CHAPTER 2

Wellesley College

1921–1925

Enflamed with the study of learning, and the admiration of virtue.

—John Milton

GRACE FRICK HAD A KNACK for making friends. Shirley McGarr, her next-door neighbor in Northeast Harbor, Maine, has attributed this trait to Grace’s upbringing in the Midwest, where people are reputedly less standoffish than prickly New Englanders.1 Marguerite Yourcenar’s biographers often comment on Grace’s eagerness to connect with others. Michèle Goslar, for example, describes the thirty-four-year-old Grace as “a tall, thin, elegant young woman, erect in her bearing,” who enjoyed unexpected encounters and “was constantly on the lookout for chances to make contact with others.”² Male or female, she befriended them all, but her closest friends were intellectually gifted, independent women.

The one great friend we know of from Grace’s Kansas City youth, Ruth Hall, came east in the fall of 1921, as Grace did, to attend a prestigious women’s college. Ruth went to Vassar, then to Yale, and eventually returned to her hometown, where she became a prominent attorney. She never married. There is no other record of Grace’s youthful friendships. Nor do we know of any amorous adventures in high school.³ Her brother Gage once said that he regretted never having introduced any of his male friends to Grace.

When Grace stepped onto the campus of Wellesley College in the fall of 1921, she was entering America’s citadel of higher education. The greater Boston area is home to more institutions of higher learning than any other city. Wellesley is one of the original Seven Sister colleges, along with Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, and Vassar. All were founded in the mid- to late 1800s and are considered to be the rough equivalent in their level of academic excellence of the male Ivy League. Wellesley was initially unique in its commitment not only to women’s education but to an all-female faculty.4 While its faculty is now mixed, Wellesley still admits only women as students; Radcliffe, by contrast, has merged with Harvard, and Vassar became coeducational in the 1960s. The Wellesley College motto, emphasizing women’s capacity to act boldly and think for themselves, is “Non ministrari sed ministrare”: not to be ministered unto but to minister. That dictum would have held great appeal for someone like Frick, who intended to make her mark on the world.

We have seen the seriousness of purpose that characterized Frick’s high school years. There can be no doubt that she chose Wellesley for its outstanding academic reputation and its emphasis on training intelligent young women to be leaders.⁵ Grace’s brother Gage may have been another factor in her choice. Gage graduated from Harvard University in the spring of 1919. The following year, when Grace was exploring college options, he became secretary of the Kansas City chapter of the Harvard Alumni. In nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard has traditionally had a strong social connection to Wellesley. In the early decades of the twentieth century, part of Wellesley’s draw for many women was the prospect of marrying a Harvard man.

Nonetheless, like its all-female counterparts in other locations, Wellesley did not escape being labeled a haven for lesbians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Indeed,” Tirza True Latimer has noted, “in countries where colleges for women existed, euphemisms for same-sex relations between women—such as Wellesley marriage or Newnham friendship—frequently incorporated the names of women’s schools.”⁶ Romantic friendships (whether secretly sexual or not) and mad crushes were a frequent phenomenon among the students at all-female schools. Unmarried faculty women, moreover, often set up households together on or near their campuses whether for the practical purpose of sharing expenses or for more intimate reasons.

As Michelle Gibson and Deborah T. Meem have noted, “long-term partnerships between women were seen as neither unnatural nor immoral” and were often treated with the same respect accorded heterosexual marriages.⁷ As Patricia Ann Palmieri has written, “Lifelong relationships of deep significance were commonplace at Wellesley, fostering verbal and physical expressions of love.” Vida Scudder, a professor of English and social activist, became the lifelong companion of her former student Florence Converse. Katharine Lee Bates, an 1880 Wellesley graduate who came back to teach English literature at her alma mater, called Katharine Coman “her partner and ‘Joy-of-Life.’”8 Margaret Pollack Sherwood and her disciple Martha Hale Shackford, an 1896 Wellesley graduate who, like Bates, returned to Wellesley to teach, attained such iconic status as a couple that Gibson and Meem chose their photograph to adorn the cover of the essay collection Lesbian Academic Couples. Both women were professors of English literature, which, alongside Latin, would be Grace’s major. Sherwood specialized in the Romantic movement in Great Britain, and Shackford was one of the first scholars to recognize Emily Dickinson as a significant poet. Grace would take advanced courses from both women in her senior year. The rich history of woman-identified women of accomplishment that Sherwood and Shackford represented would not be lost on her.

