At Gloucester in the last decade of the eighteenth century a resolution was passed that two hours out of eight hours of daily instruction be devoted to girls, "as they are a tender and interesting branch of the community, but have been much neglected in the public schools in this town" - indeed, much neglected up to that time in every town. In the New England tradition education had been looked upon as a necessity; it had seemed to men a fundamental condition for right living. Behind an ineradicably democratic spirit, never at all general in the South, lay Puritanical conviction not only of the worth of an individual soul, but also of the importance of a man's knowledge and thought, for which training was provided in the common school.
Two hundred years after the establishment of Harvard College there was no college for women, who were still reckoned largely according to their economic value in the community, a necessity in Colonial days, but, with greater internal resources, more service at command, and the advent of the factory, ceasing to be such a necessity. The father who considered his daughter's education as important as his son's for the welfare of the family was then unknown; the father who put his son to work and gave his daughter the distinctively literary training would have seemed to our seventeenth and eighteenth century ancestors derelict - as it may be he really would be. The men of a family, according to good English usage, bore the responsibilities of culture; now these responsibilities are often in the keeping of mother and sister and daughter. Before the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century but few efforts had been made to give women even the rudiments of education - reading and writing, if need be - efforts which may be designated as fairly unsuccessful.
The royal founding of Mount Holyoke, two hundred years from the date of Harvard's establishment, lay in the generous undaunted heart of a woman. It had, in common with the greater institutions for men, New England traditions of piety, learning, sturdiness, and the best qualities of good New England blood. Previous to this there had been Dame Schools, mothers' helpers, so to speak, for very little children; academies which prepared boys for college, sometimes admitting girls for an hour or so, or, as in the instance of South Byfield and other academies, being co-educational; and the public schools, which had made, in general, no adequate provision for this "tender and interesting branch of the community." The movement for the higher education of women began about 1820 with the Rev. Joseph Emerson at Byfield. Later came the Emma Willard School, still a school in excellent standing, and the Catharine Beecher Seminary at Hartford, which was given up with the removal of Miss Beecher to the West. In the South, there were several early efforts towards the higher education of women; these schools, prosperous till the time of the Civil War, had since then deteriorated. It was for Mary Lyon, the founder of Mount Holyoke Seminary, to solve the problem of a school for young women which should not be the plaything of circumstance. Mary Lyon's ideal was to establish a permanent, endowed institution, which was "designed to be furnished with every advantage that the state of education in this country will allow." This is no idle castle-building on her part, for the robust, rosy-cheeked, curly-haired, blue-eyed young woman knew the hard facts to be faced with any such scheme in mind. As early as 1814 she had begun her teaching career at seventy-five cents a week and "boarded round;" she taught up and down the Connecticut Valley, was well known, well liked, and in great demand. All her experience but made her realize more fully how far short the opportunities for girls feel of the substantial education which she had in mind. Limited, naturally, by the times, hers was, nevertheless, a collegiate ideal, as the clause in the first circular of the school reveals: "We intend it to be like our colleges, so valuable that the rich will be glad to attend it, and so economical that people in moderate circumstances may be equally accommodated." As in all colleges of that day and of to-day, Holyoke students then, as well as now, received more than that for which they paid. Her object, too, was the highest object of the highest education: to meet public and not private wants - to serve the country. The opening curriculum exceeded in advancement and breadth of subject any courses offered in any schools elsewhere; it is included, among other studies, logic, moral philosophy, ancient and modern history, and the natural sciences taught according to the laboratory method. At the time Harvard was, I think, the only other institution teaching science in this fashion. But it was the first entrance requirements that caused the most serious flutter. The "young ladies," not unlike other young ladies of to-day, were in despair at such high requirements; to enter Mount Holyoke they were obliged to pass in arithmetic, geography, history, English grammar, and Watts "On the Mind" - especially Watts "On the Mind." Nevertheless, the second year four hundred applicants were turned away because there was not room to accommodate them, and from that day to this the demands have been in excess of room at the institution's command.
