Nothing Daunted

by Wickenden, Dorothy

  Smith students were caught between the college’s aspirations for them and the social mores of the day—some of which the school administration shared. Not all of the women made it through four years. Seventy-five of Dorothy and Ros’s classmates, about a fifth of the class of 402, withdrew before commencement. One graduate wrote a “Senior Class history of 1909” for the yearbook, in which she coyly presented their dilemma as they entered the world: “We have not yet decided whether to ‘come out’ in society or ‘go in’ for settlement work.” Jane Addams had started Hull House, the country’s first settlement house, in Chicago in 1889. The underprivileged, regardless of race or ethnicity, took advantage of its social services, including school for their children and night classes for themselves. Addams had longed to go to Smith, to prepare for a career in medicine, but her father wouldn’t allow it; he believed that her duty was to serve her family. In the years after his death, she became known across the country for her advocacy for civil rights, unions, female suffrage, and an end to child labor. To many college women, she was a model of enlightened thought and industry.

  Yet, the Smith graduate continued in the yearbook, “Unlike our neighbor Holyoke ‘over the way,’ we have not troubled our busy heads over the right and wrong of woman suffrage, but are discussing whether psyches make long noses look longer and just who are the best-looking girls in the class. Some of us are hoping for an M.A., others, to quote a scintillating Junior, are hoping for a M.A.N. A few of us look, may look, forward to getting Ph.D.’s after our names, a few more of us, however, are looking forward to getting M-r-s. in front of them.”

  Smith College, started by Sophia Smith, a maiden lady who lived in Hatfield, near Northampton, was young: chartered in 1871, it opened in 1875. The only other full-fledged women’s colleges in the country at that time were Elmira, Mary Sharp, and Vassar. Mount Holyoke and Wellesley were still known as female seminaries, where students attended Bible-study groups, church services, chapel talks, and prayer meetings. Twice a day they performed private devotions. Wellesley Female Seminary changed its name to Wellesley College in 1875, and Mount Holyoke, eighteen years later. The pastor of Sophia Smith’s church had repeatedly urged her to pursue the idea of a college for women, and three months before her death, she made a codicil to her will in which she declared her belief that a higher Christian education for women would be the best way to redress their wrongs and to increase their wages and their “influence in reforming the evils of society . . . as teachers, as writers, as mothers, as members of society.”

  This belief—that women and men should be educated in separate colleges—was not widely shared among public intellectuals along the Eastern Seaboard. Henry Ward Beecher, for one, thought that the solution to higher education for women was to admit them to men’s colleges, a practice already being followed in the Midwest and the West. (Oberlin became the first coeducational college in the country in 1837, when it enrolled four women. Two years earlier, it had admitted its first African-American students.) At Amherst’s semi-centennial celebration in July 1871, Beecher gave a speech in which he pressed his alma mater to admit women. So did the former governor of Massachusetts. Lengthy deliberations followed at Amherst and at Yale, Harvard, Williams, and Dartmouth, but the notion was not pursued at any of these colleges for another century. When Radcliffe College opened in 1879, it was known as “the Harvard Annex.”

  The president and trustees of Smith were clear about their mission. In June 1877, while Lou Smart was negotiating trades with the Utes in Yampa Valley, President L. Clark Seelye wrote in an annual circular in Northampton, “It is to be a woman’s college, aiming not only to give the broadest and highest intellectual culture, but also to preserve and perfect every characteristic of a complete womanhood.” He often said that one of Smith’s missions was to teach its students to become “refined, intelligent gentlewomen.”

  The college intended to provide a curriculum just as rigorous as that of the best men’s schools, but Seelye conceded that many of the students were not entirely ready for the academic demands. He and his successor expected Smith to stimulate students’ intellectual curiosity and help them develop an appreciation of the scientific method. However, since most of them had “neither the call nor the competence to devote their lives to research,” they were encouraged to work on “the development of the character and capacities of the personality.”

