marriage. I would never marry. It would interfere with my plan; it would
fetter my freedom. I didn’t quite know what Freedom meant; certainly I
was far from realizing that it exists only in the spirit, never in human
relations, never in human activities—that the road to it is as often as
not what men call bondage. But above all I must be free; and to be free
I must be a spinster. When I was fourteen I was praying God on my knees
to keep me from marriage. I suspect that it was only an echo of the
strident feminine cry filling the air at that moment, the cry that woman
was a slave in a man-made world. By the time I was ready to go to
college I had changed my prayer for freedom to a will to freedom. Such
was the baggage I carried to college, where I was soon to find several
things I had not counted on.
3
A COEDUCATIONAL COLLEGE OF THE EIGHTIES
When I entered Allegheny College in the fall of 1876 I made my first
contact with the past. I had been born and reared a pioneer; I knew only
the beginning of things, the making of a home in a wilderness, the
making of an industry from the ground up. I had seen the hardships of
beginnings, the joy of realization, the attacks that success must
expect; but of things with a past, things that had made themselves
permanent, I knew nothing. It struck me full in the face now, for this
was an old college as things west of the Alleghenies were reckoned—an
old college in an old town. Here was history, and I had never met it
before to recognize it.
The town lay in the valley of a tributary of the Allegheny River—French
Creek. Its oldest tradition after the tales of Indians was that George
Washington once drank from a spring on the edge of the campus. Certainly
he passed that way in 1753 when he came up the river valley from Fort
Duquesne (Pittsburgh), following the route which led to Fort Le Bœuf
near Lake Erie. He comments in his diary, published the year after his
trip, on the extensive rich meadows through which he had passed, one of
which “I believe was nearly four miles in length and considerable wider
in some places.” To this particular “rich meadow” a few years later came
one David Mead and laid out a town and sold land. Here soon after came
the representative of the Holland Land Company, colonizers of first
quality. Good men came, distinguished names in Pennsylvania’s history,
and they wanted a college. The answer to their wish came in 1815 when
one of the most scholarly men of that day, Timothy Alden of
Massachusetts, heard their call and, picking up all his worldly
possessions, made the two months’ trip by coach and boat to the
settlement called Meadville.
Timothy Alden, like many of his fellows, was fired by a deep belief that
through Christian democracy alone could men arrive at the better world
towards which he, scholar that he was, knew they had been groping from
their earliest beginnings. But men could only come to an understanding
of their individual and collective responsibilities to democracy through
education. Therefore, as men spread westward he and others like him must
follow them with education.
But once in Meadville how little he found with which to carry out his
project—a log courthouse for a schoolhouse, and little or no money,
though of what they had men gave freely. Now Timothy Alden knew that
throughout the East were men of scholarly traditions convinced as was he
that democracy would work only if men were trained to understanding and
sacrifice. He believed that they would help his Western venture. In 1816
he went East to find out. He was not wrong in thinking there would be
sympathy for the young college. Out of their meager store men gave—this
one, fifty cents; that one, five dollars; few, more—and men gave books,
one, two, five. The list of donors now in the college archives shows
many of the best known names of the day—Lowell, Adams, Tucker, Parkman,
Channing in Boston and twenty-nine fine New York names. Friends were
made for Allegheny in every town and city where its brave story was
told. Timothy Alden came back with $361 in money and with books, more
needed than money, estimated to be worth $1,642.26.
From that time he kept the undertaking steadily before the East,
promoted it by every method known to the times. A great response to his
passionate effort came in 1819 when the college world of the East was
shocked by learning that William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts, had
left his famous collection of “classical and theological books,
dictionaries, lexicons and Bibles” to a college in the wilderness of
northwestern Pennsylvania, a college without a home, still doing its
work in a log courthouse. That gift, long a bitter drop in the cup of
Harvard, it is said, made a home of its own necessity for Allegheny, and
in 1820 the corner stone of Bentley Hall, named for the donor, was laid.
