Bryn Mawr College, Class of 1907. 137 pp.
“The large, outgiving life” is a graphic phrase used by the biographer
of Ellen H. Richards in introducing the story of her sixty-eight
well-spent years. Mrs. Richards was a woman in whose nature the quality
of acquisitiveness seems almost to have been omitted. She gave
boundlessly of herself to individuals and to the common welfare. Her
thoughtfulness for friends and associates and her notable public
services were intrinsic forms of self-expression. Apparently, she was
incapable of a perfunctory act. Her letters to friends, the gift for the
coming baby, the “treat” for the girl student away from home for the
first time, the pot of flowers sent to a new neighbor, her letters to
“correspondence” students, her analysis of the water supply of the state
of Massachusetts, her leadership in the home economics movement—all
these things, from the least to the most important, were but the sincere
expressions of her outpouring spirit.
Her impulse for service was re-enforced by a remarkable talent for
administration. It was this which made possible the extraordinary
generosity of her life. It was scientifically managed from the start. At
the height of her career, as Miss Hunt remarks, Mrs. Richards was doing
the work of ten people. Even as a little girl, Ellen Swallow had shown
her capacity to carry on a triple career by helping her mother at home
and her father in the “general store,” besides doing the lessons proper
for a little girl. Later she combined teaching with housekeeping and
storekeeping and helped to earn the money with which she went to
college. During the greater part of her two years at Vassar, she
supported herself by tutoring. From this time on, as student in the
Boston Institute of Technology and subsequently as instructor, Mrs.
Richards was steadily increasing the range of her energies and
activities. The history of her life is the history of the inauguration
of many social and scientific movements.
As a leader, she united to a marked degree the qualities of pioneer and
conservator. To have been the first woman to enter the Institute of
Technology and to have opened the way for other women was for her a
life-long satisfaction. She was never weary in fighting the battle for
the higher education of women. But she had also a strong instinct for
sustaining the victory so hardly won. This is illustrated by a
reproachful letter which she wrote to a woman friend, a college
professor, who had fainted. “Take beef three times a day for a fortnight
to tone yourself up,” she wrote, “and don’t do it again. It is fully as
important to keep in physical condition as to have a mental grasp.
Nowadays the last card they can trump up against us is that we are not
physically equal to what we try to do. The more prominent we are the
more closely they watch us. Just now, too, when so much is in the air
against woman’s education.”
The volume is issued as a memorial and was prepared with the
co-operation of Professor Richards and a committee of Mrs. Richards’
friends representing her various interests.
* * * * *
At the age of twenty-five, Ellen Swallow was just pulling herself free
from the narrow life of a New England village and starting off to Vassar
College. At the same age, Carola Woerishoffer, thanks to a more
favorable environment and a more enlightened generation, had finished
her college course and entered upon a well-established career of social
service. When her gallant and useful life came to a tragical end in an
automobile accident at this same age, she had already accomplished much
that was worth recording.
A picture of her life and personality is given in a small memorial
volume, which consists chiefly of a series of addresses made by personal
friends at a meeting held in Greenwich House shortly after her death. In
the descriptions of her friends, the girl’s devotion to athletics, her
spirit of comradeship, her strong-willed nature, her democratic
instincts, her German fondness for thoroughness and hatred of
dilettantism, and her sense of social responsibility as the possessor of
wealth are the qualities which are made to stand out as most
representative of her.
The spirit in which her social work was done was thus described by one
of the speakers: “She and another young woman, Elizabeth Butler, who
also did immeasurably hard things and who also left us forever this
summer—they undertook so simply the things that to us of my generation
seemed a moral adventure, a wonderful undertaking,—these young women
took them in such a matter-of-fact way. It did not seem to Carola an
adventure to go into laundries any more than it did to Elizabeth Butler
to go into the depths of blackest Pittsburgh. The things were there, and
we had to know about them, and it was all matter-of-fact, just as it
would have been for an able-bodied man to go and look at things and come
back and tell the world what it bitterly needs to know about them. It
was all matter-of-fact for them, and I believe they are forerunners of
new generations of women who will insist in their youth on knowing life
as it is, on facing the world clear-eyed and changing these things which
we of my generation, in our youth, shirked and preferred not to know.”