The Seminary opened its doors in 1837; fifty-one years later it became Mount Holyoke Seminary and College, and in 1893 was chartered as a college only. For several years previous to the opening, Mary Lyon had faced the problem of collecting an endowment. She met with opposition, indifference, even discourtesy; but she met with friends, too. One good gentleman, a minister at Cummington, gave up his pastorate, unblessed by his congregation for so doing, and became Mary Lyon's agent in soliciting funds. "Pa" Hawks, as the students named him, held a new - perhaps to call it old would be more apt - argument in favor of the higher education of women: he thought that, as woman had been the occasion of the fall, she ought to have the highest possible education to undo the ill effects of the fatal apple. Here is another argument against the present opponents this time, for man has never been known to contest the apple. In sums ranging from six cents, in three cases, upwards, they collected $27,000 for the first building, an amount representing eighteen hundred subscribers. Deacon Safford, a prosperous Boston merchant, was one of the early promoters of the institution. He repeated his first gift, $500, a generous sum for those days, many times, and he considered his investment, as did many of Mount Holyoke's friends, the best he had ever made; for, he said, there was "no depreciation in the stock; it yields the largest dividends."
The early hall, built, as its founder wished, of the best material, provided with the best plumbing and heating the times could give, nevertheless, in Puritan wise, made but little of the outer aspect. Yet, as in the case of a New England church, it had a character of its own, quaint and not unattractive. To-day the seventeen main buildings form a unified impression uncommon among our American colleges - buildings, largely English Collegiate and Tudor in style, divided into two campuses: the residential and the academic. Some of these buildings seem a part of the earth in which they stand - than this unity there is no severer architectural test. Even the newest comes as gracefully from the turf as if it were kin to its neighbors on the pines. Of the ugliest possibility on the grounds - the power-house smoke-stack - John Ruskin would not have been ashamed. The grounds, a third of a square mile in extent, show modified English traditions of learning in buildings, lawns, parks, ordered groves, driveways, little streams and lakes. From "Prospect," which rises two hundred feet at the edge of the lower college lake, may be seen two ranges of hills, green in spring, with the gray of rocks showing through the delicate feather of budding leaves; deep green and dark blue in summer, with wide flumes of shadow between the valley hills; red and gold and brown in autumn; white in winter, with the pines scattered here and there and the soft fringe of leafless trees along the summits; above, the vivid blue of a winter sky. Through the cut of the Connecticut River between these two valley ranges lies a wide upland of blue hills stretching away toward Cummington, Little Switzerland, and the girlhood home of Mary Lyon, two thousand feet above sea-level. It is all not only a scene of meditative beauty, a place of wonderment, the hills trailing into blue distance, but also a scene of indescribable richness, luxuriance, fertility. The Connecticut Valley is one of the most fertile valleys in the country, with no hint of the sterile, rock-ribbed pastures of Massachusetts. In its garden aspect it resembles much of the English hill country. As with Wordsworth, love of nature has led to love of man and a keen sense of the immanence of the divine -
"a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man."
The careers of many of the women who have gone forth from Mount Holyoke have been characterized by reverence for the divine in the world about them, love for their fellow-beings and a desire to serve them, just such a spirit of worship and devotion as mountain solitude since time was has bred among people. From this valley these women have followed duty into the crowded and evil places of the world, to remember with refreshment this bountiful life of nature, sun and moon and stars, the cool latticed light of ferny pathways, to hear in retrospect the whispering blades of grass, the bees bustling in the flowers, to love nature's various music and all the windage of the hills; to see again the checkering of light and shade on mountain-side and on lake and stream, and the colors of nature's coverlids,
"Gold tinted like the peach
Or ripe October's faded marigolds,"
and to feel, as Keats did, sleep filled with the soft sound of water and with moonlight.
