Clio's Lives
Page 44
scant opportunities then open to women for teaching at major doctorate-
granting schools’.8 In my own biographical study of Viola Barnes, drawing
on Steele and Johnson, I also cited the proportion of women who studied
with Andrews as a reason for exploring Barnes’s career in the context of her
association with the ‘imperial school’.9 Yet, as Johnson correctly pointed
out in a footnote, the list of signatories includes a number who ‘did not
study with Andrews in the field of colonial history’.10 The list, in reality,
is a complex source in many respects. Not all of the signatories had been
doctoral students, and some from Bryn Mawr – where Andrews had taught
undergraduates, by contrast with his years at Johns Hopkins and Yale
when he dealt exclusively with graduate students – had not been graduate
students at all. Thus, the women listed were more varied in scholarly
terms than the men, of whom 55 (or 86 per cent) had or would attain
doctoral degrees compared with 21 of the women (42 per cent). Of the
Yale graduate students, women or men, it is difficult in some cases to
establish which were actually supervised by Andrews and which may have
taken his seminar but were primarily supervised by others, prominently
including at Yale his own former students Charles Seymour and Leonard
Woods Labaree. The process by which signatories were added to the list
also bears examination. It was, of course, a self-selected group, and esteem
for Andrews was a precondition. If there were students who, for whatever
reason, disapproved of his teaching or scholarship, or did not share in the
7
Essays in Colonial History, v–viii. The reasons for the omission of the list in 1931 are unknown, but its authenticity is corroborated by the tracing of connections to Andrews on the part of the signatories, as well as in some cases by agreements to make donations to the cost of the volume in CMAP, Box 30, Folders 347–8.
8 Johnson, ‘Charles McLean Andrews’, 532.
9 John G. Reid, Viola Florence Barnes, 1885–1979: A Historian’s Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), xiii, doi.org/10.3138/9781442628076.
10 Johnson, ‘Charles McLean Andrews’, 542–3, note 41.
277
CLIo'S LIvES
affection expressed in the Dedication, then they would by definition be
excluded. The only essential qualifications for inclusion, in addition to
being well disposed towards Andrews, seem to have been having at some
point studied with Andrews and being willing to contribute at least $10
to the production costs of the Festschrift. Stanley M. Pargellis, a Yale PhD
graduate of 1929 and one of the five-person editorial steering group –
which also included Barnes, Helen Taft Manning, Frederick J. Manning
and Labaree – was the chief collector, and the criteria he used for deciding
who should be approached have not survived.11
Nevertheless, this essay will argue that collective biographical analysis
based on the list of 114 names in Essays in Colonial History – focusing
especially on the 50 women and, within that number, on those who
in 1931 either had or would attain the PhD degree or in some other
way were demonstrably associated with Andrews in a research capacity
– can contribute significantly towards our understanding of the career
trajectories of women historians in the United States during the twentieth
century. As well as illustrating the obstacles that they – along with women
in other professional fields – had to face and overcome, the analysis
can also indicate the nature of the institutions and networks that lent
support to their efforts. Yale was not alone in offering doctoral degrees
to women. As well as Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe, Columbia, Cornell
and the University of Pennsylvania offered doctoral programs in history
by the early twentieth century, as did state universities further west.12
Nevertheless, the department at Yale, and Andrews’s ‘imperial school’
in particular, offers an opportunity to explore one well-defined group of
women scholars and to compare their experiences directly in some respects
with those of their male colleagues.
A report drafted for the Yale graduate school during the 1919–20 year,
which had clearly been influenced by initiatives led by Viola Barnes on
behalf of the women graduate students, claimed that ‘Yale has done
pioneer work in making the facilities for higher education available to
women’, but went on to enumerate a series of difficulties that women
11 See the correspondence in CMAP, Box 30, Folders 347–8; the editorial group is named in Essays in Colonial History, vii.
12 Julie Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 34–5. For a valuable contemporary analysis of the availability of PhDs to women in the United States from 1877 to 1927, although with limited differentiation of history as a field, see Emilie J. Hutchinson, Women and the Ph.D. (Greensboro: North Carolina College for Women, 1929), esp. 20–7.
