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November 8, 2003 Dear Classmates, Be in
touch!
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December 10, 2003
Responses flowed May 15, 1886 I could not prove the Years
had feet-
Are there any women of
history whom YOU would like to see nominated and celebrated?
And…speaking of "nominations", Paula Ham Johnson is looking for
volunteers to serve on the Nominating Committee for the Class. Her
e-mail address is
phj@cox.net. Be in touch!!!!
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SUSAN B.
ANTHONY February 15, 1820 - March 13, 1906
When her teachers
refused to teach her long division, Susan's father arranged for home
schooling by a woman named Mary Perkins. These sessions offered her
a new image of womanhood. (We would like to know more about Mary
Perkins!) Susan's independent and zealous nature allowed her to
begin speaking publicly in 1849, first, in favor of temperance, then
abolition, then equal pay for women. In 1872, she demanded that
women be given the same civil and political rights as men. She
worked tirelessly on this project until her death, and the
establishment of the 19th amendment has been largely attributed to
her efforts. She joined forces with other women and those
friendships were important to her. We have quoted one of her closest
friends, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in a class letter. Because of her
and women like her, we are able to vote and be involved in campaign
issues. She said, "There will never be complete equality until women
themselves help to make the l! aws and elect lawmakers." An anonymous
poet spoke of her thus: ________________________________________ Shall we vote for class officers online??Have you
checked out the class web site, either via
www.alumnae.mtholyoke.edu
or directly @
www.mhcclassof1960.net?
Lecture
Mini-Reunions: New York (February 26th), Philadelphia (February
28th)
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Cornelia Maria
Clapp March 17,1849 Cornelia Maria Clapp, after
whom Clapp Laboratories was named, was a Professor of Zoology for
the twelve years before she retired. She had graduated from
Mt.Holyoke in 1871 and begun her teaching career here as an
instructor in mathematics and gymnastics! ________________________________________
So far three
mini-reunions have been organized around Mary Lyon events and
reports indicate that a good time was had by all. There have been
gatherings following lectures in NYC and Philadelphia and a tea in
the Bay area. There will be a lecture in Boston on Thursday, March
25th which several of us plan to attend. Interested?? Contact us at
dlfwhyte@comcast.net
and we will forward information. Contact Nancy Zone Bloom nancyerb@aol.com or Pat Ascher pascher@mtholyoke.edu if you would like to help with Reunion 2005! Check web site for more detailed information. Stay well and be in
touch!
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| Frances Perkins April 10 1885-1965 A 1902 graduate of Mount Holyoke, she was an aristocratic progressive who retained her maiden name after marriage. She joined the settlement-house movement, working at Hull House and becoming an advocate of social reform, with a particular interest in the problems of blue-collar workers. In 1910 she received an M.A. in social economics from Columbia University and began serving as secretary of the New York Consumers League. In that position she investigated conditions in factories, especially those employing women and children, and lobbied for the reduction of their workweek.
During Roosevelt’s governorship (1929-1933) Perkins headed the state industrial commission. As President, Roosevelt appointed her Secretary of Labor. The first woman cabinet member in U.S. history, Frances Perkins and her post became a lightning rod for criticism and attack by the many business, labor and political opponents of the New Deal. Perkins proved equal to the task and administered her expanded duties with notable efficiency and restraint, withstanding repeated private and public attack. During her tenure she strengthened an almost defunct department, injecting new life into its bureaus of Labor Statistics, Women, and Children. She spearheaded enactment of the Social Security Act of 1936, was committed to federal public works and relief, and championed legislation for minimum wages and maximum hours and for the abolition of child labor. The desperate conditions of German Jews under the Nazi regime moved Perkins to help. Beginning in April 1933 she made it a primary cause. She stood alone in Roosevelt’s cabinet as an advocate for the liberalization of immigration procedures, boldly confronting the Secretary of State and his deputies when trying to find ways and means to enable as many Jewish refugees as possible to enter the United States. Her advocacy was essentially doomed, in the main by anti-Semitism. On Perkins’s death, the Times of London praised her as "one of the chief architects of the New Deal," a woman with a "true sense of justice and humanity."
Stay well and be in touch.
Sue Bradley Cabot
amitybc@maine.rr.com ________________________________________ |
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RACHEL CARSON Born May 27, 1907 Died April 14, 1964 A shy young woman who loved books and nature equally well, Rachel Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (later Chatham College), studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received an MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins in 1932. Hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to write scripts during the Depression, she also wrote feature articles on natural history for the Baltimore Sun. By 1951 Carson was Editor of all publications for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In her free time she had turned her government research into lyric prose. In 1952 she published her prize-winning study of the ocean, The Sea Around Us - and in that year resigned from government service to devote herself to writing. Her graceful prose opened up scientific knowledge about the oceans to the lay person. Embedded in all her published writing was the view that human beings were but one part of nature, distinguished primarily by their power to alter it, in some cases irreversibly. She was not by nature a crusader; but when aerial spraying of DDT killed the birds in a friend’s bird sanctuary, she began to investigate the effects of heedless pesticide poisoning of our rivers and soils. In Silent Spring, published in 1962, she warned that we might soon face a spring when no bird songs could be heard. As a woman threatening the status quo, Rachel Carson had to weather a storm of controversy and abuse, and she did not live to see the eventual banning of DDT in this country. But "the environment" and "ecology" have become household words and the environmentalist movement carries on the work she began. "If I had influence with the good fairy …….I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life."
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VIRGINIA APGAR
June 7, 1909 Dr. Selma Calmes has said of Virginia Apgar "She drove her convertible like an airplane. Once she took off, the wheels seemingly never touched the ground." Virginia graduated from MHC in
1933 and attended Columbia Medical School. After being advised (by a
male colleague) that she should not continue in surgery, she turned
her attention to anesthesiology, a fledgling field at the time. We
all recognize her as the originator of the Apgar score for ranking
newborns; this was presented in 1952 and is still considered to be
the best predictor of infant health in the first month of life. Her
"prepared mind" is cited for her ability to devise this score so
spontaneously. She was not considered for chairmanship of her then
male dominated department, but continued to practice anesthesia and
champion interest in perinatal care (maternal and infant) and infant
resuscitation. A commemorative stamp was
issued in her honor in 1994, and in 1995, she was inducted into the
National Women's Hall of Fame. She was given an Honorary Degree by
MHC in 1965. An emeritus MHC professor recalls that she frequently
visited the college and was encouraging and helpful to premedical
women even in her later years. We like to think that her MHC
education contributed to the "prepared mind" cited for her many
achievements. Live passionately! Be in
touch! Sue Bradley
Cabot amitybc@maine.rr.com
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Mary Emma Woolley
July 13, 1863 September 5, 1947 "How uncomfortable to be a static female in a world where all the males are moving." Mary Emma Woolley agreed with Epictetus who said, "To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be held by permanent ideals; that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him." Biographies attest to Ms. Woolley’s patience and calm as she administered this Institution. The first female to graduate
from Brown University, this energetic, visionary woman taught at
Wellesley before becoming President of Mount Holyoke from the turn
of the century until her retirement in 1937. Inside the College, she
fostered an orderly, forward looking program. She established more democratic conditions, encouraging equality of opportunity and diversity, and she increased faculty salaries. She was a NON-denominational President. Outside the College she stood for "whatever concerns the welfare of women, the advancement of education (and broader interests for women), and the conservation of young life." This, of course, included being a spokes person for women’s suffrage. Active in the cause of world peace, she strongly believed that women could be helpful in the peace process. She was the only woman chosen from the United States to be a delegate to the Geneva Disarmament Conference in 1932, which she attended during her Presidency. It has been said that Ms.
Woolley had "a personal immunity to panic." She was an attentive
woman who was never bored and who loved the out-of-doors. She was
partnered to Jeanette Marks, an English professor at Mount Holyoke,
for 52 years. Ms. Marks wrote a biography of Mary Woolley. She emphasized that education
gave purpose to life and she differentiated between achieving and
education, feeling that an education is extremely important in the
management of a home, for a woman could gain a truer "perspective"
which afforded her more tolerance and understanding. Ms. Woolley did not believe
that knowledge alone was power but that this knowledge without the
ability to "concentrate the mind" was virtually useless. She
lectured that "acquirement and training become a means to an end
rather than an end in themselves." These factors, she said, serve in
the development of power which is the secret of effective service
and peace and happiness. To apply the knowledge we acquire..... the power of critical thinking..... acceptance of diversity..... the avoidance of "whatever-ism"..... calm..... the legacy continues..... Be in touch Sue Bradley Cabot P.S. We cannot resist the
following: Frances Lester Warren graduated Phi Beta Kappa from MHC in 1911, giving her first hand knowledge of Ms. Woolley’s presidency. She taught English at MHC and at Wellesley, and served as Head of the English Department at the New England Conservatory of Music. She published many essays and books. She was an accomplished musician, artist and photographer. She was awarded an Honorary Degree at Mount Holyoke in 1937 after the publication of her book, "On a New England Campus." This book recounts charming vignettes of college life at the time and makes the historical data come to life. Her descriptions of Ms. Woolley are quite wonderful!
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Thoughts on a Mount Holyoke woman whose birthday we celebrate on August 13Lucy
Stone
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Orra Phelps September 10, 1896 August 26, 1986 Orra’s life embodied adventure and accomplishment. Gifted with superior intelligence, physical stamina and boundless enthusiasm, she enjoyed a multi-faceted life as physician, teacher, mentor, naturalist, botanist, geologist, ecologist, naval officer, Girl Scout leader, author and mountaineer/hiker extraordinaire. She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1918, a Mary Lyon Scholar. After teaching zoology at U. of New Hampshire and geology at Mount Holyoke, she was admitted to Johns Hopkins Medical school. Because she was not financially able to open a private practice, she became a school physician. Orra’s mother, Orra Elmira Parker Phelps (MHC 1888), was a botanist and author whose appreciation of the natural world had inspired her daughter. Dr. Phelps’s own energy and enthusiasm led her to explore the Adirondack region, where she climbed and mapped the many peaks in the area—leading to the publication, in 1934, of the first comprehensive Guide to Trails in Adirondack Park. The New Yorker magazine has called Dr. Phelps the "resident ranger-naturalist for the Adirondack Mountain Club." Often a solitary hiker, Orra was known to walk as far as 35 miles in a day. When she did not hike alone she served as guide to such folk as Court Justice William O. Douglas and many possibly grateful Girl Scout troops. Nature trails in different areas have been dedicated to both her and her mother. Leaving her medical practice in 1946, she enlisted in the Naval Reserve and achieved the rank of Lieutenant Commander. She then served as a staff physician at a local VA Hospital until her retirement at age 77. She settled in her sanctuary, a farm in upstate New York, and proceeded to climb all of the Adirondack peaks once again in order to update the official trail book. Later she was instrumental in the creation of a museum for the Adirondack Mountain Club. Orra was a loyal MHC alumna. When she gave a class address at her 60th Reunion, she cited the importance of the Mountain Day tradition which had influenced her life and which is still enjoyed on Campus. Her niece, Mary Arakelian, accompanied her to her 65th Reunion. Mary has written a biography of her energetic aunt entitled Doc. In it she says that Orra was a positive person who "found joy in nature, [and] stimulation in the work of young scientists.... She hiked thousands of miles and savored the natural world every step of the way. She lived her life as she climbed mountains, overcoming hardship for the pure joy of that moment on the peak." Savor the natural world! Sue Bradley Cabot
amitybc@maine.rr.com
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Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
born October 11, 1884 "No one is neutral about Eleanor Roosevelt. I know people, reasonable folks, who loathe even her memory. To countless others, the former First Lady is the jewel in the crown of the New Deal, a heroine who changed forever the notion that Presidential wives are mere adornments. 'If democracy had saints', said Adlai Stevenson, 'Eleanor Roosevelt would be the first canonized'."(3) ER visited Mount Holyoke five times, staying at the College Inn and at least once in a dorm, discussing with Mary Woolley women's role in the peace process (a favorite topic of Woolley), and in October of 1945 lecturing at Chapin to an audience of 1200 (1) on "Politics in a Democracy." ER first visited MHC in 1931, when her husband was Governor of New York. During her 1945 visit, she said she planned to make several public appearances that fall in the interest of the Political Action Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (1)—to some, including my own rural Republican parents, known as the dreaded CIO. She also declared herself in favor of a year's compulsory training for both boys and girls. In answer to a question from a student, she said, "I would be opposed to a year devoted to military training for boys alone. If we have military service, I hope it is for boys and girls alike. I hope we discuss fully what kind of training and what kind of service is to be accomplished in that year." She said that the United States citizen must care what happens to all the peoples of the world "for purely selfish reasons..... [because] what happens to them will affect our economy." Her lecture emphasized the importance of the individual's education in a world so closely knit. "It is really very frightening." In discussing education in a democracy, ER said, "I hope that this challenge is going to be met. Otherwise I see only misery, apprehension and fear in our generation and in the coming generation. And in the end I see only destruction."(1) After the MHC lecture, she took questions. "She takes that period with great understanding," wrote the Holyoke reporter. "In the first place she knows her answers or she says with utmost frankness, 'I don't know'. It is very refreshing to have somebody say that to a questioner." (1) Her most recent biographer, Blanche Cook, recalls ER visiting Hunter College in 1961, when Cook was a student and ER was a student advisor. When the regally tall Mrs. Roosevelt entered the room, the atmosphere changed: "So much energy bounced off her. And I remember her eyes—they were an incredibly clear, luminescent blue." (2) Goodwin writes, 'Eleanor shattered the ceremonial mold in which the role of the First Lady had traditionally been fashioned, and reshaped it around her own skills and her deep commitment to social reform. She gave a voice to people who did not have access to power. She was the first woman to speak in front of a national convention, to write a syndicated column, to be a radio commentator, and to hold regular press conferences'. (5) She had been propelled to that place of prominence by her strengths and resourcefulness. Thirteen years after her marriage in 1904, and after bearing 6 children, Eleanor had resumed the search for her identity that had been interrupted by being orphaned at 10 and married at 21. 'The voyage began with a shock—the discovery in 1918 of love letters revealing that Franklin was involved with Lucy Mercer, Eleanor's personal secretary. "The bottom dropped out of my own particular world," she later said. "I faced myself, my surroundings, my world honestly, for the first time." There was talk of divorce, but when Franklin promised never to see Lucy again, the marriage continued. For Eleanor, a new path had opened, a possibility of standing apart from Franklin. No longer would she define herself solely in terms of his wants and needs. Long before the contemporary women's movement provided ideological arguments for women's rights, Eleanor instinctively challenged institutions that failed to provide equal opportunity for women. As First Lady, she held more than 300 press conferences that she cleverly restricted to women journalists, knowing that news organizations all over the country would be forced to hire their first female reporter in order to have access to the First Lady. Nowhere was ER's influence greater than in civil rights. Citing statistics to back up her assertion that blacks were being systematically discriminated against at every turn, she confronted her husband relentlessly, barging in to his cocktail hour and cross-examining him at dinner. She compelled him to sign a series of Executive orders barring discrimination in the administration of various New Deal projects. African Americans' share in the New Deal work projects expanded, and Eleanor's independent legacy began to grow. Her positions on civil rights were far in advance of her time: ten years before the Supreme Court rejected the "separate but equal" doctrine, Eleanor argued that equal facilities were not enough—"The basic fact of segregation, which warps and twists the lives of our Negro population, [is] itself discriminatory." She understood the importance of symbolism in fighting discrimination. In 1938, while attending the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (which she had helped found) in Birmingham, Alabama, she refused to abide by a segregation ordinance that required her to sit in the white section of the auditorium, apart from her black friends. The following year she publicly resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution after it barred Marian Anderson from its auditorium. During WW 11, Eleanor remained an uncompromising voice on civil rights, insisting that American could not fight racism abroad while tolerating it at home. Progress was slow, but her continuing intervention led to broadened opportunities for blacks in the factories and shipyards at home and in the armed forces. She never let the intense criticism she encountered silence her'.(5) 'She was unstinting in her commitment to Arthurdale, the federally planned housing community in West Virginia, and to providing health care for all Americans. Thumbing her nose at convention, ER opened the White House to women reporters, to African-American activists including Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter White, and to labor zealots such as Georgia's Lucy Randolph Mason. For all this, of course, ER suffered the slings and arrows of virulent critics, many from the white South, but also Yankee Republicans who deeply resented her activities. She spoke out for federal anti-lynching legislation even when FDR refused to support any such national law. She sounded off publicly whenever she heard of New Deal agencies turning a deaf ear to the cries of poor blacks or whites. Cook looks critically at ER's failure to speak out about what was happening in Nazi Germany. From as early as 1933, Cook shows, ER had first-hand, reliable information of what Hitler was plotting against German Jews. Yet she said nothing'. (3) In this regard she was all too conventional, mirroring the prejudices of her class. Later, when Jews were trying to flee their homelands and get to safety, ER became an advocate for relaxing immigration statutes, though her efforts by then seemed feeble and late. While she gained worldwide acclaim as a champion of social justice, first she had to overcome an unhappy childhood, her husband's infidelity, a domineering mother-in-law, paralyzing depressions, and thunderous public criticism. Her children resented the time and devotion she showered on strangers around the globe instead of on them (did they resent their father's choices as well?), and all five surviving children led troubled lives. Nonetheless, ER's work and pursuits must have given her joys and satisfactions. She had a true partnership with FDR. She had "an extraordinary constellation of female friends" (2) with whom she shared time at Val-Kill Cottage from 1925 until her death. After Franklin died, Val-Kill became her permanent home—and is now the centerpiece of the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site at Hyde Park. There was also one special friend, Lorena Hickock, 'the nation's first female sportswriter and a star Associated Press reporter, with whom ER exchanged thousands of passionate letters over three decades. To some readers, Cook (herself lesbian) had replaced a bloodless paragon of virtue with a full-bodied portrait of a woman who loved the world in more than the abstract. To others, she had misread the historical evidence in an effort to "out" Mrs. Roosevelt'. (2) 'Based on Streitmatter's compilation of the ER letters, more intriguing than the physical aspect of their relationship is the effect Hickock had on Roosevelt’s role as First Lady. Streitmatter argues that Roosevelt—often shy, depressed, and somewhat cynical—did not create the ground-breaking role of a modern First Lady alone. "When Eleanor wrote Lorena that her life would be 'empty without you,' the most eminent American woman of the twentieth century was speaking not only of an emotional void but also of a substantive one," writes Streitmatter. 'Although Hickock destroyed many letters before her death (in particular, those in which Eleanor had been less "discreet"), the remaining letters paint a romantic love affair—both tender and passionate'. (4) '"Hick" had fallen in love with ER in the 1920s. Cook asserts that the language and tone of ER's letters to Hick prove that they were physical lovers. What else is one to make of "I love you dear one and have wanted you all day"? Cook quotes such letters extensively. But ER, who loved writing long, passionate letters late into the night, expressed similar sentiments to many others, young and old, male and female. She even penned erotic-sounding letters to her mother-in-law, whom she detested'. (3) Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was deeply feeling, deeply intelligent, compassionate, visionary, accomplished—and enigmatic. Robert Frost's lines come to mind: "We dance around in a ring and suppose/While the secret sits in the middle and knows." Keep the faith, [Not wanting to mire in footnotes a birthday appreciation of ER, I've dealt with my sources rather high-handedly: I identify them—all secondary—with a number, as follows: (1): MHC archives, in this case from Holyoke and/or Springfield newspapers; (2): Publishers' Weekly, 7/5, 1999, Jennifer Schuessler reviewing Blanche Wiesen Cook's In the First Lady's Footsteps, Vol. 1; (3): Bruce Clayton for Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 7/18/99, reviewing Cook's Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 2; (4): Heather Lee Schroeder reviewing for Capital Times, Madison, WI, 10/13/98, Empty Without You [edited by Rodger Streitmatter], letters between Lorena Hickock and ER (Streitmatter, a journalism professor at American University, also authored Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America); and (5): Doris Kearns Goodwin, Time, "100 Leaders & Revolutionaries of the 20th Century," 4/13/98.] ________________________________________ |
