Clio's Lives
Page 45
to write and undertook later in life an extended visiting professorship at
the coeducational Rider College in New Jersey. Another (Frear) had an
early appointment at Pennsylvania State College, took a break presumably
for child rearing, but after the death of her husband when she was still
in her late 40s had brief sojourns at Vassar and Wellesley before spending
some 15 years as dean of the faculty at the all-women Hood College in
Maryland. A fourth (Kennedy) took her doctorate in 1945, long after
she had first attended Yale, and by the time her book was published in
1948 she had an association with the Department of History at Smith
College. Helen Taft Manning, meanwhile, had a long and uninterrupted
career as an administrator and professor at Bryn Mawr, while her
husband taught at nearby Swarthmore College. Of the remaining nine,
six had long careers as historians at women’s colleges: Barnes at Mount
Holyoke, Calder at Wells, Campbell at Vassar, Clark at Wilson College in
Pennsylvania, Clarke at Beaver College also in Pennsylvania and Jacobsen
– who died relatively early in life, however, in 1942 – at Hunter College.
Ruth Bourne had a series of positions at coeducational institutions before
completing her career at California Western University, and Sarah Tirrell
held administrative positions in admissions offices at Mount Holyoke
and the New Jersey College for Women before taking her Columbia PhD
in 1946 and taking up a professorship at the Municipal University of
Omaha, later part of the University of Nebraska. Finally, Eleanor S. Upton
had an earlier career as a social worker, became a librarian first at Brown
University and then at Yale in 1921, took her University of Chicago PhD
in 1930, and then returned to the library at Yale for the balance of her
working life.
Thus, in the most general terms, the women PhDs associated with
Andrews – and especially those whose connection was through Yale –
present a pattern of relatively diverse social and geographical origins, which
were then distilled through graduate study into careers at institutions
that were largely though not exclusively specific to women, among
which prestigious colleges predominated, although again not exclusively.
Yet within this overall configuration lay complex decisions and dilemmas
that the women characteristically encountered. The issues centred in two
areas – economic and career challenges, and those surrounding marriage
283
CLIo'S LIvES
and family – while the ability to address them effectively depended
not only on the resourcefulness of the individual, along with possible
support from Andrews and Yale, but also on the formation of networks to
coordinate responses to common problems.
The economic and career issues, although obviously depending on the
social background of each individual, began for many of the women even
before reaching Yale. Among the reasons for the age – mid-30s – at which
women typically took PhD degrees was the necessity of working and
saving funds before and frequently during doctoral study and research.
Of the Yale-linked women, it was common to have taught high school
for a number of years prior to enrolment at Yale: Bourne, Campbell,
Frear, Garrison, Hoon and Tirrell are examples. Others already had
appointments at colleges, but not necessarily of the elite variety. One
who felt the resulting dilemma acutely was Mary Patterson Clarke, the
liveryman’s daughter from Lawrence, Kansas, who was 53 years old when
she took her doctorate in 1932 and had been a student of Andrews at both
Bryn Mawr and Yale.19 Clarke spent most of her career – both before and
after PhD graduation – at Beaver College. Although in the early 1920s
she entertained thoughts of finding a position at the University of Kansas,
her alma mater, or at one of the institutions in Philadelphia, she faced
a constraint with which she found that the appointments bureaus at either
Bryn Mawr or Yale were of no help. Characterising Beaver College as
a two-year vocational school where no work at college level was possible,
she found her research on the role of colonial Assemblies slow going. She
wrote to Andrews in March 1925 that:
I am supporting myself and working at the same time on my assemblies,
and … I have not an oversupply of strength to bear the double burden …
After spending so much time and money and effort as I have done on this
subject I cannot afford either to give it up or to rush it too much, and it is
hard to think of staying in this kind of institution till it is completed and
in print if that should ever occur.20
19 Mary Patterson Clarke to Evangeline W. Andrews (hereafter EWA), 14 September 1943, CMAP, Box 89, Volume I.
20 Mary Patterson Clarke to CMA, 4 March 1925, CMAP, Box 23, Folder 280; see also Clarke to CMA, 17 April 1923, CMAP, Box 22, Folder 267.
284
12 . IMPERIAL WoMEN
By 1927, again casting in vain for alternatives, Clarke was even more direct:
I am caught in a ‘vicious circle.’ I can not get the position I want – I mean
the kind of position, I have no one in mind – without my degree; I can
not get the degree without finishing the book; and I can not finish the
book to my satisfaction in this atmosphere.21
For Clarke, matters did eventually improve. Although still encountering
heavy teaching loads at Beaver College, she conceded by the summer of
1930 that the college had ‘improved until I begin to have some hope that
I might sometime be less out of sympathy with the way it is managed
than I always have been’ and, moreover with some pushback on her part
on contested points, she gained Andrews’s approval of her dissertation
in early 1932.22 Nevertheless, she had set out clearly and accurately the
economic pressures that had slowed and threatened to stall her progress.