To live in so beautiful a world makes for the healthiness of body and soul, it contributes to a fuller, purer womanhood as well as manhood. The alumnae mothers, thinking of the health-giving out-of-door world as well as of other influences, send their children to Mount Holyoke. One mother's greatest sorrow was that she could not send her sons there as well as all her daughters. Undoubtedly, if those boys had come, they would have been met with the hospitality characteristic of the college. Still, it might have been necessary for them to behave rather well. I have heard one boy, now a distinguished elderly gentleman, tell how, while visiting the Seminary, he made a raid upon the cookies in the kitchen when he thought "teacher" was not looking, and received a wholly unexpected blessing. There were two things Mary Lyon announced, with the twinkle in her eye, the "young ladies" were not to do while at Mount Holyoke: one was break the fire regulations, the other kill themselves. If they insisted upon killing themselves, she continued, then they would better go home and die in the arms of their dear mothers. The early school had much ill health to combat, for the poor health of the women of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century is something appalling as one looks back from the robust womanhood of the present. One physician of the first quarter of the nineteenth century said that not one woman in ten enjoyed complete health. It was Mary Lyon's aim to correct this; and so well did she succeed in making a beginning that if there is anything the matter with nine-tenths of the present college students they do not know it. They are so busy with walking, basket-ball, hockey, snow-shoeing, and skeeing, that they do not spend time in imagining ills they have not. One has to read the psychological tracts of faddists before one is fully aware of the lugubrious, anaemic straits to which, these tracts say, college girls are reduced.
The antidote to this deplorable condition of educated womanhood which the psychologists advocate, critics to the contrary, Holyoke has never possessed. She has never had any teaching or system of domestic science. The founder had most uncommon good sense: she had no notion of relieving mothers and home life of their duties. Mary Lyon wrote: "I have no faith in any of the schemes of manual labor by which it is supposed that girls can support themselves at school. I should expect anything of that kind would become an expense rather than an income." There was in the old days no service to be obtained in South Hadley, and, too, it made the expenses somewhat less for the students to do a little household work. At first seventy minutes for each student covered all the work that was required; now an average of less than thirty minutes is sufficient. Although the writer thinks even thirty minutes daily for four years might be more advantageously spent in golf, in skeeing, or at a concert, yet the prescribed domestic work has its advantages. It maintains a level of admirable democracy; it is good for the rich girl; it does no harm to the poor girl who is accustomed to more than is required at college. It creates a certain helpful, unselfish, friendly spirit. Personally, I enjoyed myself immensely as a Freshman at Wellesley during the last year of domestic work at that college, when I sold ink and mucilage on a sliding scale, an experience which seems to me now in retrospect even more valuable than a condition. At Holyoke all the heavy work is done by servants; no student is allowed in the kitchen; practically the flourish of duster and pen describes the arc of domestic duties.
"Everything I do is such a privilege!" exclaimed the Founder; and I am certain that the old girls thought the dusting and bedmaking, or "just taking a step from the fourth floor down to the basement," part of the idyllic scheme for their advancement. There was no satiety then to dull the eyes and stuff the minds with a sense of indifference, nor is there now. One old alumna writes that not even the side step in calisthenics had proved useless to her; doubtless she has come upon the day of the automobile, and we all know the joys of the "side step" nowadays. Eager is the word that characterized the mind of the Founder, and eager is the word that marks the spirit of the present college. Fifty years before its actual inclusion in the curriculum Mary Lyon was seeking a way to provide Hebrew. Seventy years ago, when there were no standards for the education of women, Mary Lyon set a standard which in its broad purpose is not yet realized. The Founder would have resented indignantly any attempt to limit her mind between the covers of a book, that mind which could master the contents of a Latin grammar in four days. The textbooks used then and at present are merely adjunctive. In texts obstacles are at a minimum; and at Holyoke obstacles are highly prized, such obstacles as force the "young ladies" to the unhappy necessity of doing their own thinking. The lecture system, too, is at a minimum; I have noticed that as long as the lecturer continues to lecture, and the absorbent heads continue to wag, and the fountain pens continue to spurt, students have a sense of comfortable superiority. The thrust direct is the simple question to the individual student; and such a method is thoroughly hygienic, for it prevents, on the part of the students who are trying to answer, the feeling of an overcrowded brain.
Mary Lyon believed that the Christian spirit is a quickener of mental power. If the beauty of word and beauty of thought in the Bible are any evidence, then, indeed, it must be! Her own English, although marked by some of the cant phrases of the time, was singularly pure, graphic, direct, cadenced. And from laughter to tears she had the power of speech. But what the "Christian spirit" did for Mary Lyon was to make her service as a teacher incorruptible - I do not say faultless; and from her the college has derived an ideal in teaching which has nothing to do with "trade," and which sets no value upon the intellectual adventurer however brilliant, however likely to succeed in climbing the ladder of high place. "Never teach immortal minds for money," said the Founder, and certainly she did not; the average instructor in the College to-day receives five times as much as Mary Lyon did as President. Teaching as a service has been the aim of the College; and from the first Holyoke has had an enviable record in making good teachers of her students, students who have taught the world over with the courage, the self-sacrifice of pioneers, in this country, in Persia, Turkey, South Africa, the Transvaal, in Spain, in the Hawaiian Islands, and in Japan, where they were the first to provide for the higher education of Japanese students. Holyoke has, indeed, been the "Mother of Schools," and, to count only the colleges, there are five which owe their origin directly to her.