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Georgia
O’Keeffe born November 15, 1887, Sun Prairie WI died March 6, 1986, Santa Fe At the Founder's Day ceremonies in 1971 the college's new art building was dedicated—and David Truman presented Georgia O'Keeffe with an honorary Doctor of Letters. She was one of five women prominent in the arts to be so honored that day. Some of her paintings have become iconic. Even the artist herself has become an American icon: we know both too little and too much about her and have tended to cope with our confusion by reducing her to dramatic gesture and archetype. The following review by Jed Perl of a new biography of O'Keeffe refreshes our memories of the artist and seems a healthy corrective to stale thinking. Naturally it won't be the last word on the subject. [Perl is the art critic of The New Republic and the author of a forthcoming study of art in mid-20th-century New York, ''New Art City.'' This review appeared in the New York Times 9/26/04.] FULL BLOOM "GEORGIA O'KEEFFE'S life spans the first century of modern art; she was born on a farm in Wisconsin in 1887 and died in Santa Fe in 1986. And her paintings, which are at once bold and hermetic, immediately appealing and unnervingly impassive, are very much a product of those years when American artists were buffeted by the conflicting pressures of an art-for-art's-sake individualism and an explosive populism. No wonder O'Keeffe so often provoked strong, often contradictory reactions. At mid-century, well after the press had enshrined her as an American original, the Abstract Expressionists rejected the spiritualized aestheticism that she shared with Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer who was her husband and her staunchest supporter. And near the end of her life, when O'Keeffe was presented as a feminist icon, another backlash ensued, for there were those who could not imagine that an artist who had been embraced as politically correct was a real artist after all. As ! Hunter Drohojowska-Philp makes clear in her biography, O'Keeffe was exceedingly sensitive to her shifting critical fortunes. Somewhere, deep down, she may have even understood that the size of her legend had little to do with the quality of her painting, and that in the end what she had achieved was something small and true, a slender thread in the weave of Western art. The story that Drohojowska-Philp, an art critic and journalist, relates in Full Bloom has been told before. In a sense it had been told well before O'Keeffe became a subject for biographers, for the journey of an American artist as related by Willa Cather in "The Song of the Lark" and Theodore Dreiser in "The 'Genius'" is in many respects the story of O'Keeffe. The rural America that had nourished the sensitive youngster was at once a springboard and a trap, and the wide world that beckoned had its confounding disappointments as well as its shimmering possibilities. O'Keeffe grew up in Wisconsin and Virginia, in a family in which the vestiges of an Old World feeling for the value of culture and education were sorely tried by her father's inability to ever make a decent living for long. O'Keeffe's parents saw her stints in college and art school in Chicago and New York as preparation for a career as a teacher, but for the determined young woman w! ho was discovering the sky-high possibilities of modern art, the prospect of working in some third-rate girls' school was nothing more than submission to grim necessity. It was while teaching at Columbia College in South Carolina, which Drohojowska-Philp describes as essentially a finishing school for debutantes, that O'Keeffe dug deep into the nascent world of abstract art and produced a group of lyrical charcoal drawings that a friend back in New York showed to Stieglitz early in 1916. There is a fairy-tale excitement about the story of the brilliant young woman, trapped in the hopelessly provincial women's college, who provoked Stieglitz, the legendary arbiter of all things modern, to exclaim, ''Finally a woman on paper.'' O'Keeffe's early travails and triumphs make for a riveting story, even in Drohojowska-Philp's merely workmanlike pages. Like Cather's and Dreiser's accounts of the artist's coming-of-age in America, O'Keeffe's journey lights up the old democratic vistas with an artist's damn-everything-but-the-beautiful kind of optimism, and the excitement carries well into O'Keeffe's conquest of 1920's New York. Drohojowska-Philp offers a well-reasoned portrait of Stieglitz, the proselytizer for modern art two decades older than O'Keeffe, who took her as his lover, found an audience for her work and produced a series of photographs of her face and hands and naked body that suggest a new kind of sensuousness, a slow-motion eroticism. O'Keeffe and Stieglitz married, and she became one of America's top-earning artists. Yet as the pages turn, Drohojowska-Philp's account of O'Keeffe's life (like all the others I have read) becomes a fairly tiresome catalog of friends, enemies, love affairs, homes, vacations, illnesses, exhibitions, reviews, sales and awards. Drohojowska-Philp is not the first student of O'Keeffe who has aimed to cut through the myths and set the record straight, and she wants us to know that her book does go deeper than previous accounts into the details of Stieglitz's affair with Dorothy Norman, a well-to-do younger woman who came to his side in the late 1920's and whom O'Keeffe never accepted, although she was herself by then happiest when she was away from Stieglitz, eventually establishing a new life in the Southwest. Drohojowska-Philp resists the temptation to force O'Keeffe into the role of either victim or victor, and she understands that a person who knows how to master every situ! ation will still register a hurt. But even as she wisely refuses to exaggerate the psychodrama, she gets bogged down in a business-as-usual approach. Drohojowska-Philp never puts us in touch with the imaginative adventure that is the crux of an artist's life. Instead of gathering her observations about O'Keeffe's paintings of flowers and deserts and darkened cities into focused discussions, she scatters brief descriptions throughout her book, so that we never move beyond a superficial survey of the work. She lacks the literary gifts that might give O'Keeffe's world some color and depth, and it is a huge relief when we are presented with some lines from Christopher Isherwood's diaries about the high bohemian decrepitude of Taos in the 1940's, for Isherwood can give us the lowdown on Mabel Dodge Luhan and the rest of the tough-as-nails old avant-gardist dames with a few niftily placed words. In Drohojowska-Philp's account, the aging O'Keeffe begins to sound dangerously like any wealthy old lady taking expensive cruises around the world. This high priestess of the Southwest is robbed of her sly theatricality. Readers may ! find themselves yearning for a bit of the shameless mythologizing that O'Keeffe brought to two volumes of autobiographical reflections. Her vatic remarks may have nothing to do with telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but there are elegantly embroidered lies that come closer to the truth than many straight-on recitations of the facts. With O'Keeffe, artistic invention and psychological self-invention were so tightly lashed together that the biographer who attempts to separate them runs the risk of diminishing the artist. O'Keeffe may never have made her peace with the critics who described her paintings as reflections of a woman's sexuality, a theme sounded by her friend Paul Rosenfeld, whose essays on the arts in early-20th-century New York are among the rare critical writings from that period that have endured. Yet O'Keeffe clearly understood that her studies of growth and decay—the luxuriant flowers, the parched bones, the canyons with their geological layerings and wind- and water-shaped rocks—were reflections of her own evolution. Her paintings are all image, like Art Deco visualizations of love lyrics, loudly whispering, ''O Life! O Death!'' And the work eludes sentimentality because the over-the-top themes are presented frankly, almost clinically. There's a cold but hot fascination a! bout her work, a fascination that emerges from the very physicality of her being; at least so it seems when we look at Stieglitz's photographs, in which the erotic charge of O'Keeffe's slim, athletic body adds spice to the Kabuki calm of her face. Many people believe there is something essentially feminine not only in O'Keeffe's subjects but also in the way her work sometimes appears to arise, almost unedited, out of her temperament. Similar observations have been made about another woman whose paintings developed a following in those years, Frida Kahlo. Yet women are not the only artists who can strike us as putting their faith more in personal expression than in artistic actualization. The life-and-art dynamic operated in similar ways in the careers of Modigliani and Dalí, two more artists who became legends in the years between the world wars, when it was evident that the hyper personalization that characterized many modern styles could have an extraordinarily wide appeal. O'Keeffe, Kahlo, Modigliani and Dalí were all aware that the idea of a style as a communal avowal had collapsed in the 19th century. And they knew that while some artists were dreaming of a new universality in art, a universality! often associated with pure abstract form, there were other artists who had concluded that style must become an essentially private expression. In the towering achievements of modern art—those of Mondrian or Matisse or Brancusi—the expression becomes so absolutely personal that it takes on a freestanding power and can feel, paradoxically, impersonal. What connects O'Keeffe with Kahlo, Modigliani and Dalí is that they were all unwilling to allow a style to take on a life of its own. In the work of these artists style remained a private matter, and the public flocked to their work precisely because it seemed the revelation of a secret—a kind of visual arts exposé. For Dalí there was nothing but the preternatural weirdness of his dreams. For Modigliani the whole world was a succession of bohemian Everymen and Everywomen. For Kahlo life was as intricately tangled as the figures on an antique Mexican votive painting. For O'Keeffe all experie! nce was a cycle of blossoming forth and withering away. And for the public these signature styles became like an actor's beloved mannerisms—like Clark Gable's swaggering toughness or Marlene Dietrich's suave seduction. O'Keeffe's finest paintings are not artistic expressions so much as they are apprehensions about life that have been documented in paint on canvas. The work is mythologized autobiography, and a biographer like Drohojowska-Philp, who examines the life behind the fantasy, can leave us feeling that the artist has been sadly diminished. O'Keeffe's work, however, is a conundrum for the critic as well as the biographer, for her paintings—like those of Kahlo, Dalí, and Modigliani—often have an impact that is not quite earned, at least not in the terms of art. O'Keeffe's paint handling is generally inert and her color tends to be dry and formulaic. The compositions are not anything much. And yet there is an engine in these paintings that holds them aloft. Even when her work is numbingly programmatic—I am thinking especially of the studies of clouds that she did late in life—it can have a strange integrity. A number of the other artists to whom Stieg! litz gave his support, especially John Marin, Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove, did paintings that in their originality of conception, structural intricacy and coloristic subtlety go way beyond anything of which O'Keeffe was capable. And yet there is an authenticity in much of what she did. It is her sense of herself as an original, which she has stamped into the image, time and again. She is one of those moderns who confound the old modern argument that the feeling is all in the form. With O'Keeffe, the form is a token of the feeling—a token that is made with so much grit and determination that it lasts and lasts." Best, Sue Bradley Cabot
amitybc@maine.rr.com
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EMILY
DICKINSON (re-visited)
December 10, 1830 She claimed that the brain is
wider than the sky and this was printed on the front of material
distributed at a recent International Neuroscience Convention. She
did not know, she said, that years had feet. Collectively we sigh,
for, likewise, we did not know. Controversial analyses appear but we prefer to think of her as the woman presented in Luce’s "Belle of Amherst," a woman who CHOSE her life as an eccentric recluse in order to amuse the world and have the privacy to create: she was an individualist of the highest order asking for nothing but to share "the ecstasy and sacrament of her life." She was, indeed, interested in publishing her poetry. There appeared to be unconsummated love affairs with older married men in her life and she experienced many emotions with very few excursions from her Amherst homes. She claims that as a child she giggled and played and that she was deeply involved with her teachers and friends. She was close to her family. Letters reveal that the Dickinsons often experienced financial difficulties. They were all religious but Emily rejected formal religion, and continued to do so during the year she attended MHC (1847-48). She claims that MHC was "run by a dragon," Mary Lyon, who was so determined to have all her students accept Christ that she classified them into 3 groups: SAVED, WITH HOPE and HOPELESS. Only Emily remained in this last group. It is probable, however, that she left MHC after one year because her father wanted her at home and not because of this potential conflict. Indeed, many of her comments about ML were more benign, citing her as one who cared for the students, stating in one letter that, "Miss Lyon and all the teachers seem to consult our comfort and happiness in everything they do..." She wished (as more mod! ern students have) that life in South Hadley were not so "isolated" and asked about the Mexican War, indicating that she was certain ML would furnish them with weapons if necessary. She spent the remainder of her life in Amherst helping to care for her invalid mother, writing and hoping to be published. It has been suggested that she retained a childish innocence far beyond the normal period of time and it was not until sometime after 1858 that she began her exploration of the tragic world of desire. She became more introspective, dropped "emilie" as the spelling of her name and became ill when her dog and constant companion, Carlos, died in 1865. Her illnesses were often associated with her emotional state. When a mentor of hers,
Higginson, finally met with her, he recorded many of the things that
transpired including comments on her father’s "remoteness." On that
meeting day, Higginson was relieved to leave her and stated," I
never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without
touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her." He
did not offer her encouragement regarding her poetry during her
lifetime although he was ultimately responsible for her publication
4 years after her death. She had written:
This is my letter to the World Her message is committed We do- Stay in touch-
"The Belle of Amherst" William Luce (1976) The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson Thomas H. Johnston, editor Mount Holyoke College Archives (papers, articles and letters)
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| Charlotte Haywood
January 14, 1897 Charlotte Haywood's personal yearbook was discovered only recently during an excavation in Curtis Smith's basement. She graduated from MHC in 1919......a year after Orra Phelps (hiker extraordinaire) graduated and the year after Mary Frances Farnham returned for her 50th Reunion. I cannot improve upon the memorial tribute which appeared in the Alumnae Quarterly, and so have included it in its entirety: It is never possible to capture the essence of a complex personality in a few words. If it were possible, the words used of Charlotte Haywood would sound like the exhortations of a slightly old-fashioned schoolmaster: "strength of character," "self-discipline," "absolute integrity," and "self less devotion." No one would deny that Charlotte exemplified these virtues, but no one who knew her would allow that such phrases do justice to her liveliness and enthusiasm, her love of beauty, or the warmth of her friendship. She was, in many respects, a fairly typical product of the great patrician tradition of New England. As a girl she often accompanied her physician father on his rounds in a horse and buggy. She must have absorbed the uncompromising standards of her Yankee heritage, along with the appreciation of art and the love of science which marked her whole life. As an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College she began an association with Abby Turner, who, along with Ann Morgan, carried on the traditions of excellence in science under the impetus of the legendary Cornelia Clapp. The association was to continue for the rest of Miss Turner's life; and it is one of the tragedies of Charlotte's own life that she was never able to find a protegée to continue this worthy succession. Those undergraduate days were not all plain living and high thinking! Charlotte was always fun-loving and full of the zest for living which remained one of her most charming characteristics to the very end. Only a few years before her retirement she man aged to hitch a ride on Otto Kohler's antique fire engine while it was transporting male members of the faculty on a careening tour of the campus during their annual post-graduation party. She later remarked, with considerable satisfaction, "It was something I've always wanted to do!" Endearing as her personal traits were, it is in her career that one finds her greatest monument. Between earning her master's degree at Brown University and her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, she returned to Mount Holyoke as an instructor of physiology from 1921 to 1924. After receiving her doctorate she taught for three years at Vassar, but in 1930 she came back to Mount Holyoke for the career of teaching and research that was to continue for the rest of her life. In that long span of time a great many of her students have achieved distinction in careers of their own. They provide visible testimony to the excellence of her teaching and the inspiration of her example. But even more than this, it was in her elementary courses, taught not specifically for science students, but as a part of a liberal education, that she made her greatest mark. Hundreds of students who got their first, and sometimes their only, taste of science at her hands, remember her with affection and respect; and few of them could have realized how meticulously the smooth-running laboratories were rehearsed with the teaching staff, or how many hours she spent preparing each lecture, no matter how familiar she was with the material. Even when the enrollment exceeded two hundred, she would know the name of every student in her class, and no returning alumna was unrecognized. There are many roads to immortality; and in the many hundreds of! students that knew Charlotte Haywood, her memory lives on. Although her love for teaching took first place in her life, Charlotte was an active and productive research scientist as well. Many summers were spent at her beloved Woods Hole, at the marine biological station, carrying on her studies in respiratory physiology. She was one of the first woman members of the American Physiological Society, and was known and respected by a great many of the scientific "establishment." After her retirement she continued her work on her scientific publications, and attended seminars when ever she found time in her busy life. Although her whole professional life had been characterized by an extraordinary devotion to her students and her work, upon her retirement Charlotte revealed new talents and found new outlets for her restless mind. Always an ardent traveler, she was finally able to extend her wandering to a trip around the world. Her life-long love of flowers was expressed in a new-found skill in photography. She continued her regular attendance at concerts, plays, and lectures; and she found more time for her friends. Throughout her life her contacts with students, friends, and associates were characterized by an ingrained and spontaneous graciousness. She was uncompromising in her personal standards, but forgiving of others. Perhaps she typified her era, but her gentle nobility of spirit is a quality needed by every era. Her passing sadly diminishes our world. CURTIS G. SMITH Miss Haywood was on a very active Sabbatical when we arrived at MHC in 1956 so many of us did not reap the benefits of her most popular course, a course targeted to teach basic physiology to liberal arts students. Instead she was doing research on the respiratory effects of CO2 on women and the effects of high pressures of nitrogen and helium on cells. She worked closely with the Navy during this last project. She was interested in the effects of CO2 as a narcotic agent, and she shared this ongoing project with Abby Turner. A pair of Abby Turner's eyeglasses was also found during the basement excavation mentioned above. When she was awarded the Mary Lyon Professorship, she was described as "a physiologist who has for 30 years, combined research with a full teaching schedule and a specialist in education concerned with recruiting liberal arts graduates to teach in public schools." Again, the emphasis was on showing non -scientists that science can be exciting. She conveyed the sense of wonder that belongs to the study of living functions. A room in Kendade Hall has been dedicated to Miss Haywood. Anecdotes abound. Many classmates found
Charlotte to be a warm and gentle woman who helped them learn the
concept of the laboratory. Others found her to be a formidable
tyrant. I found her to be frightening but fun... with a kind
twinkling sense of humor. I smile when I think of her comments on a
paper written for her course on permeability but I will tell this
anecdote only on demand as it is a lengthy one. An old Polaroid
photo taken of the two of us at Graduation has faded but her
presence has not. She was, indeed, a specialist in education. ________________________________________ |
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Mary Frances Farnham
January 9, 1847 (Maine) November 14, 1942 With a strong and steady hand in her 87th year, Ms. Farnham wrote to the Alumnae Association: "My interest in the College
has steadily increased with the passing years. What I have
accomplished has largely been due to influence I received in my old
Seminary days....It was my privilege, in 1918, to celebrate the 50th
anniversary of my graduation. I was thrilled with the dignity and
appropriateness of all the arrangements. The improvements on every
hand have combined to make the campus and the equipment among the
finest of our country....With good wishes for the continued advance
of Mount Holyoke College...." Mary Frances grew up in Maine
and attended MHC, graduating in 1868. During these early years many
of Mary Lyon's students pursued a missionary career and Miss Farnham
traveled to Cape Colony, South Africa to teach at a boarding school
for 8 years. While there, she and a colleague, Ms. Ballantine,
copied cave drawings which were later identified as those done by
Native Bushman. Copies of these drawings are on file at MHC and at
Dartmouth and letters in the MHC archives indicate a charming
account of her adventures and of the serendipitous rediscovery of
these drawings in the cellar at Dwight Hall. After teaching in New
England and the Midwest, she was selected as a Fellow at Radcliffe
where she spent a year obtaining her graduate degree. A photo of her
taken at that time reveals a strong, handsome face. She was selected to be Dean of
Women/ Professor of Literature at Pacific University in Forest
Grove, Oregon and served from 1903 until her retirement in 1924.