Ruth Bourne, meanwhile, daughter of an Indiana pottery presser, wrote
to Andrews in 1928 from California, where she was teaching high school,
that she hoped to apply to Yale but still had debts from working her
way through college. A fellowship from the American Association of
University Women proved to be a crucial support, and Bourne received
her doctorate in 1931.23 Even so, and after finding employment at Bowling
Green State College in Ohio, she still had debts and the pressures of the
Great Depression were adding further complications: ‘it is not certain
yet whether my parents are going to need my assistance soon. They have
double liability stock in a defunct loan company!’24 Bessie Hoon, perhaps
from a more financially secure though certainly not wealthy background
as a minister’s daughter from Illinois, by age 24 had already headed a high
school history department and had gained two degrees including a Yale
MA. In early 1930, she hoped to find a college or university teaching
position prior to turning fully to research. ‘I realize,’ she commented to
Andrews, ‘that as a woman competing with men such a position may
not be easy to locate; the lack of a PhD perhaps will handicap me, but
on the other hand I
have absolute confidence in my own ability to fill
such a position if it can be located.’25 Hoon’s determination stood her
21 Mary Patterson Clarke to CMA, 24 November 1927, CMAP, Box 26, Folder 309.
22 Mary Patterson Clarke to CMA, 19 August 1930, CMAP, Box 29, Folder 340; Clarke to CMA,
6 March 1932, CMAP, Box 31, Folder 359.
23 Ruth Bourne to CMA, 19 November 1928, CMAP, Box 27, Folder 318; Bourne to CMA,
24 February 1929, CMAP, Box 27, Folder 321.
24 Ruth Bourne to CMA, 29 February 1932, CMAP, Box 31, Folder 358.
25 Bessie E. Hoon to CMA, 26 February 1930, CMAP, Box 28, Folder 334.
285
CLIo'S LIvES
in good stead, as she found a position for two years at Albany College
in Oregon and then began the research that would earn her a University
of London PhD. Yet even college employment, as others discovered, did
not ensure a smooth path. Dora Mae Clark, a physician’s daughter from
Vermont, who had lamented after gaining her doctorate in 1924 that ‘for
the first time in my experience history teachers are a drug on the market’,
nevertheless found a position at Wilson College, but by 1930 found that
her research time was severely limited and a leave of absence difficult to
negotiate.26 Gertrude Ann Jacobsen, meanwhile, was employed at Hunter
College in New York as she arranged in 1928 her transfer from the
doctoral program at the University of Minnesota to Yale and Andrews,
and she too had difficulty obtaining a leave. For Jacobsen, the leave itself
was not the problem, but rather her need for half-salary, especially as her
father, a minister in Minneapolis, had recently had an accident which
‘has rendered my financial status even more precarious’.27
While economic issues of this kind were not the concern only of women –
Cecil Johnson, for example, who would take his PhD along with Clarke in
1932, wrote to Andrews in early 1928 of having had to pay off a debt load
aggravated by his father’s serious injury in a car accident – nevertheless,
women did not have access to the range of instructorships that were
routinely filled through requests sent quietly to Andrews and other senior
scholars to recommend ‘a man’ for any given position.28 The informality
of such dealings was underlined by Leonard Labaree in September
1929. On a leave from Yale and teaching temporarily at Armstrong
College, University of Durham (later the University of Newcastle upon
Tyne), Labaree was surprised by the elaborate advertising and interview
process that in the United Kingdom went into a junior appointment
and commented tersely, ‘I must say, I am glad that we do not fill our
junior vacancies in that way’.29 Women scholars, generally, did not have
access to employment at the genuinely research-oriented institutions,
and at women’s colleges as well as at the smaller coeducational colleges
26 Dora Mae Clark to CMA, 28 August 1924, CMAP, Box 23, Folder 275; Clark to CMA,
27 February 1930, CMAP, Box 28, Folder 334.
27 Gertrude Ann Jacobsen to CMA, 6 April 1928, CMAP, Box 26, Folder 312. For more general
discussion of financial stresses on women PhD students of this era, and their health implications, see Hutchinson, Women and the Ph.D. , 38–9.
28 Cecil Johnson to CMA, 1 January 1928, CMAP, Box 26, Folder 311; for one example among
many of requests for ‘a man’, see Beverley W. Bond to CMA, 16 October 1929, CMAP, Box 28,
Folder 329.
29 Leonard W. Labaree to CMA, 20 September 1929, CMAP, Box 28, Folder 328.
286
12 . IMPERIAL WoMEN
that did hire women heavy teaching duties often precluded systematic
research activity.30 The problem extended, unsurprisingly, into the area
of salaries and working conditions, and was compounded not only by
the Depression but also by the increasing trend for women’s colleges to
appoint men to their faculties. A major study of the career trajectories
of women holders of doctorates in history noted in 1943 that ‘taken as
a whole, women taught in smaller and poorer schools … and, presumably,
carried heavier teaching loads for leaner salaries’.31
The role of Yale, and of Andrews in particular, in enabling women students
and graduates to meet economic and career challenges was complex.
