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Mary Lyon
A Thousand Streams
When Mary Lyon stood before her class and paraphrased the verse she knew by heart—“My father and mother forsook me, but the LORD took me up”1—she wasn’t simply repeating memorized lines from Psalm 27. She spoke from personal experience. After her father died, Mary’s mother remarried and moved several towns away with her younger children, leaving Mary behind on the family’s one-hundred-acre farm in Buckland, Massachusetts, to manage her older brother’s household. She cooked on the open hearth; baked bread; spun and dyed wool; wove coverlets; sewed clothes and embroidered linens; preserved fruits and vegetables; churned butter; made cheese, jam, soap, and candles; cured meat; washed clothes; and swept floors—all for the wage of one silver dollar a week. Thirteen-year-old Mary was left virtually on her own to fend for herself.
Women’s Education Advocate, Servant of God
Even worse, perhaps, than the loneliness and separation from her family was the fact that Mary’s heavy domestic responsibilities forced her to abandon what brought her the most joy: school. Fortunately, her brother’s marriage liberated Mary from her domestic roles, and in 1814, at age seventeen, she was offered her first teaching job at a one-room schoolhouse in Buckland. No formal training was required—Mary’s reputation as a stellar student years earlier was enough to qualify her for the job.
She was paid 75 cents plus board per week, far less than the standard ten to twelve dollars a month a male teacher received in the same role. As was the custom of the day, Mary “boarded round,” meaning she lived an equal number of days in each pupil’s home, which in this case required that she move every five days. Mary didn’t find teaching easy or enjoyable, despite her own zeal for learning. She struggled with disciplining her students, especially on rainy days when the unruly older boys were temporarily released from their work in the fields and returned to her classroom. During that long first term she resolved more than once that she would never teach again after her contract was up.
By the time the next term rolled around, however, Mary had changed her mind. Not only did she continue to teach, she also decided, against her family’s wishes, to pursue her own higher education. Her stepfather, who still controlled Mary’s finances, finally agreed to let her use her father’s inheritance to enroll at Byfield Seminary, north of Boston. But he was so incensed he charged Mary by the mile for the use of his horse to make the three-day journey to the school.
At Byfield, Mary was particularly inspired by headmaster Reverend Joseph Emerson, whose religious convictions composed the foundation of his instruction. It was under Emerson’s tutelage that Mary’s vision of Christian-centered higher education for women first began to take shape. “Mary Lyon . . . kindled at the possibility of dedicating her life to the service of God in a way that made continuing demands on her power to learn and to reflect, as well as on her eagerness to serve,” observes biographer Elizabeth Alden Green.2 Mary became known as an advocate for the education of women as her reputation as a gifted teacher continued to spread far beyond Buckland. First and foremost, she yearned to serve God, and she viewed her work as an educator in light of her calling.
The Vision Takes Root
Mary took a dramatic step in her career in 1834 when she left Ipswich Female Seminary, where she had worked as a teacher and principal with her close friend, Ipswich founder Zilpah Polly Grant, to focus her efforts entirely on raising money to fund a new institution of higher learning for women. It was not the best time to ask people for donations—the United States was in a severe economic depression—but Mary was relentless. She had neither the financial backing of a church nor a single wealthy patron to support her. Instead, she wrote hundreds of personal fund-raising letters, crafted newspaper articles and advertisements outlining her vision, and visited schools as far away as Detroit to research curriculum and administrative practices. She also single-handedly persuaded prominent men to fund her enterprise and created a board of trustees comprised of what she called “benevolent gentlemen.” Mary did not underestimate the power of these male benefactors. The plans, she wrote to Zilpah, “should not seem to originate with us, but with benevolent gentlemen,” acknowledging that “many good men will fear the effect on society of so much female influence, and what they will call female greatness.”3
In an 1836 article published in the Boston Recorder, Mary made a vigorous bid for support from the church, which had long funded colleges for men:
Who can survey the ground for the last 20 years, and count up the thousands, and tens of thousands of dollars, which have been generously raised in behalf of these institutions, and not be filled with gratitude to Him. . . . But while we thus rejoice in what had been done, we cannot but inquire with painful emotions, why has not the hand of public beneficence been equally extended towards the higher institutions of the other sex?4
Despite her impassioned pleas, Mary did not get the support of the church. However, she did raise more than fifteen thousand dollars in three years, much of it the result of her tireless door-to-door solicitation throughout the western Massachusetts hill towns and beyond. “She spread out the whole subject, talking so fast that her hearers could hardly put in a word, anticipating every objection before it was uttered, and finally appealing to their individual humanity and benevolence,” observed a friend who accompanied Mary on many of her home visits. “She uttered no falsehood; she poured out truth; she offered arguments to make out her case; and, last and best of all, she carried the will of nearly every person with whom she labored.”5
While there were a handful of large donations of one thousand dollars or more, most contributions were modest, five or ten dollars of hard-earned money at a time. Fund-raising was painfully slow, but when she despaired, which was not often, Mary put her trust in God. “When all human help and human wisdom fail,” she wrote to Zilpah in 1835, “and all knowledge of future events, as connected with present causes, and present actions, seems entirely cut off, how sweet it is to go to One, who knows all from the beginning to the end—to One who can direct our very thoughts, and who can take us individually by the hand, and lead us in a plain path.”6
Mary also mapped out the vision for her school during these years, a vision like none other. While most women’s educational institutions of the time were available only to the affluent, Mary intended her school to be affordable and accessible to women of modest means. She devoted her mission not to the higher or poorer classes, she explained in a letter to Zilpah, but to the middle class, which she described as “the main springs, and the main wheels, which are to move the world.”7 Mary felt a kinship with the middle class. It was, after all, the class to which she as a farmer’s daughter belonged and the one she felt called to support. She planned to keep tuition costs low—sixty dollars per year—by instituting a unique policy that would require the students to perform all the domestic chores, from washing, ironing, cleaning, and food preparation to dish washing, gardening, and maintaining the fires.
