A College of Her Own, by Robert McCaughey (chapter 3)

A C OLLE G E OF HER OWN The History of Barnard

ROBERT M C C AU G HEY

3 BECOMING BARNARD

A Place in the City

A student body of 600, heterogeneous in the extreme.

—PROFESSOR OF LATIN CHARLES KNAPP, (1910) 1

I

n May 1893, Barnard College graduated its first class of eight seniors with appropriate fanfare. Joseph H. Choate wrote of the occasion to his wife, the trustee Carline Dutcher Choate, who was away from the city: “Last night’s Post has such an excellent account of the first Commencement of the Barnard girls that I have cut it out and enclose it. Mr. Brownell tells me that they made a great sensation as they appeared upon the stage and were received with overwhelming applause.” That fall, 106 students returned to the rented Madison Avenue campus to continue the work begun by the college’s first graduates, not least of which was the fashioning of an extracurriculum.2

IN VENTING A COL L EG E LI FE

The first students consisted of fourteen young women, enrolled as “regulars” on the basis of examination as degree-seekers, plus twenty-two “specials,” nondegree candidates who registered for one or two courses.

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Of that class, eight regulars stayed on to graduate in the spring of 1893.

That same fall, Barnard began its fifth academic year with nearly half of its 106 enrollments nondegree specials. Of the regulars, seven stayed on to graduate in 1894, another eight in 1895.3 The small size of these first graduating classes and the absence of a discernible upward trend were troubling. Equally concerning was the heavy reliance upon specials, who were expected to be eliminated once four regular classes were in place. Their persistence in numbers, a matter of financial exigency, gave the impression that Barnard’s academic standards were lower than other women’s colleges who admitted only degree students. Yet their continued presence after the move to Morningside, when they again briefly became a majority of all enrollments, reflects Barnard’s continued problem attracting full-time students in sustainable numbers. Not until 1900 did regular enrollments again exceed specials and not until 1905, by which time Barnard had graduated thirteen classes, did specials make up less than one-third of all enrollments. One special in 1910, Iphigene Ochs, described her status as “students who were not very bright or who were inadequately prepared for regular college courses.” In Ochs’s case, she passed the entrance exams at the start of her third year and became a member of the class of 1914. Specials would not be eliminated until 1927, not coincidentally the same year Barnard became a founding member of the prestigious Seven Sisters College Conference.4 Given that all the 200 or so students enrolled at Barnard during the first eight years on the East Side commuted to school, the creation of even a semblance of college life outside the classroom is impressive. During the second year of operations, an Undergraduate Association was introduced that provided the college with a rudimentary student government. A year later, the first chapter of a Greek national fraternity, Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG) was established. In 1894, the first yearbook, Barnard Annual, was published, succeeded three years later by Barnard Mortarboard. The first issue of the college’s campus newspaper, Barnard Bulletin, appeared in 1901. By 1904, students had formed teams in basketball, tennis, and pingpong; clubs included La Société Française, Deutscher Kreis, the Greek Club, the Botany Club, the Barnard College Young Women’s Christian Association, and a chapter of the Church Students’ Missionary Association. For those interested in music, there was the Barnard Chorus and the Mandolin Club; for those interested in social service, a chapter of

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the College Settlement Association. Literary undertakings included the Barnard Bear. The invention of an early student life at Barnard reached its imaginative highpoint in 1903 when the sophomores (class of 1905) challenged the incoming freshmen (class of 1906) to a series of athletic contests in what came to be known as the Greek Games. These were thereafter faithfully repeated every spring for seven decades.5 Despite the many extracurricular activities, the absence of a residential dimension made the early Barnard experience fundamentally different from that of the other women’s colleges and that of “country” colleges in general. This shortcoming was made all the more glaring by the fact that a year after the move to Morningside, with the opening of Fiske Hall in 1898, some twenty-five Barnard students from outside New York City took up temporary residence in the as-yet-unoccupied top floor.

The experiment lasted only two years before the space was reassigned

FIGURE 3.1 Annual

enactment of Greek Games, 1914.

