10

“Mental Hermaphrodites”: Pioneers in Women’s Higher Education

[At Smith College] they write each other the wildest love-letters, & send presents, confectionery, all sorts of things, like a real courting of the Shakespearean style. If the “smash” is mutual, they monopolize each other & “spoon” continually, & sleep together & lie awake all night talking instead of going to sleep; & if it isn’t mutual the unrequited one cries herself sick & endures pangs unspeakable.

—Alice Stone Blackwell to Kitty Blackwell, 1882

 

Education and the “Semi-Women”: Mary Lyon and Zilpah Grant, Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles

In EIGHTEENTH- and early nineteenth-century America, education of females from any class was minimal. In Boston from 1789 to 1822, for example, girls were allowed to attend the public schools during the summer only, and for a time for two hours in the afternoon during the school year, after the boys had gone home. The girls’ curriculum consisted primarily of the “4 R’s” (the fourth being religion). Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, which opened in 1821, was revolutionary in its intention to provide serious study for girls, including courses such as physiology and algebra, but it was met with general disfavor. Though Mrs. Willard tried to be assuring in her “Address to the Public” that her school would not “masculinize” girls, many were not convinced. As one clergyman complained, study of higher mathematics and science would surely unfit young women for husbands and babies.

Catharine Beecher was even more direct than Emma Willard in her attempts to convince the public that more rigorous education would not unsex women. She vehemently claimed to oppose the proto-feminist moves that were afoot. She later became an avowed antisuffragist. Yet Beecher argued that female education must be taken seriously—as a preparation for women’s “distinctive profession,” which was “the nursing of infants and the sick, and all the handicrafts and management of the family state.” At Hartford Female Seminary, which she founded in the 1820s, young women were given courses in subjects such as chemistry and mathematics, but Beecher insisted that the purpose of such studies was to teach future housewives what they needed to know about chemical or mathematical principles in the workings of the kitchen or the handling of the household accounts. In making “domestic scientists” of the women she educated, Beecher was looking for ways to expand women’s stature. She wished to help them to a more exalted position, yet she was unable to move beyond the conventional construction of womanhood. Unlike Anna Shaw and Jane Addams, who cleverly used the gender constructions of their day to expand women’s roles outside the home, Beecher never acknowledged a function for women apart from the domestic setting—though she herself did not marry.

In the decades before the Civil War, institutions similar to Beecher’s were also founded for southern white women—for example, the Georgia Female College, in Macon (1836), and the Tennessee and Alabama Female Institute, in Winchester, Tennessee (1851). However, higher education for women could not become a serious business without leadership from women who had no interest in domesticity, who could think beyond the conventions of women’s appropriate sphere, and who had no investment in femininity. Mary Lyon was just such a woman. Lyon designed an education for females that would be as rigorous as she could get away with in the mid-1830s. Like Catharine Beecher, she never married, but unlike Beecher, she had no wish to train young women for a domesticity that she herself never knew.

Lyon was “unfeminine” in appearance and manner, as her contemporaries repeatedly observed. When young she had a number of romantic friendships with other women, but “the outstanding personal relation [of her life]”—as even a homophobic 1937 biographer was constrained to admit after perusing the letters between them—was Zilpah Grant, who was her partner at the beginning of her pioneering pursuits. As Mary Lyon wrote to her sister, “I love Miss Grant’s society more than ever, and I believe we may love our friends very ardently.” That ardent personal love led Lyon and Grant to dream about a shared mission to expand the possibilities of women’s education.

The two women met in 1821, when both were teaching at Byfield, a girl’s school. Grant became the head of a female academy in New Hampshire a couple of years later, and Lyon soon followed her. Together they planned a course of study for girls that would be equal to what boys were given in the best academies, including natural philosophy, astronomy, and chemistry (without Catharine Beecher’s excuse of its usefulness in the kitchen). In 1828, when Zilpah Grant established an academy for girls in Ipswich, Massachusetts, Lyon followed her again.

Four years later, Mary Lyon conceived of establishing a larger institution for the serious training of female teachers, but she postponed her pursuit of the plan, expressly so that she could remain longer with Zilpah Grant. She felt conflict over this decision, however. As she wrote in 1834, she believed she had a vital mission: “My heart has so yearned over the adult female youth in the common walks of life, that it has sometimes seemed as if there was a fire shut up in my bones.” When she finally resolved to found her seminary for “adult female youth,” she was equally pained by the anticipated separation from Zilpah. “I have to bid Miss Grant farewell,” she wrote mournfully, “no more to live with her on earth,” which, she lamented, shook her heart with “all emotions of affection.” Zilpah too was pained at the separation. As an 1887 historian of Mount Holyoke College characterized it, her letters “show at what sacrifice of feeling to both the decision to separate was reached.”

