I get very tired. I do
feel thankful for the privilege of trying to do something in
the cause of Christ. I feel daily that I am not worthy of such
a privilege, and I do wish to be a faithful servant to my Master.
Yet this does not prevent me from being very weary and sorely
discouraged at times. To-night I am so tired I can hardly sit up
to write."
And from one who, as a young girl, was visiting at his country
house when the house was building, we have this vivid reminiscence:
"My first impression of Mr. Durant was, 'Here is the quickest
thinker'--my next--'and the keenest wit I have ever met.' Then
came the day when under the long walls that stood roofed but bare
in the solitude above Lake Waban, I sat upon a pile of plank, now
the flooring of Wellesley College, and listened to Mr. Durant.
I could not repeat a word he said. I only knew as he spoke and
I listened, the door between the seen and the unseen opened and
I saw a great soul and its quest, God's glory. I came back to
earth to find this seer, with his vision of the wonder that should
be, a master of detail and the most tireless worker. The same day
as this apocalypse, or soon after, I went with Mr. Durant up a
skeleton stairway to see the view from an upper window. The
workmen were all gone but one man, who stood resting a grimy hand
on the fair newly finished wall. For one second I feared to see
a blow follow the flash of Mr. Durant's eye, but he lowered rather
than raised his voice, as after an impressive silence he showed
the scared man the mark left on the wall and his enormity....
Life was keyed high in Mr. Durant's home, and the keynote was
Wellesley College. While the walls were rising he kept workman's
hours. Long before the family breakfast he was with the builders.
At prayers I learned to listen night and morning for the prayer
for Wellesley--sometimes simply an earnest 'Bless Thy college.'
We sat on chairs wonderful in their variety, but all on trial for
the ease and rest of Wellesley, and who can count the stairways
Mrs. Durant went up, not that she might know how steep the stairs
of another, but to find the least toilsome steps for Wellesley feet.
"Night did not bring rest, only a change of work. Letters came and
went like the correspondence of a secretary of state. Devotion
and consecration I had seen before, and sacrifice and self-forgetting,
but never anything like the relentless toil of those two who toiled
not for themselves. If genius and infinite patience met for
the making of Wellesley, side by side with them went the angels
of work and prayer; the twin angels were to have their shrine
in the college."
V.
On September 8, 1875, the college opened its doors to three hundred
and fourteen students. More than two hundred other applicants
for admission had been refused for lack of room. We can imagine
the excitement of the fortunate three hundred and fourteen, driving
up to the college in family groups,--for their fathers and mothers,
and sometimes their grandparents or their aunts came with them.
They went up Washington Street, "the long way", past the little
Gothic Lodge, and up the avenue between the rows of young elms
and purple beeches. There was a herd of Jersey cows grazing in
the meadow that day, and there is a tradition that the first student
entered the college by walking over a narrow plank, as the steps
up to the front door were not yet in place; but the story, though
pleasantly symbolical, does not square with the well-known energy
and impatience of the founder.
The students were received on their arrival by the president,
Miss Ada L. Howard, in the reception room. They were then shown
to their rooms by teachers. The majority of the rooms were in
suites, a study and bedroom or bedrooms for two, three, and in
a few suites, four girls. There were almost no single rooms in
those days, even for the teachers. With a few exceptions, every
bedroom and every study had a large window opening outdoors.
There were carpets on the floors, and bookshelves in the studies,
and the black walnut furniture was simple in design. As one alumna
writes: "The wooden bedsteads with their wooden slats, of vivid
memory, the wardrobes, so much more hospitable than the two hooks
on the door, which Matthew Vassar vouchsafed to his protegees,
the high, commodious bureaus, with their 'scant' glass of fashion,
are all endeared to us by long association, and by our straining
endeavors to rearrange them in our rooms, without the help of man."
When the student had showed her room to her anxious relatives,
on that first day, she came down to the room that was then the
president's office, but later became the office of the registrar.
There she found Miss Sarah P. Eastman, who, for the first six
years of the college life, was teacher of history and director of
domestic work. Later, with her sister, Miss Julia A. Eastman, she
became one of the founders of Dana Hall, the preparatory school
in Wellesley village. An alumna of the class of '80 who evidently
had dreaded this much-heralded domestic work, writes that Miss
Eastman's personality robbed it of its horrors and made it seem
a noble and womanly thing. "When, in her sweet and gracious
manner, she asked, 'How would you like to be on the circle to
scrape dinner dishes?' you straightway felt that no occupation
could be more noble than scraping those mussy plates."
"All that day," we are told, "confusion was inevitable. Mr. Durant
hovered about, excited, anxious, yet reassured by the enthusiasm
of the students, who entered with eagerness into the new world.
He superintended feeding the hungry, answered questions, and
studied with great keenness the faces of the girls who were entering
Wellesley College. In the middle of the afternoon it had been
discovered that no bell had been provided for waking the students,
so a messenger went to the village to beg help of Mrs. Horton
(the mother of the professor of Greek), who promptly provided
a large brass dinnerbell. At six o'clock the next morning two
students, side by side, walked through all the corridors, ringing
the rising-bell,--an act, as Miss Eastman says, symbolic of the
inner awakening to come to all those girls." Thirty-nine years
later, at the sound of a bell in the early morning, the household
were to awake to duty for the last time in the great building.
The unquestioning obedience, the prompt intelligence, the unconscious
selflessness with which they obeyed that summons in the dawn of
March 17, 1914, witness to that "inner awakening."
The early days of that first term were given over to examinations,
and it was presently discovered that only thirty of the three hundred
and fourteen would-be college students were really of college grade.
The others were relegated to a preparatory department, of which
Mr. Durant was always intolerant, and which was finally discontinued
in 1881, the year of his death.
Mr. Durant's ideals for the college were of the highest, and in
many respects he was far in advance of his times in his attitude
toward educational matters. He meant Wellesley to be a university
some day. There is a pretty story, which cannot be told too often,
of how he stood one morning with Miss Louise Manning Hodgkins,
who was professor of English Literature from 1877 to 1891, and
looked out over the beautiful campus.
"Do you see what I see?" he asked.
"No," was the quiet answer, for there were few who would venture
to say they saw the visions in his eyes.
"Then I will tell you," he said. "On that hill an Art School,
down there a Musical Conservatory, on the elevation yonder a
Scientific School, and just beyond that an Observatory, at the
farthest right a Medical College, and just there in the center a
new stone chapel, built as the college outgrew the old one.
Yes,--this will all be some time--but I shall not be here."
It is significant that the able lawyer did not number a law school
among his university buildings, and that although he gave to
Wellesley his personal library, the gift did not include his law
library. Nevertheless, there are lawyers among the Wellesley
graduates, and one or two of distinction.
Mr. Durant's desire that the college should do thorough, original,
first-hand work, cannot be too strongly emphasized. Miss Conant
tells us that, "For all scientific work he planned laboratories
where students might make their own investigations, a very unusual
step for those times." In 1878, when the Physics laboratory was
started at Wellesley, under the direction of Professor Whiting,
Harvard had no such laboratory for students. In chemistry also,
the Wellesley students had unusual opportunities for conducting
their own experimental work. Mr. Durant also began the collection
of scientific and literary periodicals containing the original
papers of the great investigators, now so valuable to the college.
"This same idea of original work led him to purchase for the
library books for the study of Icelandic and allied languages, so
that the English department might also begin its work at the root
of things. He wished students of Greek and Latin to illuminate
their work by the light of archeology, topography, and epigraphy.
Such books as then existed on these subjects were accordingly
procured. In 1872 no handbooks of archeology had been prepared,
and even in 1882 no university in America offered courses in
that subject."
His emphasis on physical training for the students was also an
advance upon the general attitude of the time. He realized that
the Victorian young lady, with her chignon and her Grecian bend,
could not hope to make a strong student. The girls were encouraged
to row on the lake, to take long, brisk walks, to exercise in the
gymnasium. Mr. Durant sent to England for a tennis set, as none
could be procured in America, "but had some difficulty in persuading
many of the students to take such very violent exercise."
But despite these far-seeing plans, he was often, during his
lifetime, his own greatest obstacle to their achievement. He brought
to his task a large inexperience of the genus girl, a despotic
habit of mind, and a temperamental tendency to play Providence.
Theoretically, he wished to give the teachers and students of
Wellesley an opportunity to show what women, with the same
educational facilities as their brothers and a free hand in directing
their own academic life, could accomplish for civilization.
Practically, they had to do as he said, as long as he lived. The
records in the diaries, letters, and reminiscences which have come
down to us from those early days, are full of Mr. Durant's commands
and coercions.
On one historic occasion he decides that the entire freshman
schedule shall be changed, for one day, from morning to afternoon,
in order that a convention of Massachusetts school superintendents,
meeting in Boston, may hear the Wellesley students recite their
Greek, Latin, and Mathematics. In vain do the students protest
at being treated like district school children; in vain do the
teachers point out the injury to the college dignity; in vain do
the superintendents evince an unflattering lack of interest in
the scholarship of Wellesley. It must be done. It is done.
The president of the freshman class is called upon to recite her
Greek lesson. She begins. The superintendents chatter and laugh
discourteously among themselves. But the president of the freshman
class has her own ideas of classroom etiquette. She pauses. She
waits, silent, until the room is hushed, then she resumes her
recitation before the properly disciplined superintendents.
In religious matters, Mr. Durant was, of course, especially active.
Like the Christian converts of an earlier day, he would have harried
and hurried souls to Christ. But Victorian girls were less docile
than the medieval Franks and Goths. They seem, many of them,
to have eluded or withstood this forceful shepherding with a
vigilance as determined as Mr. Durant's own.
But some of the letters and diaries give us such a vivid picture
of this early Wellesley that it would be a pity not to let them
speak. The diary quoted is that of Florence Morse Kingsley,
the novelist, who was a student at Wellesley from 1876 to 1879,
but left before she was graduated because of trouble with her eyes.
Already in the daily record of the sixteen-year-old girl we find
the little turns and twinkles of phrase which make Mrs. Kingsley's
books such good reading.
VI.
Wellesley College, September 18th., 1876. I haven't had time
to write in this journal since I came. There is so much to do
here all the time. Besides, I have changed rooms and room-mates.
I am in No. 72 now and I have a funny little octagon-shaped
bedroom all to myself, and two room-mates, I. W. and J.S.
Both of these are in the preparatory department. But I am in
the semi-collegiate class, because I passed all my mathematics.
But I didn't have quite enough of the right Latin to be a full
freshman. We get up at 6.30, have breakfast at 7, then a class
at 7.55, after that comes silent hour, chapel, and section
Bible class. Then hours again till dinner-time at one, and
after dinner till 4.55. We can go outdoors all we want to
and to the library, but we can't go in each other's rooms,
which is a blessing. There are some girls here who would like
to talk every minute, morning, noon and night.
I went out to walk this afternoon with B. We were walking very
slow and talking very fast, when all of a sudden we met
Mr. Durant. He was coming along like a steam engine, his
white hair flying out in the wind. When he saw us he stopped;
of course we stopped too, for we saw he wanted to speak to us.
"That isn't the way to walk, girls," he said, very briskly.
"You need to make the blood bound through your veins; that
will stimulate the mind and help to make you good students.
Come now, I'll walk with you as far as the lodge, and show
you what I mean."
B. and I just straightened up and walked! Mr. Durant talked
to us some about our lessons. He seemed pleased when we told
him we liked geometry. When we got back to the college we
told the girls about meeting Mr. Durant. I guess nobody will
want to dawdle along after this; I'm sure I shan't.
Oct. 5. I broke an oar to-day. I'm not used to rowing anyway,
and the oar was long; two of us sit on one seat, each pulling
an oar. There is room for eight in the boat, beside the captain.
We went out to-day in a boat called the Ellida and after going
all around the lake we thought it would be fun to go under a
little stone bridge. The captain told us to ship our oars;
I didn't ship mine enough, and it struck the side of the bridge
and snapped right off. I was dreadfully frightened; especially
as the captain said right away, "You'll have to tell Mr. Durant."
The captain's name is ----. She was a first year girl, and
on that account thinks a great deal of herself.
I wish I'd come last year. It must have been lots of fun.
Well, anyway, I thought I might as well have the matter of
the oar over with, so as soon as we landed I took the two
pieces of the oar and marched straight into the office.
Mr. Durant sat there at the desk. He appeared to be very busy
and he didn't look at me at first. When he did my heart beat
so fast I could hardly speak. I guess he saw I was frightened,
for he laughed a little and said, "Oh ho, you've had an
accident, I see."
I told him how it happened, and he said, "Well, you've learned
that stone bridges are stronger than oars; and that bit of
information will cost you seventy cents."
I was so relieved that I laughed right out. "I thought it would
cost as much as five dollars," I said. I like Mr. Durant.
October 15. Mr. Durant talked to us in chapel this morning on
the subject of being honest about our domestic work. Of course
some girls are used to working and can hurry, while others...
don't even know how to tie their shoestrings or braid their hair
properly when they first come.... My work is to dust the
center on the first floor. It's easy, and if I didn't take
lots of time to look at the pictures and palms and things
while I am doing it I couldn't possibly make it last an hour.
But I'm thorough, so my conscience didn't prick me a bit. But
some of the girls got as red as beets and... cried afterward;
she hadn't swept her corridor for two whole days. Mr. Durant
certainly does get down to the roots of things, and if you
haven't a pretty decent conscience about your lessons and
everything, you feel as though you had a clear little window
right in the middle of your forehead through which he can
look in and see the disorder. Some of the girls say they are
just paralyzed when he looks at them; but I'm not. I feel like
doing things just as well as I can.
Sunday, November 19. We had a missionary from South Africa to
preach in the chapel this morning. He seemed to think we were
all getting ready to be missionaries, because he said among
other things that he hoped to welcome us to the field as soon
as possible after we graduated. His complexion was very
yellow. It reminded one of ivory, elephants' tusks and that
sort of thing. We heard afterward that he wasn't married, and
that he hoped to find a suitable helpmate here. But although
Mr. Durant introduced him to all the '79 girls I didn't think
he liked the looks of any of them. At least he didn't propose
to any of them on the spot. They're only sophomores, anyway,
when one comes to think of it, but they certainly act as if the
dignity of the whole institution rested on their shoulders.
Most of them wear trails every day. I wish I had a trail.
To complete this picture of the college woman in 1876 we need
the description of the college president, by a member of the class
of '80: "Miss Howard with her young face, pink cheeks, blue eyes,
and puffs of snow-white hair, wearing always a long trailing gown
of black silk, cut low at the throat and finished with folds of
snowy tulle." None of these writers gives the date at which the
trail disappeared from the classroom.
The following letters are from Mary Elizabeth Stilwell, a member
of that same class of '79 which wore the trails. She, like
Florence Morse, left college on account of her health. The letters
are printed by the courtesy of her daughter, Ruth Eleanor McKibben,
a graduate of Denison College and a graduate student at Wellesley
during 1914 and 1915. Elizabeth Stilwell was older and more mature
than Florence Morse, and her letters give us the old Wellesley
from quite a different angle.
Wellesley College--
Oct. 16, '75.
My Dear Mother:--
If you are at all discouraged or feel the need of something to
cheer you up you had better lay this letter aside and read it
some other time, for I expect it will be exceedingly doleful.
But really, Mother, I am exceedingly in earnest in what I am
going to write and have thought the whole matter over carefully
before I have ventured a word on the subject. Wellesley is
not a college. The buildings are beautiful, perfect almost;
the rooms and their appointments delightful, most of the
professors are all that could be desired, some of them are
very fine indeed in their several departments, but all these
delightful things are not the things that make a college....
And, Oh! the experiments! It is enough to try the patience of
a Job. I came here to take a college course, and not to dabble
in a little of every insignificant thing that comes up. More
than half of my time is taken up in writing essays, practicing
elocution, trotting to chapel, and reading poetry with the
teacher of English literature, and it seems to make no difference
to Miss Howard and Mr. Durant whether the Latin, Greek and
Mathematics are well learned or not. The result is that I do
not have time to half learn my lessons. My real college work
is unsatisfactory, poorly done, and so of course amounts to
about nothing. I am not the only one that feels it, but every
member of the freshman class has the same feeling, and not only
the students but even the professors. You can have no idea of
how these very professors have worked to have things different
and have expostulated and expostulated with Mr. Durant, but all
to no avail. He is as hard as a flint and his mind is made up of
the most beautiful theories, but he is perfectly blind to facts.
He rules the college, from the amount of Latin we shall read to
the kind of meat we shall have for dinner; he even went out into
the kitchen the other day and told the cook not to waste so much
butter in making the hash, for I heard him myself.
We must remember that the writer is a young girl, intolerant, as
youth is always intolerant, and that she was writing only one month
after the college had opened. It is not to be expected that she
could understand the creative excitement under which the founder
was laboring in those first years. We, who look back, can appreciate
what it must have meant to a man of his imagination and intensity,
to see his ideal coming true; naturally, he could not keep his
hands off. And we must remember also that until his death Mr. Durant
met the yearly deficit of the college. This gave him a peculiar
claim to have his wishes carried out, whether in the classroom or
in the kitchen.
Miss Stilwell continues:
I know there are a great many things to be taken into
consideration. I know that the college is new and that all
sorts of discouragements are to be expected, and that the best
way is to bear them patiently and hope that all will come out
right in the end. At the same time I am DETERMINED to have
a certain sort of an education, and I must go where I can get
it.... Oh! if I could only make you see it as we all
feel it! It is such a bitter disappointment when I had looked
forward for so long to going to college, to find the same
narrowness and cramped feeling.--There is one other thing
that Mrs. S. (the mother of one of the students) spoke of
yesterday, which is very true I am sorry to say, and that is
in regard to the religious influence. She said that she thought
that Mr. Durant by driving the girls so, and continually harping
on the subject, was losing all his influence and was doing just
the opposite of what he intended. I know that with my room-mate
and her set he is a constant source of ridicule and his
exhortations and prayers are retailed in the most terrible way.
I have set my foot down on it and I will not allow anything
of the sort done in my room, but I know that it is done
elsewhere, and that every spark of religious interest is killed
by the process. I have firmly made up my mind that it shall
not affect me and I have succeeded in controlling myself this far.
On December 31, we find her writing: "My Greek is the only pleasant
thing to which I can look forward, and I am quite sure good
instruction awaits me there."
In 1876 she cheers up a bit, and on September 17, writes: "I am
going to like Miss Lord (professor of Latin) very much indeed
and shall derive a great deal of profit from her teaching." And
on October 8,
"Having already had so much Greek, I think I could take the classical
course for Honors right through, even though I did not begin German
until another year, and as I am quite anxious to study Chemistry
and have the laboratory practice perhaps I had best take Chemistry
now and leave German for another year. It is indeed a problem and
a profound one as to what I am to do with my education and I am
very anxious to hear from father in answer to my letter and get
his thoughts on the matter. I have the utmost confidence in
Miss Horton's judgment (professor of Greek) and I think I shall
talk the matter over with her in a day or two."
Evidently the "experiments" which had taken so much of her time
in 1875 had now been eliminated, and she was able to respect
the work which she was doing. Her Sunday schedule, which she
sends her mother on October 15, 1876, will be of interest to the
modern college girl.
Rising Bell 7
Breakfast 7.45
Silent Hour 9.30
Bible Class 9.45
Church 11
Dinner 1
Prayer Meeting 5
Supper 5.30
Section Prayer Meeting 7.30
Once a Month Missionary Prayer Meeting 8
Silent Hour 9
Bed 9.30
And in addition to her required work, this ambitious young student
has arranged a course of reading for herself:
During the last week I have been in the library a great deal and
have been browsing for two or three hours at a time among those
delightful books. I have arranged a course of reading upon Art,
which I hope to have time to pursue, and then I have made
selections from some such authors as Kingsley, Ruskin, De Quincey,
Hawthorne,--and Mrs. Jameson, for which I hope to find time.
Besides all this you can't imagine what domestic work has been
given me. It is in the library where I am to spend 3/4 of an hour
a day in arranging "studies" in Shakespeare. The work will be
like this:--Mr. Durant has sent for five hundred volumes to form
a "Shakespeare library." I will read some fully detailed life
of Shakespeare and note down as I go along such topics as I think
are interesting and which will come up next year when the Juniors
study Shakespeare. For instance, each one of his plays will
form a separate topic, also his early home, his education, his
friendships, the different characteristics of his genius, &c.
Then all there is in the library upon this author must be read
enough to know under what topic or topics it belongs and then
noted under these topics. So that when the literature class
come to study Shakespeare next year, each one will know just
where to go for any information she may want. Mr. Durant came
to me himself about it and explained to me what it would be and
asked me if I would be willing to take it. He said I could do
just as I wanted to about it and if I felt that it would be
tiresome and too much like a study and so a strain upon me,
he did not want me to take it. I have been thinking of it now
for a day or two and have come to the conclusion to undertake
it. For it seems to me that it will be an unusual advantage and
of great benefit to me.--Another reason why I am pleased and
which I could tell to no one but you and father is that I think
it shows that Mr. Durant has some confidence in me and what
I can do. But--"tell it not in Gath"--that I ever said anything
of the kind.
Thus do we trace Literature 9 (the Shakespeare Course) to its
modest fountainhead.
Elizabeth Stilwell left her Alma Mater in 1877, but so cherished
were the memories of the life which she had criticized as a girl,
and so thoroughly did she come to respect its academic standards,
that her own daughters grew up thinking that the goal of happy
girlhood was Wellesley College.
From such naive beginnings, amateur in the best sense of the word,
the Wellesley of to-day has arisen. Details of the founder's plan
have been changed and modified to meet conditions which he could
not foresee. But his "five great essentials for education at
Wellesley College" are still the touchstones of Wellesley scholarship.
In the founder's own words they are:
FIRST. God with us; no plan can prosper without Him.
SECOND. Health; no system of education can be in accordance
with God's laws which injures health.
THIRD. Usefulness; all beauty is the flower of use.
FOURTH. Thoroughness.
FIFTH. The one great truth of higher education which the noblest
womanhood demands; viz. the supreme development and unfolding
of every power and faculty, of the Kingly reason, the beautiful
imagination, the sensitive emotional nature, and the religious
aspirations. The ideal is of the highest learning in full harmony
with the noblest soul, grand by every charm of culture, useful
and beautiful because useful; feminine purity and delicacy and
refinement giving their luster and their power to the most absolute
science--woman learned without infidelity and wise without conceit,
the crowned queen of the world by right of that Knowledge which
is Power and that Beauty which is Truth."
CHAPTER II
THE PRESIDENTS AND THEIR ACHIEVEMENT
Wellesley's career differs in at least one obvious and important
particular from the careers of her sister colleges, Smith, Vassar,
and Bryn Mawr,--in the swift succession of her presidents during
her formative years. Smith College, opening in the same year as
Wellesley, 1875, remained under President Seelye's wise guidance
for thirty-five years. Vassar, between 1886 and 1914, had but
one president. Bryn Mawr, in 1914, still followed the lead of
Miss Thomas, first dean and then president. In 1911, Wellesley's
sixth president was inaugurated. Of the five who preceded President
Pendleton, only Miss Hazard served more than six years, and even
Miss Hazard's term of eleven years was broken by more than one
long absence because of illness.
It is useless to deny that this lack of administrative continuity
had its disadvantages, yet no one who watched the growth and
development of Wellesley during her first forty years could fail
to mark the genuine progression of her scholarly ideal. Despite
an increasingly hampering lack of funds--poverty is not too strong
a word--and the disconcerting breaks and changes in her presidential
policy, she never took a backward step, and she never stood still.
The Wellesley that Miss Freeman inherited was already straining
at its leading strings and impatient of its boarding-school horizons;
the Wellesley that Miss Shafer left was a college in every modern
acceptation of the term, and its academic prestige has been confirmed
and enhanced by each successive president.
Of these six women who were called to direct the affairs of Wellesley
in her first half century, Miss Ada L. Howard seems to have been
the least forceful; but her position was one of peculiar difficulty,
and she apparently took pains to adjust herself with tact and
dignity to conditions which her more spirited successors would
have found unbearably galling. Professor George Herbert Palmer,
in his biography of his wife, epitomizes the early situation when
he says that Mr. Durant "had, it is true, appointed Miss Ada L. Howard
president; but her duties as an executive officer were nominal
rather than real; neither his disposition, her health, nor her
previous training allowing her much power."
Miss Howard was a New Hampshire woman, the daughter of William
Hawkins Howard and Adaline Cowden Howard. Three of her great
grandfathers were officers in the War of the Revolution. Her father
is said to have been a good scholar and an able teacher as well
as a scientific agriculturist, and her mother was "a gentlewoman
of sweetness, strength and high womanhood." When their daughter
was born, the father and mother were living in Temple, a village of
Southern New Hampshire not very far from Jaffrey. The little girl
was taught by her father, and was later sent to the academy at
New Ipswich, New Hampshire, to the high school at Lowell, and to
Mt. Holyoke Seminary, where she was graduated. After leaving
Mt. Holyoke, she taught at Oxford, Ohio, and she was at one time
the principal of the Woman's Department of Knox College, Illinois.
In the early '70's this was a career of some distinction, for a
woman, and Mr. Durant was justified in thinking that he had found
the suitable executive head for his college. We hear of his saying,
"I have been four years looking for a president. She will be a
target to be shot at, and for the present the position will be one
of severe trials."
Miss Howard came to Wellesley in 1875, giving up a private school
of her own, Ivy Hall, in Bridgeton, New Jersey, in order to become
a college president. No far-seeing policies can be traced to her,
however; she seems to have been content to press her somewhat
narrow and rigid conception of discipline upon a more or less
restive student body, and to follow Mr. Durant's lead in all matters
pertaining to scholarship and academic expansion.
We can trace that expansion from year to year through this first
administration. In 1877 the Board of Visitors was established,
and eminent educators and clergymen were invited to visit the
college at stated intervals and stimulate by their criticism the
college routine. In 1878 the Students' Aid Society was founded
to help the many young women who were in need of a college training,
but who could not afford to pay their own way. Through the wise
generosity of Mrs. Durant and a group of Boston women, the society
was set upon its feet, and its long career of blessed usefulness
was begun. This is only one of the many gifts which Wellesley
owes to Mrs. Durant. As Professor Katharine Lee Bates has said
in her charming sketch of Mrs. Durant in the Wellesley Legenda
for 1894: "Her specific gifts to Wellesley it is impossible to
completely enumerate. She has forgotten, and no one else ever
knew. So long as Mr. Durant was living, husband and wife were
one and inseparable in service and donation. But since his death,
while it has been obvious that she spends herself unsparingly in
college cares, adding many of his functions to her own, a
continuous flow of benefits, almost unperceived, has come to
Wellesley from her open hand." As long as her health permitted,
she lavished "her very life in labor of hand and brain for Wellesley,
even as her husband lavished his."
In 1878 the Teachers' Registry was also established, a method of
registration by which those students who expected to teach might
bring their names and qualifications before the schools of the
country. But the most important academic events of this year,
and those which reacted directly upon the intellectual life of
the college, were the establishment of the Physics laboratory,
under the careful supervision of Professor Whiting, and the
endowment of the Library by Professor Eben N. Horsford of Cambridge.
This endowment provided a fund for the purchase of new books and
for various expenses of maintenance, and was only one of the many
gifts which Wellesley was to receive from this generous benefactor.
Another gift, of this year, was the pipe organ, presented by
Mr. William H. Groves, for the College Hall Chapel. Later, when
the new Memorial Chapel was built, this organ was removed to
Billings Hall, the concert room of the Department of Music.
On June 24, 1879, Wellesley held her first Commencement exercises,
with a graduating class of eighteen and an address by the Reverend
Richard S. Storrs, D.D., on the "Influence of Woman in the Future."
In 1880, on May 27, the corner stone of Stone Hall was laid, the
second building on the college campus. It was the gift of Mrs.
Valeria G. Stone, and was intended, in the beginning, as a dormitory
for the "teacher specials." Doctor William A. Willcox of Malden,
a devoted trustee of Wellesley from 1878 to 1904, and a relative
of Mrs. Stone, was influential in securing this gift for the college,
and it was he who first turned the attention of Mr. and Mrs. Durant
to the needs of the women who had already been engaged in teaching,
but who wished to fit themselves for higher positions by advanced
work in one or more particular directions. At first, there were
a good many of them, and even as late as 1889 and 1890 there were
a few still in evidence; but gradually, as the number of regular
students increased, and accommodations became more limited, and
as opportunities for college training multiplied, these "T. Specs."
as they were irreverently dubbed by the undergraduates, disappeared,
and Stone Hall has for many years been filled with students in
regular standing.
On June 10, 1880, the corner stone of Music Hall was laid; the
inscription in the stone reads: "The College of Music is dedicated
to Almighty God with the hope that it will be used in his service."
There are added the following passages from the Bible:
"Trust ye in the Lord forever: for in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting
strength." Isaiah, 26: 4.
"Sing praises to God, sing praises:
Sing praises unto our King, sing praises.
For God is the King of all the earth." Psalms, 47: 6-7.
The building was given by the founders.
The year 1881 is marked by the closing, in June, of Wellesley's
preparatory department, another intellectual advance. In June
also, on the tenth, the corner stone of Simpson Cottage was laid.
The building was the gift of Mr. Michael Simpson, and has been
used since 1908 as the college hospital. In the autumn of 1881,
Stone Hall and Waban Cottage--the latter another gift from the
founders were opened for students.
On October 3, 1881, Mr. Durant died, and shortly afterwards
Miss Howard resigned. After leaving Wellesley, she lived in
Methuen, Massachusetts, and in Brooklyn, New York, where she
died, March 3, 1907. Mrs. Marion Pelton Guild, of the class of
'80, says of Miss Howard, in an article on Wellesley written for
the New England Magazine, October, 1914, that "she was in the
difficult position of the nominal captain, who is in fact only a
lieutenant. Yet she held it with a true self-respect, honoring
the fiery genius of her leader, if she could not always follow
its more startling fights; and not hesitating to withstand him in
his most positive plans, if her long practical experience suggested
that it was necessary." From Mt. Holyoke, her Alma Mater,
Miss Howard received, in the latter part of her life, the honorary
degree of Doctor of Letters.
II.
Wellesley's second president, Alice E. Freeman, is, of all the six,
the one most widely known. Her magnetic personality, her continued
and successful efforts during her administration to bring Wellesley
out of its obscurity and into the public eye, her extended activity
in educational matters after her marriage, gave her a prominence
throughout the country which was surpassed by very few women of
her generation. And her husband's reverent and poetical
interpretation of her character has secured for her reputation a
literary permanence unusual to the woman of affairs who "wrote
no books and published only half a dozen articles", and whose many
public addresses were never written.
It is from Professor Palmer's "Life of Alice Freeman Palmer",
published by the Houghton Mifflin Co., that the biographical
material for the brief sketch following is derived.
Alice Elvira Freeman was born at Colesville, Broome County, New York,
on February 21, 1855. She was a country child, a farmer's daughter
as her mother was before her. James Warren Freeman, the father,
was of Scottish blood. His mother was a Knox, and his maternal
grandfather was James Knox of Washington's Life Guard. James Freeman
was, as we should expect, an elder of the Presbyterian church.
The mother, Elizabeth Josephine Higley, "had unusual executive
ability and a strong disposition to improve social conditions
around her. She interested herself in temperance, and in legislation
for the better protection of women and children." Their little
daughter Alice, the eldest of four children, taught herself to
read when she was three years old, and we find her going to school
at the age of four. When she was seven, her father, urged by his
wife, decided to be a physician, and during his two years' absence
at the Albany medical school, Mrs. Freeman supported him and the
four little children. The incident helps us to understand the
ambition and determination of the seventeen-year-old daughter
when she declared in the face of her parents' opposition, "that
she meant to have a college degree if it took her till she was
fifty to get it. If her parents could help her, even partially,
she would promise never to marry until she had herself put her
brother through college and given to each of her sisters whatever
education they might wish--a promise subsequently performed."
