Real appreciation of what Mt. Holyoke College for women has become in 1926 requires knowledge of what its remarkable founder, Mary Lyon, was and did nearly a century ago. Such information is as essential and timely as current student statistics. She thought and planned in terms of fifty, of one hundred years ahead. now, the outcome is simply as she would have it. It is impossible to think otherwise when visiting the college today and checking up what the teachers and students are saying and doing by reference to what she said and did. One outstanding impression from such a visit is that nothing in the modern Mt. Holyoke would surprise Mary Lyon, should she return.
It would not shock her to find the teaching of science going on in a new $750,000 building of many splendidly equipped laboratories and lecture rooms, while an old building that also has to house the office of administration must serve for a while longer as the religious center before the new chapel dreamed of by President Mary E. Woolley can be erected. Mary Lyon herself studied chemistry early in the last century when it was called a disgrace for a woman to know of such things. As a girl she made bricks in the village kiln simply to learn how it was done. The germ of the laboratory enthusiasm at Mt. Holyoke was born with her. When a child she attracted attention because of the time she spent examining the hourglass in her mother's kitchen and her explanation was that she was trying to find a way for making more time. As compared with most colleges of the country, Holyoke has gained years of time for modern education by the manner in which it has equipped itself for the sciences.
Again, Mary Lyon would find nothing to regret in the architectural beauty and almost luxurious interiors of the newer dormitories. She wanted the best of 1837 for her students. Why not the best of 1926?
Neither would she be disturbed by the short skirts and knickerbockers of the thousand young women hiking through the woods or climbing the hills that surround the college. She might regret that she had been too busy to think of such sensible costumes in 1837, when she insisted that walking a mile a day for the sake of health be a part of every girl's routine.
One of the things that no doubt would amuse Mary Lyon today is the fact that Mt. Holyoke is still criticized for requiring students to do their own housework, although the college abandoned that practice twelve years ago because it had become an economic loss.
To the founder herself there was a grain of humor in that housework from the very beginning. It occurred to her that contributions to establish the college might be obtained more easily from thrifty New Englanders if she announced that the students themselves would do the domestic work and thus decrease the operating costs. The expedient worked, and that's all there was to it. However, in the opinion of somewhat snobbish and uninformed outsiders, those brooms and dishpans gave to the school a tinge of institutional charity which was never intended and never deserved, because it never existed.
Along with this mistaken idea concerning domestic service, there always has been a twin misconception as to the religious atmosphere of Holyoke. It is sometimes sniffed at by ultramoderns as a bigoted school for training missionaries. But the word "bigotry" is as out of place as the words "institutional charity" in any discussion of Mt. Holyoke.
President Mary E. Woolley, who has now been administering the affairs of Mt. Holyoke and inspiring her students for a quarter of a century, told the writer that science and religion never had been and never would be mutually exclusive at that college. "We do not conceive of education here as something that divides life into compartments," continued President Woolley. "The religious service and the laboratory experiment are for the same great purpose. I want and need both the chapel and the little theater because of what they both mean. We have the tendencies to create and express given to us by God, and He has given us many mediums in which to work. Science and religion both belong here. It would be as illiberal, as bigoted, as unscientific to reject one as to reject the other. We teach the Bible as literature and history, and as an inspiration in right living together, and as a help in our great college problem of developing character. We try to teach the spiritual truth of the Bible and not the shell.
"But this college is between two fires. There are those who condemn us for being narrow and bigoted. Miss Purington, the dean, tells me that many of the students are so resentful of the fact that we are sometimes called mawkish and goody-goody that they themselves lean back the other way in the needless emphasis they put on the fact that they are not going to be missionaries. On the other hand, there are those who think that we are a dangerous menace to Christianity, and that our science is driving out our religion."
Miss Woolley then told me of a letter she had received from a Holyoke graduate, declaring that she must cancel her pledge to the alumnae fund for the aid of the college because she was convinced that Mt. Holyoke was undermining religion.
The graduate wrote that the college was attacking the faith by its higher criticism of the Bible and by "its public defense of Harry Emerson Fosdick." She added that her love for the college remained, but that her pride in it was crushed and that she had been "stabbed with pain by the thought that a young woman cannot go to Mt. Holyoke without risking her faith."
President Woolley's reply to the letter of the graduate was as follows:
Your letter of June fifth I have read and thought over carefully. I am sorry that you feel as you do about Mt. Holyoke's "stand." The study of the Bible at the college, I believe, never accomplished more for the real Christianity of its students than it is doing today, and I am sure that there are few, if any, preachers who do more in that direction than Mr. Fosdick. I cannot assent to your opinion that the college is standing for "undermining of the faith."
There are many fundamentalists, Miss Woolley added, who send their daughters to Mt. Holyoke.
