Passionate Commitments: The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins

Introduction

Introduction Your stuff is grand. I am, however, still working on a couple of pages of background. Really hopeful, however, of cleaning the subject up by Friday. You won’t mind if I use chunks out of your memo, but not many whole pages as such. . . . Oh, so very glad, that you are coming back so soon. Very eager to hear all the news you will have to tell. . . . Thou knowest that I love thee. Anna. —Anna Rochester to Grace Hutchins, July 26, 1939 Wish we’d had time for you to tell me more about your work on “The Nature of Capitalism ” and how much you found was involved in expanding some parts of it. You’ll tell me about it tomorrow night. . . . “Since we parted two hours ago” you are ten times dearer, 10 times sweeter, and all the rest of the song which I don’t quite remember but echo heartily. Never did anyone have such a grand and wonderful partner as you. . . . With all my love from Grace. —Grace Hutchins to Anna Rochester, October 8, 1945 In 1995, I came upon the papers of Anna Rochester (1880–1966) and Grace Hutchins (1885–1969) in the Special Collections at the University of Oregon. Filed among copious materials on the structures of capitalism and women in the labor force were eloquent expressions of devotion—letters, poems, notes—offering a glimpse of the forty-five year partnership of Rochester and Hutchins. I wanted to know more about these women, whose love for each other so clearly fueled their work to create a more egalitarian world. Archives are never able to deliver fully the individuals whose lives produced the welter of paper housed in a few boxes. Yet, at the same time, archives offer a different, perhaps more useful range of prospects, lying, as Penny Russell has argued, “at a point of interface between the subject and her world—a power-laden domain of imagination and experience, ideology and discourse, negotiation and agency.”1 It is this point of interface, or, rather, the many points of interface between Hutchins and Rochester and their worlds, that I sought to explore. Grace Hutchins and Anna Rochester came of age during the early twentieth century in well-connected East Coast families, both active suffragists and both eligible for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. Rochester, tall, reserved, a talented pianist, spoke and wrote in several languages and proved adept at theory and statistics . Hutchins, also tall, a basketball and field hockey player in her college years, exuded warmth, building families among those near her, shaping her feminism around women’s traditional and potential strengths and insisting upon women’s economic independence as the key to liberation. 1 2 INTRODUCTION Hutchins and Rochester both matriculated at Bryn Mawr, joining other young women from upper middle class homes who were attending the new women’s colleges. These colleges offered women hitherto unexplored opportunities for love and work. At the time, fully 50 percent of Bryn Mawr graduates did not marry; many formed partnerships among themselves,2 and success was measured by the public contributions students made after leaving the college. Hutchins was able to stay the full four years and graduate, later spending time in China as a missionary. Rochester left Bryn Mawr after her sophomore year in 1899 to care for her mother after her father’s sudden death. In 1904, however, Anna Rochester met Wellesley English professor Vida Dutton Scudder and her partner Florence Converse, who, recognizing her intellect and independence , began to mentor her and introduced her to the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross (SCHC), an Episcopal laywomen’s organization, offering her another opportunity to experience a community of thoughtful, committed women.3 At the Companions’ annual retreat in 1919, Rochester found Grace Hutchins, who by then was living in New York and teaching the New Testament at the New York Training School for Deaconesses. They would spend the rest of their lives together, determined to have an effect upon the world. Rochester and Hutchins were two among many women crafting new identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women who first separated from their families and then, independent of traditional expectations, lived in partnerships with each other. In her groundbreaking study Spinsters and Lesbians, Trisha Franzen notes that “in attempting an analysis or even a description of these women’s lifelong relationships, it is important to find the reasons they came together. If there...