And the girl had her own ideas about the kind of college she meant
to attend. It must be a real college. Mt. Holyoke she rejected
because it was a young ladies' seminary, and Elmira and Vassar
fell under the same suspicion, in her mind, although they were
nominally colleges. She chose Michigan, the strongest of the
coeducational colleges, and she entered only two years after its
doors were opened to women.
She did not enter in triumph, however; the academy at Windsor,
New York, where she had gone to school after her father became
a physician, was good at supplying "general knowledge" but "poorly
equipped for preparing pupils for college", and Doctor Freeman's
daughter failed to pass her entrance examinations for Michigan
University. President Angell tells the story sympathetically in
"The Life", as follows:
"In 1872, when Alice Freeman presented herself at my office,
accompanied by her father, to apply for admission to the university,
she was a simple, modest girl of seventeen. She had pursued her
studies in the little academy at Windsor. Her teacher regarded
her as a child of much promise, precocious, possessed of a bright,
alert mind, of great industry, of quick sympathies, and of an
instinctive desire to be helpful to others. Her preparation for
college had been meager, and both she and her father were doubtful
of her ability to pass the required examinations. The doubts were
not without foundation. The examiners, on inspecting her work,
were inclined to decide that she ought to do more preparatory work
before they could accept her. Meantime I had had not a little
conversation with her and her father, and had been impressed with
her high intelligence. At my request the examiners decided to
allow her to enter on a trial of six weeks. I was confident she
would demonstrate her capacity to go on with her class. I need
hardly add that it was soon apparent to her instructors that my
confidence was fully justified. She speedily gained and constantly
held an excellent position as a scholar."
President Angell is of course using the term "scholar" in its
undergraduate connotation for, as Professor Palmer has been careful
to state, "In no field of scholarship was she eminent." Despite
her eagerness for knowledge, her bent was for people rather than
for books; for what we call the active and objective life, rather
than for the life of thought. Wellesley has had her scholar
presidents, but Miss Freeman was not one of them. This friendly,
human temper showed itself early in her college days. To quote
again from President Angell: "One of her most striking characteristics
in college was her warm and demonstrative sympathy with her circle
of friends.... Without assuming or striving for leadership, she
could not but be to a certain degree a leader among these, some
of whom have since attained positions only less conspicuous for
usefulness than her own.... No girl of her time on withdrawing
from college would have been more missed than she."
It is for this eagerness in friendship, this sympathetic and
helpful interest in the lives of others that Mrs. Palmer is especially
remembered at Wellesley. Her own college days made her quick
to understand the struggles and ambitions of other girls who were
hampered by inadequate preparation, or by poverty. Her husband
tells us that, "When a girl had once been spoken to, however
briefly, her face and name were fixed on a memory where each
incident of her subsequent career found its place beside the
original record." And he gives the following incident as told
by a superintendent of education.
"Once after she had been speaking in my city, she asked me to stand
beside her at a reception. As the Wellesley graduates came forward
to greet her--there were about eighty of them--she said something
to each which showed that she knew her. Some she called by their
first names; others she asked about their work, their families,
or whether they had succeeded in plans about which they had
evidently consulted her. The looks of pleased surprise which
flashed over the faces of those girls I cannot forget. They
revealed to me something of Miss Freeman's rich and radiant life.
For though she seemed unconscious of doing anything unusual, and
for her I suppose it was usual, her own face reflected the happiness
of the girls and showed a serene joy in creating that happiness."
Her husband, in his analysis of her character, has a remarkable
passage concerning this very quality of disinterestedness. He says:
"Her moral nature was grounded in sympathy. Beginning early, the
identification of herself with others grew into a constant habit,
of unusual range and delicacy.... Most persons will agree that
sympathy is the predominantly feminine virtue, and that she who
lacks it cannot make its absence good by any collection of other
worthy qualities. In a true woman sympathy directs all else. To
find a virtue equally central in a man we must turn to truthfulness
or courage. These also a woman should possess, as a man too
should be sympathetic; but in her they take a subordinate place,
subservient to omnipresent sympathy. Within these limits the
ampler they are, the nobler the woman.
"I believe Mrs. Palmer had a full share of both these manly
excellences, and practiced them in thoroughly feminine fashion.
She was essentially true, hating humbug in all its disguises....
Her love of plainness and distaste for affectation were forms of
veracity. But in narrative of hers one got much besides plain
realities. These had their significance heightened by her eager
emotion, and their picturesqueness by her happy artistry.... Of
course the warmth of her sympathy cut off all inclination to
falsehood for its usual selfish purpose. But against generous
untruth she was not so well guarded. Kindness was the first
thing.... Tact too, once become a habit, made adaptation to the
mind addressed a constant concern. She had extraordinary skill
in stuffing kindness with truth; and into a resisting mind could
without irritation convey a larger bulk of unwelcome fact than
any one I have known. But that insistence on colorless statement
which in our time the needs of trade and science have made current
among men, she did not feel. Lapses from exactitude which do not
separate person from person she easily condoned."
Surely the manly virtues of truthfulness and courage could be no
better exemplified than in the writing of this passage. Whether
his readers, especially the women, will agree with Professor Palmer
that, in woman, truthfulness and courage "take a subordinate place,
subservient to omnipresent sympathy", is a question.
Between 1876 when she was graduated from Michigan, and 1879 when
she went to Wellesley, Miss Freeman taught with marked success,
first at a seminary in the town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where
she had charge of the Greek and Latin; and later as assistant
principal of the high school at Saginaw in Northern Michigan. Here
she was especially successful in keeping order among unruly pupils.
The summer of 1877 she spent in Ann Arbor, studying for a higher
degree, and although she never completed the thesis for this work,
the university conferred upon her the degree of Ph.D. in 1882, the
first year of her presidency at Wellesley.
In this same summer of 1877, when she was studying at Ann Arbor,
she received her first invitation to teach at Wellesley. Mr. Durant
offered her an instructorship in Mathematics, which she declined.
In 1878 she was again invited, this time to teach Greek, but her
sister Stella was dying, and Miss Freeman, who had now settled
her entire family at Saginaw, would not leave them. In June, 1879,
the sister died, and in July Miss Freeman became the head of the
Department of History at Wellesley, at the age of twenty-four.
Mr. Durant's attention had first been drawn to her by her good
friend President Angell, and he had evidently followed her career
as a teacher with interest. There seems to have been no abatement
in his approval after she went to Wellesley. We are told that they
did not always agree, but this does not seem to have affected
their mutual esteem. In her first year, Mr. Durant is said to have
remarked to one of the trustees, "You see that little dark-eyed
girl? She will be the next president of Wellesley." And before
he died, he made his wishes definitely known to the board.
At a meeting of the trustees, on November 15, 1881, Miss Freeman
was appointed vice president of the college and acting president
for the year. She was then twenty-six years of age and the youngest
professor in the college. In 1882 she became president.
During the next six years, Wellesley's growth was as normal as
it was rapid. This is a period of internal organization which
achieved its most important result in the evolution of the Academic
Council. "In earlier days," we are told by Professor Palmer,
"teachers of every rank met in the not very important faculty
meetings, to discuss such details of government or instruction as
were not already settled by Mr. Durant." But even then the faculty
was built up out of departmental groups, that is, "all teachers
dealing with a common subject were banded together under a head
professor and constituted a single unit," and, as Mrs. Guild tells
us, Miss Freeman "naturally fell to consulting the heads of
departments as the abler and more responsible members of the
faculty," instead of laying her plans before the whole faculty at
its more or less cumbersome weekly meetings. From this inner
circle of heads of departments the Academic Council was gradually
evolved. It now includes the president, the dean, professors,
associate professors (unless exempted by a special tenure of
office), and such other officers of instruction and administration
as may be given this responsibility by vote of the trustees.
Miss Freeman also "began the formation of standing committees
of the faculty on important subjects, such as entrance examinations,
graduate work, preparatory schools, etc."
This faculty, over which Miss Freeman presided, was a notable one,
a body of women exhibiting in marked degree those qualities and
virtues of the true pioneer: courage, patience, originality,
resourcefulness, and vision. There were strong groups from
Ann Arbor and Oberlin and Mt. Holyoke, and there was a fourth
group of "pioneer scholars, not wholly college bred, but enriched
with whatever amount of academic training they could wring or charm
from a reluctant world, whom Wellesley will long honor and revere."
With the organization of the faculty came also the organization
of the college work. Entrance examinations were made more severe.
Greek had been first required for entrance in 1881. A certificate
of admission was drawn up, stating exactly what the candidate had
accomplished in preparation for college. Courses of study were
standardized and simplified. In 1882, the methods of Bible study
were reorganized, and instead of the daily classes, to which no
serious study had been given, two hours a week of "examinable
instruction" were substituted. In this year also the gymnasium
was refitted under the supervision of Doctor D. A. Sargent of Harvard.
Miss Freeman's policy of establishing preparatory schools which
should be "feeders" for Wellesley was of the greatest importance
to the college at this time, as "in only a few high schools were
the girls allowed to join classes which fitted boys for college."
When Miss Freeman became president, Dana Hall was the only Wellesley
preparatory school in existence; but in 1884, through her efforts,
an important school was opened in Philadelphia, and before the end
of her presidency, she had been instrumental in furthering the
organization of fifteen other schools in different parts of the
country, officered for the most part by Wellesley graduates.
In this same year the Christian Association was organized. Its
history, bound up as it is with the student life, will be given
more fully in a later chapter, but we must not forget that Miss
Freeman gave the association its initial impulse and established
its broad type.
In 1884 also, we find Wellesley petitioning before the committee
on education at the State House in Boston, to extend its holdings
from six hundred thousand dollars to five million dollars, and
gaining the petition.
On June 22, 1885, the corner stone of the Decennial Cottage,
afterwards called Norumbega, was laid. The building was given
by the alumnae, aided by Professor Horsford, Mr. E. A. Goodenow
and Mr. Elisha S. Converse of the Board of Trustees. Norumbega
was for many years known as the President's House, for here
Miss Freeman, Miss Shafer, and Mrs. Irvine lived. In the academic
year 1901-02, when Miss Hazard built the house for herself and
her successors, the president's modest suite in Norumbega was
set free for other purposes.
In 1886, Norumbega was opened, and in June of that year, the
Library Festival was held to celebrate Professor Horsford's many
benefactions to the college. These included the endowment of the
Library, an appropriation for scientific apparatus, and a system
of pensions.
In a letter to the trustees, dated January 1, 1886, the donor
explains that the annual appropriation for the library shall be
for the salaries of the librarian and assistants, for books for
the library, and for binding and repairs. That the appropriation
for scientific apparatus shall go toward meeting the needs of the
departments of Physics, Chemistry, Botany, and Biology. And that
the System of Pensions shall include a Sabbatical Grant, and a
"Salary Augment and Pension." By the Sabbatical Grant, the heads
of certain departments are able to take a year of travel and
residence abroad every seventh year on half salary. The donor
stipulated, however, that "the offices contemplated in the grants
and pensions must be held by ladies."
In his memorable address on this occasion, Professor Horsford
outlines his ideal for the library which he generously endowed:
"But the uses of books at a seat of learning reach beyond the wants
of the undergraduates. The faculty need supplies from the daily
widening field of literature. They should have access to the
periodical issues of contemporary research and criticism in the
various branches of knowledge pertaining to their individual
departments. In addition to these, the progressive culture of an
established college demands a share in whatever adorns and ennobles
scholarly life, and principally the opportunity to know something
of the best of all the past,--the writers of choice and rare books.
To meet this demand there will continue to grow the collections in
specialties for bibliographical research, which starting like the
suite of periodicals with the founder, have been nursed, as they
will continue to be cherished, under the wise direction of the
Library Council. Some of these will be gathered in concert, it
may be hoped, with neighboring and venerable and hospitable
institutions, that costly duplicates may be avoided; some will be
exclusively our own.
"To these collections of specialties may come, as to a joint
estate in the republic of letters, not alone the faculty of the
college, but such other persons of culture engaged in literary
labor as may not have found facilities for conducting their
researches elsewhere, and to whom the trustees may extend invitation
to avail themselves of the resources of our library."
These ideals of scholarship and hospitality the Wellesley College
Library never forgets. Her Plimpton collection of Italian manuscripts
is a treasure-house for students of the Italy of the Middle Ages
and Renaissance; and her alumnae, as well as scholars from other
colleges and other lands, are given every facility for study.
In 1887, two dormitories were added to the college: Freeman Cottage,
the gift of Mrs. Durant, and the Eliot, the joint gift of Mrs. Durant
and Mr. H. H. Hunnewell. Originally the Eliot had been used as
a boarding-house for the young women working in a shoe factory
at that time running in Wellesley village, but after Mrs. Durant
had enlarged and refurnished it, students who wished to pay a part
of their expenses by working their way through college were boarded
there. Some years later it was again enlarged, and used as a
village-house for freshmen.
In December, 1887, Miss Freeman resigned from Wellesley to marry
Professor George Herbert Palmer of Harvard; but her interest in
the college did not flag, and during her lifetime she continued
to be a member of the Board of Trustees. From 1892 to 1895 she
held the office of Dean of Women of the University of Chicago; and
Radcliffe, Bradford Academy, and the International Institute for
Girls, in Spain, can all claim a share in her fostering interest.
From 1889 until the end of her life, she was a member of the
Massachusetts Board of Education, having been appointed by
Governor Ames and reappointed by Governor Greenhalge and Governor
Crane.
In addition to the degree of Ph.D. received from Michigan in 1882,
Miss Freeman received the honorary degree of Litt.D. from Columbia
in 1887, and in 1895 the honorary degree of LL.D., from Union
University.
What she meant to the women who were her comrades at Wellesley
in those early days--the women who held up her hands--is expressed
in an address by Professor Whiting at the memorial service held
in the chapel in December, 1903:
"I think of her in her office, which was also her private parlor,
with not even a skilled secretary at first, toiling with all the
correspondence, seeing individual girls on academic and social
matters, setting them right in cases of discipline, interviewing
members of the faculty on necessary plans. The work was overwhelming
and sometimes her one assistant would urge her, late in the
evening, to nibble a bite from a tray which, to save time, had
been sent in to her room at the dinner hour, only to remain
untouched.... No wonder that professors often left their lectures
to be written in the wee small hours, to help in uncongenial
administrative work, which was not in the scope of their recognized
duties."
The pathos of her death in Paris, in December, 1902, came as a
shock to hundreds of people whose lives had been brightened by
her eager kindliness; and her memory will always be especially
cherished by the college to which she gave her youth. The beautiful
memorial in the college chapel will speak to generations of
Wellesley girls of this lovable and ardent pioneer.
III.
Wellesley's debt to her third president, Helen A. Shafer, is
nowhere better defined than in the words of a distinguished alumna,
Sophonisba P. Breckenridge, writing on Miss Shafer's administration,
in the Wellesley College News of November 2, 1901. Miss
Breckenridge says:
It is said that in a great city on the shore of a western
lake the discovery was made one day that the surface of the
water had gradually risen and that stately buildings on the
lake front designed for the lower level had been found both
misplaced and inadequate to the pressure of the high level.
They were fair without, well proportioned and inviting; but
they were unsteady and their collapse was feared. To take
them down seemed a great loss: to leave them standing as
they were was to expose to certain perils those who came and
went within them. They proved to be the great opportunity of
the engineer. He first, without interrupting their use, or
disturbing those who worked within, made them safe and sure
and steady, able to meet the increased pressure of the higher
level, and then, likewise without interfering with the day's
work of any man, by skillful hidden work, adapted them to
the new conditions by raising their level in corresponding
measure. The story told of that engineer's great achievement
in the mechanical world has always seemed applicable to the
service rendered by Miss Shafer to the intellectual structure
of Wellesley.
Under the devoted and watchful supervision of the founders,
and under the brilliant direction of Miss Freeman, brave plans
had been drawn, honest foundations laid and stately walls
erected. The level from which the measurements were taken
was no low level. It was the level of the standard of
scholarship for women as it was seen by those who designed
the whole beautiful structure. To its spacious shelter were
tempted women who had to do with scholarly pursuits and girls
who would be fitted for a life upon that plane. But during
those first years that level itself was rising, and by its
rising the very structure was threatened with instability if
not collapse. And then she came. Much of the work of her
short and unfinished administration was quietly done; making
safe unsafe places, bringing stability where instability was
shown, requires hidden, delicate, sure labor and absorbed
attention. That labor and that attention she gave. It required
exact knowledge of the danger, exact fitting of the brace to
the rift. That she accomplished until the structure was again
fit. And then, by fine mechanical devices, well adapted to
their uses, patiently but boldly used, she undertook to raise
the level of the whole, that under the new claims upon women
Wellesley might have as commanding a position as it had
assumed under the earlier circumstances. It was a very
definite undertaking to which she put her hand, which she was
not allowed to complete. So clearly was it outlined in her
mind, so definitely planned, that in the autumn of 1893, she
thought if she were allowed four years more she would feel
that her task was done and be justified in asking to surrender
to other hands the leadership. After the time at which this
estimate was made, she was allowed three months, and the hands
were stilled. But the hands had been so sure, the work so
skillful, the plans so intelligent and the purpose so wise
that the essence of the task was accomplished. The peril of
collapse had been averted and the level of the whole had been
forever raised. The time allowed was five short years, of
which one was wholly claimed by the demands of the frail body;
the situation presented many difficulties. The service, too,
was in many respects of the kind whose glory is in its
inconspicuousness and obscure character, a structure that
would stand when builders were gone, a device that would
serve its end when its inventor was no more.--These are her
contribution. And because that contribution was so well made,
it has been ever since taken for granted. Her administration
is little known and this is as she would have it--since it
means that the extent to which her services were needed is
likewise little realized. But to those who do know and who do
realize, it is a glorious memory and a glorious aspiration.
Rare delicacy of perception, keen sympathy, exquisite honesty,
scholarly attainment of a very high order, humility of that
kind which enables one to sit without mortification among the
lowly, without self-consciousness among the great--these are
some of the gifts which enabled her to do just the work she
did, at the time when just that contribution to the permanence
and dignity of Wellesley was so essential.
Miss Freeman's work we may characterize as, in its nature,
extensive. Miss Shafer's was intensive. The scholar and the
administrator were united in her personality, but the scholar
led. The crowning achievement of her administration was what was
then called "the new curriculum."
In the college calendars from 1876 to 1879, we find as many as
seven courses of study outlined. There was a General Course for
which the degree of B.A. was granted, with summa cum laude for
special distinction in scholarship. There were the courses for
Honors, in Classics, Mathematics, Modern Languages, and Science;
and students doing suitable work in them could be recommended for
the degree. These elective courses made a good showing on paper;
but it seems to have been possible to complete them by a minimum
of study. There were also courses in Music and Art, extending
over a period of five years instead of the ordinary four allotted
to the General Course. Under Miss Freeman, the courses for Honors
disappeared, and instead of the General Course there were substituted
the Classical Course, with Greek as an entrance requirement and
the degree of B.A. as its goal; and the Scientific Course, in which
knowledge of French or German was substituted for Greek at entrance,
and Mathematics was required through the sophomore year. The
student who completed this course received the degree of B.S.
The "new curriculum" substituted for the two courses, Classical
and Scientific, hitherto offered, a single course leading to the
degree of B.A. As Miss Shafer explains in her report to the
trustees for the year 1892-1893: "Thus we cease to confer the
B.S. for a course not essentially scientific, and incapable of
becoming scientific under existing circumstances, and we offer
a course broad and strong, containing, as we believe, all the
elements, educational and disciplinary, which should pertain to
a course in liberal arts."
Further modifications of the elective system were introduced
in a later administration, but the "new curriculum" continues to
be the basis of Wellesley's academic instruction.
Time and labor were required to bring about these readjustments.
The requirements for admission had to be altered to correspond
with the new system, and the Academic Council spent three years
in perfecting the curriculum in its new form.
Miss Shafer's own department, Mathematics, had already been brought
up to a very high standard, and at one time the requirements for
admission to Wellesley were higher in Mathematics than those for
Harvard. Under Miss Shafer also, the work in English Composition
was placed on a new basis; elective courses were offered to seniors
and juniors in the Bible Department; a course in Pedagogy, begun
toward the end of Miss Freeman's residency, was encouraged and
increased; the laboratory of Physiological Psychology, the first
in a woman's college and one of the earliest in any college, was
opened in 1891 with Professor Calkins at its head. In all,
sixty-seven new courses were opened to the students in these five
years. The Academic Council, besides revising the undergraduate
curriculum, also revised its rules governing the work of candidates
for the Master's degree.
But the "new curriculum" is not the only achievement for which
Wellesley honors Miss Shafer. In June, 1892, she recommended
to the trustees that the alumnae be represented upon the board,
and the recommendation was accepted and acted upon by the trustees.
In 1914, about one fifth of the trustees were alumnae.
Professor Burrell, Miss Shafer's student, and later her colleague
in the Department of Mathematics, says:
"From the first she felt a genuine interest in all sides of the
social life of the students, sympathized with their ambitions and
understood the bearing of them on the development of the right
spirit in the college." And the members of the Greek letter
societies bear her in especial remembrance, for it was she who
aided in the reestablishing in 1889 of the societies Phi Sigma
and Zeta Alpha, which had been suppressed in 1880, under Miss Howard.
In 1889 also the Art Society, later known as Tau Zeta Epsilon, was
founded; in 1891, the Agora, the political society, came into
being, and 1892 saw the beginnings of Alpha Kappa Chi, the classical
society. Miss Shafer also approved and fostered the department
clubs which began to be formed at this time. And to her wise and
sympathetic assistance we owe the beginnings of the college
periodicals,--the old Courant, of 1888, the Prelude, which began
in 1889, and the first senior annual, the Legenda of 1889.
The old boarding-school type of discipline which had flourished
under Miss Howard, and lingered fitfully under Miss Freeman, gave
place in Miss Shafer's day to a system of cuts and excuses which
although very far from the self-government of the present day,
still fostered and respected the dignity of the students. At the
beginning of the academic year 1890-1891, attendance at prayers
in chapel on Sunday evening and Monday morning was made optional.
In this year also, seniors were given "with necessary restrictions,
the privilege of leaving college, or the town, at their own
discretion, whenever such absence did not take them from their
college duties." On September 12, 1893, the seniors began to
wear the cap and gown throughout the year.
Other notable events of these five years were the opening of the
Faculty Parlor on Monday, September 24, 1888, another of the gifts
of Professor Horsford, its gold and garlands now vanished never
to return; the dedication of the Farnsworth Art Building on
October 3, 1889, the gift of Mr. Isaac D. Farnsworth, a friend of
Mr. Durant; the presentation in this same year, by Mr. Stetson,
of the Amos W. Stetson collection of paintings; the opening, also
in 1889, of Wood Cottage, a dormitory built by Mrs. Caroline A. Wood;
the gift of a boathouse from the students, in 1893; and on Saturday,
January 28, 1893, the opening of the college post office. We
learn, through the president's report for 1892-1893, that during
this year four professors and one instructor were called to fill
professorships in other colleges and universities, with double the
salary which they were then receiving, but all preferred to remain
at Wellesley.
This custom of printing an annual report to the trustees may also
be said to have been inaugurated by Miss Shafer. It is true that
Miss Freeman had printed one such report at the close of her first
year, but not again. Miss Shafer's clear and dignified presentations
of events and conditions are models of their kind; they set the
standard which her successors have followed.
Of Miss Shafer's early preparation for her work we have but few
details. She was born in Newark, New Jersey, on September 23, 1839,
and her father was a clergyman of the Congregational church, of
mingled Scotch and German descent. Her parents moved out to
Oberlin when she was still a young girl, and she entered the college
and was graduated in 1863. The Reverend Frederick D. Allen of
Boston, who was a classmate of Miss Shafer's, tells us that there
were two courses at Oberlin in that day, the regular college course
and a parallel, four years' course for young women. It seems that
women were also admitted to the college course, but only a few
availed themselves of the privilege, and Miss Shafer was not one
of these. But Mr. Allen remembers her as "an excellent student,
certainly the best among the women of her class."
After graduating from Oberlin, she taught two years in New Jersey,
and then in the Olive Street High School in St. Louis for ten years,
"laying the foundation of her distinguished reputation as a teacher
of higher mathematics." Doctor William T. Harris, then superintendent
of public schools in St. Louis, and afterwards United States
Commissioner of Education, commended her very highly; and her
old students at Wellesley witness with enthusiasm to her remarkable
powers as a teacher. President Pendleton, who was one of those
old students, says:
"Doubtless there was no one of these who did not receive the news
of her appointment as president with something of regret. No one
probably doubted the wisdom of the choice, but all were unwilling
that the inspiration of Miss Shafer's teaching should be lost to
the future Wellesley students. Her record as president leaves
unquestioned her power in administrative work, yet all her students,
I believe, would say that Miss Shafer was preeminently a teacher.
"It was my privilege to be one of a class of ten or more students
who, during the last two years of their college life (1884-1886)
elected Miss Shafer's course in Mathematics. It is difficult to
give adequate expression to the impression which Miss Shafer made
as a teacher. There was a friendly graciousness in her manner of
meeting a class which established at once a feeling of sympathy
between student and teacher.... She taught us to aim at clearness
of thought and elegance of method; in short, to attempt to give
to our work a certain finish which belongs only to the scholar....
I believe that it has often been the experience of a Wellesley
girl, that once on her feet in Miss Shafer's classroom, she has
surprised herself by treating a subject more clearly than she
would have thought possible before the recitation. The explanation
of this, I think, lay in the fact that Miss Shafer inspired her
students with her own confidence in their intellectual powers."
When we realize that during the last ten years of her life she
was fighting tuberculosis, and in a state of health which, for
the ordinary woman, would have justified an invalid existence,
we appreciate more fully her indomitable will and selflessness.
During the winter of 1890-1891, she was obliged to spend some
months in Thomasville, Georgia, and in her absence the duties of
her office devolved upon Professor Frances E. Lord, the head
of the Department of Latin, whose sympathetic understanding of
Miss Shafer's ideals enabled her to carry through the difficult
year with signal success. Miss Shafer rallied in the mild climate,
and probably her life would have been prolonged if she had chosen
to retire from the college; but her whole heart was in her work,
and undoubtedly if she had known that her coming back to Wellesley
meant only two more years of life on earth, she would still have
chosen to return.
Miss Shafer had no surface qualities, although her friends knew
well the keen sense of humor which hid beneath that grave and
rather awkward exterior. But when the alumnae who knew her speak
of her, the words that rise to their lips are justice, integrity,
sympathy. She was an honorary member of the class of 1891, and
on December 8, 1902, her portrait, painted by Kenyon Cox, was
presented to the college by the Alumnae Association.
Miss Shafer's academic degrees were from Oberlin, the M.A. in 1877
and the LL.D. in 1893.
Mrs. Caroline Williamson Montgomery (Wellesley, '89), in a memorial
sketch written for the '94 Legenda says: "I have yet to find the
Wellesley student who could not and would not say, 'I can always
feel sure of the fairness of Miss Shafer's decision.' Again and
again have Wellesley students said, 'She treats us like women,
and knows that we are reasoning beings.' Often she has said,
'I feel that one of Wellesley's strongest points is in her alumnae.'
And once more, because of this confidence, the alumnae, as when
students, were spurred to do their best, were filled with loyalty
for their alma mater.... If I should try to formulate an expression
of that life in brief, I should say that in her relation to the
students there was perfect justness; as regards her own position,
a passion for duty; as regards her character, simplicity, sincerity,
and selflessness."
For more than sixteen years, from 1877, when she came to the
college as head of the Department of Mathematics, to January 20,
1894, when she died, its president, she served Wellesley with all
her strength, and the college remains forever indebted to her
high standards and wise leadership.
IV.
In choosing Mrs. Irvine to succeed Miss Shafer as president of
Wellesley, the trustees abandoned the policy which had governed
their earlier choices. Miss Freeman and Miss Shafer had been
connected with the college almost from the beginning. They had
known its problems only from the inside. Mrs. Irvine was, by
comparison, a newcomer; she had entered the Department of Greek
as junior professor in 1890. But almost at once her unusual
personality made its impression, and in the four years preceding
her election to the presidency, she had arisen, as it were in spite
of herself, to a position of power both in the classroom and in
the Academic Council. As an outsider, her criticism, both constructive
and destructive, was peculiarly stimulating and valuable; and even
those who resented her intrusion could not but recognize the noble
disinterestedness of her ideal for Wellesley.
The trustees were quick to perceive the value to the college of
this unusual combination of devotion and clearsightedness, detachment
and loving service. They also realized that the junior professor
of Greek was especially well fitted to complete and perfect the
curriculum which Miss Shafer had so ably inaugurated. For Mrs. Irvine
was before all else a scholar, with a scholar's passion for
rectitude and high excellence in intellectual standards.
Julia Josephine (Thomas) Irvine, the daughter of Owen Thomas and
Mary Frame (Myers) Thomas, was born at Salem, Ohio, November 9,
1848. Her grandparents, strong abolitionists, are said to have
moved to the middle west from the south because they became
unwilling to live in a slave state. Mrs. Irvine's mother was the
first woman physician west of the Alleghenies, and her mother's
sister also studied medicine. Mrs. Irvine's student life began at
Antioch College, Ohio, but later she entered Cornell University,
receiving her bachelor's degree in 1875. In the same rear she
was married to Charles James Irvine. In 1876, Cornell gave her
the degree of Master of Arts. After her husband's death in 1886,
Mrs. Irvine entered upon her career as a teacher, and in 1890 came
to Wellesley, where her success in the classroom was immediate.
Students of those days will never forget the vitality of her
teaching, the enthusiasm for study which pervaded her classes.
Wellesley has had her share of inspiring teachers, and among these
Mrs. Irvine was undoubtedly one of the most brilliant.
The new president assumed her office reluctantly, and with the
understanding that she should be allowed to retire after a brief
term of years, when "the exigencies which suggested her appointment
had ceased to exist." She knew the college, and she knew herself.
With certain aspects of the Wellesley life she could never be
entirely in accord. She was a Hicksite Quaker. The Wellesley
of the decade 1890-1900 had moved a long way from the evangelical
revivalism which had been Mr. Durant's idea of religion, but it was
not until 1912 that the Quaker students first began to hold their
weekly meetings in the Observatory. About this time also, through
the kind offices of the Wellesley College Christian Association,
a list of the Roman Catholic students then in college was given
to the Roman Catholic parish priest. That the trustees in 1895
were willing to trust the leadership of the college to a woman
whose religious convictions differed so widely from those of the
founder indicates that even then Wellesley was beginning to outgrow
her religious provincialism, and to recognize that a wise tolerance
is not incompatible with steadfast Christian witness.
The religious services which Mrs. Irvine, in her official capacity,
conducted for the college were impressive by their simplicity and
distinction. An alumna of 1897 writes: "That commanding figure
behind the reading-desk of the old chapel in College Hall made
every one, in those days, rejoice when she was to lead the morning
service." But the trustees, anxious to set her free for the academic
side of her work, which now demanded the whole of her time,
appointed a dean to relieve her of such other duties as she desired
to delegate to another. This action was made possible by amendment
of the statutes, adopted November 1, 1894, and in 1895, Miss
Margaret E. Stratton, professor of the Department of Rhetoric, as
it was then called, was appointed the first dean of the college.
The trustees did not define the precise nature of the relation
between the president and the dean, but left these officers to
make such division of work as should seem to them best, and we
read in Mrs. Irvine's report for 1895 that, "For the present the
Dean remains in charge of all that relates to the public devotional
exercises of the college, and is chairman of the committee in
charge of stated religious services. She is the authority referred
to in all cases of ordinary discipline, and is the chairman of
the committee which includes heads of houses and permission
officers, all these officers are directly responsible to her."
