Notes

The following abbreviations are used to denote libraries, archives, and special collections.

 

APS	American Philosophical Society
AUHS	Allegheny University of the Health Sciences Archives and Special Collections
BL	Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley
BMC	Bryn Mawr College Archives
CU	Cornell University Bare and Manuscript Collections
HL	Huntington Library
LC	Library of Congress
MHC	Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections
NHA	Nantucket Historical Association
SC	Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College
SCPC	Swarthmore College Library, Peace Collection
SL	Schlesinger Library, Badcliffe College
VC	Vassar College Special Collections
WC	Wellesley College Archives

 

1. INTRODUCTION

 

The sexologists’ roles as creators and/or observers of lesbian identity have been the subject of scholarly debate for some time. See my article “The Morbidification of Love Between Women by Nineteenth-Century Sexologists,” Journal of Homosexuality 4, no. 1 (Fall 1978): 73–90; George Chauncey, “From Female Inversion to Homosexuality: The Changing Medical Conceptualization of ‘Deviance,’” Salmagundi (Fall/Winter 1983): 58–59, 114–46; Carroll Smith-Bosenberg, “The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and the Gender Crisis, 1870–1936,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985); Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman,” in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, eds., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Lesbian and Gay Past (New York: New American Library, 1989); and Lisa Duggan, “The Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology, and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-the-Century America,” Signs (Summer 1993): 791–813.

In Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981), I discuss the historical development of romantic friendship and Boston marriage.

 

1 “Not-men”: Katherine Anne Porter, “Gertrude Stein: A Self-Portrait,” Harper’s 195 (Dec. 1947), pp. 519–27.

2 Academic postmodernists: Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 100.

3 “passionate fictions”: Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. xiv.

4 “modern movement”: Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1902), pp. 99–100. See also Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming of Age (London: Mitchell Kennerley, 1911), p. 72: “The women of the new movement are naturally drawn from those [who] . . . do not altogether represent their sex; some are rather mannish in temperament; some are ‘homogenic,’that is, inclined to attachment of their own rather than the opposite sex.”

7 “Two business women”: Crystal Eastman, “Now We Can Begin” (1920), in Blanche Cook Wiesen, ed., Toward the Great Change: Crystal Eastman on Feminism, Militarism, and Revolution (New York: Garland, 1976).
“refusing to be yoked”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Passing of Matrimony,” Harper’s Bazaar 40 (June 1906), pp. 495–98.

8 “I am SO glad”: Susan B. Anthony to Anna Dickinson, Feb. 22, 1870, reel 6, Anna Dickinson Papers, LC.
It is not surprising: Statistics analyzed in Andrew Sinclair, The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 144.
“and then withdrew”: Aileen Kraditor, The Idea of the Woman Suffrage Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 284.

10 Judith Butler: See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
“as changeable as dress”: Smith-Rosenberg, “New Woman as Androgyne,” p. 289.
Though few: The phrase “mother-heart” is from a speech by Anna Shaw; see chapter 6.

11 “the rocking horse”: Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the Antipathetic Sexual Instinct (1886; rpt. Brooklyn: Physicians and Surgeons Book Co., 1908), pp. 334–35.
“sacrificed to clean clothes”: Susan B. Anthony, “The True Woman,” speech, 1857, reel 1 (microfilmed pages titled “Speeches,” pp. 56–57), Susan B. Anthony Papers, SL.

 

2. THE LOVES AND LIVING ARRANGEMENTS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SUFFRAGE LEADERS

 

For this chapter I consulted the papers of Mary Grew, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anna Howard Shaw, Lucy Anthony, Alice Stone Blackwell, and Kitty Barry Blackwell, which can be found in the collections noted below. France Willard’s papers are available on microfilm through the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Evanston, Illinois.

In addition, the works that follow have been especially useful. Lee Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, A Better Husband: Single Women in America, the Generations of 1780–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), discusses the great extent to which nineteenth-century social movements were fueled by single women who did not have domestic distractions. Obviously, this is not to say that married women contributed nothing to women’s advancement. For a discussion of heterosexual married partnerships that advanced women’s rights, see Barbara Kuhn Campbell, The Liberated Woman of 1914: Prominent Women in the Progressive Era (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979), especially the chapter “Marriage.” Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989), p. 12off., which presents a good discussion of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s refusal to support the Fifteenth Amendment and the consequent split with Lucy Stone, as well as a discussion of Anthony’s support of African-American woman suffragists. Ellen DuBois, “The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement: Notes Toward the Reconstruction of Nineteenth-Century Feminism,” Feminist Studies 3, no. 1–2 (Fall 1975): 63–71, delineates the unpopularity of the movement among most American women in the nineteenth century.

Two important biographies that deal with Frances Willard’s role in the suffrage movement are Ruth Bordin, Frances Willard: A Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), and Mary Earhart, Frances Willard: From Prayer to Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), especially chapter 10.

 

15 “I shall go”: Susan B. Anthony to Isabel Howland, Aug. 28, 1894, ms. group 78, box 1, Isabel Howland Papers, SC.
Carrie: Mary Gray Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Biography (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1944), p. 5.

16 “Dear Anna”: Susan B. Anthony to Anna Dickinson, n.d., reel 6, Anna Dickinson Papers, LC.
“as women”: Quoted in Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (New York: Scribner’s, 1923), p. 275.

17 “unsexed”: That “unsexed” was sometimes used to signify “lesbian” is suggested in an article in a Washington, D.C., newspaper, The Capitol, on Lillie Duer, who killed Ella Hearn, “her ‘bosom’ companion.” The author comments: “The peculiar features in this remarkable history . . . present the most morbid, hideous phase of the unnatural female—of unsexed woman—ever recorded in tangible history”; “The Morbid, Unsexed Woman,” June 22, 1879, vol. 9, p. 17, col. 1.
Sojourner Truth: Saunders Redding, “Sojourner Truth,” in Edward James and Janet Wilson James, eds., Notable American Women, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 480 “a gathering”: Quoted in Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage, p. 27.

18 “It is a settled”: Quoted in Theodore Tilton, “Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” in James Parton et al., Eminent Women of the Age (1868; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1974).

19 “Papa . . . has been blaming”: Alice Stone Blackwell to Sarah Blackwell, Dec. 6, 1893, folder 689, Blackwell Family Papers, SL.
“I think any female”: Susan B. Anthony, diary, Feb. 6, 1838, Susan B. Anthony Papers, SL. See also June 10 and 11, 1839.
“Not another baby”: Susan B. Anthony to Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Apr. 22, 1858, Anthony Papers. Anthony urged Stanton too to stop procreating; see Ellen DuBois, ed., Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writing, Speeches (New York: Schocken, 1981), p. 61.
“would bite out”: Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 254–55.

20 “Your words”: Mary Grew to Isabel Howland, Apr. 27, 1892, Howland Papers.

21 “affection passing”: John White Chadwick, A Life for Liberty: Anti-Slavery and Other Letters of Sallie Holley (1899; rpt. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), p. 7.
“When I say”: Mary Grew to William Lloyd Garrison II, June 20, 1866, Garrison Family Papers, SC.

22 “The largesse”: Emily Howland to Mary Grew, Aug. 24, 1893, quoted in Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, p. 210.

23 “sit up”: Quoted in Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, vol. 3 (1898; rpt. Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1983), p. 1263.
“So closely interwoven”: Quoted in Katherine Anthony, Susan B. Anthony: Her Personal History and Her Era (New York: Russell and Russell, 1954). Stanton appears to have had romantic feelings for other women as well, including Anna Dickinson; Anthony teasingly told Dickinson that Stanton confessed that Dickinson’s “charming face” presented itself to her “whenever she wakes at night—I have never seen her so wholly captivated with anyone—says Anna is a great deal more wonderful even in private than in public—said she could do nothing but look, gaze her in the face & admire & listen”; Susan B. Anthony to Anna Dickinson, June 19, 1867, reel 6, Dickinson Papers.
“Do you believe”: Quoted in Evans, Born for Liberty, p. 120.

24 Susan B. Anthony became: Alma Lutz, “Susan B. Anthony,” in James and James, Notable American Women, vol. 1, p. 54.
“merchantable property”: Susan B. Anthony, “The True Woman,” reel 1, Anthony Papers.
“a grim Old Gal”: Quoted in Harper, Life and Work, vol. 1, p. 397.

25 Anthony argued: Susan B. Anthony, “The New Century’s Manly Woman,” Leslie’s Weekly, Mar. 3, 1900, clipping, Anthony Papers.
“the outpourings”: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1 (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881–1922), p. 678.
“I have an irresistible”: Louise Brockett to Anna Dickinson, Mar. 8, 1865, reel 6, Dickinson Papers.
“Sweet Anna”: Laura Bullard to Anna Dickinson, June 6 and June 8, 1872, ibid.
“I want to see”: Quoted in Giraud Chester, Embattled Maiden: The Life of Anna Dickinson (New York: Putnam, 1951), p. 41.

26 “speak right out”: Susan B. Anthony to Anna Dickinson, Oct. 23, 1866; Dec. 6, 1866; Aug. 15, 1867; Nov. 28, 1867; all in reel 6, Dickinson Papers.

26 “My Dear Chicky”: Ibid., Feb. 19, 1868; Mar. 18, 1868; Mar. 31, 1868; Nov. [?] 25, 1868; Nov. 11, 1869.
In some: See, for example, Susan B. Anthony to Anna Dickinson, n.d., addressed to “Lovey,” in which she refers to her “mother’s yearning” for Dickinson; ibid.

27 “made my life-work”: Quoted in Ida Husted Harper, ms. of Shaw biography, reel 14 (p. 144), Anna Howard Shaw and Lucy Elmina Anthony Papers, Mary Earhart Dillon Collection, SL.
“I have very weak”: Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sept. 27, 1857, container 1, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, LC.
“that I wanted”: Susan B. Anthony to Jessie Anthony, Mar. 17, 1897, in Anthony Family Papers, Susan B. Anthony Collection, AF 18, HL.
“I will try”: Susan B. Anthony to Lucy Anthony, Dec. 10, 1897, reel 2, Anthony Papers, SL.

28 “I am so thankful”: Anna Howard Shaw, diary, Sept. 30, 1893, series x, reel 17, Mary Earhart Dillon Collection, SL.
“call in Chicago”: Susan B. Anthony to Jessie Anthony, Mar. 17, 1895, AF 18, box 1, Anthony Family Papers.
“I’m sure”: San Francisco Chronicle interview, June 28, 1896, clipping, Anthony Papers. For other mentions of Emily Gross’s travel with Susan B. Anthony to the West Coast, see Susan B. Anthony to Anna Dann, June 2, 1905, AF 82, and Susan B. Anthony to Maud Koehler, July 14, 1905, AF 27, Anthony Family Papers. This travel is also mentioned in series x, reel 14 (Harper ms., p. 131), Shaw and Anthony Papers. Anthony’s visits to Gross in Chicago are mentioned in Anna Howard Shaw’s diary, March 9 and March 26, 1901, reel 15, ibid. Their travel to Europe is mentioned in Susan B. Anthony to Cherril Wells, May 6, 1899, CC1–48, and Susan B. Anthony to Clara Colby, July 24, 1899, CC3–96, HL. Also see references to Gross and her travels with Anthony in reel 16, Dillon Collection, SL: Susan B. Anthony to Anna Howard Shaw, May 26, 1897, and Harper, Life and Work, vol. 3, pp. 1120, 1132, 1145, 1179, 1230, 1366, 1373.

29 “the great Susan B.”: Katherine Anthony to Mr. Baker, Apr. 10, 1952, reel 2, Anthony Papers.
“If you could”: Susan B. Anthony to Anna O., Oct. 14, 1894, ibid,
“splendid as ever”: Susan B. Anthony to Jessie Anthony, Mar. 17, 1895, AF 18, box 1, Anthony Family Papers. For a discussion of the lesbian circles around Harriet Hosmer, see Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, p. 219ff.

30 “Times are very hard”: Lydia A. C. Ward to Anna Howard Shaw, Mar. 25 [1906], reel 16, Anna Howard Shaw Papers, Dillon Collection, SL.

“a long talk”: Anna Howard Shaw, diary, Mar. 8, 1919, reel 17, ibid.
“My Dear girls”: Susan B. Anthony to Isabel Howland and Harriet May Mills, Nov. 23, 1892; June [?] 9, 1894; June n, 1894; ms. group 78, box 1, folder 4, Howland Papers.
Suffragism had long: See DuBois, “Radicalism.”

32 “No girl”: Frances Willard, Glimpses of Fifty Years: The Autobiography of an American Woman (Chicago: H. J. Smith, 1889), p. 69.
“I never hung”: Oct. 2, 1860; quoted in ibid., pp. 149–50.

33 “never . . . abrupt”: Boston Times-Democrat, clipping, Willard scrapbook 57, p. 63, WCTU series, reel 39, WCTU Library.
“Womanliness first”: Quoted in Evans, Born for Liberty, p. 127.
“lovely Boston girl”: Willard, Glimpses, pp. 641–42. Although Willard continued to live with the devoted Anna Gordon for the rest of her life, their relationship became a ménage à trois from 1892 to 1896, when Willard became involved with a wealthy British suffragist, Lady Isabel Somerset. See Bordin, Frances Willard, pp. 198–200, for a discussion of Willard’s relationship with Somerset.

34 “chopping kindling”: Willard, Glimpses, p. 198.
“be with me”: Ibid., p. 191.
“the fate of women”: Frances Willard, diary, Mar. 12–13, 1869, quoted in Bordin, Frances Willard, pp. 44–45.

35 “my loved and last”: Willard, Glimpses, p. 342.

36 “spoony”: Alice Stone Blackwell to Kitty Barry Blackwell, Dec. 17, 1882, folder 688, Blackwell Family Papers, SL. According to Geoffrey Blodgett, Alice Stone Blackwell, who was involved in relief efforts after the Armenian genocide, may have had a romantic interest in 1893 in an Armenian theology student, Johannes Chatschumian, who died shortly thereafter; see Blodgett, “Alice Stone Blackwell,” in James and James, Notable American Women, vol. 1, p. 158.
“[Collins] harps”: Alice Stone Blackwell to Emily Blackwell, Mar. 27, 1885, folder 688, Blackwell Family Papers, SL.

37 “I fell in love”: Alice Stone Blackwell to Kitty Barry Blackwell, Nov. 30, 1884, reel 6, Blackwell Family Papers, LC.
She generally refused: See, for example, Alice Stone Blackwell to Kitty Barry Blackwell, Dec. 31, 1877, and Mar. 12, 1882 (the latter is a surprisingly hypocritical response to college “smashes”). In 1912 Alice was reading, with great ambivalence, Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which included “Sexual Inversion”; Alice Stone Blackwell to Kitty Barry Blackwell, Mar. 21, 1912. All in reel 16, Blackwell Family Papers, LC.
“Dear Betrothed”: Ibid., Oct. 15, 1871.

38 “Indeed, when”: Kitty Barry Blackwell to Alice Stone Blackwell, Feb. 12, 1872, reel 56, ibid.
“forcibly possess”: Alice Stone Blackwell to Kitty Barry Blackwell, Nov. 26, 1871, reel 6, ibid.
“Your stomach”: Ibid., Mar. 19, 1871. Their aunt, Anna Blackwell, was a spiritualist who, Nancy Salhi says, “had discovered that Kitty was the reincarnation of the pirate William Kidd”; “Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D. (1821–1910)” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1974), p. 253.
“your faithful lover”: Kitty Barry Blackwell to Alice Stone Blackwell, Jan. 2, 1874, reel 6, Blackwell Family Papers, LC.
“Why don’t you”: Alice Stone Blackwell to Kitty Blackwell, July 7, 1874, ibid. “If I lost”: Kitty Barry Blackwell to Alice Stone Blackwell, Mar. 24, 1877, reel 56, ibid.
“My dear Pie”: Ibid., Feb. 18, 1883, reel 6.
“wrap you in ermines”: Alice Stone Blackwell to Kitty Barry Blackwell, Feb. 7, 1911, ibid.
“I fell in love”: Ibid., May 24, 1891, reel 7.