Grace arrived at Wellesley early in what a centennial history of the college calls the Jazz Age, an era during which mores at Wellesley underwent considerable change.⁹ World War I had ended three years earlier, and the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had finally granted women the right to vote in August of 1920. Grace E. Hawk, who wrote one chapter of Wellesley College, 1875–1975: A Century of Women, notes regarding the spirit of the time that “for social activists the doctrines inculcated during the Progressive Era still formed a sound basis for protests against newly powerful enemies of the people: racism, at its worst in the Ku Klux Klan; fundamentalism, as it was exhibited in the Scopes trial; restriction of immigration; anti-intellectualism.”¹⁰ During Grace’s freshman year, Vice President Calvin Coolidge denounced Wellesley as a “hotbed of radicalism,” singling out one professor, Mary Calkins, for particular criticism: she was rumored to have voted for the socialist Eugene V. Debs in the 1920 presidential race! Wellesley aimed to inculcate in its students the ideals of service to others and what was called “symmetrical womanhood,” which entailed, if not entirely rejecting the privatized sphere to which women had traditionally been confined, stepping onto “the public stage of community activism and careers.”¹¹ Wellesley was clearly a school that would further shape Grace’s childhood sense of justice and expose her to a community of like-minded women.

In early 1921, one of Grace’s former schoolmates had given readers of the Westport Crier a taste of what to expect if they were headed to Wellesley. Eleanor Brown was a freshman at that school when she spoke to the Crier. One of the aspects of life that most strikingly impressed her was “that one has to walk miles and miles every day.” All that exercise made for an exceptionally fit student body, as it were, and sports were all the rage. Freshmen often lived in Wellesley Village rather than on campus and “practically govern[ed] themselves” under the oversight of an elected student government. A dramatics club called the Barnswallows mounted plays every year so that every Wellesley student, by the time she graduated, would see “at least one Greek play, one modern play, and two Shakespearian plays.” Finally, Brown pointed out, the grading scale at Wellesley at that time was so high that an E, the highest mark at Westport High, would be no more than a C at Wellesley. Even Harvard was reputed to have a more lenient grading policy than Wellesley.12

Thanks to a 1950 speech given by Grace’s classmate Eleanor (Wallace) Allen, we have a firsthand account of what it was like the day the Wellesley class of 1925 embarked upon its freshman year. By virtue of their matriculation date, the members of this class would find their lives forever entwined with the history of their alma mater:

 

On a warm, hazy September day in 1921, 402 young ladies . . . arrived in Wellesley, having come from every section of the United States and eight from foreign lands. It was a memorable day for them, and, although they were oblivious of the fact, an even more significant one for the College. . . . The College had waited forty-six years for the Class of 1925 to arrive and, here at last, it actually was. Now, the College could look ahead four years and plan its fiftieth birthday and even project further into the future to its seventy-fifth, for 1925 was to stand forever firmly to mark these important occasions, the first by its graduation and the second by its twenty-fifth reunion. . . . So no wonder our first week was spent in being welcomed on all sides. Everyone was so glad to see us. As we descended from the train, smiling “Ask Me’s” stepped forward to dispel our fears. . . . Then in rapid succession came our first chapel with President [Ellen Fitz] Pendleton’s welcome, the C[hristian] A[association] Reception, the Barnswallows’ Reception, the Sophomore Serenade, and then the Sophomore Prom—each of us being escorted by a sophomore and dancing gaily through an evening, until nine-thirty, with other sophomores. Is it any wonder that we questioned how the college had got along without us?¹³

 

While American women were gaining new freedoms in the wake of World War I, Wellesley College was still imposing strict rules of conduct on its students. If Eleanor Allen mentions the Sophomore Prom ending at nine-thirty, it’s because that was when school policy required dances to end. Nor could Wellesley women play golf or tennis or volleyball on Sunday. Students were admonished to wear “knickers” only for sport, not to tea rooms, shops, or dinner. There were also wide-ranging curriculum requirements. All first-year students had to take gymnastics and outdoor sports classes five hours a week, for example. At its founding, the college had been known as the Wellesley Female Seminary; in the 1920s, although the name had changed, classes in biblical history were still required of all sophomores and juniors. Members of the college met daily in the Houghton Memorial Chapel for morning prayers.