Of course this question is not new at Mt. Holyoke. In the twelve years that Miss Lyon lived to serve as the first president, or principal, of the school there were clergymen of New England who did not dare preach to the students because Mt. Holyoke was considered too liberal. The founder, undoubtedly, would approve the letter from Miss Woolley to the unhappy graduate.
Miss Lyon was no more deeply religious than is Miss Woolley. For her own time, she was no less modern than Miss Woolley is now. For both of them, the justification of education was and is the service to which it may be applied. In the beginning of Mt. Holyoke there was practically no service that the educated woman could render outside her own home, the schoolroom and the missionary field. Miss Lyon trained for them all.
Her chief purpose was to provide the country with adequate teachers. Harvard College was founded primarily to save the colonies from being afflicted with an illiterate clergy after the passing of the educated ministers who had brought their learning with them from England. Two hundred years later Mt. Holyoke was founded to render precisely that same service to the public schools. Mary Lyon, who had taught in various parts of New England since her young girlhood, knew the need from personal experience.
Miss Lyon could not qualify as a founder by the simple process of signing a check or writing a will, thereby placing a fortune at the disposal of a board of trustees. She had no cash balance to draw upon, no estate to bequeath.
So her only equipment as a founder was her ideal, her plan for its realization and the indomitable energy which she devoted to three years of traveling about new England, winter and summer, in stagecoaches and on foot, to overcome indifference, skepticism and ridicule and to win practical support in the way of contributions to a fund.
Farm people promised to give of their produce to be sold for the seminary. In the towns the converts to the idea gave or pledged small sums.
In some instances men in cities, to whom Miss Lyon appealed, got together and talked the matter over, but such was the conventional attitude toward women in affairs in those days that Miss Lyon herself was not expected to attend these gatherings.
In the course of her three years of wandering Miss Lyon received, all told, seventy thousand dollars. Meantime the site had been chosen at South Hadley and work had begun. There were many delays and difficulties. After construction was well underway, the building collapsed because of an unsuspected quicksand. The financial panic of 1837 made it difficult to collect many of the pledges when the critical period for receiving pupils arrived. The founder had to fight off awkward suggestions from various men who had contributed to the fund. One of them, for example, wanted to call the school Pangynaskean, the Greek word suggesting a woman of all-round cultivation.
"Oh, not that," exclaimed Mary Lyon. Then, finding the inspiration she needed for the moment by gazing off over the range of hills that make South Hadley beautiful, she added: "Let us call it Mount Holyoke."
Her distinction as founder, other than that of her lack of a personal fortune, was that she set down nothing hard and fast in charter or constitution that would hamper trustees or teachers of the future. She did not pretend to say in 1837 what Mt. Holyoke faculty and students of 1926 or any other period must teach or believe. She took Christianity and morality for granted without laying any more special emphasis on religion than on any other part of a woman's education. She made no attempt to bind the future with rules of conduct. Academic freedom was one of her chief bequests. From the start she left pretty nearly everything to the judgment and sense of decency of the students as to what their behavior would be. That, plus her scheme for letting girls report their own delinquencies, was no doubt the beginning of the student self-government system that now prevails in all important American colleges.
Miss Lyon taught chemistry herself. Astronomy, geology, physiology and botany were in the curriculum - all shameful subjects for women at the time. Latin was taught, but rather surreptitiously, because, for women, that was a little more of a strain on New England public opinion than Miss Lyon thought advisable. But by 1847 she boldly demanded Latin as a requirement for admission.
It was the founder herself who gave to Mt. Holyoke the early direction which was to result in its present high rating not only as a college of the humanities but of the sciences. By the time of her death, in 1849, she had an enthusiastic following of students and teachers of science that has never dwindled. When Agassiz opened its famous summer school of science on Penikese Island, women professors of Mt. Holyoke were qualified to go there and work with him and his successors. One of these women was Cornelia Maria Clapp, for whom the new $750,000 science building has been named. She was head of the department of zoology at Holyoke for many years.
Dean Purington told me of a dinner at her home where one of the guests, the president of a Western college, asked: "Why is it that the teaching of science at Mt. Holyoke is not blocked and hampered as it is at almost every other college in the country?" His hostess replied: "It is because we know Miss Clapp is a Christian woman, and are not afraid of any new truths she may have to teach us."
So far as the spirit and quality of the early teaching are concerned, Mt. Holyoke may be described justly as a college for American women which was opened in 1837. But the Mt. Holyoke people themselves are punctilious about sticking to the strict letter of the matter and explain that in the beginning their school was called a seminary. A college charter with authority to confer degrees was not granted by the Massachusetts legislature until 1888. It was characteristic of the place that the women, both students and teachers, saw to it that their school was a college in fact before it asked for the label. For several years prior to 1888 many students remained at Holyoke five years instead of four to cover the ground demanded by standard colleges for a degree, and many women of the teaching staff took courses abroad and in American universities to earn their doctorates and thus to qualify for the academic rank of a full-fledged college.