39 “Florence says”: Kitty Barry Blackwell to Alice Stone Blackwell, Oct. 9, 1875, reel 56, ibid.
“made her home:” Alice Stone Blackwell, obit, of Kitty Barry Blackwell, [Martha’s] Vineyard Gazette, June 19, 1936, folder 648, Blackwell Family Papers, SL.

 

3. BRINGING THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT INTO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: ANNA HOWARD SHAW

 

40 “The last day”: Anna Howard Shaw, journal, Dec. 31, 1901, quoted in Ida Husted Harper, unpublished ms., p. 76, series x, reel 14, Anna Howard Shaw and Lucy Elmina Anthony Papers, Mary Earhart Dillon Collection, SL.
“the strongest force”: Obituary, New York Sun, quoted in Wil A. Linkugel and Martha Solomon, Anna Howard Shaw: Suffrage Orator and Social Reformer (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), p. 3.
“measureless patience”: Obituary, New York Times, July 4, 1919, p. 8.
“the ideal type”: Obituary, The Nation, July 12, 1919, p. 33.

41 “I will admit”: Anna Howard Shaw, The Story of a Pioneer (1915; rpt. New York: Harper and Bros., 1929), p. 240.
The New York World: “An Adamless Eden of Women in Bloomers,” New York World, Aug. 6, 1895, p. 23.
“almost libelous:” Shaw, Story of a Pioneer, pp. 261–68.
“no woman in public”: Anna Howard Shaw, Current Opinion, Dec. 1915, quoted in Linkugel and Solomon, Shaiv, p. 12.

42 “esteemed by her countrymen”: Halford R. Ryan, “Foreword,” in Linkugel and Solomon, Shaw.
“an arrangement”: Shaw, Story of a Pioneer, pp. 32, 44, 55.
“We will never”: Anna Howard Shaw to Dr. Esther Phol-Lovejoy, Mar. 12, 1914, folder 46, Anna Howard Shaw Papers, SL.
“Just think”: Anna Howard Shaw to Clara Osburn, Aug. 19, 1902, reel 17, Shaw Papers.

43 “My dear little girl”: Ibid., Nov. 5, 1873, reel 18.
“[Persis] brought me”: Shaw, Story of a Pioneer, p. 90.
“coming opened”: Ibid.
“I would give”: Anna Howard Shaw to Mila Maynard, quoted in James R. McGovern, “Anna Howard Shaw: New Approaches to Feminism,”Journal of Social History 3, no.2 (Winter 1969): 151.

44 “If she knows”: Anna Howard Shaw, journal, Mar. 6, 1902, reel 15, Shaw Papers.
“a charge”: Shaw, Story of a Pioneer, p. 148.

45 “You are dear”: Frances Willard to Anna Howard Shaw, Nov. 22, 1888, reel 16, Shaw Papers.
The social historian: McGovern, “Shaw: New Approaches,” p. 139.
“the greatest woman”: North American Magazine, July 3, 1919.

46 “Miss Shaw”: Pomona Weekly Times, June 19, 1895, box 1, folder 18, Susan B. Anthony Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, SC.
“invad[ing men’s] prerogative”: Anna Howard Shaw, “The New Man,” reel 16, Shaw Papers.

47 “Now it may be”: Anna Howard Shaw, “The Fundamental Principle of a Republic,” unidentified newspaper clipping, July 1, 1915, box 20, Shaw Papers.
“men and women must”: Ibid.

48 “fired my soul”: Shaw, Story of a Pioneer, pp. 191, 202.
Anthony made it clear: Ibid., p. 226.

49 “So you are”: Anna Howard Shaw to Lucy Anthony, Apr. 27, 1888, reel 17, Shaw Papers.
“So you could”: Ibid., Feb. 11, 1889.
“I believe”: Ibid., [July] 1889.
“but that cannot”: Ibid., Jan. 20, 1890.

49 “Just think”: Ibid., Aug. 20, 1890.

50 “I don’t understand”: Ibid., Aug. 1890.
“We [the Anthonys]”: Susan B. Anthony to Lucy Anthony, Apr. 25, 1897, ibid,
“the keenest pleasure”: Harper, unpublished ms., p. 52.
“I am thankful”: Anna Howard Shaw to Lucy Anthony, Mar. 6, 1891, reel 17, Shaw Papers.
“I will teach you”: Anna Howard Shaw to Harriet Cooper, Sept. 4, 1895, #1273, Sarah Cooper Papers, Bare and Manuscript Collection, CU.

51 “I wish I could”: Anna Howard Shaw to Lucy Anthony, Sept. 24, 1891, reel 17, Shaw Papers.
“My dear”: Ibid., Mar. 8, 1891.
“If I am”: Ibid., Nov. 21, 1896.

52 “The wind whistles”: Anna Howard Shaw to Lucy Anthony, 1892, quoted in Harper, unpublished ms., pp. 95–96.
“what a lonely”: Anna Howard Shaw to Lucy Anthony, [New York], 1913, reel 17, Shaw Papers.

53 “I was interested”: Carrie Chapman Catt to Mary Peck, Mar. 13, 1912, reel 5, Carrie Chapman Catt Papers, LC. Shaw’s love letters to Harriet Cooper are in no. 1273, Cooper Papers, CU. Shaw’s intimate involvements with a number of women were widely acknowledged by suffrage leaders, both nationally and internationally. See, for instance, Rachel Foster Avery to Aletta Jacobs regarding Shaw’s affair with Frances Potter, who had been elected secretary of NAWSA under Shaw in 1909; in Mineke Bosch and Annemarie Klousterman, Politics and Friendship: Letters from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1902–1942 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990), p. 108.
“December 31”: Lucy Anthony, Shaw’s journal, Dec. 31, 1919, reel 15, Shaw Papers.

54 “I don’t see anybody”: Quoted in Linkugel and Solomon, Shaw, p. 62.
“Oh, the joy”: Anna Howard Shaw, journal, Nov. 2, 1912, quoted in Harper, unpublished ms., p. 229.

55 “distinctly favorable”: Ibid., p. 255.
“Votes for women”: Anna Howard Shaw, “Militancy . . . ,” Trend, Oct. 10, 1913, p. 31, A-68, #446, Shaw Papers.

56 “[Anna Shaw’s] wise guidance”: Obituary, New York Times, July 4, 1919.

57 Shaw removed the Sting: The New York Telegram, July 4, 1914, quotes Shaw’s letter to President Wilson denouncing the Congressional Union debacle; see scrapbook, folder 367, reel 14, Shaw Papers. Carrie Chapman Catt credited Wilson’s conversion to suffrage to Shaw; see Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., eds., The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 5 (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881–1922), p. 489. Wilson considered Shaw to be the spokesperson for American women and consulted her on a number of matters that concerned women; see, for example, Woodrow Wilson to Anna Howard Shaw, Aug. 22, 1918, reel 17, Shaw Papers: “Your counsel is good and I shall follow it. I took the liberty of writing to you because your counsel I have found to be a thing to be depended upon.”

58 “for years”: “Sees Death of Divine Right of Sex Fetish . . . ,” San Antonio Light, Oct. 27, 1917, clipping, reel 17, Shaw Papers.
“There are two million”: Anna Howard Shaw, “Select Your Own Principle of Life,” speech, box 23, folder 546, Shaw Papers.

59 “Our country needs”: “Dr. Shaw’s Call to Arms,” Woman Citizen, Apr. 27, 1918, clipping, reel 17, Shaw Papers.
“wild oats”: Anna Howard Shaw to Lucy Anthony, Jan. 1, 1918, reel 17, Shaw Papers.
“if we come home”: Ibid., Mar. 9, 1919.

60 “There is no other”: William Short [League to Enforce the Peace] to Anna Howard Shaw, May 1, 1919, ibid.

 

4. VICTORY: CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT

 

In addition to the biographies cited in the following notes, Robert Booth Fowler’s Carrie Chapman Catt: Feminist Politician (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986) has been especially helpful to my understanding of Catt.

 

61 “Mollie do you know”: Carrie Chapman Catt to Mary Garrett Hay, Mar. 21, 1923, reel 3, Carrie Chapman Catt Papers, LC.
In a 1923 article: Carrie Chapman Catt, “A Suffrage Team,” Woman Citizen, Sept. 8, 1923, in Mary Gray Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Biography (New York: Wilson, 1944), p. 60.
“the two of them”: Peck, Catt.

62 “almost without”: David Howard Katz, “Carrie Chapman Catt and the Struggle for Peace” (Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, 1973), p. 29.
“beginning”: Peck, Catt, p. 86. The evidence that Catt and Flay became friends in 1890 is suggested by the inscription on the marker over their shared burial place, which says they were together for thirty-eight years; Hay died in 1928.

63 “walk . . . the chalk”: Carrie Chap man Catt to Mary Peck, Oct. 23, 1912, reel 5, Catt Papers, LC.

One biographer explains: Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), p. 65.
In 1889 alone: James P. Louis, “Mary Garrett Hay,” in James and James, Notable American Women, vol. 2, p. 164.

64 “Any hope”: Peck, Catt, p. 108.
“Mrs. Catt”: Maud Wood Park, Front Door Lobby, ed. Edna Lamprey Stantial (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), p. 120.

65 “She was queenly”: Caroline Reilly to Anna Howard Shaw, June 11, 1919, series x, reel 16, Anna Howard Shaw Papers, Mar}’ Earhart Dillon Collection, SL.
“the enthusiasm”: Peck, Catt, p. 96.

66 “When she looks”: Quoted in ibid., p. 222.

67 “a body of opinion”: Ibid., pp. 233–34.
“the decisive bottle”: Ibid., pp. 233–34, 277–80.

70 “I was born”: Carrie Chapman Catt to Caroline LaMonte, Mar. 8, 1930, ms. group 31, box 4, folder 29, Carrie Chapman Catt Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, SC.

71 “I’m for Pandemonium”: Carrie Chapman Catt to Mary Peck, Oct. 23, 1912, reel 5, Catt Papers, LC.
“I’m sorry”: Carrie Chapman Catt to Mary Garrett Hay, Aug. 27, 1911, reel 3, ibid. According to Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (New York: Macmillan, 1984), p. 1111, the sexual term “soixante-neuf” was “adopted from French . . . late c. 19–20. Orig. upper and middle classes.” Catt’s private humor was often bawdy, which would argue for her familiarity with the term “69” as a sexual expression. For example, she wrote to Hay from North Africa (on the course of her world suffrage tour) a racist but revealing letter that demonstrates her penchant for sexual explicitness: “Here is a kind of black man with hair about six inches long which stands straight out. It is about half wool and half hair. His ancestors got mixed up I think. They are called the fuzzy wuzzies. They loaded about 200 sheep on a neighboring ship. These sheep too had indecent ancestors for while they have the form of sheep they have hair”; ibid.

72 “chum”: Carrie Chapman Catt to Clara Hyde, July 7, 1914, reel 4, ibid.
“I received”: Carrie Chapman Catt to Mary Peck, Aug. 8, 1911, reel 5, ibid. A perusal of Catt’s personal correspondence reveals that she was often carried away by the appeal of others; see, for example, her correspondence with Clara Hyde and Rosa Manus, reel 4, ibid.

74 “Mollie Dear”: Carrie Chapman Catt to Mary Garrett Hay, July 25, 1911, reel 3, ibid.

75 “I love you:” Ibid., Aug. 8, 1911; Aug. 27, 1911; Mar. 13, 1912.
“So you have”: Ibid., Nov. 17, 1911; Nov. [?], 1911.

76 “I do not like”: Ibid., [Nov. 20?], 1911; Nov. 21, 1911.
“You are excusable”: Ibid., Dec. 25, 1911.

77 “It is a great”: Ibid., Nov. 1, 1922.
“Now don’t be”: Ibid., Apr. 24, 1923.
“bereavement”: Peck, Catt, pp. 436–37.

78 “It is impossible”: Lucy Anthony to Carrie Chapman Catt, Oct. 11, 1928, reel 2, Catt Papers, LC. See also Catt’s response, Oct. 28, 1928, ibid.

 

5. TWO STEPS FORWARD . . .

 

A seminal essay on compulsory heterosexuality during the 1920s has been Christina Simmons’s “Companionate Marriage and the Lesbian Threat,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 4, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 54–59.

Paul C. Taylor’s “Mary Williams Dewson,” in Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), is a useful, concise supplement to Susan Ware’s excellent biography, Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987). Sara M. Evans includes a good discussion of how Progressive-era philosophy was brought into the New Deal in Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989), pp. 205–10.

In addition to the sources noted below, I found helpful the discussions about the National Woman’s Party at mid-century in Leila J. Rupp, “The Women’s Community in the National Woman’s Party, 1945 to the 1960s,” Signs 10 (Summer 1985), and Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America since 1960 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).

 

79 “There is a gay”: Virginia Bellamy (?), “To M.G.P. and M.W.D.,” reel 1, Dewson-Porter album, Molly Dewson Papers, SL. M.G.P. was Mary (Polly) G. Porter; M.W.D. was Mary (Molly) Williams Dewson.

79 “masculinized” women: Phyllis Blanchard, “Sex in the Adolescent Girl,” in V. F. Calverton and Samuel D. Schmalhausen, eds., Sex in Civilization (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1929), pp. 538–61.

80 “becoming more fully”: Floyd Dell, Love in the Machine Age (1930; rpt. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973), p. 282.
Even by the 1940s: Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), p. 141.

81 “fools”: Alice Stone Blackwell to Carrie Chapman Catt, Sept. 4, 1929, Blackwell Family Papers, LC.
“for intelligent”: Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (New York: Scribner’s, 1923), p. xix.
“to get on the inside”: Ibid.
Ironically, by the 1940s: See Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 48–49, and Martha May Eliot, interview by Jeannette Barley Cheek, Rockefeller Oral History Project, November 1973, p. 431, Martha May Eliot Papers, SL.
Two prevalent caricatures: Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 271.
“as quaint”: Robert Coughlan, “Changing Roles in Modern Marriage,” Life, Dec. 24, 1956, p. 110.

82 After more than a decade: Sophonisba Breckinridge, Women in the Twentieth Century: A Study of their Political, Social, and Economic Activities (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), p. 326.
For example, Anne: Two Ph.D. dissertations describe Martin’s professional life and give glimpses of her personal life: Ann Warren Smith, “Anne Martin and the History of Woman Suffrage in Nevada, 1869–1914” (University of Nevada, 1976), and Kathryn Anderson, “Practical Political Equality for Women: Anne Martin’s Campaigns for the United States Senate in Nevada, 1918 and 1920” (University of Washington, 1978).
   Martin undertook the presidency of the Nevada Equal Franchise Society under the influence of Hannah Clapp, one of the state’s first exponents of woman suffrage. Clapp, who never married, was described by her contemporaries as “always dressed in a severe masculine fashion” and as “a mannish-looking woman,” and she lived with Elizabeth Babcock, a “regular little lady,” with whom Clapp founded a well-respected school in the late nineteenth century. Although Martin seems to have been less interested in obviously butch/femme-type lesbian relationships than her mentor and model, there can be little doubt of her same-sex intimacies.
   Martin’s correspondence, BL, is also useful. See especially her correspondence with Mabel Vernon, in which Martin acknowledged Vernon’s intimate relationships with women, and with Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith, whom Martin addressed as a couple. Addams and Smith responded by acknowledging Martin and Dr. Margaret Long as a couple. See also Long’s correspondence with Florence Sabin, Florence Sabin Papers, APS; the Margaret Long Papers (especially correspondence of the 1940s), SC; and the correspondence between Mabel Vernon and Anne Martin and Dr. Margaret Long, in the People’s Mandate Papers, SCPC.
   Martin was deeply disappointed that enfranchisement gave women little political power. As Kristi Andersen points out in After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics Before the New Deal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 107–8, other suffragists who had had high hopes for women were also devastated by the reality of the difficulties of gaining female political representation. Emily Blair, who became vice president of the Democratic National Committee in 1924 and its only female officer, complained by 1930 that she had been deluded into thinking that women could make gains through traditional party politics. Like Martin, she called (in vain) for women “to organize as women, not only in politics but everywhere.” See also Anne Martin, “Feminists and Future Political Action,” The Nation, Feb. 18, 1925, pp. 185–86.