Not surprisingly, Grace—or Fricky, as she came to be known—undertook a challenging array of yearlong classes in addition to the five that were required of all freshmen. Her choices are uncannily predictive of what became enduring passions. Botany 101, Plant Studies, sought to give the Wellesley woman a “familiar and intimate acquaintance with her living environment.”14 The school’s three-hundred-acre campus, with its fields, woods, hills, and lake, was an idyllic setting in which to develop that acquaintance, and Grace became a lifelong lover of nature.

French 102 included readings from notable contemporary authors, exercises in speaking, and writing from dictation. Latin 102 focused on authors whose ideas “are part of the classical heritage of modern life”: imperial destiny, citizenship, humanism, and the like.¹⁵

Fascinated by the ancient world, Grace proceeded in her sophomore year to study Roman history and take three more courses in Latin: Horace, Tacitus and Pliny, and Latin prose composition. She also sought to hone her writing skills in English, electing to take two semesters of Advanced Expository Writing. Despite her emphasis on Latin, Grace did not abandon French, taking a yearlong course in translation, themes, and oral composition, which aimed to prepare students for more advanced work in language and literature.¹⁶

Not content with the hefty load of courses she had tackled during two years at Wellesley, in 1923 Grace attended summer school at the University of Colorado. David M. Hays, archivist at the University Libraries in Boulder, calls those summer sessions “marketed nationally, with prominent visiting professors, a mountain recreation program, and other perks.”¹⁷ Grace loved to hike, and counted “mild climbing” among her habitual recreational activities well into middle age.¹⁸ The city of Boulder and the nearby Rocky Mountains were an obvious draw.

Back at Wellesley that fall, Grace turned at least some of her attention to extracurricular matters. Until the 1930s only juniors and seniors were allowed to join one of Wellesley’s six private “societies,” which entailed secret initiation rites and competed with one another for members. The process involved a series of “teas” held at the various houses during which members and those hoping to join could size each other up. One Wellesley student near the turn of the twentieth century complained in a letter to her mother about the undemocratic nature of these clubs: “I never saw such a place for snobby cliques. . . . Here a person counts for absolutely nothing unless she is a Society girl.” All these groups involved a social component, of course, but they also had various, sometimes overlapping, fields of concentration. Phi Sigma and Zeta Alpha, for example, were literary societies. Tau Zeta Epsilon focused on art and music. The Agora Society was primarily political in nature and encouraged Wellesley women to devote themselves to making the world a better place.19 Grace joined Alpha Kappa Chi, whose focus was the study and performance of the classics.

Alpha Kappa Chi had been founded in the spring of 1892, modeling itself on the highly regarded Shakespeare Society.²⁰ Founders hoped to do as fine a job of staging Greek drama as the “Shakespeare girls” were doing with their Elizabethan plays. From its humble beginnings, the society became one of the most popular ones on campus. Also joining AKX her junior year was one of Grace’s closest friends at Wellesley, Elizabeth “Betsy” Teter of Chicago, Illinois. Betsy would go on to teach biology at Lake Forest College in her home state. Frances Ilg, another Midwesterner and friend of Grace’s, also pledged Alpha Kappa Chi. Frances would become a medical doctor and distinguished authority on child behavior.

Among the other most important friends that Grace made during her years at Wellesley were classmates Phyllis “Phyll” Bartlett, Mary Grace “M.G.” Coates, and Florence Codman. Phyllis hailed from New York City and shared Grace’s love of English literature. She and Fran Ilg were both members of the Wellesley College Government Association in 1925. M.G. came from Bayville, New York, and was president of the Agora Society. M.G. went to nursing school after graduation and married a doctor. Florence, a Philadelphia native, became a writer and literary critic, publishing in prominent magazines such as the Nation and the New Yorker.