It took many years to complete it; but, when done on the lines Timothy
Alden had himself laid down, it was one of the most beautiful buildings
in the country. Today it easily stands after Independence Hall as the
most perfect piece of Colonial architecture in the state of
Pennsylvania. For me Bentley Hall was an extraordinary experience. It
was the first really beautiful building I had seen, a revelation,
something I had never dreamed of.
Fifty-six years had passed since the corner stone of Bentley Hall was
laid, and not one of them without disappointments and sacrifices. More
than once it had seemed as if the brave attempt must fail. Two buildings
only had been added in these years: Culver Hall, a frame boarding house
for men; Ruter Hall, a grim uncompromising three-story rectangular brick
structure, fifty by ninety feet in size, a perfect reflection of the
straitened period to which it belonged. The “Factory” was our slighting
name for Ruter Hall, but in this stern structure I was to find a second
deep satisfaction—the library; in a room on the top floor, ninety feet
long and at least sixteen in height was housed not only the splendid
Bentley collection, but one even more valuable, that of Judge James
Winthrop of Cambridge, Massachusetts, rare volumes from the great
presses of Europe, three tons of books brought overland in wagons by
Boston teamsters in 1822. They lined the great unbroken inside wall, as
well as every space between openings. From the window seats one looked
out on the town in the valley, its roofs and towers half hidden by a
wealth of trees, and beyond to a circle of round-breasted hills. Before
I left Allegheny I had found a very precious thing in that severe
room—the companionship there is in the silent presence of books.
Allegheny did not of course admit women at the start; but the ferment
caused by the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment making it clear that
only men were to be regarded as citizens stirred the Allegheny
constituents mightily. Its chief patron, as I have said, was the
Methodist Church. Now the Methodist Church was a militant reformer. The
greatest of its bishops, Matthew Simpson, had backed Mrs. Stanton and
Miss Anthony and their colleagues at every step. Leaders among Methodist
women had been abolitionists, aggressive temperance advocates, and now
they became militant suffragists. Their influence began to tell. In
1870, with misgivings in not a few minds the admission of women was
voted. This was the same year that the University of Michigan opened its
doors to women, and two years before Cornell. In the six years before I
entered ten women had graduated. When I came there were but two seniors,
two juniors, no sophomores. I was a lone freshman in a class of forty
hostile or indifferent boys. The friendly and facetious professor
charged with the care of the “young ladies” put it that I was “Lost in
the Wilderness of Boy.”
From the first I was dimly conscious that I was an invader, that there
was abroad a spirit of masculinity challenging my right to be there, and
there were taboos not to be disregarded. My first experience was that of
which Virginia Woolf speaks so bitterly in “A Room of One’s Own”—the
closing of the college green to her at Oxbridge. Nearly fifty years
before her book was written I was having at Allegheny the same
experience.
The sloping green of the campus below Bentley Hall was inviting. Between
classes I made my way one day to a seat under a tree only to hear a
horrified call from the walk above, “Come back, come back quick.” An
imperative summons from an upper-class woman. “You mustn’t go on that
side of the walk, only men go there.”
It was not so simple to find a spot where you could go and be
comfortable. If Bentley Hall, where all the classes were held, was a
beautiful piece of architecture, its interior could hardly have been
more severe. The rooms were heated with potbellied cast-iron stoves,
seated with the hardest wooden chairs, lighted by kerosene lamps. In
winter (and the winters were long) the snow tracked in kept the floors
wet and cold. Often one wore a muffler in chapel. But of all that I was
unheeding. My pioneer childhood served me well. Moreover, I realized at
the start that I had found what I had come to college for, direction in
the only field in which I was interested—science. I found it in a way
that I doubt if Cornell could have given me at the moment, shy and
immature as I was: the warming and contagious enthusiasm of a great
natural teacher, one who had an ardent passion for those things which
had stirred me and a wide knowledge which he fed by constant study and
travel—Jeremiah Tingley, the head of Allegheny’s department of natural
science.