Regarded from an intellectual and academic point of view, the
administrations of Miss Shafer and Mrs. Irvine are a unit.
Mrs. Irvine developed and perfected the policy which Miss Shafer
had initiated and outlined. By 1895, all students were working
under the new curriculum, and in the succeeding years the details
of readjustment were finally completed. To carry out the necessary
changes in the courses of study, certain other changes were also
necessary; methods of teaching which were advanced for the '70's
and '80's had been superseded in the '90's, and must be modified
or abandoned for Wellesley's best good. To all that was involved
in this ungrateful task, Mrs. Irvine addressed herself with a
courage and determination not fully appreciated at the time. She
had not Mrs. Palmer's skill in conveying unwelcome fact into a
resisting mind without irritation; neither had she Miss Shafer's
self-effacing, sympathetic patience. Her handling of situations
and individuals was what we are accustomed to call masculine; it
had, as the French say, the defects of its qualities; but the
general result was tonic, and Wellesley's gratitude to this firm
and far-seeing administrator increases with the passing of years.
In November, 1895, the Board of Trustees appointed a special
committee on the schools of Music and Art, in order to reorganize
the instruction in these subjects, and as a result the fine arts
and music were put upon the same footing and made regular electives
in the academic course, counting for a degree. The heads of these
departments were made members of the Academic Council and the terms
School of Music and School of Art were dropped from the calendar.
In 1896, the title Director of School of Music was changed to
Professor of Music. These changes are the more significant, coming
at this time, in the witness which they bear to the breadth and
elasticity of Mrs. Irvine's academic ideal. A narrower scholasticism
would not have tolerated them, much less pressed for their adoption.
Wellesley is one of the earliest of the colleges to place the fine arts
and music on her list of electives counting for an academic degree.
During the year 1895-1896, the Academic Council reviewed its rules
of procedure relating to the maintenance of scholarship throughout
the course, with the result that, "In order to be recommended
for the degree of B.A. a student must pass with credit in at least
one half of her college work and in at least one half of the
work of the senior year." This did not involve raising the actual
standard of graduation as reached by the majority of recent
graduates, but relieved the college of the obligation of giving
its degree to a student whose work throughout a large part of
her course did not rise above a mere passing grade.
In Mrs. Irvine's report for 1894-1895, we read that, "Modifications
have been made in the general regulations of the college by which
the observation of a set period of silent time for all persons is no
longer required." In the beginning, Mr. Durant had established
two daily periods of twenty minutes each, during which students
were required to be in their rooms, silent, in order that those
who so desired might give themselves to meditation, prayer, and
the reading of the Scriptures. Morning and evening, for fifteen
years, the "Silent Bell" rang, and the college houses were hushed
in literal silence. In 189 or 1890, the morning interval was
discontinued, but evening "silent time" was not done away with
until 1894, nineteen years after its establishment, and there are
many who regret its passing, and who realize that it was one of
the wisest and, in a certain sense, most advanced measures
instituted by Mr. Durant. But it was a despotic measure, and
therefore better allowed to lapse; for to the student mind,
especially of the late '80's and early '90's it was an attempt
to fetter thought, to force religion upon free individuals, to
prescribe times and seasons for spiritual exercises in which the
founder of the college had no right to concern himself. As
Wellesley's understanding of democracy developed, the faculty
realized that a rule of this kind, however wise in itself, cannot
be impressed from without; the demand for it must come from the
students themselves. Whether that demand will ever be made is
a question; but undoubtedly there is an increasing realization in
the college world of the need of systematized daily respite of
some sort from the pressure of unmitigated external activity; the
need of freedom for spiritual recollection in the midst of academic
and social business. It is a matter in which the Student Government
Association would have entire freedom of jurisdiction.
In 1896, Domestic Work was discontinued. This was a revolutionary
change, for Mr. Durant had believed strongly in the value of this
one hour a day of housework to promote democratic feeling among
students of differing grades of wealth; and he had also felt that
it made the college course cheaper, and therefore put its advantages
within the reach of the "calico girls" as he was so fond of calling
the students who had little money to spend. But domestic work,
even in the early days, as we see from Miss Stilwell's letters,
soon included more than the washing of dishes and sweeping of
corridors. Every department had its domestic girls, whose duties
ranged from those of incipient secretary to general chore girl.
The experience in setting college dinner tables or sweeping college
recitation rooms counted for next to nothing in equipping a student
to care for her own home; and the benefit to the "calico girls"
was no longer obvious, as the price of tuition had now been raised
several times. In May, 1894, the Academic Council voted "that
the council respectfully make known to the trustees that in their
opinion domestic work is a serious hindrance to the progress of
the college, and should as soon as possible be done away." But
it was not until the trustees found that the fees for 1896-1897
must be raised, that they decided to abolish domestic work.
Miss Shackford, in her pamphlet on College Hall, describes, "for
the benefit of those unfamiliar with the old regime," the system
of domestic work as it obtained during the first twenty years of
Wellesley's life. She tells us that it "brought all students into
close relation with kitchens, pantries and dining-room, with brooms,
dusters and other household utensils. Sweeping, dusting,
distributing the mail at the various rooms, and clerical work were
the favorite employments, although it is said the students always
showed great generosity in allowing the girls less strong to have
the lighter tasks. Sweeping the matting in the center of the
corridor before breakfast, or sweeping the bare 'sides' of this
matting after breakfast, were tasks that developed into sinecures.
The girl who went with long-handled feather duster to dust the
statuary enjoyed a distinction equal to Don Quixote's in tilting
at windmills. Filling the student-lamps, serving in a department
where clerical work was to be done, or, as in science, where
materials and specimens had to be prepared, were on the list
of possibilities. Sophomores in long aprons washed beakers and
slides, seniors in cap and gown acted as guides to guests. A
group of girls from each table changed the courses at meals.
Upon one devolved the task of washing whatever silver was required
for the next course. Another went out through the passage into the
room where heaters kept the meat and vegetables warm in their
several dishes. Perhaps another went further on to the bread-room,
where she might even be permitted to cut bread with the bread-cutting
machine. Dessert was always kept in the remote apartment where
Dominick Duckett presided, strumming a guitar, while his black
face had a portentous gravity as he assigned the desserts for
each table. What an ordeal it was for shy freshmen to rise and
walk the length of the dining-room! How many tables were kept
waiting for the next course while errant students surveyed the
sunset through the kitchen windows! Some of us remember the
tragic moments when, coming in hot and tired from crew practice,
we found on the bulletin-board by the dining-room the fateful words,
'strawberries for dinner', and we knew it was our lot to prepare
them for the table."
Other important changes in the college regulations were the opening
of the college library on Sunday as a reading-room, and the removal
of the ban upon the theater and the opera; both these changes took
place in 1895. On February 6, 1896, the clause of the statutes
concerning attendance at Sunday service in chapel was amended
to read, "All students are expected to attend this or some other
public religious service."
In 1896-1897, Bible Study was organized into a definite Department
of Biblical History, Literature, and Interpretation; and in the
same year voluntary classes for Bible Study were inaugurated by
the Christian Association and taught by the students.
The first step toward informing the students concerning their marks
and academic standing was taken in 1897, when the so-called
"credit-notes" were instituted, in which students were told whether
or not they had achieved Credit, grade C, in their individual
studies. Mr. Durant had feared that a knowledge of the marks
would arouse unworthy competition, but his fears have proved
unfounded.
In this administration also the financial methods of the college
were revised. Mrs. Irvine, we are reminded by Florence S. Marcy
Crofut, of the class of 1897, "established a system of management
and purchasing into which all the halls of residence were brought,
and this remains almost without change to the present day." On
March 27, 1895, Mrs. Durant resigned the treasurership of the
college, which she had held since her husband's death, and upon
her nomination, Mr. Alpheus H. Hardy was elected to the office.
In 1896, the trustees issued a report in which they informed the
friends of Wellesley that although Mr. Durant, in his will, had
made the college his residuary legatee, subject to a life tenancy,
the personal estate had suffered such depreciation and loss "as to
render this prospective endowment of too slight consequence to be
reckoned on in any plans for the development and maintenance of
the college." At this time, Wellesley was in debt to the amount
of $103,048.14. During the next nineteen years, trustees and
alumnae were to labor incessantly to pay the expenses of the
college and to secure an endowment fund. What Wellesley owes
to the unstinted devotion of Mr. Hardy during these lean years
can never be adequately expressed.
The buildings erected during Mrs. Irvine's tenure of office were
few. Fiske Cottage was opened in September, 1894, for the use
of students who wished to work their way through college. The
"cottage" had been originally the village grammar school, but when
Mr. Hunnewell gave a new schoolhouse to the village, the college
was able, through the generosity of Mrs. Joseph M. Fiske,
Mr. William S. Houghton, Mr. Elisha S. Converse, and a few other
friends, to move the old schoolhouse to the campus and remodel it
as a dormitory. In February, 1894, a chemical laboratory was built
under Norumbega hill,--an ugly wooden building, a distress to
all who care for Wellesley's beauty, and an unmistakable witness
to her poverty.
On November 22, 1897, the corner stone of the Houghton Memorial
Chapel was laid, a building destined to be one of the most
satisfactory and beautiful on the campus. It was given by
Miss Elizabeth G. Houghton and Mr. Clement S. Houghton of Cambridge
as a memorial of their father, Mr. William S. Houghton, for many
years a trustee of the college.
In 1898 Mrs. John C. Whitin, a trustee, gave to the college an
astronomical observatory and telescope. The building was completed
in 1900. Another gift of 1898, fifty thousand dollars, came from
the estate of the late Charles T. Wilder, and was used to build
Wilder Hall, the fourth dormitory in the group on Norumbega hill.
In 1898, the first of the Society houses, the Shakespeare House,
was opened.
On November 4, 1897, Mrs. Irvine presented before the Board of
Trustees a review of the history of the college under the new
curriculum, and a statement of urgent needs which had arisen.
She closed with a recommendation that her term of office should
end in June, 1898, as she believed that the necessities which had
led to her appointment no longer existed, and she recognized that
new demands pressed, which she was not fitted to meet. As Mrs. Irvine
had stated verbally, both to the Board of Trustees and to a committee
appointed by them to consider her recommendation, that she would
not serve under a permanent appointment, the committee "was limited
to the consideration of the time at which that recommendation
should become operative." They asked the president to change her
time of withdrawal to June, 1899, and she consented to do this,
with the provision that she was to be released from her duties
before the end of the year, if her successor were ready to assume
the duties of the office before June, 1899.
After her retirement from Wellesley, Mrs. Irvine made her home in
the south of France, but she returned to America in 1912 to be
present at the inauguration of President Pendleton. And in the
year 1913-1914, after the death of Madame Colin, she performed
a signal service for the college in temporarily assuming the
direction of the Department of French. Through her good offices,
the department was reorganized, but the New England winter had
proved too severe for her after her long sojourn in a milder
climate, and in 1914, Mrs. Irvine returned again to her home in
Southern France, bearing with her the love and gratitude of
Wellesley for her years of efficient and unselfish service.
During the war of 1914-1915, she had charge of the linen room
in the military hospital at Aix-les-Bains.
V.
On March 8, 1899, the trustees announced their election of Wellesley's
fifth president, Caroline Hazard. In June, Mrs. Irvine retired,
and the new administration dates from July 1, 1899.
Unlike her predecessors, Miss Hazard brought to her office no
technical academic training, and no experience as a teacher. Born
at Peacedale, Rhode Island, June 10, 1856, the daughter of Rowland
and Margaret (Rood) Hazard, and the descendant of Thomas Hazard,
the founder of Rhode Island, she had been educated by tutors and
in a private school in Providence, and later had carried on her
studies abroad. Before coming to Wellesley, she had already won
her own place in the annals of Rhode Island, as editor, by her
edition of the philosophical and economic writings of her grandfather,
Rowland G. Hazard, the wealthy woolen manufacturer of Peacedale,
as author, through a study of life in Narragansett in the eighteenth
century, entitled "Thomas Hazard, Son of Robert, called College Tom",
and as poet, in a volume of Narragansett ballads and a number of
religious sonnets, followed during her Wellesley years by "A Scallop
Shell of Quiet", verses of delicate charm and dignity.
Mrs. Guild has said that Miss Hazard came, "bringing the ease and
breadth of the cultivated woman of the world, who is yet an idealist
and a Christian, into an atmosphere perhaps too strictly scholastic."
But she also brought unusual executive ability and training in
administrative affairs, both academic and commercial, for her
father, aside from his manufacturing interests, was a member of
the corporation of Brown University. Hers is the type of intelligence
and power seen often in England, where women of her social position
have an interest in large issues and an instinct for affairs,
which American women of the same class have not evinced in
any arresting degree.
Miss Hazard's inauguration took place on October 3, 1899, in the
new Houghton Memorial Chapel, which had been dedicated on June 1
of that year. This was Wellesley's first formal ceremony of
inauguration, and the brilliant academic procession, moving among
the autumn trees between old College Hall and the Chapel, marked
the beginning of a new era of dignity and beauty for the college.
In the next ten years, under the winning encouragement of her
new president, Wellesley blossomed in courtesy and in all those
social graces and pleasant amenities of life which in earlier years
she had not always cultivated with sufficient zest. All of
Miss Hazard's influence went out to the dignifying and beautifying
of the life in which she had come to bear a part.
It is to her that Wellesley owes the tranquil beauty of the morning
chapel service. The vested choir of students, the order of
service, are her ideas, as are the musical vesper services and
festival vespers of Christmas, Easter, and Baccalaureate Sunday,
which Professor Macdougall developed so ably at her instigation.
By her efforts, the Chair of Music was endowed from the Billings
estate, and in December, 1903, Mr. Thomas Minns, the surviving
executor of the estate, presented the college with an additional
fifteen thousand dollars, of which two thousand dollars were set
aside as a permanent fund for the establishment of the Billings
prize, to be awarded by the president for excellence in
music,--including its theory and practice,--and the remainder was
used toward the erection of Billings Hall, a second music building
containing a much-needed concert hall and classrooms, completed
in 1904.
Miss Hazard's love of simple, poetical ceremonial did much to
increase the charm of the Wellesley life. Of the several hearth
fires which she kindled during the years when she kept Wellesley's
fires alight, the Observatory hearth-warming was perhaps the
most charming. The beautiful little building, given and equipped
by Mrs. Whitin, a trustee of the college, was formally opened
October 8, 1900, with addresses by Miss Hazard, Professor Pickering
of Harvard, and Professor Todd of Amherst. In the morning,
Miss Hazard had gone out into the college woods and plucked bright
autumn leaves to bind into a torch of life to light the fire on the
new hearth. Digitalis, sarsaparilla, eupatorium, she had chosen,
for the health of the body; a fern leaf for grace and beauty; the
oak and the elm for peace and the civic virtues; evergreen, pine,
and hemlock for the aspiring life of the mind and the eternity
of thought; rosemary for remembrance, and pansies for thoughts.
Firing the torch, she said, "With these holy associations we light
this fire, that from this building in which the sun and stars are
to be observed, true life may ever aspire with the flame to the
Author of all light."
Mrs. Whitin then took the lighted torch and kindled the hearth fire,
and as the pleasant, aromatic odor spread through the room,
the college choir sang the hearth song which Miss Hazard had
written for the occasion, and which was later burned in the wooden
panel above the hearth:
"Stars above that shine and glow,
Have their image here below;
Flames that from the earth arise,
Still aspiring seek the skies.
Upward with the flames we soar,
Learning ever more and more;
Light and love descend till we
Heaven reflected here shall see."
At the beginning of her term of office, Miss Hazard had requested
the trustees to make "a division of administrative duties somewhat
different from that before existing," as the technical knowledge
of courses of study and the wisdom to advise students as to such
courses required a special training and preparation which she did
not possess. It was therefore arranged that the dean should take
in charge the more strictly academic work, leaving Miss Hazard
free for "the general supervision of affairs, the external relations
of the college, and the home administration," and Professor Coman
of the Department of History and Economics consented to assume
the duties of dean for a year. At the end of the year, however,
Miss Hazard having now become thoroughly familiar with the financial
condition of the college, felt that retrenchments were necessary,
and asked the trustees to omit the appointment of a dean for the
year 1900-1901. The academic duties of the dean were temporarily
assumed in the president's office by the secretary of the college,
Miss Ellen F. Pendleton, and Professor Coman returned to her
teaching as head of the new Department of Economics, an office
which she held with distinction until her retirement as Professor
Emeritus in 1913.
Mrs. Guild reminds us that "the pressing problem which confronted
Miss Hazard was monetary. The financial history of Wellesley
College would be a volume in itself, as those familiar with the
struggles of unendowed institutions of like order can well realize....
The appointment during Mrs. Irvine's administration of a professional
treasurer, and the gradual accumulation of small endowments, were
helps in the right direction. The alumnae had early begun a series
of concerted efforts to aid their Alma Mater in solving her ever
present financial problem. Miss Hazard, in generous cooperation
with them and with the trustees, did especially valiant work in
clearing the college from its burden of debt; and during her
administration the treasurer's report shows an increase in the
college funds of $830,000." In round numbers, the gifts for
endowments and buildings during the period amounted to one million
three hundred six thousand dollars. Eleven buildings were erected
between 1900 and 1909: Wilder Hall and the Observatory were
completed in 1900; the President's House, Miss Hazard's gift, in
1902; Pomeroy and Billings Hall in 1904; Cazenove in 1905; the
Observatory House, another gift from Mrs. Whitin, 1906; Beebe, 1908;
Shafer, the Gymnasium, and the Library, in 1909.
During these years also, five professorial chairs were partially
endowed. The Chair of Economics in 1903; the Chair of Biblical
History, by Helen Miller Gould, in December, 1900, to be called
after her mother, the Helen Day Gould Professorship; the Chair of
Art, under the name of the Clara Bertram Kimball Professorship
of Art; the Chair of Music, from the Billings estate; the Chair
of Botany, by Mr. H.H. Hunnewell, January, 1901. And in 1908
and 1909, the arrangements with the Boston Normal School of
Gymnastics were completed, by which that school,--with an endowment
of one hundred thousand dollars and a gymnasium erected on the
Wellesley campus through the efforts of Miss Amy Morris Homans,
the director, and Wellesley friends,--became a part of Wellesley
College: the Department of Hygiene and Physical Education.
Among the notable gifts were the Alexandra Garden in the West
Quadrangle, given by an alumna in memory of her little daughter;
the beautiful antique marbles, presented by Miss Hannah Parker
Kimball to the Department of Art, in memory of her brother, M. Day
Kimball; and the Plimpton collection of Italian manuscripts and
early editions, given by George A. Plimpton in memory of his wife,
Frances Taylor Pearsons Plimpton, of the class of '84. Of romances
of chivalry, "those poems of adventure, the sources from which
Boiardo and Ariosto borrowed character and episodes for their real
poems," we have, according to Professor Margaret Jackson, their
curator, perhaps the largest collection in this country, and one of
the largest in the world. Many of these books are in rare or
unique editions. Of the editions of 1543, of Boiardo's "Innamorato"
only one other copy is known, that in the Royal Library at Stuttgart.
The 1527 edition of the "Orlando Furioso" was unknown until 1821,
when Count Nilzi described the copy in his collection. Of the
"Gigante Moronte", Wellesley has an absolutely unique copy.
A thirteenth-century commentary on Peter Lombard's "Sentences"
has marginal notes by Tasso, and a contemporary copy of Savonarola's
"Triumph of the Cross" shows on the title page a woodcut of the
frate writing in his cell. Bembo's "Asolini" a first edition,
contains autograph corrections. In 1912, Wellesley had the unusual
opportunity, which she unselfishly embraced, to return to the
National Library at Florence, Italy, a very precious Florentine
manuscript of the fourteenth century, containing the only known
copy of the Sirventes and other important historical verses of
Antonio Pucci.
The most important change in the college life at this time was
undoubtedly the establishment of the System of Student Government,
in 1901. As a student movement, this is discussed at length in
a later chapter, but Miss Hazard's cordial sympathy with all that
the change implied should be recorded here.
Among academic changes, the institution of the Honor Scholarships
is the most noteworthy. In 1901, two classes of honors for juniors
and seniors were established, the Durant Scholarship and the
Wellesley College Scholarship,--the Durant being the higher.
The names of those students attaining a certain degree of excellence,
according to these standards, are annually published; the honors
are non-competitive, and depend upon an absolute standard of
scholarship. At about the same time, honorary mention for freshmen
was also instituted.
On June 30, 1906, Miss Hazard sailed for Genoa, to take a well-earned
vacation. This was the first time that a president of Wellesley
had taken a Sabbatical year; the first time that any presidential
term had extended beyond six years. During Miss Hazard's absence,
Miss Pendleton, who had been appointed dean in 1901, conducted the
affairs of the college. On her return, May 20, 1907, Miss Hazard
was met at the Wellesley station by the dean and the senior class,
about two hundred and fifty students, and was escorted to the
campus by the presidents of the Student Government Association
and the senior class. The whole college had assembled to welcome
her, lining the avenue from the East Lodge to Simpson, and waving
their loving and loyal greetings. It was a touching little ceremony,
witnessing as it did to the place she held, and will always hold,
in the heart of the college.
In the spring of 1908 and the winter of 1909, Miss Hazard was
obliged to be absent, because of ill health, and again for a part
of 1910. In July, 1910, the trustees announced her resignation to
the faculty. No one has expressed more happily Miss Hazard's
service to the college than her successor in office, the friend
who was her dean and comrade in work during almost her entire
administration. In the dean's report for 1910 are these very
human and loving words:
"President Hazard's great service to the college during her eleven
years of office are evident to all in the way of increased endowment,
new buildings, additional departments and officers, advanced
salaries, improved organization and equipment; but those who have
had the privilege of working with her know that even these gains,
to which her personal generosity so largely contributed, are less
than the gifts of character which have brought into the midst of
our busy routine the graces of home and a far-pervading spirit of
loving kindness.
"Miss Hazard came to us a stranger, but by her gracious bearing
and charming hospitality, by her sympathetic interest and eagerness
to aid in the work of every department, together with a scrupulous
respect for what she was pleased to call the expert judgment of
those in charge, by the touches of beauty and gentleness accompanying
all that she did, from the enrichment of our chapel service to the
planting of our campus with daffodils, and by the essential
consecration of her life, she has so endeared herself to her faculty
that her resignation means to us not only the loss of an honored
president, but the absence of a friend."
Miss Hazard's honorary degrees are the A.M. from Michigan and
the Litt.D. from Brown University. She is also an honorary member
of the Eta chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, which was installed at
Wellesley on January 17, 1905.
VI.
On Thursday, October 19, 1911, Ellen Fitz Pendleton was inaugurated
president of Wellesley College in Houghton Memorial Chapel.
Professor Calkins, writing in the College News in regard to this
wise choice of the trustees, says: "There has been some discussion
of the wisdom of appointing a woman as college president. I may
frankly avow myself as one of those who have been little concerned
for the appointment of a woman as such. On general principles,
I would welcome the appointment of a man as the next president of
Bryn Mawr or Wellesley; and, similarly, I would as soon see a woman
at the head of Vassar or of Smith. But if our trustees, when
looking last year for a successor to Miss Hazard in her eminently
successful administration, had rejected the ideally endowed
candidate, solely because she was a woman, they would have indicated
their belief that a woman is unfitted for high administrative work.
The recent history of our colleges is a refutation of this conclusion.
The responsible corporation of a woman's college cannot possibly
take the ground that 'any man' is to be preferred to the rightly
equipped woman; to quote from The Nation, in its issue of June 22,
1911, 'if Wellesley, after its long tradition of women presidents,
and able women presidents, had turned from the appointment of a
woman, especially when a highly capable successor was at hand,
the decision would have meant... the adoption of the principle
of the ineligibility of women for the college presidency.... It is
an anomaly that women should be permitted to enter upon an
intellectual career and should not be permitted to look forward
to the natural rewards of successful labor.'"
Professor Calkins's personal tribute to Miss Pendleton's power
and personality is especially gracious and deserving of quotation,
coming as it does from a distinguished alumna of a sister college.
She writes:
"Miss Pendleton unites a detailed and thorough knowledge of the
history, the specific excellences, and the definite needs of
Wellesley College, with openness of mind, breadth of outlook and
the endowment for constructive leadership. No college procedure
seems to her to be justified by precedent merely; no curriculum
or legislation is, in her view, too sacred to be subject to revision.
Her wide acquaintance with the policies of other colleges and
with modern tendencies in education prompts her to constant
enlargement and modification, while her accurate knowledge of
Wellesley's conditions and her large patience are a check on the
too exuberant spirit of innovation. With Miss Pendleton as
president, the college is sure to advance with dignity and with
safety. She will do better than 'build up' the college, for she
will quicken and guide its growth from within.
"Fundamental to the professional is the personal equipment for
office. Miss Pendleton is unswervingly just, undauntedly generous,
and completely devoted to the college. Not every one realizes
that her reserve hides a sympathy as keen as it is deep, though
no one doubts this who has ever appealed to her for help. Finally,
all those who really know her are well aware that she is utterly
self-forgetful, or rather, that it does not occur to her to consider
any decision in its bearing on her own position or popularity.
This inability to take the narrowly personal point of view is,
perhaps, her most distinguishing characteristic....
"Miss Pendleton unquestionably conceives the office of college
president not as that of absolute monarch but as that of constitutional
ruler; not as that of master, but as that of leader. Readers of
the dean's report for the Sabbatical year of Miss Hazard's absence,
in which Miss Pendleton was acting president, will not have failed
to notice the spontaneous expression of this sense of comradeship
in Miss Pendleton's reference to the faculty."
Rhode Island has twice given a president to Wellesley, for Ellen
Fitz Pendleton was born at Westerly, on August 7, 1864, the daughter
of Enoch Burrowes Pendleton and Mary Ette (Chapman) Pendleton.
In 1882, she entered Wellesley College as a freshman, and since
that date, her connection with her Alma Mater has been unbroken.
Her classmates seem to have recognized her power almost at once,
for in June, 1883, at the end of her freshman year, we find her on
the Tree Day program as delivering an essay on the fern beech;
and she was later invited into the Shakespeare Society, at that
time Wellesley's one and only literary society. In 1886, Miss
Pendleton was graduated with the degree of B.A., and entered the
Department of Mathematics in the autumn of that year as tutor;
in 1888, she was promoted to an instructorship which she held
until 1901, with a leave of absence in 1889 and 1890 for study
at Newnham College, Cambridge, England. In 1891, she received
the degree of M.A. from Wellesley. Her honorary degrees are the
Litt.D. from Brown University in 1911, and the LL.D. from Mt. Holyoke
in 1912. In 1895, she was made Schedule Officer, in charge of
the intricate work involved in arranging and simplifying the
complicated yearly schedule of college class appointments. In
1897, she became secretary of the college and held this position
until 1901, when she was made dean and associate professor of
Mathematics. During Miss Hazard's absences and after Miss Hazard's
resignation in 1910, she served the college as acting president.
The announcement of her election to the presidency was made to
the college on June 9, 1911, by the president of the Board of
Trustees, and the joy with which it was received by faculty, alumna,
and students was as outspoken as it was genuine. And at her
inauguration, many who listened to her clear and simple exposition
of her conception of the function of a college must have rejoiced
anew to feel that Wellesley's ideals of scholarship were committed
to so safe and wise a guardian. Miss Pendleton's ideal cannot
be better expressed than in her own straightforward phrases:
"Happily for both, men and women must work together in the world,
and I venture to say that the function of a college for men is not
essentially different from that of a college for women."
Of the twofold function of the college, the training for citizenship
and the preparation of the scholar, she says: "What are the
characteristics of the ideal citizen, and how may they be developed?
He must have learned the important lesson of viewing every question
not only from his own standpoint but from that of the community; he
must be willing to pay his share of the public tax not only in
money but also in time and thought for the service of his town and
state; he must have, above all, enthusiasm and capacity for working
hard in whatever kind of endeavor his lot may be cast. It is
evident, therefore, that the college must furnish him opportunity
for acquiring a knowledge of history, of the theory of government,
of the relations between capital and labor, of the laws of
mathematics, chemistry, physics, which underlie our great industries,
and if he is to have an intelligent and sympathetic interest in
his neighbors, and be able to get another's point of view, this
college-trained citizen must know something of psychology and
the laws of the mind. Nor can he do all this to his own satisfaction
without access to other languages and literatures besides his own.
Moreover, the ideal citizen must have some power of initiative,
and he must have acquired the ability to think clearly and
independently. But it will be urged that a college course of four
years is entirely too short for such a task. Perhaps, but what
the college cannot actually give, it can furnish the stimulus and
the power for obtaining later."
But although Miss Pendleton's attitude toward college education
is characteristically practical, she is careful to make it clear
that the practical educator does not necessarily approve of
including vocational training in a college course. "I do not
propose to discuss the question in detail, but is it not fair to
ask why vocational subjects should be recognized in preparation
when the aim of the college is not to prepare for a vocation but
to develop personal efficiency?"
And her vision includes the scholar, or the genius, as well as
the commonplace student. "The college is essentially a democratic
institution designed for the rank and file of youth qualified to
make use of the opportunities it offers. But the material equipment,
the curriculum, and the teaching force which are necessary to
develop personal efficiency in the ordinary student will have
failed in a part of their purpose if they do not produce a few
students with the ability and the desire to extend the field of
human knowledge. There will be but few, but fortunate the college,
and happy the instructor, that has these few. Such students have
claims, and the college is bound to satisfy them without losing
sight of its first great aim.... It is the task of the college to
give such a student as broad a foundation as possible, while
allowing him a more specialized course than is deemed wise for
the ordinary student. The college will have failed in part of
its function if it does not furnish such a student with the power
and the stimulus to continue his search for truth after graduation....
"Training for citizenship and the preparation of the scholar are
then the twofold function of the college. To furnish professional
training for lawyers, doctors, ministers, engineers, librarians,
is manifestly the work of the university or the technical school,
and not the function of the college. Neither is it, in my opinion,
the work of the college to prepare its students specifically to
be teachers or even wives and husbands, mothers and fathers. It
is rather its part to produce men and women with the power to think
clearly and independently, who recognize that teaching and
home-making are both fine arts worthy of careful and patient
cultivation, and not the necessary accompaniment of a college
diploma. College graduates ought to make, and I believe do make,
better teachers, more considerate husbands and wives, wiser fathers
and mothers, but the chief function of the college is larger than
this. The aim of the university and the great technical school is
to furnish preparation for some specific profession. The college
must produce men and women capable of using the opportunities
offered by the university, men and women with sound bodies, pure
hearts and clear minds, who are ready to obey the commandment,
'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all
thy soul and with all thy strength and with all thy mind, and thy
neighbor as thyself.'"
In this day of diverse and confused educational theories and ideals
it is refreshing to read words so discriminating and definite.
The earliest events of importance in President Pendleton's
administration are connected, as might be expected, with the alumnae,
who were quickened to a more active and objective expression
of loyalty by this first election of a Wellesley alumna to the
presidential office. On June 21, 1911, the Graduate Council, to
be discussed in a later chapter, was established by the Alumnae
Association; and on October 5, 1911, the first number of the alumnae
edition of the College News was issued. In the academic year
1912-1913, the Monday holiday was abolished and the new schedule
with recitations from Monday morning until Saturday noon was
established. After the mid-year examinations in 1912, the students
were for the first time told their marks. In 1913, the Village
Improvement Association built and equipped, on the college grounds,
a kindergarten to be under the joint supervision of the Association
and the Department of Education. The building is used as a free
kindergarten for Wellesley children, and also as a practice school
for graduate students in the department. A campaign for an
endowment fund of one million dollars was also started by the
trustees and alumnae under the leadership and with the advice
of the new president. A committee of alumnae was appointed, with
Miss Candace C. Stimson, of the class of '92 as chairman, to
cooperate with the trustees in raising the money, and more than
four hundred thousand dollars had been promised when, in March, 1914,
occurred Wellesley's great catastrophe--which she was to translate
immediately into her great opportunity--the burning of old
College Hall.