During the years of Grace’s membership in the classical society, the group staged selected scenes from Sophocles’s Antigone and Aristophanes’s Frogs, sometimes adorning them with Greek statuary.²¹ But the major annual offerings of the group were two plays by Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis in 1924 and Iphigenia in Tauride in 1925. Several of Frick’s friends played roles in these productions. Grace contented herself with chairing the costume committee.

An in facultate associate of the Society Alpha Kappa Chi was Katharine Canby Balderston, who at that time was still a young English instructor. Katharine had graduated from Wellesley in 1916 and gone on, after obtaining a master’s at Radcliffe, to earn a doctorate at Yale, as many promising English majors at Wellesley were encouraged by their mentors to do. Her most celebrated work was a groundbreaking scholarly edition of the diary of an eighteenth-century British friend of Samuel Johnson, Hester Lynch Thrale, entitled Thraliana.22 Balderston and another renowned Wellesley professor, the classicist Margaret “Peg” Taylor, would join forces after Taylor’s arrival in the 1930s and eventually share a home in Wellesley village. With the publication of the Thraliana, Balderston was appointed to the Martha Hale Shackford Chair in English Literature in 1942, a post she held until her retirement in 1960.²³

The development of a woman-focused academic culture was crucial to these kinds of mentor-student relationships, especially in the early years when conservative opinion held that women could not hope to match wits with men. Those connections had strong and lasting effects on teacher and student alike. Balderston and Taylor maintained ties with Grace for decades after she left Wellesley. In 1969 and 1970, forty-four and forty-five years after Frick’s graduation, she and Marguerite Yourcenar made the three-hour drive to Round Pond, Maine, from Northeast Harbor to share Thanksgiving dinner with the Wellesley pair.²⁴

Frick’s extracurricular pursuits may have affected her scholarship in her junior year, the only time during her Wellesley career when four of Grace’s ten semester grades, all in academic subjects, were C’s. Those subjects were requirements, however, which—to use an expression for which Grace would later be known—were not her cup of tea. One of the two-semester courses in question was the yearlong Introduction to Philosophy. The Wellesley College Bulletin makes this class sound like something Grace would greatly enjoy, concentrating as it did on ethics, psychology, and the science of the moral self,²⁵ but Grace obviously gave it short shrift. Her performance was equally lackluster in Biblical History 202 and 204, The Life of Christ and The Apostolic Age, respectively. Grace was still a Christian Scientist when she entered Wellesley.²⁶ In a biographical questionnaire filled out later by members of her class, Grace made a point of noting that she left the United Church of Christ, Scientist, between her sophomore and her junior years—which is to say, between her first and second yearlong bouts with biblical history.²⁷ Although these courses apparently failed to engage Grace in a meaningful way, they may have caused her to view Christianity in a different light. Mme Yourcenar would later tell me that Grace had long ago rejected religion when the two of them met.²⁸

Things went better for Grace in Economics 201, Principles of Economics, a study of current economic thought, and Economics 204, Economic History of the United States. Economics classes at Wellesley had historically focused more on social problems and industrial conditions than had, for example, the more theoretically oriented Harvard.29 Grace did well in both of these courses, as she did in the yearlong Development of Thought from Classic Times through the Middle Ages.

It was also during Grace’s junior year that she took her first advanced class in English literature. English was one of the strongest departments at Wellesley, if not the strongest. Grace took English Literature 204, a course in Milton, from Laura Lockwood. A Yale PhD, Lockwood was known for her unerring memory and for challenging students “to walk up the highest hill in South Natick reciting Paradise Lost from memory.”³⁰ Whether or not it was because of this pedagogical tactic, her teaching of Paradise Lost made an indelible impression on Frick.³¹

Grace excelled in all her English courses. English Literature 309, taught by the legendary Renaissance specialist Martha Hale Shackford, entailed reading all of Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays.³² Patricia Palmieri describes Shackford’s Shakespeare seminar as commanding “such respect that she became known as the female counterpart to George Kittredge of Harvard.” Lockwood’s Eighteenth Century Literature devoted two semesters, first to Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Richard Steele, and Jonathan Swift, and then to Samuel Johnson and his circle. In English Literature 322, Grace studied the Romantic movement in England and its influence on the work of the early nineteenth-century poets with Margaret Sherwood.³³

Classes in early Roman history and religion, European history, and Latin literature took up the rest of Grace’s senior year. By the time Grace was done with her bachelor’s degree, she had taken more courses in Latin and ancient Rome than she had in English literature. Those classes laid the intellectual foundation for the personal and professional partnership of her life.

