The Story of Wellesley Part 9

In 1913, Madame Colin, who had served the college as head of the Department of French since 1905, died during the spring recess after a three days' illness. Madame Colin had studied at the University of Paris and the Sorbonne, and her ideals for her department were high.

Among Wellesley's own alumnae, only a very few who were officers of the college during the first forty years have died. Of these are Caroline Frances Pierce, of the cla.s.s of 1891, who was librarian from 1903 to 1910. To her wise planning we owe the conveniences and comforts in the new library building which she did not live to see completed.

In 1914, the Department of Greek suffered a deep loss in Professor Annie Sybil Montague, of the cla.s.s of 1879. Besides being a member of the first graduating cla.s.s, Miss Montague was one of the first to receive the degree of M.A. from Wellesley. In 1882, the college conferred this degree for the first time, and Miss Montague was one of the two candidates who presented themselves.

One of her old students, Annie Kimball Tuell, of the cla.s.s of 1896, herself an instructor in the Department of English Literature, writes:

I think Miss Montague would wish that another of her pupils, one who worked with her for an unusually long time, should say--what can most simply and most warmly and most gratefully be said--that she was a good teacher. So I want to say it formally for myself and for all the others and for all the years. For I suppose that if we were doomed to go before our girls for a last judgment, the best and the least of us would care just for the simple bit of testimony that we knew our business and attended to it. And of all the good people who made college days so rich for me, there is none of whom I could say this more entirely than of Miss Montague.

Often as I have caught sight of her in the jostling crowd of the second floor, I have felt a lively regret that she was known to so few of the girls, and that her excellent ability to give zest to drill and to stablish fluttering wits in order, could not have a fuller and freer exercise. In the old days we valued what she had to give, and in the usual silent, thankless way, elected her courses as long as there were courses to elect; but we have had to teach many years since to know how special that gift of hers was. Just as closer acquaintance with herself proved her breadth of mind and sympathy not quite understood before, so more intelligent knowledge of her methods showed them to be broader and more fundamental than we had quite comprehended. With her handling, rules and sub-rules ceased to jostle and confuse one another, but grouped themselves in a simpler harmony which we thought a very beautiful discovery, and grammar took on a reasonable unity which seemed a marvel. So we took our laborious days with cheer and enjoyed the energy, for we quite understood that our work would lead to something.

But if there could be an interchange of grace and I could take a gift from Miss Montague's personality, I would rather have what she in a matter-of-fact way would take for granted, but what is harder for us who are beginners here to come by,--I mean her altogether fine and blameless relation to her girls outside the cla.s.sroom. She was a presence always heartily responsive, but never unwary, without the slightest reflection of her personality upon us, with never a word too much of praise or blame, of too much intimacy or of too much reserve. She was a figure of familiar friendliness, ready with sympathy and comprehension, but wholesome, sound and sane, without trace of sentimentality. Above all, I felt her a singularly honorable spirit, toward whom we always turned our best side, to whom we might never go with talk wanton or idle or unkind or critical, but always with our very precious thoughts on whatsoever things are eager, and honest and kindly and of good report. And so she was able to do us much good and no harm at all. She can have had no millstones about her neck to reckon with....

Miss Montague used to have a little cla.s.s in Plato, and I have not forgotten how quietly we read together one day at the end of the Phaedo of the death of Socrates. After Miss Montague died, I turned to the book and found the place where the servant has brought the cup of poison, but Crito, unreconciled, wants to delay even a little:

"For the sun," said he, "is yet on the hills, and many a man has drunk the draught late."

"Yes," said Socrates, "since they wished for delay. But I do not think that I should gain anything by drinking the cup a little later."

In January, 1915, while this story of Wellesley was being written, Katharine Coman, Professor Emeritus of Economics, went like a conqueror to the triumph of her death. Miss Coman's power as a teacher has been spoken of on an earlier page, but she will be remembered in the college and outside as more than a teacher. Her books and her active interest in industrial affairs, her n.o.ble att.i.tude toward life, all have had their share in informing and directing and inspiring the college she loved.

"A mountain soul, she shines in crystal air Above the smokes and clamors of the town.

Her pure, majestic brows serenely wear The stars for crown.

"She comrades with the child, the bird, the fern, Poet and sage and rustic chimney-nook, But Pomp must be a pilgrim ere he earn Her mountain look.