In 1835, with plans well under way for Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Mary implored Zilpah to join her on the new campus, but Zilpah elected to remain at Ipswich. What happened between the two women during these years of separation is not entirely clear; however, in 1841, at the age of forty-four, Zilpah married a man. Yet as Mary often acknowledged, it was with Zilpah Grant that she had been able to conceive of rigorous academic training for women, and like Hull House, which owed its founding to the relationship between Jane Addams and Ellen Starr, Mount Holyoke would not have been established without the women’s joint conceptions.

Though Lyon perfunctorily agreed that God designated “a difference in the situation of the sexes,” the course of study she established for Mount Holyoke students did not acknowledge that difference. She emphasized “high standards of mental discipline” and a “slow, thorough, and patient manner of study.” Her focus was on classics and hard science. She was preparing women not to be housewives or social ornaments but rather to be serious scholars and independent beings through a career in education. As she wrote in a pamphlet outlining the focus of Mount Holyoke, through the seminary’s stringent program young women would be prepared as “educators . . . of youth, rather than . . . [as] mere teachers,” who had often been badly trained and were sometimes barely fifteen or sixteen years old. Thanks to Lyon, female educators might now be professionals.

Protests were predictable and were generally meant to dissuade and mortify. One critic, for example, claimed in The Ladies’ Companion that the only women who would want a serious education were “mental hermaphrodites” and “semi-women.” Another declared in The Religious Magazine that the “principles and design of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary” were deplorable because the institution would create “characters expressly formed for acting a manly [sic] part upon the theatre of life. . . . Under such influences the female character is fast becoming masculine.” Gender inversion was consistently the great fear of those who abjured serious education for women.

Oberlin College authorities, who had declared in 1833 that their new college would admit women in order “to prepare them to become the useful wives of the male graduates,” understood how to avert accusations that an institution was turning women into men. They made sure not to “neglect” female students’ “domestic education” and assigned them tasks of cooking and cleaning for the male students. Womanly modesty was also carefully enforced by the administration: though any woman who had completed the regular college course was required to write an essay for the commencement exercises, a male student was appointed to read it for her. As Oberlin’s president, James Fairchild, declared, “It is a thing positively disagreeable to both sexes to see a woman in a public character.” At Mount Holyoke, however, there were no men to keep the women demure and womanly.

 

Though there was little enthusiasm for “educating women like men” during the first half of the nineteeth century, the Civil War caused some shifts in attitudes. First of all, it opened various employment opportunities to women, who were needed to take the places of men who had become soldiers. An author of the period, Lizzie Bates, observing the ways in which conditions were changing, voiced the question of presumably many females: “What can I do?” Her answer was, “Nothing but what God has given you the ability to perform; or, in other words, anything that you can do, and do well.” For good numbers of women, a new day had dawned. At least a few of the 338 occupations that women filled during and soon after the war required advanced education. And many more women had to prepare themselves for work, since the Civil War had forced them to become self-supporting: more than 600,000 men had been killed, which meant that more than a half-million women over the usual number would never have husbands. After the 1860s, higher education was perceived as useful by some, not only because it would occupy the bereft spinster for four or more years of her life but because it might prepare her to make her own living.

Teaching was still the most likely career for a daughter of the middle class. Since Mary Lyon had helped create an interest in well-educated teachers, young women without apparent marriage prospects were now often sent to college in order to learn the profession. Work opportunities for teachers also increased. The need for them in the democracy had been further expanded by immigrants who were coming to America in a new wave, beginning in the 1870s, and by the freed slaves, who had been kept largely illiterate in slavery and now had to be educated. These new populations also provided a pool of inexpensive domestic labor, which meant that a middle-class daughter’s hands were no longer needed in the parental home. Her domestic work would not be missed if she went off to get an education.

Therefore, in the years after the Civil War, colleges for women proliferated, as did colleges that had been exclusively male but were now opened to women. The war had reduced the number of young men who would be going to college, and coeducation helped underenrolled institutions survive. All over the country, numerous universities, both private and state-supported, began accepting women. By 1870, eight thousand women were attending seminaries and three thousand were attending degree-granting colleges. In the course of that decade, several women’s colleges that came to play a crucial role in the history of women’s education opened. Vassar had been founded in 1865, and in the 1870s, Smith, Wellesley, and Radcliffe were established. Mount Holyoke Female Seminary claimed to have upgraded itself to college status in the 1880s, and Bryn Mawr and Barnard opened their doors in that decade as well.

