Wellesley College Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive Wellesley Histories Archives 1915 The tS ory of Wellesley Florence Converse Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.wellesley.edu/wellesleyhistories Recommended Citation Converse, Florence, "The tS ory of Wellesley" (1915). Wellesley Histories. 2. http://repository.wellesley.edu/wellesleyhistories/2 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Archives at Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wellesley Histories by an authorized administrator of Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive. For more information, please contact [email protected]. <^l P^'#J ^Y/^J^. r Kl! llfrlWiJtit 1 .vU «iv^ui^. THE STORY OF WELLESLEY \ 11 FLORENCE CONVERSE % C^VW^J LIBRARY OF WELLESLEY COLLEGE GIFT OF ANONYMOUS M:c^<^.M^ THE STORY OF WELLESLEY m ^assTfi*?! SSW!* The Chapel Doorway THE STORY OF WELLESLEY BY FLORENCE CONVERSE WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY NORMAN IRVING BLACK IKI oM-REFERtl ^WVAD'QgS BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1915 WELLESUET College Archives" Copyright, 1915, By Little, Brown, and Company. All rights reserved Published, October, 1915 Pritttera S. J. Paekhill <fc Co., Boston, U.SJ ; ALMA MATER To Alma Mater, Wellesley's daughters. All together join and sing. Thro' all her wealth of woods and waters Let your happy voices ring ; In every changing mood we love her. Love her towers and woods and lake ; Oh, changeful sky, bend blue above her. Wake, ye birds, your chorus wake ! We'll sing her praises now and ever. Blessed fount of truth and love. Our heart's devotion, may it never Faithless or unworthy prove. We'll give our lives and hopes to serve her. Humblest, highest, noblest — all A stainless name we will preserve her. Answer to her every call. Anne L. Barrett, '86. PREFACE THE day after the Wellesley fire, an eager young reporter on a Boston paper came out to the college by appointment to interview a group of Wellesley women, alumnae and teachers, grief- stricken by the catastrophe which had befallen them. He came impetuously, with that light-hearted breathlessness so characteristic of young reporters in the plays of Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett. He was charmingly in character, and he sent his voice out on the run to meet the smallest alumna in the group : "Now tell me some pranks !" he cried, with pencil poised. What she did tell him need not be recorded here. Neither was it set down in the courteous and sym- pathetic report which he afterwards wrote for his paper. And readers who come to this story of Welles- ley for pranks will be disappointed likewise. Not vii PREFACE that the lighter side of the Wellesley life is omitted ; play-days and pageants, all the bright revelry of the college year, belong to the story. Wellesley would not be Wellesley if they were left out. But her alumnae, her faculty, and her undergraduates all agree that the college was not founded primarily for the sake of Tree Day, and that the Senior Play is not the goal of the year's endeavor. It is the story of the Wellesley her daughters and lovers know that I have tried to tell : the Wellesley of serious purpose, consecrated to noble ideals of Christian Scholarship. I am indebted for criticism, to President Pendleton who kindly read certain parts of the manuscript, to Professor Katharine Lee Bates, Professor Vida D. Scudder, and Mrs. Marian Pelton Guild ; for historical material, to Miss Charlotte Howard Co- nant's "Address Delivered in Memory of Henry Fowle Durant in Wellesley College Chapel", Feb- ruary 1 8, 1906, to Mrs. Louise McCoy North's Historical Address, delivered at Wellesley's quarter centennial, in June, 1900, to Professor George Her- bert Palmer's Life of Alice Freeman Palmer, pub- lished by the Houghton Mifflin Co., to Professor Margarethe Miiller's Carla Wenckebach, Pioneer, published by Ginn & Co. ; to Dean Waite, Miss Edith Souther Tufts, Professor Sarah F. Whiting, Miss viii PREFACE Louise Manning Hodgkins, Professor Emeritus Mary A. Willcox, Mrs. Mary Gilman Ahlers ; to Miss Can- dace C. Stimson, Miss Mary B. Jenkins, the Secre- tary 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 edi- tors of the Wellesley Courant, Prelude, Magazine, News, and Legenda, whose labors went so far to lighten mine. F. C. IX CONTENTS PAGE Preface ...... vii I. The Founder and his Ideals II. The Presidents and their Achievement 50 III. The Faculty and their Methods 121 IV. The Students at Work and Play 168 V. The Fire : an Interlude . 222 VI. The Loyal Alumna 237 Index ...... 277 XI LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The Chapel Doorway . College Hall from Roof of Norumb East Lodge Outlet, Lake Waban . The Story of Wellesley 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 ad- venturers themselves always knew, that the move- ment for the higher education of women was not the least romantic of those Mctorian 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 1 ; THE STORY OF WELLESLEY must be a common heritage if Democracy was to be a working theory, missed the beauty of the picture. He saw the sUm beginning of a procession of young women, whose obstinate, dreaming eyes beheld the visions hitherto relegated by scriptural prerog- ative 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 sig- nificance 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 suf- frage. 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 pene- trate. 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 2 THE FOUNDER AND HIS IDEALS women to Oberlln 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 achieve- ment ; annals very far from meager, for achieve- ment 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 accom- plished, industrially, socially, and politically, with- out that first woman's college, we shall never know, but the alumnae registers, with their statistics con- cerning 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 full- ness of life that they connote to American women, middle-aged and young, — blotted out ; coeduca- tional institutions harassed by numbers and invent- ing drastic legislation to keep out the women ; man still the almoner of education, and woman his depend- 3 THE STORY OF WELLESLEY ent. 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 mod- estly evades the public eye, in the academic formali- ties 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 rela- tion to her material as the Venerable Bede was to his when he set out to write his Ecclesiastical History. The thought brings us its own inspiration. If we sift our miracles with as much discrimination as he sifted his, we shall be doing well. We shall discover, .among other things, that in addition to the composite influence which these colleges all together exert, each one also brings to bear upon our educational problems her individual experience and ideals.