"Her mountain look, the candor of the snow, The strength of folded granite, and the calm Of choiring pines, whose swayed green branches strow A healing balm.

"For lovely is a mountain rosy-lit With dawn, or steeped in sunshine, azure-hot, But loveliest when shadows traverse it, And stain it not."

[From a poem, "A Mountain Soul," by Katharine Lee Bates, 1904.]

CHAPTER IV

THE STUDENTS AT WORK AND PLAY

The safest general statement which can be made about Wellesley students of the first forty years of the college is that more than sixty per cent of them have come from outside New England, from the Middle West, the Far West, and the South. Possibly there is a Wellesley type. Whether or not it could be differentiated from the Smith, the Bryn Mawr, the Va.s.sar, and the Mt. Holyoke types, if the five were set up in a row, unlabeled, is a question. Yet it is true that certain recognizable qualities have developed and tend to persist among the students of Wellesley.

Wellesley girls are in the best sense democratic. There is no Gold Coast on the campus or in the village; money carries no social prestige. More money is spent, and more frivolously, than in the early days; there are more girls, and more rich girls, to spend it; yet the indifference to it except as a mechanical convenience, a medium of exchange and an opportunity for service, continues to be naively Utopian.

But money is not the only touchstone of democratic sensitiveness.

At Wellesley there has always been uneasiness at the hint of unequal opportunity. When the college grew so large that membership in the six societies took on the aspect of special privilege, restiveness was as marked among the privileged as among the unprivileged, and more outspoken. The first result was the Barn Swallows, a social and dramatic society to which every student in college might belong if she wished. The second was the reorganization of the six societies on a more democratic and intellectual basis, to prevent "rushing", favoritism, cliques, and all the ills that mutually exclusive clubs are heir to. The agitation for these reforms came from the societies themselves, and they endured with Spartan determination the months of transitional misery and readjustment which their generous idealism brought upon their heads.

Enthusiasm for equality also enters into the students' att.i.tude toward "the academic", and like most enthusiasts, from the French Revolution down, they are capable of confusing the issue. In the early days, they were not allowed to know their marks, lest the knowledge should rouse an unworthy spirit of compet.i.tion; and of all the rules inst.i.tuted by the founder, this is the one which they have been most unwilling to see abolished. Silent Time they relinquished with relief; Domestic Work they abandoned without a pang; Bible Study shrank from four to three years and from three to two, and then to one, almost without their noticing it. But when, in 1901, the Honor Scholarships were established, a storm of protest burst among the undergraduates, and thundered and lightened for several weeks in the pages of College News. And not the least vehement of these protestants were the "Honor girls"

themselves. To see their names posted in an alphabetical list of twenty or more students who had achieved, all unwittingly, a certain number of A's and B's throughout their course, seems to have caused them a mortification more keen than that experienced by St. Simeon Stylites on his pillar. But that the college ideal should be "degraded" pained them most.

There was something very touching and encouraging about this wrong-headed, right-hearted outburst. After the usual Wellesley fashion, freedom of speech prevailed; everybody spoke her mind.

In the end "sweetness and light" dispersed the mists of sentiment which had a.s.sumed that to acknowledge inequality of achievement was to abolish equality of opportunity, and burned away the ethical haziness which had magnified mediocrity; the crusaders realized that the pseudo-compa.s.sion which would conceal the idle and the stupid, the industrious and the brilliant, in a common obscurity, is impracticable, since the fool and the genius cannot long be hid, and unfair, since the ant and the gra.s.shopper would enjoy a like reward, and no democracy has yet claimed that those who do not work shall eat. When in 1912 the faculty at last decided to inform the students as to all their marks, the news was received with no protest and with an intelligent appreciation of the intellectual and ethical value of the new privilege.