Although these colleges were generally interested in “elite” young women—that is, those of the middle and upper classes and of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant parentage—the move to educate women soon affected a broader spectrum. The most notable of the early efforts to educate African-American women was undertaken by a white female couple, Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles, who, like Mary Lyon and Zilpah Grant, felt a devotion to each other that fueled their devotion to the cause of women. In 1881, Packard and Giles founded Spelman College, in Atlanta, Georgia. They had met years earlier, when Harriet was a senior at a New England girls’ academy where Sophia, who was ten years older, was a preceptress. In 1859 they had opened a short-lived school together in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and in the years that followed they taught together in various other New England schools. Sophia’s diary entries at this time suggest her two main desires: they refer to Harriet as “my darling Hattie,” and they implore God to “lay me out for usefulness!”

In 1864, Sophia Packard became the head of the Oread Collegiate Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. A nineteenth-century History of the Oread Collegiate Institute describes her as “a woman of powerful intellect and strong will, aggressive and energetic, with almost a masculine genius for business and capacity for leadership” (though the usually disconcerting gender reference was modified by the assurance that she was “a thoroughly conservative and devoted Christian”). The author does not draw the conclusions that became inevitable in the twentieth century when recalling that Packard was assisted in her various duties by “Miss Hattie E. Giles, her devoted friend, with whom she had been constantly associated in all she had done for ten years. . . . It would have been impossible for a school girl of those days to speak or think of one without the other. They dressed alike and in leisure hours were nearly always together. Miss Giles was in character quite unlike Miss Packard, being most gentle, mild, and self-effacing.”

Their romance of opposites was enhanced by their similarities. Both women were interested in the welfare of the freed slaves, and on a trip to the South in 1880 they decided to start a school for African-American women. The Baptist church, to which they appealed, was slow in coming to their assistance, and in her impatience, Harriet Giles sold her piano for start-up money. Eventually they were helped by the church, as well as by John D. Rockefeller (the school was named after Rockefeller’s wife, Laura Spelman). The statement of aims that Sophia Packard prepared emphasized the school’s serious goals: “to train the intellect,” “to store the mind with useful knowledge,” “to inspire love for the true and the beautiful.”

When Sophia Packard died, in 1891, the “feminine” Harriet Giles transcended her habits of demureness and became the head of Spelman. Though the school was not named a college until 1924, Giles established a “college department” in 1897, and in 1901, through classes taken jointly at Spelman and Atlanta Baptist College, a men’s school, two Alrican-American women became Spelman’s first college graduates. Spelman was now called alternately “the Wellesley of the South” and “the Mount Holyoke of the South.” Though Giles, like Packard, emphasized professional training in teaching and nursing, students were also encouraged to take liberal arts courses like those given in the elite colleges of the North—rhetoric, Latin, moral and natural philosophy, zoology, geology.

Harriet Giles made Spelman the foremost school in the country for African-American women. At her death, in 1909, she was buried with the woman with whom she had shared her life for almost forty years. The single tombstone that covers both their graves bears their names on one side, and on the other is the inscription “Founders of Spelman Seminary.”

 

“But Who Will Bake the Pies and Have the Babies?” Not Lucy Salmon and Adelaide Underbill

With the proliferation of educational possibilities for women came a proliferation of fears about what that education might lead to. Initially the concerns centered on the possibilities that females would become not-women. “Who will bake the pies?” one critic of educated womanhood blurted, reducing the panic to its most basic terms. That fear of “unsexing,” as the prevalent term was, soon led to the fear that educated women would become not only economically but also emotionally independent of men. Indeed, both in college and after, many women were forming romantic ties and even quasi-marriages with other women that kept them from heterosexual arrangements. From the fears of unsexing and same-sex dyads developed the fear of “race suicide.” Since women of the elite classes were being educated in the greatest numbers, the pundits claimed, waving statistics before the eyes of a troubled public, they were less likely to marry and thus to procreate. Meanwhile, immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were “invading” the country and reproducing in what those same pundits considered dizzying proportions. The imminent death of the elite classes was predicted, and female higher education was given a lion’s share of the blame. Such fears became the stuff of popular books and magazine articles for more than fifty years, from the 1870s to the 1920s.

Those who wished to limit females to the conventions of femininity, who believed that all Anglo-Saxon women needed to give birth to four or more children, or who were opposed to love and companionship that was not heterosexual actually did have a realistic basis for their conviction that women’s higher education posed a serious threat. The pioneers—the first generations of female college students—did often reject what had been considered “womanhood.” M. Carey Thomas, the president of Bryn Mawr, bitterly wrote of childhood feelings that must have been shared by many pioneering college women of her generation. One summer day, she recalled, “when sitting in a hammock under the trees with a French dictionary, blinded by tears more burning than the July sun, I translated the most indecent book I have ever read [Michelet’s La Femme]. I was beside myself with terror lest it might prove true that I myself was so vile and pathological a thing [as Michelet had described woman].”