When, in November, 1837, Mt. Holyoke opened its doors, eighty young women came to receive the instruction miss Lyon had to give them. it was a bleak beginning. The first seminary - years later destroyed by fire - was a bare, shutterless, four-story building rising out of a waste of sand. To save time and money the trustees were there when the students began to arrive, doing the last odd jobs, tacking down straw matting, painting thresholds. Wives of the trustees were washing new dishes, setting up beds and preparing for the first meal. fathers who had accompanied their daughters in stagecoaches or the family chaises from all parts of New England, shouldered the girls' trunks up to their rooms.
The price for board and tuition was sixty dollars a year, exclusive of light and heat. Each student was expected to provide her own candles and to keep her individual wood bin filled.
Tuition today is three hundred dollars a year, and the board and room cost each student five hundred dollars. An infirmary fee, required of all students, is ten dollars, making a total uniform, minimum charge of $810. Although the system of student housework has been abandoned, there are two dormitories in which the students are allowed to do a part of the work in return for a rebate on their bills for lodging. Many of the thousand women at Mt. Holyoke have a comfortable and happy time on a thousand dollars a year. Twelve hundred is considered a generous allowance.
To help to offset these bills there are many scholarships awarded for merit in academic work, and there are various loan funds with which the college helps to tide students over hard financial places. There are a few jobs in the library, the laboratories and the administrative offices by which a student may earn a part of her expenses as she goes along. But undergraduates are not encouraged to try to be self-supporting. "It is wiser for them to borrow from the college loan funds," Dean Purington told me, "and repay us after graduation when they have become established in their work."
Classroom demands are increasing, and the purely intellectual opportunities have widened greatly in the last ten years. To get students more surely qualified to avail themselves of these, the system of admitting freshmen on high school certificates was abandoned six years ago. Now no girl can be admitted except by passing the examinations set by the college itself or by the College Entrance Examination Board. But even with this restriction, there is no difficulty in filling classes. Two hundred and forty-six girls were rejected last fall - some of them because they were not sufficiently prepared; some unfortunately because there was no room for them. For the fall of 1926 there are already 738 applicants and not more than three hundred can be received.
With the increase in the requirements for admission, there have developed many improvements in the curriculum. In the ten years between 1915 and 1925 one hundred and nineteen new courses were added. For the benefit of anyone who shares the fears of the graduate who cancelled her fund pledge, it should be stated that seven of the new courses are in the study of the Bible, making seventeen courses now available in that department, most of them attracting large groups of students. Even in Greek and Latin, additional courses have been offered because of the strong minority interest that still persists in the classics. There are eight new courses in art and archaeology, including several on American painting and one to meet the comparatively new desire for training in appreciation of early American furniture. Research has been extended in history and the several literatures, and there are notable additions all along the line in the physical and social sciences.
To give practical and cultural value to all this, and to save the curriculum from being merely an impressive, high-sounding list of subjects through which a girl may roam in search of easy courses, there is the system of major and correlated minor fields, in one of which each student must settle down for her special work. In this she must take a comprehensive examination in senior year, readiness for which presupposes a great deal of hard, individual research work and not a mere lucky recollection of what she has heard in the class. In other words, a young woman must be a pretty good student to get into Mt. Holyoke at all, and she must develop into something of a real scholar if she is to get out four years later with a degree. But that seems to be just what they are doing. Not more than 4 per cent are dropped each year from the freshman class because of academic failure, and the percentage is less in the upper classes. Dismissals for disciplinary reasons do not average one a year. Dropping out because of illness is also unusual.
Good health, as well as a good mental showing, is required for admission, and after that everything is done to make that good health still better.
In addition to all this, there are the dramatics, the formal and informal dances, the outdoor pageants and the social service work of the Young Women's Christian Association. A recent activity is the voluntary work of the student poets, which, with the encouragement of Professor Snell of the Department of English, has assumed the proportions of a genuine literary movement at Mt. Holyoke.
How do they do it all? No mere outsider can answer that question. The nearest approach to an explanation that I could get was from Dean Purington, who said that the modern college girl does not know the meaning of the word leisure. Her work and her fun overlap, dovetail into each other. There is no "rest" except in sleep. Outside of that, there is continuous and intense performance.
"But I do not despair of them," added the Dean. "We can do something with practically all of them, make a dent even with the increasing group of the non-serious. As I go about the country seeing the graduates as individuals and in their alumnae associations, I am astonished to learn what a splendid thing is being made out of life by women who seemed almost hopeless as undergraduates. Here at the college, strange as it may seem, fun and real work can increase at the same time. Studying itself is becoming popular with these girls. Five years ago we had a student here who was entitled to the Phi Beta Kappa key, but who declined to accept it. She was squeamish about wearing a badge which meant that she had worked hard. That sort of foolishness has died out. now, on the contrary, we have an annually increasing number of women who voluntarily take on more academic work so that they may graduate with honors."