The Connecticut Valley might better be called the Valley of Colleges, for up and down its river are Amherst, Williams, Smith, Trinity, and Yale. Such a segregation makes unusual intellectual opportunities possible in interchange of lecturers, instructors, entertainments. And the whole country is a laboratory for observation work, from the monster, whose cacophonous name I have forgotten, who accommodatingly planted his extraordinary feet on the Connecticut Valley river bed, to the spring display of living birds which would make an unprincipled milliner wild with greed. It is, too, not only a valley of colleges, but also a manufacturing valley, which offers unusual laboratories for economic and sociological studies.
The members of the Faculty of the Mount Holyoke of to-day represent a high degree of advanced work; they come from the graduate schools of almost all the universities in this country and from many abroad. Merely the new appointments for the year 1904-1905 include degrees from Barnard, Vassar, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, University of Berlin, University of Paris, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, University of Cambridge, England, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, and Yale University. In 1837 the Faculty was represented by a principal, an associate principal, two teachers, three pupil assistants; in 1896 there were thirty-eight teachers, with seven library and laboratory assistants; in 1905 there were twenty professors of full standing, men and women; nine associates, thirty-five instructors, twelve assistants and readers, and an administrative staff of twenty-four, including the president, registrar, secretaries, and stenographers. Mount Holyoke, together with other colleges, offers a large number of electives; there is a slightly greater demand in required work, the proportion of required studies to electives being somewhat higher than in other colleges of equal standing. There are about thirty-five undergraduate scholarships, and there are four full fellowships for graduate work. Each year senior honors are conferred on two candidates and sophomore honors on four students. In addition to these distinctly academic honors, Mount Holyoke has a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, granted in 1904. Out of six hundred and seventy-four students for the year 1905, twenty students came with advanced standing from other colleges, and in the residence list twenty-five States and three foreign countries were represented.
In the class-room a great deal of individual work is done; the classes and laboratory sections are kept small, so that the work of each student may receive careful attention. Of necessity there are some large lecture divisions, but, on the whole, there is an approach to the tutor system which Princeton is now introducing. From the beginning the students have never been led to think that their acquirement could be or was remarkable; they are taught how to study and shown the wide country before them, and, in their modesty, I think the general tendency is to underestimate what they know. There is rigid opposition to the modern commercializing of college work, on the one hand, and, on the other, to all the sufficiency of the extreme intellectualists who think acquirement, per se, the end. Learning as a "trade" is discountenanced, not only by the staff, but also by the administration. Study as a preparation for right living, for life usefulness, the establishment of high ideals, is the aim of the College. Such a purpose could not be maintained were it not for the traditions of Holyoke and the untroubled unity among its present Faculty.
From early days the College has been more than ordinarily well equipped for scientific training, and the students particularly eager, for reasons connected with the special fitness of the staff and their own personnel, for this work. Now the humanities are coming into their own - history, philosophy, literature, art; and this is well in the present day and generation, for three reasons - the character of the times, the personality of the students, and the probable future demands to be made on most of the girls. For myself, I believe the idealizing faculty may prove, in the well-ordered life, under some circumstances, an even greater gift than scientific knowledge. Let students once realize that beauty of expression is in a manner essentially practical, and they will put it to use; their houses, where they make homes, will have in them only attractive and useful objects; they will light a cleansing bonfire with all the vulgar rubbish, cheap decoration, which usually goes by the name of furnishings. A book, a picture, interprets history; it fills the mind with memories that remain to uplift, to purify, to strengthen. If ever there was one, the educated American woman of to-day is an individuality; she is practical, self-reliant, capable - which is all very well. On the other hand, she has been accused (and justly, I think) of lacking in sympathy, imagination, refinement. And I would suggest that it may be a direct duty in the course of our education to develop sympathy and imagination; for not only will they lead to deeper personal experience, but also to a greater love for country and a finer sense of the universality of men and nations.
