"Scholar," "Lady," "Best Man in the English Department"? Recalling the Career of Marjorie Hope Nicolson

Abstract

“We came late enough to escape the self-consciousness and the belligerence of the pioneers, to take education and training for granted. We came early enough to take equally for granted professional positions in which we could make full use of our training. This was our double glory.” Speaking before an audience at the University of Michigan, her alma mater, in 1937 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, then Dean of Smith College, reflected on the heady years during which she, Class of 1914, and her female contemporaries came of age. These lines, later published in a well-known essay entitled “The Rights and Privileges Pertaining Thereto…,” are often quoted in histories of women's higher education to capture the circumstances—among them, peaking female enrollments, rising doctorates, and wartime employment—that buoyed the aspirations and career ambitions of college women in the early decades of the twentieth century. By vividly evoking the spirit of possibility that so deeply influenced women in the Progressive Era, Nicolson's description, in turn, offered an equally telling perspective on the disillusionment that many female graduates experienced later, in the wake of vastly changed employment realities and a widespread backlash against women's advances. “We did not realize that such fever is inevitably followed by reaction…. Within a decade shades of the prison house began to close.”