"No Better Education": Helen Solomon at Wellesley College, 1901–1902

In 1901, Hannah Greenebaum Solomon and her husband sent Helen Solomon—their only daughter—from their home in Chicago, Illinois to spend her junior year at Wellesley College near Boston, Massachusetts.¹ The voluminous correspondence between this Midwestern Jewish daughter and her mother during the 1901–1902 academic year sheds a great deal of light on the ambivalent experiences of the Jewish students—fewer than one hundred every year—who attended the Seven Sisters, a predominantly Protestant group of women's colleges on the East Coast, at the beginning of the twentieth century.² Although Wellesley's Protestant foundations made it difficult for Helen to practice at college the form of Judaism she learned from her mother—a syncretic belief system drawn from radical Reform Judaism, universalism, and Progressivism—she overcame the limitations of this environment with diplomacy and humor to experience what she called "a perfectly beautiful year."³

Helen was the daughter of an extraordinary woman. A master coalition builder and agent for dramatic social change, Hannah Solomon was a celebrated figure even in her own lifetime. She led Jewish women in their transition from the noblesse oblige of the Gilded Age to the preventive philanthropy of the Progressive Era: from ladies' societies to women's clubs. She famously organized the Jewish Women's Congress of 1893 after standing up to the men who refused to put women on the Jewish program of the World Parliament of Religions.⁴ She and her sister were the first Jews to be admitted to the Chicago Woman's Club. As founder and president of the National Congress of Jewish Women (NCJW), she went on to represent Jewish women nationally and internationally, in Jewish and non-Jewish contexts.⁵ A congregant of perhaps the country's most radical Reform rabbi, Emil G. Hirsch, Hannah observed almost no Jewish ritual and saw Judaism not as a race or ethnicity but as a religion. Yet, in many other respects, she was a traditionalist. Adele Hast writes, "She [Hannah G. Solomon] called herself a 'confirmed woman's rightser'… but her perceptions of such rights were a mix of traditional and progressive approaches. For Solomon, the most desired role for a woman was as wife and mother."⁶ This duality was likely essential to Hannah's success.⁷ It was only as a traditional Jewish wife and mother that Hannah was able to garner political support for the radical advancement of Jewish women's rights for which she advocated. And indeed, it was probably Hannah's embrace of radical Reform Judaism that helped her daughter to succeed as a Jew in an elite Protestant institution.

As the daughter of a radical Reform Jewish celebrity, Helen was not exactly a typical Reform Jewish woman collegian. Yet in her letters home, she articulated many of the typical dilemmas faced by upper-class young Jewish women at elite private colleges at the turn of the twentieth century. How much should a Jewish student participate during Christian worship? How could she attend Jewish services? How openly could she respond in encounters with antisemitism? What was the proper role for women in society, and what was the purpose of a girl's education? A closer examination of Helen and Hannah Solomon's correspondence during this "perfectly beautiful year" offers us insight into the complicated position of upper-class Jewish women at the turn of the twentieth century, and into the conflicted demands of higher education during this era. Jewish parents encouraged their daughters to become a part of a Protestant elite world of culture and education, while at the same time urging them to preserve elements of Jewish identity in a Christian world that was indifferent or openly hostile to them. Upper-class Jewish women were encouraged to develop the skills that would make them effective organizers and even public figures, while still assuming that they would pursue a domestic future of marriage and motherhood. While scholars have written about the conflicts of Jewish girls and women during these Progressive years, and they have charted the ambivalent...