Professor Tingley was then a man of fifty, sparkling, alive, informal.
Three years before, he had been one of the fifty chosen from many
hundred applicants to spend the summer with Louis Agassiz on the island
of Penikese in Buzzards Bay. Agassiz had planned with enthusiasm for the
Penikese Summer School, and for those privileged to enter who could
understand and appreciate it was an unforgettable experience; certainly
it was for Jeremiah Tingley. He carried there Agassiz’s faith in
observation and classification, as well as his reverence for Nature and
all her ways. For both men the material world was but the cover of the
spirit. Professor Tingley would quote Agassiz sometimes: “Nature always
brings us back to absolute truth whenever we wander.”
This fervent faith had a profound and quieting effect on my religious
tumult. I learned a new word: Pantheism. Being still in that early stage
of development where there must be a definite word by which to classify
oneself, I began to call myself a pantheist—and I had a creed which I
repeated more often than the creed I had learned in childhood:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand
Little flower—but _if_ I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
It reassured me; I was on the right track, for was I not going to find
out with the microscope what God and man are?
Professor Tingley’s method for those he found really interested in
scientific study was to encourage them to look outside the book. There
was where I had already found my joy; but I suspected it was the willful
way, that the true way was to know first what was in the books. Here in
Professor Tingley’s classes you were ordered to go and see for yourself.
He used to tell us a story of his first experience at Penikese. A stone
was put before him, a round water-washed stone, on which he was to
report. He looked at the stone, turned it over. There was nothing to
report. “It is not the outside, it is the inside of things that
matters,” said Agassiz. And in the laboratory that became our watchword:
Look inside.
Discovering my interest in the microscope, I was not only allowed, I was
urged to use the magnificent binocular belonging to the college, was
given the free run of the laboratory along with a few as crazy as
myself. Here my most exciting adventure apart from what I found under
the microscope came from actually having my hands on a “missing link.”
Evolution, to which I was clinging determinedly, could only be
established, I realized, by discovering the links. There was one
peculiar to the waters in our valley, the _Memopomo Alleghaniensis_, a
creature twelve to fifteen inches long with gills and one lung, able to
live in the water or mud as circumstances required. The mud puppy, as it
was appropriately called, was slimy, loathsome, but I worked over it
with awe. Was I not being admitted into the very workshop of Nature
herself—seeing how she did it?
Professor Tingley took his little group of laboratory devotees into his
home circle. He and Mrs. Tingley were housed in a wing of Bentley
Hall—big rooms built for classrooms. They had no children, and in the
years of their study and travel they had gathered about them things of
beauty and interest. The atmosphere of those rooms was something quite
new and wonderful to me. It was my first look into the intimate social
life possible to people interested above all in ideas, beauty, music,
and glad to work hard and live simply to devote themselves to their
cultivation.
And such good talks! Much of it was concerned with fresh scientific
thought, the inventions and discoveries which were stirring the world.
An omnivorous reader of the scientific publications of Europe and
America, Professor Tingley kept us excited, not only by what had been
done but what it might mean. There was the telephone. I had been in
college but a few weeks when my father asked me to go with him and my
brother to the Centennial Exposition of 1876. President Bugbee, who had
made me his special care for a time—Mrs. Bugbee even taking me into
their home until an appropriate boarding place could be found—was
heartily in favor of my going. I went, and when I returned Professor
Tingley’s first question was, “Did you see the telephone?” I hadn’t even
heard of it. Two exhibits only of that exposition made a deep enough
impression on me to last until today—my first Corot and the Corliss
engine. Professor Tingley was greatly disappointed, and I did not
understand why until a few weeks later he called the student body
together to explain and illustrate the telephone by a homemade
instrument. “You’ll talk to your homes from these rooms one day,” he
told us. “New York will talk to Boston.” He didn’t suggest Chicago.