83 Marion Dickerman: See Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt: Vol. I, 1884–1933 (New York: Viking, 1992), pp. 321–22.

84 “The reading of”: Quoted in Peck, Catt, p. 280. On Hay’s political career, see also Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., eds.; The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 6 (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881–1922).

85 “Funny, everything”: Rodger Streitmatter, ed., Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok (New York: Free Press, 1998), pp. 54, 77. See also Doris Faber, The Life of Lorena Hickok: E.R.’s Friend (New York: Morrow, 1980).
“introduced an alternative”: Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, pp. 3–4, 123. See also p. 116 for a discussion of the rampant homosexual crushes in Souvestre’s school. Cook portrays Eleanor Roosevelt as bisexual. Streitmatter focuses on her lesbianism. See also Joseph P. Lash, Love, Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982), and A World of Love: Eleanor Roosevelt and her Friends, 1943–1962 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964). Lash, who counted himself among the first lady’s friends, preferred to see her as asexual. Dorothy Bussy’s autobiographical lesbian novel Olivia (1948; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1975) is set in Mlle. Souvestre’s school.

86 The lesbians: Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, pp. 4–6, 13–14. For a discussion of Roosevelt’s work with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman on women’s issues, see also Joseph P. Lash, “Eleanor Roosevelt’s Role in Women’s History,” in Mabel E. Deutrich and Virginia C. Purdy, eds., Clio Was a Woman: Studies in the History of American Women (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980), pp. 243–53.
“the first independent”: Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, Ladies of Courage (New York: Putnam, 1954), pp. 258–59.
“sanctuary”: Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, pp. 292–97. The Greenwich Village lesbian circle is also discussed in Streitmatter, Empty, pp. xvi–xviii.

87 “profound influence”: Clarke A. Chambers, Seedtime of Reform: American Social Service and Social Action, 1918–1933 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), p. 255.
“should receive”: Hickok, Ladies, p. 278.
Because of her: Elaine M. Smith, “Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Youth Administration,” in Deutrich and Purdy, Clio, pp. 149–77.
“gave me the opportunity”: Quoted in Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne, 1982), p. 91.

88 “one of the most”: Ware, Partner and I, p. xi.

89 “the biggest coup”: Quoted in ibid., p. 217.

90 “the way [for women]”: Quoted in George W. Martin, Madame Secretary: Frances Perkins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), p. 146.
“mirrored”: Ware, Partner and I, p. 58.
“Little danger”: Ibid., p. 59.

91 “The two women”: Ibid., p. 144.
“The overwhelming argument”: Quoted in Ware, Holding Their Own, p. 92. Nevertheless, she: According to O’Day’s son, Perkins’s primary domestic arrangement was with O’Day; see Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, p. 3240.

93 “Men and women”: In 1943 the wording of the ERA was changed to “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
When American women: Rupp and Taylor, Survival, p. 51.

94 “If my marriage”: Quoted in ibid., p. 112.
“weird goings-on”: Quoted in ibid., p. 106. See also Leila Rupp, “Feminism and the Sexual Revolution in the Early Twentieth Century: The Case of Doris Stevens,” Feminist Studies 15, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 289–309. Rupp shows that Stevens too was capable of intense sensual and emotional relationships with another woman (Sara Bard Field). Stevens may in fact have been victimized by lesbian panic, which would explain her obsessive heterosexual insistences, such as her declaration in a 1927 speech that “the only fun in life is when men and women play together and men and women work together.”
     Alice Paul’s reputation as a lesbian has long made some of her biographers exceedingly uncomfortable. A colleague recently informed me of a contemporary Paul biographer who “just called [her], with great relief, to say she has just discovered some evidence of a young man in Alice Paul’s life that will counter those rumors about Paul and Lucy Burns!”

95 The social theorist; See Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

 

6. MOTHER-HEARTS/LESBIAN-HEARTS

 

Useful discussions of the women’s labor movement and relations between women in the movement can be found in Alice Kessler-Harris, “Where Are the Organized Women Workers?” Feminist Studies 3, no. 1–2 (1975); Ellen DuBois, “Working Women, Class Belations, and Suffrage Militance . . . ,” in Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 176–94; Diane Raiser, Sisterhood and Solidarity: Feminism and Labor in Modern Times (Boston: South End Press, 1987); and Nancy Schrom Dye, As Equals and as Sisters: Feminism, the Labor Movement, and the Women’s Trade Union League of New York (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980). Elisabeth Marbury, “We Are All Members of the One National Family,” American Federationist 17 (March 1910): 21, provides an emotional articulation of the views of upper-class lesbian women about their support of working-class women in their labor struggles.

The relationship between Marbury and DeWolfe is well traced in Kim Marre, “A Lesbian Marriage of Cultural Consequence,” Theatre Annual 47 (1994): 71–76.

I gleaned insights on Marot and Pratt from Caroline Pratt, I Learn from Children (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948), and Helen Marot, American Labor Unions (New York: Henry Holt, 1914), as well as Sandra Adickes, To Be Young Was Very Heaven: Women in New York Before the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997).

 

99 “We can hardly”: John White Chadwick, A Life for Liberty: Anti-Slavery and Other Letters of Sallie Holley (1899; rpt. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), p. 7.
“how shall we”: Anna Howard Shaw, “The Great Defect in Our Government,” in Wilmer A. Linkugel, “The Speeches of Anna Howard Shaw,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1960), vol. 2, pp. 149–78.
“finding any wrong”: Anna Howard Shaw, “God’s Women,” in Rachel Foster Avery, ed., Proceedings of the National Council of Women of the United States, 1891 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1891), pp. 242–49.

101 “conscience and heart”: Quoted in Chadwick, Life for Liberty, pp. 181–82.
“fashioned a full”: Katherine Lydigsen Herbig, “Friends for Freedom: The Lives and Careers of Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam” (Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1977), p. 135.
“Oh, my heart”: Quoted in Chadwick, Life for Liberty, pp. 186–87.

102 “Dear Loving Heart”: Quoted in Herbig, “Friends,” pp. 86, 105, 164. See also Lee Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America, the Generations of 1780–1840 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984).

104 “bosom sex”: Karen V. Hansen, ‘“No kisses is like youres’: An Erotic Friendship Between Two African-American Women During the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Martha Vicinus, ed., Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Studies Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 178–207.

105 “keep women out”: Quoted in Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon, and Susan Reverby, eds., America’s Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1976), p. 167.

107 Pratt became: When birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger had to flee the country after being threatened with a forty-five-year prison term for her work, she left two of her young children in the care of Marot and Pratt; see Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 99. “only women of the highest”: The strike, especially the Colony Club’s participation in it, is discussed in Rheta Childe Dorr, What Eight Million Women Want (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1910), p. 172.

108 “progress towards”: Ibid., p. 175.

109 But they were disappointed: In her book American Labor Unions, Helen Marot is critical not only of labor union men who withheld their support of working women but also of the working women who were reluctant to fight for their rights within unions. She blames women’s timidity largely on their (heterosexual) domestic arrangements, which did not encourage them to speak out boldly as workers (p. 16). See also Dye, As Equals, p. 75.
These relationships: Annaliese Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), discusses the twenty-five-year partnership between two working-class female leaders in the WTUL, Rose Schneiderman and Maud O’Farrel Swartz.

110 “fiery soapbox orator”: Pauline Newman, “Letters to Michael and Hugh Owen from P. M. Newman,” box 1, folder 3, Newman and Miller Papers, SL.
“girl strikers”: Ibid.
“Her need”: Ann Schofield, “To Do and to Be”: Portraits of Four Women Activists (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), p. 94.

111 “She was blonde”: Elisabeth Owen, quoted in ibid., p. 49.

112 In Germany, Frieda: Newman stated in a 1973 interview that Elisabeth was adopted. Ann Schofield, who interviewed Elisabeth in 1988, says that she was Miller’s natural daughter; “To Do,” p. 166, note 53.
“Dear Girl”: Pauline Newman to Frieda Segelke Miller, Aug. 23, 1927, box 1, folder 8, Newman and Miller Papers, SL. Although considerable material tracing their relationship appears in the Newman and Miller Papers at the Schlesinger Library, it is likely that important material was censored. When Miller was in London, working at the American Embassy, she wrote regularly only to Newman and expected her to share news with their friends. Newman told her in a letter of March 3, 1944, that she found it necessary to spend a good deal of time “preparing” Miller’s letters for circulation: “I cannot give them to Miss B. [Miller’s secretary] because I do not trust her judgement in what to leave out. So I ‘edit’ them, as it were, leaving out personal references”; ibid.
“I spent”: Pauline Newman to Frieda Segelke Miller, June 1, 1936, ibid.

113 “The sun is out”: Ibid., Mar. 3, 1944.
Despite Pouline’s: The relationship between Newman and Miller could be stormy. In 1959, Miller, by then in her late sixties, had an affair with a man, which caused a breach with Newman. Their temporary separation did not affect Newman’s role as grandmother to Elisabeth’s children. When Miller had a stroke in 1969, Newman cared for her until her death, four years later. See also Trisha Franzen, Spinsters and Lesbians: Independent Womanhood in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 127–28.

113 “You and Frieda”: Vera Joseph, M.D., to Pauline Newman, Aug. 10, 1973, box 3, folder 50, Newman and Miller Papers, SL.

114 “in the endless”: Quoted in Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. xii.
Linda Gordon: Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 78–79. Gordon’s figure of 28 percent is an underestimate too because it fails to include women such as Martha May Eliot (one of the leading reformers whom Gordon names), who lived her entire adult life with Dr. Ethel Dunham. Gordon erroneously identifies Eliot as the wife of Thomas Eliot, assistant solicitor to the Department of Labor (p. 258).

 

7. SOCIAL HOUSEKEEPING: THE INSPIRATION OF JANE ADDAMS

 

In addition to the biographies cited below, an excellent, concise account of Jane Addams’s accomplishments can be found in Ann Firor Scott, “Jane Addams,” in James and James, Notable American Women, vol. 1. Ida B. Wells’s Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), discusses Addams’s work with African Americans.

Several other researchers have considered the emotional and/or erotic relationships between women that characterized the settlement movement. Most notable are Blanche Wiesen Cook, “Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Chrystal Eastman, Emma Goldman,” Chrysalis 3 (1977): 43–61; Estelle Freedman, “Separatism as a Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism,” Feminist Studies 5, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 512–29; and Rebecca Alpert, Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

 

115 “My Ever Dear”: Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, Feb. 21, 1897, reel 113.3, Jane Addams Papers, SCPC.
In her account: Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 71–72.
“involving the use”: Jane Addams, “Filial Relations,” in Democracy and Social Ethics (1902; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 87.

116 The historian: Jill Conway, “Women Reformers and American Culture, 1870–1930,” Journal of Social History 5 (Winter 1971–72): 174–75.
“educated woman’s”: Jane Addams, “The Modern City and the Municipal Franchise for Women,” speech, Feb. 1906.
“less selfish time”: Addams, Twenty Years, p. 71.

117 “I love your sex”: “A Voter” to Jane Addams, Jan. 17, 1898, reel 113.3, Addams Papers.

118 the quintessential: Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
“No other single”: Charles and Mary Beard, The American Spirit: A Study of the Idea of Civilization in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1942), p. 478.
“a central figure”: John C. Farrell, Beloved Lady: A History of Jane Addams’ Ideas on Reform and Peace (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), p. 20.
“moving force”: Daniel Levine, Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1971), p. 18.

119 “social intercourse”: Jane Addams to Ellen Gates Starr, Aug. 11, 1879, box 1, folder 5A, Ellen Gates Starr Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, SC.
“I suppose”: Ellen Gates Starr to Jane Addams, [1886], box 1, folder 10A, Starr Papers. In the preceding years, Ellen had been infatuated with a fellow teacher, Mary Runyan, whom she described to Jane as “so beautiful,” confessing “how devoted I am to her”; Ellen Gates Starr to Jane Addams, Jan. 1, 1882, reel 113.1, Addams Papers. See also Apr. 9, 1882, and Jan. 12, 1883, ibid.
“She said today”: Ellen Gates Starr to Jane Addams, [1886], box 1, folder 10A, Starr Papers.
“My Dear”: Ellen Gates Starr to Jane Addams, Dec. 6, 1885, box 1, folder 10A, Starr Papers.

120 “It has set me”: Jane Addams to Ellen Gates Starr, Dec. 2, 1883, box 1, folder 5A, Starr Papers.
“I am very impatient”: Ibid., Feb. 21, 1885.
“Let’s love”: Jane Addams to Ellen Gates Starr, Jan. 24, 1889, box 1, folder 7 A, Starr Papers.

120 “I need you”: Jane Addams to Ellen Gates Starr, June 7, 1889, box 1, folder 7, Starr Papers.
“My Dear One”: Ibid., June 14, 1889.

121 “had our own”: Ellen Gates Starr to Mary Blaisdell, Feb. 23, 1889, box 1, folder 3, Starr Papers.
“supplying in a radical”: Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers,” Signs 10 (Summer 1985): 658.
Hull House: See Jane Addams to Katharine Coman, Dec. 7, 1891, reel 113.1, Addams Papers.

122 “With the exception”: Helen Christine Bennett, American Women in Civil Work (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1915), p. 82.

123 In the 1890s: See Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 16–18.
“The comfort of”: Addams, Twenty Years, p. 87.
“College Girls”: Kansas City Journal, clipping, box 1, folder 3, Starr Papers.

124 “More perfect”: Leila Bedell, Woman’s Journal, May 5, 1889, clipping, ibid.
“More important”: Davis, American Heroine, p. 62.

125 “I positively feel”: Jane Addams to Ellen Gates Starr, May 3, 1889, box 1, folder 7, Starr Papers.
“Her humanitarianism”: James Weber Linn, Jane Addams: A Biography (New York: Appleton-Century, 1938), p. 81.
“drifted”: Ibid., p. 147.
“It would give”: Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, [Spring 1890], reel 113.1, Addams Papers.
“I have a great”: Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, Dec. 19, 1890, ibid.

126 “Jane and Ellen”: Davis, American Heroine, p. 85.
“I feel uncommon”: Ellen Gates Starr to Jane Addams, n.d., London, box r, folder 10A, Starr Papers.
“My dear, I’m tired”: Ibid., Oct. 10 [no year].
“Your letter”: Jane Addams to Ellen Gates Starr, July 1892, reel 113.1, Addams Papers.

127 “I can see”: Quoted in Davis, American Heroine, p. 85. Ellen’s emotional life did not come to a permanent end with the end of her intimacy with Jane. About 1907 she formed a romantic friendship with Frances Lillie, the wife of the dean of sciences at the University of Chicago, who was, in terms of religious enthusiasm, far more suitable to Ellen than Jane had been. Their correspondence is in box 10, folder 87, Starr Papers.
“conventional lady”: Cook, “Female Support Networks,” p. 47.
“so good to me”: Jane Addams to Alice Haldeman, Feb. 23, 1893, reel 113.1, Addams Papers.

128 “One day I came”: Quoted in Linn, Jarre Addams, pp. 289–90.