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as a planned laboratory. Despite the brevity of the residency, it was long enough to provoke two different reactions. Trustee Henrietta Talcott, on the basis of a single visit, declared the dormitory “a godless place,” and trustee Augusta Arnold agreed, complaining that there were “no limits to the hours that the girls could dance.” But trustee Annie Nathan Meyer, while declaring herself to Treasurer Plimpton no fan of country colleges, with their extensive residential quarters conveying “a sense of self-importance, or of mental isolation, or eccentricity,” lamented the closing of the temporary dormitory, it having “succeeded in attracting the finest women from all over the country.” She closed her letter with a plea: “Do get us a gift of a dormitory. I am sure you will, you have never failed us as yet in any of our great needs.”6 The ever-resourceful Plimpton already had set his sights on Elizabeth Milbank Anderson for such a gift. Although she had never attended college, Anderson had taken to heart the calls of others on the importance of a dormitory if Barnard was to compete with the country colleges for the daughters of New York’s well-to-do families. Indeed, her own daughter, Eleanor, a Brearley graduate, had opted for Bryn Mawr. Anderson’s purchase in 1902 of the three acres of land between 116th and 119th Streets, contiguous with the original site, was intended for Barnard’s first dormitory, which she likely expected other trustees to underwrite. When none did and Meyer took it upon herself in 1904 to try to interest the Guggenheim family in making a naming gift of a dormitory, Anderson shortly thereafter announced her third major gift to the college, in the amount of $150,000, for a dormitory to be named after the Reverend Arthur Brooks, first chair of the trustees and Anderson’s spiritual counselor at the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation.7 The building that became Brooks Hall faced inward on the southern edge of the Milbank Quadrangle, with its back facing 116th Street. It was not just another utilitarian college dormitory. Historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, in her illuminating Alma Mater, described it this way: Designed as an urban residence by Lamb & Rich. The architects of Barnard’s first buildings, Brooks Hall rose nine stories in brick and limestone to match the Milbank group some distance away. Built on a steel skeleton, it was a vertical rectangle. A handsome portico fitted with

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FIGURE 3.2 Brooks

Hall, opened in 1907 to attract residential students from beyond New York City. Barnard Archives.

white limestone columns, an ornamental cornice, and bay windows kept Brooks from looking severe.

Severe it was not. Brooks consisted of eight floors of outward-facing rooms and suites designed to accommodate just ninety-seven students, with interior public rooms on each of the upper floors as well as on the first floor off the elegant entry. Anderson selected the in-demand Elsie de Wolfe, who had decorated the Andersons’ Fifth Avenue apartment and countless other East Side homes, to decorate the public spaces. They were to have, DeWolfe assured her client, referring to New York’s most fashionable women’s club, “gilt applique like [the] parlor and tea room at [the] Colony Club.”8 Annual room rents in Brooks varied significantly, with the smallest double rooms going for $160 a year, while the suites, which consisted of

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FIGURE 3.3 Interior

of Brooks Hall room. Barnard Archives.

two rooms, a private bath, and fireplace, a princessly $1,000. Board was fixed at $500, making the total cost of residence several times the tuition of $150 and substantially higher than the other women’s colleges. Horowitz convincingly argues that the opening of Brooks Hall “began Barnard’s partial transformation into a women’s college along the lines of Vassar or Bryn Mawr.”9 The opening of Brooks Hall in the fall of 1907 was clearly intended to attract wealthy applicants, both New York City residents with resources to live away from home and those from beyond the city. Yet four years after Brooks opened, it had still not attracted enough undergraduates to be fully occupied. In their absence, Barnard rented suites to Columbia female graduate students and offered them to unmarried Barnard women instructors as part of their compensation. When full occupancy by undergraduates was finally achieved in 1913, it was only after the introduction of resident scholarships explicitly designed to attract out-of-state applicants.

If early Barnard wanted more out-of-town girls, it seemed it would have to buy them.10

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SCHL EPPIN G TO BA R N A RD

When Barnard was located on Madison Avenue on the East Side, it became one of many cultural institutions within walking distance of the homes of the city’s wealthiest families. Situated midway up the island, the college was accessible by trolley car from other parts of Manhattan.

Students coming from the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens required the additional services of a ferry across the East River; those coming from the Bronx and lower Westchester County used a bridge across the Harlem River; and those from northern New Jersey rode a ferry across the Hudson. The longest trek was from eastern Queens and involved a combination of ferry; trolley car; and, from western Long Island, the Long Island Railroad. But whether a leisurely five-minute walk or an arduous two-hour slog, the fact that each school day began and ended with a commute is what most distinguished the Barnard student experience from their country sisters.11 The move to Morningside in 1897 only reinforced this distinction. Now East Siders confronted a daily trek by trolley car over the top of Central Park to the thinly populated and considerably more down-market Upper West Side. The commute from northern New Jersey, with its river-crossing terminus at the 135th Street Ferry pier, was shortened by the college’s relocation, but the commute was made longer for students from Queens.

A more determinative development in confirming Barnard as a commuting school was the 1904 opening of the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit) subway between City Hall in lower Manhattan to 145th Street. This was soon followed by rapid transit links between the Upper West Side and the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, extending Barnard’s commuting zone from ground zero, the Broadway and 116th Street IRT station, outward to a radius of thirty miles. This tristate region included New York’s suburbs, plus the densely populated southwest Connecticut and northern New Jersey: a total area of 3,800 square miles, and, by 1900, home to 15,000,000 people, or roughly one-fifth of all Americans.12 While hardly cloistered in its original East Side location, the Upper West Side where Barnard now found itself permanently located put the college at the geographical center and cultural heart of the American urban condition, with its fast-paced tempo, rough-edged diversity, and social heterogeneity. Whatever second thoughts these facts of life prompted among

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its founders and early backers, Barnard’s distinct urban essence had to be acknowledged; accepted; and then, if possible, embraced. This last condition would be decades in coming, but as early as 1901, a graduating senior, Florence L. Sanville, gave voice to the “thoroughly cosmopolitan nature of the student body which Barnard’s situation in New York makes possible.”