The college was founded "for the glory of G.o.d and the service of the Lord Jesus Christ, in and by the education and culture of women"; and Wellesley girls are, in the best sense, religious. There has been no time in the first forty years when the undergraduates were not earnestly and genuinely preoccupied with religious questions and religious living. One recognizes this not only by the obvious and commonplace signs, such as the interest in the Christian a.s.sociation, the Student Volunteer Movement, the Missionary Field, Silver Bay, manifested by the conventional Christian students; it is evident also in the hunger and thirst of the sincere rebels, in such signs as the "Heretics' Bible Cla.s.s" a volunteer group which existed for a year or two in the second decade of the century, and which has had its prototypes at intervals throughout the forty years. One sees it in the interest and enthusiasm of the students who follow Professor Case's course in the Philosophy of Hegel; in the reverence and love with which girls of all creeds and of none speak of the Chapel services, and attend them. When two thirds of the girls go voluntarily and as a matter of course to an Ash Wednesday evening service, when Jew and Roman Catholic alike testify eagerly to the value of the morning Chapel service in their spiritual development, it is evident that the religious life is genuine and healthy. And it finds its outlet in the pa.s.sion for social service which, if statistics can be trusted, inspires so many of the alumnae. The old-fashioned Puritan, if she still exists, may tremble for the souls of the Wellesley girls who crowd by hundreds into the "matinee train" on Sat.u.r.day afternoon, but let us hope that she would be rea.s.sured to find the voluntary Bible and Mission Study cla.s.ses attended, and even conducted, by many of these same girls. She might grieve over the years of Bible Study lost to the curriculum, and over the introduction of modern methods of Biblical Higher Criticism into the cla.s.sroom; but surely she would be comforted to see how the students have arisen to the rescue of the devotional study of the Scriptures, with their voluntary cla.s.ses enthusiastically maintained.

It might even touch her sense of humor.

As the college has grown larger, undoubtedly more and more girls have come to Wellesley for other than intellectual reasons,--because it is "the thing" to go to college, or for "the life." But it is rea.s.suring to find that the reactions of "the life" upon them always quicken them to a deeper respect for intellectual values.

The "academic" holds first place in the Wellesley life, not perfunctorily but vitally. The students themselves are swift to recognize and rebuke, usually in the "Free Press" or the "Parliament of Fools", of the College News, any signs of intellectual indifference or laxity. Wellesley, like Harvard and other large colleges, has its uninspiring level stretches of mediocrity; but it has its little leaping hills, its soaring peaks as well. Every cla.s.s has its band of devoted students for whom the things of the mind are supreme; every cla.s.s has its scattering of youthful scholars to give distinction to the academic landscape.

It would be absurd and useless to deny that Wellesley girls have their defects; they are of the sort that press for recognition; defects of manner, and manners, which are not confined to the students of any one college, or even to college students, but are due in a measure to the general change in our att.i.tude towards women, and to the new freedom in which they all alike share. It is true that, to a degree, the graces and reserves which give charm and finish to daily living are sacrificed to the more pushing claims of study and athletics, in college. It is true that the unmodulated voice, the mushy enunciation, the unrestrained att.i.tude, the slouchy clothes, too often go unrebuked in cla.s.sroom and dormitory, where it seems to be n.o.body's business to rebuke them; but it is also usually true that, before they ever came to college, that voice, that att.i.tude, those clothes, went unrebuked and even unheeded, at home or in the girls' camp, where it emphatically was somebody's business to heed and rebuke.

But it is the public which sees the worst of it, especially on trains, where groups of young voices or extreme fashions in dress become quite unintentionally conspicuous. Experienced from within, the life, despite its many little roughnesses, its small lapses in taste, is gracious and gentle, selfless in un.o.btrusive ways, and genuinely kind.

Religious, democratic, intellectually serious is our Wellesley girl, and last but not least, she is a lover of beauty. How could she fail to be? How many times, in early winter twilights, has she come over the stile into the Stone Hall meadow, and stood long moments, hushed, bespelled, by the tranquil pale loveliness of the lake, the dusky, r.i.m.m.i.n.g hills, the bare, slim blackness of twig and bough embroidering the silver sky,--the whole luminous etching? How often, mid-morning in spring, has she sat with her book in a green shade west of the library, and lifted her eyes to see above the daffodil-bank of Longfellow's fountain the blue lake waters laughing between the upspringing trunks of the tall oak trees? Wherever there are Wellesley women, when spring is waking,--in Switzerland, in Sicily, in j.a.pan, in England,--they are remembering the Wellesley spring, that pageant of young green of lawns and hills and tenderest flushing rose in baby oak leaves and baby maples, that twinkling dance of birches and of poplars, that splendor of the youth of the year amid which young maidens shone and blossomed, starring the campus among the other spring flowers. And are there Wellesley women anywhere in the autumn who do not think of Wellesley and four autumns? Of the long russet vistas of the west woods? Of the army with banners, scarlet and golden, and bronze and russet and rose, that marched and trumpeted around Lake Waban's streaming Persian pattern of shadows? When you speak to a Wellesley girl of her Alma Mater, her eyes widen with the lover's look, and you know that she is seeing a vision of pure beauty.