129 “no affinity”: Margaret Tims, Jane Addams of Hull House (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961), p. 57.
“one supremely”: Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades: The Autobiography of Alice Hamilton, M.D. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), p. 67.
“did not need”: Davis, American Heroine, p. 88.

130 “I will confide”: Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, Apr. 6, 1902, reel 133.4, Addams Papers.
“I bless you”: Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, Dec. 23, 1894; Jan. 15, 1895; Jan. 27, 1895; Feb. 4, 1895; all in reel 113.1, Addams Papers.
“I came home”: Mary Rozet Smith to Jane Addams, Dec. [?], 1896; Feb. 1896; Mar. 1896; ibid.

131 “a good deal”: Jane Addams to Ellen Gates Starr, May 29, 1896, ibid.
“a very pressing”: Jane Addams to Mary Bozet Smith, June [?] 1897, ibid.
“Bro Wood’s”: Ibid., Aug. 24, 1899.

132 “Dearest, It”: Ibid., Jan. 11, 1900.
“You must know”: Jane Addams to Mary Bozet Smith, May 26, 1902, reel 113.4, Addams Papers.
“healing domesticity”: Ibid., Aug. 4, 1904.
“Our house”: Ibid.
“Dearest, I had”: Jane Addams to Mary Bozet Smith, Oct. 16, 1914, reel 113.7, Addams Papers.
“I suppose”: Linn, Jane Addams, p. 408.
In 1904: See Bobert H. Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1956), p. 219.

133 “an effective instrument”: Linn, Jane Addams, pp. 292, 349.

134 “When the day”: Quoted in Farrell, Beloved Lady, p. 214.
As early as 1897: See Jane Addams, “Social Settlements,” Proceedings (National Conference of Charities and Corrections, 1897): 338–46, and Addams, Twenty Years, pp. 310–13.

135 “People listened”: Levine, Jane Addams, p. xi. Sklar analyzes the ways in which Addams combined the power of female institutions with access to the male spheres of influence; see “Hull House.”

135 “Will you let me”: Theodore Roosevelt to Jane Addams, Jan. 24, 1906, reel 113.4, Addams Papers.

 

8. SOCIAL HOUSEKEEPING BECOMES A PROFESSION: FRANCES KELLOR

 

For a helpful discussion of the settlement movement as a training ground for professionals, see Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967)

No full-length biography of Frances Kellor has been published, but William Maxwell’s “Frances Kellor in the Progressive Era: A Study of the Professionalization of Reform” (Ed.D. dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1968) provides a good overview of her professional contributions. Valuable chapters on Kellor can also be found in Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). For information about Kellor’s work on immigration, see Edward George Hartmann, The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), and Edward Corsi, “Frances A. Kellor Sponsored New York State Policy Toward Immigration,” Industrial Bulletin (newsmagazine, New York Department of Labor), Mar. 1952, pp. 14–18. See also Frances Kellor, Immigration and the Future (New York: Doran, 1920).

Mary Dreier’s work is discussed in Nancy Schrom Dye, As Equals and as Sisters: Feminism, the Labor Movement, and the Women’s Trade Union League of New York (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980), and Ann Schofield, “To Do and to Be”: Portraits of Four Women Activists (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997).

 

136 “My own dear”: Frances Kellor to Mary Dreier, [ca. 1905], box 5, folder 77, Mary Dreier Papers, SL.
“scientific skills”: Jane Addams, “The Idea of a Settlement Movement,” College Settlement Association: Ninth Annual Report, 1897–98 (New York: Reynolds Press, 1898), p. to.

137 In 1910: Addams, Twenty Years, pp. 450–5).

139 “fearless tomboy”: Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade, pp. 17, 60.
“could whittle”: Ibid., p. 60.
“never really”: Ibid., p. 148.

140 “If women are”: Frances Kellor, “A Psychological Basis for Physical Culture,” Education 19 (1898).

141 “close and intimate”: Mary Dreier to Phyllis Holbrook, Dec. 16, 1961, courtesy of Holbrook’s nephew, Pete Stewart, Columbia, South Carolina.

142 “will be unable”: Frances Kellor to Mary Dreier, May 5, 1904, box 5, folder 77, Dreier Papers.
“The colors”: Ibid., Oct. 10, 1904.
“My own dear beautiful”: Ibid., n.d. [1905].
“I have this whole”: Ibid., Jan. 3, 1905.

143 “Sixy dear”: Ibid., July 31, 1905.
“There is such”: Ibid., Aug. 11, 1905.
“I’d give most anything”: Ibid., Aug. 20, 1905.
As the papers: See Elizabeth Anne Payne, Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women’s Trade Union League (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 32. The love poems to Raymond Bobins are in box 1, folder 17, Dreier Papers.
“something of a wreck”: note in Dreiers hand, written on the back of a letter from Frances Kellor, Oct. 10, 1904, box 5, folder 77, Dreier Papers.
“Along with your love”: Frances Kellor to Mary Dreier, Oct. 10, 1904, ibid.

144 “that beautiful mind”: Ibid., n.d. [1905].
“Then it will”: Ibid., July 17, 1905.

145 “always so dear”: Ibid., Summer [?] 1905.

146 “I don’t do Christmas”: Ibid., Dec. 22, 1905.
“It is so beautiful”: Ibid., Oct. 30, 1906.
In her early work: See Maxwell, “Frances Kellor,” p. 139ff; Payne, Reform, p. 26ft; and Helen Christine Bennett, American Women in Civic Work (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1915), pp. 163–79.

147 For example, in her book: Kellor discusses the northern victimization of southern African-American women in Out of Work: A Study of Employment Agencies (New York: Putnam, 1904), chap. 3. Kellor’s role in the formation of the National League for the Protection of Colored Women is discussed in Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper and Bow, 1966). See also Mary Dreier to Phyllis Holbrook, Nov. 23, 1960, courtesy of Pete Stewart.

148 “did more”: John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955). p. 190

151 “only tepidly”: Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1919), p. 180.

153 “the tremendous forces”: Frances Kellor, “Psychological and Environmental Study of Women Criminals,” American Journal of Sociology 5, no. 4/5 (Jan.–Mar. 1900): 528.

 

9. POISONING THE SOURCE

 

The Swarthmore College Peace Collection holds the papers of most of the women discussed in this chapter, including Frances Witherspoon, Tracy Mygatt, Hannah Clothier, and Mildred Scott Olmsted; those of Mabel Vernon, Vida Milholland, and Margaret Hamilton can be found in the People’s Mandate Papers (PMP).

Margaret Hope Bacon has written an excellent biography of Olmsted, which details Olmsted’s relationship with Ruth Mellor: One Woman’s Passion for Peace and Freedom: The Life of Mildred Scott Olmsted (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1993). Information for my discussion of Olmsted was also garnered from Margaret Bacon during our meetings on January 15 and 16, 1997, at Swarthmore College, and from her letter to me of January 17, 1997.

 

154 “All, oil”: Tracy Mygatt to Frances Witherspoon, April 12, 1933, box 6, Tracy Mygatt—Frances Witherspoon Papers, SCPC.
“people the tools”: Quoted in Clarke A. Chambers, Seedtime of Reform: American Social Service and Social Action, 1918–1933 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), p. 80.
Convinced that now: On the women’s peace movement after the Great War, see Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 243ff., and Gertrude Bussey and Margaret Tims, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915–1965 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1965).

155 “family”: Jeannette Marks to Mabel Vernon, July 13, 1950, Mabel Vernon Papers, PMP, SCPC.
“How is Mabel”: Vida Milholland to Mary Gertrude [?], Oct. 27, 1939, series B, box 15, PMP, SCPC.

156 “I pray”: Margaret Hamilton to Mabel Vernon, Dec. [?] 1952, ibid,
“decided to share”: Mary Ellicott Arnold, “A Brief Chronological Statement,” ms., box 1, folder 1, Mary Arnold Papers, SL.

157 “ladies”: Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed, In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country (1957; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), p. 181.
“civilize the Indians”: Ibid., p. 24.
“reserve and dignity”: Ibid, pp. 110–11.

158 “masculine qualifications”: Ibid., p. 68.
“I’d give all”: [Mr.] Gussie MacDonald to Mary Arnold and Mabel Reed, Sept, 11, 1941, box 2, folder 12, Mary Arnold Papers, SL.

159 “at least”: Arnold and Reed, In the Land, p. 163.

160 Together Mygatt and Witherspoon: See box 7, Mygatt-Witherspoon Papers, SCPC, for details of their activities. See box 1, ibid., for material on the Bureau of Legal Advice.
“It’s a wonderful”: Tracy Mygatt to Frances Witherspoon, May 20, 1923, box 6, Mygatt-Witherspoon Papers, SCPC.
“My own dear Darling”: Ibid., Apr. 12, 1933.

161 “And I’ll work”: Ibid.
“Darling dear”: Ibid., May 20, 1923.
“a model”: Interview with Mygatt and Witherspoon, Feb. 1966, Columbia University Oral History Project, p. 26, in Mygatt-Witherspoon Papers.

162 “substitut[ing] an anti-gay”: See Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall, Words on Fire: The Life and Writings of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 277n–278n. Baxandall discusses Flynn’s lesbianism but doubts the apocryphal tale that Flynn came out in her first draft of Alderson Story. Marie Equi’s lesbianism is further discussed in Nancy Krieger, “Queen of the Bolsheviks: The Hidden History of Dr. Marie Equi,” Radical America 17, no. 5 (Sept.–Oct. 1983), and Tom Cook, “The Life of a Northwestern Original: Dr. Marie Equi of Portland,” paper read at “Do Ask, Do Tell: Conference on Outing Pacific Northwest History,” Tacoma, Wash., Oct. 24, 1998.
As a penologist: See Estelle Freedman, Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), the definitive biography of Van Waters; also see Burton J. Bowles, The Lady at Box 99: The Story of Miriam Van Waters (Greenwich, Conn.: Seabury Press, 1959).

163 “deeply romantic”: Freedman, Maternal Justice, pp. xii, 161, 171, 166.

164 “The evil Hearst”: Ibid., pp. 278–79.
“The Burning”: Ibid., p. 280.
In her last years: Ibid., p. 332.

165 “My dear ‘Little Lady’”: Ruth Mellor to Mildred Scott [Olmsted], Sept. 17, 1913 [?], series II, box 3, Mildred Scott Olmsted Papers, SCPC.

166 “You say as usual”: Ibid., Jan. 5, 1914.
“Jewels”: Ibid., Sept. 10, 1914.
“That you want”: Ibid., Oct. 2, 1914.
“the conflict”: Mildred Scott Olmsted to Ruth Mellor, n.d. [1927], box 7, Olmsted Papers.

167 “Oh—Scottie”: Ruth Mellor to Mildred Scott [Olmsted], Aug. 28, 1916, box 4, Olmsted Papers.
Ruth’s solution: A number of writers have suggested in recent years that the Victorians were much sexier than was earlier recognized. However, my own research has led me to wonder whether they have not generally overstated the Victorian woman’s willingness to indulge her libido. Mildred Olmsted’s repression of sexuality and Ruth Mellor’s sexual guilt seem to me to be characteristic of many women born in the nineteenth century.
“Passionate friendships”: Mildred Scott [Olmsted] to Ruth Mellor, Nov. 10, 1919, box 5, Olmsted Papers.

168 “friendship wasn’t natural”: Ruth Mellor to Mildred Scott [Olmsted], Sept. 22, 1920, box 6, Olmsted Papers. Information about Adele comes from my discussions with Margaret Bacon and her letter to me, cited above.

169 “complete absence”: Allen Olmsted to Mildred Scott [Olmsted], June 23, 1920, box 6, Olmsted Papers.
“bonds on a firmer”: Bacon, One Woman’s Passion, p. 96.
“Do you”: Mildred Scott Olmsted to Allen Olmsted, May 29, 1923, ibid.

170 “You should have been”: Ruth Mellor to Mildred Scott Olmsted, Apr. 16, 1936, ibid.

171 “No woman could”: Ibid., [Oct. 1934].
“Ruth was confidante”: Bacon, One Woman’s Passion, p. 273.
“Marriage has been”: Ibid., p. 330.

172 “had several times”: Ibid., p. 60.

 

10. “MENTAL HERMAPHRODITES”: PIONEERS IN WOMEN’S HIGHER EDUCATION

 

Useful discussions about romantic relationships in women’s colleges can be found in L. R. Smith, “Social Life at Vassar,” Lippincott’s Magazine 39 (May 1889): 841–51; Lavinia Hart, “A Girl’s College Life,” Cosmopolitan 31 (June 1901): 192; Nancy Salhi, “Smashing: Women’s Relationships Before the Fall,” Chrysalis 8 (Summer 1979): 17–27; Debra Herman, “College and After: The Vassar Experiment in Women’s Education, 1861–1924” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1979); Patricia A. Palmieri, “Here Was Fellowship: A Social Portrait of Academic Women at Wellesley College, 1895–1920,” History of Education Quarterly 23 (Summer 1983): 194–214; Jeanine M. Paquin, “Redefining Love, Friendship, and Sexuality: Women’s Relationships at Women’s Colleges, 1890–1920” (master’s thesis, School of Social Science, Hampshire College, 1993), pp. 48–49; and Mary Jo Deegan, ‘“Dear Love, Dear Love’: Feminist Pragmatism and the Chicago World of Love and Ritual,” Gender and Society 10, no. 5 (Oct. 1996): 590–607.

Judith Schwarz has written very feelingly of the relationship between Katharine Lee Bates and Katharine Coman in “Yellow Clover: Katharine Lee Bates and Katharine Coman,” Frontiers 4, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 59–67. See also Bates’s poems memorializing their relationship, written after Coman’s death: Yellow Clover: A Book of Remembrance (New York: Dutton, 1922). Vida Scudder’s relationship with Florence Converse is discussed in Nan Bauer Maglin, “Vida to Florence: ‘Comrade and Companion,’” Frontiers 4, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 13–20. Helen Hull and Mabel Robinson, who met when teaching at Wellesley and went on to teach at Columbia University, are discussed in Judith Schwarz, Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village, 1912–1940 (Norwich, Vt.: New Victoria, 1986), pp. 36–39.

Copies of Hull’s papers, held at Columbia University, can be found in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, New York. A number of Sophie Jewett’s lesbian poems have recently been reprinted in Paula Bernat Bennett, ed., Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 333–40.

 

175 [At Smith College]: Alice Stone Blackwell to Kitty Blackwell, Mar. 12, 1882, reel 16, Blackwell Family Papers, LC.
As one clergyman: Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (New York: Scribner’s, 1923), pp. 10–11.

176 “distinctive profession”: Catharine E. Beecher, “How to Bedeem Woman’s Profession from Dishonor,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 31 (1865). See also Mae Elizabeth Harveson, Catharine Esther Beecher: Pioneer Educator (1932; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1969).
In the decades: Southern women’s colleges are discussed in Elizabeth Seymour Eschbach, The Higher Education of Women in England and America, 1865–1920 (New York: Garland, 1993), chap. 3.

176 Like Catharine: In her Prospectus: Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1837), Lyon states, “It is no part of the design of this seminary to teach young ladies domestic work.” She does concede that “this branch of education is exceedingly important”; however, “a literary institution is not the place to gain it”; Reel 2, Mary Lyon Papers, MHC.