278
12 . IMPERIAL WoMEN
graduate students encountered that ranged from dining and residential
restrictions to the inaction of the Board of Appointments in finding
professional placements for women.13 With the publication in 1920 of
a booklet for which the report had been a precursor, pride in achievement
took a higher priority. Andrews himself contributed the section on
graduate programs in history, including a biographical directory of the
12 women who to that point had gained PhDs. His analysis, that ‘two
of the twelve are investigators [researchers], four more are teachers, and
the remaining six have withdrawn from all connection with historical
work’, led to definite conclusions that he believed confirmed what he had
learned also at Bryn Mawr:
With this evidence before us, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the
majority of women, whose interest lies in the historical field, should be
urged to attempt no more than one or two years of graduate study, for
the purpose of familiarizing themselves with graduate methods and the
handling of historical materials. The M.A. degree, for which two years are
required, is a sufficient qualification for those who have no other aim than
to teach … On the other hand, those with special aptitude and enthusiasm,
who are possessed of a fixed determination to make investigation a part of
their life-work and have proved themselves competent to do so, may well
be encouraged and aided to go on to the Doctor’s degree.14
In the context of the significant representation of women among
Andrews’s research students, as shown in the list of signatories to the
Festschrift, and also of the limitations thus enunciated by Andrews on his
own receptiveness to women students, this essay will therefore explore
through an analysis of the experience of the signatories the extent to
which Yale and the ‘imperial school’ offered genuine scope for aspiring
women historians to advance in their chosen field.
Of the 50 women signatories, 11 were Bryn Mawr students who did
not take doctorates at that institution; most had been graduate students
> or graduate fellows, but two were undergraduates. Among the 11 was
Caroline Miles Hill, who was a graduate fellow in history at Bryn Mawr
in 1891–92 but took her doctorate in 1892 from the University of
13 Draft Report, [1919–20], Graduate School Records, Records of the Dean (RU 948), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, 2004-A-173, Box 1, Folder on Graduate Women, 1902–1944; the report was almost certainly prepared by Margaret Trumbull Corwin, executive secretary of the Graduate School. On Viola Barnes’s advocacy, see Reid, Viola Florence Barnes, 34–5.
14 Charles McLean Andrews, ‘History’, in [Margaret Trumbull Corwin, ed.], Alumnae Graduate School, Yale University, 1894–1920 (New Haven: Yale University, 1920), 40–1.
279
CLIo'S LIvES
Michigan.15 Six of the signatories, however, were PhD graduates from Bryn
Mawr: Eleanor L. Lord (1898), Nellie Neilson (1899), Ellen Deborah Ellis
(1905), Marion Parris Smith (1908), Louise Dudley (1910) and Margaret
Shove Morriss (1911). Of those whose connection with Andrews was
through Yale, 11 were either PhD graduates by 1931 or would later take
that degree at Yale: Viola Florence Barnes (1919), Dora Mae Clark (1924),
Helen Taft Manning (1924), Isabel MacBeath Calder (1929), Gertrude
Ann Jacobsen (1929), Ruth May Bourne (1931), Mildred L. Campbell
(1932), Mary Patterson Clarke (1932), Mary Reno Frear (1933), Helen
Stuart Garrison (1934) and Maybelle R. Kennedy (1945). Nine were MA
graduates from Yale, of whom two are known later to have taken PhD
degrees elsewhere: Bessie E. Hoon (University of London, 1934) and
Sarah R. Tirrell (Columbia, 1946). A further 10 were registered at some
point with the graduate school at Yale, but took no degree; one, Eleanor
S. Upton, took a PhD in 1930 from the University of Chicago. There
was also one other small but significant subgroup among the 50: three
Scottish holders of fellowships at Yale from the Commonwealth Fund,16
comprising two who already held PhD degrees from the University of St
Andrews – Edith E. MacQueen (1926) and Edith E.B. Thomson (1928)
– and one – Agnes M. Whitson – who would not take a PhD but became
a published author on the basis of her MA thesis from the University
of Manchester.17
Thus, 21 of the 50 women were graduate students from the United States
who, whether before or after they signed the list for Andrews’s Festschrift,
took doctoral degrees. A number of the others, in particular the three
holders of Commonwealth Fund fellowships and two of the Yale MA
graduates – Florence Cook Fast and Dorothy S. Towle – who continued
their interest in research even after marriage had made further academic
15 Others who can be identified as graduate students were Mabel Davis, a Canadian who studied at Bryn Mawr during the 1905–06 year after taking a University of Toronto MA, and Katharine Dame, who spent a year at Bryn Mawr after taking her AB at Boston University. In order to avoid burdening of the footnotes to this essay with specific evidence on individual students, the sources used for each person have been gathered, along with essential biographical data, in a document entitled ‘Summary of Sources for Biographical Data’, posted at: library2.smu.ca/handle/01/25926.
16 Not to be confused with the Commonwealth Scholarships scheme launched in 1959, the
Commonwealth Fund was a private, New York-based foundation that existed in part to provide
fellowships (analogous in reverse to Rhodes Scholarships) to enable young scholars from the British Commonwealth to study in the United States.
17 For simplicity, the names of the women signatories to Andrews’s Festschrift are given throughout this essay – even though a few were married names, and other signatories used married names later in life – in the form that is found on the list.