II.

In 1876, the students, shocked and grieved by the discovery of one of those cases of cheating with which every college has to deal from time to time, met together, and made a very stringent rule to be enforced by themselves. This "law", enacted on February 18, 1876, marks the first step toward Student Government at Wellesley; it reads as follows:

"The students of Wellesley College unanimously decree as a perpetual law of the college that no student shall use a translation or key in the study of any lesson or in any review, recitation, or examination. Every student who may enter the college shall be in honor bound to expose every violation of this law. If any student shall be known to violate this law, she shall be warned by a committee of the students and publicly exposed. If the offense be repeated the students shall demand her immediate expulsion as unworthy to remain a member of Wellesley College."

It is signed by the presidents of the two cla.s.ses, 1879 and 1880, then in college.

Until 1881, when the Courant, the first Wellesley periodical, gave the students opportunity to express their minds concerning matters of college policy, we have no definite record of further steps toward self-government on the part of the undergraduates. The disciplinary methods of those early years are amusingly described by Mary C. Wiggin, of the cla.s.s of '85, who tells us that authority was vested in four bodies, the president, the doctor, the corridor teacher and the head of the Domestic Department.

"The president was responsible for our going out and our coming in. The 'office' might give permission to leave town, but all tardiness in returning must be explained to the president. How timidly four of us came to Miss Freeman in my soph.o.m.ore year to explain that the freshman's mother had kept us to supper after our 'permitted' drive on Monday afternoon! What an occasion it gave her to caution us as to soph.o.m.ore influence over freshmen!

"Very infrequent were our journeys to Boston in those days, theaters were forbidden. Once during my four years I saw Booth in 'Macbeth'

during a Christmas vacation, salving my conscience with a liberal interpretation of the phrase, 'while connected with the college', trying to forget the parting injunction, 'Remember, girls, that You are Wellesley College.'...

"In the old days we were seated alphabetically in church and chapel, where attendance was kept in each 'section' by one of its members. A growing laxity permitted you to sit out of place on Sunday evenings, provided that you reported to your section girl. Otherwise you would be called to the office to explain your absence....

"Very slowly did the idea dawn upon me that there was a faculty back of all these very pleasant personal relations."

But in the late '80's, the advance toward student self-government begins to be traceable, slowly but surely. In the spring of 1887, on the initiative of the faculty, the first formal conference between representatives of faculty and students was called, to consider questions of cla.s.s organization. Other conferences took place at irregular intervals during the next seven years, as occasion arose, and these often led to new legislation. The subjects discussed were, the Magazine, the Legenda, Athletics, the Junior Prom. In the autumn of 1888, students were first allowed to hand in excuses for absence from college cla.s.ses; the responsibility for giving a "true, valid and signed excuse" resting with the individual student. In this same autumn the law forbidding eating between meals was repealed, but students were still not permitted to keep eatables in their rooms.

Articles on college courtesy, quiet in the library, articles for and against Domestic Work, begin to appear in the Courant and the Prelude in 1888 and 1889. In May, 1890, we learn of a Students' a.s.sociation, which was the means of obtaining cla.s.s bulletin boards in the autumn of 1890. From this time also, agitation on all topics of interest to the students is more openly active. In September, 1891, the faculty consent to allow library books to be taken out of the library on Sat.u.r.day afternoon for use over Sunday. In October, 1891, we find that the Students'

a.s.sociation is to offer a medium for discussion and to foster a scholarly spirit. In December, 1891, a plea appears in the Prelude for occasional conferences between faculty and students on problems of college policy. In 1892, we read that the individual students are allowed to choose a church in the village and attend it on Sundays, if they so desire, instead of attending the College Chapel. In 1892 also, we have the agitation, in the Wellesley Magazine, for the wearing of cap and gown, and in this year senior privileges are extended, and the responsibility for absence from cla.s.s appointments rests with the student. In November, 1892, the Magazine prints an article on Student Government by Professor Case of the Department of Philosophy. And the cap and gown census and discussion go gayly on. Early in 1893, there is a discussion of Student Government. In the spring of this year, there is an agitation for voluntary chapel. In September, the seniors begin to wear the cap and gown throughout the year. The year 1894 sees Silent Time abolished; and agitation,--always courteous and friendly,--goes on for Student Government, for the opening of the library on Sunday, for the abolition of Domestic Work. In 1893 or 1894, Professor Burrell, as head of College Hall, introduces the custom of having students sign for overtime when they wish to study after ten o'clock at night. In 1894, excuses for absence from chapel and cla.s.ses are no longer required. In the spring of 1894, at the request of undergraduates, a conference with the faculty, in a series of meetings, considers matters of interest in student life. Beginning with May, 1895, the library is opened on Sundays.