Carey Thomas rebelled violently against La Femme’s hurtful stereotypes of inferiority and their inevitable corollary, that women were fit only for the prison house of compulsory domesticity. Many young women with mental energy, imagination, and intelligence must have felt as she did. Of course they envied the broader freedoms of young men of their class. To study what men studied and valued must have seemed to hold the promise of vaulting them from the despised category of “woman.” Gender inversion in various forms—but for them, especially the inverted desire to lay claim to the role of scholar—surely represented escape.

The fear of race suicide voiced by those who opposed higher education for women was based on statistics that demonstrated a high rate of spinsterhood among educated women. Spinsterhood was especially common among those who graduated from college between 1885 and 1905, perhaps because those years saw an exciting proliferation of professions that enabled educated women to become self-supporting. A common prod to marriage for many nineteenth-century women—economic necessity—disappeared for some. Even those college-educated women who did marry, the race-suicide observers pointed out, generally did so late in life (sometimes after they had enjoyed a career for several years), and they had far fewer children than the average woman of their class. Thirty-two percent of married Bryn Mawr graduates had no children; 23 percent of married Wellesley graduates had no children.

And the majority of women who graduated from college by the early 1890s were likely not to marry at all. Of Bryn Mawr graduates, only 43 percent married. Other women’s colleges produced similar marriage rates: among Wellesley graduates of that period, only 49 percent married; among Radcliffe graduates, only 41 percent married. Even female graduates of coeducational institutions were much less likely to marry than women without educations: among Oberlin graduates of that period, 61 percent married; among University of Michigan graduates, 52 percent married. Of their female cohorts in the general population, over 90 percent married!

Women who received Ph.D.’s and went on to become professors to future generations of women were especially unlikely to marry. Conventional domesticity would have been virtually impossible in academia. When Lucy Salmon went to Vassar in 1887 as its first history professor, she was expected to live on campus and be almost always on duty. In a letter to friends, she described her typical workday, which began at 6 A.M. and ended at 10 P.M., with barely a moment of privacy, even in her own rooms. “It is considered quite the proper thing for students to call on the teachers—all the members of your classes expect to call and bring their friends who are not, all the students rooming on your corridor expect to call, all who occupy your [pew] in chapel expect to call, all who bring letters of introduction call,” she wrote. Not even meals at Vassar could be a time of privacy, because “as a rule one teacher sits at each table” in order to lead uplifting conversations.

Even if a female professor was not constrained to live on campus, a workload such as Salmon had, of 170 students, would make it impossible for her to conduct a conventional household—which demanded being a loving maternal guide to several children and being a companion to a husband who was likely to have socially reinforced expectations about his due. Not even the Sabbath could be a day of respite for an academic, as Salmon reported to her friends. One Sunday she attended “a beautiful chapel service at 9 o’clock,” but, she added, “I’ll not say anything of the notebooks and papers I examined after that.”

Lucy Salmon did ultimately find domestic happiness in a relationship, the kind that was so commonplace at Wellesley College that it was dubbed a Wellesley marriage. It was commonplace at Vassar and most other women’s colleges as well in the late nineteenth century. In her first history class at Vassar, Salmon met a senior student, Adelaide Underbill, who went off to study library science after graduation and then returned to Vassar as a librarian in 1892. Salmon and Underhill collaborated in building the Vassar library into one of the most impressive among liberal arts colleges. They also took up life together in their own off-campus home, where Salmon often held her history seminars and they jointly entertained students and faculty.

Years later, an alumna writing in the Vassar Quarterly reminisced romantically about the home of Lucy Salmon and Adelaide Underhill, with its “porch covered with wisteria, . . . the door wide open in welcome, . . . [an] ample desk, the walls lined to the ceiling with books,” the dining table “with its centerpiece of brightly-hued flowers,” and a manservant to cook and serve. The domestic arrangement the two women created together was what many of the female pioneers in education longed for and not infrequently achieved. It was a deep and permanent commitment that gave both women the delicious refuge Susan B. Anthony had described in her 1877 lecture “Homes of Single Women,” but it also gave them each space and time to pursue work that was all the more exciting because it had been withheld from generations of women before them. They were the pathbreakers, they thought, for the generations of women after them. Having their work, each other, and the home they created together, they had what they needed. Heterosexual marriage would have deprived them of the forms of excitement and achievement they valued most.