If, in the years to come, Wellesley fulfills that great opportunity,
and becomes in spirit and in truth, as well as in outward seeming,
the College Beautiful which her daughters see in their visions
and dream in their dreams, it will be by the soaring, unconquerable
faith--and the prompt and selfless works--of the daughter who said
to a college in ruins, on that March morning, "The members of the
college will report for duty on the appointed date after the spring
vacation," and sent her flock away, comforted, high-hearted,
expectant of miracles.
CHAPTER III
THE FACULTY AND THEIR METHODS
I.
At Wellesley, to a degree unusual in American colleges, whether
for men or women, the faculty determine the general policy of the
college. The president, as chairman of the Academic Council,
is in a very real and democratic sense the representative of the
faculty, not the ruler. In Miss Freeman's day, the excellent
presidential habit of consulting with the heads of departments
was formed, and many of the changes instituted by the young president
were suggested and formulated by her older colleagues. In
Miss Shafer's day, habit had become precedent, and she would be
the first to point out that the "new curriculum" which will always
be associated with her name, was really the achievement of the
Academic Council and the departments, working through patient years
to adjust, develop, and balance the minutest details in their
composite plan.
The initiative on the part of the faculty has been exerted chiefly
along academic lines, but in some instances it has necessitated
important emendations of the statutes; and that the trustees were
willing to alter the statutes on the request of the faculty would
indicate the friendly confidence felt toward the innovators.
In the statutes of Wellesley College, as printed in 1885, we read
that "The College was founded for the glory of God and the service
of the Lord Jesus Christ, in and by the education and culture of women.
"In order to the attainment of these ends, it is required that every
Trustee, Teacher, and Officer, shall be a member of an Evangelical
church, and that the study of the Holy Scriptures shall be pursued
by every student throughout the entire College course under the
direction of the Faculty."
In the early nineties, pressure from members of the faculty,
themselves members of Evangelical churches, induced the trustees
to alter the religious requirement for teachers; and the reorganization
of the Department of Bible Study a few years later resulted in
a drastic change in the requirements for students.
As printed in 1898, the statutes read, "To realize this design it
is required that every Trustee shall be a member in good standing
of some Evangelical Church; that every teacher shall be of decided
Christian character and influence, and in manifest sympathy with
the religious spirit and aim with which the College was founded;
and that the study of the Sacred Scriptures by every student shall
extend over the first three years, with opportunities for elective
studies in the same during the fourth year."
But it was found that freshmen were not mature enough to study
to the best advantage the new courses in Biblical Criticism, and
the statutes as printed in 1912 record still another amendment:
"And that the study of the Sacred Scriptures by every student
shall extend over the second and third years, with opportunities
for elective studies in the same during the fourth year."
These changes are the more pleasantly significant, since all actual
power, at Wellesley as at most other colleges, resides with the
trustees if they choose to use it. They "have control of the college
and all its property, and of the investment and appropriation of
its funds, in conformity with the design of its establishment and
with the act of incorporation." They have "power to make and
execute such statutes and rules as they may consider needful for
the best administration of their trust, to appoint committees from
their own number, or of those not otherwise connected with the
college, and to prescribe their duties and powers." It is theirs
to appoint "all officers of government or instruction and all
employees needed for the administration of the institution whose
appointment is not otherwise provided for." They determine the
duties and salaries of officers and employees and may remove,
either with or without notice, any person whom they have appointed.
In being governed undemocratically from without by a self-perpetuating
body of directors, Wellesley is of course no worse off than the
majority of American colleges. But that a form of college government
so patently and unreasonably autocratic should have generated so
little friction during forty years, speaks volumes for the
broadmindedness, the generous tolerance, and the Christian
self-control of both faculty and trustees. If, in matters financial,
the trustees have been sometimes unwilling to consider the scruples
of groups of individuals on the faculty, along lines of economic
morals, they have nevertheless taken no official steps to suppress
the expression of such scruples. They have withstood any reactionary
pressure from individuals of their board, and have always allowed
the faculty entire academic freedom. In matters pertaining to
the college classes, they are usually content to ratify the
appointments on the faculty, and approve the alterations in the
curriculum presented to them by the president of the college; and
the president, in turn, leaves the professors and their associates
remarkably free to choose and regulate the personnel and the
courses in the departments.
In this happy condition of affairs, the alumnae trustees undoubtedly
play a mediating part, for they understand the college from within
as no clergyman, financier, philanthropist,--no graduate of a
man's college--can hope to, be he never so enthusiastic and
well-meaning in the cause of woman's education. But so long as
the faculty are excluded from direct representation on the board,
the situation will continue to be anomalous. For it is not too
sweeping to assert that Wellesley's development and academic
standing are due to the cooperative wisdom and devoted scholarship
of her faculty. The initiative has been theirs. They have proved
that a college for women can be successfully taught and administered
by women. To them Wellesley owes her academic status.
From the beginning, women have predominated on the Wellesley
faculty. The head of the Department of Music has always been a
man, but he had no seat upon the Academic Council until 1896.
In 1914-1915, of the twenty-eight heads of departments, three
were men, the professors of Music, of Education, and of French.
Of the thirty-nine professors and associate professors, not heads
of departments, five were men; of the fifty-nine instructors, ten
were men. It is interesting to note that there were no men in the
departments of Greek, Latin, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry,
Astronomy, Biblical History, Italian, Spanish, Reading and Speaking,
Art, and Archaeology, during the academic year 1914-1915.
Critics sometimes complain of the preponderance of women upon
Wellesley's faculty, but her policy in this respect has been
deliberate. Every woman's college is making its own experiments,
and the results achieved at Wellesley indicate that a faculty made
up largely of women, with a woman at its head, in no way militates
against high academic standards, sound scholarship, and efficient
administration. That a more masculine faculty would also have
peculiar advantages, she does not deny.
From the collegiate point of view, this feminine faculty is a very
well mixed body, for it includes representative graduates from the
other women's colleges, and from the more important coeducational
colleges and state universities, as well as men from Harvard and
Brown. The Wellesley women on the faculty are an able minority;
but it is the policy of the college to avoid academic in-breeding
and to keep the Wellesley influence a minority influence. Of the
twenty-eight heads of departments, five--the professors of English
Literature, Chemistry, Pure Mathematics, Biblical History, and
Physics--are Wellesley graduates, three of them from the celebrated
class of '80. Of the thirty-nine professors and associate professors,
in 1914-1915, ten were alumnae of Wellesley, and of the fifty-nine
instructors, seventeen. Since 1895, when Professor Stratton was
appointed dean to assist Mrs. Irvine, Wellesley has had five deans,
but only Miss Pendleton, who held the office under Miss Hazard
from 1901 to 1911, has been a graduate of Wellesley. Miss Coman,
who assisted Miss Hazard for one year only, and Miss Chapin, who
consented to fill the office after Miss Pendleton's appointment to
the presidency until a permanent dean could be chosen, were both
graduates of the University of Michigan. Dean Waite, who succeeded
to the office in 1913, is an alumna of Smith College, and has been
a member of the Department of English at Wellesley since 1896.
II.
Only the women who have helped to promote and establish the higher
education of women can know how exciting and romantic it was to be
a professor in a woman's college during the last half-century.
To be a teacher was no new thing for a woman; the dame school
is an ancient institution; all down the centuries, in classic
villas, in the convents of the Middle Ages, in the salons of the
eighteenth century, learned ladies with a pedagogic instinct have
left their impress upon the intellectual life of their times. But
the possibility that women might be intellectually and physically
capable of sharing equally with men the burdens and the joys of
developing and directing the scholarship of the race had never been
seriously considered until the nineteenth century. The women who
came to teach in the women's colleges in the '70's and '80's and
'90's knew themselves on trial in the eyes of the world as never
women had been before. And they brought to that trial the heady
enthusiasm and radiant exhilaration and fiery persistence which
possess all those who rediscover learning and drink deep. They
knew the kind of selfless inspiration Wyclif knew when he was
translating the Bible into the language of England's common people.
They shared the elation and devotion of Erasmus and his fellows.
To plan a curriculum in which the humanities and the sciences
should every one be given a fair chance; to distinguish intelligently
between the advantages of the elective system and its disadvantages;
to decide, without prejudice, at what points the education of the
girl should differ or diverge from the education of the boy; to
try out the pedagogic methods of the men's colleges and discover
which were antiquated and should be abolished, which were susceptible
of reform, which were sound; to invent new methods,--these were
the romantic quests to which these enamored devotees were vowed, and
to which, through more than half a century, they have been faithful.
Wellesley's student laboratory for experimental work in physics,
established 1878, was preceded in New England only by the student
laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her
laboratory for work in experimental psychology, established by
Professor Calkins in 1891, was the first in any women's college
in the country, and one of the first in any college. In 1886, the
American School of Classical Studies at Athens invited Wellesley
to become one of the cooperating colleges to sustain this school
and to enjoy its advantages. The invitation came quite unsolicited,
and was the first extended to a woman's college.
The schoolmen developing and expanding their Trivium and Quadrivium
at Oxford, Paris, Bologna, experienced no keener intellectual delights
than did their belated sisters of Vassar, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley.
But in order to understand the passion of their point of view,
we must remember that the higher education for which the women
of the nineteenth century were enthusiastic was distinctly an
education along scholarly and intellectual lines; this early and
original meaning of the term "higher education", this original and
distinguishing function of the woman's college, are in danger of
being blurred and lost sight of to-day by a generation that knew
not Joseph. The zeal with which the advocates of educational
and domestic training are trying to force into the curricula of
women's colleges courses on housekeeping, home-making, dressmaking,
dairy farming, to say nothing of stenography, typewriting, double
entry, and the musical glasses minus Shakespeare, is for the most
part unintelligible to the women who have given their lives to the
upbuilding of such colleges as Bryn Mawr, Smith, Mt. Holyoke,
Vassar, and Wellesley,--not because they minimize the civilizing
value of either homemakers or business women in a community, or
fail to recognize their needs, but simply because women's colleges
were never intended to meet those needs.
When we go to the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts, we do not
complain because it lacks the characteristics of the Smithsonian
Institute, or of the Boston Horticultural Show. We are content
that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology should differ in
scope from Harvard University; yet some of us, college graduates
even, seem to have an uneasy feeling that Wellesley and Bryn Mawr
may not be ministering adequately to life, because they do not
add to their curricular activities the varied aims of an
Agricultural College, a Business College, a School of Philanthropy,
and a Cooking School, with required courses on the modifying of
milk for infants. Great institutions for vocational training, such
as Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and Simmons College in Boston,
have a dignity and a usefulness which no one disputes. Undoubtedly
America needs more of their kind. But to impair the dignity and
usefulness of the colleges dedicated to the higher education of
women by diluting their academic programs with courses on business
or domesticity will not meet that need. The unwillingness of
college faculties to admit vocational courses to the curriculum is
not due to academic conservatism and inability to march with
the times, but to an unclouded and accurate conception of the
meaning of the term "higher education."
But definiteness of aim does not necessarily imply narrowness
of scope. The Wellesley Calendar for 1914-1915 contains a list
of three hundred and twelve courses on thirty-two subjects, exclusive
of the gymnasium practice, dancing, swimming, and games required
by the Department of Hygiene. Of these subjects, four are ancient
languages and their literatures, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit.
Seven are modern languages and their literatures, German, French,
Italian, Spanish, and English Literature, Composition, and Language.
Ten are sciences, Mathematics, pure and applied, Astronomy, Physics,
Chemistry, Geology, Geography, Botany, Zoology and Physiology,
Hygiene. Seven are scientifically concerned with the mental and
spiritual evolution of the human race, Biblical and Secular History,
Economics, Education, Logic, Psychology, and Philosophy. Four
may be classified as arts: Archaeology, Art, including its history,
Music, and Reading and Speaking, which old-fashioned people still
call Elocution.
From this wide range of subjects, the candidates for the B.A.
degree are required to take one course in Mathematics, the prescribed
freshman course; one course in English Composition, prescribed for
freshmen; courses in Biblical History and Hygiene; a modern
language, unless two modern languages have been presented for
admission; two natural sciences before the junior year, unless
one has already been offered for admission, in which case one is
required, and a course in Philosophy, which the student should
ordinarily take before her senior year.
These required studies cover about twenty of the fifty-nine hours
prescribed for the degree; the remaining hours are elective; but
the student must group her electives intelligently, and to this end
she must complete either nine hours of work in each of two
departments, or twelve hours in one department and six in a
second; she must specialize within limits.
It will be evident on examining this program that no work is
required in History, Economics, English Literature and Language,
Comparative Philology, Education, Archaeology, Art, Reading and
Speaking, and Music. All the courses in these departments are
free electives. Just what led to this legislation, only those who
were present at the decisive discussions of the Academic Council
can know. Possibly they have discovered by experience that young
women do not need to be coaxed or coerced into studying the arts;
that they gravitate naturally to those subjects which deal with
human society, such as History, Economics, and English Literature;
and that the specialist can be depended upon to elect, without
pressure, courses in Philology or Pedagogy.
But little effort has been made at Wellesley, so far, to attract
graduate students. In this respect she differs from Bryn Mawr.
She offers very few courses planned exclusively for college
graduates, but opens her advanced courses in most departments to
both seniors and graduates. This does not mean, however, that
the graduate work is not on a sound basis. Wellesley has not yet
exercised her right to give the Doctor's degree, but expert
testimony, outside the college, has declared that some of the
Master's theses are of the doctorial grade in quality, if not in
quantity; and the work for the Master's degree is said to be more
difficult and more severely scrutinized than in some other colleges
where the Doctor's degree is made the chief goal of the graduate student.
The college has in its gift the Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship,
founded in 1903 by Mrs. David P. Kimball of Boston, and yielding
an income of about one thousand dollars. The holder must be a
woman, a graduate of Wellesley or some other American college of
approved standing; she must be "not more than twenty-six years of
age at the time of her appointment, unmarried throughout the whole
of her tenure, and as free as possible from other responsibilities."
She may hold the fellowship for one year only, but "within three
years from entrance on the fellowship she must present to the
faculty a thesis embodying the results of the research carried on
during the period of tenure."
Wellesley is proud of her Alice Freeman Palmer Fellows. Of the
eleven who have held the Fellowship between 1904 and 1915, four
are Wellesley graduates, Helen Dodd Cook, whose subject was
Philosophy; Isabelle Stone, working in Greek; Gertrude Schopperle,
in Comparative Literature; Laura Alandis Hibbard, in English
Literature. Two are from Radcliffe, and one each from Cornell,
Vassar, the University of Dakota, Ripon, and Goucher. The Fellow
is left free to study abroad, in an American college or university,
or to use the income for independent research. The list of
universities at which these young women have studied is as impressive
as it is long. It includes the American Schools for Classical
Studies at Athens and Rome; the universities of Gottingen, Wurzburg,
Munich, Paris, and Cambridge, England; and Yale, Johns Hopkins,
and the University of Chicago.
This is not the place in which to give a detailed account of the
work of each one of Wellesley's academic departments. Any intelligent
person who turns the pages of the official calendar may easily
discover that the standard of admission and the requirements for
the degree of Bachelor of Arts place Wellesley in the first rank
among American colleges, whether for men or for women. But every
woman's college, besides conforming to the general standard, is
making its own contribution to the higher education of women.
At Wellesley, the methods in certain departments have gained a
deservedly high reputation.
The Department of Art, under Professor Alice V.V. Brown, formerly
of the Slater Museum of Norwich, Connecticut, is doing a work in
the proper interpretation and history of art as unique as it is
valuable. The laboratory method is used, and all students are
required to recognize and indicate the characteristic qualities
and attributes of the great masters and the different schools of
paintings by sketching from photographs of the pictures studied.
These five and ten minute sketches by young girls, the majority of
whom have had no training in drawing, are remarkable for the
vivacity and accuracy with which they reproduce the salient
features of the great paintings. The students are of course given
the latest results of the modern school of art criticism. In
addition to the work with undergraduates, the department offers
courses to graduate students who wish to prepare themselves for
curatorships, or lectureships in art museums, and Wellesley women
occupy positions of trust in the Metropolitan Museum in New York,
in the Boston Art Museum, in museums in Chicago, Worcester, and
elsewhere. The "Short History of Italian Painting" by Professor
Brown and Mr. William Rankin is a standard authority.
The Department of Music, working quite independently of the
Department of Art, has also adapted laboratory methods to its own
ends with unusual results. Under Professor Hamilton C. Macdougall,
the head of the department, and Associate Professor Clarence G.
Hamilton, courses in musical interpretation have been developed
in connection with the courses in practical music. The first-year
class, meeting once a week, listens to an anonymous musical
selection played by one of its members, and must decide by internal
evidence--such as simple cadences, harmonic figuration as applied
to the accompaniment and other characteristics--upon the school
of the composer, and biographical data. The analysis of the
musical selection and the reasons for her decision are set down
in her notebook by the listening student. The second-year class
concerns itself with "the thematic and polyphonic melody, the
larger forms, harmony in its aesthetic bearings, the aesthetic
effects of the more complicated rhythms, comparative criticism
and the various schools of composition."
These valuable contributions to method and scope in the study of
the History of Art and the History of Music are original with
Wellesley, and are distinctly a part of her history.
Among the departments which carry prestige outside the college
walls are those of Philosophy and Psychology, English Literature,
and German. Wellesley's Department of English Literature is
unusually fortunate in having as interpreters of the great literature
of England a group of women of letters of established reputation.
What Longfellow, Lowell, Norton, were to the Harvard of their day,
Katharine Lee Bates, Vida D. Scudder, Sophie Jewett, and Margaret
Sherwood are to the Wellesley of their day and ours. Working
together, with unfailing enthusiasm for their subjects, and keen
insight into the cultural needs of American girls, they have built
up their department on a sure foundation of accurate scholarship
and tested pedagogic method. At a time when the study of literature
threatened to become, almost universally, an exercise in the dry
rot of philological terms, in the cataloguing of sources, or the
analyzing of literary forms, the department at Wellesley continued
unswervingly to make use of philology, sources, and even art forms,
as means to an end; that end the interpretation of literary epochs,
the illumination of intellectual and spiritual values in literary
masterpieces, the revelation of the soul of poet, dramatist,
essayist, novelist. No teaching of literature is less sentimental
than the teaching at Wellesley, and no teaching is more quickening
to the imagination. Now that the method of accumulated detail
"about it and about it", is being defeated by its own aridity,
Wellesley's firm insistence upon listening to literature as to
a living voice is justified of her teachers and her students.
Indications of the reputation achieved by Wellesley's methods
of teaching German are found in the increasing numbers of students
who come to the college for the sake of the work in the German
Department, and in the fact that teachers' agencies not infrequently
ask candidates for positions if they are familiar with the Wellesley
methods. In an address before the New Hampshire State Teachers'
Association, in 1913, Professor Muller describes the aims and
ideals of her department as they took shape under the constructive
leadership of her predecessor, Professor Wenckebach, and as they
have been modified and developed in later years to meet the needs
of American students.
"Cinderella became a princess and a ruler over night," says Professor
Muller, "that is, German suddenly took the position in our college
that it has held ever since. Such a result was due not merely to
methods, of course, but first of all to the strong and enthusiastic
personality that was identified with them, and that was the main
secret of the unusual effectiveness of Fraulein Wenckebach's teaching.
"But this German professor had not only live methods and virile
personal qualities to help her along; she also had what a great
many of the foreign language teachers in this country must as yet
do without, that is, the absolute confidence, warm appreciation,
and financial support of an enlightened administration. President
Freeman and the trustees seem to have done practically everything
that their intrepid professor of German asked for. They not only
saw that all equipments needed... were provided, but they also
generously stipulated, at Fraulein Wenckebach's urgent request,
that all the elementary and intermediate classes in the foreign
language departments should be kept small, that is, that they
should not exceed fifteen. If Fraulein Wenckebach had been
obliged, as many modern language teachers still are, to teach
German to classes of from thirty to forty students; if she had
met in the administration of Wellesley College with as little
appreciation and understanding of the fine art and extreme difficulty
of foreign language work as high school teachers, for instance,
often encounter, her efforts could not possibly have been crowned
with success.
"Another agent in enabling Fraulein Wenckebach to do such fine
constructive work with her Department was the general Wellesley
policy, still followed, I am happy to say, of centralizing all
power and responsibility regarding department affairs in the person
of the head of the Department. Centralization may not work well
in politics, but a foreign language department working with the
reformed methods could not develop the highest efficiency under
any other form of government. With a living organism, such as
a foreign language department should be, there ought to be one,
and only one, responsible person to keep her finger on the pulse
of things--otherwise disintegration and ineffectiveness of the
work as a whole is sure to follow."
Professor Muller goes on to say, "Now JOY, genuine joy, in their
work, based on good, strong, mental exercise, is what we want
and what on the whole we get from our students. It was so in the
days of Fraulein Wenckebach and is so now, I am happy to say--and
not in the literature courses only, but in our elementary drill
work as well.
"It may be of interest to note that our elementary work and also
the advanced work in grammar and idiom are at present taught by
Americans wholly. I have come to the conclusion that well-trained
Americans gifted with vivid personalities get better results along
those lines than the average teacher of foreign birth and breeding."
Even in the elementary courses, only those texts are used which
illustrate German life, literature, and history; and the advanced
electives are carefully guarded, so that no student may elect
courses in modern German, the novel and the drama, who has not
already been well grounded in Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing. The
drastic thoroughness with which unpromising students are weeded
out of the courses in German enhances rather than defeats their
popularity among undergraduates.
The learned women who direct Wellesley's work in Philosophy and
Psychology lend their own distinction to this department. Professor
Case, a graduate of the University of Michigan, has been connected
with the college since 1884, and her courses in Greek Philosophy
and the Philosophy of Religion make an appeal to thoughtful students
which does not lessen as the years pass. Professor Gamble,
Wellesley's own daughter, is the foremost authority on smell,
among psychologists. In her chosen field of experimental psychology
she has achieved results attained by no one else, and her work
has a Continental reputation. Professor Calkins, the head of the
Department, is one of the distinguished alumnae of Smith College.
She has also passed Harvard's examination for the Doctor's degree;
but Harvard does not yet confer its degree upon women. She was
the first woman to receive the degree of Litt.D. from Columbia
University, and the first woman to be elected to the presidency
of the American Psychological Association, succeeding William James
in that office.
In the Department of Economics and Sociology, organized under
the leadership of Professor Katharine Coman, in 1901, Wellesley
has been fortunate in having as teachers two women of national
reputation whose interest in the human side of economic problems
has vitalized for their eager classes a subject which unless
sympathetically handled, lends itself all too easily to mechanical
interpretations of theory. Professor Coman's wide and intimate
knowledge of American economic conditions, as evidenced in her
books, the "Industrial History of the United States", and "Economic
Beginnings of the Far West", in her studies in Social Insurance
published in The Survey, and in her practical work for the College
Settlements Association and the Consumers' League, and as an
active member of the Strike Committee during the strike of the
Chicago Garment Workers in 1910-1911, lent to her teaching an
appeal which more cloistered theorists can never achieve. The
letters which came to her from alumnae, after her resignation
from the department in 1913, were of the sort that every teacher
cherishes. Since her death in January, 1915, some of these letters
have been printed in a memorial number of the Wellesley College
News. Nothing could better illustrate her influence as an intellectual
force in the college to which she came as an instructor in 1880.
One of her oldest students writes:
"I am too late for the thirtieth anniversary, but still it is
never too late to say how much I enjoyed my work with you in
college. It always seemed such grown-up work. Partly, I suppose,
because it was closely related to the things of life, and partly
because you demanded a more grown-up and thoughtful point of view.
It was a great privilege to have your Economics as a sophomore.
I have always meant to tell you, too, of what great practical value
your seminar in Statistics was to me; it gave me enough insight
into the principles and practice to encourage me to present my
work the first year out of college in statistical form. It was
approved. Without the incentive and the little experience I had
gained from you I might not have tried to do this. Since then,
in whatever field of social work I have been I have found this
ability valuable, and I developed enough skill at it to handle
the investigation into wages of the Massachusetts Minimum Wage
Commission without other training. I am very grateful to you for
this bit of technical training for which I would never have taken
the time later."
Another says: "It is a pleasure to have an opportunity, after so
many years, to make some expression of the gratitude I owe you.
The course in Political Economy which I was so wise as to take
with you has proved of vital importance to me. That was in 1887-1888,
but as I look back I see that in your teaching then, you presented
to us the ideas, the concepts, which are now accepted principles
of men's thought as to the relation of class to class, of man to
man. And so I feel that it was to your enthusiasm, your power of
inspiring your pupils that I owe my own interest in economic and
sociological affairs."
And still another: "I have had more real pleasure from my Economics
courses and Sociology courses than from any others of my college
course. Had it not been for yourself and Miss Balch, that work
would not have stood for so much. For your guidance and your
inspiration I am most grateful. I have tried to carry out your
ideals as far as possible in the Visiting Nurse work and the
Social Settlement in Omaha ever since leaving Wellesley."
Professor Emily Greene Balch, who succeeded Miss Coman as head
of the Department of Economics, is herself an authority on questions
of immigration; her book, "Our Slavic Fellow Citizens", is an
important contribution to the history of the subject, and has been
cited in the German Reichstag as authoritative on Slavic immigration.
She has also served on more than one State commission in
Massachusetts,--among them the disinterested and competent City
Planning Board,--and the sanity and judicial balance of her opinions
are recognized and valued by conservatives and radicals alike.
Besides the traditional courses in Economic History and Theory,
Wellesley offers under Miss Balch a course in Socialism, a critical
study of its main theories and political movements, open to juniors
and seniors who have already completed two other courses in
Economics; a course entitled "The Modern Labor Movement", in which
special attention is given to labor legislation, factory inspection,
and the organization of labor, with a study of methods of meeting
the difficulties of the modern industrial situation; and a course
in Immigration and the problems to which it gives rise in the
United States.
The Wellesley fire did the college one good turn by bringing to
the notice of the general public the departments of Science. When
so many of the laboratories and so much of the equipment were
swept away, outsiders became aware of the excellent work which
was being done in those laboratories; of the modern work in Geology
and Geography carried on not only in Wellesley but for the teachers
of Boston by Professor Fisher who is so wisely developing the
department which Professor Niles set on its firm foundation; of
the work of Professor Robertson who is an authority on the bryozoa
fauna of the Pacific coast of North America and Japan; of the
authoritative work on the life history of Pinus, by Professor
Ferguson of the Department of Botany; of the quiet, thorough,
modern work for students in Physics and Chemistry and Astronomy.
An evidence of the excellent organization of departmental work
at Wellesley is found in the ease and smoothness with which the
Department of Hygiene, formerly the Boston Normal School of
Gymnastics, has become a force in the Wellesley curriculum under
the direction of Miss Amy Morris Homans, who was also the head
of the school in Boston. By a gradual process of adjustment,
admission to the two years' course leading to a certificate in
the Department of Hygiene "will be limited to applicants who are
candidates for the B.A. degree at Wellesley College and to those
who already hold the Bachelor's degree either from Wellesley College
or from some other college." A five years' course is also offered,
by which students may obtain both the B.A. degree and the certificate
of the department. But all students, whether working for the
certificate or not, must take a one-hour course in Hygiene in
the freshman year, and two periods a week of practical gymnastic
work in the freshman and sophomore years.
Like all American colleges, Wellesley makes heavy and constant
demands on the mere pedagogic power of its teachers. Their days
are pretty well filled with the classroom routine and the necessary
and incessant social intercourse with the eager crowd of youth.
It may be years before an American college for women can sustain
and foster creative scholarship for its own sake, after the example
of the European universities; but Wellesley is not ungenerous;
the Sabbatical Grant gives certain heads of departments an opportunity
for refreshment and personal work every seven years; and even those
who do not profit by this privilege manage to keep their minds
alive by outside work and contacts.
Every two years the secretary to the president issues a list of
faculty publications, ranging from verse and short stories in the
best magazines to papers in learned reviews for esoteric consumption
only; from idyllic novels, such as Margaret Sherwood's "Daphne",
and sympathetic travel sketches like Katharine Lee Bates's "Spanish
Highways and Byways", to scholarly translations, such as Sophie
Jewett's "Pearl" and Vida D. Scudder's "Letters of St. Catherine of
Siena", and philosophical treatises, of which Mary Whiton Calkins's
"Persistent Problems of Philosophy", translated into several
languages, is a notable example.
But the Wellesley faculty is a public-spirited body; its contribution
to the general life is not only abstract and literary; for many of
its members are identified with modern movements toward better
citizenship. Miss Balch, besides her work on municipal committees,
is connected with the Woman's Trade Union League, and is interested
in the great movement for peace. In the spring of 1915, she was
one of those who sailed with Miss Jane Addams to attend the Woman's
Peace Congress at the Hague, and she afterwards visited other
European countries on a mission of peace. Miss Bates is active
in promoting the interests of the International Institute in Spain.
The American College for Girls in Constantinople often looks to
Wellesley for teachers, and more than one Wellesley professor
has given a Sabbatical year to the schoolgirls in Constantinople.
During the absence of President Patrick, Professor Roxana Vivian
of Wellesley was acting president, and had the honor of bringing
the college safely through the perplexities and terrors of the
Young Turks' Revolution in 1908 and 1909. Professor Kendall,
of the Department of History, is Wellesley's most distinguished
traveler. Her book, "A Wayfarer in China", tells the story of
some of her travels, and she has received the rare honor, for
a woman, of being made a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Miss Calkins is an officer of the Consumers' League. Miss Scudder
has been identified from its outset with the College Settlements
Movement, and of late years with the new service to Italian
immigrants inaugurated by Denison House.
As a result of these varied interests, the intellectual fellowship
among the older women in the college community is of a peculiarly
stimulating quality, and the fact that it is almost exclusively a
feminine fellowship does not affect its intellectuality. The
Wellesley faculty, like the faculty of Harvard, is not a cloistered
body, and contact with the minds of "a world of men" through books
and the visitations of itinerant scholars is about as easy in the
one case as in the other. Every year Wellesley has her share of
distinguished visitors, American, European, and Oriental, scholars,
poets, scientists, statesmen, who enrich her life and enlarge
her spiritual vision.
III.
One chapter of Wellesley's history it is too soon to write: the
story of the great names and great personalities, the spiritual
stuff of which every college is built. This is the chapter on
which the historians of men's colleges love best to dwell. But
the women's lips and pens are fountains sealed, for a reticent
hundred years--or possibly less, under pressure--with the seals
of academic reserve, and historic perspective, and traditional
modesty. Most of the women who had a hand in the making of
Wellesley's first forty years are still alive. There's the rub.
It would not hamper the journalist. But the historian has his
conventions. One hundred years from now, what names, living
to-day, will be written in Wellesley's golden book? Already they
are written in many prophetic hearts. However, women can keep
a secret.
Even of those who have already finished their work on earth, it is
too soon to speak authoritatively; but gratitude and love will not
be silent, and no story of Wellesley's first half-century would
be complete that held no records of their devotion and continuing
influence.
Among the pioneers, there was no more interesting and forceful
personality than Susan Maria Hallowell, who came to Wellesley as
Professor of Natural History in 1875, the friend of Agassiz and
Asa Gray. She was a Maine woman, and she had been teaching
twenty-two years, in Bangor and Portland, before she was called
to Wellesley. Her successor in the Department of Botany writes
in a memorial sketch of her life:
"With that indefatigable zeal so characteristic of her whole life,
she began the work in preparation for the new position. She went
from college to college, from university to university, studying
the scientific libraries and laboratories. At the close of this
investigation she announced to the founders of the college that
the task which they had assigned to her was too great for any
one individual to undertake. There must be several professorships
rather than one. Of those named she was given first choice, and
when, in 1876, she opened her laboratories and actually began her
teaching in Wellesley College, she did so as professor of Botany,
although her title was not formally changed until 1878.
