Before They Could Vote: American Women's Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919

9. Selections from Her Journals (1874/78)

9 Selections from Her Journals (1874/78) M. Carey Thomas martha carey thomas (1857–1935) was born in Baltimore in 1857, the eldest of ten children. Her father was a physician and a preacher, and her mother was an active member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Called “Minnie” as a child, she later preferred that her first name be dropped. At seven, Thomas was severely burned by a lamp, and the family felt the accident and her recovery signaled that she would become an important figure. Thomas grew up an avid reader with an interest in women’s rights and increasing skepticism about religion. Her father opposed her wish to attend Cornell University, but with her mother’s support she graduated from Cornell in 1877. She did a year of graduate work at Johns Hopkins, where, as a woman, she could only have private tutoring. She then studied in Germany at the University of Leipzig but was required to sit separately from male students and was refused a doctoral degree. Thomas went on to the University of Zurich, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1882, the first woman to receive a PhD with such high honors. The next year, in a letter to the trustees (including her father) of the newly established 219 Bryn Mawr College, she nominated herself for its presidency. She was hired instead as dean and professor of English in 1884, the first dean of a women’s college to hold a PhD. In 1894 she became president and served in that capacity until retiring in 1922. Bryn Mawr was the first women’s college to have a graduate program and, under Thomas, the college established a progressive climate, admitting foreign exchange students, pioneering an innovative curriculum, and promoting freedom for its students and liberal hiring practices. Thomas also created the Summer School for Women Workers in Industry. Her love of architecture is evident in the beauty of campus buildings. A staunch supporter of women’s suffrage, Thomas left the National American Woman Suffrage Association (later the League of Women Voters) for the National Women’s Party, which adopted a more radical agenda that proposed an Equal Rights Amendment. She supported birth control, decried marriage, and sustained lifelong relationships with two women. Leila Rupp contrasts Thomas’s romantic friendship or “little love” with Mamie Gwinn, which both women considered a “marriage,” to the intense passion she shared with Mary Garrett, noting that Thomas had to arrange the two women’s alternating visits. For Rupp, Thomas is a woman who successfully bridged the nineteenth-century world of romantic friendship and the twentieth-century world of lesbian identities (90 and Ch. 4, passim). In 1891 Thomas, Garrett (who became a dean at Bryn Mawr), and Gwinn assembled a Women’s Fund for Johns Hopkins in exchange for an equal admissions policy to the Medical School. Like many intellectuals of her time, Thomas was a supporter of eugenics and the superiority of northern European “races,” beliefs that are now repudiated. Thomas wrote an entry for the American Peace Prize (to provide a U.S. plan to maintain global peace) that was published with the top twenty entries. In 1915 Garrett had bequeathed her wealth to Thomas, who, upon retiring, rented a villa on the French Riviera where she planned to write an autobiography. Instead, she devoted herself to adventurous world travel. After Thomas died on December 2, 1935, her letters and journals were stored for decades in four large trunks hidden on the Bryn Mawr campus. A fire led to their rediscovery, though it took Thomas’s last living executor, Millicent McIntosh, to release them officially to Bryn Mawr. In 1979 Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, who sorted out the collection, published an anthology of Thomas’s 220 m. carey thomas writings, The Making of a Feminist: Early Journals and Letters of M. Carey Thomas. The autobiographical sketch we include, drawn from this collection, suggests Thomas’s struggle to define a gendered identity and sexuality in conflict with the religious orthodoxy of her youth. While to date Thomas has not been critically considered as an autobiographical writer, in 1994 Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz published a biography of her. Early Journals I am beginning to look forward to another summer and to think that last summer we were everything to each other and now—but I am no different only may be able to understand more what sorrow means...