  The exceptions were notable. After graduation, Jane Kelly, Class of 1888, went to Northwestern University Women’s Medical School and then to Johns Hopkins for a year of postgraduate work in medicine—there, she was required to sit in the balcony behind a curtain during lectures. She established both a medical practice and a family in Boston. After a week at Wood’s Hole in the summer of 1902, she wrote to her classmates, “There was a large number of Smith girls working in the Laboratories, which speaks well for the scientific spirit fostered in our Alma Mater.”

  Dorothy did not have that calling. She had graduated from Rye Seminary with strong grades and managed to pass Smith’s entrance examinations, which included translating English sentences into Greek, Latin, French, and German, and—in the English section—writing on the themes of Julius Caesar, The Vicar of Wakefield, and Silas Marner; and on the form and structure of Macbeth, Lycidas, L’Allegro, and other texts. She was not strongly motivated, though, and claimed that Rye had not taught her how to study. “The fact that I’d gone to Smith College to learn, I don’t think made much impression on me,” she said. The first semester, she got the equivalent of Ds in her two English classes, C- in French, B- in German, C- in Latin, and C+ in mathematics. She was put on probation. Ros did better, with a C, two B-’s, a B, and two A’s. Dorothy’s record improved somewhat as the semesters wore on, but she never excelled and was not overly concerned about her grades.

  She had warm recollections of one teacher at Smith, just as she’d had at Rye. In her junior and senior years, she took European history with Charles Hazen, whom she described as the first teacher she’d ever had who “could make you live the way those characters lived so long ago and the events in history seem so real.” Dorothy’s fascination with the past, sparked in Auburn and revived by Hazen, stayed with her throughout her life.

  Admitting that her academic performance over her four years was undistinguished, she described herself as “romping” through Smith: “I loved every minute . . . I was invited to join all of the fun and social clubs that there were.” She and Ros both belonged to the Phi Kappa Psi Society, the Current Events Club, and the Novel Club (its goals were to write a good novel and to have a good time; no one seemed to bother with the novel). She was a “tumble bug” at the Junior Frolic event at “the Hippodrome” and helped design costumes for the senior production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ros was a member of the Smith College Council. Their friendship was no less close in those years; it simply expanded to include others. “Life was very relaxed and easy,” Dorothy noted. “Although of course we studied, we nevertheless had plenty of time to be with each other.” They kept in touch with their Smith friends for sixty years.

  When it came time to choose an “invitation house,” Ros joined the White Lodge, and Dorothy agonized between that and Delta Sigma, which was, one of its founding members emphasized, not a secret society or a sorority—a distinction, perhaps, without a difference. The invitation houses cost more than campus housing, but along with an exclusive circle of friends, they promised single rooms, a housekeeper, a cook, a waitress, and some freedom not allowed on campus. Dorothy wryly described the choice between the two houses as “really one of the great problems of my young life—what I should do about this.”

  She joined Delta Sigma as a sophomore, and she idolized the juniors and seniors—“I thought they were the most beautiful and brilliant creatures on earth.” The members had recently moved into a yellow clapboard house off Main Street, with a welcoming veranda and a spacious side porch that had two long wooden swings, cushioned in chintz and suspended from the ceiling by
chains. The living room had a large fireplace, which was lit on chilly days after lunch. Sixteen students ate their meals at a long table in the dining room, presided over by the house matron. When they invited President Seelye or professors to dinner, dessert was the Faculty Cake, filled with macaroons, sherry, and whipped cream. The girls managed the household budget and were expected to observe the college’s “ten o’clock rule” at bedtime. The college held dances, but they were women-only. Students were allowed to invite gentlemen to the Junior Promenade, the Rally on Washington’s Birthday, and the Glee Club Concert.

  Dorothy and Ros played gentle games of tennis in white skirts sweeping their ankles, and planned off-campus activities, including picnics. They took the trolley out Main Street to the end of the line in Greenfield, and walked through the woods to a brook, where they gathered twigs and built a fire. They roasted sausages called “bacon bats” on forked sticks, which they ate on buttered rolls, and they made coffee in a tin pail. For longer trips, they rented an old horse and wagon and rode out into the country, occasionally stopping for a night or two at one of the farmhouses.

