The Drunken Duchess of Vassar: Grace Harriet Macurdy, Pioneering Feminist Classical Scholar by Barbara McManus (review)

With The Drunken Duchess of Vassar: Grace Harriet Macurdy, Pioneering Feminist Classical Scholar, Barbara McManus makes a convincing case for the significance of Macurdy's work and provides an important contribution to the history of female academics in the United States. This well-researched biography traces Macurdy's remarkable trajectory from the one of nine children of a laborer, through her education as one of the first women to graduate from the Harvard Annex, to her decades of teaching Greek at Vassar while earning a PhD at Columbia and building an international reputation as a scholar. McManus, who was herself a Professor of Classics at the College of New Rochelle, brings insight into Macurdy's scholarship, particularly her research on women of the ancient world, her development as a teacher, and her ability to navigate nasty academic politics. Less clear is what drove Macurdy, both professionally and personally.

Divided into eleven chapters, the biography gets off to a slow start with a perhaps too-detailed account of Macurdy's ancestors. But by the second chapter, McManus begins to trace Macurdy's intellectual development, a compelling theme throughout the rest of the volume. Born in Maine in 1866, Macurdy moved to Watertown, Massachusetts with her family in 1870, where her father Angus hoped to improve his fortunes. While the family always struggled financially, Grace's mother Rebecca stressed the importance of education, ensuring all her children at least completed high school. Grace was the first in the family to complete the college preparatory course offered by Watertown High School. She passed the examination for the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women at Harvard, known as the Harvard Annex and later chartered as Radcliffe College, and began her studies in 1884, while living at home and finding ways to contribute to the family income. By the time she graduated, McManus explains, "Grace had developed a different sort of ambition from that of most of the women at the Annex. She was determined to win recognition as a classical scholar with a professional career like her Harvard mentors," despite having no female role models (27). The account of Macurdy's years in school sheds light the educational opportunities and curriculum available for intellectually engaged, ambitious female students in the 1870s and 1880s, but it hard not to wish for more information about what drove this young woman. What drew her to classical students and an academic career? Since Macurdy left few records from her time at Harvard, it is may be impossible to know, but a little more informed speculation would have been welcome.

Macurdy, who died in 1946, spent her career at Vassar, and McManus skillfully draws a portrait of her life as an academic, tracing her evolution as a teacher and as a scholar. Passages from reminiscences by Macurdy's students, including the novelist Mary McCarthy, create a lively sense of Macurdy in the classroom. A teetotaler, she earned the nickname the "Drunken Duchess" from her students for her habit of wearing elegant clothes in a slightly disheveled manner and her endless enthusiasm for the study of the classical world. McManus shows a light touch as she charts the growing tensions between Macurdy and Abby Leach, the chair of the Greek Department; while her sympathies clearly lie with Macurdy, McManus is able to depict the feud while showing the rationale which leads Leach to try to oust Macurdy from the Vassar faculty. She also uses the feud to highlight different paths available for women in academia at the time, as Leach dedicated herself to administrative work while Macurdy stayed true to her youthful vision of becoming a respected scholar of the classical world.

McManus's own background as a classicist helps her illuminate the significance of Macurdy's contributions to the field, and her analysis of Macurdy's work, and the motivations for it, are strengths of the book. After originally focusing...