By the late 1920s, the Bureau of Appointments was active in placing
women as well as men, and in one case in 1928 was experiencing difficulty
in finding a woman candidate for a position at Wells College in American
history, particularly as both Viola Barnes and Dora Mae Clark preferred
to stay in their existing positions at, respectively, Mount Holyoke and
Wilson College. ‘Do you think of any other possibilities,’ the Bureau
asked R.H. Gabriel of the Department of History, ‘if not with the Ph.D.
at least fairly well along the way toward it?’32 Andrews, meanwhile, was
tenacious in efforts to secure funding for both male and female graduate
students. ‘I know I owe this to you,’ observed Isabel MacBeath Calder
feelingly on receiving an increased fellowship in 1928, ‘It is the kindest
thing anyone has done for me for years and far more than I deserve. Thank
you.’33 In 1931, Andrews remonstrated vigorously with the Guggenheim
Foundation on behalf of Ruth Bourne, a new PhD at the time who had
not been offered the Guggenheim Fellowship.34 And he promoted his
graduate students for vacancies at likely institutions, exemplified by Hoon
and Calder (unsuccessfully) at Vassar in 1930 and Mildred L. Campbell
(successfully) at the same institution in 1932.35
30 See, for an example, Patricia Palmieri, ‘Here Was Fellowship: A Social Portrait of Academic Women at Wellesley College, 1895–1920’, History of Education Quarterly, 23:2 (1983), esp. 210,
doi.org/10.2307/368159.
31 William B. Hesseltine and Louis Kaplan, ‘Women Doctors of Philosophy in History: A Series of Comparisons’, Journal of Higher Education, 14:5 (1943), 256, doi.org/10.2307/1975170; see also Reid, Viola Florence Barnes, 76–7.
32 Sarah Menner, Yale University Bureau of Appointments, to R.H. Gabriel, 10 December 1928, History Department Records (RU 591), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, 1960-A-2002, Box 2, Folder 14.
33 Isabel MacBeath Calder to CMA, 2 October 1928, CMAP, Box 37, Folder 317.
34 CMA to Henry Allen Moe (copy), 21 November 1931, CMAP, Box 31, Folder 355.
35 Eloise Ellery to CMA, 21, 26 February 1930, CMAP, Box 28, Folder 334; Mildred L. Campbell to CMA, 19 May 1932, CMAP, Box 31, Folder 360.
287
CLIo'S LIvES
Viola Florence Barnes
Source: Courtesy of Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections .
Nevertheless, Andrews’s advancement of the careers of his women students
by this and other means could overbalance at times into being controlling.
In 1919, when Viola Barnes took her PhD she had a position being held
for her at the University of Nebraska. Andrews, however, pressed her to
interview with Neilson for a vacancy at Mount Holyoke, and then urged
her to reconsider when she informed him that she would rather return to
Nebraska. Barnes ultimately relented and spent the rest of her career at
Mount Holyoke, but it was a decision about which she always retained
; deep misgivings.36 Barnes, although she continued to have a profound
36 See Reid, Viola Florence Barnes, 39–40.
288
12 . IMPERIAL WoMEN
and almost reverential regard for Andrews and Yale, also had other
difficult experiences with her mentor. On one occasion, she believed –
with considerable corroborative evidence – that he had used her research
findings without acknowledgement. At another time, he seems to have
facilitated access to her recently completed dissertation by James Truslow
Adams – self-taught as a historian but winner of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize
for his account of The Founding of New England – who, Barnes was
convinced, then proceeded to appropriate her ideas for his next book.37
Isabel MacBeath Calder’s experience was less dramatic but still indicative.
She, it must be said, initiated the episode by asking Andrews in 1929
if he could assist in placing essays drawn from her recently completed
dissertation on the seventeenth-century New Haven colony in journals
that included the New England Quarterly, then edited by Samuel Eliot
Morison, who also edited the equally estimable Transactions of the
Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Andrews clearly took seriously what
he saw as his task, but by April 1931 Calder had become aware that she
had entirely lost control of the process. Her exasperation showed in her
concern over the fate of one of the essays. ‘I do not think,’ she wrote
to Andrews, ‘that you should offer this short paper to anyone else until
Mr. Morison has said definitely that he does not want it for the Colonial
Society of Massachusetts. It may be that he thinks he has accepted it.’38
In the meantime, Gertrude Ann Jacobsen had been pleased to have
Andrews encourage her – in a session along with Dora Mae Clark – to
present a paper drawn from her dissertation research on the seventeenth-
century imperial official William Blathwayt at the annual meeting of the
American Historical Association at Duke University in December 1929.
37 These episodes are discussed in Reid, Viola Florence Barnes, 48–52, and in John G. Reid, ‘Viola Barnes, the Gender of History, and the North Atlantic Mind’, Acadiensis, 33:1 (Autumn 2003), 9–12.
Andrews’s relationship with James Truslow Adams was odd and complex. Although Adams had no