  Several weeks before graduation, Dorothy wrote to her grandmother. She and some friends had visited Deerfield’s Memorial Hall, a museum that contained relics from the French and Indian Raid of 1704. Referring to the sacking of the town and the letters written from Canada by captured French officers to their families, she observed: “The village is so little and sleepy, and still so much in the country, that it required very little imagination to take us back to those times.” The girls had supper by “that same brook, which has seen so many awful things,” she wrote, “but I never saw more wonderful country. The mountains are so very green, dotted here and there with fruit trees and the air heavy with the odor of lilacs.”

  There is no indication that either Dorothy or Ros had in mind anything more taxing for their futures than the kind of charity work pursued by their friends and mothers in Auburn. Nor were they intent on finding husbands, not having met any young men whose company they liked nearly as much as they liked each other’s. Dorothy told her grandmother how much she appreciated the privilege of attending college, then said, “Nevertheless, I am looking forward a great deal to being at home with you all next year.” On a note of determined good cheer, she concluded: “I am sure I shall be very happy.”

  On the afternoon of June 13, 1909, the first of the four-day commencement events for Smith College, Northampton residents lined the streets and clustered by the First Congregational Church. “It was a fine opportunity,” the Springfield Republican reported, “for the automobile experts to see a larger variety of automobiles than is often observed in Northampton and an equally rare opportunity, most appreciated by the women, to see a splendid display of handsome gowns and beautiful millinery.” At four o’clock, the seniors marched in from the vestry, attended by the junior class, to the sight of masses of pink mountain laurel on the platform. President Seelye gave the sermon, telling the rows of serious young women, “[Y]ou will not become the useless members, but the benefactors, of society. Whatever be your employments, your lives then will be prolific of good deeds.”

  The congregation sang “Jesus Comes, His Conflict Over,” and as Seelye gave the benediction, a light rain began to fall. It was pouring as they got ready to leave the church. The junior ushers rushed back to campus, returning with the girls’ black rubber coats and hats and armfuls of umbrellas. They escorted the seniors and their guests into the hacks and carriages and automobiles outside the church.

  The next morning, the heavy skies lifted in time for the Ivy Day procession. After chapel services at St. John’s Church, the alumnae set forth by class along a white canvas carpet, past the gymnasium to Seelye Hall. The junior class—in brightly colored dresses and hats festooned with flowers—carried the ivy chains (actually long ropes made of laurel leaves) on their shoulders. The graduating class marched in pairs, their hair piled high in soft buns, in wasp-waisted, high-collared white dresses, carrying their roses. To Dorothy’s great disappointment, her mother and father didn’t see her graduate. They were in Europe and unwilling to interrupt their holiday. They returned with a present for her: a filigreed silver card case from Holland.

  After the ivy song was sung and a class photograph taken, the graduates marched into the assembly hall for the class-day program. At the chapel exercises, President Seelye spoke of the first Smith class, of 1879: “There were eleven graduates and ten are still living, and seven of them are married. All of them hold honored positions. One of them is a professor in college; two are wives of college professors; one is at the head of an educational institution; a number of them are interested in educational work and are home-makers, and the same is true of graduates of succeeding classes.”