177 “the outstanding”: Marion Lansing, Mary Lyon Through Her Letters (Boston: Books, 1937), p. 28. Lansing is at great pains to deny the emotional significance of the relationship between Lyon and Grant, though she admits that she omitted from this collection “unimportant and repetitive” material such as the “many personal protestations of affection and loyalty” (p. ix). Compare Sarah D. Locke Stow, History of Mount Holyoke Seminary of South Hadley During the First Half Century, 1837–1887 (South Hadley, Mass.: Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, 1887), pp. 30–67 passim, which does not diminish the importance of the relationship.
“I love Miss Grant’s”: Quoted in Edward Hitchcock, The Power of Christian Benevolence Illustrated in the Life and Labors of Mary Lyon (Northampton, Mass.: Hopkins, Brigman, 1852), pp. 53–54.
“My heart”: Mary Lyon to Miss White, Feb. 26, 1834, series A, subseries 3, Mary Lyon Collection, MHC.
“I have to bid”: Ibid, Aug. 1, 1834.
“show at what sacrifice”: Stow, History, p. 37.

178 “a difference”: Mary Lyon, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (South Hadley, Mass.: Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, 1835), pp. 4–5.
“educators”: Mary Lyon, “General View of the Principles and Designs of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary,” February 1837, reel 2, Lyon Papers. I agree with Tiziana Rota’s observation that although Lyon had to compromise on her articulated views because she believed the seminary “had to be accepted by the general public,” the training she established was nevertheless “subversively masculine”; see “Between ‘True Women’ and ‘New Women’: Mount Holyoke Students, 1837 to 1908” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1983), p. 6.
“mental hermaphrodites”: Harry F. Harrington, “Female Education,” Ladies’ Companion 9 (1838): 293.
“principles and design”: Quoted in Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 58.
“to prepare them”: Katherine Lydigsen Herbig, “Friends for Freedom: The Lives and Careers of Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam” (Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1977), p. 70. Regardless of such attempts to control women at Oberlin, their education led them to ideas that were often rebellious. For example, in the 1840s and ’50s the Young Ladies Association of Oberlin College conducted debates on such subjects as “Is married life more conducive to a woman’s happiness than single?” and “Is the marriage relation . . . essential to the happiness of mankind?” See Lee Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, A Better Husband: Single Women in America, the Generations of 1780–1840, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 15.

179 “It is a thing”: Herbig, “Friends,” p. 70.
“What can I do?”: Lizzie Bates, Woman: Her Dignity and Sphere (New York: American Tract Society, 1870), p. 7.

181 “my darling Hattie”: Quoted in Florence Matilda Read, The Story of Spelman College (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 16.
“a woman of powerful”: Quoted in ibid., pp. 22–23.
“to train the intellect”: Ibid., p. 192.

182 “Who will bake”: W. I. Thomas, “The Older and Newer Ideals of Marriage,” American Magazine (Apr. 1909): 548–52.

183 “when sitting”: M. Carey Thomas, “Present Tendencies in Women’s College and University Education,” AAUW Journal 3, no. 17 (Feb. 1908): 46.
Spinsterhood was especially: See Mary Cookingham, “Bluestockings, Spinsters, and Pedagogues: Women College Graduates, 1865–1910,” Population Studies 38 (November 1984): 360.

184 Thirty-two percent: Roberta Frankfort, Collegiate Women: Domesticity and Career in Turn-of-the-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1977), tables 13 and 14.
Of Bryn Mawr: Statistics compiled from Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), table 4, and Daniel Scott Smith, “Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America,” in Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner, eds., Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women (New York: Harper and Row), table 1.
Women who received: Of the 229 women who attained Ph.D.’s in the nineteenth century, only 16 married; of the 1025 women who attained Ph.D.’s by 1924, only 20 percent married. See Solomon, In the Company, pp. 137–38; Emily J. Hutchinson, Women and the Ph.D. (Greensboro: North Carolina College for Women, 1930), pp. 117–18. Even by 1970, it was very difficult for women to combine serious academic work “with the spouse role.” See Saul D. Feldman, Escape from the Doll’s House: Women in Graduate and Professional School Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), pp. 125, 131.

184 “It is considered”: Lucy Salmon to the Learned Six, Oct. 16, 1887, Lucy Salmon Papers, VC.

185 “0 beautiful chapel”: Lucy Salmon to the Learned Six, Oct. 19, 1887, ibid,
“porch covered”: Elsie Rushmore, “In Memory of Lucy Maynard Salmon,” Vassar Quarterly, July 1932, clipping, Underhill biographical file, folder 1, VC.

186 “You . . . were”: Margaret [cousin of Lucy Salmon] to Adelaide Underhill, Feb. 20, 1927, Salmon Papers. See also Louise Fargo Brown, Apostle of Democracy: The Life of Lucy Salmon (New York: Harper and Bros, 1943).
“Russian blouse and bloomers”: “A Fraulein Not Forgotten,” [New York] Evening Post, Nov. 1, 1908, clipping, Wenckebach Papers, VC.

187 “suited her well”: Eliza H. Kendrick, “Recollections of Miss Wenckebach’s Student Days,” In Memoriam: Carla Wenckebach, reprinted from Wellesley Magazine, February 1903, and College News, February 27, 1903.
“the center of”: “Fraulein Not Forgotten.”
“neat cut-away coat”: Rose Chamberlin, “The True Womanly Woman,” box 35, folder 3, Salmon Papers, “she maintains”: Ibid.

188 “more or less lacking”: Quoted in Elaine Kendall, “Peculiar Institutions”: An Informal History of the Seven Sister Colleges (New York: Putnam, 1976), p. 128.
“My father”: Quoted in Linda M. Perkins, “The Education of Black Women in the Nineteenth Century,” in John Mack Faragher and Florence Howe, eds. Women and Higher Education in American History: Essays from the Mount Holyoke College Sesquicentennial Symposium (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 84.

189 “I need no bells”: Quoted in Rosalind S. Cuomo, ‘“Very Special Circumstances’: Women’s Colleges and Women’s Friendships at the Turn of the Century” (master’s thesis, University of Massachusetts, 1988), p. 46.

190 “Miss Shipp”: Quoted in Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 152.
“Like the blue”: “My Lady of Dreams,” Newcomb Arcade (Jan. 1912), quoted in Katy Coyle and Nadiene Van Dyke, “Sex, Smashing, and Storyville in Turn-of-the-Century New Orleans,” in John Howard, ed, Carryin’ On in the Lesbian and Gay South (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 60.
“Can I tell you”: Gertrude Jones, “To One I Love,” in Cordelia C. Nevers, ed., Wellesley Lyrics: Poems Written by the Students and Graduates of Wellesley College (Boston: Frank Wood, 1896), p. in.

191 “I’m glad”: Quoted in Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 19.
“a mere forerunner”: Howard Chandler Christy, The American Girl as Seen and Portrayed by Howard Chandler Christy (1906; rpt. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976), pp. 46–47.
“New Women”: Quoted in Joyce Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 72.

192 “A woman needs”: Phebe Mitchell Kendall, Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters and Journals (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1896), p. 25. See also Mitchell’s diary, 1854–1857, in which she observes, “I have certainly some female friends who are strangely attracted to me, and the longer I live the more I do value the love of my own sex” (Nov. 14, [?]). In a December 5, [?], entry, Mitchell distinguishes between her feeling for Susie, which is “as one loves a sister,” and her feeling for Ida: “I am jealous of her regard for others—it is something like love and less generous than that which I have for Susie, which is affection”; Maria Mitchell Papers, APS. Patricia Palmieri discusses the term “Wellesley marriage” in “Here Was Fellowship,” p. 203, and Ethel Puffer Howes in In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 96.
“Men think”: Quoted in Dorothy Burgess, Dream and Deed: The Story of Katharine Lee Bates (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952), p. 4. “sternly nip[ped]”: Quoted in Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, p. 99.

193 “I want you”: Katharine Lee Bates to Katharine Coman, n.d. [ca. Aug. 1898], Katharine Lee Bates Papers, Wellesley College Archives. Dorothy Burgess, who was Bates’s niece, expurgated her discussion of the relationship between Bates and Coman in Dream and Deed. For example, she altered (pp. 88–91) the most revealing extant letter that Bates wrote to Coman (Feb. 28, 1891), in which Bates, in England, promises to return to Wellesley after a year’s leave. Burgess never indicated where she expurgated telling phrases or added words that were not in the original. On the letter itself, now in the Wellesley College Archives, Burgess placed in parentheses what she would leave out [or add] when she quoted it in Dream and Deed: for example, “It was never very possible to leave Wellesley, because so many (love) anchors held me there, and (it seemed least of all possible when I just found the long-desired way to your dearest heart. Resides) I knew that [President] Shafer tho’t it dishonorable in a teacher not to return, if she could, after a year of leave.” Burgess’s obvious motive was to hide what would have been recognized in 1952 as lesbian love declarations.

193 “The work of men”: Quoted in Elaine M. Smith, “Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Youth Administration,” in Mabel E. Deutrich and Virginia Purdy, eds, Clio Was a Woman: Studies in the History of American Women (Washington, D.C.: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 149.
“marriage and family”: Elaine M. Smith, “Mary McLeod Bethune,” in Jessie Carney Smith, ed. Notable Black American Women (Detroit: Gale Research, 1992).
“The male attitude”: Anonymous, “Confessions of a Woman Professor,” quoted in Penina Migdal Glazer and Miriam Slater, Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of Women into the Professions, 1890–1940 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 59.

194 “distressed to see”: Caroline Hazard, ed. An Academic Courtship: Letters of Alice Freeman and George Herbert Palmer, 1886–1887 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940), p. 5.
“power/As I”: Alice Freeman Palmer, A Marriage Cycle, ed. George Palmer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), p. 3.
“Perhaps”: Hazard, An Academic Courtship, p. 6. “Then as a little girl”: Ibid, p. 7.

195 “Great love”: Palmer, Marriage Cycle, p. 24.
“If I marry”: Quoted in Joyce Antler, “Was She a Good Mother?” in Barbara Harris and JoAnn McNamara, eds. Women and the Social Structure (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984), p. 57.
“You have lived”: Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, p. 168.
“You would not have to”: Antler, “Was She,” p. 58.

 

11. MAKING WOMEN’S HIGHER EDUCATION EVEN HIGHER: M. CAREY THOMAS

 

Thomas’s voluminous papers, which are available on microfilm at Bryn Mawr College, are indexed with useful descriptions of the contents of each reel in Lucy Fisher West, The Papers of M. Carey Thomas in the Bryn Maxvr College Archives: Reel Guide and Index to the Microfilm Collection (Woodbridge, Conn.: Research Publications, 1982).

Gertrude Stein fictionalized the Thomas-Gwinn-Hodder triangle in Fernhurst (1904; rpt. Fernhurst, QED, and Other Stories, New York: Liveright, 1971). The triangle is also discussed in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1872–1914, vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 194–95. (Russell was Thomas’s cousin by marriage.)

Useful discussions of the Bryn Mawr Summer School can be found in Rita Heller, “Blue Collars and Bluestockings: The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1921–1938,” in Joyce L. Kornbluh and Mary Frederickson, eds., Sisterhood and Solidarity: Workers Education for Women, 1914–1984. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), pp. 107–45, and Joyce L. Kornbluh, A New Deal for Workers’ Education: The Workers’ Service Program, 1933–1942 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

 

197 “If only it were”: M. Carey Thomas to Mary Whitall Thomas, Nov. 21, 1880, reel 31, M. Carey Thomas Papers, BMC.

198 “unusually good”: M. Carey Thomas to Dr. James B. Bhoads, Aug. 14, 1883, ibid.
“solid and scientific”: Ibid.

199 “Oh my”: M. Carey Thomas, diary, Jan. 6, 1871, reel 1, Thomas Papers.
“Min says”: Hannah Whitall Smith to Mary Whitall Thomas, n.d. [Summer 1863], ibid.
If she had been: See my discussion of working-class women who passed as men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 41–45.

200 “I greatly prefer”: M. Carey Thomas, diary, Nov. 26, 1870, reel 1, Thomas Papers.
“Go ahead”: Ibid., Jan. 23, 1872.
“one aim”: Ibid., Feb. 26, 1871.
“I shall fail”: Ibid., Feb. 22, 1878, reel 2.

201 “and when I go”: Ibid., Mar. 24, 1878.
“To think”: Mamie Gwinn to M. Carey Thomas, Mar. [?], 1882, reel 53, Thomas Papers. Though Thomas left many papers that revealed her lesbianism, she did censor some material. For example, there is a hiatus in her journals from 1879 to early 1885. When the journal resumed, on Feb. 2, 1885, she wrote that she would describe in the pages to follow what she considered “an experience and a madness, a temptation and a delusion.” But many of those pages were destroyed: the journal skips from p. 77 to p. 82, and then again to p. 128. See reel 2, Thomas Papers.

202 “Yes, dear love”: Quoted in Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 105.
She blamed herself: Thomas wrote to her aunt, Hannah Whitall Smith, that if she had not been appointed president, it would have been to her “a sign that I could set my wings for an attic in Paris and Bohemia”; Mar. 11, 1894, reel 29, Thomas Papers.

203 “the Cause”: Ibid.
“elegant times”: M. Carey Thomas, diary, Feb. 13, 1878, reel 12, Thomas Papers.
“I am devoted”: M. Carey Thomas, diary, Aug. 25, 1878, reel 2, Thomas Papers.
“take you in my arms”: M. Carey Thomas to Mary Garrett, Aug. 9, 1893, reel 17, Thomas Papers.
“my lips”: Ibid, [Oct. ?], 1893. After Julia’s departure, Mary went to stay with Carey at every opportunity, whenever Mamie was gone from the Deanery. For many years, Carey balanced her two loves, never denying the importance of both in her life. She wrote to Mary: “To have such a charming thing have happened as our caring for each other, when my love for Mamie and hers for me is really as much as one lifetime deserves”; Mar. 5, 1893, ibid.

204 “That chained woman”: Mary Garrett to M. Carey Thomas, Aug. 30, 1892, reel 43, Thomas Papers.
“Whenever Miss M. Carey Thomas”: Quoted in Edith Finch, Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), p. 209.
“the power and opportunities”: Ibid.

205 “‘smashed’ on each other”: M. Carey Thomas, diary, Spring 1873, reel 1, Thomas Papers.
“we are carried”: Ibid, Feb. 22, 1878, reel 2.

206 “clasped hands”: Ibid.

207 “the materials”: Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Nous Autres: Reading, Passion, and the Creation of M. Carey Thomas, “Journal of American History 79 (June—Sept. 1992): 72.
“bizarre”: M. Carey Thomas to Margaret Hicks, Mar. 9, 1879, reel 32, Thomas Papers.

208 “frenzied mirth”: Charles Baudelaire, “Lesbos,” in The Flowers of Evil, trans. P. J. W. Higson and Elliot R. Ashe (Cestrian Press, 1975), p. 122.
“wretched victims”: Ibid., “Delphinia and Hippolyta,” p. 156.
“devotion”: See M. Carey Thomas, diary, Aug. 25, 1878, reel 2; M. Carey Thomas to Mary Whitall Thomas, Nov. 14, 1882, reel 32; and M. Carey Thomas to Mary Garrett, Nov. 11, 1887, reel 15, all in Thomas Papers. More rarely, gossiping with Mary Garrett, Thomas used language that may have been more descriptive; for instance, she referred to Lady Henry Somerset and Frances Willard, who were in the throes of a relationship in England (Anna Gordon was back in Illinois), as “our lovers”; M. Carey Thomas to Mary Garrett, Feb. 13, 1895, reel 18, Thomas Papers.
“vile”: Quoted in Marjorie Housepian Dobkins, ed. The Making of a Feminist: Early Journals and Letters of M. Carey Thomas (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979), p. 87.
“It is difficult”: M. Carey Thomas, diary, Feb. 13, 1878, reel 2, Thomas Papers.
Through her lesbian: Among Thomas’s papers is a letter to The Woman Leader, written probably after The Well of Loneliness was reviewed, that refers to “yearning” that is “the multiple and complicated need of a complex human being.” Many women could satisfy that yearning, the letter states, “with equal success through man or woman”; quoted in Dobkins, Making of a Feminist, p. 86. Thomas reported to Mary Garrett that reading a reprint of Samuel Tissot’s 1758 book Onanism: A Treatise Upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation had answered for her “all questions raised by French novels.” She was undoubtedly referring to Tissot’s discussion of mutual clitoral masturbation and his observation that such exchanges caused “women to love other women with as much fondness and jealousy as they did men”; M. Carey Thomas to Mary Garrett, Aug. 27, 1895, reel 19, Thomas Papers.

