Here Was Fellowship: A Social Portrait of Academic Women at Wellesley College, 1895-1920

Abstract

IN 1929 HISTORIAN WILLYSTINE GOODSELL noted the meager professional opportunities available to academic women. Only in the women's colleges did women professors of all ranks considerably outnumber the men. Goodsell concluded, the realm of higher education this is their one happy hunting ground and they make good use of it.' One such golden arena was the academic community of Wellesley College 1895-1920. Wellesley was the only women's college which from its founding in 1875 was committed to women presidents and a totally female professoriate. In the Progressive era this professoriate was a stellar cast: it included Katharine Coman, historian; Mary Calkins, philosopher; Vida Dutton Scudder, literary critic and social radical; Margaret Ferguson, botanist; Sarah Frances Whiting, physicist; Emily Greene Balch, economist; and Katharine Lee Bates, author of America the Beautiful. To outside observers this group had created a female Harvard, a bubbling cauldron that seethed, a hotbed of radicalism.2 To their students the noble faculty provided a rich world which stirred them. To the next generation of faculty women the old crowd were completely dedicated war horses.3 To each other, they were kindred spirits, diverse, but united in the bonds of Wellesley.4 Today such outstanding academic women are relatively unknown. It is not solely the passage of time, however, that has distanced these women from us; historians have not considered them worthy of study. Traditional scholarship in the history of academe has tended to focus on presidents, not academic faculty. Moreover, there has been an implicit presumption that only one model of the academic exists-that of the male professional. Even in the recent renaissance in women's educational history, historians have tended to dismiss women scholars a priori. Thus Sheila Rothman in Women's Proper Sphere concludes that women's colleges were dens of domesticity where female virtue and moraltiy intruded on women's intellectual life. According to Roth-