Whether it was simply her Midwestern companionability or a more distinctive blend of personal qualities—intelligence, good humor, concern for the well-being of others—Grace eventually emerged as something of a leader among her band of friends. Reading the Wellesley College directories from her undergraduate years, one can follow the way those young women coalesced residentially as time went by. Grace spent her first year at 599 Washington Street in Wellesley Village with seven other students, none of whom seems to have become a lasting friend. In her sophomore year she roomed at Fiske with Betsy Teter; next door were Phyllis Bartlett and Rusty Montgomery. Fran Ilg was a few doors down the hall. Florence Codman stayed on for a second year at Wood Cottage, the homey shingle-style residence where the future Madame Chiang Kai-Shek had lived as a sophomore at Wellesley in 1914–15. M.G. Coates and another member of the group, Alice E. K. Wood, moved from Wood to Wilder Hall on Norumbega Hill; they turned out to be the advance guard for most of the rest of the gang.

Wilder Hall, completed in 1900, represented a distinct architectural departure from the residential “cottages” of the 1880s. As described in The Landscape and Architecture of Wellesley College, “Wilder took the form of a neoclassical, pedimented pavilion of red brick with white trim. Its blind arcade and Palladian motif echoed other Bulfinchian work designed by Boston architects at the turn of the century.”34 By their junior year, Bartlett, Coates, Frick, Montgomery, Teter, and Wood had all moved over to or stayed on at Wilder, where they would remain until graduation. As seniors, Grace’s pals joined other Wilder residents in electing their organized and energetic friend from Kansas City president of that house.

The end of Grace’s senior year was punctuated by two momentous occasions, the Wellesley College anniversary pageant and commencement for the class of 1925. The observances connected with Wellesley’s fiftieth anniversary began on Saturday, May 24, with Tree Day, an annual ceremony in which the freshman class would plant a tree on the green in front of College Hall. Organizers eschewed the elaborate costumed performances of recent years, preferring to revive the simplicity of the first Tree Day in 1877, two years after the college was founded. That initial event featured a handful of undergraduate marchers; forty-eight years later the participants “stretched out to such a distance that when the freshman line had turned onto the green, the seniors could still be seen on the hill by Norumbega” far away.³⁵ Those marchers, carrying on a sacred tradition, formed a vivid illustration of how much Wellesley College had grown in its first fifty years.

A few days later, on Thursday evening, May 28, a cast of more than two hundred students would perform The Winged Soul by Marie Warren Potter (class of 1907) at Alumnae Hall. Designed and directed by Dugald Stuart Walker of New York’s Studio Theater, this main event of the Semi-Centennial was described in the Wellesley College News of April 16 as the “Most Spectacular Project Ever Launched at Wellesley.”³⁶ Based on Plato’s Phaedrus, the production sought to express “the beauty of the arts, knowledge, and finally brotherhood, the beauty that ‘floods all other loveliness with light.’”³⁷

Friday morning, May 29, brought the culmination of the Semi-Centennial, an academic procession in which Wellesley students and faculty were joined by delegates from colleges throughout the United States and around the world, including the College of Kobe, Japan; Constantinople College; Montreal’s McGill University; Oxford University; the University of Paris; and Wellesley’s sister college, Yenching, in China.38 Members of the senior class, wearing their caps and gowns, “marched in double file from the hill in back of Founders Hall along the road leading to the chapel. Through those lines came the long procession of guests and delegates to the celebration.”³⁹

President James Rowland Angell of Yale delivered the Semi-Centennial address, “The Theory and Practice of Education in the American College,” at the Houghton Memorial Chapel. Other speakers included President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, representing Wellesley’s male counterparts throughout New England; Louise Pope Johnson, president of the Wellesley Alumnae Association; and President Mary Emma Woolley of Mount Holyoke College, bearer of greetings from the other women’s colleges.⁴⁰ As the Wellesley College News reported, “President Lowell recalled the ancient myth of Pallas springing out fully armed and endowed with all the wisdom of the time from the forehead of Zeus” (to which Barbara P. McCarthy spunkily replied in her chapter of Wellesley College, 1875–1975, “Zeus of course being colleges for men”).⁴¹ President Lowell discussed the rapid development of women’s colleges and declared, “As the representative of the men’s colleges, I am privileged to bring their congratulations, marveling, like other elder brothers, that their younger sister has grown so fair and tall.’”⁴²