Clearly Salmon and Underhill felt no need to hide their intimacy from others, since they saw it as neither unique nor pathological. A cousin of Lucy Salmon’s, who visited them in their Poughkeepsie home and also when they were abroad, wrote to Adelaide after Lucy’s death in 1927, reflecting how the relationship between the two women appeared to sympathetic outside observers:

 

You . . . were her greatest love and care! For I realized that summer when we were in France, how greatly she loved and admired you, from her own words as well as in other ways, and two years ago I saw there was the same strong affection and regard for you on her part. Indeed the friendship between you had always seemed to me to be perfect. Each of you gave what the heart of each needed. It must surely be a joy to you now to think that you made her life so happy and complete as you did. She so greatly enjoyed her home, after the years during which she longed for one, but it was you who made it home for her.

 

Such relationships were not seen as “happy and complete” by those who cried “race suicide,” of course.

 

College Inverts

Like the women who led the suffrage movement, such as Anna Shaw and Mollie Hay, or those who established professions for women in reform or politics, like Frances Kellor and Molly Dewson, many of the early female academics were virtually case studies of sexual inversion, seemingly right out of the pages of sexological tomes. The nineteenth-century Wellesley German professor Carla Wenckebach is an example. As a child, she rebelled violently against sewing and knitting and hated whatever seemed “sissy.” She much preferred boys’ games and boy companions, with whom she climbed trees, played marbles, went eel-catching, smoked, and whistled. She exchanged her dresses for a masculine “Russian blouse and bloomers” for as long as her parents permitted. In her youth she rejected her feminine Christian names and insisted on being called Cato, after the Roman poet and grammarian of the first century B.C. A school friend recalled that the name “suited her well,” since her “carriage was commanding and the whole bearing repudiated everything suggestive of feminine weakness or dependence.”

Wenckebach’s gender inversion was accompanied by a rejection of men as romantic objects. As a student, she was “the center of an adoring crowd of enthusiastic girls.” As a professor at Wellesley, her loves included Alice Freeman, who was Wellesley’s president. When Freeman married, Wenckebach’s biographer observes, “the blow was a bitter one. [Wenckebach] was irreconcilable and went to the wedding as if to a funeral,” though in later years she formed a dyad with Margarethe Muller, a colleague in Wellesley’s German department, which lasted until Wenckebach’s death, in 1902.

Pioneering academic women knew that they were accused of gender inversion by those who opposed higher education for females. Yet since they deplored femininity, they saw its opposite quality, masculinity, not as undesirable but rather as consisting of attributes that permitted the freedoms they coveted. In “The True Womanly Woman,” a one-act nineteenth-century satire that made fun of those who feared the educated woman, Rose Chamberlin presents a university student, Thomasina (or “tomboy”), who comes onstage wearing a “neat cut-away coat; her billy-cock hat set rakishly askew, smoking a short pipe, and cracking a whip.” When Thomasina offers to help the silly, feminine Angelina adjust to university life, Angelina responds, “You surely cannot think Thomasina that I could condescend to receive information and instruction as to my conduct from an amphibious—at least—no—not amphibious, I mean carnivorous—no—I don’t—dear me what is the word? [hermaphrodite?]—oh I know—from a she male-ish creature like yourself?” Thomasina responds, with only partial sarcasm, “Many thanks for the compliment my love.”

There is no question about whose side Rose Chamberlin—who was a Bryn Mawr graduate student in the 1880s—is on. She concludes with a disgusted narrative explaining that the dainty Angelina manages to continue at school though “she maintains the character of a most womanly woman—throughout her college career—by carefully eschewing even a pretense of study—and by keeping up her reputation for slavish admiration of the male sex.” “The True Womanly Woman” illustrates that for committed college women of Chamberlin’s generation, not only was higher education an escape from the limitations of womanhood, but a rejection of attributes that were considered feminine—that is, an “unsexing”—was seen to be crucial to the success of their academic endeavors.

For several decades, women like Thomasina were generally not called lesbians or homosexuals, though their critics sometimes hinted at abnormality. In an article in the American Journal of Heredity in the 1890s, for instance, such women were accused of being “more or less lacking in normal sex instincts.” The writer opined that colleges actually served a useful purpose in segregating these women from others!

Early in the twentieth century, such accusations became even more explicit. Merely a woman’s desire to be seriously educated was enough to arouse suspicions about her sexuality. Such suspicions crossed race and class lines. As May Edward Chinn, an African-American woman who was in college around 1920, bluntly recollected, “My father objected to me going to college, number one. . . . His idea of a girl was that you got married and had children. A girl that went to college became a queer woman. And he did not want to be the father of a queer girl.” As it happened, Chinn, who went on to medical school after college, was the only female doctor in Harlem for fifty years. She never married.