209 “as well known”: M. Carey Thomas, “Notes for the Opening Address of Bryn Mawr College, 1899,” in Barbara Cross, ed., The Educated Woman in America (New York: Teachers’ College Press of Columbia University, 1965), p. 140.
Sixty-one percent: Roberta Frankfort, Collegiate Women: Domesticity and Career in Turn-of-the-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1977), pp. 75–78.
“had set out”: Quoted in Horowitz, Power and Passion, p. 197.

210 “Women scholars”: Thomas, “Present Tendencies,” p. 60.
“Amazonian”: G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. 2 (New York: Appleton, 1904), p. 595.

211 “schools of manners”: M. Carey Thomas to Mary Garrett, Oct. 3, 1899, reel 21, Thomas Papers.
“What is the best”: M. Carey Thomas, “Should the Higher Education of Women Differ from That of Men?” Educational Review 31 (1901): 1.
“aims”: Laurence Vesey, “Martha Carey Thomas,” in Edward T. James et al., eds., Notable American Women, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 448.
“young women”: Quoted in Hilda Worthington Smith, Women Workers at the Bryn Mawr Summer School (New York: Affiliated Schools for Women Workers, 1929), p. 4.

212 “to barter”: Thomas, “Present Tendencies,” p. 54.

213 Between 1909 and 1918: Frankfort, Collegiate Women, p. 73.
“find their greatest”: M. Carey Thomas, “The Future of Woman’s Higher Education,” Mount Holyoke College: The 75th Anniversary (South Hadley, Mass, 1913), pp. 100–104.

214 “Until women”: M. Carey Thomas to Mary Whitall Thomas, Oct. 8, 1881, reel 31, Thomas Papers.
“is so absolutely”: Mary Garrett to M. Carey Thomas, May 1, 1894, reel 44, ibid.

215 “yearning”: Quoted in Dobkins, Making of a Feminist, p. 86.
“there was no hope”: M. Carey Thomas to Simon Flexner, July 10, 1914, M. Carey Thomas Collection, Flexner Papers, APS. Thomas’s relationship with this Jewish brother-in-law, whom she loved and trusted, poses another provocative contradiction to her troubling anti-Semitism.

216 “after Mary’s death”: Quoted in Horowitz, Power and Passion, p. 409.

“strenuous intellectual”: M. Carey Thomas, “The Curriculum of the Women’s College—Old Fashioned Disciplines,” Journal of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae 10 (May 1917).
“the functions”: Hall, Adolescence, chap. 2.
“I have forgotten”: Quoted in Cross, Educated Woman, p. 37.

 

12. THE STRUGGLE TO MAINTAIN WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP: MARY EMMA WOOLLEY

 

Valuable studies of Mary Woolley’s role at Mount Holyoke College include Francis Lester Ward, On a New England Campus (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937); Arthur C. Cole, A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College: The Evolution of an Educational Ideal (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1940); Mabel Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education for Women (New York: Harper and Row, 1959); Elaine Kendall, “Peculiar Institutions”: An Informal History of the Seven Sister Colleges (New York: Putnam, 1976); Tiziana Rota, “Between ‘True Women’ and ‘New Women’: Mount Holyoke Students, 1837 to 1908” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1983); Cynthia Farr Brown, “Leading Women: Female Leadership in American Women’s Higher Education” (Ph.D. dissertation, Brandeis University, 1992); and Ann Karus Meeropol, “A Practical Visionary: Mary Emma Woolley and the Education of Women” (Ed.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1992).

217 “Oh! My dear”: Mary Woolley to Jeannette Marks, April 1900, Mary Woolley Papers, MHC.

218 Of the thirty-seven: M. Carey Thomas, “Education of Women,” in Nicholas Murray Butler, ed., Monographs on Education in the United States, vol. 1 (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1900), 319–58.
“grounded in reality”: Mary Woolley, inaugural address, May 15, 1901, The Mount Holyoke, inauguration no. [May 5, 1901], pp. 8–15, MHC.
“among all sorts”: Ibid.

219 “ability in leadership”: Ibid.

220 “a member of a sex”: Mary E. Woolley, speech to the woman suffrage convention honoring Susan B. Anthony, Baltimore, Md., Feb. 8, 1906, Woolley Papers.
“a man would”: Mary E. Woolley, “Some Results of Higher Education for Women,” Harper’s Bazaar 43 (1909): 586–89.

221 “those coldly intellectual”: editorial, The Brunonian, quoted in Anna Mary Wells, Miss Marks and Miss Woolley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), pp. 38–39.
“not to ‘seem’”: Jeannette Marks, Life and Letters of Mary Emma Woolley (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1955), p. 39.

222 “a good figure”: Springfield Republican, Jan. 18, 1900, clipping, Woolley Papers.

223 “young and vigorous”: Marks, Life and Letters, p. 46.
“like a poet”: Quoted in Mary Woolley to Jeannette Marks, Oct. 3, 1910, Woolley Papers.
“Dearest, I thought”: Mary Woolley to Jeannette Marks, n.d., folder of undated letters, “1898–1900,” Woolley-Marks correspondence, Woolley Papers.

224 “my heart’s great”: Ibid., Aug. 28, 1900.

224 “to lavish”: Ibid, Aug. 20, 1900.
“May, I want”: Jeannette Marks to Mary Woolley, Apr. 6, 1905, ibid. Marks understood how the letters would be read when she debated whether to deposit them in the Mount Holyoke College Archives; see, for example, her letter to the Wellesley librarian Hannah French, a sympathetic friend, May 1, 1956, Special Collections, WC Library. In choosing to give the love letters to the archives, she knew very well that she was preserving a bit of lesbian history.

225 “Just think”: Mary Woolley to Jeannette Marks, Aug. 18, 1900, Wooley Papers.
“As I look”: Ibid, July 13, 1900. Wells (Miss Marks and Miss Woolley) presents Woolley’s love for Marks as a tragic flaw in the life of an otherwise wholly admirable individual. Meeropol (“Practical Visionary”) is far more persuasive in her reasoned observation that “Woolley and Marks functioned at a remarkably high level professionally throughout their long lives, an achievement attributable in part to the emotional sustenance of their relationship” (p. 301).

226 “The demands of the home”: Mary Woolley, “The College Woman’s Place in the World,” Oct. 16, 1908, speech 44, Woolley Papers.

227 “Your success”: Mary Woolley to Jeannette Marks, Apr. 7, 1905, Woolley Papers.
“No stone”: Ibid, Oct. 3, 1910.
“one of the twelve”: Good Housekeeping, Mar. 1931, pp. 200–204.

228 “I can picture”: Mary Woolley to Jeannette Marks, Oct. 1, 1901, Woolley Papers.
“The week has been”: Ibid, Oct. 3, 1901.
“with some amusement”: Susan Stifler, interview by Elizabeth Green, May 1972, in Mount Holyoke in the Twentieth Century, transcript of oral history, vol. 10, pp. 2–3, Special Collections, MHC.
“as everyone else”: Viola Barnes, interview by Elizabeth Green, ibid, vol. 3, pp. 3, 1–2.

229 “My anxiety”: Mary Woolley to Jeannette Marks, Oct. 21, 1910, Woolley Papers.

230 “a feministic”: Mary Woolley, “The Woman’s College,” quoted in Marks, Life and Letters, p. 80.

231 “You are the one”: M. Carey Thomas to Mary Woolley, June 28, 1913, Woolley Papers.

233 “If Jeannette”: See Wells, Miss Marks and Miss Wolley, p. 169.
“the best person”: See Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in Women’s Colleges from their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 304.

234 “If the college”: Quoted in Meeropol, “Practical Visionary,” pp. 341–42.

235 “get [the college]”: “Dr. Woolley Opposes Male Successor,” Newsweek, Feb. 13, 1937.
“Mr. Ham’s big”: Quoted in “What Would Mary Lyon Say?” Boston Sunday Globe, Feb. 7, 1937, p. 1.
Not only did: Penina Migdal Glazer and Miriam Slater discuss the ways in which Ham changed the composition of the faculty, specifically reversing departmental nominations of women in favor of men because he felt that “there were too many older women at the college and . . . any new appointment should go to a younger man”; Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of Women into the Professions, 1890–1940 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Butgers University Press, 1987), pp. 259–60n. History professor Margaret Judson, who was refused an appointment on such grounds in 1941, discusses the incident in Breaking the Barrier: A Professional Autobiography by a Woman Educator and Historian Before the Women’s Movement (New Brunswick, N.J.: Butgers University Press, 1984), pp. 75–76.

236 “Jeannette writes”: Quoted in Jeannette Marks to Martha Shackford, Oct. 1, 1955, WC.

 

13. THE TRIUMPH OF ANGELINA: EDUCATION IN FEMININITY

 

Attitudes toward women’s education at mid-century may be gleaned from George Stoddard, On the Education of Women (New York: Macmillan, 1950); Louis W. Norris, “How to Educate a Woman,” Saturday Review, Nov. 27, 1954, p. 40ff.; and Dorothy D. Lee, “What Shall We Teach Women?” Mademoiselle (Aug. 1947): p. 213ff.

The shift in views of women’s education is well traced in Roberta Frankfort, Collegiate Women: Domesticity and Career in Turn-of-the-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1977), and Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985).

 

237 “Nine [professors]”: Quoted in Trisha Franzen, Spinsters and Lesbians: Independent Womanhood in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 139–40.

237 “Women as a whole”: Charles W. Eliot, Charles W. Eliot: The Man and His Beliefs (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1926), p. 167.

238 “equal education”: Dehra Herman, “College and After: The Vassar Experiment in Women’s Education, 1861–1924” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1979), p. 334.
“little thought”: Robert Foster and Pauline Wilson, Women After College (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), p. 239.
In 1920: Jessie Bernard, Academic Women (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964), p. 40, and Cynthia Fuchs Eppstein, Options and Limits in Professional Careers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 200–201. See also Susan B. Carter, “Academic Women Revisited: An Empirical Study of Changing Patterns in Women’s Employment as College and University Faculty, 1890–1963,” Journal of Social History 14 (Summer 1981): 675–95. Carter argues that the spread of coeducation opened many more jobs for women, but acknowledges that within these coeducational institutions “women’s academic employment has been restricted to the lowest rungs of the hierarchy” (p. 690).
For example, at Smith: Penina Migdal Glazer and Miriam Slater, Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of Women into the Professions, 1890–1940 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 260–61. Anecdotal information corroborates the statistics. For example, in a 1919 article, Helen Hughes talked about her personal experiences with a department that had virtually hired her and then reversed its decision when a man became available. As the chairman admitted, “We prefer to appoint a man.” See “The Academic Chance,” Journal of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae 12, no. 2 (Jan. 1919). Boswell Ham’s blatant discrimination against women at Mount Holyoke is described in Mary Woolley to Belle Ferris, Feb. 6, 1942, Woolley Papers; Woolley quotes a New York Times article that reported on eight hirings: four men, all in professorial ranks; four women, all in instructor rank.

239 The decrease: See Brown, “Leading Women,” p. 15.
“prevailing view”: Radcliffe Alumnae Report, Class of 1952 (1977), quoted in Wini Breines, Young, White and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 193.

240 “who yearns”: John W. Meagher, “Homosexuality: Its Psychobiological and Psychopathological Significance,” Urological and Cutaneous Review 33 (Aug. 1929): 508.

241 “homosexuality among women”: Carl Jung, “The Love Problem in the Student” (1928), in John Francis McDermott, ed. The Sex Problem in Modern Society (New York: Modern Library, 1931), pp. 327–47.

242 A 1923 survey: Cited in Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 322.
“turned their backs”: Bernard, Academic Women, p. 215.
“thought with the founders”: Worth Tuttle, “Autobiography of an Ex-Feminist,” Part I, Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1933, p. 641.

243 “handful of eager”: Quoted in Horowitz, Alma Mater, p. 284. In fact: Newcomer, Century of Higher Education.
By the end: Ibid.

244 But by 1930: Patricia Graham, “Expansion and Exclusion: A History of Women in American Higher Education,” Signs 3 (1978): 764–65. Frank Strieker has attempted to counter figures such as these by pointing out that though women failed to keep up with men proportionally, the number of doctorates they were awarded during these years continued to increase. See “Cookbooks and Law Books: A Hidden History of Career Women in Twentieth Century America,” Journal of Social History 10 (Fall 1976): 1–19.
Of 1025 women: Emily J. Hutchinson, Women and the Ph.D. (Greensboro: North Carolina College for Women, 1930). In a mid-century study of women who won fellowship support in graduate school, the authors were surprised to discover that “the proportion of single women in [this] group is much greater than in the population as a whole” (p. 189) and that 84 percent of the single women said that they were “satisfied with [their] personal life” (p. 134); Eli Ginzberg et al., Life Styles of Educated Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). Fifty-five percent: Helen Astin, The Woman Doctorate in America: Origins, Career, and Family (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1969), pp. 26, 101–2.

245 In fact, only: Glazer and Slater, Unequal Colleagues, p. 254n
“an air”: Eva von Baur Hansl, “Parenthood and the College,” Journal of the AAUW 15, no. 2 (1922): 44.
“threw off”: Clarence Little, “Women in College Administration” (1928), quoted in Brown, “Leading Women,” pp. 444–45.

246 “The estate”: Lorraine Hansberry, letter to the editor, The Ladder 1, no. 1 (Aug. 1957): 28. The Ladder’s editor, Barbara Grier, identified the anonymous letter as having been written by Hansberry in “Lesbiana,” The Ladder 14, no. 5–6 (Feb.–Mar. 1970).
“I don’t believe”: Quoted in Anne MacKay, Wolf Girls at Vassar: Lesbian and Gay Experiences, 1930–1990 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 16. Binger did not, in fact, have much to worry about with regard to the lesbian influence of Vassar’s leaders. The general ethos of the era guaranteed that most students would choose heterosexual domesticity. The Mellon survey of Vassar women, which was published in 1956 (Donald Brown, Journal of Social Studies), concluded that Vassar students were “overwhelmingly ‘future family oriented,’” and elected to take courses primarily that would “enrich family life”; quoted in Elaine Kendall, “Peculiar Institutions”: An Informal History’ of the Seven Sister Colleges (New York: Putnam, 1976), p. 219.

247 “It is of great”: Annual Report of Dean Gildersleeve of Barnard College (New York: Barnard College, 1932), p. 7.
“almost always”: Quoted in Brown, “Leading Women,” p. 445.

248 “There was an old maid”: Anonymous, “Down with English,” Mount Holyoke Magazine, Spring 1920.
College women thus chose: Clyde V. Kiser et al. Trends and Variations in Fertility in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 148–49.
“whether or not”: Dorothy Bromley and Florence Haxton Britten, Youth and Sex: A Study of 1300 College Students (New York: Harper and Row, 1938), p. 129.
In their study: Ibid, p. 117.

249 In Davis’s study: Katharine Bement Davis, Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women (New York: Harper and Row, 1929), pp. 246–48.
As a further: Bromley and Britten, Youth and Sex, p. 120. “they frequently”: Ibid, pp. 129–30.

250 “I felt passionately”: Quoted in MacKay, Wolf Girls, pp. 23–24.
“attraction of colleges”: Milton E. Hahn and Byron H. Atkinson, “The Sexually Deviant Student,” School and Society 82 (Sept. 17, 1955): 85.
“if I didn’t”: Quoted in MacKay, Wolf Girls, p. 16.