"The foundations which she laid were so broad and sure, the several
courses which she organized were so carefully outlined, that,
except where necessitated by more recent developments in science,
only very slight changes in the arrangement and distribution of
the work in her department have since been necessary.... She
organized and built up a botanical library which from the first
was second to that of no other college in the country, and is
to-day only surpassed by the botanical libraries of a few of our
great universities."
Fortunately the botanical library and the laboratories were housed
in Stone Hall, and escaped devastation by the fire.
Professor Hallowell was the first woman to be admitted to the
botanical lectures and laboratories of the University of Berlin.
She "was not a productive scholar", again we quote from Professor
Ferguson, "as that term is now used, and hence her gifts and her
achievements are but little known to the botanists of to-day. She
was preeminently a teacher and an organizer. Only those who knew
her in this double capacity can fully realize the richness of her
nature and the power of her personality." She retired from active
service at the college in February, 1902, when she was made
Professor Emeritus; but she lived in Wellesley village with her
friend, Miss Horton, the former professor of Greek, until her
death in 1911. Mrs. North gives us a charming glimpse of the
quaint and dignified little old lady. "When in recent years the
blossoming forth of academic dress made a pageant of our great
occasions, the badges of scholarship seemed to her foreign to the
simplicity of true learning, and she walked bravely in the
Commencement procession, wearing the little bonnet which henceforth
became a distinction."
Another early member of the Department of Botany, Clara Eaton
Cummings, who came to Wellesley as a student in 1876 and kept her
connection with the college until her death, as associate professor,
in 1906, was a scientific scholar of distinguished reputation.
Her work in cryptogamic botany gained the respect of botanists
for Wellesley.
With this pioneer group belongs also Professor Niles, who was
actively connected with the college from 1882 until his retirement
as Professor Emeritus in 1908. Wellesley shares with the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology her precious memories of
this devoted gentleman and scholar. His wise planning set the
Department of Geology and Geography on its present excellent
basis. At his death in 1910, a valuable legacy of geological
specimens came to Wellesley, only to be destroyed in 1914 by the
fire. But his greatest gifts to the college are those which no
fire can ever harm.
Anne Eugenia Morgan, professor in the Department of Philosophy
from 1878 to 1900; Mary Adams Currier, enthusiastic head of the
Department of Elocution from 1875 to 1896, the founder of the
Monroe Fund for her department; Doctor Speakman, Doctor Barker,
Wellesley's resident physicians in the early days; dear Mrs. Newman,
who mothered so many college generations of girls at Norumbega,
and will always be to them the ideal house-mother,--when old alumnae
speak these names, their hearts glow with unchanging affection.
But the most vivid of all these pioneers, and one of the most
widely known, was Carla Wenckebach. Of her, Wellesley has a picture
and a memory which will not fade, in the brilliant biography
[Carla Wenckebach, Pioneer (Ginn & Co. pub.).] by her colleague and
close friend, Margarethe Muller, who succeeded her in the Department
of German. As an interpretation of character and personality,
this book takes its place with Professor Palmer's "Life of Alice
Freeman Palmer", among literary biographies of the first rank.
Professor Wenckebach came to Wellesley in 1883, and we have the
story of her coming, in her own letters, given us in translation
by Professor Muller. She was attending the Sauveur Summer School
of Languages at Amherst, and had been asked to take some classes
there, in elementary German, where her methods immediately attracted
attention; and presently we find her writing:
"Hurrah! I have made a superb catch--not a widower nor a bachelor,
but something infinitely superior! I must not anticipate, though,
but proceed according to program....
"The other day, when I was in my room digging away at my Greek
lessons, the landlady brings in three visiting cards, remarking
that the three ladies who wish to see me are in the reception room.
I look at the cards and read: Miss Alice Freeman, President
(in German, Rector Magnificus) of Wellesley College; Mrs. Durant,
Treasurer; and Miss Denio, Professor of German Literature at
Wellesley College (Wellesley, you must know, is the largest and
most magnificent of all the women's colleges in the United States).
I immediately comprehended that these were three lions (grosse
Tiere), and I began to have curious presentiments. Fortunately,
I was in correct dress, so that I could rush down into our elegant
reception room. Here I made a solemn bow, the three ladies
returning the compliment. The president, a lady who must be a
good deal younger than myself, a real Ph.D. (of Philosophy and
History), told me that she had heard of me and therefore wished
to see me in regard to a vacancy at Wellesley College, which,
according to the statutes, must not be filled by a man so long
as a woman could be procured. The woman she was looking for must
be able, she said, to give lectures on German Literature in German,
and to expound the works of German writers thoroughly; she would
engage me for this position, she added, if she found that I was
the right person for it.
"I was dumfounded at the mere suggestion of this gift of Heaven
coming to me, for I had heard so many beautiful things about
Wellesley that the idea of possibly getting a position there
totally dazed me. Summoning up courage, however, I controlled
my wild joy, and pulling myself together with determination, I
gave the ladies the desired account of my studies, my journalistic
work, etc., whereupon the president informed me that she would
attend my class the next day."
The ordeal was successfully passed, and the position of "head
teacher in the German Department at Wellesley" was immediately
offered her. "Now you think, I suppose, that I fell round the
necks of those angels of joy! I didn't though!" she blithely
writes. But she agreed to visit Wellesley, and her description
of this visit gives us old College Hall in a new light.
"The place in itself is so beautiful that we could hardly realize
its being merely a school. The Royal Palace in Berlin is small
compared to the main building, which in length and stateliness
of appearance surpasses even the great Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.
The entrance hall is decorated with magnificent palms, with
valuable paintings, and choice statuary. The walls in all the
corridors are covered with fine engravings; there are carpets
everywhere and elegant pieces of furniture; there is gas, steam
heat, and a big elevator; everything, down to the bathrooms,
is princely."
Professor Muller adds, "Of course, she was 'kind enough' to accept
the position offered, although it was not especially lucrative.
'But what is a high salary,' she exclaims, 'in comparison to the
ease and enthusiasm with which I can here plow a new field of work!
That, and the honor attached to the position, are worth more to
me than thousands of dollars. I am to be a regular grosses Tier
now myself,--what fun, after having been a beast of burden so long!'"
From the first, Wellesley recognized her quality, and wisely gave
it freedom. In addition to her work in German, we owe to her the
beginnings of the Department of Education, through her lectures
on Pedagogy.
Speaking of her power, Professor Muller says: "Truly, as a teacher,
especially a teacher of youth, Fraulein Wenckebach was unexcelled.
There was that relieving and inspiring, that broadening and yet
deepening quality in her work, that ease and grace and joy, that
mark the work of the elect only,--of those rare souls among us
who are 'near the shaping hand of the Creator.'" And Fraulein
Wenckebach herself said of her profession: "Every teacher, every
educator, should above all be a guide. Not one of those who, like
signposts, stretch their wooden arms with pedantic insistence in
a given direction, but one, rather, who, after the manner of the
heavenly bodies, diffusing warmth and light and cheer, draws the
young soul irresistibly to leave its dark jungles of prejudice and
ignorance for the promised land of wisdom and freedom." And her
students testify enthusiastically to her unusual success. One
of them writes:
"To Fraulein Wenckebach as a teacher, I owe more than to any other
teacher I ever had. I cannot remember that she reproved any
student or that she ever directly urged us to do our best. She
made no efforts to make her lectures attractive by witticisms,
anecdotes, or entertaining illustrations. Yet her students worked
with eager faithfulness, and I, personally, have never been so
absorbed and inspired by any lectures as by hers. The secret of
her power was not merely that she was master of the art of teaching
and knew how to arouse interest and awaken the mind to independent
thought and inquiry, but that her own earnestness and high purpose
touched our lives and made anything less than the highest possible
degree of effort and attainment seem not worth while."--"We girls
used to say to each other that if we ever taught we should want
to be to our students what she was to us, and if they could feel
as we felt toward her and her work we should want no more. She
demanded the best of us, without demanding, and what she gave us
was beyond measure.--It was courses like hers that made us feel
that college work was the best part of college life."
These are the things that teachers care most to hear, and in the
nineteen years of her service at Wellesley, there were many students
eager to tell her what she had been to them. She writes in 1886:
"What a privilege to pour into the receptive mind of young American
girls the fullness of all that is precious about the German spirit;
and how enthusiastically they receive all I can give them!"
In the late eighties and early nineties there came to the college
a notable group of younger women, destined to play an important
part in Wellesley's life and to increase her academic reputation:
Mary Whiton Calkins, Margarethe Muller, Adeline B. Hawes, the able
head of the Department of Latin, Katharine M. Edwards, of the
Department of Greek, Sophie de Chantal Hart, of the Department
of English Composition, Vida D. Scudder, Margaret Sherwood, and
Sophie Jewett, of the Department of English Literature. In the
autumn of 1909, Sophie Jewett died, and never has the college been
stirred to more intimate and personal grief. So many poets, so
many scholars, are not lovable; but this scholar-poet quickened
every heart to love her. To live in her house, to sit at her
table, to listen to her "cadenced voice" in the classrooms, were
privileges which those who shared them will never forget. Her
colleague, Professor Scudder, speaking at the memorial service
in the College Chapel, said:
"We shall long rejoice to dwell on the ministry of love that was
hers to exercise in so rare a measure, through her unerring and
reverent discernment of all finest aspects of beauty; on her
sensitive allegiance to truth; on the fine reticence of her
imaginative passion; on that heavenly sympathy and selflessness
of hers, a selflessness so deep that it bore no trace of effort or
resolute purpose, but was simply the natural instinct of the soul....
"Let us give thanks, then, for all her noble and delicate powers;
for her all-controlling Christianity; for her subtle rectitude of
intellectual and spiritual vision; for her swift ardor for all
high causes and great dreams; for that unbounded tenderness toward
youth, that firm and steady standard of scholarship, that central
hunger for truth, which gave high quality to her teaching, and
which during twenty years have been at the service of Wellesley
College and of the Department of English Literature."
This very giving of herself to the claims of the college hampered,
to a certain extent, her poetic creativeness; the volumes that
she has left are as few as they are precious, every one "a pearl."
Speaking of these poems, Miss Scudder says: "And in her own
verse,--do we not catch to a strange degree, hushed echoes of
heavenly music? These lyrics are not wholly of the earth: they
vibrate subtly with what I can only call the sense of the Eternal.
How beautiful, how consoling, that her last book should have been
that translation, such as only one who was at once true poet and
true scholar could have made, of the sweetest medieval elegy
'The Pearl'!" And Miss Bates, in her preface to the posthumous
volume of "Folk-Ballads of Southern Europe", illumines for us
the scholarship which went into these close and sympathetic
translations:
"For the Roumanian ballads, although she pored over the originals,
she had to depend, in the main, upon French translation, which
was usually available, too, for the Gascon and Breton. Italian,
which she knew well, guided her through obscure dialects of Italy
and Sicily, but Castilian, Portuguese, and Catalan she puzzled out
for herself with such natural insight that the experts to whom
these translations have been submitted found hardly a word to
change. 'After all,' as she herself wrote, 'ballads are simple
things, and require, as a rule, but a limited vocabulary, though
a peculiarly idiomatic one.'"
Not the least poetic of her books, although it is written in prose,
is the delicate interpretation of St. Francis, written for children
and called "God's Troubadour."
"Erect, serene, she came and went
On her high task of beauty bent.
For us who knew, nor can forget,
The echoes of her laughter yet
Make sudden music in the halls."
["In Memoriam: Sophie Jewett." A poem by Margaret Sherwood,
Wellesley College News, May 1, 1913.]
In 1913, Madame Colin, who had served the college as head of
the Department of French since 1905, died during the spring recess
after a three days' illness. Madame Colin had studied at the
University of Paris and the Sorbonne, and her ideals for her
department were high.
Among Wellesley's own alumnae, only a very few who were officers
of the college during the first forty years have died. Of these
are Caroline Frances Pierce, of the class of 1891, who was librarian
from 1903 to 1910. To her wise planning we owe the conveniences
and comforts in the new library building which she did not live
to see completed.
In 1914, the Department of Greek suffered a deep loss in Professor
Annie Sybil Montague, of the class of 1879. Besides being a
member of the first graduating class, Miss Montague was one of
the first to receive the degree of M.A. from Wellesley. In 1882,
the college conferred this degree for the first time, and Miss
Montague was one of the two candidates who presented themselves.
One of her old students, Annie Kimball Tuell, of the class of 1896,
herself an instructor in the Department of English Literature, writes:
I think Miss Montague would wish that another of her pupils,
one who worked with her for an unusually long time, should
say--what can most simply and most warmly and most gratefully
be said--that she was a good teacher. So I want to say it
formally for myself and for all the others and for all the
years. For I suppose that if we were doomed to go before
our girls for a last judgment, the best and the least of us
would care just for the simple bit of testimony that we knew
our business and attended to it. And of all the good people
who made college days so rich for me, there is none of whom
I could say this more entirely than of Miss Montague.
Often as I have caught sight of her in the jostling crowd of
the second floor, I have felt a lively regret that she was
known to so few of the girls, and that her excellent ability
to give zest to drill and to stablish fluttering wits in order,
could not have a fuller and freer exercise. In the old days
we valued what she had to give, and in the usual silent,
thankless way, elected her courses as long as there were
courses to elect; but we have had to teach many years since
to know how special that gift of hers was. Just as closer
acquaintance with herself proved her breadth of mind and
sympathy not quite understood before, so more intelligent
knowledge of her methods showed them to be broader and more
fundamental than we had quite comprehended. With her handling,
rules and sub-rules ceased to jostle and confuse one another,
but grouped themselves in a simpler harmony which we thought
a very beautiful discovery, and grammar took on a reasonable
unity which seemed a marvel. So we took our laborious days
with cheer and enjoyed the energy, for we quite understood
that our work would lead to something.
But if there could be an interchange of grace and I could take
a gift from Miss Montague's personality, I would rather have
what she in a matter-of-fact way would take for granted, but
what is harder for us who are beginners here to come by,--I mean
her altogether fine and blameless relation to her girls outside
the classroom. She was a presence always heartily responsive,
but never unwary, without the slightest reflection of her
personality upon us, with never a word too much of praise
or blame, of too much intimacy or of too much reserve. She
was a figure of familiar friendliness, ready with sympathy and
comprehension, but wholesome, sound and sane, without trace
of sentimentality. Above all, I felt her a singularly honorable
spirit, toward whom we always turned our best side, to whom
we might never go with talk wanton or idle or unkind or
critical, but always with our very precious thoughts on
whatsoever things are eager, and honest and kindly and of good
report. And so she was able to do us much good and no harm
at all. She can have had no millstones about her neck to
reckon with....
Miss Montague used to have a little class in Plato, and I have
not forgotten how quietly we read together one day at the end
of the Phaedo of the death of Socrates. After Miss Montague
died, I turned to the book and found the place where the servant
has brought the cup of poison, but Crito, unreconciled, wants
to delay even a little:
"For the sun," said he, "is yet on the hills, and many a man
has drunk the draught late."
"Yes," said Socrates, "since they wished for delay. But
I do not think that I should gain anything by drinking the
cup a little later."
In January, 1915, while this story of Wellesley was being written,
Katharine Coman, Professor Emeritus of Economics, went like a
conqueror to the triumph of her death. Miss Coman's power as
a teacher has been spoken of on an earlier page, but she will be
remembered in the college and outside as more than a teacher. Her
books and her active interest in industrial affairs, her noble
attitude toward life, all have had their share in informing and
directing and inspiring the college she loved.
"A mountain soul, she shines in crystal air
Above the smokes and clamors of the town.
Her pure, majestic brows serenely wear
The stars for crown.
"She comrades with the child, the bird, the fern,
Poet and sage and rustic chimney-nook,
But Pomp must be a pilgrim ere he earn
Her mountain look.
"Her mountain look, the candor of the snow,
The strength of folded granite, and the calm
Of choiring pines, whose swayed green branches strow
A healing balm.
* * * * * * *
"For lovely is a mountain rosy-lit
With dawn, or steeped in sunshine, azure-hot,
But loveliest when shadows traverse it,
And stain it not."
[From a poem, "A Mountain Soul," by Katharine Lee Bates, 1904.]
CHAPTER IV
THE STUDENTS AT WORK AND PLAY
The safest general statement which can be made about Wellesley
students of the first forty years of the college is that more than
sixty per cent of them have come from outside New England, from
the Middle West, the Far West, and the South. Possibly there is
a Wellesley type. Whether or not it could be differentiated from
the Smith, the Bryn Mawr, the Vassar, and the Mt. Holyoke types,
if the five were set up in a row, unlabeled, is a question. Yet
it is true that certain recognizable qualities have developed and
tend to persist among the students of Wellesley.
Wellesley girls are in the best sense democratic. There is no
Gold Coast on the campus or in the village; money carries no
social prestige. More money is spent, and more frivolously, than
in the early days; there are more girls, and more rich girls, to
spend it; yet the indifference to it except as a mechanical
convenience, a medium of exchange and an opportunity for service,
continues to be naively Utopian.
But money is not the only touchstone of democratic sensitiveness.
At Wellesley there has always been uneasiness at the hint of
unequal opportunity. When the college grew so large that membership
in the six societies took on the aspect of special privilege,
restiveness was as marked among the privileged as among the
unprivileged, and more outspoken. The first result was the Barn
Swallows, a social and dramatic society to which every student
in college might belong if she wished. The second was the
reorganization of the six societies on a more democratic and
intellectual basis, to prevent "rushing", favoritism, cliques, and
all the ills that mutually exclusive clubs are heir to. The
agitation for these reforms came from the societies themselves,
and they endured with Spartan determination the months of transitional
misery and readjustment which their generous idealism brought upon
their heads.
Enthusiasm for equality also enters into the students' attitude
toward "the academic", and like most enthusiasts, from the French
Revolution down, they are capable of confusing the issue. In the
early days, they were not allowed to know their marks, lest the
knowledge should rouse an unworthy spirit of competition; and of
all the rules instituted by the founder, this is the one which
they have been most unwilling to see abolished. Silent Time they
relinquished with relief; Domestic Work they abandoned without
a pang; Bible Study shrank from four to three years and from three
to two, and then to one, almost without their noticing it. But
when, in 1901, the Honor Scholarships were established, a storm
of protest burst among the undergraduates, and thundered and
lightened for several weeks in the pages of College News. And
not the least vehement of these protestants were the "Honor girls"
themselves. To see their names posted in an alphabetical list
of twenty or more students who had achieved, all unwittingly, a
certain number of A's and B's throughout their course, seems to
have caused them a mortification more keen than that experienced
by St. Simeon Stylites on his pillar. But that the college ideal
should be "degraded" pained them most.
There was something very touching and encouraging about this
wrong-headed, right-hearted outburst. After the usual Wellesley
fashion, freedom of speech prevailed; everybody spoke her mind.
In the end "sweetness and light" dispersed the mists of sentiment
which had assumed that to acknowledge inequality of achievement
was to abolish equality of opportunity, and burned away the ethical
haziness which had magnified mediocrity; the crusaders realized
that the pseudo-compassion which would conceal the idle and the
stupid, the industrious and the brilliant, in a common obscurity,
is impracticable, since the fool and the genius cannot long be
hid, and unfair, since the ant and the grasshopper would enjoy
a like reward, and no democracy has yet claimed that those who
do not work shall eat. When in 1912 the faculty at last decided
to inform the students as to all their marks, the news was received
with no protest and with an intelligent appreciation of the
intellectual and ethical value of the new privilege.
The college was founded "for the glory of God and the service of
the Lord Jesus Christ, in and by the education and culture of women";
and Wellesley girls are, in the best sense, religious. There has
been no time in the first forty years when the undergraduates
were not earnestly and genuinely preoccupied with religious
questions and religious living. One recognizes this not only by
the obvious and commonplace signs, such as the interest in the
Christian Association, the Student Volunteer Movement, the Missionary
Field, Silver Bay, manifested by the conventional Christian
students; it is evident also in the hunger and thirst of the sincere
rebels, in such signs as the "Heretics' Bible Class" a volunteer
group which existed for a year or two in the second decade of
the century, and which has had its prototypes at intervals throughout
the forty years. One sees it in the interest and enthusiasm of
the students who follow Professor Case's course in the Philosophy
of Hegel; in the reverence and love with which girls of all creeds
and of none speak of the Chapel services, and attend them. When
two thirds of the girls go voluntarily and as a matter of course to
an Ash Wednesday evening service, when Jew and Roman Catholic
alike testify eagerly to the value of the morning Chapel service
in their spiritual development, it is evident that the religious
life is genuine and healthy. And it finds its outlet in the
passion for social service which, if statistics can be trusted,
inspires so many of the alumnae. The old-fashioned Puritan,
if she still exists, may tremble for the souls of the Wellesley
girls who crowd by hundreds into the "matinee train" on Saturday
afternoon, but let us hope that she would be reassured to find
the voluntary Bible and Mission Study classes attended, and even
conducted, by many of these same girls. She might grieve over
the years of Bible Study lost to the curriculum, and over the
introduction of modern methods of Biblical Higher Criticism into
the classroom; but surely she would be comforted to see how the
students have arisen to the rescue of the devotional study of the
Scriptures, with their voluntary classes enthusiastically maintained.
It might even touch her sense of humor.
As the college has grown larger, undoubtedly more and more girls
have come to Wellesley for other than intellectual reasons,--because
it is "the thing" to go to college, or for "the life." But it is
reassuring to find that the reactions of "the life" upon them
always quicken them to a deeper respect for intellectual values.
The "academic" holds first place in the Wellesley life, not
perfunctorily but vitally. The students themselves are swift to
recognize and rebuke, usually in the "Free Press" or the "Parliament
of Fools", of the College News, any signs of intellectual indifference
or laxity. Wellesley, like Harvard and other large colleges, has
its uninspiring level stretches of mediocrity; but it has its
little leaping hills, its soaring peaks as well. Every class has
its band of devoted students for whom the things of the mind
are supreme; every class has its scattering of youthful scholars
to give distinction to the academic landscape.
It would be absurd and useless to deny that Wellesley girls have
their defects; they are of the sort that press for recognition;
defects of manner, and manners, which are not confined to the
students of any one college, or even to college students, but
are due in a measure to the general change in our attitude towards
women, and to the new freedom in which they all alike share. It
is true that, to a degree, the graces and reserves which give
charm and finish to daily living are sacrificed to the more pushing
claims of study and athletics, in college. It is true that the
unmodulated voice, the mushy enunciation, the unrestrained attitude,
the slouchy clothes, too often go unrebuked in classroom and
dormitory, where it seems to be nobody's business to rebuke them;
but it is also usually true that, before they ever came to college,
that voice, that attitude, those clothes, went unrebuked and even
unheeded, at home or in the girls' camp, where it emphatically was
somebody's business to heed and rebuke.
But it is the public which sees the worst of it, especially on
trains, where groups of young voices or extreme fashions in dress
become quite unintentionally conspicuous. Experienced from within,
the life, despite its many little roughnesses, its small lapses in
taste, is gracious and gentle, selfless in unobtrusive ways, and
genuinely kind.
Religious, democratic, intellectually serious is our Wellesley
girl, and last but not least, she is a lover of beauty. How could
she fail to be? How many times, in early winter twilights, has
she come over the stile into the Stone Hall meadow, and stood
long moments, hushed, bespelled, by the tranquil pale loveliness
of the lake, the dusky, rimming hills, the bare, slim blackness
of twig and bough embroidering the silver sky,--the whole luminous
etching? How often, mid-morning in spring, has she sat with her
book in a green shade west of the library, and lifted her eyes
to see above the daffodil-bank of Longfellow's fountain the blue
lake waters laughing between the upspringing trunks of the tall
oak trees? Wherever there are Wellesley women, when spring is
waking,--in Switzerland, in Sicily, in Japan, in England,--they are
remembering the Wellesley spring, that pageant of young green
of lawns and hills and tenderest flushing rose in baby oak leaves
and baby maples, that twinkling dance of birches and of poplars,
that splendor of the youth of the year amid which young maidens
shone and blossomed, starring the campus among the other spring
flowers. And are there Wellesley women anywhere in the autumn
who do not think of Wellesley and four autumns? Of the long russet
vistas of the west woods? Of the army with banners, scarlet and
golden, and bronze and russet and rose, that marched and trumpeted
around Lake Waban's streaming Persian pattern of shadows? When
you speak to a Wellesley girl of her Alma Mater, her eyes widen
with the lover's look, and you know that she is seeing a vision of
pure beauty.
II.
In 1876, the students, shocked and grieved by the discovery of
one of those cases of cheating with which every college has to deal
from time to time, met together, and made a very stringent rule
to be enforced by themselves. This "law", enacted on February 18,
1876, marks the first step toward Student Government at Wellesley;
it reads as follows:
"The students of Wellesley College unanimously decree as a perpetual
law of the college that no student shall use a translation or key
in the study of any lesson or in any review, recitation, or
examination. Every student who may enter the college shall be
in honor bound to expose every violation of this law. If any
student shall be known to violate this law, she shall be warned
by a committee of the students and publicly exposed. If the
offense be repeated the students shall demand her immediate
expulsion as unworthy to remain a member of Wellesley College."
It is signed by the presidents of the two classes, 1879 and 1880,
then in college.
Until 1881, when the Courant, the first Wellesley periodical, gave
the students opportunity to express their minds concerning matters
of college policy, we have no definite record of further steps
toward self-government on the part of the undergraduates. The
disciplinary methods of those early years are amusingly described
by Mary C. Wiggin, of the class of '85, who tells us that authority
was vested in four bodies, the president, the doctor, the corridor
teacher and the head of the Domestic Department.
"The president was responsible for our going out and our coming
in. The 'office' might give permission to leave town, but all
tardiness in returning must be explained to the president. How
timidly four of us came to Miss Freeman in my sophomore year to
explain that the freshman's mother had kept us to supper after
our 'permitted' drive on Monday afternoon! What an occasion it
gave her to caution us as to sophomore influence over freshmen!
"Very infrequent were our journeys to Boston in those days, theaters
were forbidden. Once during my four years I saw Booth in 'Macbeth'
during a Christmas vacation, salving my conscience with a liberal
interpretation of the phrase, 'while connected with the college',
trying to forget the parting injunction, 'Remember, girls, that
You are Wellesley College.'...
"In the old days we were seated alphabetically in church and
chapel, where attendance was kept in each 'section' by one of
its members. A growing laxity permitted you to sit out of place
on Sunday evenings, provided that you reported to your section
girl. Otherwise you would be called to the office to explain your
absence....
"Very slowly did the idea dawn upon me that there was a faculty
back of all these very pleasant personal relations."
But in the late '80's, the advance toward student self-government
begins to be traceable, slowly but surely. In the spring of 1887,
on the initiative of the faculty, the first formal conference
between representatives of faculty and students was called, to
consider questions of class organization. Other conferences took
place at irregular intervals during the next seven years, as
occasion arose, and these often led to new legislation. The
subjects discussed were, the Magazine, the Legenda, Athletics,
the Junior Prom. In the autumn of 1888, students were first
allowed to hand in excuses for absence from college classes; the
responsibility for giving a "true, valid and signed excuse" resting
with the individual student. In this same autumn the law forbidding
eating between meals was repealed, but students were still not
permitted to keep eatables in their rooms.
Articles on college courtesy, quiet in the library, articles for
and against Domestic Work, begin to appear in the Courant and
the Prelude in 1888 and 1889. In May, 1890, we learn of a
Students' Association, which was the means of obtaining class
bulletin boards in the autumn of 1890. From this time also,
agitation on all topics of interest to the students is more openly
active. In September, 1891, the faculty consent to allow library
books to be taken out of the library on Saturday afternoon for
use over Sunday. In October, 1891, we find that the Students'
Association is to offer a medium for discussion and to foster a
scholarly spirit. In December, 1891, a plea appears in the Prelude
for occasional conferences between faculty and students on problems
of college policy. In 1892, we read that the individual students
are allowed to choose a church in the village and attend it on
Sundays, if they so desire, instead of attending the College
Chapel. In 1892 also, we have the agitation, in the Wellesley
Magazine, for the wearing of cap and gown, and in this year senior
privileges are extended, and the responsibility for absence from
class appointments rests with the student. In November, 1892,
the Magazine prints an article on Student Government by Professor
Case of the Department of Philosophy. And the cap and gown census
and discussion go gayly on. Early in 1893, there is a discussion
of Student Government. In the spring of this year, there is an
agitation for voluntary chapel. In September, the seniors begin
to wear the cap and gown throughout the year. The year 1894 sees
Silent Time abolished; and agitation,--always courteous and
friendly,--goes on for Student Government, for the opening of the
library on Sunday, for the abolition of Domestic Work. In 1893
or 1894, Professor Burrell, as head of College Hall, introduces
the custom of having students sign for overtime when they wish
to study after ten o'clock at night. In 1894, excuses for absence
from chapel and classes are no longer required. In the spring
of 1894, at the request of undergraduates, a conference with the
faculty, in a series of meetings, considers matters of interest in
student life. Beginning with May, 1895, the library is opened
on Sundays.
It is significant to note, in looking over these old files of
college magazines, that when the students' interest waned, the
faculty were always ready to administer the necessary prod. Not
all the articles in favor of Student Government are written by
students. President Shafer herself gave the strongest early
impetus to the movement, although not through the press. In 1899,
Professor Woolley, as head of College Hall, instituted a House
Organization, which as an experiment in Student Government among
the students then living in College Hall was a complete success.
In June, 1900, we find arrangements made for a Faculty-Student
Conference, to be held during the autumn months; and this body
met five times. Its establishment did a great deal in paving the
way to mutual understanding and trust when the definite question
of Student Government was approached.
On March 6, 1901, at a mass meeting of the students, and after
a spirited discussion, it was voted that the Academic Council be
petitioned to give self-government to the students in all matters
not academic. This date is kept every year as the birthday of
Student Government. At another mass meeting, on April 9, Miss
Katharine Lord, the President of the Student Association of
Bryn Mawr, spoke to the college on Student Government, and on
April 23, there was still another mass meeting. The student
committee appointed to confer with the committee from the faculty
had for its chairman Mary Leavens, of the class of 1901, student
head of College Hall; Miss Pendleton, at that time secretary of
the college, was the chairman of the faculty committee. Student
Government found in her, from the beginning, a convinced and able
champion. In April, the constitution was submitted to the committee
of the faculty, and in May the constitution and the agreement, after
careful consideration, were submitted to the Executive Committee
of the Board of Trustees. On May 29, an all day election for
president was held, resulting in the choice of Frances L. Hughes,
1902, as first president of the Student Government Association of
Wellesley College. On June 6, the report was adopted and the
agreement was signed by the president and secretary of the Board
of Trustees and the president of the college. On June 7, in the
presence of the faculty and the whole student body, in chapel, the
agreement was read and signed on behalf of the faculty by the
secretary of the college. The ceremony was impressive and memorable
in its simplicity and solemnity. After Miss Pendleton had signed
her name, the students rose and remained standing while the agreement
was signed by Frances L. Hughes, President of the Association for
1901 and 1902, May Mathews, President of the Class of 1902,
Margaret C. Mills, President of the Class of 1901, and Mary Leavens,
President of the House Council of College Hall. The Scripture
lesson was taken from I. Corinthians, "Other foundation can no
man lay than that is laid," and the recessional was, "How firm
a foundation."
The Association is organized with a president and vice president,
chosen from the senior class, and a secretary and a treasurer from
the juniors; these are all elected by the whole undergraduate body.