 

Smashes, Mashes, Pashes, and More

It is not known when the word “queer” was first used in America, whether in black or white communities, to describe women who loved other women, but pioneering college women would probably not have seen themselves in the term, since the dyads they formed were the norm in their milieu. Professor-student relationships like the one between Lucy Salmon and Adelaide Underhill led often to “marriages” such as theirs. With few female role models for serious achievement in nineteenth-century America, Underhill, whose girlhood ambitions went beyond the usual domesticity, would naturally have been awed and fascinated by Salmon, an attractive young woman who had already accomplished a great deal by earning a graduate degree and becoming a college professor. And Salmon would have been touched by Underhill, who was bright and eager and anxious to take the torch of women’s progress from her hand and run with it. Deeper and more personal feelings would have followed easily and with less worried reflection than in the twentieth century, when pathologizing terms were current and sexual harassment became an issue.

A poem written in the early years by a professor at Smith College about her student suggests how the spiritual conviction of mission was reified in sensual expression:

 

I need no bells nor chanted hymn;
Her silk-soft hand, so white, so slim,
Shall bless for me my way.
Her kiss upon my lips shall be
An absolution full and free
That hell cannot dismay.

 

Women who met as professor and student in a classroom and became a couple—often for the next forty or fifty years—included not only the founders of Spelman College but also the Wellesley professors Margaret Sherwood and Martha Hale Shackford (who was Sherwood’s student in 1896); the Mount Holyoke president Mary Woolley and the professor Jeannette Marks (who was a twenty-one-year-old freshman in Woolley’s first class at Wellesley, in 1895); and the writer Florence Converse (the author of Diana Victrix) and the professor Vida Scudder, who taught Converse shortly after she went to Wellesley in 1887, to name only a few.

Romances between female students were even more common than those between students and their professors. Numerous terms were coined to describe such passionate love between women on campus: “smash,” “mash,” “pash,” “crush,” “rave,” “spoon,” “flame,” “twosing.” In an era before “sexual identity,” young women were sometimes humorously confused by their crushes, as a Smith freshman at the beginning of the twentieth century demonstrated in declaring her love for a junior who had invited her to tea: “Miss Shipp, I wish I were a man . . . a Harvard graduate. . . . I’d like to make love to you . . . Only if I were a man I couldn’t be here to see you serve tea so charmingly.” The impulse was ubiquitous and overt in both northern and southern women’s colleges.

Love poems written by students to other students were frequently printed in college publications. Typically, such verses pledged eternal devotion to the beloved woman, enumerated her beauties, or lamented unrequited, jealous love for her. For example, students at Sophie Newcomb, a women’s college in New Orleans, published poems such as “My Lady of Dreams” in the school’s Newcomb Arcade:

 

Like the blue of the sea are My Lady’s eyes,

Like a benediction, her face;

And the sunbeams that touch her hair with light

But reveal all her gentle grace.

 

And the song that is on My Lady’s lips,

That she sings in her voice of gold,

Doth pass to my soul with its message of hope,

With its meaning manifold.

 

Sentimentality and excess were so rampant in these poems that one Wellesley wit saw fit to satirize them, writing in Wellesley Lyrics (1896), a collection of verse that included numerous love poems from female students to other female students, “Can I tell you how I love you / With your beautiful brown eyes, / And your pretty lips just parted / In a smile both sweet and wise?” The reader’s assumption, of course, is that this is a love poem from one female student to another. But the object of admiration is revealed in the last lines, in which the speaker refers, smirking, to the “darling little furry sable, / That around my throat I wear!”

Smashes between female students were encouraged by the rituals of romance in which they engaged. For example, women’s college dances in the late nineteenth century did not include men, but they did include dates. One student (usually an upperclassman) would call for her date with flowers or candy in hand; sometimes she would wear a tuxedo and her date would wear a gown, and always she would take the lead in dancing and would act the part of a gentleman. Letters and diaries of students of the era often suggest the practice between them of a kind of amour courtois, as Tiziana Rota describes it in her work on Mount Holyoke College. Much more significant than these romantic rituals, however, was the fact that these students shared the excitement of their pioneering endeavors in education. In the absence of male distractions, they could dare to see one another as heroes and objects of intense admiration rather than as rivals. At coeducational colleges also, female students in the nineteenth century were likely to fall in love with each other. They took each other seriously, while the male students were often hostile to them, as a popular Cornell song of the 1890s shows: “I’m glad all the girls are not like Cornell women; / They’re ugly as sin and there’s no good within ’em.”

Those who observed the love relationships between college women from a distance often trivialized them, like a 1906 writer who assured his readers that crushes between young women were “a mere forerunner” to the real thing, just as “the ragdoll is to the infant”; those same-sex passions would end at the altar, “when one is the other’s bridesmaid.” But many of the women involved would have disagreed vehemently. They often envisioned continuing their passionate love relationships with other women for their entire lives. The Radcliffe College student commencement speaker in 1900 prophesied that of the sixty-three graduates, only six would end up at the altar. The others would live as what she called “New Women,” engaged in a fulfilling profession and “unmarried but not lonesome.” She was not hinting at heterosexual cohabitation, as she made clear by her suggestion that these New Women would be sharing “bachelor quarters” with “kindred female spirits.”

