by Doug Munro
qualifications as a professional historian, and moreover did not let the absence of such restrain him from giving damaging reviews to works published by Andrews’s young recent graduate students,
nevertheless, Andrews’s letters to him were almost deferential in tone, and in 1925 the Yale Graduate School had to quietly turn back an effort on Andrews’s part to have Adams appointed to a position at Yale. See, among other items of correspondence in CMAP, Albert S. Cook to CMA, 30 October
1925, CMAP, Box 24, Folder 286.
38 Isabel M. Calder to CMA, 20 August 1929, CMAP, Box 22, Folder 327; Calder to CMA,
4 October 1929, CMAP, Box 28, Folder 328; Calder to CMA, 1 April 1931, CMAP, Box 30, Folder
348; Calder to CMA, 29 April 1931, CMAP, Box 30, Folder 348. The essay eventually appeared
in the 1930–1933 Transactions, published in 1935; see www.colonialsociety.org/node/520 (accessed
17 September 2017).
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CLIo'S LIvES
Even though managing to retain her good humour, Jacobsen found
herself a few days before the meeting rewriting the paper to Andrews’s
specifications:
I quite understand your criticisms and I smile now at my conscious efforts
to keep the paper on a general plane, feeling that what you wanted was
a presentation of the unity of England’s policy at this time and of the
common tendencies which displayed themselves in all departments. I shall
work at it this weekend using Blathwayt and his activities as the key.39
While not all of these experiences were as serious as those of Barnes, there
is no indication in Andrews’s correspondence of similar pressures being
placed on male graduate students. Insofar as Barnes’s steering to Mount
Holyoke is concerned, Andrews may have had specific motives, beyond
his stated rationale that Barnes would be better off to stay close to her
archival sources in New England and to the ocean crossing to London, that
would have included nurturing his close existing relationship (through
Neilson, Ellis and another former student who was a medieval historian
there, Bertha Putnam) with the college. However, it was consistent with
his efforts to find appointments for others of his women graduate students
at Seven Sisters institutions. Even though, for many or most, these were
positions they were undoubtedly glad to attain, there was no challenge
involved to the orthodoxy that women historians should aspire to careers
at women’s colleges.40 Another area in which Andrews held decided and
conventional views was on the incompatibility of graduate study with the
intent to marry. Again, Viola Barnes had early experience along these lines.
Meeting with Andrews for the first time, before being accepted for PhD
work in 1916, Barnes was surprised when he asked if she was engaged to
be married, but clearly recalled many years later his explanation: that ‘Yale
did not encourage women who expected to marry, because the training was
such a waste’.41 By 1927, his view was unchanged as he expressed surprise
at hearing of the marriage of a promising graduate student, Florence
M. Cook (Florence Cook Fast on the Festschrift list), soon after her MA
graduation and remarked to his correspondent, Frank J. Klingberg – also
39 Gertrude Ann Jacobsen to CMA, 24 August 1929, CMAP, Box 27, Folder 327; Jacobsen to
CMA, 5 October 1929, CMAP, Box 28, Folder 329; Jacobsen to CMA, 12 December 1929, CMAP,
Box 28, Folder 331. For evidence of Andrews’s orchestration of Clark’s paper also, see Dora Mae Clark to CMA, 4 September 1929, CMAP, Box 28, Folder 328.
40 For trenchant comments on the implications of this constraint made by anonymous women
PhD history graduates of the era, see Hutchinson, Women and the Ph.D. , 182–5.
41 Viola F. Barnes to [Blanche], 20 December 1958, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections, Viola Florence Barnes Papers, VIII, 9.