Our situation in a great city with its counter attractions, the home ties and demands which bind a large proportion of the students, the hurrying comings and goings in crowded trolley cars, trains, or ferry boats. . . . In no other college, probably, do the students represent as many different classes as they do at Barnard College. Barnard satisfies the demand of every type—from the girl who cannot afford the expense of an out-oftown college, to the girl who seeks to combine higher studies with a continuance of social life and pleasures. The result of this intermingling of classes is a broad democratic spirit which makes itself felt throughout our ranks.

Not everyone shared Sanville’s urban ethic.13

“S H E I S NOT A N EW YORK ER”: T HE MI SB EG OT T EN GIL L DEANSHI P

Dean Emily James Smith Putnam, newly married and in anticipation of motherhood, resigned as dean in February 1900. Her abbreviated tenure, surprise resignation, and the reason prompting it led President Low to urge that her successor be a man. To this end, he appointed the thirtyseven-year-old historian James Harvey Robinson, a popular instructor of history at Barnard and Columbia, as acting dean. Although Elizabeth Milbank Anderson had favored Putnam resigning, she opposed the idea of a male dean for Barnard and urged fellow trustee Silas Brown Brownell to convey her sentiments to Low, his personal friend and fellow Centurion. Brownell did, arguing that “I cannot avoid feeling that the financial support of Barnard is quite as essential as her new administration, and that that support depends upon women, whom Barnard, therefore, cannot afford to alienate.” Although Low ceded the point in this instance, he

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refused Brownell’s request to alter the intercorporate agreement to require the Barnard dean be a woman. A new search was then undertaken, in which Anderson played a leading role, and in January 1901, the fortyone-year old Laura Drake Gill was named Barnard’s second dean. She proved to be a bad choice. During her seven-year deanship, the progress that Putnam had made in collaboration with Low in securing Barnard’s stability was undone.14 Effective service as a hospital administrator in Cuba following the American assault in the summer of 1898 had brought Laura Drake Gill to the attention of the Barnard search committee. Born and raised in rural Maine, a Smith graduate, she taught mathematics at Smith’s preparatory school in Northampton before joining the Red Cross. That she was single and available counted in her favor; the fact that she was a stranger to New York and, as it turned out, hostile to urban life seems not to have been thought disqualifying. In her very first dean’s report to her trustees, she declared “that most unlovely form of provincialism [was] the provincialism of a great city.”15 Within nine months of Gill’s appointment, a newspaper account reached Treasurer Plimpton that Gill had resigned following an early encounter with Columbia’s newly installed president Nicholas Murray Butler. Unlike Low, who treated Dean Smith like a partner in the larger university enterprise who reported to her own board of trustees, Butler expected all deans of Columbia schools to report directly to him. In Gill’s case, Butler wanted her to limit her dealings with the Barnard board, on which he sat ex officio, by funneling all communications through him. It took Gill several years to grasp Butler’s notion of their relationship and too late to salvage any semblance of mutual trust.

Butler also blamed Gill for rendering Barnard’s biggest benefactor and her defender, Elizabeth Milbank Anderson, unwilling to direct some of her largesse Columbia’s way.16 In ways large and small, Gill offended would-be allies. While the 1900 intercorporate agreement gave Barnard full responsibility for the undergraduate instruction of women within the university, it did not take into account that Teachers College (TC), a party to the agreement, had among its women students some who did not possess ABs. Rather than propose an amicable resolution to a sister institution with overlapping missions, Gill insisted that TC cede all responsibility for instructing undergraduates

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FIGURE 3.4 Laura Drake Gill (1860–1932), second dean of Barnard College (1901–1907).

Barnard Archives.

to Barnard. For good measure, she publicly made disparaging remarks about the “heterogeneous” students attending TC. Although she prevailed in this dispute, it earned her and Barnard the enmity of TC Dean James Earl Russell and ended space-sharing arrangements in which Barnard students had used the TC gymnasium.17

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Gill was equally maladroit in lesser ways, for example, in offending trustee Meyer by neglecting to keep the college’s Steinway piano in tune.