 

The Wellesley Marriage vs. Straight Marriage

Large numbers of female professors of the era had just the kind of domestic arrangement that the Radcliffe commencement speaker described, often with another academic woman. As Maria Mitchell, Vassar’s famous astronomy professor from 1865 to 1888, observed, “A woman needs a home and the love of other women, at least, if she lives without that of a man.” In many cases such arrangements resembled marriages; hence the terms used to describe them, such as “Boston marriage” and “Wellesley marriage.” As Lucy Salmon’s account of her packed days as a professor demonstrates, academic women had no time for conventional marriage. It is not surprising that of fifty-three female faculty members at Wellesley in the late nineteenth century, only one, Ethel Puffer Howes, married. As Patricia Palmieri points out in her study of Wellesley, Howes’s married life left her little time for scholarship; she never obtained a professorship, and she felt obliged to leave Wellesley.

But there are other, more emotional reasons than time constraints that explain why many academic women preferred “marriage” with one another to heterosexual marriage. One such reason is their intense lifelong resentment of what they considered men’s assumption of superiority over women. The ambitious girl of the nineteenth century was galled by the injustice of her position vis-à-vis males, as the Wellesley professor (and the author of the song that almost became our national anthem, “America, the Beautiful”) Katharine Lee Bates wrote in her diary when she was a child in the early 1870s: “Men think they are more important than women. . . . I am happy to say [women] have become impatient under the restraint men put upon them. So the great question of women’s rights has arisen. I like women better than men. . . . Sewing is always expected of girls. Why not of boys? . . . It isn’t fair.”

Bates’s prepubescent feminism never left her. Indeed, it became stronger as she grew older and realized that regardless of her talents and attainments, she still lacked privileges commonly accorded to men. Her deep-rooted anger made heterosexual marriage unthinkable. When, in 1889, as a thirty-year-old scholar at Oxford, she aroused the amorous interest of one or two male tutors, she wrote that she “sternly nip[ped] these frivolities in the bud.” But, as she had told her diary years earlier, she “lik[ed] women.” While it was impossible for her to trust men, she could trust and love other women. She could write to them, as she did to the woman with whom she shared her life for almost thirty years, Katharine Coman, “I want you so much my Dearest, and I want to love you so much better than I have ever loved.”

Such anger over the injustices females suffered because of gender transcended racial lines. To Mary McLeod Bethune, for example, the African-American civil rights leader and founder of what became Bethune-Cookman College, heterosexuality was no less problematic than it was for Katharine Lee Bates. Bethune was as vehement over gender issues as she was over those of race. “The work of men is heralded and adored while that of women is given last place or entirely overlooked,” she declared. “We [women] must go to the front and take our rightful place; fight our battle and claim our victories.” Though Bethune married in 1898 and had a child the following year, she separated from her husband, because, as the scholar Elaine Smith explains, “marriage and family experiences were unsatisfactory for her.” To Bethune, a more fulfilling kind of experience was her relationship with a young widow, Frances Reynolds Keyser, who matched her in ambition and devotion to their shared cause and with whom Bethune “stood shoulder to shoulder” in the running of her school.

But resentment over the generic male’s complicity in woman’s inferior position could not alone have kept these women from heterosexuality or made them prefer partnerships with other women. More important was academic women’s conviction that no man they had ever met on a personal level would accept and nurture their professorial positions. A 1903 article, “Confessions of a Woman Professor,” states the case as many female professors must have seen it: “The male attitude of mind I have found to vary from a mild objection about my ideas of professional life . . . as ‘impracticable’ to a fierce jealousy which refuses to tolerate the suggestion that a woman may possibly love at once her profession and her husband.” The writer’s conclusion was that marriage would bring her nothing she needed and would demand of her an “unspeakable sacrifice.” She thus refused “to exchange the work to which my best efforts and dearest ambitions have been given” for “the considerably overestimated boon of being supported.” The notion of being transported by love or passion for a man seems never to have occurred to her; heterosexual romantic susceptibilities would have been psychologically as well as practically devastating to the efforts and ambitions dearest to her.