There is an Executive Board whose members are the president,
vice president, secretary and treasurer of the association, the
house presidents and their proctors, and a representative from
each of the four classes, elected by the class. The government
is in all essentials democratic. The rules are made and executed
by the whole body of students; but all legislation of the students
is subject to approval by the college authorities, and if any
question arises as to whether or not a subject is within the
jurisdiction of the association, it is referred to a joint committee
of seven, made up of a standing committee of three appointed by
the faculty, a standing committee of three appointed by the
association, and the president of the college.
In intrusting to the association the management of all matters
not strictly academic concerning the conduct of students in their
college life, the College authorities reserve the right to regulate
all athletic events and formal entertainments, all societies, clubs
and other organizations, all Society houses, and all publications,
all matters pertaining to public health and safety and to household
management and the use of college property. The students are
responsible for all matters of registration and absence from college,
for the regulation of travel, permission for Sunday callers, rules
governing chaperonage, the maintenance of quiet, the general
conduct of students on the campus and in the village. It is they
who have abolished the "ten-o'clock-bedtime rule"; it is they who
have decreed that students shall not go to Boston on Sundays, but
this rule is relaxed for seniors, who are allowed two Boston
Sundays, in which they may attend church or an afternoon sacred
concert in the city. If a student wishes to spend Sunday away
from college, she must go away on Saturday and remain until Monday.
Questions of minor discipline, such as the enforcing of the rule
of quiet in the dormitories, are handled by the students; not yet,
it must be confessed, with complete success, as the quiet in the
dormitories--especially the freshman houses--falls short of that
holy calm which studious girls have a right to claim. Serious
misdemeanors are of course in the jurisdiction of the president
of the college and the faculty. One very important college duty,
the proctoring of examinations, which would seem to be an entirely
legitimate function of the Student Government Association, the
students themselves have not as yet been willing to assume. During
the years when the freshmen, sometimes as many as four hundred,
were housed in the village because of the crowded conditions on
the campus, the burden upon the Student Government Association,
and especially upon the vice president and her senior assistants
who had charge of the village work, was, in the opinion of many
alumnae and some members of the faculty, heavier than they should
have been expected to shoulder; for, when all is said, students do
come to college primarily to pursue the intellectual life, rather
than to be the monitors of undergraduate behavior. Fortunately,
with the endowment of the college and the building of new dormitories
on the campus, the village problem will be eliminated. The students
themselves are unanimously enthusiastic concerning Student Government,
and the history of the association since its establishment reveals
an earnest and increasingly intelligent acceptance of responsibility
on the part of the student body. From the beginning the ultimate
success of the movement has been almost unquestioned, and the
association is now as stable an institution, apparently, as the
Academic Council or the Board of Trustees.
III.
The most important of the associations which bring Wellesley
students into touch with the outside world are the Christian
Association and the College Settlements Association. These two,
with the Consumers' League and the Equal Suffrage League--also
flourishing organizations--help to foster the spirit of service
which has characterized the college from its earliest days.
The Christian Association did not come into existence until 1884,
but in the very first year of the college a Missionary Society was
formed, which gave "Missionary concerts" on Sunday evenings in
the chapel, and adopted as its college missionary, Gertrude Chandler
(Wyckoff) of the class of 1879, who went out to the mission field
in India in 1880. In the first decade also a Temperance Society
was formed, and noted speakers on temperance visited the college.
But in 1883, in order to unify the religious work, a Christian
Association was proposed. The initiative seems to have come from
the faculty, and this was natural, as the little group of teachers
from the University of Michigan--President Freeman, Professor
Chapin of the Department of Greek, Professor Coman of Economics,
Professor Case of Philosophy, Professor Chandler of Mathematics,--had
had a hand in developing the Young Women's Christian Association
at Ann Arbor.
The first meeting of this Association was held in College Hall
Chapel, October 8, 1884, and we read that it was formed "for the
purpose of promoting Christian fellowship as a means of individual
growth in character, and of securing, by the union of the various
societies already existing, a more systematic arrangement of the
work to be done in college by officers and students, for the cause
of Christ."
Those who joined the association pledged themselves to declare
their belief in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and to
dedicate their lives to His service. They promised to abide by
the laws of the association and seek its prosperity; ever to strive
to live a life consistent with its character as a Christian
Association, and, as far as in them lay, to engage in its activities;
to cultivate a Christian fellowship with its members, and as
opportunity offered, to endeavor to lead others to a Christian life.
Wellesley is rightly proud of the Christian simplicity and
inclusiveness of this pledge.
The work of the association included Bible study, devotional
meetings, individual work, and the development of missionary
interest. Three hundred and seventy signed as charter members,
and Professor Stratton of the Department of Rhetoric was the first
president. The students held most of the offices, but it was not
until 1894 that a student president,--Cornelia Huntington of the
class of 1895--was elected. Since then, this office has always
been held by a student. From its inception the association received
the greatest help and inspiration from Mrs. Durant, for many years
the President of the Boston Young Women's Christian Association,
which was one of the first of its kind.
Early in its career, the Wellesley Association adopted, besides
its foreign missionary, a home missionary, and later a city
missionary who worked in New York. An Indian committee was
formed, and Thanksgiving entertainments were given at the Woman's
Reformatory in Sherborn and the Dedham Asylum for released prisoners.
In this prison work, the college always had the fullest help and
sympathy of Mrs. Durant. The Wellesley Student Volunteer Band
was organized May 26, 1890, and in 1915 there were known to be
about one hundred Wellesley girls in the foreign field, and there
were probably others of whom the college was uninformed. It is
a noble and inspiring record.
In 1905, after the union of many of the Young Women's Christian
Associations and the formation of the National Board, Wellesley
was urged to affiliate herself with the National Association, but
she was unwilling to narrow her own pledge, to meet the conditions
of the National Board. She felt that she better served the cause
of Christian Unity by admitting to her fellowship a wider range of
Christians, so-called, than the National Board was at that time
prepared to tolerate; and she was also more or less fearful of too
much dictation. It was not until 1913, at the Fourth Biennial
Convention of the Young Women's Christian Associations, held at
Richmond, Virginia, that Wellesley was received into the National
organization; and she came retaining her own pledge and her own
constitution.
In the old days, the Christian Association was the stronghold of
the dying Evangelicalism, and was looked on with distaste by many
of the radical students; but of late years, its tone and its method
have changed to meet the needs of the modern girl, and it has
become a power throughout the college. The annual report for
1913-1914 shows a total membership of 1297. The association
carries on Mission Study Classes; Bible Classes which the students
teach, under the direction of volunteers from the faculty, in such
subjects as "The Social Teachings of Jesus", "The Ideals of Israel's
Leaders as Forces in Our Lives", "Christ in Everyday Life";
"General Aid" work, for girls who need to earn money in college.
Its Social Committee is active among freshmen and new students.
Of its special committees, the one on Conferences and Conventions
plays an important part in quickening the interest in Silver Bay,
and the one on "the College in Spain" presents the needs and
claims of the International Institute for Girls at Madrid. Besides
its regular meetings, the Christian Association now has charge
of the Lenten services, and this effort to deepen the devotional
life of the college has met with a swift response from the students.
During 1913-1914, in Lent, the chapel was open every afternoon
for meditation and prayer, and cards with selected prayers for each
day were furnished to all who cared to use them. Unquestionably,
Wellesley possesses no student organization more living and more
life-giving than its Christian Association.
Four years after the foundation of the Christian Association,
Wellesley had opened her heart and her mind to the College Settlement
idea. The movement, as is well known, originated in the late '80's
in America. At the same time that Jane Addams and Ellen Gates
Starr were starting Hull House in Chicago, a group of Smith College
alumnae, chief among whom were Vida D. Scudder, Clara French,
Helen Rand (Thayer), and Jean Fine (Spahr), was pressing for the
establishment of a house in the East. And the idea was understood
and fostered by Wellesley about as soon as by Smith, for it was
interpreted at Wellesley by Professor Scudder, who became a member
of the college faculty, as instructor in English Literature, in
the autumn of 1887. In 1889, the Courant printed an article on
College Settlements, and students of the later '80's and early '90's
will never forget the ardor and excitement of those days when
Wellesley was bearing her part in starting what was to be one
of the important movements for social service in the nineteenth
century. All her early traditions and activities made the college
swift to understand and welcome this new idea.
From the beginning, the social impulse has been inherent in
Wellesley, and settlement work was native to her. Professor Whiting
tells us that there used to be a shoe factory in Wellesley Village,
about where the Eliot now stands; that the students became interested
in the girl operatives, most of whom lived in South Natick, and
that they started a factory girls' club which met every Saturday
evening for years, and was led by college girls. In Charles River
Village, also at that time a factory town, Mr. Durant held
evangelistic services during one winter, and "teacher specials"
used to help him, and to teach in the Sunday School.
In 1890-1891, probably because of the settlement impulse, work
among the maids in the college was set going by the Christian
Association. A maids' parlor was furnished under the old gymnasium,
and classes for the maids were started.
In 1891, the Wellesley Chapter of the College Settlements Association
was organized. It was Professor Katharine Lee Bates (Wellesley '80)
who first suggested the plan for an intercollegiate organization,
with chapters in the different colleges for women; and her friend
Adaline Emerson (Thompson), a Wellesley graduate of the class
of '80, was the first president of the association. Wellesley women
have ever since taken a prominent part in the direction of the
association's policy and in the active life of the settlement houses
in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Wellesley has
given presidents, secretaries, and many electors to the association
itself, and head-workers and a continuous stream of efficient and
devoted residents, not only to the four College Settlements, but
to Social Settlement houses all over the country. The College
Chapter keeps a special interest in the work of the Boston
Settlement, Denison House; students give entertainments occasionally
for the settlement neighbors, and help in many ways at Christmas
time; but practical social service from undergraduates is not the
ideal nor the desire of the College Settlements Association. It
aims rather at the quickening of sympathy and intelligence on
social questions, and the moral and financial support which the
College Chapter can give its representatives out in the world.
Such by-products of the settlement interest as the Social Study
Circle, an informal group of undergraduates and teachers which
met for several years to study social questions, are worth much
more to the movement than the immature efforts of undergraduates
in directing settlement clubs and classes.
Already the historic perspective is sufficiently clear for us to
realize that the College Settlement Movement is the unique, and
perhaps the most important organized contribution of the women's
colleges to civilization during their first half century of existence.
Through this movement, in which they have played so large a part,
they have exerted an influence upon social thought and conscience
exceeded, in this period, by few other agencies, religious,
philanthropic or industrial, if we except the Trade-union Movement
and Socialism, which emanate from the workers themselves. The
prominent part which Wellesley has played in it will doubtless be
increasingly understood and valued by her graduates.
IV.
Let it be frankly acknowledged: the ordinary adult is usually
bored by the undergraduate periodical--even though he may, once
upon a time, have edited it himself. The shades of the prison-house
make a poor light for the Gothic print of adolescence. But the
historian, if we may trust allegory, bears a torch. For him no
chronicle, whether compiled by twelfth-century monk or twentieth-century
collegian, can be too remote, too dull, to reflect the gleam. And
some chronicles, like the Wellesley one, are more rewarding than
others.
No one can turn over the pages of these fledgling journals, Courant,
Prelude, Magazine, News, without being impressed by the unconscious
clarity with which they reflect not merely the events in the college
community--although they are unusually faithful and accurate
recorders of events--but the college temper of mind, the range
of ideas, the reaction to interests beyond the campus, the general
trend of the intellectual and spiritual life.
The interest in social questions is to the fore astonishingly
early. In Wellesley's first newspaper, the Courant, published in
the college year 1888-1889, we find articles on the Working Girls
of Boston, on the Single Tax, and notes of a prize essay on
Child Labor. And throughout the decade of the '90's, the dominant
note in the Prelude, 1889-1892, and its successor, the Wellesley
Magazine, 1892-1911, is the social note. Reports of college
events give prominent place to lectures on Woman Suffrage, Social
Settlements, Christian Socialism. In 1893, William Clarke of the
London Chronicle, a member of the Fabian Society, visiting America
as a delegate to the Labor Congress in Chicago, gave lectures at
Wellesley on "The Development of Socialism in England", "The
Government of London", "The London Working Classes." Matthew
Arnold's visit came too early to be recorded in the college paper,
but he was perhaps the first of a notable list of distinguished
Englishmen who have helped to quicken the interest of Wellesley
students along social lines. Graham Wallas, Lowes-Dickinson,
H. G. Wells, are a few of the names found in the pages of the
Magazine and the News. The young editors evidently welcomed
papers on social themes, such as "The Transition in the Industrial
Status of Women, by Professor Coman"; and the great strikes of
the decade, The Homestead Strike, the Pennsylvania Coal Strike,
the New Bedford Strike, are written up as a matter of course. It
is interesting to note that the paper on the Homestead Strike,
with a plea for the unions, was written by an undergraduate,
Mary K. Conyngton, who has since won for herself a reputation
for research work in the Labor Bureau at Washington.
Political articles are only less prominent than social and industrial
material. As early as 1893 we have an article on "The Triple Alliance"
and in the Magazine of 1898 and 1899 there are papers on "The Colonial
Expansion of the Great European Powers", "The Italian Riots of
May, 1898", "The Philippine Question", "The Dreyfus Incident."
This preoccupation of young college women of the nineteenth century
with modern industrial and political history is significant when
we consider the part that woman has elected to play in politics
and reform since the beginning of the twentieth century.
In the first years of that new century, the Magazine and the weekly
News begin to reflect the general revival of religious interest
among young people. The Student Volunteer Movement, the increased
activities in the Christian Associations for both men and women,
find their response in Wellesley students. Letters from missionaries
are given prominence; the conferences at Silver Bay are written
up enthusiastically and at great length. Social questions never
lapse, at Wellesley, but during the decade 1900 to 1910, the
dominant journalistic note is increasingly religious. Later, with
the activity of the Social Study Circle, an informal club for the
study of social questions, and its offspring the small but earnest
club for the study of Socialism, the social interests regained
their vitality for the student mind.
Besides the extra mural problems, the periodicals record, of course,
the events and the interests of the little college world. Through
the "Free Press" columns of these papers, the didactic, critical,
and combative impulses, always so strong in the undergraduate
temperament, find a safe vent. Mentor and agitator alike are
welcomed in the "Free Press", and many college reforms have been
inaugurated, and many college grievances--real and imagined--have
been aired in these outspoken columns. And not the least readable
portions of the weeklies have been the "Waban Ripples" in the
Prelude, and the "Parliament of Fools" in the News. For Wellesley
has a merry wit and is especially good at laughing at herself,--yes,
even at that "Academic" of which she is so loyally proud. Witness
these naughty parodies of examination questions, which appeared
in a "Parliament of Fools" just before the mid-year examinations
of 1915.
Philosophy:
"Translate the following into Kant, Spencer, Perry, Leibnitz,
Hume, Calkins (not more than one page each allowed).
"'Little drops of water, little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean, and a pleasant land.'
"The remainder of the time may be employed in translating
into Kantian terminology, the title of the book: 'Myself and I.'"
English Literature:
"Give dates and significance of the following; and state whether
they are persons or books: Stratford-on-Avon, Magna Charta,
Louvain, Onamataposa, Synod of Whitby, Bunker Hill, Transcendentalism,
Mesopotamia, Albania, Hastings.
"Write an imaginary conversation between John Bunyan and
Myrtle Reed on the Social significance of Beowulf.
"Do you consider that Browning and Carlyle were influenced by
the Cubist School? Cite passages not discussed in class to
support your view.
"Trace the effects of the Norman strain in England in the works
of Tolstoi, Cervantes, and Tagore."
English Composition:
"Write a novelette containing:
(a) Plot; (b) two crises; (c) three climaxes; (d) one character.
"Write a biography of your own life, bringing out distinctly
reasons pro and con. Outline form."
Biblical History:
"Trace the life of Abraham from Genesis through Malachi.
"Quote the authentic passages of the New Testament. Why or
why not?
"Where do the following words recur? Verily, greeting, begat,
therefore, Pharisee, holy, notacceptedbythescholars."
Excellent fooling, this; and it should go far to convince a
skeptical public that college girls take their educational advantages
with sanity.
As literary magazines, these Wellesley periodicals are only
sporadically successful. Now and again a true poet flashes through
their pages; less often a true story-teller, although the mechanical
excellence of most of the stories is unquestionable,--they go
through the motions quite as if they were the real thing. But
the appeals of the editors for poetry and literary prose; their
occasional sardonic comments upon the apathy of the college reading
public,--especially during the waning later years of the Magazine,
before it was absorbed into the monthly issue of the News,--would
seem to indicate that the pure, literary imagination is as rare at
Wellesley as it is in the world at large. Yet there are shining
pages in these chronicles, pages whose golden promise has been fulfilled.
In 1911, the Alumnae Association discussed the advisability of
publishing an alumnae magazine, but it was decided that the time
was not yet ripe for the new enterprise, and instead an agreement
was entered into with the News, by which a certain number of
pages each month were to be at the disposal of the alumnae editor,
for articles and essays on college matters which should be of
interest to the alumnae. The new department has been marked
from the beginning by dignity and interest, and the papers contributed
have been unusually valuable, especially from the point of view
of college history.
In 1889 Wellesley's Senior Annual, the Legenda, came into being.
In general it has followed the conventional lines of all college
annuals, but occasionally it has departed from the beaten path,
as in 1892, when it was transformed into a Wellesley Songbook;
in 1894, when it printed a memorial sketch of Miss Shafer, and
a biographical sketch of Mrs. Durant; in 1896, when it became
a storybook of college life.
In October, 1912, The Wellesley College Press Board was organized
by Mrs. Helene Buhlert Magee, of the class of 1903. The board
is the outgrowth of an attempt by the college authorities, in 1911,
to regulate the work of its budding journalists. Up to this time
the newspapers had been supplied, more or less intermittently and
often unsatisfactorily, with items of college news by students
engaged by the newspapers and responsible only to them. The
college now appoints an official reporter from its own faculty,
who sends all Wellesley news to the newspapers and is consulted
by the regular reporters when they desire special information.
The Press Board, organized by this official reporter, consists of
seven students reporting for Boston papers and two for those in
New York. At the time of the Wellesley fire, this board proved
itself particularly efficient in disseminating accurate information.
V.
But it is not the workaday Wellesley, tranquilly pursuing her
serious and semi-serious occupations, that the outsiders know
best. To them, she is wont to turn her holiday face. And no
college plays with more zest than Wellesley. Perhaps because
no college ever had such a perfect playground. Every hill and
grove and hollow of the beautiful campus holds its memories of
playdays and midsummer nights.
Those were the nights when Rosalind and Orlando wandered out of
Arden into a New England moonlight; when flitting Ariel forsook
Prospero's isle to make his nest in Wellesley's bowering
rhododendrons--in blossom time he is always hovering there, a winged
bloom, for eyes that are not holden. Those were the nights when Puck
came dancing up from Tupelo with Titania's fairy rout a-twinkle at his
heels; when the great Hindu Raj floated from India in his canopied
barge across the moonlit waters of Lake Waban; when Tristram and
Iseult, on their way to the court of King Mark, all love distraught,
cast anchor in the little cove below Stone Hall and played their
passion out; when Nicolette kilted her skirts against the dew and
argued of love with Aucassin. Those were the nights when the
Countess Cathleen--loveliest of Yeats's Irish ladies--found Paradise
and the Heavenly Host awaiting her on a Wellesley hilltop when
she had sold her soul to feed her starving peasants.
But the glamour of the sun is as potent as the glamour of the
moon at Wellesley. High noon is magical on Tree Day, for then
the mythic folk of ancient Greece, the hamadryads and Dian's nymphs,
Venus and Orpheus and Narcissus, and all the rest, come out and
dream a dance of old days on the great green billows of the lawn.
To see veiled Cupid, like a living flame, come streaming down
among the hillside trees, down, swift as fire, to the waiting
Psyche, is never to forget. No wood near Athens was ever so
vision-haunted as Wellesley with the dancing spirits of past
Tree Days.
On that day in early June the whole college turns itself into a
pageant of spring. From the long hillside above which College Hall
once towered, the faculty and the alumnae watch their younger
sisters march in slow processional triumph around and about the
wide green campus. Like a moving flower garden the procession
winds upon itself; hundreds and hundreds of seniors and juniors
and sophomores and freshmen,--more than fourteen hundred of them
in 1914. Then it breaks ranks and plants itself in parterres
at the foot of the hill, masses of blue, and rose, and lavender,
and golden blossoming girls. Contrary Mistress Mary's garden was
nothing to it. And after the procession come the dances. Sometimes
a Breton Pardon wanders across the sea. The gods from Olympus
are very much at home in these groves of academe. Once King Arthur's
knight came riding up the wide avenue at the edge of the green.
The spirits of sun and moon, the nymphs of the wind and the rain,
have woven their mystical spells on that great greensward. And
in the fairy ring around Longfellow fountain, gnomes and fays and
freshmen play hide-and-seek with the water nixies.
The first Tree Day was Mr. Durant's idea; no one was more awake
than he, in the old days, to Wellesley's poetic possibilities.
And the first trees were gifts from Mr. Hunnewell; two beautiful
exotics, Japanese golden evergreens--one for 1879 and one for
1880. The two trees were planted on May 16, 1877, the sophomore
tree by the library, the freshman tree by the dining room. An
early chronicler writes, "Then it was that the venerated spade
made its first appearance. We had confidently expected a trowel,
had written indeed 'Apostrophe to the Trowel' on our programs,
and our apostrophist (do not see the dictionary), a girl of about
the same height as the spade, but by no means, as she modestly
suggested, of the same mental capacity, was so stricken with
astonishment when she had mounted the rostrum and this burly
instrument was propped up before her, that she nearly forgot her
speech.... And then it was there was introduced the more questionable
practice of planting class trees too delicate to bear the college
course. Although a foolish little bird built her nest and laid
her eggs in the golden-leaved evergreen of '79, and although a
much handsomer nest with a very much larger egg appeared immediately
in the Retinospora Precipera Aurea of '80, yet the rival 'nymphs
with golden hair' were both soon forced to forsake their withered
tenements; Mr. Hunnewell's exotics, after another trial or two,
being succeeded by plebeian hemlocks."
The true story of the Wellesley spade and how it came to be handed
down from class to class, is recorded in Florence Morse Kingsley's
diary, where we learn how the "burly instrument" of 1877 was
succeeded by a less unwieldy and more ladylike utensil. Under
the date, April 3, 1878, we find:
Our class (the class of '81) had a meeting last night.
We held it in one of the laboratories on the fifth floor,
quite in secret, for we didn't want the '80 girls to find it
out. The class of '80 is thought to be extraordinarily brilliant,
and they certainly do look down on us freshmen in haughty
disdain as being correspondingly stupid. I don't say very
much against them, since I---- is an '80 girl: besides,
if I work hard I can graduate with '80, but at present my
lot is cast with '81. We have decided to have a tree planting,
and it is to be entirely original and the first of a series.
Mr. Durant has given a Japanese Golden Evergreen to '79 and
one to '80. They are precisely alike and they had been planted
for quite a while before he thought of turning them into class
trees. We heard a dark rumor yesterday to the effect that
Mr. Durant is intending to plant another evergreen under the
library window and present it to us. But we voted to forestall
his generosity. We mean to have an elm, and we want to plant
it out in front of the college, in the center or just on the
other side of the driveway. The burning question remained
as to who should acquaint Mr. Durant with our valuable ideas.
Nobody seemed ravenously eager for the job, and finally I was
nominated. "You know him better than we do," they all said,
so I finally consented. I haven't a ghost of an idea what to
say; for when one comes to think of it, it is rather ungrateful
of '81 not to want the evergreen under the library window.
April 10. Alice and I went to Mr. Durant to-day about the
tree planting; but Alice was stricken with temporary dumbness
and never opened her lips, though she had solemnly promised
to do at least half the talking; so I had to wade right into
the subject alone. I began in medias res, for I couldn't think
of a really graceful and diplomatic introduction on the spur
of the moment. Mr. Durant was in the office with a pile of
papers before him as usual; he appeared to be very preoccupied
and he was looking rather severe. The interview proceeded
about as follows:
He glanced up at us sharply and said, "Well, young ladies,"
which meant, "Kindly get down to business; my time is valuable."
I got down to it about as gracefully as a cat coming down a
tree, like this: "We have decided to have a regular tree-planting,
Mr. Durant." Of course I should have said, "The class of '81
would like to have a tree-planting, if you please."
Mr. Durant appeared somewhat startled: "Eh, what's that?"
he said, then he settled back in his chair and looked hard at us.
His eyes were as keen as frost; but they twinkled--just a little,
as I have discovered they can and do twinkle if one isn't
afraid to say right out what one means, without unnecessary
fuss and twaddle.
"Alice and I are delegates from the Class of '81," I explained,
a trifle more lucidly. "The class has voted to plant an elm
for our class tree, and we would like to plant it in front of
the college in a prominent spot." We had previously decided
gracefully to ignore the evergreen rumor.
Mr. Durant looked thoughtful. "Hum," he said, "I'd planned
to give you girls of '81 a choice evergreen, and as for a place
for it: what do you say to the plot on the north side, just
under the library window?"
I looked beseechingly at Alice. She was apparently very much
occupied in a meek survey of the toes of her boots, which she
had stubbed into premature old age scrambling up and down
from the boat landings.
Meanwhile Mr. Durant was waiting for our look of pleased
surprise and joyful acquiescence. Then, without a vestige
of diplomacy, I blurted right out, "Yes, Mr. Durant; we heard
so; but we don't think, that is, we don't want an evergreen
under the library window; we would like a tree that will live
a long, long time and grow big like an elm, and we want it
where everybody will see it."
Mr. Durant looked exceedingly surprised, and for the space
of five seconds I was breathless. Then he smiled in the
really fascinating way that he has. "Well," he said, and
looked at me again, "what else have you decided to do?"
Then I told him all about the program we had planned, which
is to include an address to the spade (which we hope will be
preserved forever and ever), a class song, a procession, and
a few other inchoate ideas. Mr. Durant entered right into
the spirit of it, he said he liked the idea of a spade to be
handed down from class to class. He asked us if we had the
spade yet, and I told him "no," but Alice and I were going to
buy it for the class in the village that afternoon.
"Well, mind you get a good one," he advised. We said we would,
very joyfully. Then he told us we might select any young elm
we wanted, and tie our class colors on it, and he would order
it to be transplanted for us. After that he put on his hat
and all three of us went out and fixed the spot right in front
of the college by the driveway. Mr. Durant himself stuck a
little stick in the exact place where the elm of '81 will wave
its branches for at least a hundred years, I hope.
The hundred years are still to run, and old College Hall has
vanished, but the '81 elm stands in its "prominent" place, a tree
of ancient memories and visions ever young.
It was not until 1889 that the pageant element began to take
a definite and conspicuous place in the Tree Day exercises.
The class of '89 in its senior year gave a masque in which tall
dryads, robed in green, played their dainty roles; and that same
year the freshmen, the class of 1892, gave the first Tree Day
dance: a very mild dance of pink and white English maidens around
a maypole--but the germ of all the Tree Day dances yet unborn.
In its senior year, 1892 celebrated the discovery of America by
a sort of kermess of Colonial and Indian dances with tableaux,
and ever since, from year to year, the wonder has grown; Zeus,
and Venus, and King Arthur have all held court and revel on the
Wellesley Campus. Every year the long procession across the green
grows longer, more beautiful, more elaborate; the dancing is more
exquisitely planned, more complex, more carefully rehearsed. In
the spring, Wellesley girls are twirling a-tiptoe in every moment
not spent in class; and in class their thoughts sometimes dance.
Indeed, the students of late years have begun to ask themselves
if it may not be possible to obtain quite as beautiful a result
with less expense of effort and time and money; for Tree Day,
the crowning delight of the year, would defeat its own end, which
is pure recreation, if its beauty became a tyrant.
This multiplication of joys--and their attendant worries--is
something that Wellesley has to take measures to guard against,
and the faculty has worked out a scheme of biennial rotatory
festivities which since 1911-1912 has eased the pressure of revelry
in May and June, as well as throughout the winter months.
Wellesley's list of societies and social clubs is not short, but
the conditions of membership are carefully guarded. As early
as the second year of the college, five societies came into
existence: of these, the Beethoven Society and the Microscopical--which
started with a membership of six and an exhibition under three
microscopes at its first meeting--seem to have been open to
any who cared to join; the other three--the Zeta Alpha and Phi
Sigma societies founded in November, 1876, and the Shakespeare
in January, 1877--were mutually exclusive. The two Greek letter
societies were literary in aim, and their early programs consisted
in literary papers and oral debates. The Shakespeare Society,
for many years a branch of the London Shakespeare Society, devoted
itself to the study and dramatic presentation of Shakespeare. Its
first open-air play was "As You Like It", given in 1889; and until
1912, when it conformed to the new plan of biennial rotation,
this society gave a Shakespearean play every year at Commencement.
In 1881, Zeta Alpha and Phi Sigma were discontinued by the faculty,
because of pressure of academic work, but in 1889 they were
reorganized, and gradually their programs were extended to include
dramatic work, poetic plays, and masques. The Phi Sigma Society
gives its masque--sometimes an original one--on alternate years
just before the Christmas vacation; and Zeta Alpha alternates with
the Classical Society at Commencement. The Zeta Alpha Masque
of 1913, a charming dramatization in verse of an old Hindu legend
by Elizabeth McClellan of the class of 1913, was one of the notable
events of Commencement time, a pageant of poetic beauty and oriental
dignity; and in 1915 Florence Wilkinson Evans's adaptation of the
lovely old poem "Aucassin and Nicolette", was given for the
second time.
In 1889, the Art Society--known since 1894 as Tau Zeta Epsilon--was
founded; and, alternating with the Shakespeare play, it gives
in the spring a "Studio Reception", at which pictures from the
old masters, with living models, are presented. The effects of
lighting and color are so carefully studied, and the compositions
of the originals are so closely followed that the illusion is
sometimes startling; it is as if real Titians, Rembrandts, and
Carpaccios hung on the wails of the Wellesley Barn. In 1889,
also, the Glee and Banjo clubs were formed.
In 1891, the Agora, the political society, came into existence.
The serious intellectual quality of its work does honor to the
college, and its open debates, at which it has sometimes represented
the House of Commons, sometimes one or the other of the American
Chambers of Congress, are marked events in the college calendar.
In 1892, Alpha Kappa Chi, the Classical Society, was organized,
and of late years its Greek play, presented during Commencement
week, has surpassed both the senior play and the Shakespeare play
in dramatic rendering and careful study of the lines. Gilbert
Murray's translation of the "Medea", presented in 1914, was a
performance of which Wellesley was justly proud. Usually the
Wellesley plays are better as pageants than as dramatic productions,
but the Classical Society is setting a standard for the careful
literary interpretation and rendering of dramatic texts, which
should prove stimulating to all the societies and class organizations.
The senior play is one of the chief events of Commencement week,
but the students have not always been fully awake to their dramatic
opportunity. If college theatricals have any excuse for being, it
is not found in attempts to compete with the commercial stage and
imitate the professional actor, but rather in dramatic revivals
such as the Harvard Delta Upsilon has so spiritedly presented,
or in the interpretation of the poetic drama, whether early or late,
which modern theaters with their mixed audiences cannot afford
to present. The college audience is always a selected audience,
and has a right to expect from the college players dramatic caviare.
That Wellesley is moving in the right direction may be seen by
reading a list of her senior plays, among which are the "Countess
Cathleen", by Yeats, Alfred Noyes's "Sherwood", and in 1915
"The Piper" by Josephine Peabody Marks.
But Wellesley's recreation is not all rehearsed and formal.
May Day, when the seniors roll their hoops in the morning, and
all the college comes out to dance on the green and eat ice-cream
cones in the afternoon, is full of spontaneous jollity. Before the
burning of College Hall, the custom had arisen of cleaning house
on May Day, and six o'clock in the morning saw the seniors out
with pails and mops, scrubbing and decorating the many statues
which kept watch in the beloved old corridors.