The dean also alienated a leading young alumna, Alice Duer Miller, class of 1899, by declining her application in 1905 for an unpaid part-time teaching appointment because Miller was married. Three months after that happened, Miller, a future chronicler of Barnard history, organized a group of fourteen alumnae from different classes who wrote to President Butler asking him “to consider the removal of Miss Gill.” Among their complaints was her “imposing on Barnard the attitude of isolated colleges.” But their most damning indictment: “She is not a New Yorker.”18 The following spring, Gill declined to renew the appointment of a popular English instructor, alumna, and Miller classmate, Virginia Gildersleeve.

Here again she demonstrated a flair for offending those who could retaliate.

When Gildersleeve later explained her reasoning for accepting the Barnard deanship in 1911, she said that she wished to avoid having “another stranger come in as Miss Gill had done and mess up my College again.”19 Even in posterity Gill has attracted critics. In her estimable Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (1984), the historian

FIGURE 3.5 Class

Day marchers in 1908. Barnard Archives.

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Margaret W. Rossiter cites Dean Gill as responsible for cutting short the promising scientific career of Harriet Brooks. A Canadian by birth and one of Sir Ernest Rutherford’s most promising graduate students at McGill University, Brooks was hired as a physics instructor by Barnard in 1903. Four years later, she informed Dean Gill of her engagement to marry, while stating her intentions to continue teaching and conducting research. Gill, over the objections of Margaret Maltby, Barnard’s senior physicist, promptly terminated Brooks, who, as it turned out, did not marry the man to whom she was engaged but did abandon her research. Thus, Barnard lost the woman who, at her death in 1933, the New York Times called “one of the leading women in the field of nuclear physics, second only to Marie Curie.”20 A final instance of Gill’s innocence of New York City’s folkways was her attempt, prior to the Steinway kerfuffle, to help Annie Nathan Meyer find an appropriate school for her daughter, Margaret. This happened after several of the city’s fashionable day schools, all with Columbia officials on their boards, had declined to consider Margaret because she was Jewish. Dean Gill then suggested Margaret apply to the Sacks Collegiate Institute, only to receive from Meyer this pointed lesson in New York tribal distinctions: I do not like the atmosphere of the Sachs School simply because the girls there come almost exclusively from a wealthy class—one which has not had the stability of generations of wealth—and which is unfortunately an intensely materialistic class. Margaret comes from a family in America since the 17th century and I do not care—another reason—to have her in such an exclusively German atmosphere.21

It may well have been Gill’s cluelessness about New York ethnic and social mores that kept her out of the discussions occupying the boards of both Columbia and Barnard during her deanship on the subject that went by the anodyne label “the Hebrew Problem.”

CO LUM BI A’ S—A N D BA RN A RD’ S—“ HEB R EW P R OB LEM”

Columbia College, from its founding as King’s College in 1754, had been open to the sons of New York City’s pre-Revolutionary Sephardic Jewish

Praise for

A COLLEGE OF HER OWN “If one measure of a college’s impact on American life is the writers and artists it has produced, then what to say about Barnard College, whose alumnae include Zora Neale Hurston, Ntozake Shange, Anna Quindlen, Erica Jong, Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Vega, Delia Ephron, Greta Gerwig, Jhumpa Lahiri, Twyla Tharp, Mary Gordon, and Joan Rivers—and thousands more? Robert McCaughey’s A College of Her Own tell the complex, inspiring story of a singular institution whose alumnae changed the world.”

—JEN NIFER FIN NEY BOY L A N, BA R NA R D COLLEGE “McCaughey combines his knowledge as a historian of American higher education with his deep personal experience at Barnard and Columbia to provide a richly textured account of Barnard College and its role as one of America’s leading women’s colleges and preeminent liberal arts colleges.”

—ELLEN V. F U T TER, PR ESIDEN T OF T HE A MER ICA N M USEU M OF NAT U R A L HISTORY A N D FOR MER PR ESIDEN T OF BA R NA R D COLLEGE “A College of Her Own is an exemplary institutional history and contribution to NYC social history. Indeed, it is one of the most thorough and engaging accounts of a liberal arts college. McCaughey provides a masterful depiction of the segmented social hierarchies of the city and their complex interactions with who attended the college, who ran it, and who supported it.”

—ROGER L . GEIGER, AU T HOR OF A MER ICA N HIGHER EDUCAT ION SINCE WOR LD WA R II: A HISTORY “A College of Her Own gives us a deeply researched, vividly written, bracingly candid account. McCaughey shows how a small, chronically undercapitalized, mostly Protestant college for women came to leverage its affiliation with one of America’s greatest research universities and to embrace the religious, racial, and ethnic heterogeneity of its urban location to become the most selective women’s college in America.”

—ROSA LIND ROSENBERG, AU T HOR OF CH A NGING T HE SU BJECT: HOW T HE WOMEN OF COLU MBI A SH A PED T HE WAY W E T HINK A BOU T SE X A ND POLI T ICS

CO L U M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S / N E W YO R K c up.columbia.edu Printed in the U.S.A.