The Story of Wellesley | Page 4

Manning Hodgkins, Professor Emeritus Mary A. Willcox,
Mrs. Mary Gilman Ahlers; to Miss Candace C. Stimson, Miss Mary B.
Jenkins, the Secretary of the Alumnae Restoration and Endowment
Committee, and to the many others among alumnae and faculty, whose
letters and articles I quote. Last but not least in my grateful memory are
all those painstaking and accurate chroniclers, the editors of the
Wellesley Courant, Prelude, Magazine, News, and Legenda, whose

labors went so far to lighten mine.
F.C.

CONTENTS
I. PREFACE
II. THE PRESIDENTS AND THEIR ACHIEVEMENT
III. THE FACULTY AND THEIR METHODS
IV. THE STUDENTS AT WORK AND PLAY
V. THE FIRE: AN INTERLUDE
VI. THE LOYAL ALUMNAE
INDEX [not included]
CHAPTER I
THE FOUNDER AND HIS IDEALS
I.
As the nineteenth century recedes into history and the essentially
romantic quality of its great adventures is confirmed by the "beauty
touched with strangeness" which illumines their true perspective, we
are discovering, what the adventurers themselves always knew, that the
movement for the higher education of women was not the least
romantic of those Victorian quests and stirrings, and that its relation to
the greatest adventure of all, Democracy, was peculiarly vital and close.
We know that the "man in the street", in the sixties and seventies,
watching with perplexity and scornful amusement the endeavor of his
sisters and his daughters--or more probably other men's daughters--to

prove that the intellectual heritage must be a common heritage if
Democracy was to be a working theory, missed the beauty of the
picture. He saw the slim beginning of a procession of young women,
whose obstinate, dreaming eyes beheld the visions hitherto relegated by
scriptural prerogative and masculine commentary to their brothers;
inevitably his outraged conservatism missed the beauty; and the
strangeness he called queer. That he should have missed the democratic
significance of the movement is less to his credit. But he did miss it,
fifty years ago and for several years thereafter, even as he is still
missing the democratic significance of other movements to-day.
Processions still pass him by,--for peace, for universal suffrage, May
Day, Labor Day, and those black days when the nations mobilize for
war, they pass him by,--and the last thing he seems to discover about
them is their democratic significance. But after a long while the
meaning of it all has begun to penetrate. To-day, his daughters go to
college as a matter of course, and he has forgotten that he ever grudged
them the opportunity.
They remind him of it, sometimes, with filial indirection, by
celebrating the benevolence, the intellectual acumen, the idealism of
the few men, exceptional in their day, who saw eye to eye with Mary
Lyon and her kind; the men who welcomed women to Oberlin and
Michigan, who founded Vassar and Wellesley and Bryn Mawr, and so
helped to organize the procession. Their reminders are even beginning
to take form as records of achievement; annals very far from meager,
for achievement piles up faster since Democracy set the gate of
opportunity on the crack, and we pack more into a half century than we
used to. And women, more obviously than men, perhaps, have
"speeded up" in response to the democratic stimulus; their
accomplishment along social, political, industrial, and above all,
educational lines, since the first woman's college was founded, is not
inconsiderable.
How much, or how little, would have been accomplished, industrially,
socially, and politically, without that first woman's college, we shall
never know, but the alumnae registers, with their statistics concerning
the occupations of graduates, are suggestive reading. How little would

have been accomplished educationally for women, it is not so difficult
to imagine: Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr,--with
all the bright visions, the fullness of life that they connote to American
women, middle-aged and young,--blotted out; coeducational
institutions harassed by numbers and inventing drastic legislation to
keep out the women; man still the almoner of education, and woman
his dependent. From all these hampering probabilities the women's
colleges save us to-day. This is what constitutes their negative value to
education.
Their positive contribution cannot be summarized so briefly; its
scattered chronicle must be sought in the minutes of trustees' meetings,
where it modestly evades the public eye, in the academic formalities of
presidents' reports and the journalistic naivete of college periodicals; in
the diaries of early graduates; in newspaper clippings and magazine
"write-ups"; in historical sketches to commemorate the decennial or the
quarter-century; and from the lips of the pioneers,--teacher and student.
For, in the words of the graduate thesis, "we are still in the period of the
sources." The would-be historian of a woman's college to-day is in
much the same relation to her material as the Venerable Bede was to
his when he set out to write his Ecclesiastical History. The thought
brings us its