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12 . IMPERIAL WoMEN
a Yale PhD graduate, though before Andrews’s time, and a longstanding
mentor to Cook from her undergraduate days at UCLA – that ‘you were
quite right in thinking that she would not have gone back to Yale after her
marriage’.42 Agnes M. Whitson, one of the Commonwealth Fund fellows,
wrote to Andrews in 1934 to announce her own impending marriage,
and although her tone was playful, the import of her opening anecdote
was clear: ‘I remember you once saying to me of [one of] your women
students “She fell by the wayside, in other words she married.”’43
In a revealing contrast, Andrews strongly recommended marriage to his
male graduate students. Evangeline Walker Andrews recalled, as cited by
A.S. Eisenstadt, that her husband had believed ‘that productive scholarship
could not proceed without a favourably circumstanced domestic life’,
and so ‘he urged bachelor students to marry and married students to
free themselves from encumbering responsibilities at home until they
had completed their doctoral work’.44 The large majority of his female
doctoral graduates, however, remained single. The reasons, naturally,
went far beyond Andrews’s own influence. Emilie J. Hutchinson noted in
1929, on the basis of a large survey of women PhD graduates across the
disciplines, that three-quarters of her respondents were single, even though
she did observe that ‘women who take the Ph.D. after marriage are more
likely to combine gainful employment than those who take it before’ and
discerned an increasing trend for women PhDs ‘to make this combination
of marriage and gainful occupation’.45 For most, the reality remained
that career and marriage could not be combined, and Bonnie G. Smith
has argued that professional women in general and women historians in
particular resembled ‘a third sex’, frequently forming – as did Viola Barnes
and no doubt others of the Yale group – close personal relationships with
other unmarried women.46 Of the women PhD graduates linked with
Andrews, only one appears to have married and then to have had no
further academic activity: Helen S. Garrison, who married an earlier Yale
PhD graduate in William H. Dunham, Jr, a member of the Department
42 CMA to Frank J. Klingberg (copy), 22 September 1927, CMAP, Box 26, Folder 27.
43 Agnes M. Whitson to CMA, 20 December 1934, CMAP, Box 34, Folder 390.
44 Eisenstadt, Charles McLean Andrews, 150.
45 Hutchinson, Women and the Ph.D. , 17.
46 Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 189–90.
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of History at Yale until 1970. Hoon, Frear and Kennedy – as noted above
– continued their academic work in various ways, although none had
a continuous formal career.
Helen Taft Manning
Source: Courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Library Special Collections .
292
12 . IMPERIAL WoMEN
The one who, to all appearances, did not allow marriage to impinge
on her professional prowess was Helen Taft Manning. Already married
to Frederick J. Manning well before they received their respective
Yale PhDs in 1924 (Helen) and 1925 (Frederick), she had apparently
announced that she was leaving academic employment behind when i
n
1920 she resigned to get married, after a year – while still well short of
her 30th birthday – as acting president of Bryn Mawr.47 However, she
was approached in 1925 by Marion Edwards Park, the new Bryn Mawr
president, about taking up a deanship. Pregnant with her second daughter,
she accepted. Although her husband later remarked to Andrews that it was
a decision ‘I cannot regret’,48 and his own appointment at Swarthmore
soon followed, he may have had misgivings at the time. Writing while
Andrews was on a leave in France, Charles Seymour relayed the news in
early 1925:
Manning wrote me a long letter some weeks ago, to which I replied giving
a personal approval of what he and Mrs. Manning had in mind. I think
it is well that he should face now the fact that she would probably not
be happy until she had tried her hand at the Bryn Mawr Deanship, and
I doubt whether she would be contented to stay on in New Haven as the
wife of an Instructor or Assistant Professor for a number of years.49
Helen Manning represented, in effect, the exception that proved the
rule. While it would be unfair and simplistic to attribute her professional
success, as shown in her continuous years at Bryn Mawr until becoming
professor emeritus in 1957, primarily to her social origins, as she was
a gifted historian and a successful administrator who served another
term as acting president in 1929–30, nevertheless she was well placed to
subvert gender norms regarding marriage and career. Not only carrying
the cachet of being a former president’s daughter, she also had the
resources to hire a live-in child care nurse.50 She also enjoyed an easy and
informal relationship with Andrews, who wrote to Evangeline Andrews
in June 1930 – who was travelling at the time but, as usual when absent,
exchanged lengthy daily letters with her husband:
47 See obituary, ‘Helen Manning, Bryn Mawr Dean and Daughter of President Taft’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 February 1987, p. B06.
48 Frederick J. Manning to CMA, 28 November 1927, CMAP, Box 26, Folder 309.
49 Charles Seymour to CMA, 9 February 1925, CMAP, Box 23, Folder 279.
50 See Frederick J. Manning to CMA, 8 September 1924, CMAP, Box 23, Folder 276.
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CLIo'S LIvES
yesterday Helen Manning blew in for a talk about her dissertation
[as revised for publication], which is approaching completion. I thought
she looked tired and worn, for she has had a hard spring, what with her
father’s death and her duties at Bryn Mawr. But she seemed cheerful and
full of energy.51
Andrews deliberately did not maintain an office at Yale, so as to avoid
interruptions to his work, but if a student – ‘man or woman’, according
to Labaree – visited him at home, he was well known for being open to
extended conversation.52 It is likely, however, that few if any of the others,
students or graduates, ‘blew in’ as confidently as did Helen Taft Manning.
Quite different was the experience of two of Andrews’s MA graduates,
Florence Cook Fast and Dorothy S. Towle, who attempted to maintain
their research interests in conjunction with marriage and motherhood.
Towle was already married at the time of her MA graduation to Carroll
S. Towle, another Yale graduate student who would take his PhD in
English in 1933 but had already taken up in 1931 a faculty position at the
University of New Hampshire. Dorothy Towle confided to Andrews soon
after moving to Durham, NH, that ‘you have no idea how much I miss
your seminar. It is very difficult to work all alone, but I am doing the best
I can until I can put all my [research] problems before you’.53 However,
caring for a frail mother-in-law was a prelude to child-raising with limited
assistance from either husband or hired help and, by 1937, Towle noted
that ‘my summers are one long nightmare of housekeeping’.54 Although
she still hoped to apply for a fellowship to advance her research, she
was neither in academic employment nor studying for a doctorate and
had no illusions about the resulting disadvantages. Even so, Towle had
already built sufficiently on her MA work to publish in 1936 a 595-page
scholarly edition of eighteenth-century records of the Rhode Island court
of vice-admiralty, with an introduction by Andrews.55 Later publishing
other works of more popular history before her death in 1950 while still
51 CMA to EWA, 17 June 1930, CMAP, Box 29, Folder 338.
52 Leonard W. Labaree, ‘Charles McLean Andrews: Historian, 1863–1943’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 1:1 (January 1944), 11.