One of these statutes had become in some sort the genius of
College Hall. Of heroic size, a noble representation of womanly
force and tranquillity, Anne Whitney's statue of Harriet Martineau
had watched the stream of American girlhood flow through "the Center"
and surge around the palms for twenty-eight years. The statue
was originally made at the request of Mrs. Maria Weston Chapman,
the well-known abolitionist and dear friend of Miss Martineau;
but after Mrs. Chapman's death, it was Miss Whitney's to dispose
of, and, representing as it did her ideal modern woman, she gave
it in 1886 to Wellesley, where modern womanhood was in the making.
In later years, irreverent youth took playful liberties with
"Harriet", using her much as a beloved spinster aunt is used by
fond but familiar young nieces. No freshman was considered properly
matriculated until she had been dragged between the rungs of
Miss Martineau's great marble chair; May Day always saw "Aunt Harriet"
rise like Diana fresh from her bath, to be decked with more or less
becoming furbelows; and as the presiding genius in the lighter
columns of College News, her humor--an acquired characteristic--was
merrily appreciated. Of all the lost treasures of College Hall
she is perhaps the most widely mourned.
The pretty little Society houses, dotted about the campus, also
give the students opportunity to entertain their guests, both
formally and informally, and during the months following the fire,
when Wellesley was cramped for space, they exercised a generous
hospitality which put all the college in their debt.
As the membership in the Shakespeare and Greek letter societies
is limited to between forty and fifty members in each society,
the great majority of the students are without these social
privileges, but the Barn Swallows, founded in 1897, to which
every member of the college may belong if she wishes, gives
periodic entertainments in the "Barn" which go far to promote
general good feeling and social fellowship. The first president
of the Barn Swallows, Mary E. Haskell, '97, says that it arose
as an Everybody's Club, to give buried talents a chance. "Suddenly
we adjured the Trustees by Joy and Democracy to bless our charter,
to be gay once a week, and when they gave the Olympic nod we
begged for the Barn to be gay in--and they gave that too.
"It was a grim joy parlor; rough old floor, bristly with splinters,
few windows, no plank walk, no stage, no partitions, no lighting.
We hung tin reflectored lanterns on a few of the posts,--thicker
near the stage end,--and opened the season with an impromptu
opera of the Brontes'." To Professor Charlotte F. Roberts,
Wellesley '80, the Barn Swallows owe their happy name.
Besides these more formal organizations there are a number of
department clubs, the Deutsche Verein, the Alliance Francaise,
the Philosophy Club, the Economics Club, and informal groups such
as the old Rhymesters' Club, which flourished in the late nineties,
the Scribblers' which seems to have taken its place and enlarged
its scope, the Social Study Circle, the little Socialist Club, and
others through which the students express their intellectual and
social interests.
Of Wellesley's many festivities and playtimes it would take too
long to tell: of her Forensic Burnings, held when the last junior
forensic for the year is due; of her processional serenades, with
Chinese lanterns; of her singing on the chapel steps in the evenings
of May and June. These well-beloved customs have been establishing
themselves year by year more firmly in undergraduate hearts, but
it is not always possible to trace them to their "first time."
Most of them date back to the later years of the nineteenth century,
or the first of the twentieth. Wellesley's musical cheer seems
to have waked the campus echoes first in the spring of 1890, as
a result of a prize offered in November, 1889, although as far
back as 1880 there is mention of a cheer. The musical cheer has
so much beauty and dignity, both near at hand and at a distance,
that many of the early alumnae and the faculty wish it might some
time quite supersede the ugly barking sounds, imitated from the
men's colleges, with which the girls are fain to evince their
approval and celebrate their triumphs. They invariably end their
barking with the musical cheer, however, keeping the best for the
last, and relieving the tortured graduate ear.
Formal athletics at Wellesley developed from the gymnasium practice,
the rowing on the lake, and the Tree Day dancing. In the early
years, the class crews used to row on the lake and sing at sunset,
in their heavy, broad-bottomed old tubs; and from these casual
summer evenings "Float" has been evolved--Wellesley's water
pageant--when Lake Waban is dotted with gay craft, and the crews
in their slim, modern, eight-oared shells, display their skill.
This is the festival which the public knows best, for unlike
Tree Day, to which outsiders have been admitted on only three
occasions, "Float" has always been open to friendly guests. Year
by year the festival grows more elaborate. Chinese junks, Indian
canoes, Venetian gondolas, flower boats from fairyland, glide over
the bright sunset waters, and the crews in their old traditional
star pattern anchor together and sing their merry songs. There
are new songs every spring, for each crew has its own song, but
there are two of the old songs which are heard at every Wellesley
Float, "Alma Mater", and the song of the lake, that Louise Manning
Hodgkins wrote for the class of '87.
Lake of gray at dawning day,
In soft shadows lying,--
Waters kissed by morning mist,
Early breezes sighing,--
Fairy vision as thou art,
Soon thy fleeting charms depart.
Every grace that wins the heart,
Like our youth is flying.
Lake of blue, a merry crew,
Cheer of thee will borrow.
Happy hours to-day are ours,
Weighted by no sorrow.
Other years may bring us tears,
Other days be full of fears,
Only hope the craft now steers.
Cares are for the morrow.
Lake of white at holy night,
In the moonlight gleaming,--
Softly o'er the wooded shore,
Silver radiance streaming,--
On thy wavelets bear away
Every care we've known to-day,
Bring on thy returning way
Peaceful, happy dreaming.
After the singing, the Hunnewell cup is presented for the crew
competition; and with the darkness, the fireworks begin to flash
up from the opposite shore of the lake.
Besides the rowing clubs, in the first decade, there were tennis
clubs, and occasional outdoor "meets" for cross-country runs, but
apparently there was no regular organization combining in one
association all the separate clubs until 1896-1897, when we hear
of the formation of a "New Athletic Association." There is also
record of a Field Day on May 29, 1899. In 1902, we find the
"new athletics"--evidently a still newer variety than those of
1897--"recognized by the trustees"; and the first Field Day under
this newest regime occurred on November 3, 1902. All the later
Field Days have been held in the late autumn, at the end of the
sports season, which now includes a preliminary season in the
spring and a final season in the autumn. An accepted candidate
for an organized sport must hold herself ready to practice during
both seasons, unless disqualified by the physical examiner, and
must confine herself to the one sport which she has chosen. During
both seasons the members may be required to practice three times
a week.
The Athletic Association, under its present constitution, dates
from March, 1908. All members of the college are eligible for
membership, all members of the organized sports are ipso facto
members of the association, and the Director of Physical Training
is a member ex officio. An annual contribution of one dollar is
solicited from each member of the association, and special funds
are raised by voluntary contribution. In the year 1914-1915, the
association included about twelve hundred members, not all of them
dues-paying, however.
The president of the Athletic Association is always a senior; the
vice president, who is also chairman of the Field Day Committee,
and the treasurer are juniors; the secretary and custodian are
sophomores. The members of the Organized Sports elect their
respective heads, and each sport is governed by its own rules and
regulations and by such intersport legislation as is enacted by
the Executive Board, not in contravention to regulations by the
Department of Physical Training and Hygiene. In this way the
association and the department work together for college health.
The organized sports at Wellesley are: rowing, golf, tennis,
basket ball, field hockey, running, archery, and baseball. The
unorganized sports include walking, riding, swimming, fencing,
skating, and snowshoeing. Each sport has its instructor, or
instructors, from the Department of Physical Training. The members
are grouped in class squads governed by captains, and each class
squad furnishes a class team whose members are awarded numerals,
before a competitive class event, on the basis of records of
health, discipline, and skill. Honors, blue W's worn on the
sweaters, are awarded on a similar basis. Interclass competitions
for trophies are held on Field Day, and the association hopes,
with the development of outdoor baseball, to establish interhouse
competitions also. The gala days are, besides Field Day in the
autumn, the Indoor Meet in the spring at the end of the indoor
practice, "Float" in June, and in winter, when the weather permits,
an Ice Carnival on the lake.
Through the Athletic Association, new tennis courts have been laid
out, the golf course has been remodeled, and the boathouse repaired.
In 1915, it was making plans for a sheltered amphitheater, bleachers,
and a baseball diamond; and despite the fact that dues are not
obligatory, more and more students are coming to appreciate the
work of the Association and to assume responsibility toward it.
Wellesley does not believe in intercollegiate sports for women.
In this opinion, the women's colleges seem to be agreed; it is
one of the points at which they are content to diverge from the
policy of the men's colleges. Wellesley's sports are organized
to give recreation and healthful exercise to as many students as
are fit and willing to take part in them. Some students even
disapprove of interclass competitions, and it is thought that
the interhouse teams for baseball will serve as an antidote to
rivalry between the classes.
The only intercollegiate event in which Wellesley takes part is
the intercollegiate debate. In this contest, Wellesley has been
twice beaten by Vassar, but in March, 1914, she won in the debate
against Mt. Holyoke, and in March, 1915, in the triangular debate,
she defeated both Vassar and Mt. Holyoke.
In September, 1904, the college was granted a charter of the
Phi Beta Kappa Society, and the Wellesley Chapter,--installed
January 17, 1905, is known as the Eta of Massachusetts.
CHAPTER V
THE FIRE: AN INTERLUDE
On the morning of March 17, 1914, College Hall, the oldest and
largest building on the Wellesley campus, was destroyed by fire.
No one knows how the fire originated; no one knows who first
discovered it. Several people, in the upper part of the house,
seem to have been awakened at about the same time by the smoke,
and all acted with clear-headed promptness. The night was thick
with fog, and the little wind "that heralds the dawn" was not strong
enough to disperse the heavy vapors, else havoc indeed might have
been wrought throughout the campus and the sleeping village.
At about half past four o'clock, two students at the west end of
College Hall, on the fourth floor, were awakened and saw a fiery
glow reflected in their transom. Getting up to investigate, they
found the fire burning in the zoological laboratory across the
corridor, and one of them immediately set out to warn Miss Tufts,
the registrar, and Miss Davis, the Director of the Halls of
Residence, both of whom lived in the building; the other girl
hurried off to find the indoor watchman. At the same time, a
third girl rang the great Japanese bell in the third floor center.
In less than ten minutes after this, every student was out of
the building.
The story of that brief ten minutes is packed with self-control
and selflessness; trained muscles and minds and souls responded
to the emergency with an automatic efficiency well-nigh unbelievable.
Miss Tufts sent the alarm to the president, and then went to the
rooms of the faculty on the third floor and to the officers of the
Domestic Department on the second floor. Miss Davis set a girl
to ringing the fast-fire alarm. And down the four long wooden
staircases the girls in kimonos and greatcoats came trooping,
each one on the staircase she had been drilled to use, after she
had left her room with its light burning and its corridor door shut.
In the first floor center the fire lieutenants called the roll of
the fire squads, and reported to Miss Davis, who, to make assurance
doubly sure, had the roll called a second time. No one said the
word "fire"--this would have been against the rules of the drill.
For a brief space there was no sound but "the ominous one of
falling heavy brands." When Miss Davis gave the order to go out,
the students walked quietly across the center, with embers and
sparks falling about them, and went out on the north side through
the two long windows at the sides of the front door.
And all this in ten minutes!
Meanwhile, Professor Calkins, who does not live at the college
but had happened to spend the night in the Psychology office on
the fifth floor, had been one of the earliest to awake, had wakened
other members of the faculty and helped Professor Case and her
wheel-chair to the first floor, and also had sent a man with an ax
to break in Professor Irvine's door, which was locked. As it
happened, Professor Irvine was spending the night in Cambridge,
and her room was not occupied. Most of the members of the faculty
seem to have come out of the building as soon as the students did,
but two or three, in the east end away from the fire, lingered to
save a very few of their smaller possessions.
The students, once out, were not allowed to re-enter the building,
and they did not attempt to disobey, but formed a long fire line
which was soon lengthened by girls from other dormitories and
extended from the front of College Hall to the library. Very
few things above the first floor were saved, but many books,
pictures, and papers went down this long line of students to find
temporary shelter in the basement of the library. Associate
Professor Shackford, who wrote the account of the fire in the
College News, from which these details are taken, tells us how
Miss Pendleton, patrolling this busy fire line and questioning the
half-clad workers, was met with the immediate response, even from
those who were still barefooted, "I'm perfectly comfortable,
Miss Pendleton", "I'm perfectly all right, Miss Pendleton." Miss
Shackford adds:
"At about five o'clock, a person coming from the hill saw
College Hall burning between the dining-room and Center,
apparently from the third floor up to the roof, in high, clear
flames with very little smoke. Suddenly the whole top seemed
to catch fire at once, and the blaze rushed downward and upward,
leaping in the dull gray atmosphere of a foggy morning. With
a terrific crash the roof fell in, and soon every window in the
front of College Hall was filled with roaring flames, surging
toward the east, framed in the dark red brick wall which served
to accentuate the lurid glow that had seized and held a building
almost one eighth of a mile long. The roar of devastating fury,
the crackle of brands, the smell of burning wood and melting iron,
filled the air, but almost no sound came from the human beings who
saw the irrepressible blaze consume everything but the brick walls.
"The old library and the chapel were soon filled with great billows
of flame, which, finding more space for action, made a spectacle
of majestic but awful splendor. Eddies of fire crept along the
black-walnut bookcases, and all that dark framework of our beloved
old library. By great strides the blaze advanced, until innumerable
curling, writhing flames were rioting all through a spot always
hushed 'in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.' The
fire raged across the walls, in and around the sides and the
beautiful curving tops of the windows that for so many springs
and summers had framed spaces of green grass on which fitful
shadows had fallen, to be dreamed over by generations of students.
In the chapel, tremendous waves swelled and glowed, reaching
almost from floor to ceiling, as they erased the texts from the
walls, demolished the stained-glass windows, defaced, but did not
completely destroy the college motto graven over them, and, in
convulsive gusts swept from end to end of the chapel, pouring in
and out of the windows in brilliant light and color. Seen from
the campus below, the burning east end of the building loomed up
magnificent even in the havoc and desolation it was suffering."
At half past eight o'clock, four hours after the first alarm was
sounded, there stood on the hill above the lake, bare, roofless
walls and sky-filled arches as august as any medieval castle
of Europe. Like Thomas the Rhymer, they had spent the night
in fairyland, and waked a thousand years old. Romance already
whispered through their dismantled, endless aisles. King Arthur's
castle of Camelot was not more remote from to-day than College Hall
from the twentieth-century March morning. Weeks, months, a little
while it stood there, vanishing--like old enchanted Merlin--into
the impenetrable prison of the air. There will be other houses
on that hilltop, but never one so permanent as the dear house
invisible; the double Latin cross, the ten granite columns, the
Center ever green with ageless palms, the "steadfast crosses,
ever pointing the heavenward way",--to eyes that see, these have
never disappeared.
At half past eight o'clock, in the crowded college chapel, President
Pendleton was saying to her dazed and stricken flock, "We know
that all things work together for good to them that love God,--who
shall separate us from the love of Christ?" And when she had
given thanks, in prayer, for so many lives all blessedly safe,
there came the announcement, so quiet, so startling, that the
spring term would begin on April 7, the date already set in the
college calendar. This was the voice of one who actually believed
that faith would remove mountains. And it did. By the faith of
President Pendleton, Wellesley College is alive to-day. She did
literally and actually cast the mountain into the sea on that
seventeenth of March, 1914. St. Patrick himself never achieved
a greater miracle.
She knew that two hundred and sixteen people were houseless;
that the departments of Zoology, Geology, Physics, and Psychology,
had lost their laboratories, their equipment, their lecture rooms;
that twenty-eight recitation rooms, all the administrative offices,
the offices of twenty departments, the assembly hall, the study
hall, had all been swept away. Yet, in a little less than three
weeks, there had sprung up on the campus a temporary building
containing twenty-nine lecture and recitation rooms, thirteen
department offices, fifteen administrative offices, three dressing
rooms, and a reception room. Plumbing, steam heat, electricity,
and telephone service had been installed. A week after college
opened for the spring term, classes were meeting in the new building.
During that first week, offices and classes had been scattered all
over the campus,--in the Society houses, in the basements of
dormitories, the Art Building, the Chemistry Building, the Gymnasium,
the basement of the Library, the Observatory, the Stone Hall Botany
Laboratories, Billings Hall; all had opened their doors wide. The
two hundred and sixteen residents of old College Hall had all been
housed on the campus; it meant doubling up in single rooms, but
the doublets persuaded themselves and the rest of the college
that it was a lark.
This spirit of helpfulness and cheer began on the day of the fire,
and seems to have acquired added momentum with the passing months.
Clothes, books, money, were loaned as a matter of course. By
half past nine o'clock in the morning, the secretary of the dean
had written out from memory the long schedule of the June examinations,
to be posted at the beginning of the spring term. Members of
the faculty were conducting a systematic search for salvage among
the articles that had been dumped temporarily in the "Barn" and the
library; homes had been found for the houseless teachers, most
of whom had lost everything they possessed; several members of
the faculty had no permanent home but the college, and their worldly
goods were stored in the attic from which nothing could be saved.
It is said that when President Pendleton, in chapel, told the
students to go home as soon as they had collected their possessions,
"an unmistakable ripple of girlish laughter ran through the
dispossessed congregation." This was the Franciscan spirit in
which Wellesley women took their personal losses. For the general
losses, all mourned together, but with hope and courage. In the
Department of Physics, all the beautiful instruments which Professor
Whiting had been so wisely and lovingly procuring, since she first
began to equip her student-laboratory in 1878, were swept away;
Geology and Psychology suffered only less; but the most harrowing
losses were those in the Department of Zoology, where, besides
the destruction of laboratories and instruments, and the special
library presented to the department by Professor Emeritus Mary A.
Willcox, "the fruits of years of special research work which had
attracted international attention have been destroyed.... Professor
Marion Hubbard had devoted her energies for six years to research
in variation and heredity in beetles.... In view of the increasing
interest in eugenics, scientists awaited the results with keen
anticipation, but all the specimens, notes, and apparatus were
swept away." Professor Robertson, the head of the department,
who is an authority on certain deep-sea forms of life, had just
finished her report on the collections from the dredging expedition
of the Prince of Monaco, which had been sent her for identification;
and the report and the collections all were lost.
Among the few things saved were some of the ivies and the roses
which the classes had planted year by year; these the fire had not
injured; and a slip from the great wistaria vine on the south side
of College Hall has proved to be alive and vigorous. The alumnae
gavel and the historic Tree Day spade were also unharmed. But
that no life was lost outweighs all the other losses, and this was
due to the fire drill which, in one form or another, has been
carried on at Wellesley since the earliest years of the college.
Doctor Edward Abbott, writing of Wellesley in Harper's Magazine
for August, 1876, says:
"Whoever heard of a fire brigade manned by women? There is one at
Wellesley, for it is believed that however incombustible the
college building may be, the students should be taught to put out
fire,... and be trained to presence of mind and familiarity with
the thought of what ought to be done in case of fire." From time
to time the drill has been strengthened and changed in detail, but
in 1902, when Miss Olive Davis, Director of Houses of Residence,
was appointed by Miss Hazard to be responsible for an efficient
fire drill, the modern system was instituted. An article in
College News explains that "the organization of the present
fire-drill system is much like the old one. With the adoption of
Student Government, it was put into the hands of the students.
Each year a fire chief is elected from the student-body, by the
students. This girl is a senior. She is counted an officer of
the Student Government Association, and is responsible to Miss Davis.
Then at meetings held at the beginning of the fall term, each
dormitory elects one fire captain, who in turn appoints lieutenants
under her,--one for every twenty or twenty-five girls.
"The directions for a fire drill are:
"Upon hearing the alarm (five rings of the house bell),
"1. Close your windows, doors, and transoms.
"2. Turn on the electric lights.
"3. March in single file, and as quickly as possible, downstairs,
and answer to your roll call.
"Each lieutenant is responsible for all the girls on her list.
After the ringing of the alarm, she must look into every room
in her district and see that the directions have been complied
with and the inmates have gone downstairs. If the windows and
doors have not been shut, she must shut them. Then she goes
downstairs and calls her roll (some lieutenants memorize their
lists). When the lieutenants have finished, the captain calls
the roll of the lieutenants, asking for the number absent in each
district, and the number of windows and doors left open or lights
not lighted, if any.
"The captains are required to hold two drills a month. At the
regular meetings of the organization at which the fire chief
presides and Miss Davis is often present, the captains report the
dates of their drills, the time of day they were held, the number
of absentees and their reasons, the time required to empty the
building, and the order observed by the girls.
"Drills may be called by the captain at any time of the day or
night. Frequently there were drills at College Hall when it was
crowded with nonresident students, there for classes. In that
case no roll was called, but merely the time required and the
order reported. The penalty for non-attendance at fire drills
is a fine of fifty cents, and a serious error credited to the absentee.
"There are devices such as blocking some of the staircases to train
the girls for an emergency. It was being planned, just about the
time College Hall burned, to have a fire drill there with artificial
smoke, to test the girls. The system is still being constantly
changed and improved. On Miss Davis's desk, the night of the
fire, was the rough draft of a plan by which property could be
better saved in case of fire, without more danger to life."
A few weeks after the burning of College Hall, a small fire broke
out at the Zeta Alpha House, but was immediately quenched, and
Associate Professor Josephine H. Batchelder, of the class of 1896,
writing in College News of the self-control of the students, says:
"Perhaps the best example of 'Wellesley discipline since the fire,'
occurred during the brief excitement occasioned by the Zeta Alpha
House fire. A few days before this, a special plea had been made
for good order and concentrated work in an overcrowded laboratory,
where forty-six students, two divisions, were obliged to meet at
the same time. On this morning, the professor looked up suddenly
at sounds of commotion outside. 'Why, there's a fire-engine going
back to the village!' she said. 'Oh, yes' responded a girl near
the window. 'We saw it come up some time ago, but you were busy
at the blackboard, so we didn't disturb you.' The professor looked
over her roomful of students quietly at work. 'Well,' she said,
'I've heard a good deal of boasting about various things the girls
were doing. Now I'm going to begin!'"
And this self-control does not fail as the months pass. The
temporary administration building, which the students have dubbed
the Hencoop, tests the good temper of every member of the college.
Like Chaucer's wicker House of Rumors it is riddled with vagrant
noises, but as it does not whirl about upon its base, it lacks the
sanitary ventilating qualities of its dizzy prototype. On the
south it is exposed to the composite, unmuted discords of Music Hall;
on the north, the busy motors ply; within, nineteen of the twenty-six
academic departments of the college conduct their classes, between
walls so thin that every classroom may hear, if it will, the
recitations to right of it, recitations to left of it, recitations
across the corridor, volley and thunder. Though they all
conscientiously try to roar as gently as any sucking dove. The
effect upon the unconcentrated mind is something like--The cosine
of X plus the ewig weibliche makes the difference between the
message of Carlyle and that of Matthew Arnold antedate the Bergsonian
theory of the elan vital minus the sine of Y since Barbarians,
Philistines and Populace make up the eternal flux wo die citronen
bluhn--but fortunately the Wellesley mind does concentrate, and
uncomplainingly. The students are working in these murmurous
classrooms with a new seriousness and a devotion which disregard
all petty inconveniences and obstacles.
And the fire has kindled a flame of friendliness between faculty
and students; it has burned away the artificial pedagogic barriers
and quickened human relations. The flames were not quenched
before the students had begun to plan to help in the crippled
courses of study. They put themselves at the disposal of the
faculty for all sorts of work; they offered their notes, their own
books; they drew maps; they mounted specimens on slides for the
Department of Zoology. In that crowded, noisy, one-story building
there are not merely the teachers and the taught, but a body of
tried friends, moving shoulder to shoulder on pilgrimage to truth.
CHAPTER VI
THE LOYAL ALUMNAE
I.
Ever since we became a nation, it has been our habit to congratulate
ourselves upon the democratic character of our American system of
education. In the early days, neither poverty nor social position
was a bar to the child who loved his books. The daughter of the
hired man "spelled down" the farmer's son in the district school;
the poor country boy and girl earned their board and tuition at
the academy by doing chores; American colleges made no distinctions
between "gentlemen commoners" and common folk; and as our public
school system developed its kindergartens, its primary, grammar, and
high schools, free to any child living in the United States,
irrespective of his father's health, social status, or citizenship,
we might well be excused for thinking that the last word in
democratic education had been spoken.
But since the beginning of the twentieth century, two new voices
have begun to be heard; at first sotto voce, they have risen
through a murmurous pianissimo to a decorous non troppo forte,
and they continue crescendo,--the voice of the teacher and the
voice of the graduate. And the burden of their message is that
no educational system is genuinely democratic which may ignore
with impunity the criticisms and suggestions of the teacher who is
expected to carry out the system and the graduate who is asked to
finance it.
The teachers' point of view is finding expression in the various
organizations of public school teachers in Chicago, New York,
and elsewhere, looking towards reform, both local and general;
and in the movement towards the formation of a National Association
of College Professors, started in the spring of 1913 by professors
of Columbia and Johns Hopkins. At a preliminary meeting at
Baltimore, in November, 1913, unofficial representatives from
Johns Hopkins, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, Clark,
and Wisconsin were present, and a committee of twenty-five was
appointed, with Professor Dewey of Columbia as chairman, "to arrange
a plan of organization and draw up a constitution." President
Schurman, in a report to the trustees of Cornell, makes the situation
clear when he says:
"The university is an intellectual organization, composed essentially
of devotees of knowledge--some investigating, some communicating,
some acquiring--but all dedicated to the intellectual life.... The
Faculty is essentially the university; yet in the governing boards
of American universities the Faculty is without representation."
President Schurman has suggested that one third of the board
consist of faculty representatives. At Wellesley, since the
founder's death, the trustees have welcomed recommendations from
the faculty for departmental appointments and promotions, and this
practice now obtains at Yale and Princeton; the trustees of Princeton
have also voted voluntarily to confer on academic questions with
a committee elected by the faculty.
An admirable exposition of the teachers' case is found in an
article on "Academic Freedom" by Professor Howard Crosby Warren
of the Department of Psychology at Princeton, in the Atlantic Monthly
for November, 1914. Professor Warren says that "In point of fact,
the teacher to-day is not a free, responsible agent. His career is
practically under the control of laymen. Fully three quarters
of our scholars occupy academic positions; and in America, at
least, the teaching investigator, whatever professional standing
he may have attained, is subject to the direction of some body of
men outside his own craft. As investigator he may be quite
untrammeled, but as teacher, it has been said, he is half tyrant
and half slave....
"The scholar is dependent for opportunity to practice his calling,
as well as for material advancement, on a governing board which
is generally controlled by clergymen, financiers, or representatives
of the state....
"The absence of true professional responsibility, coupled with
traditional accountability to a group of men devoid of technical
training, narrows the outlook of the average college professor and
dwarfs his ideals. Any serious departure from existing educational
practice, such as the reconstruction of a course or the adoption
of a new study, must be justified by a group of laymen and their
executive agent....
"In determining the professional standing of a scholar and the
soundness of his teachings, surely the profession itself should be
the court of last appeal."
The point of view of the graduate has been defining itself slowly,
but with increasing clearness, ever since the governing boards of
the colleges made the very practical discovery that it was the duty
and privilege of the alumnus to raise funds for the support of
his Alma Mater. It was but natural that the graduates who banded
together, usually at the instigation of trustees or directors and
always with their blessing, to secure the conditional gifts
proffered to universities and colleges by American multimillionaires,
should quickly become sensitive to the fact that they had no power
to direct the spending of the money which they had so efficiently
and laboriously collected. An individual alumnus with sufficient
wealth to endow a chair or to erect a building could usually give
his gift on his own terms; but alumni as a body had no way of
influencing the policy of the institutions which they were helping
to support.
The result of this awakening has been what President Emeritus
William Jewett Tucker of Dartmouth has called the "Alumni Movement."
More than ten years ago, President Hadley of Yale was aware of
the stirrings of this movement, when he said, "The influence of
the public sentiment of the graduates is so overwhelming, that
wherever there is a chance for its organized cooperation, faculties
and students... are only too glad to follow it."
It would be incorrect, however, to give the impression that graduates
had had absolutely no share in the government of their respective
colleges before the Alumni Movement assumed its present proportions.
Representatives of the alumni have had a voice in the affairs of
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Self-perpetuating boards of trustees
have elected to their membership a certain number of mature alumni.
In some instances, as at Wellesley, the association of graduates
nominates the candidates for graduate vacancies on these boards.
The benefits of alumnae representation on the Board of Trustees
seem to have occurred to the alumnae and the trustees of Wellesley
almost simultaneously. As early as June, 1888, the Alumnae
Association of Wellesley appointed a committee to present to
the trustees a request for alumnae representation on the Board;
but as the Association met but once a year, results could not
be achieved rapidly, and in June, 1889, the committee reported
that it had not presented the petition as it had been informed
unofficially that the possibility of alumnae representation was
already under consideration by the trustees. In fact, the trustees,
at a meeting held the day before the meeting of the Alumnae
Association, this very June of 1889, had elected Mrs. Marian
Pelton Guild, of the class of 1880, a life member of the Board.
But the alumnae, although appreciating the honor done them by
the election of Mrs. Guild, still did not feel that the question
of representation had been adequately met, and in June, 1891,
a new committee was appointed with instructions to inform itself
thoroughly as to methods employed in other colleges to insure
the representation of the graduate body on governing boards, and
also to convey to the trustees the alumnae's strong desire for
representation of a specified character. And a second time the
trustees forestalled the committee and, in a letter addressed
to the Association and read at the annual meeting in June, 1892,
made known their desire "to avail themselves of the cooperation
of the Association" and to "cement more closely the bond" uniting
the alumnae to the college by granting them further representation
on the Board of Trustees. A committee from the Association was
then appointed to discuss methods with a committee from the Board,
and the results of their deliberations are given by Harriet Brewer
Sterling, Wellesley, '86, in an article in the Wellesley Magazine
for March, 1895. By the terms of a joint agreement between the
Board and the Association, the Association has the right to nominate
three members from its own number for membership on the Board.
These nominees must be graduates of seven years' standing, not
members of the college faculty. Graduates of less than three
years' standing are not qualified to vote for the nominees. The
nominations must be ratified by the Board of Trustees. The term
of service of these alumnae trustees is six years, but a nominee
is chosen every two years. In order to establish this method of
rotation, two of the three candidates first nominated served for
two and four years respectively, instead of six. The first election
was held in the spring of 1894, the nominations were confirmed
by the Board in November, and the three new trustees sat with
the Board for the first time at the February meeting of 1895.
But as graduate organizations have increased in size, and membership
has been scattered over a wider geographical area, it has become
correspondingly difficult to get at the consensus of graduate opinion
on college matters and to make sure that alumni, or alumnae,
representatives actually do represent their constituents and carry
out their wishes. And the Alumni Movement has arisen to meet
the need for "greater unity of organization in alumni bodies."
In an article on Graduate Councils, in the Wellesley College News
for April, 1914, Florence S. Marcy Crofut, Wellesley, '97, has
collected interesting evidence of the impetus and expansion of
this new factor in the college world. She writes, "More clearly
than generalization would show, proofs lie in actual organization
and accomplishments of the 'Alumni Movement' which has worked
itself out in what may be called the Graduate Council Movement....
Since the organization of the Graduate Council of Princeton
University in January, 1905, the Secretary, Mr. H. G. Murray,
to whom Wellesley is deeply indebted, has received requests from
twenty-nine colleges for information in regard to the work of
Princeton's Council."