These thousand women at Holyoke are a homogenous group. Ninety-six per cent of them are American born and 81 per cent of them are American born of double American parentage. Less than 2 per cent were born abroad of foreign parents.
About 25 per cent of them come from private preparatory schools; the rest from high schools.
The homes of more than half of them are in towns of less than twenty-five thousand inhabitants, and 16 per cent of the whole hail from villages and small towns of less than twenty-five hundred population. A little less than half of the students are New England girls. The remainder represent thirty-five other states and various foreign countries.
I asked one senior from a village why she had come to college.
"Well, I knew that I would have to earn a living," she replied, "and I wanted to get fitted for doing it in a way that would stay interesting. I knew that if I remained at home, I'd just work in the store and chase myself round in an unbroken circle of going to the movies, to church, to church suppers, to bridge parties and back to the store next morning to sell a spool of thread to somebody."
The fathers of just about a third of the students are professional men, and 7 per cent of all the fathers are clergymen. Twenty-one per cent are manufacturers, and 30 per cent are in commerce. Only 5 per cent of the fathers are farmers. Ninety-one per cent of the mothers devote all their working time to their own homes. The others are in professional or clerical work; but most of the mothers who are not housewives are widows.
In this, as in every other college, one of the most interesting and important factors of the student background is in the number of girls whose families have been represented by undergraduates in previous generations. Twenty-eight of the girls now in college are the daughters of Holyoke graduates. In the class of 1928 alone there are thirty-five who have had, all told, eighty-eight of their kinswomen in Holyoke ahead of them.
Long family connections provide a leaven in the undergraduate body which helps to keep college traditions alive. There is chapel, for example. Periodically a small radical group of students insist upon abolishing compulsory chapel. The usual agitation goes on in the college press, and then, invariably, the students take the matter up in their Community Government Association, through which they control their own affairs, and vote overwhelmingly against abolishing chapel. It is significant that during the two examination periods of the year when chapel is not compulsory, there is no great falling off in the attendance. Students, however, think that many faculty members would show a little better sportsmanship if they would go to chapel themselves, even though it is not required of them at any time.
More than 56 per cent of Mt. Holyoke graduates have married, and 72 per cent of these wives have had children. The largest group of the unmarried are in educational work, chiefly as teachers in high schools and colleges, and a large proportion of these hold post-graduate degrees. All other professions and many forms of business are represented on the alumnae lists. Only 1 per cent are missionaries, and only 3 per cent have entered the field of professional work, including the missions.
Forty per cent of their husbands are professional men, and the others are in various forms of commerce, manufacturing, farming and clerical work.
These alumnae are a loyal lot of women. Something over six thousand out of eight thousand of them contributed one million, six hundred and seventy thousand dollars to the recent Mt. Holyoke drive to get three million dollars' endowment. The drive was successful, but it was a hard and hectic tug for the last half million. Now Mt. Holyoke has reformed. The entire American population, academic and non-academic, may be grateful to this college for its determination to have no more "whirlwind campaigns" for cash, to take the overworked word "drive" out of its vocabulary altogether. Incidentally, presidents of other colleges may envy President Woolley her release from being a fund-getter, that she may devote all her time to education and administration.
Under the new regime there is a financial office of the college, charged with the duty of keeping it a smoothly going concern all the time, instead of having periodical crises over money. Miss Gertrude V. Bruyn, in charge of this office, explained that there is being built up a "living endowment" made up of small annual payments from alumnae and others, which will be used as if it were the interest on the permanent endowment. In other words, an income of this sort amounting to fifty thousand dollars a year is the equivalent of interest from an extra million of permanent endowment. The plan has reached a point now which gives President Joseph A. Skinner, of the board of trustees, and his associates confidence that it will succeed. The present permanent endowment yields an annual income of $145,000, and the receipts from student board and tuition amount to about $800,000. The value of the fifty-three buildings and about three hundred acres of land, including campus, forest and two lakes, is $2,500,000.
On my last evening at Mt. Holyoke I called on Dr. Anna Chapin Edwards, now in her ninety-first year, who taught the sciences there from 1859 until 1892. "I don't suppose we had more than two butterflies and the skin of a rattlesnake in our laboratory in the beginning," said Doctor Edwards; "but we soon discovered, right here in our own hills, the footsteps of prehistoric monsters, dug them up for our museum and realized that the world had moved. If you look around among these students and laboratories, you will find that the world is still moving and that Mt. Holyoke College knows it."