During this period, she was President of the Women's Missionary
Society, served as Vice-Chair of the Red Cross and published a book
on the History of Maine (1603-1871) known as "The Farnham Papers."
In 1912, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from MHC. May our souls continue to
evolve.
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MARY MASON LYON
born February 28, 1797, Buckland
MA Ladies need to know how to take care of the fragments of time. More than nine tenths of the suffering we endure is because those around us do not show that regard for us which we think they ought to. Learn to sit with energy I don't want artificial fire. The Founder. The closer she gets to becoming an icon, the less we know her - and the less we appreciate the "magnificently persistent spirit" (4) and heightened zest for living that in her day was called 'vitativeness.' Those iconic images of her -serious, level gaze, nearly-smiling, generous mouth - were all there was for me until I read one of her students' description of her at middle age: "Rather under the medium height, with a strong, muscular frame, a florid complexion, with blazing, light-blue Saxon eyes, kindly, severe, or pathetic, as occasion warranted, but with now and then a sparkle of irrepressible merriment; hair of palest auburn, the sunny waves just sparsely threaded with gray, and so riotous in habit as to be never quite as smooth as fashion decreed, strands of it waving and jigging about her temples in an entirely unwished-for manner. She always wore a demure little lace cap, strings flying as she hurried about, with a generous coil of her! beautiful hair gleaming through its thin meshes behind." (3) Mary was born the third of eight children on the family's hundred acre farm near Buckland. Her father, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, died when Mary was five. Perhaps she was no older than that "when her mother found her one day apparently trifling with the hourglass, but (Mary) explained that she thought she had discovered a way of making more time." (4) At her mother's side, Mary learned the skills and crafts necessary for a 19th century farm girl. She cooked on an open hearth, baked breads, spun and dyed wool from family sheep, wove blankets, sewed, preserved farm produce, churned butter, made cheese, jam, soap, and candles, cured meat, washed clothes, and swept floors. Mrs. Lyon remarried when Mary was thirteen and moved into her new husband's home, leaving Mary to keep house for a brother. Mary's weekly wage was one silver dollar. In 1814, at seventeen, she began teaching in country schools in order to finance her own education. Her first teaching job was in the summer of that year at Shelburne Falls. She was paid 75 cents a week (men received ten to twelve dollars a month). As was the custom, she "boarded around" in the homes of students. It was an unsettled life, as she moved as often as every five days; and it was a challenge to teach children aged 4 to 10 in a crowded one-room schoolhouse. She worked hard to improve her teaching skills and her ability to keep order in the classroom. Between 1817 and 1821 she attended Sanderson Academy at Ashfield, Amherst Academy, and the Reverend Joseph Emerson's seminary at Byfield. (1) "She spent the next several years partly in front of the classroom as a teacher and partly struggling to find a place for herself in classrooms and lecture halls so she could learn more and fill in the gaps in her education. She sometimes traveled three days by carriage to enroll at a school." (2) Gender and finances could have been stumbling blocks or have utterly stopped her in her tracks; but she persevered with astounding patience, energy, and equanimity. She taught at Sanderson Academy, where she had been a student, opened her own school in Buckland, spent summers teaching at the Adams Female Seminary in New Hampshire, and then became assistant principal at Ipswich Female Seminary. She also attended lectures at Amherst College and the Rensselaer School (now Polytechnic Institute). "To get an education for herself, with heroic effort, was not enough for Miss Lyon. In getting it, she came to feel its value and others' need of it. Obtaining it for them was an object for as much zeal and devotion as she had bestowed upon her own." (4) In 1834 she left Ipswich to pursue her dream - a women's school with a curriculum equivalent to those at men's colleges, including a graduation requirement of seven courses in the sciences and mathematics as well as science laboratory experiments and field trips to collect specimens; low tuition to attract students of modest means ($60/year at the start); domestic work by students to keep down operating expenses; independence from influence by any wealthy donor and non-affiliation with any particular religion (though Calvinistic principles had a secure home in her); and a broad base of financial support from a variety of donors. (2) "One of the most active trustees and money raisers, the Reverend Roswell Hawks, becoming in due course president of the Mount Holyoke trustees, attempted to assert his authority one day by announcing, 'I am the head of this institution'; to which Mary Lyon flashed back, 'Then I am the neck.' On the whole her good sense saved her again and again from mistakes - as when the name Pangynaskean Seminary, suggested by a classicist who prided himself on a word that would promise to the initiated the all-around cultivation of feminine powers, was vetoed." (3) "The men and women incited by Mary Lyon to join their efforts with hers in raising the funds her project demanded did what they could, but it was her individual work that brought the Seminary into existence - and that in the small space of three years. One of her account books records about twenty-seven thousand dollars subscribed by a few more than eighteen hundred people in ninety-one towns. The largest single sums entered here are two of a thousand dollars each; the smallest, three of six cents.......... On one occasion, returning from an unfruitful call upon a family of large wealth, she summed it up by saying, ‘They live in a costly house, it is full of costly things, they wear costly clothes - but oh, they're little bits of folks! ‘" (3) On November 8th , 1837, a substantial brick building of four stories and a basement was ready for the occupancy of the eighty girls who first entered Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She said, "The stones and brick and mortar speak a language which vibrates through my very soul." She was forty years old. Mary Lyon never accepted a salary of more than $200 a year herself and found devoted associates to work with her on corresponding terms. (4) 'The success of Mount Holyoke opened the doors of higher education for women. She proved that women are as intellectually capable as men and that an institution for women offering a college curriculum could survive financially......... Mount Holyoke provided the inspiration, the model, and often the leadership, for the many women's colleges that followed (e.g., Wellesley, Smith, Mills). She herself taught chemistry. Her interest in the sciences and her high expectations for women (she inspired them to pursue careers as college teachers and researchers) sparked a tradition of leadership in science education that continues to this day.(5) The student who describes her appearance goes on to say, "Her fiftieth birthday occurred in February, 1847, and she discoursed much to us on the privileges and responsibilities of age! I can see her dear face now, all alight with feeling, as plainly as when I sat before her. She had a quick, bustling movement as she went about, and the most marvelous executive ability imaginable, extending to the minutest details of our daily lives. No one who came under the influence of her magnetic personality can ever forget her." (6) A small bit of what she said: It is one of the nicest of mental operations to distinguish between what is very difficult and what is utterly impossible. There is nothing in the universe that I fear, but that I shall not know all my duty or shall fail to do it. Our happiness lies largely in remembering. Do what will be pleasant to remember. Character, like embroidery, is made stitch by stitch. Go where no one else is willing to go; do what no one else is willing to do. Teach till you make a success of it. Make the dull ones think once a day, make their eyes sparkle once a day. Make as much effort to gain knowledge from objects around us, from passing events, and from conversation, as from books. Stop when you have done. I'm not done. Here's one last story: "A president of Amherst College, Dr. Edward Hitchcock, who knew Mary Lyon well and prepared the first extended account of her life, tells in his Memoir the significant story of a dream. He had been lecturing not long before at Mount Holyoke, and had seen a fire extinguished, under Miss Lyon's quiet direction, in the first Seminary building, which was in fact eventually devoured by that element. The dream was to the effect that on an anniversary day, when the students were undergoing an examination before a large audience, violent flames burst out in this very building. Yet everything went forward without interruption. 'As I passed along,' the dreamer tells us, 'a window opened, and Miss Lyon appeared with a letter in her hand, which she committed to someone to take to the post office. I thought it a strange time to be writing letters, but was told that it was a circular which Miss Lyon was getting out to obtain means for erecting a new building!'" The school is to be permanent, continuing onward in its operations from generation to generation......... founded and built up by the cheerful contributions of the most benevolent. We're glad to be part of the tradition. Be there at our 45th if you can. We hope to see you. With warm regards, Sue and Dana
Sources: ________________________________________
Adele Mintz Dalsimer, Mount
Holyoke class of 1960 In 1996, Irish America Magazine named a Jewish woman from Boston, Adele Mintz Dalsimer, as one of the 100 Top Irish-Americans. In a tribute to Adele, James Carroll of the Boston Globe addressed her as "Boston College's prophet of Irishness." The road to her status as a daughter of Eire meandered from a small private high school on Long Island through Mount Holyoke, graduating cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with a major in English, by Hunter College in NYC for a Master's degree, and on to a sojourn at Yale for a Doctorate in English literature. Her thesis was on Shelly's Influence on Yeats; her thesis advisor was the eminent Harold Bloom. In 1969, she began teaching full time in the English Department at Boston College. When Adele joined the English faculty at BC, she, because of her graduate work, was expected to teach Romantic poetry. When she realized that this area was already well covered by a very popular professor, she decided to introduce something new within her range of expertise. In short order she noted that in this Catholic institution, in a city where the majority of Catholics were Irish, there were no courses in Irish literature. Adele convinced her chairman to let her introduce the subject. The initial offering went well, stimulating the first of her many trips to Ireland. She fell in love with the country, and according to her husband Jim, the country fell in love with her. In many visits over the years, she met and befriended university professors, politicians, artists, writers, actors, scholars and a host of students. Few could resist Adele when she decided to accomplish some goal. Her Irish literature course paved the way to the establishment of the popular, innovative, and internationally respected Irish Studies Program, conceived and developed by her with an historian who joined the College at her urging. He testified about her - "We didn't have an office. We didn't have administrative approval. We didn't have a budget. But we had Adele's enthusiasm, so the opposition never had a chance." She instigated joint programs with Irish institutions such as the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Universities in both Dublin and Belfast, and the National Gallery. An exchange program was begun so that BC students could study in Ireland and Irish students could come to BC. The Irish Times, in February of 2000 stated: "Students of Adele Dalsimer, in America and Ireland attest to her radiance, vitality and vision and to her inestimable legacies as teacher and mentor." Adele's academic achievements were many. She held scholarships, honors, awards, and Fellowships throughout her academic life. She advanced from Instructor of English at Boston College in 1969 to Assistant Professor in 1972 to Associate Professor in 1976 to full Professor in 1990. She received Honorary Degrees from Mount Holyoke in 1995, the University of Ulster in 1998, and the National University of Ireland in 1999 for her "unique and outstanding scholarly contributions to the field of Irish Studies." Adele enriched life for all of us. Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney, said that Adele had "a gift for lifting people's spirits into vision and cooperation" and made the Boston College Irish Studies Program "a locus of energy….[which has gained the international] respect of writers, critics and all workers in the field." His poem, A Brigid's Girdle, was dedicated to Adele (who was also the subject of the piece). It will appear in the Class of! '60 Memorial Book. One particular accomplishment, which was known to many Bostonians, was the establishment and success of an annual and unique Irish-Jewish Seder in Boston at Easter/Passover. In a typical ecumenical move for Adele, it was designed to promote inter-faith understanding, recognizing that both Jews and the Irish had been taken from their lands and suffered various forms of oppression. A number of years ago, (I believe it was 1992) a few of Adele's friends and cousins convinced her to guide them on a tour of Ireland in order to show them this wonderful land that she loved so much. We were able to join the group four years later, when she was organizing another trip to see parts of the country missed on the earlier visit. Wherever we went, she had arranged for us to meet someone who could add to our knowledge and pleasure. In Dublin at the National Gallery, we attended the opening of the Irish Impressionists exhibit that she had first curated at the Boston College Art Museum. At the opening, we met Mary Robinson, the President of Ireland, who invited us all to visit her home, the "White House" of Ireland, two days later. We were invited for brunch at the home of a colleague of Adele's at University College Dublin, the daughter of a former Prime Minister, who also joined us. In County Wexford, Angela Bourke, a poet, storyteller, and lecturer at ! University College Dublin, took us on a personal tour of the area where she regaled us with tales and folklore of the region. In Connemara, Fergus Bourke, the former portraitist at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, marched us up a very long and steep "hill." He stopped every once in a while to take pictures of the powerful landscape. Three of these hang on my wall, triggering memories of both Fergus and Adele. At one point, about two-thirds of the way up, someone asked "how much further?" Some people were ready to give up and go back. He told us that it wasn't much further (it was!), but later he admitted that if he had told us in the beginning how long it would take, we wouldn't have gone. And, it was worth it. At the top was an ancient sanctuary that had been built centuries before and attracted many pilgrimages up that long trail. Adele, of course, was in the vanguard of this hike. Everyone in the group knew that she had an ultimately fatal disease, multiple myeloma. We had this in the backs of our minds as we spent precious time with her and fell in love with the country she loved so much. A most poignant moment was when we stood atop the tower of Yeats' summer home at Thoor Ballylee the day before we were to go back home. On the roof of the tower (thoor), Adele read aloud to us from Yeats' poem "The Tower." It is a poem about friendship and loss…. The last stanza goes…. "Now shall I make my soul, We all cried. In time, the battle against the disease took over her life. Every day involved a struggle to combat it. Before any other decisions could be made, how to proceed against myeloma came first. It was not a metaphor, it was the essence. She remarked to me "how unimportant some things are that used to seem so all important." She fought the good fight for a long time. She was upbeat; she was "going to beat this %$*@& disease." She had the loving support of her wonderful family: husband Jim; daughter Jenny and her husband Glenn, along with her two beloved grandchildren, Nate and Sam; and son Josh. "Nate the great," as she called him, was playing with her on her hospital bed the night before she died. She had been planning to be home the next day, and was in high spirits. Unfortunately, the next morning she fell getting out of bed and died shortly thereafter. I couldn't imagine what life would be like without Adele. Beginning in 1956, we shared so much - happiness, sadness, joy. We could say anything to each other and did, knowing there would be no judgment, just understanding. We helped each other through what we deemed as crises at the time. After college, there were sometimes long lapses between seeing one another, but there was always the telephone and our thoughts. And, when we finally did talk or get together, we just started again where we had left off the last time. Reunions at MHC became very important to us. It was a time when she, Jim, Joel, and I could spend the whole weekend together not just a few hours on a weekend. I read somewhere that Buddha's first message says "All suffering comes from attachment." Yes, but along the way, attachment is accompanied by joy. Susan Kovacs Buxbaum (susanbuxbaum@att.net) The following sources were used to put this
together: ________________________________________
Ruth Elvedt In the early 1960's, she began to play golf and she was involved with the formation of the inaugural women's golf team at MHC in the 1970's. Her association with the Orchards Golf Club continued and she was honored, in 1999, at the17th Annual Orchard's Women's Invitational. During a period of construction at Kendall, she coerced the powers that be to leave a huge mound of dirt in the parking lot so that she could easily teach beginning skiing. Students called it "Mt. Elvie". Elvie was a ubiquitous presence on
Campus--either at fitness swim, playing golf, attending meetings,
concerts or plays. Indeed, a colleague of hers once wrote: "Wherever
you see Ruth be it schussing down a ski slope or striding down a
fairway, be assured she has decided where she is going and doing it
with confidence, good humor and a joy for life that is infectious…"