53 Dorothy S. Towle to CMA, 30 October 1931, CMAP, Box 31, Folder 354.
54 Dorothy S. Towle to CMA, 24 November 1931, CMAP, Box 31, Folder 355; Towle to CMA, 5
October 1937, CMAP, Box 37, Folder 417.
55 Dorothy S. Towle, ed., Records of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Rhode Island, 1716–1752
(Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1936).
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12 . IMPERIAL WoMEN
in her early 40s, Dorothy Towle had undoubtedly pushed the limits of
combining scholarship with reproductive responsibilities, but had found
that the limits were at a certain point unyielding.
Florence Cook Fast, daughter of the proprietor of a Los Angeles poultry
hatchery and wife of a printer whose California-based enterprises were
sometimes fragile during the years of the Depression, took only a few
months after her marriage to observe to Andrews:
I have been forced to be utterly domestic, learning how to run a house and
more especially how to cook … I find myself at times quite homesick for
New Haven and particularly for the cordial atmosphere of the Graduate
Seminar Room. Miss Calder has promised me a letter full of ‘gossip’ but
so far has been too busy to write it … My marriage, I am afraid, makes it
unlikely that I shall return to New Haven for more work.56
Almost a year later, she expressed similar feelings about Yale and, working
for the time being in the picture department at Gump’s art store, she
confided the difficulties of finding teaching employment in San Francisco
in the face of prejudice against married women. Fast, however, was clear-
sighted about her life choice and the costs it involved, and resisted any
feelings of regret, especially as she had a husband ‘who understands my
interest in historical work so that it is not difficult to find time to give to
it’.57 The task would become more complicated with the birth of her son
in 1932,58 but over the years she maintained her research ambitions and
also – facilitated by Klingberg, and by her husband’s willingness to move
to Los Angeles – had short-term teaching positions at UCLA. Studying
the logwood trade of British Honduras in the colonial era, and able by late
1932 ‘to take a few hours a day off from infant care’, she had thoughts of
pursuing a doctorate at Pomona College – conveniently located close to
Los Angeles – with Frank W. Pitman, a Yale PhD graduate of 1914 and
another signatory to Andrews’s Festschrift list.59 By 1935, she maintained
her ambition but was increasingly forced to recognise the difficulties that<
br />
would ultimately prove insurmountable. ‘I am often envious’, Fast wrote,
‘of the men whom I knew in New Haven who have married and who
have been able to pursue their academic interests without interruption.
However, after eight years of marriage I cannot honestly say that I would
56 Florence Cook Fast to CMA, 16 February 1928, CMAP, Box 26, Folder 311.
57 Florence Cook Fast to CMA, 23 January 1929, CMAP, Box 27, Folder 320.
58 Florence Cook Fast to CMA, 8 February 1932, CMAP, Box 31, Folder 358.
59 Florence Cook Fast to CMA, 14 November 1932, CMAP, Box 32, Folder 367.
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CLIo'S LIvES
have chosen a different course.’ She also announced to Andrews – having
lacked the courage, she said, to do so hitherto – that she had given her
now three-year-old son the middle name ‘Andrews’, doing so ‘as a token
of what my two years in New Haven meant to me and as a constant
reminder of the things I hope to do in the field to which you introduced
me’.60 Tragically, the child died of leukemia at the age of 10 and, according
to Klingberg many years later, Fast had carefully kept Andrews’s letters,
including ‘one written to her on the death of her only son [which] is much
treasured by her’.61
Andrews’s continuing mentorship of both Towle and Fast showed that
there were more nuances to his views on women scholars and marriage
than might have appeared from his direct statements on the matter.
To both he offered ongoing encouragement, and his introduction gave
a valuable stamp of approval to Dorothy Towle’s book, even though it also
gave some reviewers the opportunity to review the introduction rather
than the book itself.62 He continued to regard Florence Fast as an actively
promising researcher, facilitating her publication of an article in North
Carolina Historical Review in 1931 and arranging for transcripts of sources
relating to the logwood trade to be sent to her from the Public Record
Office in London.63 Still, in 1938, again in the context of the logwood
study, he was ‘quite sure that you would be able to write a doctorial [sic]
dissertation on the general subject, should you choose to do so’.64 Yet the
constraints imposed by societal convention on married women, like the
career limitations that were felt by all aspiring women, went far deeper than