Wellesley president Ellen Fitz Pendleton took advantage of the fifty-year milestone to confer five honorary doctorates. The laureates were Annie Jump Cannon, the astronomer who devised the Harvard Classification of stellar spectra; Caroline Hazard and Julia Josephine Irvine, former presidents of Wellesley; Helen Barrett Montgomery, a New Testament scholar and dedicated social reformer; and the retiring Katharine Lee Bates, “for forty years the moving force in one of the strongest departments of the College, cherished in the hearts of all alumnae, scholar, poet, and author of one of the greatest of our national hymns.” Indeed, when Rev. John J. Callan of Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church had pronounced his benediction, the anniversary celebration came to an end with the singing of Bates’s America the Beautiful.⁴³

That same day, as Barbara McCarthy reported, Wellesley alumnae in Paris held their own Semi-Centennial dinner at the University Women’s Club in the sixth arrondissement: “Parisian pride in their alma mater was intensified by an anniversary gift to Wellesley College from the French Government: two large Sèvres vases and busts by Hudon of Washington and Franklin, which had been presented on April 17 in a ceremony at the Elysée Palace.”44 With anniversary events broadcast on WBZ radio, the eyes of the world were on Wellesley College.

On Sunday morning, June 14, Hugh M. Black addressed the class of 1925 at their baccalaureate service. Black was an honorary member of that class and the father of two of its soon-to-be graduates. Seniors were attired in academic dress, and Rev. Black wore scarlet ecclesiastical robes about which he remarked that he had worn “his most gorgeous robes to honor the occasion.” He urged the graduating class “to acquire and cultivate the habit of mind which looks on the world in terms of dynamics, not statics, of force, not mass.”⁴⁵ Eleanor Allen thought so highly of Black’s speech that she quoted him twenty-five years later when addressing her classmates gathered for their twenty-fifth reunion. “The words he spoke to us are as full of meaning today as they were then—perhaps more so—and I should like to leave them with you as we begin our next twenty-five years. ‘The world is big as we are big enough to use it, beautiful as we have the capacity to see beauty, rich as we acquire richness of the mind. May you, my dears, get as much of your hearts’ desire, as much true success and happiness, as I wish for you. It is all well. You are born for the love of God.’”⁴⁶ On June 16, 351 Wellesley College seniors received their degrees in the Houghton Memorial Chapel.

The members of the class of 1925 changed in appearance during their college years. As Eleanor Allen remarked to her fellow alumnae at their twenty-fifth reunion, “We arrived as freshmen in what might be called the long—ear-long hair, long skirts, long waists, and long earrings. After the spring vacation of our junior year, seventy-six girls and one faculty member returned with ‘bobbed’ hair—the reason given [being] that it was timesaving and hygienic, and that it was necessary to the all-around life that women were going to lead.”⁴⁷ Grace was no exception; her class portrait in the Wellesley Legenda shows how much she had changed during her four years at Wellesley. She and her friend Betsy Teter wore almost identical “bobs,” cut square around the base of the head to ear length, parted on the side, and stylishly waved.

In the Legenda portrait, Grace has come into her own and found a style of clothing that suits her. Gone are the rows of frilly lace that struck such a discordant note in her high school picture. In their place Grace sports the clean, geometric lines of a white blouse with the sailor’s collar that was popular early in the twentieth century. That collar is handsomely draped over the lapels of a tailored, waist-length fine wool jacket. Adorning the blouse’s V-shaped opening at her throat is a simple string of seed pearls. Grace’s gaze rests here again—as in her Westport Herald portrait—not on the photographer but on a point in the distance. The enigmatic twinkle in her eye and mischievous half smile on her lips contrast with the grave demeanor of her previous class photo. Her shoulders are square and her bearing confident. One gets the sense that she knows who she is, feels proud of what she has accomplished, and is ready for whatever comes next.