________________________________________ April 20, 2005This month we honor two women who were born a year apart but who on the face of it could not have been more different from each other: Ruth Catherine Lawson, professor of political science at Mt. Holyoke and respected internationalist, and May Sarton, Belgian-born novelist, essayist, poet and Glascock judge. April is National Poetry Month. April also marks the 82nd anniversary of the Kathryn Irene Glascock Poetry Prize Contest. Since 1923, the Glascock Contest has been bringing undergraduate poets into contact with renowned poets. It has launched the careers of some of the twentieth century's most celebrated poets. Sylvia Plath, Donald Hall, James Merrill, Kenneth Koch, Katha Pollitt, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg were all Glascock winners. Judges have included W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom, Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, Adrienne Rich, Derek Walcott, and May Sarton. May Sarton saw the universal in the ordinary and acknowledged the fruits of solitude: "Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way." Here are two of her poems: Metamorphosis Always it happens when we are not there - Lovers of wind, who will have been aware Summer Music Summer is all a green air - Summer is all a green sound - headerrow
________________________________________ Ruth
Catherine Lawson One of our classmates who studied with Professor Lawson says, "She was tough but fair and, most importantly, she made us think! Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto (remember those days) came alive in her class and international relations took on a human quality that made us want to learn more." Another classmate, a rueful but appreciative smile in her voice, says "She was my darling nemesis." Ruth Lawson graduated magna cum laude from Mount Holyoke in 1933, received both Master’s and doctoral degrees in international law from Bryn Mawr, and taught at her alma mater for 34 years, from 1942 until her retirement as full professor in 1976. Following in the tradition of Mary E. Woolley, Ellen Deborah Ellis, and other such Mount Holyoke educators and leaders, Ruth Lawson epitomized the spirit of international commitment that has distinguished this college since its founding. In 1950 she founded the MHC International Internship Program, which was one of the first in the country and which has placed over a thousand students in posts around the world. Traveling extensively throughout the Middle East and Europe, Prof. Lawson studied in The Hague and Geneva and conducted research in NATO capitals. In 1968 she was a member of a group of American political scientists invited to visit the U.S.S.R. and Eastern European capitals. She held Guggenheim, NATO, and American Society of International Law Fellowships. Author of European Security Reappraised and International Regional Organizations: Constitutional Foundations, she also published over 70 articles and book reviews in journals including Current History, American Journal of International Law, and Political Science Quarterly. Lecturing at various universities and colloquia throughout the United States and Europe, Prof. Lawson participated in numerous programs of learned societies and conferences, and held memberships on many committees and in international organizations. A partial list of organizations she served includes the Directors of the Atlantic Council, International Studies Association, International Institute for Strategic Studies, American Society of International Law, and American Political Science Organization. Locally, she served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Connecticut Valley World Affairs Council and was involved in nearly every faculty committee at the college. In 1976 a Ruth C. Lawson Fellowship was established for graduate study in International Politics. In that year she retired from teaching at Mount Holyoke, leaving a department indelibly shaped by her international outlook. Former Director General of the Foreign Service Carol C. Laise said, "Her talents as a scholar, teacher, and friend are formidable. She was very brilliant and very strict, yet full of fun." One of her students comments, "[She] will long be remembered for her humor and straight-forward, no-nonsense approach to teaching." In 1988 MHC established a chair in international politics in Ruth Lawson’s name. The accompanying tribute reads in part: "Miss Lawson’s tenure...spanned the formative global events that helped define today’s political world, including the close of WW II, the development of the United Nations and the steady growth of regional cooperation...... The academic vigor and clarity [she] brought to the classroom and demanded in turn from her students honed the skills they needed to enter careers in government, economics, law and international organizations. All [of her endeavors] were informed by a lively and analytical intelligence..." Professor Vincent Ferraro, named the first Ruth C. Lawson Professor of Politics, said of her, "Ruth was a teacher passionately committed to her students, Mount Holyoke College, and a vision of world peace. The strength of her commitment inspired an entire generation of young women to work for a better world." A student remembers, "She went out of her way to encourage us to pursue our goals — no matter how far-reaching they seemed to be." When the College awarded Ruth Lawson the Alumnae Medal of Honor, the citation read in part: "You have enriched the lives of your Mount Holyoke students by your world interests and as a passionate advocate of government by reason and international cooperation." (Mr. Bolton? Mr. Bush? Ms. Rice? Mr. Wolfowitz? Mr. Rumsfeld?........) We hope you're savoring April and its sweet insistence on 'new beginnings', ________________________________________ May 02, 2005THE MISSIONARY AND THE LIBERTY SHIP: both began their fantastic voyages in the month of May Fidelia Fiske Graduated 1842 The following excerpt from a recently published book provides
helpful background or understanding the era of Mary Lyon and the
early missionaries, one of whom was Fidelia Fiske. Mary Lyon had come to science teaching through her membership in a church-centered community of Evangelical Protestants active in college and seminary founding. As time went on, the woman faculty at MH (like their males peers at other colleges) understood "progress in the terms of the value increasing knowledge had for their own professional standing... and for the good their work brought to secular life. They supported science in the curriculum for the way it integrated students' thinking process with the systematic quest for empirical evidence, requiring self-discipline and providing positive reinforcement for responsible behavior in the form of an ever-improved vision of the great design of nature. This vision gave students the model for a moral society whose members lived in harmony with nature and strove to make the material world conform to the scientific order" ( ie, individual perfection attained through the study of nature). Hence Mary Lyon's faculty educated women to be teachers (admittedly to fill the shoes of men who were gravitating to the more lucrative fields of law and medicine etc); but her "faculty also prepared students for missionary work alongside men, putting their scientific knowledge and skills to work in founding schools and seminaries, teaching missionary children and converts, and avid building of collections."(1) During this period, missionaries did not understand the value of diversity and saw differences only as weaknesses but that is another whole topic for discussion. Fidelia Fiske, who graduated in 1842, was born in Shelburne,
Massachusetts. She was a devout Christian and an admirer of Mary
Lyon's work in Buckland. She taught briefly before coming to MH
where she quickly endeared herself to Mary Lyon, who desired that
she remain on her teaching staff. During these years, typhoid was
very common and an epidemic at MH claimed a number of lives. Fidelia
was ill for a year and remained fairly sickly. Conditions in Persia made her even more determined to be instrumental in the improvement of the condition of women. Women were disrespected and beaten. Most were illiterate and both mothers and fathers believed that education drained physical strength from girls affecting their performances of labor and thus decreasing their worth in marriage at early ages. Racism and imperialism dominated society and dishonesty was fostered as a characteristic required for survival. When Fidelia was finally granted two pupils for her proposed school for Girls in Oroomiah, she began her classes in Bible studies along with other disciplines. Through solicitation and trust her enrollment grew. She wrote to Mary Lyon (with some irony) that it was as "difficult to keep qualified teachers as it is for you at Mount Holyoke." Fidelia was devotedly attached to her Alma Mater and made her school a miniature Mount Holyoke Seminary. Within four years she stated that her pupils reminded her of her South Hadley sisters and her teachers reminded her of Miss Lyon! The two women corresponded until Mary Lyon's death in 1849. Because of poor health, Fidelia was forced to return to the United States in 1857; but other women from the Seminary, including Mary Rice (class of 1846) continued her successful work. Letters and journals indicate that Fidelia remained devout while teaching skills that helped increase self-esteem and help in daily living. Subje! cts listed were reading, writing, singing, philosophy, theology, geography, arithmetic and sciences. Fidelia was a gentle schoolmistress absorbed in lessons, rules, disciplines and the language and culture of the Persians. She stressed self-reliance in every physical, mental and moral aspect of life. Indeed she has been described as a "moral architect." Many students referred to her as "Aunt Fidelia". She joined in games and one letter stated that she was "not an ascetic." She possessed advanced nursing skills for the time, administering them willingly, and traveling to comfort and help both young and old. She had sharp linguistic abilities that facilitated understanding and trust. Some of the words used to describe her were: "poetic temperament", "rich imagination", "unfailing self-possession", "without noise, complaint or gloom", "masculine organizational skills combined with female delicacy", "unwillingness to subject anyone to inconvenience." She influenced others with words,! which she called "sharp arrows of the mighty." She imposed her zeal for the improvement of the condition of women on a resistant society. Many say that she was the most influential of Mary Lyon's missionaries; but the hardships endured and influence engendered by women who founded schools within this country cannot be underestimated. After partially recuperating from the illness, which forced her return to Massachusetts, she served at Mount Holyoke Seminary from 1859 until her death. While there she encouraged young women to become teachers and entreated them to"Carry into your homes the sunshine of a helpful, cheerful spirit. Some of you are to become teachers—remember how grand and honorable is such labor, and how great the responsibility of those who deal with immortal minds." (1) "Defining Women's Scientific Enterprise, Mount Holyoke
Faculty and the Rise of American Science" Miriam R. Levin p. 4-8
________________________________________
NOW COMES S.S. MARY LYON............... Following is an account of the life and times of Mary Lyon — S.S. Mary Lyon, that is — by Ernie Imhoff, formerly a newspaperman with the Sun papers in Baltimore and now an ordinary seaman (volunteer) aboard a restored Liberty ship. Ernie is married to Hilda Klingaman Imhoff. "In May of 1943 the S.S. Mary Lyon, a Liberty ship, was launched in South Portland, I believe there is a monument there to the shipyard and the Liberties. The Mary Lyon was a merchant ship, meaning she was manned by the merchant marine, not the Navy, but she did have Navy gunners for defensive purposes. So she was S.S. (for steam ship) not U.S.S. (which means a U.S. Navy ship). Private steam ship companies operated the ships under war orders during the war. The Mary Lyon was launched in the east yard of the New England Shipbuilding Corp. at the height of the emergency Liberty ship boom. She was one of 2,710 look-alike pre-fabricated Liberties ordered by the United States Maritime Commission between 1941 and 1945 and launched to carry cargo in WWII to the European and Pacific theaters of war. Some were converted to also carry troops. New England had two shipyards, east and west, in South Portland and built 244 Liberties during the war. The cost of Liberties at Portland was about $1.8 million each. Like all other Liberties, S.S. Mary Lyon was 441 feet long and 57 feet wide. The Lyon's triple cylinder reciprocating steam engine was built by the Harrisburg Machinery Corp. of Harrisburg, PA. The engine generated 2500 horse power and drove the ship up to 11 knots (13 mph). Based on typical figures, the civilian crew was 44 men with 12 to 25 Navy Armed Guard gunners. In the beginning Liberty ships were named for dead people: some were nationally prominent, some seem to have been known only to their mothers. Many were politicians known only in their hollows. There were also educators, union people, doctors, journalists, judges, lawyers, industrialists — every type of background. Naming was not necessarily a democratic process. Here in Baltimore resides the dominant Johns Hopkins Hospital and university etc. I once counted about 12 people with ties to Hopkins who had Liberties named after them. Someone in the South had the name of a founder of the Ku Klux Klan on a Liberty (the times allowed it). Two prominent figures in my own newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, had ships named in their memory. As far as I know, these two were average people with clout, even when dead. There were regional committees that helped a national committee pick the names. Mary Lyon was one of the famous ones. Others built at Portland included the Winslow Homer, Calvin Coolidge, Emma Willard, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Sarah Orne Jewett. All these five suffered the usual fate of Liberties — scrapped far from Portland in different places after sailing as commercial carriers after the war. The Mary Lyon had a different end... and I'll get to that. I don't know who named the ship the Mary Lyon. But no question, most Liberties were named for honorable people who did honorable things. It's possible someone at Mount Holyoke College or a Holyoke alumna submitted the name. Maybe someone with Holyoke ties had an in somewhere. A shipbuilding labor union, not one person, submitted the name of our ship, the S.S. John W. Brown, because Brown was a maritime/carpentry/mining labor leader. It and six other Liberties named for unionists were launched in one day around the country on Labor Day 1942. It made a nice patriotic story. Perhaps the people who most deserved having a Liberty named after them were WWII veterans. In the middle of the war, the government began naming new Liberties just launched after merchant seamen and other veterans who died in the line of duty. Consider the times. Just before and after Pearl Harbor. Wartime. Building Liberties in a few weeks (the Brown in 42 days), launching them somewhere every day. High level of unquestioning patriotism not known today. Give us the names of local heroes. Spread it around the country, etc. The overall need was to make up for the ships the U-boats sank — and U-boats sank more than 800 Allied ships. S.S. Mary Lyon sailed to Europe during the war and was probably in convoys that came under attack. She could carry more than 9,000 tons of cargo, planes, locomotives, jeeps and what not. She survived the war. I know little about her sailing life. I am planning to get more details on that: a friend of mine on our still-active Liberty, the John W. Brown, in Baltimore, sailed on Mary Lyon but because he was on about six Liberties, time is dimming his memories. Anyway, after the war the Mary Lyon changed names as was often the case when the country sold them very cheap to shipping companies. She became the Nestos in 1947 and the Kastela in 1961. It's possible a Greek company owned her then. In March of 1963, twenty years after she began service, the ship was carrying grain in the far north from Churchill, Canada, to the United Kingdom. On March 8 she developed leaks after sailing in pack ice. She was abandoned in the Hudson Strait and exactly one month later, she sank, off Cape Wolstenholme, 500 miles NNE of Churchill. It is safe to say the Mary Lyon lived a most useful life much like her namesake, although in a far different way than the original Mary might have imagined. Originally Liberties weren't designed to last more than five years. She lived to 20 and would have gone on except for the sad end. (Maybe that was better than the typical end — being cut up for razor blades in a foreign shipyard.) The Lyon helped the Allies defeat the Axis powers by supplying military equipment and cargo for our troops. It is possible she helped carry troops back home after the war. She probably carried needed goods to war-torn countries after the war. There are only two Liberty ships left sailing. One is ours, in Baltimore, the S.S. John W. Brown (named for a tough union leader — not the abolitionist — who died of an accidental gunshot wound in 1941 at his home near the Bath Iron Works in Bath, ME). The other is in San Francisco, the S.S. Jeremiah O'Brien, named for the first American naval hero in the Revolutionary War. The United States built 6,000 civilian and military ships in the war years. The greatest burst of shipbuilding in history anywhere. It was an amazing time and won't be repeated. One of the main purposes of our ship is to make people remember those times. Colleges and schools don't teach much of WWII today. Kids know next to nothing. We have had high school teachers on tours of the Brown ask us, "Now, when was World War II?" Amazing. Helping people remember those remarkable times is what the Brown does." [The source for some of this material was "The Liberty Ships" by L.A. Sawyer and W.H. Mitchell. If anyone wants to see what the Mary Lyon looked like, come to Baltimore and take a cruise on a ship just like her: we're sailing down the Chesapeake Bay aboard the S.S. Brown this year on June 18, Sept. 3 and Oct. 8. It is a living-history, operating WWII steam ship with an all-volunteer crew. By the way, I have written a book about the Brown with oral histories of the great people who saved her since 1988. The Glencannon Press of Palo Alto, CA will publish my manuscript about the Brown in two or three volumes over two or three years, with lots of pictures. The first volume may come out by the end of 2005. The tentative name is "Good Shipmates: The Rescue Log Book of Liberty Ship John W. Brown". The web site for the Brown and for Liberty ships in general is www.liberty-ship.com.] Brava and bravo! We wonder if further research might turn up the S.S. Fidelia Fiske....... ________________________________________
Dear classmates: In the aftermath of a most splendid 45th reunion weekend we are observing the June birthday of a Mount. Holyoke graduate who is neither conventionally famous nor conventionally accomplished. We think she is nonetheless remarkable. She was the mother of our classmate Carol Ward Campbell, who a year ago sent us the tribute and account that follows. Margaret Sherwood Ward Carol Ward Campbell writes: "Dear Friends, Normally there is a short announcement about the losses of family members in our group. Instead I would like to share with you the story of my mother, a very practical and organized ordinary person, so that you can rejoice with me on her fortune for good health and an active life until a year ago. She died this morning at age 97 after being part of my household until five years ago. Without her I wouldn’t have been able to keep odd hours at BMC [Bryn Mawr College]. I hope you will see that there are unknown opportunities ahead for all of us that should make life interesting at every turn. Margaret S. Ward [nee Sherwood] died peacefully June 29th, 2004, in Sun City Center, Florida, where she resided for the last five years. She was 97. Born in New Hampshire on June 18, 1907, the daughter of a pastor and a teacher, she lived in Keene, New Hampshire and Salem, Massachusetts (where she was a guide one summer at the House of Seven Gables). Her uncle George, a director of the Museum of Natural History in New York, showed her the animals before they went into the dioramas; and her aunt Grace, the state librarian of Rhode Island, who restored many of the books in the WWII libraries in Europe, made her love reading. She was an editor, writer of children's' publications, and production manager for the American Baptist Board of Education and Publication in Philadelphia and Valley Forge, until her retirement in 1972. She held post-retirement positions at the Green Lake Conference Center in Wisconsin and twenty years service (PT paid work) until 1999 at the Upper Merion Township Library, Children's' Department, where she was named Library Employee of the Year in 1991. She held degrees from Mount Holyoke College (zoology) and Andover-Newton Theological School (theology). (And she was the fastest, most accurate typist I ever encountered.) Having met her engineer husband in a church choir in Philadelphia, she continued her musical interests into her 90's in a Florida church choir and in a local Sun City singing group. She also loved travel in US and abroad, starting with visits in Europe while her children were studying in Berlin, Salzburg, and Athens. She traveled with Carol and Eileen Markson on an archaeological study tour of nearly every site and block in Sicily with Bryn Mawr Professor Brunhilde Sismondo Ridgway in 1971. In 1986, at age 79, as part of a MHC college tour, she visited India, Kashmir, and Nepal, and flew over Mt. Everest in a little plane. At age 88 she went with Sam and Carol to Israel (including Masada) followed by ten days in Spain. For her 90th birthday, she went with them again across Europe, and at age 92, her last trip, to Ireland and N. Ireland to meet the Campbells (Sam's many cousins). She spent several years in her '80's being the archivist for the Skatutakee Lake Association in historic Harrisville, New Hampshire where she wrote up her childhood memories of the lake residents in the days of wagons, kerosene lamps, homemade foods, and maple sugaring and where she helped save the local train depot. And she loved birds and flowers: the tulip borders that come up each spring ...were planted by her with bulbs she selected in the Netherlands. She is survived by three children, five grandsons, two great-grandsons, and one niece. Her family attributes her longevity and good health to her Maine ancestors—perhaps even to Absalom, who survived the battle of Bennington with General Stark. We rejoice in her long and purposeful life."
Because many have requested copies,
below you will find the Class History we presented at the Alumnae
Association meeting after the Parade. Please read on for other
reunion information too. "THE CLASS HISTORY" Poised between "Leave It To Beaver" and The Feminine Mystique, we missed being flower children.... by a few petals.
We searched for our identity.... before
identity theft,
Trying new attitudes: to the right.... to the left. Before the fitness craze, we wore gym suits and the same sneakers for every sport........only a few blue jeans on campus, many Bermuda shorts..........but no computers, cell phones, or instant gratification.