Among these twenty-nine colleges was Wellesley, and the plan
for her Graduate Council, presented by the Executive Board of
the Alumnae Association to the business meeting of the Association
on June 21, 1911, and voted at that meeting, is a legitimate
outgrowth of the ideals which led to the formation of the Alumnae
Association in 1880. The preamble of the Association makes this
clear when it says:
"Remembering the benefits we have received from our alma mater,
we desire to extend the helpful associations of student life, and
to maintain such relations to the college that we may efficiently
aid in her upbuilding and strengthening, to the end that her
usefulness may continually increase."
In an article describing the formation of the Wellesley Graduate
Council, in the Wellesley College News for October 5, 1911, it
is explained that, "From the time since the 1910-12 Executive
Board (of the Alumnae Association) came into office, it has felt
that there was need for a bond between the alumnae and the college
administration; and it believes that this need will be met by a
small representative (i.e. geographical) definitely chosen graduate
body, which shall act as a clearing-house for the larger Alumnae
Association. The Executive Board recognized also as an additional
reason for organizing such a graduate body, that it was necessary
to do so if the Wellesley Alumnae Association is to keep abreast
of the activities in similar organizations." The purpose of the
Council, as stated in 1911, is a fitting expansion of the Association's
preamble of 1880:
"That, as our alumnae are increasing in large numbers and are
scattered more and more widely, it will be of advantage to them
and to the college that an organized, accredited group of alumnae
shall be chosen from different parts of the country to confer with
the college authorities on matters affecting both alumnae and
undergraduate interests, as well as to furnish the college, by
this group, the means of testing the sentiment of Wellesley women
throughout the country on any matter."
There are advantages in not being a pioneer, and Wellesley has
been able to profit by the experience of her predecessors in this
movement, particularly Princeton and Smith. Membership in the
Councils of Wellesley and Smith is essentially on the same
geographical basis, but Wellesley is unique among the Councils
in having a faculty representation. The relation between faculty
and alumnae at Wellesley has always been markedly cordial, and
in welcoming to the Council representatives of the faculty who
are not graduates of the college, the alumnae would seem to indicate
that their aims and ideals for their Alma Mater are at one with
those of the faculty.
The membership of the Wellesley Graduate Council is composed
of the president and dean of the college, ex officio; ten members
of the Academic Council, chosen by that body, no more than two
of whom may be alumnae; the three alumnae trustees; the members
of the Executive Board of the Alumnae Association; and the councilors
from the Wellesley clubs. As there were more than fifty Wellesley
clubs already in existence in 1915, and every club of from twenty-five
to one hundred members is allowed one councilor, and every club of
more than one hundred members is allowed one councilor for each
additional hundred, while neighboring clubs of less than twenty-five
members may unite and be represented jointly by one councilor,
it will be seen that the Council is a large and constantly growing
body. Clubs such as the Boston Wellesley Club, and the New York
Wellesley Club, which already had a large membership, received
a tremendous impetus to increase their numbers after the formation
of the Council. All members of the Council, with the exception of
the president of the college and the dean, who are permanent,
serve for two years.
The officers of the Graduate Council are the corresponding officers
of the Alumnae Association, and also serve for two years. The
Executive Committee of five members includes the president and
secretary of the Council, an alumna trustee chosen annually from
their own number by the three alumnae trustees, and two members
at large.
The Council meets twice during the academic year, at the college;
in February, for a period of three days or less, following the
mid-year examinations, and in June, when the annual meeting is
held at some time previous to the annual meeting of the Alumnae
Association. In this respect the Wellesley Council again differs
from that of Smith, whose committee of five makes but one official
annual visit to the college,--in January. The "Vassar Provisional
Alumnae Council", like the Wellesley Graduate Council, must hold
at least two yearly meetings at the college, but unlike Wellesley,
it elects a chairman who may not be at the same time the President
of the Vassar Associate Alumnae. Bryn Mawr, we are told by
Miss Crofut, has no Graduate Council corresponding exactly to
the Councils of other colleges; but her academic committee of seven
members meets "at least once a year with the President of the College
and a committee of the faculty to discuss academic affairs."
The possibilities which lie before the Wellesley Council may be
better understood if we enumerate a few of the activities undertaken
by the Councils of other colleges. At Princeton, since 1905, more
than two million five hundred thousand dollars has been raised
by the Council's efforts. The Preceptorial System has been
inaugurated and is being slowly developed. The university has been
brought more prominently before preparatory schools. All the
colleges are feeling the need of keeping in touch with the
preparatory schools, not for the sake of mere numbers, but to
secure the best students. Doctor Tucker has suggested that
Dartmouth alumni endow outright, "substantial scholarships in
high schools with which it is desirable to establish relations,"
and the suggestion is well worth the consideration of Wellesley
women. The Yale Alumni Advisory Board has distributed to the
"so-called Yale Preparatory Schools" and to schoolboys in many
cities, a pamphlet on "Life at Yale." And Yale has also turned its
attention to tuition charges, "academic-Sheffield relations", the
future of the Yale Medical School, the Graduate Employment Bureau.
All of these Councils are concerned with the intellectual and moral
tone of the undergraduates. Wellesley's Graduate Council has
a Publicity Committee, one of whose functions is to prevent wrong
reports of college matters from getting into the press. Mrs. Helene
Buhlert Magee, Wellesley, '03, who was made Chairman of the
Intercollegiate Committee on Press Bureaus, in 1914, and was at
that time also the Manager of the Wellesley Press Board, reminds
us that Wellesley is the only college trying to regulate its
publicity through its alumnae clubs in different parts of the
country, and gives us reason to hope that in time we shall have
publicity agents trained in good methods, "since the members of
each year's College Press Board, as they go forth, naturally become
the press representatives of their respective clubs."
The Council has also a Committee on Undergraduate Activities,
whose duty it is to "obtain information regarding the interests
of the undergraduates and from time to time to make suggestions
concerning the conduct of the same as they affect the alumnae or
bring the college before the general public." This committee
proposes a Rally Day and a Freshman Forum, to be conducted each
year by a representative alumna equipped to set forth the ideals
and principles held by the alumnae.
A third committee, bearing a direct relation to the undergraduate,
is one on Vocational Guidance. In order to help students "to find
their way to work other than teaching," and to "present a survey
of all the possibilities open to women in the field of industry
to-day," this committee welcomes the cooperation of Miss Florence
Jackson, a graduate of Smith and for some years a member of the
Department of Chemistry at Wellesley, who is now at the head of
the Appointment Bureau of the Women's Educational and Industrial
Union of Boston. Miss Jackson's practical knowledge of students,
her wide acquaintance with vocational opportunities other than
teaching, and her belief in the "value of the cultural course as
a sound general foundation most valuable for providing the sense
of proportion and vision necessary for the college woman who is
to be a useful citizen," make her an ideal director of this branch
of the Council's activities, and the college gladly promotes her
work among the students; the seniors especially welcome her
expert guidance.
In framing a model constitution for the use of alumnae classes,
the Council has done a piece of work which should arouse the
gratitude of all future historians of Wellesley, for the model
constitution contains an article requiring each class to keep a
record which shall contain brief information as to the members of the
class and shall be published in the autumn following each reunion.
lf these records are accurately kept, and if copies are placed on
file in the College Library, accessible to investigators, the next
historian of Wellesley will be spared the baffling paucity of
information concerning the alumnae which has hampered her predecessor.
With ten members of the Academic Council on the Graduate Council,
and with the president of the college herself an alumna, the
relation between the faculty and the Graduate Council is intimate
and helpful to both, in the best sense. Relations with the
trustees, as a body, were slower in forming. President Pendleton,
at the Council's fifth session,--in the third year of its
existence,--reported the trustees as much interested in its formation.
At the sixth session of the Council, in June, 1914, when the campaign
for the Fire Fund was in full swing, Mr. Lewis Kennedy Morse,
the able and devoted treasurer of the college, and member of
the Board of Trustees, addressed the members upon "The Business
Side of College Administration",--a talk as interesting as it was
frank and friendly. In December, 1914, when the first of the new
buildings was already going up on the site of old College Hall,
the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees invited a joint
committee from the faculty and the alumnae to meet with them to
discuss the architectural plans and possibilities for the "new
Wellesley." The Alumnae Committee consisted of eleven members
and included representatives "from '83 to 1913, and from Colorado
on the west to Massachusetts on the east." Its chairman was
Candace C. Stimson, Wellesley, '92, whose name will always ring
through Wellesley history as the Chairman of the Alumnae Committee
for Restoration and Endowment,--the committee that conducted the
great nine months' campaign for the Fire Fund. The Faculty
Committee, of five members, chose as its chairman, Professor
Alice V.V. Brown, the head of the Department of Art.
Miss Stimson's report to the Graduate Council of this meeting of
the joint committee with the Executive Board, indicates a "strong
sense of good understanding and a feeling of great harmony and
desire for cooperation on the part of Trustees toward the alumnae."
The Faculty Committee and Alumnae Committee were invited to continue
and to hold further conferences with the Trustees' Committee
"as occasion might offer." The episode is prophetic of the future
relations of these three bodies with one another. President Nichols
of Dartmouth is reported as saying that Dartmouth, founded as
the ideal of an individual and governed at first by one man, has
grown to the point where it is no longer to be controlled as
a monarchy or an empire, but as a republic. Such an utterance
does not fail of its effect upon other colleges.
II.
The women who constitute the Wellesley College Alumnae Association,
numbered in 1914-1915 five thousand and thirty-five. The members
are all those who have received the Baccalaureate degree from
Wellesley, and all those who have received the Master's degree and
have applied for membership. But only dues-paying members receive
notices of meetings and have the right to vote. Non-graduates who
pay the annual dues receive the Alumnae Register, and the notices
and publications of the alumnae, but do not vote.
Authoritative statistics concerning the occupations of Wellesley
women are not available. About forty per cent of the alumnae
are married. The exact proportion of teachers is not known, but
it is of course large. The Wellesley College Christian Association
is of great assistance to the alumnae recorder in keeping in touch
with Wellesley missionaries, but even the Christian Association
disclaims infallibility in questions of numbers. An article in
the News for February, 1912, by Professor Kendrick, the head
of the Department of Bible Study, states that no record is kept
of missionaries at work in our own country, but there were then
missionaries from Wellesley in Mexico and Brazil, as well as those
who were doing city missionary work in the United States. The
missionary record for 1915 would seem to indicate that there were
then about one hundred Wellesley women at mission stations in
foreign countries, including Japan, China, Korea, India, Ceylon,
Persia, Turkey, Africa, Europe, Mexico, South America, Alaska,
and the Philippines.
From time to time, the alumnae section of the News publishes an
article on the occupations and professions of Wellesley graduates,
with incomplete lists of the names of those who are engaged in
Law, Medicine, Social Work, Journalism, Teaching, Business, and
all the other departments of life into which women are penetrating;
and from this all too meager material, the historian is able to
glean a few general facts, but no trustworthy statistics.
In 1914, the list of Wellesley women, most of whom were alumnae,
at the head of private schools, included the principals of the
National Cathedral School at Washington, D.C.; of Abbot Academy,
Andover, Walnut Hill School, Natick, Dana Hall, the Weston School,
the Longwood School, all in Massachusetts, and two preparatory
schools in Boston; Buffalo Seminary; Kent Place School, and a
coeducational school, both in Summit, New Jersey; Hosmer Hall, in
St. Louis; Ingleside School, Taconic School and the Catherine
Aiken School, in Connecticut; Science Hill, at Shelbyville, Kentucky;
Ferry Hall, at Lake Forest, Illinois; the El Paso School for Girls;
the Lincoln School, in Providence, Rhode Island; Wyoming Seminary,
another coeducational school; as well as schools for American girls
in Germany, France, and Italy. This does not take into account
the many Wellesley graduates holding positions of importance in
colleges, in high schools, and in the grammar and primary schools
throughout the country.
The tentative list of Wellesley women holding positions of importance
in social work, in 1914, is equally impressive. The head workers
at Denison House,--the Boston College Settlement,--at the Baltimore
Settlement, at Friendly House, Brooklyn, and Hartley House, New York,
are all graduates of Wellesley. Probation officers, settlement
residents, Associated Charity workers, Consumers' League secretaries,
promoters of Social Welfare Work, leaders of Working Girls' Clubs,
members of Trade-union Leagues and the Suffrage League, show many
Wellesley names among their numbers. A Wellesley woman is working
at the Hindman School in Kentucky, among the poor whites; another
is General Superintendent of the Massachusetts Commission for
the Blind; another is Associate Field Secretary of the New York
Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation;
another is Head Investigator for the Massachusetts Babies' Hospital.
The Superintendent of the State Reformatory for Girls at Lancaster,
Massachusetts, is a Wellesley graduate who is doing work of unusual
distinction in this field. Mary K. Conyngton, Wellesley, '94,
took part in the Federal investigation into the condition of woman
and child wage earners, ordered by Congress in 1907, and has
made a study of the relations between the occupations, and the
criminality, of women. Her book "How to Help", published by
The Macmillan Company, embodies the results of her experience
in organized charities, investigations for improved housing, and
other industrial and municipal reforms. In 1909, Miss Conyngton
received a permanent appointment in the Bureau of Labor at
Washington, D.C.
Wellesley has her lawyers and doctors, her architects, her
journalists, her scholars; every year their tribes increase.
Among her many journalists are Caroline Maddocks, 1892, and
Agnes Edwards Rothery, 1909.
Of her poets, novelists, short story writers, and essayists, the
names of Katharine Lee Bates, Estelle M. Hurll, Abbie Carter
Goodloe, Margarita Spalding Gerry, Florence Wilkinson Evans,
Florence Converse, Martha Hale Shackford, Annie Kimball Tuell,
Jeannette Marks, are familiar to the readers of the Atlantic,
the Century, Scribner's and other magazines; and the more technical
publications of Gertrude Schopperle, Laura A. Hibbard, Eleanor
A. McC. Gamble, Lucy J. Freeman, Eloise Robinson, and Flora Isabel
McKinnon, have won the suffrages of scholars.
Her most noted woman of letters is Katharine Lee Bates, Wellesley,
'80, the beloved head of the Department of English Literature.
Miss Bates's beautiful hymn, "America", has achieved the distinction
of a national reputation; it has been adopted as one of America's
own songs and is sung by school children all over our country.
The list of her books includes, besides her collected poems,
"America the Beautiful and Other Poems", published by the Thomas
Y. Crowell Company, volumes on English and Spanish travel, on the
English Religious Drama, a Chaucer for children, an edition of
the works of Hawthorne, and a forthcoming edition of the Elizabethan
dramatist, Heywood. Since her undergraduate days, when she wrote
the poems for Wellesley's earliest festivals, down all the years
in which she has been building up her Department of English
Literature, this loyal daughter has given herself without stint to
her Alma Mater. In Wellesley's roll call of alumnae, there is no
name more loved and honored than that of Katharine Lee Bates.
III.
"Hear the dollars dropping,
Listen as they fall.
All for restoration
Of our College Hall."
These words of a college song fitly express the breathless attitude
of the alumnae between March 17, 1914, and January 1, 1915, the
nine months and a half during which the campaign was being carried
on to raise the fund for restoration and endowment, after the fire.
And they did more than listen; they shook the trees on which the
dollars grew, and as the dollars fell, caught them with nimble
fingers. They fell "thick as leaves in Vallombrosa."
Between June, 1913, and June, 1915, $1,267,230.53 was raised by
and through Wellesley women.
In 1913, a campaign for a Million Dollar Endowment Fund had been
started, to provide means for increasing the salaries of the
teachers. Salaries at Wellesley were at that time lower than
those paid in every other woman's college, but one, in New England.
The fund had been started with an anonymous gift of one hundred
thousand dollars, and the committee, with Candace C. Stimson as
chairman, planned to secure the one million dollars in two years.
By March, 1914, a second anonymous gift of one hundred thousand
dollars had been received, the General Education Board had pledged
two hundred thousand dollars conditioned on the raising of the
whole amount, Wellesley women had given fifteen thousand dollars,
and there had been a few other gifts from outsiders. The amount
still to be raised on the Million Dollar Fund at the time of the
fire was five hundred and seventy thousand dollars.
President Pendleton, in a letter to Wellesley friends, printed
in the News on March 28, 1914, ten days after the fire, writes:
"Our Campaign for the Million Dollar Endowment Fund must not be
dropped... we have between five and six hundred thousand dollars
still to raise. All the new buildings must be equipped and
maintained. The sum that our Alma Mater requires for immediate
needs is two million dollars. But this is not all. Another million
will soon be needed, properly to house our departments of Botany
and Chemistry, and to provide a Student-Alumnae building, and
sufficient dormitories to house on the campus the more than five
hundred students now living in the village. We are facing a
great crisis in the history of the College. The future of our
Alma Mater is in our hands. Crippled by this loss, Wellesley
cannot continue to hold in the future its place in the front rank
of colleges, unless the response is generous and immediate.
"To sum up, Alma Mater needs three million dollars, two million
of which must be raised immediately. Shall we be daunted by
this sum? We are justly proud of the courage and self-control
of those dwellers in College Hall, both Faculty and Students.
Shall we be outdone by them in facing a crisis? Shall we be less
courageous, less resourceful? The public press has described
the fire as a triumph, not a disaster. Shall we continue the
triumph, and make our College in equipment what it has proved
itself in spirit--The College Beautiful? We can and we must."
The response of the alumnae to this stirring appeal was instant
and ardent. The committee for the Million Dollar Endowment Fund,
with its valiant chairman, Miss Stimson, shouldered the new
responsibility. "It is a big contract," they said, "it comes at
a season of business depression, and the daughters of Wellesley
are not rich in this world's goods. All this we know, but we know,
too, that the greater the need the more eagerly will love and
loyalty respond."
Then came the offer of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars
by the Rockefeller Foundation, if the college would raise an
additional million and a quarter by January 1, 1915. The intrepid
Committee of Alumnae added to its numbers, merged the two funds,
and adopted the new name of Alumnae Committee for Restoration
and Endowment.
Mary B. Jenkins, Wellesley, '03, the committee's devoted secretary,
has described the plan of the campaign in the News for March, 1915.
As the Wellesley clubs present the best chance of reaching both
graduate and non-graduate members, a chairman for each club was
appointed, and made responsible for reaching all the Wellesley women
in her geographical section, whether they were members of the club
or not. In states where there were no clubs, state committees
rounded up the scattered alumnae and non-graduates. Fifty-three
clubs appear in the report, twenty-four state committees, and eight
foreign countries,--Canada, Mexico, Porto Rico, South America,
Europe, Turkey, India, and Persia. Every state in the Union was
heard from, and contributions also came from clubs in Japan and
China. The campaign actually circled the globe. By June, 1914,
Miss Jenkins tells us, the appeals to the clubs and state committees
had been sent out, and many had been heard from, but in order
to make sure that no one escaped, the work was now taken up through
committees from the thirty-six classes, from 1879 to 1914. In
March, 1915, when Miss Jenkins's report was printed in the News,
3823 of Wellesley's daughters had contributed, and belated
contributions were still coming in. In June, 1915, 3903, out of
4840, graduates had responded. Every member of the classes of
'79, '80, '81, '84, '92, sent a contribution, and the class gift from '79,
$520,161.00 was the largest from any class; that of '92, $208,453.92,
being the next largest. The class gifts include not only direct
contributions from alumnae, and from social members who did not
graduate with the class, but gifts which alumnae and former students
have secured from interested friends. Of the remaining classes,
five show a contributing list of more than ninety per cent of the
members; eleven show between eighty and ninety per cent; and
fifteen between seventy and eighty per cent. Besides the alumnae,
1119 non-graduates had contributed. None of Wellesley's daughters
have been more loyal and more helpful than the non-graduates.
An analysis of the amount, $1,267,230.53, given by and through
Wellesley women between June, 1913, and June, 1915, shows four
gifts of fifty thousand dollars and over, all of which came through
Wellesley women, thirty gifts of from two thousand dollars to
twenty-five thousand dollars, three quarters of which came from
Wellesley women, and many gifts of less than two thousand dollars,
"only a negligible quantity of which came from any one but alumnae
and former students."
Throughout the nine months of the campaign, the Alumnae Committee
and the trustees were working in close touch with each other.
Doctor George Herbert Palmer, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at
Harvard, was the chairman of the committee from the trustees, and
he describes himself as chaperoned by alumnae at every point of
the tour which he so successfully undertook in order to interview
possible contributors. To him, to Bishop Lawrence, the President
of the Board of Trustees, and to Mr. Lewis Kennedy Morse, the
treasurer, the college owes a debt of gratitude which it can never
repay. No knight of old ever succored distressed damsel more
valiantly, more selflessly, than these three twentieth-century
gentlemen succored and served the beggar maid, Wellesley, in the
cause of higher education. Through the activities of the trustees
were secured the provisional gifts of seven hundred and fifty
thousand dollars from the Rockefeller Foundation, and two hundred
thousand dollars from the General Education Board, Mr. Andrew
Carnegie's $95,446.27, to be applied to the extension of the library,
and gifts from Mrs. Russell Sage, Mrs. David P. Kimball, and many
others. Mrs. Lilian Horsford Farlow, a trustee, and the daughter
of Prof. Eben N. Horsford, to whom Wellesley is already deeply
indebted, gave ten thousand dollars toward the Fire Fund; and
through Mrs. Louise McCoy North, trustee and alumna, an unknown
benefactor has given the new building which stands on the hill
above the lake. Because of the modesty of donors, it has been
impossible to make public a complete list of the gifts.
From the four undergraduate classes, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, and
from general undergraduate gifts and activities, came $60,572.04,
raised in all sorts of ways,--from the presentation of "Beau
Brummel" before a Boston audience, to the polishing of shoes
at ten cents a shine. One 1917 girl earned ten dollars during
the summer vacation by laughing at all her father's jokes, whether
old or new, during that period of recreation. Other enterprising
sophomores "swatted" flies at the rate of one cent for two, darned
stockings for five cents a hole, shampooed, mended, raked leaves.
Members of the class of 1916 sold lead pencils and jelly, scrubbed
floors, baked angel cake, counted knot holes in the roof of a
summer camp. Besides "Beau Brummel", 1915 gave dancing lessons
and sold vacuum cleaners. One student who was living in College Hall
at the time of the fire is said to have made ten dollars by charging
ten cents for every time that she told of her escape from the
building. The class of 1918, entering as freshmen in September,
after the fire, raised $5,540.60 for the fund when they had been
organized only a few weeks.
The methods of the alumnae were no less varied and amusing.
The Southern California Club started a College Hall Fund, and
notices were sent out all over the country requesting every alumna
to give a dollar for every year that she had lived in College Hall.
Seven hundred and fifty dollars came in. There were thes dansants,
musicales, concerts, of which the Sousa concert in Boston was
the most important, operettas, masques, garden parties, costume
parties, salad demonstrations, candy sales, bridge parties; a
moving-picture film of Wellesley went the rounds of many clubs,
from city to city, through New England and the Middle West.
An alumna of the class of 1896 "took in" $949.20 for subscriptions
to magazines, with a profit of $175.75 for the fund. She comments
on Wellesley taste in magazines by revealing the fact that the
Atlantic Monthly "received by far the largest number of subscriptions."
One girl in Colorado baked bread, "but forsook it to give dancing
lessons, as paying even better!" In New York, Chicago, and other
cities, the tickets for theatrical performances were bought up
and sold again at advanced prices. A book of Wellesley recipes
was compiled and sold. An alumna of '92 made a charming etching
of College Hall and sold it on a post card; another, also of '92,
wrote and sold a poem of lament on the loss of the dear old building.
The Cincinnati Wellesley Club held a Wellesley market for three
Saturdays in May, 1914, and netted somewhat over seventy-five
dollars a day for the three days. One Wellesley club charged ten
cents for the privilege of shaking hands with its "fire-heroine."
On Easter Monday, 1914, when the college had just come back to
work, after the fire, the "Freeman Fowls" arranged an egg hunt,
with egg-shaped tickets at ten cents, for the fund. The students
from Freeman Cottage, dressed as roosters, very scarlet as to
topknot and wattles, very feather dustery as to tail, waylaid
the unwary on campus paths and lured them to buy these tickets
and to hunt for the hundreds of brightly colored eggs which these
commercially canny fowls had hidden on the Art Building Hill.
After the hunt was successfully over, the hunters came down to
the front of the new, very new, administration building, already
called the Wellesley Hencoop, where they were greeted by the
ghosts and wraiths and other astral presentments of the vanished
statues of College Hall, and where the roosters burst into an
antiphonal chant:
"Come see the Wellesley Chicken-coop, the
Chicken-coop, the Chicken-coop.
Come see the Wellesley Chicken-coop,
(It isn't far from Chapel!)
Come get your tickets for a roost, and give
Your chicken-hearts a boost,
Come see our Wellesley Chicken-roost,
(It isn't far from Chapel!)
"Just see our brand new Collegette, it's
College yet, it's College yet,
With sixty-six new rooms to let,
(They're practicing in Billings).
The Collegette is very tall,
It isn't far from Music Hall,
Our neighbors can't be heard at all
(They learn to sing at Billings).
"Oh, statues dear from College Hall, from
College Hall, from College Hall,
Don't hesitate to come and call
On Hen-House day at Wellesley.
Niobe sad, and Harriet, and Polly Hym and Dian's pet
On Hen-House day,--on Hen-House day,
O! Hen-House day at Wellesley.
Come walk right through the big front door,
Each hour we love you more and more,
There's fire-escapes from every floor
Of the new Hen-house at Wellesley."
Having thus formally adopted the new building, whose windows and
doors were already wreathed in vines and crimson (paper) roses
which had sprung up and blossomed over night, the college now
hastened to the top of College Hall Hill, whence, at the crowing
of Chanticleer, the egg-rolling began. The Nest Egg for the fund,
achieved by these enterprising "Freeman Fowls", was about
fifty-two dollars.
Far off in Honolulu there were "College Capers" in which eight
Wellesley alumnae, helped by graduates of Harvard, Cornell,
Bryn Mawr, and other colleges, earned three hundred dollars.
The News has published a number of letters whose simple revelation
of feeling witnesses to the loyalty and love of the Wellesley
alumnae. One writes:
"A month ago, because of obligations and a very small salary,
I thought I could give nothing to the Endowment Plan. By Saturday
morning (after the fire) I had decided I must give a dollar a month.
By night I had received a slight increase in salary, therefore l
shall send two dollars a month as long as I am able. I wish it
were millions, my admiration and sympathy are so unbounded."
Another says: "Perhaps you may know that when I was a Senior
I received a scholarship of (I think) $350. It has long been my
wish and dream to return that money with large interest, in return
for all I received from my Alma Mater, and in acknowledgment of
the success I have since had in my work because of her. I have
never been able to lay aside the sum I had wished to give, but
now that the need has come I can wait no longer, I am therefore
sending you my check for $500, hoping that even this sum, so small
in the face of the immense loss, may aid a little because it comes
at the right moment. It goes with the wish that it were many,
many times the amount, and with the sincerest acknowledgment of
my indebtedness to Wellesley."
From China came the message: "In an indefinite way I had intended
to send five or ten dollars some time this year (to the Endowment
Fund), but the loss of College Hall makes me realize afresh what
Wellesley has meant to me, and I want to give till I feel the pinch.
I am writing (the treasurer of the Mission Board) to send you
five dollars a month for ten months."
From nearer home: "My sister and I intend to go without spring
suits this year in order to give twenty-five dollars each toward
the fund; this surely will not be sacrifice, but a great privilege.
Then we intend to add more each time we receive our salary....
I cannot say that I was so brave as the girls at the college, who
did not shed a tear as College Hall burned--I could not speak,
my voice was so choked with tears, and that night I went supperless
to bed. But though it seems impossible to believe that College Hall
is a thing of the past, yet one cannot but feel that from this
so great calamity great good will come--a broader, higher spirit
will be manifested; we shall cease to think in classes, but all
unite in great loving thought for the good and the upbuilding--in
more senses than one--of our Alma Mater."
And the messages and money from friends of the college were no
less touching. The children of the Wellesley Kindergarten, which
is connected with the Department of Education in the college,
held a sale of their own little handicrafts and made fifty dollars
for the fund.
One who signed himself, "Very respectfully, A Working Man," wrote:
"The results of your college's work show that it is of the best.
The Student Government is one of the finest things in American
education. The spirit shown at the fire and since is superb."
Another man, who wished that he "had a daughter to go to Wellesley,
the college of high ideals," said, "I should be ashamed even to
ride by in the train without contributing this mite to your
Rebuilding Fund."
A woman in Tasmania sent a dollar, "for you are setting a great
ideal for the broad education of women.... We (in Australia) have
much to thank the higher democratic education of America for."
From many little children money came: from little girls who hoped
to come to Wellesley some day, and from the sons and daughters
of Wellesley students.
The business men of Wellesley town subscribed generously. Many
men as well as women have expressed their admiration of the college
in a tangible way.
And from Vassar, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Mt. Holyoke, Radcliffe, Barnard,
Wells, Simmons, and Sweet Briar, contributions came pouring in
unsolicited. Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts, and others had
already loaned equipment and material for the impoverished
laboratories, and direct contributions to the fund came from the
University of Idaho, the Musical Clubs of Dartmouth and the
Institute of Technology; from Hobart College, in cooperation with
Wellesley alumnae, in Geneva, New York; from the Emerson College
of Oratory, the College Club of Tucson, Arizona, the Boston and
Connecticut branches of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae,
the Fitchburg Smith College Club, and the Cornell Woman's Club
of New York City. To Smith College, which had so lately raised
its million, Wellesley was also indebted for helpful suggestions
in planning the campaign.
When the great war broke out in August, 1914, wise unbelievers
shook their heads and commiserated Wellesley; but the dauntless
Chairman of the Alumnae Restoration and Endowment Committee
continued to press on with her campaign--to draw dilatory clubs
into line, to prod sluggish classes into activity, to remind
individuals of their opportunity.
The pledges for the last forty thousand dollars of the fund came
snowing in during Christmas week, and eleven o'clock of the evening
of December 31, 1914, found Miss Stimson's committee in New York
counting at top speed the sheaves of checks and pledges which had
been arriving all day. The remarkable thing about the campaign was
the great number of small amounts which came in, and the number
of alumnae--not the wealthy ones--who doubled their pledges at
the last minute. It was the one dollar and the five-dollar pledges
which really saved the day and made it possible for the college
to secure the large conditional gifts. On the morning of January 1,
1915, the amount was complete.
IV.
With 1915, Wellesley enters upon the second phase of her history,
but the early, formative years will always shine through the fire,
a memory and an inspiration. Nothing that was vital perished in
those flames. Yet already the Wellesley that looks back upon
her old self is a different Wellesley. All her repressed desires,
spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic, are suddenly set free. Her
lovers and her daughters feel the very campus kindle and quicken
beneath their feet to new responsibilities.
"The New Wellesley!"
No one knows what that shall be, but the words are vision-filled:
prophetic of an ordered beauty of architecture, a harmony of
taste, that the old Wellesley, on the far side of the fire, strove
after but never knew; prophetic of a pinnacled and aspiring
scholarship whose solid foundations were laid forty years deep
in Christian trust and patience; prophetic of a questing spirit
freed from the old reproach of provincialism; of a ministering
spirit in which the virtue of true courtesy is fulfilled.
The end of her first half century will see the campus flowering
with the outward and visible signs of the new Wellesley; and even
as the old fire-hallowed bricks have made beautiful the new walls,
so the beauty of the old dreams shall shine in the new vision.
"Pageant of fretted roofs that cluster*
On hill and knoll in the branches green,
Ye are but shadows, and not the luster,
Garment, ye, of a grace unseen.
"All our life is confused with fable,
Ever the fact as the phantasy seems:
Yet the world of spirit lies sure and stable,
Under the shows of the world of dreams.
"Not an idle and false derision
The rocks that crumble, the stars that fail;
Meaning caskets within the vision,
Shaping the folds of the woven veil."
* Katharine Lee Bates: from a poem, "The College Beautiful," 1886.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Story of Wellesley, by Florence Converse
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