It is significant to note, in looking over these old files of college magazines, that when the students' interest waned, the faculty were always ready to administer the necessary prod. Not all the articles in favor of Student Government are written by students. President Shafer herself gave the strongest early impetus to the movement, although not through the press. In 1899, Professor Woolley, as head of College Hall, inst.i.tuted a House Organization, which as an experiment in Student Government among the students then living in College Hall was a complete success.

In June, 1900, we find arrangements made for a Faculty-Student Conference, to be held during the autumn months; and this body met five times. Its establishment did a great deal in paving the way to mutual understanding and trust when the definite question of Student Government was approached.

On March 6, 1901, at a ma.s.s meeting of the students, and after a spirited discussion, it was voted that the Academic Council be pet.i.tioned to give self-government to the students in all matters not academic. This date is kept every year as the birthday of Student Government. At another ma.s.s meeting, on April 9, Miss Katharine Lord, the President of the Student a.s.sociation of Bryn Mawr, spoke to the college on Student Government, and on April 23, there was still another ma.s.s meeting. The student committee appointed to confer with the committee from the faculty had for its chairman Mary Leavens, of the cla.s.s of 1901, student head of College Hall; Miss Pendleton, at that time secretary of the college, was the chairman of the faculty committee. Student Government found in her, from the beginning, a convinced and able champion. In April, the const.i.tution was submitted to the committee of the faculty, and in May the const.i.tution and the agreement, after careful consideration, were submitted to the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees. On May 29, an all day election for president was held, resulting in the choice of Frances L. Hughes, 1902, as first president of the Student Government a.s.sociation of Wellesley College. On June 6, the report was adopted and the agreement was signed by the president and secretary of the Board of Trustees and the president of the college. On June 7, in the presence of the faculty and the whole student body, in chapel, the agreement was read and signed on behalf of the faculty by the secretary of the college. The ceremony was impressive and memorable in its simplicity and solemnity. After Miss Pendleton had signed her name, the students rose and remained standing while the agreement was signed by Frances L. Hughes, President of the a.s.sociation for 1901 and 1902, May Mathews, President of the Cla.s.s of 1902, Margaret C. Mills, President of the Cla.s.s of 1901, and Mary Leavens, President of the House Council of College Hall. The Scripture lesson was taken from I. Corinthians, "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid," and the recessional was, "How firm a foundation."

The a.s.sociation is organized with a president and vice president, chosen from the senior cla.s.s, and a secretary and a treasurer from the juniors; these are all elected by the whole undergraduate body.

There is an Executive Board whose members are the president, vice president, secretary and treasurer of the a.s.sociation, the house presidents and their proctors, and a representative from each of the four cla.s.ses, elected by the cla.s.s. The government is in all essentials democratic. The rules are made and executed by the whole body of students; but all legislation of the students is subject to approval by the college authorities, and if any question arises as to whether or not a subject is within the jurisdiction of the a.s.sociation, it is referred to a joint committee of seven, made up of a standing committee of three appointed by the faculty, a standing committee of three appointed by the a.s.sociation, and the president of the college.

In intrusting to the a.s.sociation the management of all matters not strictly academic concerning the conduct of students in their college life, the College authorities reserve the right to regulate all athletic events and formal entertainments, all societies, clubs and other organizations, all Society houses, and all publications, all matters pertaining to public health and safety and to household management and the use of college property. The students are responsible for all matters of registration and absence from college, for the regulation of travel, permission for Sunday callers, rules governing chaperonage, the maintenance of quiet, the general conduct of students on the campus and in the village. It is they who have abolished the "ten-o'clock-bedtime rule"; it is they who have decreed that students shall not go to Boston on Sundays, but this rule is relaxed for seniors, who are allowed two Boston Sundays, in which they may attend church or an afternoon sacred concert in the city. If a student wishes to spend Sunday away from college, she must go away on Sat.u.r.day and remain until Monday.