The quarterly tolling of Mary Lyon's
chime
Reminded us to use our "fragments of time." TV was rare. We used the Dewey decimal system and kymograph drums and slide rules and balance scales. We signed in at chapel wearing pajamas under our raincoats.... And shorts under our skirts at Gracious Living. We reveled in a community of Unlocked doors and DORM DINING at round tables and bridge and knitting and edgy talk in the Smoker......... and milk and crackers and goofiness at 9:45 p.m.
Car-less and car-free, we
Hung out at the College Inn and Glessie's. Although some rules were beginning to be contested, We even memorized the Rule Book as directed. We watched the Space Age unfold, but we did not travel much. We experienced Vietnam, the end of state-sponsored segregation, the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines, the beginning of hard rock and the sexual revolution... the assassinations, Kent State, urban riots, shopping malls....consumerism... the fall of Soviet communism, the rise of militant Islam....... the end of Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly and the divinely different Hepburns.
And as each memory surfaces, it
undergoes refinements....
We take part in the dance of infinite realignments. A letter from the class of 1900 read at reunion 2000 left no eyes dry: we were all affected. We go on making use as best we can of that major epiphany.... all things are connected. "Through orbit loops of caroming contingencies, chance changes, concatenated strings of events....(ah, a quotation, as expected)...."
We are UNCOMMONLY connected.
(Sue and Dana 2005)
Finally for now: 2) The tremendous 45th reunion book put
together by Carolyn Derby and Sue Swanson is available for $20,
which includes shipping. If you would like one for any reason,
contact Nancy Zone Bloom at 203-259-0071 or
nancyerb@aol.com
(and you thought it was over, David?) Have a wonderful summer. Stay in touch.
We have cherished the contacts we made in the making of this
reunion! Keep the aftermath going. ________________________________________ Emma Perry Carr Emma Perry Carr liked to quote Raymond Fosdick of the Rockefeller Foundation who stated that: "Science is a method, a confidence, a faith. It is a method of controlled and rechecked observations and experiments, objectively recorded with absolute honesty. It is a confidence that truth is discoverable. It is a faith that truth is worth discovering." Professor Carr lived her professional life by this creed. Professor Carr attended Mount Holyoke for two years but transferred to University of Chicago for her senior year, graduating in 1902. She served as an assistant in the Mount Holyoke Department of Chemistry for two years before returning to Chicago to obtain her PHD where she completed her thesis working on physical applications of organic chemistry under Dr. Julius Stieglitz. She returned to Mount Holyoke in 1910 and was made Chair of the Chemistry Department in 1913, a position that she filled until 1946. It has been said that she brought a "warm hearted charm and infectious enthusiasm" to this position. She was a beloved leader with a keen scientific vision and under the inspiration of her leadership the department became an outstanding one. She was a discoverer and a developer of young women of promise. She made things happen! Professor Carr was frequently honored with degrees and membership in learned and honorary societies, but perhaps most notably with the award by the American Chemical Society in 1937, of the Garvan Medal. She accepted the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science from Mount Holyoke at what would have been her 50th Reunion! Her primary work had been concerned with
the absorption spectra of organic compounds. She continued to study
spectrographic methods with the foremost male European researchers
in Belfast and Zurich. In this regard, she followed the path of many
other strong women teachers of science at Mount Holyoke such as Mary
Lyon, Cornelia Clapp, Lydia Shattuck, Ann Morgan, Abbey Turner and
Charlotte Haywood who were mentored by researchers so that the
newest material could be passed on to students at Mount Holyoke. She
was one of the Cooperating Experts in charge of Absorption Spectra
data for the International Critical Tables. Carr Laboratory was dedicated in 1955. Dr. Carr would have rejoiced in the most recent rejuvenation of her namesake building with its attachment to Kendade Hall. One of our classmates, a chemistry major,
claimed that she felt her presence at our reception on Reunion
weekend, which was held in the splendid Kendade atrium. We hope your summer is a wonderful one. Sue
amitybc@maine.rr.com ________________________________________
August 17,1828—March 15,1904 As a susceptible young student and a contemporary of Emily Dickinson, Esther had been exposed to annual Valentine’s Day celebrations at Mount Holyoke. Upon returning to Worcester where her family operated a book and stationery store, she received an English valentine from a business associate of her father’s and was certain she could improve upon the design. After persuading her father to order supplies from England and New York City, she created samples that she sent out with her brothers who were traveling salesman. She was shocked when they returned with over $5000 worth of orders and impressed her three best friends into service. A valentine assembly line was initiated at her home and on February 5, 1850, she placed her first ad in The Daily Spy. Business grew rapidly and in 1879, The New England Valentine Company was created. She rented a building and moved the business. She published 31 pages of verse in a small book so that customers could choose the verse ! they preferred. The finished products suggested fantasy and romance and set trends for more than thirty years. Other companies competed for sales unsuccessfully. She was not the first to create valentines in America but she is credited for having designed and popularized the lace valentine and the shadow box. Her original valentines display a red H or a red sticker and the embossed "NEV CO" appears on later cards. The envelopes used during this time were imported. Because there were no postage stamps, "pd 5c" had to be handwritten on the envelope. The business flourished despite her semi retirement in 1866 when a recurring knee injury forced her to function from a wheelchair. In 1881, when she was needed to care for her father, she sold her business to George Whitney who continued to pattern many of his cards in the Howland style. Whitney was forced to close the factory in 1943 because of the paper shortage during World War II. Esther never married, nor is there any record of a romantic involvement. Shortly after her death in 1904, an article referred to her as "The Mother of the American Valentine." Her creativity, flair and determination have been recognized by the Greeting Card Association with the creation of the annual Esther Howland Award. Her spirit of enterprise and energy not only made a fortune for herself but also created a new industry in America. Letters in the Archives indicate that very little is known about her during her time at Mount Holyoke. There are files of valentines available to peruse and l! etters from collectors requesting information. We do know that a great niece worked for Norcross Greeting Card Company, once again posing the question of heredity versus environment. Valentine’s Day will be upon us in just 6 months. Pay your dues.........$50 to Bev Rowlings Smith
DPSHAC@comcast.net Check www.mhcclassof1960.net for photos of Reunion, 2005 and synopses of "Back to Class" offerings.
________________________________________ August 30, 1938—February 22, 1996 If you only knew Susan Heineman by reputation while you were at Mount Holyoke, you might logically have surmised that here was a woman who would be a success. She was a Judicial Board member, vice-president of Student Government Association (SGA), a coordinator for the National Student Association. On her less serious side, Susan, though she could not read music, tried out for Glee Club her senior year -- and made it. In an even lighter vein, Susan played the role of Beethoven in our Peanuts-inspired Sophomore Skit entitled "Goobers" (a Sally Foster play).Susan was a success -- as wife, mother, educator, and friend. After Mount Holyoke, this girl from Yonkers earned two master’s degrees, one in English literature from Columbia University and one in the Humanities from San Francisco State University. Most of her career was spent at Chabot College in Hayward, CA. In addition to her influential teaching, she organized and administered a central writing center and a program in Women’s Studies. She participated in the Renaissance Program and in Interdisciplinary Studies at Chabot. Susan served as president of the Faculty Senate. In 1994, she was selected among a nationwide pool of applicants to be a Fellow for the American Council on Education (ACE). Susan spent her 1994-1995-fellowship year based at Dominican College (now Dominican University) observing how college administrators handled aspects of their jobs, taking on special projects under the aegis of Dominican’s president, and participating in na! tional ACE conferences. Sadly, her untimely death from complications of breast cancer kept Susan from pursuing yet another goal in education. Susan was also a physical presence difficult to miss. Just a hair short of 6 feet, she at times could seem ungainly as she unfolded her limbs and got up from a chair. But she usually moved with admirable grace and dignity. With her long stride, magnificent profile and high cheekbones, and a voice which could be soft and almost musical, (a voice one colleague called "that erudite, self-assured, very English professor voice"), Susan could almost be described as "regal". However, that dignified part of Susan could not subdue her wonderful wit, sense of irony, and love of a good raucous laugh. Classmates say: "She had the amazing quality of being goofy and zany and sophisticated," and that she never lost her "childlike sense of wonder and delight" (Gretchen Tenny Hall). People were drawn to her like moths to a flame. As Jack McElroy put it, "Susan lit up a room." What many people didn’t know is that Susan, the "self-assured English professor", had worked very hard to overcome a stuttering problem. She made herself do public speaking, even wrote a paper on the psychopathology of speech in college. Sometimes one could detect a stammer when Susan was particularly intense about something, but this stammer was part of her charm. Susan’s most striking trait was her passionate interest in other people – their concerns, ideas, and opinions. She sought out different ways of looking at things. Master of the personal interview, she was a dedicated and sympathetic listener. Close friends say that Susan’s conversational style could sometimes be described as "acceptable interrogation", i.e. her questions could get to the heart of a matter but stopped short of overstepping personal boundaries. Below are some examples of Susan’s character and influence: ------- Susan’s sense of fun was revealed when she served as chaperone to Sharon Faught Gillespie on one of Sherri’s appearances as Miss Massachusetts during our senior year. As Sherri introduced her chaperone, Susan stood up and said, "How do you do. I’m Miss Idaho." People looked startled, then noted this statuesque young woman’s good bones, sparkling smile, and velvet voice, and thought, "Well, it could be...." Of course, in the end, people were charmed by "Miss Idaho." ------- Kate Frum Buttenweiser, a friend since freshman year, recalls that during college she and Susan "looked like a Mutt and Jeff pair as we hiked, skied, sang at the piano, and explored Life’s Big Questions." Living most of their post-college lives 3,000 miles apart never dampened their friendship. They shared or sought each other’s advice on major and minor life decisions. Says Kate; "I don’t think I could have married Paul if he and Susan hadn’t liked each other so much." In 1968, on a visit to New York, a radiant Susan told Kate: "The next time you see me I will either be Mrs. McElroy or Miss Heineman, living in sin!" Several years later, Sue wrote to Kate asking if her decision to have children had been a happy one or one she sometimes regretted. Kate, by then the mother of a lively brood of three, can’t remember her reply, but it must have been positive. Blair McElroy was born the next year, and over the years she brought much joy to Jack ! and Susan. ------- Dana Feldshuh Whyte might not have become Dr. Whyte had it not been for Susan’s nurturing and encouragement. In her junior year of medical school, Dana began to question her reasons for becoming a doctor. This and other conflicts in her life brought on depression. Dana took a sabbatical (sanctioned by U. of Michigan because of her class standing). Susan and roommate Mary Lou invited Dana to "crash" on the sofa of their tiny apartment in Berkeley CA. Recognizing Dana’s depression and need for some kind of structure and activity, Susan gave Dana a list of things to do outside the apartment while she and Mary Lou were at work Dana had to report on her activities every day. After three or four weeks of love and listening and structure, Dana was ready to return to medical school. ------- A Chabot College student from Cambodia, a sophomore in one of Susan’s classes, appeared at her office door with an enormous bouquet of flowers. He wanted to thank her and to tell her that her teaching had made a great difference in his life, the highest accolade for a teacher. ------- Blair McElroy graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1995, nine months before her mother died. Blair tells a wonderful story about Susan which occurred during graduation week. Blair and friends had arranged a party at a local bar so their parents could become better acquainted. Unfortunately, the party was slow to get off the ground. Then Blair watched as Susan worked her way around the room, starting conversations everywhere. When conversation and laughter filled the room, Susan sauntered to the pool table, picked up a cue and began shooting pool. And she was playing quite well, enough to attract a group of admiring spectators. Others began to play. After watching her mother in action, Blair whispered, "I didn’t know that you played pool!" Her mother replied quietly, "Blair, I’ve never played pool in my life." Blair called this experience "a minor epiphany" which awakened her even more to the depth of her mother’s character. ------- I, too, had an epiphany related to Susan, but this occurred three years after her death. In 1999, I was in Los Angeles where I met my daughter who had traveled from Texas so that we could attend a special Van Gogh exhibit. The first night Lucy and I were together, I had a dream. I was standing in a room when suddenly Susan appeared, walked toward me, put her arms around me and said, "Cherish your daughter." A short dream but a powerful one, it reminded me that a week before she died, Susan had told me how much she wished that she would be able to watch Blair’s future growth. I was so moved by my dream that when I returned home I was eager to share it with someone who had known Susan. But first, I opened my e-mail and discovered a message from Dana Whyte in Atlanta. Her news was that she and Sue Bradley Cabot had agreed to co-chair our 40th reunion. "Imagine me organizing anything!" exclaimed Dana. "Susan is laughing at me. I can hear her now.! " I looked at the date and time of Dana’s e-mail. Dana had written me that message on the same night and during the same hour that I was having my dream! It has since occurred to me that this experience involved epiphany and simultaneity, two terms familiar to anyone who has read and discussed James Joyce’s Ulysses. My fellow English major Susan would enjoy that. At the 1996 memorial service for Susan, family friend Wayne Wilson gave a succinct summary of the quintessential Susan: "Her energy came from a passionate interest in people and their lives, infused with a vibrant intelligence, colored by a wonderfully ironic sense of humor, and accompanied by a rich, life-affirming, pretense-piercing laugh." For many of us, Susan’s candle still burns brightly. Sally Stillinger Larkin ________________________________________
... but before you read on... do the math... IF 100 of you send in your dues to Bev Rowlings Smith, we will have $5000 more in our class treasury to spend on our 50th or to donate to a scholarship fund... and it boggles the mind to think what we could do if 200 of you came through... Send to Bev at 10 Clark Rd., Hingham, MA 02043 ... now... the main feature: Persis
Thurston Taylor Like many graduates of Mt. Holyoke College, I have hanging on my bedroom wall a print of the original seminary building. You are probably familiar with the lithograph. The building is tall, capped by many chimneys, and observed by several fashionable young ladies holding parasols. The building is fronted by a rail fence and a row of trees, but a line of curiously tropical foliage borders the very bottom of the scene. This should not surprise you because the artist who painted the original watercolor had only been in New England for three years. She was born on 28 September 1821 to Asa and Lucy Thurston of the Pioneer Mission Company to the Hawaiian Islands. Her name was Persis Goodale Thurston. When she arrived in South Hadley in 1842, Persis was not the only missionary child to attend from the Hawaiian kingdom. In fact, her first roommate, Maria Whitney, was also a mission child, but Persis was unique in that she had not been sent to the United States for her earliest education as were most of the other mission children. Her parents had taught all of their children at home, and they were both remarkable teachers. Asa Thurston was one of the translators of the Bible into Hawaiian, and when Persis was a young teenager, he taught her that language. Her mother, author of The Life and Times of Lucy Thurston, encouraged in her daughter a similar sense of history and observation. Lucy’s daughter was also encouraged to paint watercolors of the landscape near their home in Kailua, Kona. In both her paintings and her writings, Persis captured the tenor of life at Mary Lyon’s seminary. From her earliest days in South Hadley, Persis emulated her mother by keeping a journal and writing detailed letters to friends and family back in the islands. Although her excitement at beginning college was overshadowed by her sister’s unexpected death in New York City, Persis was overwhelmed by her first meeting with Mary Lyon. Fifty years later she wrote in her own autobiography: "I shall never forget the penetrating glance with which she scanned me from head to foot, seeming to read my very soul. But her words of kindly welcome soon put me at my ease." Many young women of unusual character and ambition surrounded Persis at her new school. Maria Whitney would soon leave college to become a missionary in Hawaii. Persis’s second roommate was the remarkable Fidelia Fiske, who would emulate Mary Lyon by founding a girls’ boarding school in Orumiyeh, Persia. Susan Tolman, her classmate, went to Ceylon, India, and Hawaii after graduating and marrying Cyrus Mills. Of paramount importance and presiding over the education of these exemplary women was Mary Lyon herself. Persis remarked in her autobiography: "We were the last class that enjoyed Miss Lyon’s personal instruction in the study of Butler’s Analogy. She shewed her rare faculty of developing the most diffident of the class to a capacity of reciting marvelous to themselves and others. I felt that it was worth a voyage of 18,000 miles to know such a person as she was. She bound us to her heart with cords that neither Time nor Eternity can sever." In addition to the rigors of 18th century theology, Persis, in her second year, wrote to her family, a ". . . little sketch of my employments this term. I have studied French, Botany, & English Grammar. Including recitations, I have devoted three hours a day to French, two hours to Botany, & one hour to Grammar. Saturday, you know, is composition day, when we have no recitations. My reviews have occupied considerable time. Before entering the Senior class, we are required to be examined privately in all the previous studies & if any one is found to be deficient, she has the felicity of reviewing it again with a class." On another occasion she wrote, "I have analyzed one hundred and thirty plants this summer & pressed 45. To complete the course, one hundred botanical names are required & 59 plants arranged neatly in an herbarium with the class, order, genus & species & common name written under it." An impressive catalogue of assignments for a young woman who also had cooking, cleaning, and laundry chores assigned by the college in those early years. Persis used her artistic ability to earn more education while still an undergraduate. She wrote to her parents, "I have taught drawing one hour a day, four days in the week. I have received sixteen dollars for my services in this way this year. Miss Whitman wishes me to teach again next year. Probably I shall do so as I am considerably in advance of the Senior class." Persis used the extra money to further her own studies. "I also hope to study French again next year. This is an extra study & at an additional charge. I paid five dollars for my tuition in that branch this term." All was not work, however. The Mountain Day had already begun; a day when, "[t]he school spent one day on Mt. Holyoke according to custom. The weather was fine, & the young ladies were in fine spirits. The prospect is very extensive & delightful. We rode about four miles to the foot of the mountain & then walked up the ascent which is very steep. We analyzed a number of mountain flowers." Persis also noted the seriousness of religious life at Mt. Holyoke. As a child of a missionary family, she was very appreciative of the prayers of the school community for others in the mission field: "The first Monday of this year was observed here as a day of fasting and prayer for the advancement of the missionary cause. Miss Lyon’s remarks were deeply interesting. The next day a contribution was collected. Miss Lyon gave thirty dollars & several of the other teachers twenty each." This generosity from Mt. Holyoke lasted beyond the lifetime of Mary Lyon. Years later, when Persis’s husband, Townsend Taylor, became too ill with asthma to preach, the family was forced to move to Kailua-Kona where the climate was drier. Money was often scarce. Persis later recalled that, "I received a short time after, a letter containing six gold dollars. We and our children looked in mute astonishment at the glittering present, sent by a teacher at Mt. Holyoke and her class, as a birthday gift to me!!" Persis remained in South Hadley for two more years after her graduation in 1845. In 1847, she married Townsend Taylor and left to become a missionary wife herself. During those two years she supported herself as an art teacher at the college. It was during that time that she painted the scene from which N. Currier made his print. Eventually her husband’s asthma forced the family to leave the islands permanently for Nevada and California. When they lived in Oakland, CA, Persis taught in her home school "on Telegraph Avenue near the Deaf Asylum." Two of her daughters attended Mills College, a new school founded by old friends, Cyrus and Susan Tolman Mills. Persis returned to Honolulu after her husband’s death in 1883. Her abiding interest in the history of the early missionaries led her to co-found the Mission Children’s Society of Honolulu. She wrote her autobiography, Shifting Views of the Life of Your Mother: Persis G. Taylor from 1821 to 1894 and a biography of her husband, Sketches of Your Father’s Life by Your Mother: Persis G. Taylor, 21 June 1894. Upon her death on 21 April 1906, she left to the archives at the Mission Children Society all of her Mt. Holyoke correspondence with her parents and with her sister Mary (1845), plus her letters from Fidelia Fiske (1846). Her collection of papers, her own writings, and her paintings, which hang in private collections in Hawaii, remain a gift to future generations. Submitted by Jo Amanti Piltz (jispa38@excite.com)