280
12 . IMPERIAL WoMEN
career progress difficult, are also relevant to this essay in a qualitative sense
through their correspondence with Andrews. The 21, however, provide
a core group for a more basic biographical analysis, even though it must
be remembered that because the list itself is far from being a scientific
sample, and moreover the numbers are small, any quantification is
valuable more for its ability to inform qualitative conclusions than for
inherent statistical validity. Initial distinctions can be drawn in age of PhD
graduation, both chronologically and in gender terms. Chronologically,
the seven PhD graduates associated with Andrews through Bryn Mawr
were younger when they gained the degree: 27.6 years on average, with
a median of 27, compared to 36.6 with a median of 34 for the 14 women
associated with Andrews through Yale. In part, the difference undoubtedly
reflects more elaborate requirements for the degree in the later years –
the PhD graduations of the Bryn Mawr group spanned the years from
1892 to 1911, the Yale group from 1919 to 1946 – and a comparable
age difference is also found among the men, although not so marked: an
average of 28.5 with a median of 26.5 (26 and 27) for the six linked with
Andrews through Johns Hopkins, compared with 32.6 and a median of
32 for the 49 linked through Yale. Where the gender distinction is clear,
according to the numbers given above, is between the Yale-linked women
and men, and if only the actual Yale PhD graduates are considered, the
difference is even more marked: an average age of 35.2 and a median of
34 for the 11 women, with an average of 31.5 and a median of 31 for
the 41 men.18
For women, especially during the interwar years – the era during which all
but one of the Yale women graduates and all but two of the overall Yale-
linked group of women took their degrees – gaining a PhD was an extended,
expensive and labour-intensive process. The Bryn Mawr graduates,
small in number as they were, had family origins in the professional
and business occupations of their fathers (mothers’ occupations rarely
appearing in surviving documentation): a minister, a lawyer, a YMCA
official, merchants in tobacco and coal, and a mining engineer who was
one of the founders of Standard Steel in Philadelphia. They also came
mainly from the north-eastern United States, the exception being Louise
Dudley, a minister’s daughter from Kentucky. The Yale-linked graduates
were much more diverse, in ways that also help to explain why they took
18 Because exact birthdates are not known in all cases, nor are exact graduation dates, age is taken in all cases to be the number of years reached at whatever birthday fell in the year of graduation.
281
CLIo'S LIvES
their degrees at a somewhat more advanced age than had their Bryn Mawr
predecessors, in that for many of the Yale women a demanding prerequisite
was the ability to support themselves. They ranged in social origins from
Isabel MacBeath Calder, the daughter of Scottish immigrants whose
father worked as a carpenter, to Helen Taft Manning, the occupations
of whose father included lawyer, judge and 27th President of the United
States. In between were two whose fathers were ministers (Hoon and
Jacobsen), two university professors (Frear and Upton), and one each
of physician (Clark), engineer (Garrison), small-town newspaper editor
(Barnes), farmer (Campbell), liveryman (Clarke), green
house manager
(Kennedy), shoe factory foreman (Tirrell) and pottery presser (Bourne).
While it would be foolish to attempt to construct a firm ranking of these
bare, mainly census-derived occupational descriptions in terms of wealth
or lack of it, it is clear that – although not, of course, representing the
full spectrum of US society at the time – this was no simple cohort of
the daughters of affluence. These 14 women also had varied geographical
origins. Unsurprisingly, the largest single group consisted of six New
Englanders (three from Connecticut, and one each from Massachusetts,
Rhode Island and Vermont), while another came from Pennsylvania.
The remaining seven were spread from West Virginia and Ohio south
to Tennessee, then west to Illinois and Kansas, and north to Nebraska
and North Dakota. They had first degrees to match, although with some
variations representing family moves during childhood: Bryn Mawr,
Mount Holyoke and Smith College were all represented, but in general
the ‘Seven Sisters’ were handsomely outnumbered by state universities
– Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota and others – and other institutions –
Northwestern, Maryville College in Tennessee – outside of the north-east.
However, when it came to careers followed after PhD graduation, the
Seven Sisters and other women’s colleges loomed much larger. Of the
seven women connected to Andrews through Bryn Mawr, two (Ellis and
Neilson) spent their subsequent careers at Mount Holyoke, one (Smith)
at Bryn Mawr, one (Dudley) at Stephens College, Missouri, and another
(Morriss) became a long-serving dean at Pembroke College, the associated
women’s college at Brown University. Of the remaining two, one (Lord)
had spells at Smith, the Baltimore Women’s College, and Goucher College,
while the other (Hill) followed entirely different, non-academic career
avenues. The careers of the Yale-linked women were more complex, in that
five of the 14 married, including four whose husbands were academics,
three of whom were other Yale graduate students. Of those who married,
282
12 . IMPERIAL WoMEN
one (Garrison) appears to have had no further formal academic career,
while Bessie (later preferring to be known as Elizabeth) Hoon continued