Reading and Ambition: M. Carey Thomas and Female Heroism

Abstract

[T]HE FACT IS, FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD MINNIE THOMAS DECLARED in 1871: don't care much for any thing except dreaming about being grand & noble & famous but I can never be. She did become famous as M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, where she provided a model and an environment promoted ambition in other female dreamers. As an adolescent she hoped to show that the woman who has fought all the battles of olden time over again whitest reading the spirited pages of Homer Vergil Heroditus . . . been carried away by Carlyle & 'mildly enchanted by Emerson' ... is not any less like what God really intended a woman to be than the trifling ballroom butterfly than the ignorant wax doll baby which they admire. The passage reveals persistent themes of Thomas's adolescence: her passionate absorption in books, the possibilities for female heroism she found in classic texts, a feminist outlook sought to erase rather than highlight sexual difference, and a belief intellectual endeavor, even the sort usually gendered male, need not unsex a woman. It also demonstrates a reciprocal relation between Thomas's reading and her ambition, continuing: my greatest hope & ambition is to be an author an essayist an historian to write hearty earnest true books may do their part towards elevating the human race.' The woman who could read herself into books might grow up to write them. Thomas left an unusually full record of her reading: taken together,