________________________________________
SOJOURNER TRUTH
Unlike all the other women we’ve paid tribute to in this series, Sojourner Truth has no direct connection to Mount Holyoke: not as graduate, not as faculty, not as visiting speaker, not as recipient of an honorary degree. Her birth date is unknown. Without formal education, she took her place in a long line of brave, strong, visionary—and uncommon—women. Her early years were spent in slavery. Originally named Isabella Baumfree, she was born a slave. At the age of nine she was auctioned off to an Englishman named John Nealey. Over the next few years she was owned by a fisherman in Kingston and then by John Dumont, a plantation owner from New York County. Between 1810 and 1827 she had five children with a fellow slave. She was dismayed when one of her sons was sold to a plantation owner in Alabama. After New York State abolished slavery in 1827, Quaker friends helped her win back her son through the courts. She moved to New York City and worked as a servant. She became friends with Elijah Pierson, a religious missionary, and eventually moved into his home. In 1843 Isabella took the name Sojourner Truth. With the help of a white friend, Olive Gilbert, she published her book, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/truth/1850/1850.html. In an introduction to the book, William Lloyd Garrison wrote that he believed it would “stimulate renewed efforts to liberate all those still in slavery in America.” By the 1840s, Truth had become a powerful speaker against slavery, often moving her audiences to tears and exclamations of horror with her firsthand accounts of what many of her black brethren and sisters were enduring at the hands of cruel masters. She also spoke of the living conditions many slaves were forced to endure, crowded together into cabins with no privacy, overworked, fed scraps in many cases, and clothed in threadbare hand-me-downs. Her audiences must have felt shame as Truth recalled the auction block, upon which men and women alike were frequently forced to strip and stand before potential buyers, who would search their bodies for marks of the whip or of wrist or leg irons, the presence of which would indicate the slave had been frequently punished. The slaves would be forced to endure impersonal and degrading inspections of their teeth, muscles, and other body parts, depending on what the buyer was looking for in the purchase. Truth was self-educated, and much of her speaking bore the stamp of a deep love of and acquaintance with Scripture. When explaining to Harriet Beecher Stowe how she came to change her name, Truth said she felt God had called her “to travel up and down the land, showing the people their sins and being a sign unto them.” She also possessed a quick wit, coupled with an ability to think fast and turn the unkind words of others against them. Facing a heckler once who told her he did not care for her anti-slavery talk anymore than he would for the bite of a flea, Truth retorted, “Perhaps not, but Lord willing I'll keep you scratching.” She was very involved in political causes and strongly supported suffrage. During the Civil War, she gathered supplies for black volunteer regiments, and, in tribute to her efforts, was received at the White House by President Lincoln in 1864. Truth was appointed to the National Freedman's Relief Association in 1864, where she worked diligently to better conditions for African-Americans. She lived long enough to see her people brought to an approximation of freedom, but never stopped in her efforts to win more equality for them. Right up until her death in 1883 she spoke out for her race and for the suffragist cause. She found her voice as Everywoman—opposing cruelty and injustice and speaking the truth. [Source: The Civil War Society's “Encyclopedia of the Civil War.”] Dear Classmate, On another subject: do not fail to read a brilliant appreciation of Peter Viereck’s life and work in last week’s New Yorker (October 24). Prof. Viereck is living in a nursing home close to South Hadley. And (not in the same breath), we’re all counting on you to pay your dues, now $50 for the five year period until the next reunion – which translates to $10/yr. Hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Fondly, Sue Bradley Cabot ________________________________________
Dear Classmate: Bev Rowlings Smith tells us that dues are
rolling in but we suspect there are still a “few” more who MEAN to send
them. Take a short break from raking those leaves and please send $50 to 10
Clark Rd., Hingham, MA 02043. Katharine Rogers Green, An Independent Woman Like many students at Mount Holyoke in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries, Katharine Rogers Green was called to the mission field in her senior year. At that time, she was older than today’s senior, since she entered Mount Holyoke at the age of 21. She subsequently spent forty years in China, returning every ten years for a year of Home Leave. Never married, her life revolved around the mission, the children she taught, and her extended family when she was home on leave. She was my mother’s aunt, my great-aunt, and her name is carried by one of our daughters and one of my sister’s daughters. She was, indeed, a woman of formidable abilities and strengths. Katharine was the seventh of eight children, and the only daughter, of Garret E. Green and Caroline Voorhis Green. Born in Nyack, New York, and brought up in the Dutch Reformed Church (Reformed Church of America), she was kept under the watchful eyes of not only her parents, but all of her brothers. One can only imagine her frustration at not being allowed the privileges and freedom of her brothers, as she was a strong and forceful character. When Katharine was fourteen, the family moved to Brooklyn, New York, where she attended public school and then Packer Institute, a school for girls in Brooklyn, before going to Mount Holyoke in 1903. While at Mount Holyoke, she majored in English Literature. Her growing interest in becoming a missionary probably stemmed from the religious enthusiasms of the times and in her delight in independence from her family. As to my sources, there are many family stories, histories of the Amoy Mission of the Reformed Church of America, and of other schools and missions to which she was posted and also include records from the Mount Holyoke archives. In 1907, the year of Katharine’s graduation, China was still in turmoil following the Boxer Rebellion (1900) and continued unrest at the turn of the century. Nonetheless, she shipped out to Amoy (now Xiamen), where she took a position at The Bridgman School and studied the Chinese language for a year. This school was one of many in the 19 th C. which had an affiliation with Mount Holyoke, either having been founded by or engaging teachers from Mount Holyoke College. From there, she went on to become superintendent of the Fukien Girls School, also in Amoy. She taught English, and often trekked into the countryside on evangelistic trips. In an effort to encourage self-sufficiency as well as fresh food, she developed vegetable gardens at the school, where the girls were taught to tend the crops. This was met with distrust. Indeed, it took years to be accepted, as agricultural labor was viewed to be a step backward in the education of the girls, most of whom, if not all! , had come to escape from rural life. But Katharine persevered, and her Industrial Arts program flourished. In 1928, Katharine started to divide her year between her work in Amoy and the Christian Literature Society in Shanghai. She spent June 1 to November 1 of each year in Shanghai because of life-threatening allergies in the low-lying river environment of Amoy. While at the Christian Literature Society, she published many books and articles. Most of these are short biographies of famous people or religious study guides, but she also wrote several volumes of Shakespeare’s plays in ‘simple English’. A number were translated into Chinese, including a biography of Mary Lyon. It was customary for missionaries to return on Home Leave periodically. When she was on leave, Katharine lived with family members and lectured on various topics having to do with China. She shared her extensive knowledge of Chinese folk-lore and symbolism with clubs and study groups. Any proceeds from these lectures were sent back to China for emergency and relief work. Years later, I remember poring over Chinese wood carvings with her, looking for the ancestral clouds on which the ancestors were placed, the lotus trees and other symbols. We are fortunate to own and enjoy many of the objects that she brought home with her. In August 1937, Katharine’s work in Amoy was interrupted by Sino-Japanese hostilities. She returned to America after having been under house arrest and then interned in a prison camp in Shanghai. She ultimately returned to China, but was again forced to leave because of the advance of Chinese Communists in 1947-1949. After her return to the U.S., she worked as a translator for the Voice of America, taught English as a Foreign Language to both Hungarians and Argentines (knowing neither Hungarian nor Spanish), and volunteered extensively in church work, hospitals and for the Red Cross. Her life was one of service to others. In 1960, the Mount Holyoke College Alumnae Association sent out a questionnaire, which she dutifully answered. The primary questions were about marriage, husband, husband’s schooling and career, and family. Aunt Katharine’s answers were pointedly sharp and brief. When asked if she had undertaken any advanced study, and if so, at which institutions, her answer was “yes, the Chinese languages for 40 years.” Another time, when answering a similar questionnaire, on volunteer work, asking for names, dates, and positions in societies and on boards, she snapped “In missionary work it is impossible to separate volunteer work from regular; and it is all social, educational, philanthropic and religious.” Is it any wonder that Katharine Rogers Green left such an indelible impression on her great-nieces? ________________________________________ The following tribute to one of our own was written by Carol Parker Beatty. Once again we encourage you to write about a deceased classmate or otherwise Mount Holyoke connected woman. We are eager to hear from you after the dust has settled from, what we hope, was a warm and wonderful Holiday Season. Thanks to all of you who have sent your dues to Bev Rowlings Smith.
P.S. Please note that it took quite a bit of restraint NOT to include another paragraph about Emily D. on this, her birthday month!! December 31, 1938 GAYL FORD WERME It has always been amazing to me that out of all the people whom you meet really very few become close, lifelong friends. You may not see some of the special people very often but a strong bond continues nevertheless. This is how I remember the tall (5'12"), attractive, friendly and confident classmate in our years at Mount Holyoke. Gayl Ford was a true New Englander, hailing from Keene, New Hampshire. She was always willing to share her home with a Pennsylvanian when brief college breaks prevented the longer trip home. There were other bonds such as Glee Club, being a part of her house president group, and an unforgettable European trip between our junior and senior years. I was fortunate to be an attendant in her wedding to her longtime sweetheart, Don Werme. Then, our paths diverged. Over the intervening years I learned, as no surprise, that Gayl’s significant talent as a leader and musician were recognized through achievements causing her to become a well-known and respected member of her community. At the time of her death in December 2002, the local Kalamazoo, Michigan, newspaper honored her on the front page stating “Civic leader’s gift was in giving.” To say that she was well-known and definitely displayed great talent in many endeavors in the community is an understatement. Her background as a political science major led to several positions such as Kalamazoo County Road Commissioner (first female to serve) and campaign manager and Portage district office manager for Paul Warter who was a state representative and then a senator. In the area of education, she served on the Portage Board of Education, on the board of the Kalamazoo Valley Intermediate School District, and as a trustee for Western Michigan University. These positions resulted in numerous community service awards throughout the years. Music was a great love of Gayl’s. She was an accomplished pianist and organist, serving as her church organist for thirty-two years. She loved the symphony and was on the Kalamazoo Symphony Society board. Gayl was pleased to serve as the first chairman of the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival. Even with her participation in numerous civic activities, Gayl allowed nothing to take precedence over her family. Her husband and children were the center of her life. The children, Christopher, Jonathon, and Katherine, always knew their mother was there for support and guidance. When the children married, the grandchildren simply provided more family for Gayl to embrace. Several grandchildren inherited Gay’s musical talents which pleased her greatly. Her necklace, laden with nine charms, one for each grandchild, testified to her pride in being “Nana.” During twenty of the years of activities with seemingly endless energy, Gayl battled cancer. She informed me of this when we were reminiscing about Ceci Crary, her roommate who had died from cancer several years before. It seemed with her many treatments that she was doing well. After not attending MHC class reunions for years, she agreed that we should attend the fortieth. It was at that time she told me that the cancer had returned and that she probably would not attend another reunion. I dismissed that as not true. Sadly, after all the years, I should have learned that Gayl, still tall, strong-willed and formidable, was rarely wrong. Gayl Werme was truly a close, lifelong friend. ________________________________________ February 4, 1913 Early in 1981, the 25th anniversary year of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Mount Holyoke history professor William McFeely proposed that the college award Rosa Parks a Doctor of Humane letters. And in May of that year the college did. His formal letter to Elizabeth Kennan begins this way: “The Montgomery bus boycott was a first event of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. After Brown v. Board of Education, which was both the culmination of five decades of work toward desegregation of schools and the signal from the nation’s highest court that action to end segregation would be in accord with the law of the land, it remained for the people to move toward dismissing Jim Crow from the whole of society. That dismissal was begun in Montgomery, Alabama in December 1955 when... a seamstress working for a downtown department store...refused to move to the back of the bus. She was arrested . her neighbors refused to accept the threat that the arrest posed and began a boycott of the buses to change the seating pattern.......” Another history professor says this: “Parks was no stranger to civil rights politics – or to the brutal power of segregation – in 1950’s Alabama. Secretary to the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP for several years, she still worked with the NAACP’s Youth Council. A dozen years before her protest, she had been thrown off a city bus by the same driver who got her arrested in 1955.........So, far from being an accidental heroine, Rosa Parks was one of the best-prepared African-American women in Alabama to stay seated on that bus. But she did not organize the boycott. While she bravely agreed to be the poster child for a court challenge, it was Montgomery’s black community that had been waiting for years, making detailed plans, for just the right case. The very night of Rosa Park’s arrest, Thursday, December 1st, JoAnn Robinson, an English professor at all-black Alabama State College and leader of the Women’s Political Council, stayed up till dawn writing and secretly mimeographing 35,000 leaflets calling for a one-day bus boycott the following Monday. Friday she and her students distributed them clandestinely through the elementary and high schools.” Goldstein goes on: “When I teach this story, my students, especially African-Americans, generally don’t like it. They feel it somehow diminishes Parks’s individual achievement and heroism that she had all this help; and that white assistance made her less authentic. I try to get them to appreciate the critical importance of institutions (Alabama State College, the black churches) and organizations (the NAACP, the Women’s Political Council). And to see that without sympathetic white people North and South, the boycott would have been far less successful. This movement depended on interracial cooperation, community preparation, and the education of its leaders. And its explicit Christianity. In these days of the militant evangelical Right, we tend to forget how important liberal Christianity has been to American social movements, especially civil rights. 'We are not wrong in what we are doing,’ the 26-year old Martin Luther King Jr. told the huge crowd assembled at the Holt Street Baptist Church the night of the stunningly successful boycott. “If we are wrong – the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong – God Almighty is wrong! If we are wrong – Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to earth!’ Like Abraham Lincoln, King spoke from a Christian and Constitutional framework, marrying love to justice.” [Warren Goldstein teaches American history at the University of Hartford. His appreciation of Parks appeared in Daily Hampshire Gazette, Nov. 1, 2005.] Prof. McFeeley: “But the boycott was started by the women. They were the ones who decided enough was enough, who encouraged Rosa Parks to take her brave action, who called the protest meetings in the churches, who arranged carpools to places of work, and who walked to work. Men did their share, too, but [many historians] have documented the degree to which the women were the prime movers of the action. Soon the buses were nearly empty, the bus company complained of destroyed profits, and in December 1956, the city gave in. Black people would not have to yield seats to white people who came on the bus. The civil rights movement had begun.” [from Feb. 18 letter to Elizabeth Kennan] “The bus in which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man......has been restored and rests in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. .......Ford was brazenly adamant in his many prejudices. Honoring Rosa Parks’s stark bravery in Ford’s museum is one of those “only in America” ironies that offer hope in this century of sanctioned injustices.” [Jim Cahillane, Daily Hampshire Gazette, Nov. 1, 2005] We hope you’re enjoying the longer days and angle of light – as we certainly are in these wintry places. Doesn’t it get the sap flowing? Our class-related projects include writing the monthly birthday bios (we seek a few good “guest” columnists –YOU? – who want to choose the honoree); and sending the birthday postcards (note the ‘new’ photo). This month we’re writing a class newsletter that includes tips and ideas for mini-reunions. Look for it toward the end of the month. Let us know how you are. Be well. Warm regards,
________________________________________ CHRISTIANNA SMITH
After 40 years of teaching zoology at Mount Holyoke College, Professor Emeritus Christianna Smith retired but continued her research that had been funded by the National Cancer Institute. According to a colleague, when asked when she would truly retire, she responded, “When I am finished.” (Doesn’t this sound like one of Mary Lyon’s most famous pieces of advice, “Stop when you are done.”) Professor Smith was a world authority on the histology of the thymus gland, and over the years had discovered much of what we now know about the role of the thymus in the immunological responses manifest in growth and the aging process. Her attachment to her research was based, in part, on the conviction that despite her discoveries, the thymus was underappreciated by much of the medical profession, and she worked as a press agent to encourage more research into what is now generally recognized as a key agent in the immune response. A 1915 graduate of Mount Holyoke, she received her M.A. and Doctor of
Philosophy (1923) degrees from Cornell University. When she returned to
teach at her Alma Mater, she initiated the course in medical zoology
although she taught most other courses in the department including
comparative anatomy and histology. She supplemented her work during summers
and Sabbatical leaves at places like the Marine Biological Laboratory,
University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins and the Strangeways Research
Laboratory at Cambridge, England. She collaborated with Dr. Henry Kaplan of
Stanford University on a histochemical study of leukemia in mice. She had
consulted with the staff of the National Cancer Institute and the National
Institute of Health on the Because I have been unable to find personal vignettes in the Archives, I
have resorted to my in-house Mount Holyoke historian, Curtis Smith, who
wrote: “The old guard biologists at Mount Holyoke were not political
Feminists, but they were well aware of the limited possibilities for
professional women in the male-dominated universities, and consequently they
jealously reserved the few faculty positions available in women’s colleges
for other women. When I was hired by the Physiology department as the first
male biology professor, it was understandable that there should be some
resentment. I arrived in South Hadley with my wife and two small children on
Labor Day weekend, 1955. The campus was deserted, but lovely. We found our
way to our new home on Jewett Lane, next door to the cozy little brick house
belonging to Christianna Smith. On the door, I might add that the innate graciousness of this breed of professionals that made up the faculty of Mount Holyoke insured that I was treated pleasantly and with courtesy, but it was several years before the warmth and generosity bestowed on me and my family by Chrissie Smith on that first weekend was evidenced by many of the senior women in the biology faculty.” Stay tuned to hear about other women who contributed to the chain of excellence at Mount Holyoke College. Stay in touch... just because...