Yet some academic women had been educated in heterosexual romance as well as Greek and Latin. They neither desired to nor could transcend heterosexuality and the very gendered roles that nineteenth-century heterosexuals usually adopted. Such longings sometimes brought them conflict. They came to see their pioneering positions as burdensome and a strong male hand extended to lift them out of their difficult duties as inviting and even compelling. When George Palmer, a Harvard philosophy professor, began courting the Wellesley president Alice Freeman, she was deeply moved by his understanding of how exhausted she was by her stressful role. Men too would have been exhausted in her position, but they would not have had the luxury of escape, as Freeman, a woman formed by the nineteenth century, did—nor would a woman in a committed relationship with another woman have the luxury of escape from difficult duties. Palmer wrote to Freeman in 1886 that he was “distressed to see you look so worn, and to find you were having little appetite and sleep.” He offered her a refuge, which many pioneering academic women would have considered insulting but she found overwhelmingly seductive: “Will you not become a girl again and come like a child to our Class Day?” The invitation signaled to her his “power / As I had never known till now,” as she later wrote in a poem. He was assuming the role of the beloved patriarch, calling her back gently but firmly to the Victorian gender agreements from which she had strayed.

As Freeman’s response indicated, the temptation to abdicate the “masculine” responsibilities that she had assumed was irresistible. “Perhaps if this ‘becoming a girl again’ should succeed, it would be just as effective as a longer vacation,” she replied with pathos. Palmer took his cue: “Then as a little girl you will read carefully the following directions,” he wrote, outlining precisely how the day would go and permitting her what must have seemed like blissfully childlike, feminine mindlessness.

When Freeman and Palmer married, in 1887, Alice Freeman Palmer did not cut all her ties with Wellesley (she became an influential trustee); nevertheless she resigned from the presidency. She had been an effective leader of the college despite her exhaustion, but the role was incompatible with the nineteenth-century conceptions of womanhood that continued to sit deep in her psyche. Her verses describing her life with Palmer (published posthumously in 1915 as A Marriage Cycle) suggest the extent to which she had found her burden of “masculine power” reprehensible. The poem “Attainment,” for example, sums up the heterosexual dynamic between her and her husband, which provided what she considered a necessary refuge and made her continuation as president of Wellesley College impossible.

 

Great love has triumphed. At a crisis hour

    Of strength and struggle on the heights of life

He came, and bidding me abandon power,

    Called me to take the quiet name of wife.

 

Of course, some men did not wish to be daddies to the women they loved, or to be like the tyrants whom the author of the 1903 article “Confessions of a Woman Professor” described. When Wesley Mitchell, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, proposed marriage to Lucy Sprague (who in 1906 had become dean of women and one of the first females to be given a regular faculty appointment at Berkeley), she expressed a fear that was common among academic women: “If I marry you, your work and your standards will prevail.” Mitchell had written to her in proto-Lawrentian terms that had aroused her suspicion:

 

You have lived splendidly, proudly alone, as much as a man lives alone. You have been independent. You have cultivated a sense of privacy. A man may do as much and set store by all these things, yet marry without great reluctance at giving them up in a measure. But a girl? Don’t these things, when she has them all, become more part of her fibre? Does not she become a bit of an Amazon in soul? . . . And while she longs to be captured, must she not flee? And can she even understand what wild, shy thing of forest freedom it is within her which holds out—which bids her struggle against her judgment and passion?

 

Though Lucy Sprague must have been annoyed by his conception of independent women, nevertheless she was fascinated by the romance of the heterosexual chase that he articulated. The wild thing within her (which had been carefully nurturing an academic career for years) continued to hold out for a time. However, Mitchell soon assured her that he would accept her terms. “You would not have to give up your plans,” he wrote. “On the contrary, you would realize them more effectively by marrying me.” Though Lucy Sprague Mitchell quit her Berkeley position after the marriage and moved with her husband to New York for a new professional venture of his, he did help her in the career for which she became best known: together they established the Bureau of Educational Experiments, and Lucy Mitchell became a pioneer in progressive education for children.

However, most academic women of the era who had achieved such hard-won professional success were not willing to renounce it or to alter their career in order to accommodate a husband’s moves. Therefore, although Alice Freeman married a man, many of her faculty members found their happiness in Wellesley marriages. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, virtually the entire English department at Wellesley was paired off in lesbian arrangements: Katharine Lee Bates with the economics professor Katharine Coman, Martha Shackford and Margaret Sherwood with each other, Vida Scudder with Florence Converse, Sophie Jewett with Laura Hibbard. At Vassar too, couples such as Salmon and Underhill and Gertrude Buck and Laura Wylie abounded, as they did at Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, the University of Chicago, Columbia University—everywhere that female academics were employed. In choosing each other rather than men, they constructed brilliant solutions that allowed them to fulfill their longings for love, affection, eroticism, companionship, and support of all kinds while holding on to the fruits of their efforts and ambitions. They were thus able to claim a foothold in higher education for themselves, and they paved the way for future generations of women as college students and as academics.