A Work of Solemn Consecration
On November 8, 1837, eighty young women, some of whom had traveled three days by horse and carriage to reach South Hadley, Massachusetts, walked through the doors of the nearly finished Mount Holyoke Female Seminary to begin their pursuit of higher education. The new students were instructed to bring their own bedding, two spoons, an atlas, a dictionary, and a Bible. Furniture was sparse due to funding constraints, and construction crews scurried to complete the finishing touches on the building as the women arrived. At the time, there were 120 colleges for men in the United States. Mount Holyoke was the first institution of higher education for women, although it was not officially decreed a college by the Massachusetts state legislature until 1888.
Mary insisted the school not be named in her honor, so it took the name of a nearby mountain peak. Its motto was from Psalm 144: “That our daughters may be as cornerstones, polished after the similitude of a palace.”8 From her earliest dreams of the school, Mary had always considered its creation the holy work of the Lord. “How often have I endeavored to consecrate all the parts, all the interests, which God has given me in this contemplated institution, most sacredly and solemnly to his service,” she wrote to Zilpah in 1835, “and how often have I endeavored to pray, that every one, who had any thing to do in building up this institution, may never call aught his own. O that every one, who puts a finger to the work, by giving the smallest contribution of time—of money—or of influence, might feel that this is a work of solemn consecration—a work to be reviewed by the light of eternity.”9
Once its doors were open, Mary ensured that Mount Holyoke provided a sound spiritual foundation for its students as well. Each dormitory room was equipped with two tiny, private alcoves so roommates could have a quiet personal space for devotions and prayer. Virtually every student enrolled at Mount Holyoke during Mary’s lifetime attended two Sunday services at the village church and studied and recited passages from Scripture on the weekends. They also joined social prayer circles based on how they had classified themselves upon entrance: as a church member, as having no hope of salvation, or as somewhere in between. The students and teachers prayed regularly for missionaries, and the first Monday in January was dedicated to praying for the conversion of the world. Mary and her teachers prayed for the conversion of each student, and twice a day, half-hour periods were set aside for private prayer and meditation.
Despite her emphasis on a strong spiritual foundation, Mary struggled with a sense of inadequacy as a religious advisor. She often asked friends to pray that God would direct and inspire her in religious instruction, and she frequently felt lost and overwhelmed by her role. Yet clearly the Mount Holyoke students were impacted by Mary’s spiritual leadership, both in and out of the classroom. The class notes taken by student Eliza Hubbell, who attended Mount Holyoke from 1840 to 1844, reveal a glimpse of Mary’s teachings. “Religion is fitted to make us better in every situation in life,” Eliza’s notes read. “Our common duties will be more perfectly discharged if we are under the control of the Holy Spirit’s influence. She did not wish us to be like soap stone, which crumbles as it is rubbed, but like gold, which shines brighter, the more it is used.”10
Mary Lyon was not a women’s rights activist in the same way her contemporaries such as Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were. She did not campaign for the right for women to vote, and there is no indication that she attended or even referred to the famous 1848 women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls. Yet her advice to her students spoke volumes about her unwavering confidence in women’s abilities. “Be willing to do anything and anywhere,” she urged the young women. “Be not hasty to decide that you have no physical or mental strength and no faith or hope.”11
As Elizabeth Alden Green notes, Mary Lyon didn’t waste time trying to prove that the intellectual ability of the sexes was equal; she took it for granted. Instead, she emphasized how her female students should use their intelligence and abilities—not for pleasure and not for themselves, but to carry out God’s work in the world. “Every one we see seems to desire something of honor, ease, pleasure or improvement that will make something more of himself,” she acknowledged. “We ought to turn the current of feeling towards others and it will branch out into a thousand streams. How much happier you would be to live in a thousand beside yourself, rather than to live in yourself alone.”12
Today more women than men are enrolled in colleges and universities across the United States, a reality that would have seemed unimaginable to most nineteenth-century Americans—with the exception of Mary Lyon. The woman who had urged her students, “Go where no one else will go—do what no one else will do,”13 did exactly that in the fifty-two years of her life. In 1837, eighty young women made history when they crossed the threshold of a single brick building. Today, over 175 years later, 2,200 women from forty-eight states and nearly seventy countries enroll annually to study at Mount Holyoke, which has become one of the most prestigious colleges in America. Mary Lyon’s God-given vision flowed into eighty young women. Nearly two hundred years later, it has branched into a thousand streams.