Dana dlfwhyte@comcast.net (1) “Tibbie” Sprague was a student (1937) and colleague of Professor Smith. She died in 2004. P.S. Do any of you Zoology majors have personal recollections of Chrissie
Smith or Tibbie Sprague? ________________________________________ Eudora Welty In One Writer’s Beginnings she said, I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within. In 1975 Mount Holyoke’s president, David Truman, conferred on her an honorary Doctor of Letters, with this tribute: Eudora Welty, novelist, essayist, and master
craftsman of the short story, your work has won comparison with the best
writing of the century, won not merely in the technical coin of craft but in
a more lasting measure that you intended when you said of Jane Austen,
“She was perfectly at home in what she knew, and what she knew has
remained what all of us want to know ... what goes on perpetually in the
mind and heart.” Native and life-long resident of Jackson, Mississippi,
graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Guggenheim Fellow, member of the
American Academy What follows is a small part of a lengthy appreciation/appraisal by Carol Ann Johnston in The Mississippi Writers’ Page (an internet resource about writers in, from, or otherwise associated with the state of Mississippi). http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/welty_eudora clarifies all links and footnotes. “The simple facts of Eudora Welty’s life....
obscure for some readers her radical experiments in subject and form. Those
facts are well known from essays and interviews published throughout her
life and from Welty’s best-selling account of her writing life, One
Writer’s Beginnings (1983). Born April 13, 1909, Welty spent what
she describes as an idyllic childhood in Jackson, Mississippi with her two
brothers, Edward and Walter, and their doting parents, Chestina, a
schoolteacher, and Christian, an insurance executive. Welty lived in her
familial homes in Jackson for most of her ninety-two years—one, on
Congress Avenue near the center of town (she walked through the Welty’s education and employment history indicate
her comfort in a variety of places and situations. Yet she consistently
anchored herself in Jackson, coming home for good to nurse her ailing mother
in the 1960s. Along with Welty’s artful gentility and modesty, this idea
of the single southern woman spending most of her adult life in her
childhood home has misled some critics into assuming that Welty is little
more than a “literary aunt” addressing only polite subjects in her work.
Further, anecdotes about Welty’s “niceness” abound in print,
especially in her obituaries, and these stories add to the image of the
benign Welty. At her funeral in July 2001, for example, Welty’s agent
Timothy Seldes reported that he had heard that Welty spoke her last words to
a doctor who leaned over her bed and asked, “Eudora, is there anything I
can do for you?” Her Some recent criticism about Welty’s work has
begun to challenge the established view of her as a modest and politically
simple writer.[2] Indeed, Welty’s work embodies sophistication on many
fronts. Welty’s father, Christian, and his fascination with machines of
all sorts gave Welty her intense concentration upon time and clocks, on
travel, on telescopes and cameras. The camera that Maybe not the whole story...... We hope you’re enjoying spring in your neck of the woods—though if you live in Mississippi, it must be summer by now. Here in southern Maine the forsythia is in full flower and I’m reminded of the bittersweet Frost poem, Nature’s first green is gold Consider planning an informal mini-reunion. [The AA will send you a list of classmates in any region big or small.] Kindly pay your class dues to Bev Smith, 10 Clark Rd., Hingham MA 02043 — $50 total for five years ($10/yr). If you don’t remember whether you’ve already paid, ask Bev: dpshac@comcast.net. Check out our class website (www.mhcclassof1960.net). And please tell the Alumnae Association about changes in your contact information. We like knowing where and how you are. Warm regards, Sue and Dana ________________________________________ Dear Classmates, ________________________________________ Lydia White Shattuck The discovery of oxygen by Joseph Priestly in 1774 has been said to be the immediate forerunner of the principles that separate modern chemical science from alchemy. In 1874, one hundred years later, chemists of America met to access progress made during this time and a committee appointed by the conference subsequently became the American Chemical Society. Presiding over the meetings marking the Second Centennial of Chemistry in 1974, was Mount Holyoke Professor, Anna Jane Harrison. The significance of this celebration is of particular interest to those with Mount Holyoke connections, not only because of Miss Harrison, but because attending the Centennial conference one hundred years prior to this, although NOT listed on the program nor as signing petitions BECAUSE SHE WAS A WOMAN, was Lydia Shattuck, who taught at Mount Holyoke from 1851 to 1889. She is the scientist and teacher for whom Shattuck Hall is named. Miss Shattuck grew up on a farm in New Hampshire and, from her mother she acquired an aesthetic perception, which led to appreciation of wildflowers. She wrote about them in both prose and poetry some of which can be seen in the Archival collections. She attended a local school and, at 15, she was teaching District school, taking time off over the next 11 years, to further her education. When she was 26, she entered Mount Holyoke Seminary where she came under the influence of Mary Lyon during the last year of her life. As an older student, Lydia was committed to working for her tuition and was assisted by Mary Lyon in this regard. From her, Lydia developed an absorbing interest in Botany as a science but her role was primarily restricted to categorizing specimens for potential display. After graduating with honor in 1851, she remained at Mount Holyoke as a teacher. Miss Shattuck was an outstanding figure in carrying forward the tradition of scientific laboratory instruction, which Mary Lyon had instituted. She did this through her own excellent teaching, through mentoring of younger instructors and by helping secure many distinguished professors to teach short science courses. She expanded Mount Holyoke’s influence in the world of science and helped define its role as a women’s college that specialized in science. Her own scientific background developed from her keen powers of observation, her wide reading and her association with scientists at other institutions. She was chosen by Louis Agassiz to attend the Anderson School of Natural History at Penikese Island in 1873. Here she was not only able to explore marine biology but she made acquaintances with some of the foremost naturalists of the time … networking, as it were. Her work there helped prove that women were capable of advanced work in scientific research and led the way for the next generation of women scientists to enter graduate schools. Her travels within the United States, Europe, Canada and Hawaii, added richness to her work. Her Botanical research, typical of this time, consisted of collection and classification of specimens submitted by inspired students and graduates and the Mount Holyoke Seminary herbarium contained thousands of analyzed plants, seeds and woods from all over the world. Because of her efforts, the Seminary established a botanical garden, much of which Miss Shattuck transplanted herself. There are letters in the Archives which investigate the possibility that some of the current plants are descendants of her original labors. She had few, if any, scientific publications but correspondence with other scientists abound. (Women did not publish papers!!) Students were infected with her enthusiasm and energy and they recognized her mastery of botany, chemistry, physics, physiology and astronomy. Although she trained students in science, she also helped them see the beauty and poetry in nature. Letters from students after her death stated that,“… her power came from what she was and not from an office she held…” She believed that, “… science did not tolerate any half-way work…” She was an early proponent of the belief in Darwin’s theory of Evolution and stated that she could see no conflict between Darwin’s theory and her own liberal views of religion. It has been suggested that her adoption of this view had been influenced by her friendship with Asa Gray, a noted Harvard botanist and early exponent of Darwinism. In 1888, Mount Holyoke became a college and upon her retirement in 1889, Miss Shattuck received the title of Professor Emeritus. During the difficult times leading up to the radical change from Seminary to College, Miss Shattuck offered this reason for going forward: “Since, therefore, the instruction of the seminary has had a scientific trend from the first without tendency to convert us into agnostics or infidels, since this is a scientific age and we are bound to keep abreast of the times, since every college has its on particular individuality, let us press onward in these lines till we obtain full recognition among the colleges of New England.” She died in 1889 and records indicate that her last words involved fund raising for the science building which became Shattuck Hall in 1893. The original building was demolished in 1954 but the name was transferred to the Shattuck Hall we knew which is now part of the Kendade complex. She is buried in Ev ergreen Cemetery in South Hadley. This little biography would not be complete without mentioning that two of her more well-known students from our point of view, were Henrietta Hooker and Cornelia Clapp, both of whom, primarily because of her efforts, went on to obtain PhD’s at established Universities and returned to spend their careers carrying on the scientific tradition at Mount Holyoke. Miss Clapp quotes Shattuck as saying,” I never in all my wildest dreams expected to have a microscope to use for my very own.” “Faith” is a fine invention Clapp also wrote of some experiences they shared while collecting specimens . Apparently they did go into the ponds naked and they hid behind logs if someone came along. She says that Shattuck did not mind her body being seen as long as her head did not show and Miss Clapp mused, “Miss Shattuck was not prudish. Miss Shattuck had a streak of the modern.” GO LYDIA!….and thank you from all of us.
www.mhcclassof1960.net Fondly, __________________________________________________________ (1) Emily Dickinson (She preceded Lydia Shattuck at Mount
Holyoke Other Sources: “Notable American Women 1607-1950” (Charlotte Haywood!!) Letters and Papers from the Archives at Mount Holyoke College ________________________________________ July 15, 1908 A retirement notice called Minnie a “one-of-a-kind professor”. She was also a one-of-a-kind person. Her commitment to the education of women worldwide was a model for others to emulate. Her work and love of travel overlapped. Traveling through Europe, West Africa, South and Central America, the Lesser Antilles and Cuba in the 1920’s and 1930’s prepared her for the MHC classroom. She initiated the first Latin American studies program in conjunction with the Spanish Department chair, Joan Ciruti. While she did research and some writing her true love was teaching. She believed the world was a classroom and insisted on taking students on field trips and to AAG regional and national meetings. She took each of her nephews and her niece (Sally J. Lemaire ’68, retired executive director of the MHC Alumnae Association) on a six week European trip when they were 14 years old to open up the vast world of travel at an early age. She was a Phi Beta Kappa alumna of Wheaton College and received her PhD. from Clark University where she originally wanted to study physics. She was told that physics wasn’t a “good field” for employment for women and turned to geography as a substitute. Being a fighter for equality for women led her to challenge the status quo of different salary levels for married male faculty and single women faculty. She conducted an informal study and presented the results to President Ham. She did not receive a raise for three years but the salary scales were changed. She also influenced the founding of the original shared equity loan program as a benefit for faculty. Minnie wasn’t a particularly good cook (in fact she was a lousy cook) but she loved to share meals with her students. While sorting out her papers following her death in 2000, I found the recipe for West African Peanut Soup next to her print out of the barometric pressure chart on the day of the Worcester Tornado in June, 1953. Her slide collection of over 4000 pictures recently donated to the American Geological Society are part of an important stream of history of land changes around the world. The photographs were not “works of art” but showed the landscapes of the early to mid 1900’s in a variety of locations. Joan Ciruti wrote: “I remember one time when I had just returned from South America and was enthusiastically telling her about a trip I had made to Iguazu Falls on the Brazil/Argentina border. Minnie quietly walked to her filing cabinet and pulled out an article she had written some years earlier on the basin of the Iguazu River and on the Falls. She had been there and done that and she had immediately set it down in a form that could be shared.” At Minnie’s memorial service on campus Marjorie Kaufman said, “In the thirty-five years I taught at Mount Holyoke, I never knew a faculty member who did more for the morale and economic well-being of the faculty or who did so with greater courage and at greater personal sacrifice than Minnie Lemaire.” She also said, “Even professors committed to the importance of the past in understanding the present and anticipating the future, even professors forget. But attention should be paid. It mattered immensely that Minnie Lemaire was among us.” Recipe for West African Peanut Soup available from Sally by writing, calling or e-mailing her at slemaire@mtholyoke.edu. P.S. It matters little that her menu plans never changed…hers was the only faculty home I was ever invited to for dinner. It was a good early lesson to realize that what was ON the table was not as important as who was AT the table.” Thank you ALL for your contributions. Fondly, Sue amitybc@maine.rr.com ________________________________________
Mignon Talbot, Professor of Geology and Geography born 16 August, 1869, Iowa City As the first woman geologist to be elected to the Paleontological Society, in 1909, she was a pioneer in earth science development in this country. “Every alumna who frequented ‘Old Williston’ or the modern Clapp Laboratory probably treasures the memory of a tiny dinosaur named podokesaurus holyokensis. For many of us it was the first and most spectacular introduction to the scientific fame of Mount Holyoke. Whether it was the original dainty little fossil, or its reconstruction after the fire destroyed Williston, there it stood, a 250,000,000 year old Holyoke inhabitant, reappearing in the present to form a surprisingly fitting and attractive memorial to another tiny denizen of the region, Dr. Mignon Talbot, who discovered it in red Triassic shale during one of her energetic rambles in 1910. A convenient break in the stone of a quarry laid bare the small, rare, extraordinarily well-preserved skeleton that became known as ‘Miss Talbot’s pet dinosaur.’ One of the smallest of our faculty in physical stature, she was one of the “greater ones” in fame and spirit. Her subjects were solidly in the Mount Holyoke tradition, for geology and geography were required of students from the time of Mary Lyon for many years. An extremely good collection of dinosaur tracks and a large number of minerals and other specimens had been collected by others before Miss Talbot came, but it remained to her not only to make this collection more scientific with her exacting methods but to build it up a second time — literally from the ground up — after the disastrous burning of Williston consigned it all to its original earth. Its minerals and ores, its fossils, its models and maps she brought together from the ends of the Americas and the world. Not daunted by difficulty, she housed it in random rooms of the old library basement, taught the courses where she could, and valiantly sought to make good until such time as the new Clapp Laboratory could be built. Those who knew her well describe her as ‘vivacious, of a sparkling eye and a merry face. A charming chuckle joined her sense of humor and her smile was ready. She was a good companion on the long tramps and camping trips which she took, for her interest covered all of nature, from trees to beetles, from rocks to brooks.’ Miss Talbot was quick in thought, quick in action, and quick in her rise to prominence. Two years at Yale (after an A.B. from Ohio State University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa) gave her the doctorate — and the years between 1904, when she came to Mount Holyoke, and 1908 brought her in swift moves from instructor to associate professor of professor of geology and geography to professor and chair of the department of geology.” In 1929 she became professor and chair of the combined departments of geology and geography. [Harriet M. Allyn, Mount Holyoke Quarterly, Nov. 1950] From The Mount Holyoke, Feb 1911: “The small dinosaur found in the fall [in a gravel pit on the John Poynton farm near South Hadley Center] has proved to be more important than was at first known. Miss Mignon Talbot read a short paper before the Paleontological Society at its annual meeting in Pittsburgh in December (1910), giving a preliminary description of the specimen. The discussion that followed confirmed the opinion expressed that the fossil was that of a herbivorous dinosaur, the only herbivorous one ever found in eastern North America and probably the oldest herbivorous dinosaur ever found anywhere. The specimen has been sent to Yale University, where they have kindly offered to clean away as much as possible of the encasing rock, work that needs expert manipulation. By this means it is hoped that some important parts of bones may be uncovered, particularly two or three bones that are thought to to belong to the skull. The fossil will then be studied thoroughly and described full y by Prof. R.S. Lull of Yale University. It is hoped that the dinosaur will be on exhibition again in Williston Hall late in the spring.” Prof. Talbot had urged that it be sent either to Washington or kept at Yale. But it was returned; and in 1916 podokesaurus holyokensis was destroyed when Williston Laboratory burned. “When the science hall caught fire, she went to supervise the rescue of her dinosaur. She was horrified when she saw that the firemen had rescued the plaster-of-paris model. She sent them back to rescue her real dinosaur. I never did find out how the story ended (from an Archival sketch filed in 1932 and titled MAKE IT BEER {An Expurgated Autobiography of Louise Hyde Reilly}).” However that particular story ended, the story of Mignon’s life has heroism to it. She seemed to live wholeheartedly, like a pilgrim, always intensifying her experience of her own life. With warm regards, Sue amitybc@maine.rr.com p.s. We hope you’ve enjoyed summer (pant, pant?) and are having a surge of that lovely September energy. Consider looking at the evolving class website and writing Scribe Sheila [Porter1vt@yahoo.com] with news of your adventures and misadventures — and planning a mini-reunion, so easy to do and so much fun. The Alumnae Association will send you a list of classmates within a radius of you.