251 According to a recent: Margaret M. Caffrey, Ruth Benedict: Stranger in this Land (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989).

 

14. “WHEN MORE WOMEN ENTER PROFESSIONS”: LESBIAN PIONEERING IN THE LEARNED PROFESSIONS

 

Useful general histories of women in medicine include Mary Roth Walsh, Doctors Wanted—No Women Need Apply: Social Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835–1975 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), and Ruth J. Abram, ed, “Send Us a Lady Physician”: Women Doctors in America, 1835–1920 (New York: Norton, 1985). The most complete biography of Dr. Mary Walker is Charles McCool Snyder’s Dr. Mary Walker: The Little Lady in Pants (New York: Vantage, 1962); also see Elizabeth Leonard, Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War (New York: Norton, 1994). S. Josephine Baker’s Fighting for Life (New York: Macmillan, 1939) is a good autobiographical account of a female doctor in the early twentieth century, though Baker veils her lesbianism. Dr. Eliza Mosher’s series for the Medical Woman’s Journal, “The History of American Medical Women,” generally acknowledged the “devoted companions” of the doctors on whom she focused. See, for instance, Jan. 1924, pp. 14–16, on Dr. Mary Smith, whose relationship with Dr. Emma Culbertson is discussed, and on Dr. Chloe Annette Buckell and her “beloved friend,” Charlotte Playter; and Oct. 1922, pp. 253–59, in which Mosher discusses herself and Lucy Hall.

Ionia Whipper is discussed in Carole Ione, Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color (New York: Summit Books, 1991). For information about Charlotte Bay, see the Woman’s Journal, May 25, 1872, p. 161ff.; Phebe A. Hanaford, Daughters of America (Augusta, Ga.: True, 1882); Sadie T. M. Alexander, “Women as Practitioners of Law in the United States,” National Bar Journal (July 1941); and Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in America (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1993), p. 965.

Karen Berger Morello’s The Invisible Bar: The Woman Lawyer in America, 1638 to the Present (New York: Random House, 1986), is a good general history of female lawyers.

 

255 “Dr. Culbertson”: M. Carey Thomas to Mary Whitall Thomas, Nov. 14, 1882, reel 32, M. Carey Thomas Papers, BMC.

256 “the cult of true”: See Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” in Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 21–41, and Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989).
“the privilege”: Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 13.
“a woman who has”: Quoted in Gloria Moldow, Women Doctors in Gilded Age Washington: Race, Gender, and Professionalization (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 33. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg demonstrates the connection between the New Woman and the lesbian in “The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and the Gender Crisis, 1870–1936,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985). See also my chapter “New Women” in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981).

257 “You give me”: Quoted in Agnes C. Victor, ed, A Woman’s Quest: The Life of Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. (1924; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1972), pp. 140–41.
“with them: Ibid, pp. 7–8, 22.
258 Even by 1900: Marriage statistics for 1900 and 1920 in William Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles (New York; Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 219–20, and Lynn Y. Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 4, 6.
For example: Frances Bryan, “Occupations of Vassar Women,” Vassar Quarterly (Feb. 1932), pp. 26–29. Bryan found that only 21 percent of Vassar graduates were both “married and gainfully employed.”

259 “the most distinguished”: R. W. Shufeldt, “Dr. Havelock Ellis on Sexual Inversion,” Pacific Medical Journal 45 (1902): 201.
By 1870: See Mabel Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education for Women (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), pp. n-15, and Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: New Viewpoints, 1979), pp. 85–89.

260 “Well did she know”: a Willystine Goodsell, ed. Pioneers of Women’s Education in the United States: Emma Willard, Catharine Beecher, Mary Lyon (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931),pp. 131–32.

261 “froward females”: Quoted in Lillian O’Connor, Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the Ante-Bellum Reform Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), p. 32.
Antoinette Brown: The relationship between Brown and Stone is discussed in Andrew Sinclair, The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 155–58. As Sinclair phrases it, “At Oberlin, Antoinette Brown fell in love with Lucy Stone, with all the passion and sentimental license possible between women of the time, before they learned to question their subconscious motives” (p. 155). Jonathan Katz quotes from their love letters in Gay American History (New York: Crowell, 1976), p. 644.
“Paul said”: Anna Howard Shaw, The Story of a Pioneer (1915; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1929), pp. 126, 127.

262 “preaching a doctrine”: Joseph Hanaford to Phebe Hanaford, June 10, 1872, folder 2, Hanaford Papers, NHA.

263 “My loved one”: Ellen Miles to Phebe Hanaford, n.d. [early 1880s], folder 21, Hanaford Papers.
“the golden links”: Marietta Holley to Phebe Hanaford, Nov. 31, 1914, folder 20, Hanaford Papers. Letters from Frances Willard and Alice Stone Blackwell are also in this collection. Hanaford and Miles’s care of Anna Dickinson can be traced through letters in reel 6, Anna Dickinson Collection, Manuscript Division, LC: see, for instance, Feb. 8, Feb. 24, and Mar. 3, 1893.

264 “both physically”: Jean McMahon Humez, ed., Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), pp. 312–13.
“She was going east”: Ibid., p. 261.

265 “of all things”: Ibid., p. 17.
“unit[ing]”: Ibid., p. 252.
“crowned King”: Ibid., p. 308.
“I saw Rebecca”: Ibid,, p. 225.
“close relationship”: Ibid., p. 9.

266 As Eula Young: Eula H. Young, “The Law as a Profession for Women,” Publications of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, series III, no. 5 (Feb. 1902): 15–23.
In 1880: Ronald Chester, “Women Lawyers in the Urban Bar: An Oral History,” New England Law Review 18, no. 3 (1983): 522. Virginia G. Drachman says there were only seventy-five female lawyers in the United States in 1880; Women Lawyers and the Origins of Professional Identity in America: The Letters of the Equity Club, 1887 to 1890 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 2. “not a virtue”: Young, “The Law,” p. 19.

267 “The majority”: Quoted in Drachman, Women Lawyers, p. 27.
One law historian: Virginia Drachman, ‘“My Partner in Law and Life’: Marriage in the Lives of Women Lawyers in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century America,” Law and Social Inquiry 14 (1989). For example: See Chester, “Women Lawyers,” p. 521.

268 When Frances Kellor: See William Joseph Maxwell, “Frances Kellor in the Progressive Era: A Case Study in the Professionalization of Reform” (Ed.D. dissertation, Teachers’ College, Columbia University, 1968), on Perry’s influence on Kellor.

269 “made a mockery”: Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 30.

 

269 “gain complete”: Elizabeth Blackwell, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women: Autobiographical Sketches (1895; rpt. New York: Source Book Press, 1970), p. 61.
“[even] if no other”: Isabel Ross, Child of Destiny: The Life Story of the First Woman Doctor (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), p. 109.

270 “We . . . had looked”: Lilian Welsh, Reminiscences of Thirty Years in Baltimore (Baltimore: Norman, Remington, 1925), pp. 32–33.
“No woman”: Gertrude Baillie, “Should Professional Women Marry?” Woman’s Medical Journal 2 (Feb. 1894): 33.
In any case: Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, p. 137. Though no separate statistics have been gathered for pioneering African-American physicians, many of them also were unmarried. See Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in America (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1993), entries for Francis Kneeland, Matilda Evans, Rebecca Crumpler, May Edward Chinn, etc.

272 “The whole dreadful week”: Elizabeth Clark to Ada P. McCormick, n.d. [Jan. 1914], box 1, folder 7, Ada P. McCormick Papers, AUHS.

273 “I do not”: Florence Converse, Diana Victrix (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897), pp. 240–41, 339.

 

15. MAKING PLACES FOR WOMEN IN MEDICINE: EMILY BLACKWELL

 

An assessment of the Drs. Blackwell by their medical contemporaries can be found in Women’s Medical Association of New York, eds. In Memory of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and Dr. Emily Blackwell (New York: Academy of Medicine, 1911). Annie Sturgis Daniel’s “A Cautious Experiment: The History of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children and the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary,” Medical Women’s Journal 49 (Jan. 1942): 12–15, is an interesting mid-century account of their work.

My view of Elizabeth Blackwell is informed by Nancy Ann Salhi’s “Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D. (1821–1910): A Biography” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1974), as well as by the sources cited below.

 

274 “I have often thought”: Emily Blackwell, journal, July 16, 1853, reel 3, Blackwell Family Papers, SL.
“her [professional] desires”: Elizabeth M. Cushier, “In Memory of Dr. Emily Blackwell,” Woman’s Medical Journal (Apr. 1911): p. 88.

275 “strong-minded woman”: Emily Blackwell, journal, Oct. 1852, reel 3, Blackwell Family Papers.
“very persevering”: Ibid., June 15, 1851. “a something sprawling”: Ibid., Aug. 20, 1850.
“little womanly airs”: Emily Blackwell to Elizabeth Blackwell, Oct. 1858, box 11, folder 163, Blackwell Family Papers.
“idea of studying”: Emily Blackwell, journal, Dec. 15, 1852, reel 3, Blackwell Family Papers.

276 “tall, broad-shouldered”: Baker, Fighting for Life, pp. 34–35.
“study in disguise”: Emily Blackwell, journal, July 16, 1853, reel 3, Blackwell Family Papers. Until the 1870s, even in Paris a woman could not get a medical degree if it was known she was a female; see Haryett Fontage, Les femmes docteurs en medecine . . . (Paris: Alliance Cooperative du Livre, 1901).
“If we could”: Emily Blackwell to Elizabeth Blackwell, May 15, 1854, box 11, folder 163, Blackwell Family Papers.
“more under her control”: Emily Blackwell, journal, Jan. 9, 1853, reel 3, Blackwell Family Papers,
“the nature”: Ibid., Jan. 8, 1852.

277 “If I might”: Ibid., Jan. 6, 1852.

278 “They slept”: Quoted in Alice Stone Blackwell, “An Early Woman Physician,” Woman’s Journal, Oct. 6, 1906, p. 158.

279 “the first practical”: Elise S. L’Esperance, “Influence of the New York Infirmary on Women in Medicine,” Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association (June 1949): 258. Most historians of women in medicine have given short shrift to Emily Blackwell’s role in the Women’s Medical College and the New York Infirmary, since Elizabeth Blackwell captured the spotlight as the first female doctor and a founder of both those institutions. However, the Blackwells’ letters make clear the extent to which Emily was the sustaining force. See also Alice Stone Blackwell’s account in “An Early Woman Physician,” p. 1.

280 “friends”: Emily Blackwell, journal, Sept. 24, 1850, reel 3, Blackwell Family Papers.

281 “Whenever I became”: Elizabeth Blackwell, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (London: Longmans, Green, 1895), pp. 28, 185–86.

281 “utter social deadness”: Emily Blackwell to George Blackwell, June 15, 1871, box 11, folder 170, Blackwell Family Papers.
“The house would seem”: Emily Blackwell to Kitty Barry Blackwell, Nov. 14, 1871, box 11, folder 182, Blackwell Family Papers.

282 “How much”: Emily Blackwell to Elizabeth Blackwell, Oct. 21–24, 1881, reel 4, Blackwell Family Papers.
“As I walked”: Emily Blackwell, journal, Mar. 11, 1852, reel 3, Blackwell Family Papers.

283 “it for granted”: Emily Blackwell to Elizabeth Blackwell, Oct. 11, 1869, box 11, folder 164, Blackwell Family Papers.
“brought them”: Ibid, June 15–24, 1870.

284 “taxes my strength”: Ibid, Oct. 6, 1871.
“easy[,] indulgent”: Ibid, Oct. 11, 1869.

285 “We had a delightful”: Elizabeth B. Thelberg, ed, “Autobiography of Dr. Elizabeth Cushier,” Medical Review of Reviews 39, no. 3 (Mar. 1933): 126.
“with a hop”: Quoted in Elinor Hays, Those Extraordinary Blackwells: The Story of a Journey to a Better World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1967), p. 232.
“Much as I want”: Elizabeth Cushier to Emily Blackwell, [n.d.], box 13, folder 187, Blackwell Family Papers.
“it might be”: Emily Blackwell to Elizabeth Blackwell, Jan. 8, 1897, reel 4, Blackwell Family Papers.
“in 1887”: Thelberg, “Autobiography,” p. 127.

286 “marriages are so far”: Emily Blackwell, journal, Feb. 18, 1852, reel 3, Blackwell Family Papers.
“What I should”: Emily Blackwell to Elizabeth Blackwell, Nov. 22, 1894, box 11, folder 164, Blackwell Family Papers.

287 “What a difference”: Emily Blackwell to Elizabeth Blackwell, Jan. 8, 1897, reel 4, Blackwell Family Papers.
“would carry much more”: Ibid, Oct. 8, 1898.

288 “keep a certain”: Ibid.
“[Emily Blackwell]”: Baker, Fighting for Life, pp. 33–34.
“I feel”: Emily Blackwell to Elizabeth Blackwell, July 3, 1899, reel 4, Blackwell Family Papers.

289 “though I did not”: Thelberg, “Autobiography,” p. 128.
“Dr. Emily”: Alice Stone Blackwell, “Dr. Emily Blackwell,” Woman’s Journal, Oct. 6, 1906, pp. 13–14.
“We were fortunate”: Emily Blackwell to Elizabeth Blackwell, July 29, 1902, reel 4, Blackwell Family Papers.
“Thus the years”: Thelberg, “Autobiography,” p. 128.

290. “No woman”: Women’s Medical Association of New York, In Memory, p. 29.
“happy . . . companionship”: Alice Stone Blackwell, “Reminiscences of Dr. Emily Blackwell,” Woman’s Journal, Sept. 17, 1910, p. 152.

 

16. CARRYING ON: MARTHA MAY ELIOT, M.D.

 

Jacqueline K. Parker’s “Women at the Helm: Succession Politics at the Children’s Bureau, 1912–1968,” Social Work 39, no. 5 (Sept. 1994): 551–60, traces the leadership of the Children’s Bureau, including Martha Eliot and her predecessor, Katharine Lenroot, who, as Parker observes, also “shared her life with a female companion.” The trajectory of Eliot’s career is outlined in Jessie M. Bierman, “Martha May Eliot, M.D.,” Clinical Pediatrics 5, no. 9 (Sept. 1966): 569–78.

291 “It is dangerous”: John Meagher, “Homosexuality: Its Psychobiological and Psychopathological Significance,” Urologie and Cutaneous Review 33, no. 6 (Aug. 1929): 518.
“You take”: Quoted in Myron Wegman, “Martha Eliot and the U.S. Children’s Bureau,” Pediatrics 19, no. 4 (Apr. 1957): 656.

 

292 “the prime motive”: Charles W. Eliot, Charles W. Eliot: The Man and His Beliefs (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1926), p. 167.
“to leave home”: Jeannette Barley Cheek, interview with Martha May Eliot, M.D., Rockefeller Oral History Project, Nov. 1973–May 1974, p. 12, SL.
“Boys as a matter”: Ella Lyman, “The Importance of Purpose in the Life of a Girl,” May 29, 1907, scrapbook, box 1, folder 10, Martha May Eliot Papers, SL.

293 “When I announce”: Quoted in Trisha Franzen, Spinsters and Lesbians: Independent Womanhood in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 75.
“thought I was”: Cheek interview, pp. 20–21.
“So that year”: Ibid., p. 21.

294 “We [Ethel and herself] braved”: Martha May Eliot to Mary Eliot, Oct. 2, 1914, Eliot Papers.
“continued a watchful”: Begina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 123.

295 Martha Eliot’s letters: For Eliot’s references to Thomas at Johns Hopkins, see letters to Mary Eliot of Nov. 12, 1916; Feb. 10, 1917; and Apr. 22, 1917, Eliot Papers.
“E. and I”: Martha May Eliot to Mary Eliot, Nov. 6, 1914; Nov. 28, 1914; Jan. 23, 1915; all in Eliot Papers.
“Part of my reason”: Ibid., Oct. 16, 1917.

