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.