________________________________________ Jytte Muus, Keeper of the Warburg 9/24/1904—12/30/1987
Jytte Muus had the necessary drive and enthusiasm to attend professional meetings, visit with leading researchers throughout the world, and conduct an active research program of her own. The distillate of these activities in conjunction with a superb scientific background is what Miss Muus demonstrated in her teaching. She was instrumental in procuring grants in order to bring antiquated equipment up to date. Curtis Smith tells the story of his first year (1955) in the Physiology department: “Physiology laboratories require a lot of equipment, and much of what I found when I arrived was somewhat archaic and in need of repair. I gained access to the physics department machine shop, and spent a lot of my spare time repairing equipment and building new apparatus. Toward the end of that year I remarked to Jytte, in a mock complaining tone, ‘You don’t need a new professor—you needed a repairman.’ Quick as a flash, she replied, ‘Y es, we know but we couldn’t AFFORD a repair man.’ ” {Just what might that indicate about salaries?} Born in Denmark, Professor Muus was a graduate of the University of Copenhagen where she taught biochemistry for six years before she came to the United States on a Rockefeller Fellowship. Before joining the Mount Holyoke faculty (at the request of Abby Turner), she was a research assistant and fellow at Harvard Medical School. During WWII, she studied the physiological nature of burns at Harvard School of Public Health. She returned to Copenhagen in 1946 to lecture at the Biochemical Institute. It was on this trip that passengers were evacuated to lifeboats as the ship she was on began to sink. As she told the story, she was climbing over the railing to enter the lifeboat when she remembered that she had not tipped the cabin stewardess. She relinquished her place in order to take care of this detail and obviously all aboard were rescued. In 1951, in Copenhagen, once again, she studied at the Carlsberg Laboratory. Miss Muus had a brother who was an engineer in Rhodesia {now Zimbabwe} and while visiting him in 1952, she became interested in the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland which, when opened, would be the first of its kind in that part of Africa. When she applied for a Fulbright in 1958-59, she wrote: “I was hopeful that the forces working for an inter-racial university (versus ‘separate and equal facilities’) would win, as has indeed been the case.” She continues, “It is my belief that the College may have a very important role to play in the future of Africa…The need for such an institution has been great, and I should find it exciting and challenging to have an opportunity to teach…in its formative stage.” She comments that she would be willing to set up a biochemistry course and a nutrition course as, “Many local authorities are keenly aware of a nutritional problem…it would be valuable to tra in nutrition teachers and extension workers.” She explains her reasons for wanting to come to Africa, “…teaching under such entirely different conditions with students of very varied background—and different from girls in a New England liberal arts college, would be sure to pull me out of the educational rut into which most of us settle. It would give me a new impetus and new ideas with which to return to my teaching post…” She did, indeed, spend a year there and returned to Rhodesia in 1965-66. She was named Mary Lyon Professor in 1964. She received many awards and grants. To one application which questioned her qualifications, she replied modestly, “…Perhaps I did not blow my own horn enough…” She received the Grant. She was described as having “a brilliant, well balanced mind, as well as great capability in dealing with practical matters…(she) is well trained and brings technical excellence, keen theoretical understanding and initiative to bear upon the problem in question…She sees issues quickly and clearly, and does not allow a mass of details to obscure them. She thinks like a man…” {written in 1957} Nancy Nash Johnson recalls that Miss Muus was instrumental in her decision to pursue a teaching career. However, Jytte cautioned that she {Nancy} SHOULD learn to spell correctly before undertaking the profession. Miss Muus “demanded the best in us”, Nancy commented, “and, besides she taught me how to pith a frog! What an intelligent, outspoken woman!” I {Dana} must say that, because of her course in biochemistry, my freshman year in medical school was much easier. I am certain that the whole Mount Holyoke experience contributed to confidence in many areas but the fact that I had had her graduate level course in biochemistry relieved me from agonizing over medical biochemistry at Michigan and I was assigned to tutor other students. Miss Muus published in many Journals. Her research on salivary amylase, for which we were all required to contribute saliva by chewing on paraffin, contributed heavily to the understanding of the molecular mechanism of the breakdown of starch into simple sugars. Charlotte Haywood was studying temperature-regulating mechanisms in human subjects and Curtis Smith was involved with genetic mechanisms of a riboflavin-producing mold. Curtis recalls that during a discussion of recruitment of graduate students, Jytte commented, “I don’t see why anyone would want to come here--we are the sweat, spit, and mold department.” Miss Muus oversaw the combining of the departments of Botany, Physiology and Zoology in 1964, at which point, the graduate program was essentially abandoned. She also administered a major renovation of the East wing of Clapp in 1968 while continuing her teaching and research. (2) Many examples of her political engagement, her concern with problems of waste, her interest in history, and her involvement with art can be seen in the Archives. She was instrumental in instituting a program to prevent food waste on Campus. A 1946 letter to her begins, “I have your letter…to General Eisenhower, relative to confiscation of literature in Germany…” Members of the Mount Holyoke faculty, led by Miss Muus had signed a petition contesting the implementation of an order to burn books on Fascist, militaristic and anti-democratic matter. They stated that the original order was a “direct violation of the principles for which this country fought.” and that, “The burning and banning of books is not the way to put the ideas they propound out of circulation…” The result of such a petition helped modify the measures with which Nazi propaganda was dealt reserving a great deal of material for research librari es. The mode of destruction was changed to pulping and not burning…ie, recycling. After her retirement in 1970, she was active in local affairs especially in the South Hadley Historical Commission and the Historical Society. She was a curator of the Old Firehouse Museum and revived interest in the painting of Rogers Rusk, a physics professor whose paintings captured local scenes. When she became ill, friends in South Hadley helped her remain in her
home as long as possible. During one of my return trips to Mount Holyoke, I
visited her. I had done some independent work with her, too, in my senior
year and had developed a pleasant relationship with her, her Warburg and
with that 4 th floor laboratory in Clapp. I knew of her sense of humor. She
had had no advance warning of my visit. Curtis took me to her house and she
greeted me by name as she lay on her couch surrounded by PILES of books. She
said, in a smaller less gravely voice but smiling nevertheless,” Dana,
these days I choose my books by their weight---and I do NOT mean the
content.” I feel certain that if she were here today, she would be doing
research on some current topic and that she would have made it her business
to use the modern tools we now have. It is a shame that many of my former,
younger colleagues never heard of, and consequently never worked to the soot
hing sound of the Warburg shaking! Miss Muus was a multifaceted woman with
ideas that made a difference. ______________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________ Username: mhc1960 but that it is only as good as the information you send us at If you have an experience, a trip or a mini-reunion you would like to share with us to post on the site, we would love to hear about it. Several have and their stories are very interesting. Check it out. Be in touch. Sue amitybc@maine.rr.com ________________________________________
Wendy Wasserstein In the New York Times obituary for Werner Scharff, designer of the Lanz flannel granny nightgown, we read that Wendy Wasserstein said she wore one while writing. “The entire dormitory, 130 strong in Lanz flannel nightgowns, caroled in the living room while our housemother distributed gingerbread cookies.” Wendy was renowned for her humorous, down-to-earth dramatic depictions of the feminist baby-boomer generation to which she belonged. She traveled to meet with many Alumnae Clubs and when she visited Atlanta, I recall sitting on the floor cross-legged …as was she, as she engaged in animated conversation with the group. It is often quite difficult to write about these very contemporary and very public Mount Holyoke connected women so rather than attempt to distill and consolidate the volumes of material written by and about this treasured alumna, we will present or paraphrase portions of articles that have been published. As many have commented, it is difficult to separate the personality from the characters she depicted and not to include a description of the quality of feminism of the time. Wendy grew up in Flatbush and worried about her burgeoning thighs. She stated that she could “…never feel at home among the girls in leather pants and spike heels or strapless cocktail dresses. We parted company at age eight.” She was witty, encouraging to others and consistently self-deprecating. Entering Mount Holyoke, Wendy originally had considered a career in law or medicine but after taking a summer playwriting course at Smith, she was encouraged to pursue writing. {Perhaps her exposure to a liberal arts education contributed to the courage it takes to make such a change and accept it in an open-minded fashion?} She became involved in the theater at Amherst College where she spent her junior year. She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1971, received a master’s degree in creative writing at City College of New York and a master of fine arts degree from the Yale School of Drama in 1977. Her work gave voice to the concerns and anxieties of her college friends when she wrote about a group of recent Mount Holyoke graduates facing the real world calling it, “Uncommon Women and Others.” The play was produced off-Broadway and filmed for public television with a cast including Meryl Streep. (1) In 1989, her play, “The Heidi Chronicles” won the best-play Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play covers 20 years in the life of Heidi, an intelligent, insecure woman coming of age in the late 60’s, strugg ling with all the issues faced by the newly “liberated” women seeking to “have it all” and their sometimes ambivalent feelings about independence. When the Pulitzer Prize was announced, Wendy quipped that she’s “holding out for the Heisman trophy.” “It’s odd,” she commented, “suddenly I am an expert on women, Judaism, and theater or a combination of the above.” All of Wendy’s plays and books and screen plays deal with contemporary women attempting to strike that elusive balance among work, relationships and family. (2) Many of her shorter pieces portray her mother, Lola and a friend of hers accused her of embellishing these stories somewhat. One day while he was visiting Wendy, Lola stopped by dressed as Patty Hearst, complete with beret and toy gun. “Lola,” Wendy commented, “never disappoints.” Within moments after Wendy received the Pulitzer Prize, Lola had announced that her daughter won the Nobel Prize. Most published comments after her death were undisputedly laudatory, praising her talent, her wit, her friendships and her devotion to helping the disadvantaged, “As far as I am concerned every New Yorker is born with the inalienable right to ride the D train; shout ‘Hey Lady!’ with indignation; and grow up going regularly to the theater.” She said this when she wrote about her project, Open Doors, a New York City public high school program. While we recognize that this tribute should probably not involve a lengthy discussion about feminism, we feel that an article written by Jeremy Gerard entitled, “The Belles of Amherst” adds even more depth to Wendy’s personality and, thus, to her characters—perhaps, by extension to ourselves: “Wendy Wasserstein…deserves better than to be remembered only for her facile wit, her infectious laughter, and her stalwart devotion to a legion of friends (wonderful as those qualities inarguably are). The death of Betty Friedan throws into high relief not only the triumphs of feminism that took place between the generations that separated these two uncommon women, but also the gnarly, infuriating complexities of the movement they represented in such different ways. …The idea for “The Feminine Mystique” was generated by a survey Friedan conducted in 1957 of her fellow Smith College graduates from the class of 1942, virtually all of whom had gone onto lives as homemakers…Published in 1963, the book exposed a sorority of brainy, educated, upper-middle-class American women…(who) had been relegated to ‘careers’ of menial service to husbands and children that left them with…a ‘nameless, aching dissatisfaction.’ Wasserstein’s ground breaking play ‘Uncommon Women and Others’…produced just over a decade later, was a barely fictionalized account of her friends—brainy, well educated, upper middle class—from Mount Holyoke, and how the somewhat retro, not to say limited, aspirations of a women’s college education, even in the late sixties, were being redefined by nascent feminist concerns. …Wendy declared…that attention must finally be paid to women’s dreams and desires and fears and sexuality and anger…Wasserstein already was recasting the feminist gains prompted by Friedan and others into ‘aching dissatisfaction’ of a different sort. In Wendy’s plays, no heights of academic or professional achievement could be counted upon to rescue women from a growing sense of isolation and loneliness, a state in which feminism itself was complicitous.” …it is a tribute to Wasserstein to revisit to recall just how provocative the play (Heidi) was, and how sharply divided the final scene left audiences. In that scene Heidi Holland, brilliant art historian and lecturer, center of a vibrant if fungible circle of friends, sits alone in a rocking chair, holding the baby she has just adopted in the hopes of filling the vast loneliness in a life that has left her feeling ‘stranded’ by the movement that was supposed to have nurtured her. (3) Few critics were immune to the humor and compassion with which Wasserstein had sketched the complicated and sometimes irreconcilable dreams of a generation of women who had grown up in the wake of feminism’s first wave…whatever their ideology, somehow (they) inherited their creator’s gift for the zinger. And yet some detected in that final scene…an unconscionable renunciation of feminism. …Actually, I think there is more to it than that. Deservedly or not, Wendy came to represent a classic complaint about feminism… That the more women achieve, the more likely they are to end up alone, and that they have been betrayed because the movement itself promised otherwise… Whatever she was left with at the end of the day, Wendy was not alone. In truth, we were as smitten with this funny girl as unreservedly she was with the theater—the New York theater, whose plays were written by her friends, produced, staged and designed by her friends, presented in theaters owned by her friends and whose rave reviews were penned by her friends. Everybody was a friend of Wendy’s. But feminism never promised women that having it all would ever be easy, let alone enuf. Only that it’s a woman’s right, as much as a man’s to aspire.” (4) Life, of course, imitates art and Wendy pursued parenthood without a partner. She stated that her proudest achievement was giving birth to Lucy Jane in 1999 at the age of 48. She died of lymphoma in 2006. The lights were dimmed on Broadway. At one point she wrote, “I don’t much like to think that being a Bachelor Girl limits how you see the world. On the other hand, I know that it certainly limits how the world sees you.” We are indebted to Wendy for helping the world open its mind to our different living situations and we toast her with one of her very favorite snacks, Milano cookies and Diet Coke. (1) In President Gettell’s inaugural speech he said that…this has been called the century of the ‘Common Man’…it should be called the Century of the ‘Uncommon Woman.’ (Paraphrased) (2) “Uncommon Women and Others,” “The Heidi Chronicles,” “Isn’t it Romantic?” “Old Money,” “An American Daughter,” “The Sisters Rosensweig,” “Pamela’s First Musical,” “Bachelor Girls,” “How I Spent my Forties,” “Shiksa Goddess,” “Sloth.” (Partial List) (3) Click
here to read Act 2, Scene 4 speech from “The Heidi Chronicles.” Papers in the Mount Holyoke College Archives Wasserstein’s Plays and other writings We are saddened by news of the death of Donna Naramore Morjikian who
succumbed to complications of breast cancer on August 24 th. Several
classmates attended her Memorial Service. Donna had only recently
contributed to the biographical tribute on Minnie Lemaire, which was sent in
July. Even at that time the personal communication we had was very humorous
and positive. Once again, we invite any of you to write about our deceased
classmates so that we can feature them on the appropriate month. We can
furnish biographical data but this just seems too Mountain Day was glorious. The Maple trees seem more brilliant by the day and “Leaf Patrol” has begun in earnest. Come visit—and bring a rake!!
Sue Bradley Cabot amitybc@maine.rr.com ________________________________________ We thank Sarah Montgomery for writing this wonderful biography about Jean Harris, her long-time friend and house-mate. Sally is Dean of the College Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Economics. She can be reached at smontgom@mtholyoke.edu. Jean C. Harris, Wide-ranging Art Historian December 4, 1927 Jean Harris’s father liked to say that she was born on an island in the Nile. In 1927, her parents were living in Cairo, where her father was teaching at the American University and on December 4 th she was delivered at a hospital on such an island. Thirty years later Jean arrived at Mount Holyoke College. She had grown up in Lawrenceville, New Jersey and in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, though the place that meant the most to her was the ‘High Peaks’ region of the Adirondacks, where she went first as a child and where she spent some time almost every summer of her life. She graduated from Smith College, taught for several years at the Winchester-Thurston School in Pittsburgh, and then earned a PhD in Art History at Radcliffe. Her dissertation on Edouard Manet led to publication of a complete catalogue of his graphic works and to Jean achieving a kind of immortality by having Manet’s prints regularly referred to by Harris numbers. Although her graduate study focused on the19th century, Jean was asked also to teach baroque and rococo art. This sent her scurrying to the library, but also as soon as possible to Rome to view the architecture and sculpture for herself. Over the years she made many carefully planned and energetically pursued trips to museums and sacred and secular buildings not only in Italy, but also in most of the rest of Western Europe and in many parts of the United States and Canada. She always wanted to see the originals. Eventually, I returned with her to Egypt, though we visited no hospital on the Nile. When others were hired to teach baroque art, Jean added courses in the history of art criticism and in museum studies to those she taught on 19th and 20th century painting and sculpture. The museum studies course complemented her work with the Mount Holyoke collection and on special exhibitions, especially when she was Chairman of Friends of Art (1960-1969) and later Director of the Art Museum (1978-1983). The shows she organized were frequently innovative and often entailed much research and travel on her part. “Women Artists in America Today,” held in April 1962 was an early celebration of the significance of artists such as Louise Nevelson and Helen Frankenthaler who in subsequent years gained increasingly wide recognition. The first art gallery at Mount Holyoke College was opened in 1876 in Lyman Williston Hall. Jean used this landmark to build an exhibit, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, of works from Mount Holyoke and from six of the nine college and university art museums founded at earlier dates. It brought together a collection of what typically was on view in this pioneering group of museums in the centennial year. Catalogues which resulted from these exhibitions demonstrated Jean’s research skills and scholarly interests. She, however, had two long-term writing projects that were unfinished at her death. One was a complete catalogue of the graphic work of Alphonse Legros (1837-1911), a French artist who spent most of his professional life teaching in England. Jean devoted years to a complete, fully illustrated catalogue of his graphic works. It was a gigantic task because of the enormous number of prints involved. The scale of the project plus Legros’s only modest fame made it impossible to find a publisher willing to fund the publication. The second unfinished book was one that Jean and I developed out of a course we taught. Here’s how we described the book in an (unsuccessful) application for a foundation grant. The Art Complex is “a study written from our joint expertise in art and economics. We aim to present an analysis of the individuals and organizations that make up the visual art ‘network,’ focusing on the distinct and common goals and activities of artists, collectors, critics, art historians, dealers, auction houses, museums and government. We emphasize issues that confront private and governmental organizations concerned with the visual arts, and the aesthetic and social ramifications of their answers.” We devoted much time gathering basic statistical data (e.g., how many dealers were in New York City every fifth year from 1950 to 1980 and where were they located) and interviewing collectors, dealers, artists and museum curators. The interviews, conducted in California and the southwest as well as in New York City, filled many notebooks. Jean, in these and all other such conversations, immediately seemed able to establish rapport with collectors, dealers and artists. She joined them in being fully engaged by every object they viewed together. We had written a good deal, but were far from the end of this ambitious project, when Jean had her last illness. Without her it could not be completed. Jean’s many connections with those in the art world included close, continuing contacts with former students. She could count among them a number who became prominent painters and sculptors, curators, and art and architectural historians. And they often testified to the influence of her teaching. She also had numerous academic contacts, especially among Manet scholars. She served as a member of the Committee on Small College Museums of the College Art Association of America, on visiting committees to college art departments, and as a consultant to the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut, for which she wrote a guide. She was especially pleased with the success of her efforts to help establish a regional art conservation center in Williamstown, Massachusetts. After it opened in 1977, she was on its board. At Mount Holyoke College, Jean was an active citizen. She served as chair of the Art Department for many years, was a member of various influential faculty committees, and was an enthusiastic participant in the quadrennial faculty shows as author, actress and set designer. Her love of visual jokes played a role. She frequently gave a (serious) lecture on humor in art; in a faculty show with a movie theme she inserted colored cream pie throwing much to the dismay of the stage crew. Jean’s enthusiasms included collecting art, especially the work of living artists. She displayed her own creativity in setting and achieving demanding standards in dress making, knitting, gardening, and cooking. And we had great times entertaining, often using raffles to recycle favorite kitsch and as the means of emptying the unwanted from the basement. Jean died in 1988 from breast cancer that had metastasized to her lungs. To the end she wanted to keep going and hoped for some remission. ___________________________________________________________________________ We wish you all truth and beauty and peace
and many surprise contacts during this Holiday Season. Fondly, Sue amitybc@maine.rr.com P.S and speaking of “surprise contacts”: This Directory is updated frequently but is only as good as the information you send us. ________________________________________
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