I do not know of any students who, in the long run, are more likely t o love "the principle of beauty in all things" than those at Holyoke. Their morale is excellent; they have come to college for work, and they work; they are desirous of the best; they have turned as eagerly to the world of letters and art as to their opportunities in science; they are high-minded in their studies, upright, trustworthy, courteous. I have never known an appeal to them as gentlewomen, an appeal to their honor, their sense of right, to fail of generous response. Lacking in judgment they may be, as students old as well as young often are, but I have not found them lacking in honesty. The system at Holyoke has always been an "honor" system. Even in the old days, when "discipline" was a more common feature than it is now, Mary Lyon's severest rebuke ended with a gentle, "Now you won't do it again, dear, will you?" It might be written of the majority of students who have gone in and out of Holyoke's doors, Mens sibi conscia recti. In the early days there was no espionage; students reported upon themselves, poor dears! and thereby, I fear, lost much wicked pleasure which in other places has come to some of us. Mary Lyon had an especial liking for the "lively girls," for, she asserted, if rightly directed they did the best work. However, she watched these "lively girls" carefully, and was heard to remark that some young ladies were harmless oxygen and nitrogen by themselves, if brought together made nicotine and strychnine. The early influence was against class feeling; the students were considered a unit. Since then great class feeling, so harmful all over the college world, has arisen. Now mount Holyoke is swinging back to the old ideal, and the social center of the life is to be a general college society. The unity of the undergraduates is shown the unusual success of their Christian Association work, in the educational extension work the Settlement Chapter is doing in the valley, and in no other way better, I think, than in the Mount Holyoke choir, numbering one hundred and eighty students. An English lady who was asked what had impressed her most in America replied "The mammoth trees of California and the vested choir of Mount Holyoke College."
In conclusion, no history is without its mistakes, without features which may well be criticised. If Mount Holyoke was provincial in her early days, it was at least with the best provincialism of idealistic New England, a heritage no more to be despised than the early laws of Athens or the severities of Sparta. If she erred, she erred Puritan-wise, in loss of perspective, in failure to distinguish between the minor essentials and the major essentials. Some of the records of the old day show, too, the over-anxiety of the Puritan conscience; it may be that the emphasis nowadays is too much on the value of work regardless of the "still, small voice." Then also it must be said, I think, that the old students were taught to look upon life somewhat as a burden, a cross to be borne. This extreme, prevailing in early seminary days, prevailed, too, at Dr. Thomas Arnold's Rugby. Our present life, as something almost wholly joyous and to be made almost wholly beautiful for others as well as for ourselves, is a very modern conception. It is the spiritual evidence of an age in many other respects sordidly commercial.
The best of the old ideals are still intact to-day. The aim of the College is preparation for service, the development of a woman physically, mentally, spiritually. It is upon efficient service rather than upon pleasing accomplishments that the emphasis lies, with the happy result that the faddishness of the higher education for women has scarcely touched Holyoke. Miss Lyon, who said that she thought it exceedingly doubtful whether she should ever see heaven, went on cheerfully preparing the best daughters, sisters, wives, teachers, she could, whose qualities she herself possessed pre-eminently - piety, good health, and a merry heart. In an absolutely nonsectarian spirit she applied the truths of the Bible to every-day life.
Two women have met quietly, nobly, the opposition and indifference attending every considerable movement for human betterment - Mary Lyon in founding the Seminary, Mrs. Elizabeth S. Mead in shifting from Collegiate Seminary to College in full. President Woolley, coming into the heritage of their work, continuing the traditions of the culture of heart and intellect in which Holyoke was established, is making for the College a high place among modern institutions. In the best sense of the word Mount Holyoke is a public institution dependent upon the public; it was founded by and has been continued in widely distributed public benevolence; it has received several large bequests, but the aggregate of its smaller bequests has been larger. In this day of extraordinary individual endowments we have the spectacle of a college whose strength is not in one purse but in the loyal generosity of a wide public of alumnae and friends who are aware of their responsibility and who take it up gladly because they feel what Mount Holyoke has unfitted women for just one thing - idle society life.