296 “it didn’t leave”: Ibid, Nov. 24, 1917.
“You will be interested”: Ibid, Aug. 1, 1920.
“I am not”: Ibid.

297 They would have considered: See Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 133.

298 “it was frustrating”: Cheek interview, pp. 40–41.
“I spent the night”: Martha May Eliot to Mary Eliot, Dec. 27, 1921; June 1, 1922; Feb. 9, 1922; all in Eliot Papers.
“Whether I shall stay”: Ibid, March 1923; Mar. 6, 1914; Feb. 12, 1915.

299 “Those of us”: Julius B. Richmond, “From a Minority to a Majority,” American Journal of Public Health 61, no. 4 (Apr. 1971): 681.

300 “Excitement no. 2”: Martha May Eliot to Mary Eliot, May 10, 1923, Eliot Papers. She does not hide the fact that although the new house has two bedrooms, she and Ethel sleep in the same room; ibid, July 28, 1923.

301 “we brought down”: Ibid, Nov. 1932.

303 “unnatural”: Quoted in Lela B. Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), pp. 141–42. When Eliot left the Children’s Bureau, Katherine Oettinger was appointed to succeed her. Oettinger was the first married woman with children to head the bureau in its forty-five-year history; see Parker, “Women at the Helm.”

304 “Dearest, It was”: Ethel Dunham to Martha May Eliot, June 30, 1960, Eliot Papers.
“How I count”: Ibid, July 10, 1960.
“I do want”: Martha May Eliot to Ethel Dunham, July 26, 1960, Eliot Papers.

 

17. THE RUSH TO BAKE THE PIES AND HAVE THE BABIES

 

The papers of Martha Tracy and Ellen Potter can be found in the Archives and Special Collections, Allegheny University of the Health Sciences (formerly the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania).

Additional useful studies of women in the 1930s are Sophonisba Breckinridge, Women in the Twentieth Century: A Study of Their Political, Social, and Economic Activities (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933); Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne, 1982); and Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “Two Washes in the Morning and a Bridge Party at Night: The American Housewife Between the Wars,” Women’s Studies 3 (1976).

Harron and McHale are discussed in India Edwards, Pulling No Punches: Memoirs of a Woman in Politics (New York: Putnam, 1977), and Joan Ellen Organ, “Sexuality as a Category for Historical Analysis: A Study of Judge Florence E. Allen, 1884–1966” (Ph.D. dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 1998). Harron is also discussed in Doris Faber, The Life of Lorena Hickok: E. R.’s Friend (New York: Morrow, 1980), and McHale in Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

 

306 “The time”: Quoted in Roberta Frankfort, Collegiate Women: Domesticity and Career in Turn-of-the-Century America (New York: NYU Press, 1977), p. 72.
In actuality: Frank Strieker presents a fairly rosy statistical picture of women in the professions from the start of the twentieth century to 1930. However, as he points out, “The job level which these women reached is another question. . . . Half the female professionals were school teachers. . . . Nurses [were] the second largest subcategory of female professionals”; “Cookbooks and Law Books: The Hidden History of Career Women in Twentieth Century America, “Journal of Social History 10 (Fall 1976): 6–7.

307 “The traditional”: Janet M. Hooks, Women’s Occupations Through Seven Decades, Women’s Bureau Bulletin, no. 218 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947), pp. 25–26.
“don knickerbockers”: Esse V. Hathaway, “Finding a Balance in Living,” Independent Woman, June 1924.

308 “frequently] resort”: Marguerite Mooers Marshall, “Don’t Be a Vegetable Wife . . . Dr. Ellen C. Potter Warns,” Oct. 1, 1919, clipping, Ellen Potter Collection, AUHS.
“a wife and mother”: Irma Benjamin, “Marriage and Fame,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 17, 1932, pp. 1, 8.

309 “demonstrated that women”: Martha Tracy and Ellen Potter, “The Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania; Its Belation to All Women in Medicine,” Woman’s Medical Journal, Oct. 1919.

309 “men are married”: Henry Carey, “This Two-Headed Monster—The Family,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 156 (June 1928): 169.
“in forswearing”: Lillian Symes, “Still a Man’s Game: Reflections of a Tired Feminist,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 158 (May 1929): 685.
“We’re tired”: Alice Beal Parsons, “Man-Made Illusions About Woman,” in Samuel D. Schmalhausen and V. F. Calverton, eds. Woman’s Coming of Age (New York: Horace Liveright, 1931), p. 23.

311 “I think”: Quoted in Nancy Milford, Zelda (New York: Avon, 1971), p. 160.
“for the modern”: Phyllis Blanchard and Carolyn Manasses, New Girls for Old (New York: Macaulay, 1930), pp. 174–75.
When a poll: Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: New Viewpoints, 1979), p. 188.

312 For instance: See Ware, Holding Their Own, p. 12.
In 1940: See Hooks, Women’s Occupations, p. 5.

313 “aggressive occupations”: George W. Henry, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1941), pp. 1024, 1026–27.

“homosexual women”: Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), p. 296.

“wears her hair”: Quoted in Karen Berger Morello, The Invisible Bar: The Woman Lawyer in America, 1638 to the Present (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 184.

314 In 1950: Figures on working women are from Glenda Riley, Inventing the American Woman: A Perspective on Women’s History, 1865 to the Present (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1986), p. 125, and Alice Rossi, “Barriers to the Career Choice of Engineering, Medicine, or Science Among American Women,” in Jacqueline Mattfeld and Carol G. Van Aken, eds. Women in the Scientific Professions (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), p. 77.

315 “For my part”: Adlai E. Stevenson, address, Smith College Commencement, June 6, 1955, p. 2, Neilson Library, SC.

316 “deliberately renounce[d]”: Frank S. Caprio, Female Homosexuality: A Psychodynamic Study of Lesbianism (New York: Citadel Press, 1954), p. 11. Donna Penn has argued that “butch style” and “masculine appearance” were what raised antilesbian hysteria during these years; “The Meanings of Lesbianism in Post-War America,” Gender and History 3, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 190–203. However, the persecution of women like Harron, Van Waters, and McHale suggests that success in professions that were deemed masculine was much more likely to incite public ire against non-working-class women than their “masculine appearance.”

“contradictions”: Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Beassessment of Post-War Mass Culture, 1946–1958 “Journal of American History 79, no. 4 (Mar. 1993): 1457, 1462. Meyerowitz refers, of course, to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963).

317 “None of them”: Ronald Chester, “Women Lawyers in the Urban Bar,” New England Law Review 18, no. 3 (1983): 574.

318 “retard the work”: Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 231.
At the first meeting: Ibid. See also Organ, “Sexuality as a Category,” p. 100.
By 1931: Cott, Grounding, p. 231.
“Because there can be”: Quoted in J. Stanley Lemons, “Lena Madesin Phillips,” in Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 544.

319 As her autobiographical: Lisa Sergio’s A Measure Filled: The Life of Lena Madesin Phillips Drawn from Her Autobiography (New York: Robert B. Luce, 1972), is the most complete biography of Phillips. See also Bupp and Taylor, Survival.
“no impression”: Rupp and Taylor, Survival, p. 122.
“the most beautiful”: Quoted in ibid., p. 104.
“Of course, the ideal”: Quoted in Sergio, Measure Filled, p. 54.

320 When they met: Ibid., pp. 47, 60, 62.

322 Florence Allen may have: Organ, “Sexuality as a Category,” p. 148.

323 “concern”: Florence Allen to Marion Harron, May 1957, quoted in ibid., p. 242.

325 “feminists at that time”: Quoted in Rupp and Taylor, Survival, p. 96.
“sexual deviancy”: Sara Cable, “Biology as Social Identity: How the Medical Discourse on Sexuality During the Early Twentieth Century Influenced Pauli Murray’s Conception of Her Identity in American Society During the 1930s and ’40s,” unpublished ms., SL, pp. 5, 6, 23. Cable shows that Murray was so tormented by the image of lesbianism as pathology and the rigidity of gender roles that she believed herself to be a man trapped in a woman’s body and actually sought testosterone implants in the 1930s, when she read that such treatments were transforming “effeminate boys” into “virile men.” See also Heather Phillips, “I Feel in My Bones That You Are Making History: The Life and Leadership of Pauli Murray” (senior honors thesis, Radcliffe College, 1997), especially the section “Hiding Identity,” pp. 21–25.

325 “crowded”: Jess Stearn, The Grapevine: A Report on the Secret World of the Lesbian (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 3, 59.

 

18. CONCLUSION: LEGACIES

 

For more information on “women-identified-women,” see New York Radicalesbians, “Woman-Identified-Woman,” 1970; rpt. in Lesbians Speak Out (Oakland, Calif.: Women’s Press Collective, 1974), pp. 87–89. Lesbian feminist communities and similarities between lesbian feminists and pioneering feminists are treated in my Surpassing the Love of Men and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers.

Lesbian leadership in NOW is discussed in Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love, Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), and Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), chap. 13.

 

327 “They talked”: Mona Harrington, Women Lawyers: Rewriting the Rules (New York: Knopf, 1994), pp. 229–30.

328 “educated in romance”: Dorothy Holland and Margaret Eisenhart, Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement, and College Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
According to the 1960: Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

329 “I will even”: Elaine Whitehill, “I’d Hate to Be a Man,” Coronet 37 (Jan. 1955), p. 27.

335 “For most women”: Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings from the Women’s Movement (New York: Norton, 1985), p. 159.

336 By the early 1970s: Sheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States (New York: Viking, 1997), p. 443.
“ignoring my feelings”: Quoted in Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 232.
The median income: Marc Breslow, “Can We Still Win the War Against Poverty?” Dollars and Sense (July/Aug. 1995), p. 40.

337 By the end: Glenda Riley, Inventing the American Woman: A Perspective on Women’s History, 1865 to the Present (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1986), p. 141.
For example: Rowbotham, Century of Women, p. 441.
Whereas most women: Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 1989), pp. 263–65.
For example, in 1963: Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Women in Law (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 53; Karen Berger Morello, The Invisible Bar: The Woman Lawyer in America, 1638 to the Present (New York: Bandom House, 1986), Bonald Chester, “Women Lawyers in the Urban Bar: An Oral History,” New England Law Review 18 (1983): 523; and “Gender Discrimination Still Alive in the Profession,” Trial 32, no. 4 (April 1996): 76.

338 Enough women: See Jill Schachnen Chanen, “Reaching Out to Women of Color: Special Report Chronicles Concerns over Bias in the Profession,” American Bar Association Journal 18 (May 1995): 105.
Though women of all races: Chris Klein, National Law Journal 18, no. 36 (May 6, 1996): Ai.
The number of women: Julie Brienza, “Upper Echelons of Large Firms Have Few Minorities or Women,” Trial 31, no. 6 (June 1995): 94–95, and Martha Lufkin, “How to Succeed in a (Still) Masculine World,” National Law Journal 18, no. 51 (Aug. 19, 1996): C8.
By 1997: Deborah Rhode, “Progress for Women in Law—But No Parity Yet,” National Law Journal 19, no. 26 (Feb. 24, 1997): A23.
In 1970: Dr. Nancy Dickey, “Our Sisters’ Sickness, Our Sisters’ Satchels,” Vital Speeches 62, no. 19 (July 15, 1996): 582–83.
By the end of the 1980s: Anita M. Harris, Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), p. 136.
the entering class: Lisa Bennett, “Women Doctors Are Changing the Face of Medicine: Or Are They?” American Health 15, no. 3 (Apr. 1996): 72–73.
A 1996 study: Dickey, “Our Sisters’ Sickness,” p. 83.

339 “go beyond”: “Amazing Grace: Fifty Years of the Black Church,” Ebony 50, no. 6 (Apr. 1995): 87.
Reformed and then: “Religious Women Gain Earthly Power and Change the Faith of their Fathers,” Working Woman 21, no. 11 (Nov.–Dec. 1996): 71.
The lawyer Pauli: See Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), pp. 369–435; Heather Phillips, “I Feel in My Bones That You Are Making History: The Life and Leadership of Pauli Murray” (senior honors thesis, Radeliffe College, 1977); and Pamela Darling, New Wine: The Story of Women Transforming Leadership and Power in the Episcopal Church (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley, 1994).

339 Barbara Harris: “The First Female Bishop of the Episcopal Church,” Working Woman 21, no. 11 (Nov.–Dec. 1996): 72.
President Reagan won: John McLaughlin, “The Galling Gap,” National Review 35 (July 22, 1983): 864.

340 “to all women”: Quoted in Ruth Mandel, “Who Won? The Women Candidates,” Working Woman 8 (Apr. 1983): 110.
They were indisputably: Deborah Kalb, “Dole Must Close the ‘Gender Gap’ to Avoid Clinton Landslide,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report 54, no. 43 (Oct. 26, 1996): 3085.
In 1986: Susan M. Hartmann, From Margin to Mainstream: American Women in Politics Since 1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. 173.
By remaining: See J. Jennings Moss, “Barbara Jordan’s Other Life,” Advocate, Mar. 5, 1996, pp. 39–45. Jordan hints at her relationship with Nancy Earl in her autobiography, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979).

341 As a result: Toni Caribillo, Judith Meuli, and June Bundy Csida, Feminist Chronicles, 1953–1993 (Los Angeles: Women’s Graphics, 1993), p. 149.
Women of color: See Kitty Dumas, “The Year of the Black Woman,” Black Enterprise 23, no. 1 (Aug. 1992): 35.
Though women did not: The 1994 election is analyzed in Katha Pollitt, “Subject to Debate,” The Nation 259, no. 18 (Nov. 28, 1994): 642. in 1996: Pam Belluck, “A ‘Year of the Woman’ Cedes to Days of Embattled Senators,” New York Times, Jan. 19, 1998, p. 1.

342 “a woman [candidate]”: Shanto Iyengar et al, “Running as a Woman: Gender Stereotyping in Political Campaigns,” in Pippa Norris, ed. Women, Media and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 97.
“most . . . members”: Alexis Simendinger, “Still a Guy’s Game,” National Law Journal 29, no. 31 (Aug. 2, 1997): 1566.
A front-page article: Belluck, “A ‘Year of the Woman,’” p. 1.

343 “most of us”: “The College Girl Puts Marriage First,” New York Times Magazine, Apr. 2, 1933, pp. 8, 9.
A 1980 article: Deena Kleiman, “Many Young Women Now Say They’d Pick Family over Career,” New York Times, Dec. 28, 1980, pp. 1, 24.
The following week: Boston Globe, Jan. 3, 1981.
“experiencing the formative”: Andy Dapper, “When Less Means More,” Hemispheres, Nov. 1997, p. 155.

344 “the newest status symbol”: Alecia Swasy, “Stay-at-Home Moms Are Fashionable Again in Many Communities,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 1993, p. Ai.
“new and different”: Harrington, Women Lawyers, pp. 145–46.
“a tremendous drive”: Harris, Broken Patterns, p. 16.

345 For example: Mary Brophy Marcus, “If You Let Me Play . . . A Basketball or a Hockey Puck May Shatter the Glass Ceiling,” U.S. News & World Report, Oct. 27, 1997, pp. 88–90.
“live in fear”: James A. Levine and Todd L. Pittinsky, Working Fathers: New Strategies for Balancing Work and Family (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1997), p. 29.
“a model”: Tracy Mygatt, Feb. 1966, Columbia University Oral History Project, p. 26, box 7, Mygatt-Witherspoon Papers, SCPC.

346 “natural or an authentic”: Shane Phelan, “(Be)Coming Out: Lesbian Identity and Politics,” Signs 18 (Summer 1993): 765–90.