  PART TWO

  Old World and New

  Rosamond, winter of 1916

  5

  UNFENCED

  Steamboat & Wolcott Stage

  Farrington Carpenter had a different kind of experience in college, and not only because it was a men’s school. His jocular personality disguised a sensitive intelligence and a restless nature, and he was far more uncomfortable with the American class system than most of his peers. The old-line East Coast students hastened to exploit his awkwardness. He had not been to Exeter or Andover. He was from Evanston, Illinois, a town that many of them had never heard of, and his father, although wealthy enough, was a shoe manufacturer. When he arrived at Princeton and read the “Freshman Bible,” he realized that the stiff collars, vested suits, and neckties his mother had bought for him were hopelessly unstylish. “A freshman had to wear a black turtleneck sweater, corduroy trousers, and a little black cap called a ‘dink’ on the back of his head,” he wrote in his autobiography, Confessions of a Maverick. When someone joked that Farrington sounded like the name of an English resort town, he told everyone his name was Ferry, but they dubbed him Skinny instead. It wasn’t long before he turned his lack of social standing to his advantage. He took courses taught by the college’s president, Woodrow Wilson, and made sure he got to know him.

  Wilson’s years at Princeton shaped his convictions about the purpose of education in a democracy—and Carpenter’s beliefs were shaped alongside them. When Wilson assumed the job in 1902, his political views were conservative. In November 1904 he gave a speech in New York to the Society of Virginians on “The Political Future of the South.” Implicitly denouncing the populism of William Jennings Bryan, he declared, “The country as it moves forward in its great material progress needs and will tolerate no party of discontent or radical experiment; but it does need a party of conservative reform, acting in the spirit of law and of ancient institutions.” At the university, though, Wilson was soon undertaking a radical experiment of his own known as the Quad Plan.

  He officially introduced it to the Board of Trustees in December 1906. The idea was to replace the university’s snobbish eating clubs or to absorb them into larger and less exclusive “quads.” Ferry Carpenter acted as an enthusiastic student liaison. As conceived by Wilson and endorsed by some faculty and alumni, the quads would provide living and eating quarters for 100 to 150 students, from freshmen to seniors, thus encouraging them to enlarge their circle of acquaintances. Young faculty would live there, too, so that conversations, as Carpenter put it, would venture beyond sports and dirty jokes. The prospect of not getting into a club, he said, was appalling—one was deemed “a sad bird” and socially ostracized.

  Wilson told Ferry, “Some of the wealthy New York and Pennsylvania people with sons here would like to turn this college into a Tuxedo Institution, a country club. I refuse to head such an establishment.” However, the board mostly was composed of wealthy easterners, and they vigorously opposed Wilson’s idea. Over the next three years, as told by one of Wilson’s biographers, Henry Bragdon, the press reported the controversy at Princeton as a fight between “college democracy” and social privilege. Wilson was depicted as a courageous progressive. “To the country at larg
e, his dispute with the Princeton clubs was analogous to Theodore Roosevelt’s struggles with the trusts, the meat packers, and the railroads.” Infuriated though he was by the trustees’ intransigence, Wilson found that the role of reformer suited him.

  In June 1908 Ferry wrote to “Dr. Wilson” about his progress with potential supporters of the Quad Plan. He had joined the “middle-rated” Campus Club, to avoid the sad-bird taint, and become its secretary. Thanking Wilson for the clear grounding he had given him in his courses in jurisprudence and constitutional government, Ferry said that he had just read an article in the Saturday Evening Post that “sounded like a trumpet call to Americans to rally to Democracies’ standard.”

  That fall, he invited Wilson to speak about the Quad Plan at the Campus Club. Wilson had just returned from a trip to the University of Wisconsin, where he had delivered a lecture on Abraham Lincoln. He was full of what he had seen there, telling his acolyte: “At those great state institutions, the gates are flung wide open. The wind of public opinion sweeps unobstructed through them. . . . But here at a proprietary institution, we are surrounded by a great high wall, which admits little from the outside world.”

  After dinner, Wilson instructed the students, “When you go out into the world and have to make your own living, you may have to sit at a desk next to a man who spits all over his own shoes, and you won’t be able to take it because you have been so careful to avoid all unpleasantness in your college associations.” In 1909 a majority of the trustees and a number of influential members of the administration at Princeton forced Wilson to drop the Quad Plan. The fight embittered him, but it also steeled him for a career in politics. Aristocracy, he informed a despondent Ferry Carpenter, was a fact of life even in democratic America.