“Dreamer,” the boys said. “Dreamer,” my father and his Titusville
friends said a little later when an agent of the Bell Associates, the
first company to attempt putting the new invention within reach of
everybody, came to town selling stock. How often I heard it said later,
“If I’d bought that telephone stock!”
Years later I told Alexander Graham Bell of my introduction to the
telephone. “Nobody,” he said, “can estimate what the teachers of science
in colleges and high schools were doing in those days not only to spread
knowledge of the telephone but to stir youth to tackle the possibilities
in electricity.”
What I best remember is not the telephone but Professor Tingley’s
amazing enthusiasm for the telephone. This revelation of enthusiasm, its
power to warm and illuminate was one of the finest and most lasting of
my college experiences. The people I had known, teachers, preachers,
doctors, business men, all went through their day’s work either with a
stubborn, often sullen determination to do their whole duty, or with an
undercurrent of uneasiness, if they found pleasure in duty. They seemed
to me to feel that they were not really working if they were not
demonstrating the Puritan teaching that labor is a curse. It had never
seemed so to me, but I did not dare gloat over it. And here was a
teacher who did gloat over his job in all its ramifications. Moreover,
he did his best to stir you to share his joy.
But while I looked on what I was learning in the laboratory as what I
had come to college for, while each term stiffened my ambition to go
deeper and deeper into the search for the original atom, science was not
all that interested me. The faculty, if small, was made up largely of
seasoned men with a perspective on life. There was not only deep
seriousness but humor and tolerance, and since we were so small a
college the student was close enough to discover them, to find out what
each man as an individual had to offer him. As I learned the power of
enthusiasm from Jeremiah Tingley, I learned from another man of that
faculty the value of contempt. Holding the chair of Latin was one of the
few able teachers I have known, George Haskins, father of that sound
scholar of international repute, the late Charles Homer Haskins, at the
time of his death Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at Harvard
University. What deep satisfaction his career gave his father, himself a
man of many disappointments!
George Haskins labored, usually in vain, to arouse us to the choiceness
of Latinity, the meaning of Rome’s rise and fall, the quality of her
men, the relation of that life to ours. Professor Haskins’ contempt for
our lack of understanding, for our slack preparation, was something
utterly new to me in human intercourse. The people I knew with rare
exceptions spared one another’s feelings. I had come to consider that a
superior grace; you must be kind if you lied for it. But here was a man
who turned on indifference, neglect, carelessness with bitter and
caustic contempt, left his victim seared. The sufferers lived to say,
some of them at least: “I deserved it. He was never unjust, never
inappreciative of effort.”
“Cherish your contempts,” Henry James advised me once when he had drawn
from me a confession of the conflict between my natural dislike of
saying anything unpleasant about anybody and the necessity of being
cruel, even brutal, if the work I had undertaken was to be truthful in
fact and logic. “Cherish your contempts,” said Mr. James, “and strength
to your elbow.” If it had not been for George Haskins I doubt if I
should have known what he meant; nor should I ever have become the
steady, rather dogged worker I am. The contempt for shiftlessness which
he inspired in me aroused a determination to be a good worker. I began
to train my mind to go at its task regularly, keep hours, study whether
I liked a thing or not. I forced myself not to waste time, not to loaf,
not to give up before I finished. If I failed at any point in this
discipline I suffered a certain mental and spiritual malaise, a
dissatisfaction with myself hard to live with.
In spite of my painful efforts to make a regular worker out of myself,
life at college was lightened by my discovery of the Boy. Incredible as
it seems to me now, I had come to college at eighteen without ever
having dared to look fully into the face of any boy of my age. To be
sure, I had from childhood nourished secret passions for a succession of
older individuals whom I never saw except at a distance, and with whom I
never exchanged a word. My brother and his friends, my father and his
friends—these I had always hobnobbed with; but those who naturally
should have been my companions, I shunned. I was unable to take part in
those things that brought the young people of the day together. I did
not dance—the Methodist discipline forbade it. I was incredibly stupid
and uninterested in games—still am. I had no easy companionable ways,
was too shy to attempt them. I had my delights; the hills which I ran,
the long drives behind our little white horse, the family doings, the
reading of French regularly with my splendid friend Annette Grumbine,
still living, still as she was then a vitalizing influence in the town
and state for all that makes for a higher social life—these things and
my precious evening walks, the full length of Titusville’s main street,
alone or with some girl friend while we talked of things deepest in our
minds.
But in all this there was no boy. I was not long in discovering him when
I reached Allegheny, for the taboos I encountered at the start soon
yielded under the increased number of women, women in college, in
special courses, in the Preparatory Department. They swept masculine
prohibitions out of the way—took possession, made a different kind of
institution of it, less scholastic, gayer, easier-going. The daily
association in the classrooms, the contacts and appraisements, the
mutual interests and intimacies, the continual procession of college
doings which in the nature of things required that you should have a
masculine attendant, soon put me at my ease. I was learning, learning
fast, but the learning carried its pains. I still had a stiff-necked
determination to be free. To avoid entangling alliances of all kinds had
become an obsession with me. I was slow in laying it aside when I began
to take part in the social life of the college, and because of it I was
guilty of one performance which was properly enough a scandal to the
young men.
There were several men’s fraternities in the college; most of the boys
belonged to one or another. It was an ambition of the fraternities to
put their pins on acceptable town and college girls. You were a Delta
girl, or a Gamma girl or a Phi Psi girl. I resented this effort to tag
me. Why should I not have friends in all the fraternities? And I had; I
accumulated four pins and then, one disastrous morning, went into chapel
with the four pins on my coat. There were a few months after that when,
if it had not been for two or three non-Frat friends, I should have been
a social outcast.
I spent four years in Allegheny College. Measured by what I got instead
of by what I did not get and was obliged to learn later, I regard them
as among the most profitable of my life. I find often that men and women
accuse the college of not opening their minds to life as it is in the
world. For a mind sufficiently developed to see “life as it is” I cannot
conceive a more fruitful field than the classics. If I had been
sufficiently mature I could have learned from George Haskins’ teachings
of Cicero and Tacitus and Livy more than I know today about the ways of
men in their personal and their national relations, more of the causes
of war, of the weaknesses of governments. But I was not ready for it.
Life is the great teacher, and she leads us step by step. It is not the
fault of the human teacher that his pupil must learn to climb by
climbing.
It was in the spring of 1880 that I graduated. I still carried the same
baggage with which I had entered—a little heavier to be sure, a little
better packed, a little better adapted to the “Purpose.” The only
difference which threatened disturbance was that I had added an item
which I had refused to bring with me in 1876. Then I was not willing to
believe I would ever marry—now I thought possibly some day I might; but
the item was not heavy, not heavy enough at least to prevent my
rejoicing over the fact that I was graduating with a job. I had signed a
contract with an institution of which I had never heard until the
negotiations leading to it opened. After frequent communications with
the faculty a representative of the Poland Union Seminary of Poland,
Ohio, with some misgivings had employed me to serve as its
Preceptress—$500 a year “and board yourself.” I was jubilant. It meant
economic independence—the first plank in my platform. I would use my
leisure to work with the microscope; I would save my money; I would one
day go abroad and study with some great biologist. I would never abandon
my search for the beginning of life, the point where I expected to find
God.
It was then with entire confidence in the future that I started out in
August of 1880 for the town of Poland on the Western Reserve of Ohio, to
begin what women were then talking of in more or less awed tones as a
Career.
4
A START AND A RETREAT
If I had been going on my honeymoon I should scarcely have been more
expectant or more curious than I was in August of 1880 when I left home
to take my first position: “Preceptress of Poland Union Seminary,
Poland, Mahoning County, Ohio—$500.00 a year and board yourself”! Poland
was not a long journey from my home—four or five hours.