To Believe in Women by Lillian Faderman

Author:Lillian Faderman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

Mary Woolley’s resistance to the imposition of gender conformity on all females was rooted in her personal experiences. She recognized early that she herself was best fitted for a life outside of conventional nineteenth-century womanhood. She worked for a few years as a teacher at Wheaton Seminary before deciding that she wanted a serious college education. The option of getting married seems never to have occurred to her, since she apparently never had significant heterosexual interests. Like her principal at Wheaton Seminary, Ellen Stanton, whose lifelong companion was Clara Pike, a science teacher and Stanton’s administrative assistant, Mary Woolley had intimate relationships only with other women.

Did Wooley enroll as the first female student at Brown University in 1891 because she realized that she had no desire to marry and thus needed a career so that she would not have to marry? As a pioneering coed at Brown, she had to endure the disdain of the male students for “those coldly intellectual females—those prospective old maid doctors and lawyers,” as one male student described them in an 1895 editorial for the student newspaper. “I don’t admire a manly woman or a womanly man,” the annoyed young man concluded. Woolley took such hostility in stride. She coached the five women who eventually became her classmates “not to ‘seem to notice’” the male students, to look straight ahead when they had to walk across the campus, to attend to the business of scholarship only. She and another woman were the first females to graduate from Brown, where Woolley, the daughter of a minister, majored in theology.

In the autumn of 1895, having received a master’s degree, Woolley accepted an appointment in biblical history and literature at Wellesley College. Her rise was meteoric. The following year she was promoted to associate professor, and in 1899 she became the head of the department of biblical history and literature at Wellesley. Before that year was over, Woolley was offered the presidency of Mount Holyoke College. By all accounts, her rapid advancement was inevitable in the pioneering days of women’s leadership in higher education. As the Springfield Republican described her on the eve of her election to the presidency, she was tall, with “a good figure, a[n] . . . intelligent face, a bright manner, and a firm but sympathetic mouth,” and seemingly she was “an earnest Christian woman” to boot.

Unlike M. Carey Thomas, who could be abrasive and brash, Mary Woolley was generally seen to be wise, lair, and judicious. She had a melodious voice that captivated her listeners. She had also the knack of seeming utterly interested in the person before her, whether it was a freshman to whom she spoke at a tea, a prospective donor to the college, or a visiting clergyman droning through the Sunday sermon in the Mount Holyoke chapel. Her ability to learn the name of every student at Mount Holyoke—and remember it years later during a chance encounter—was legendary. Though her thirty-six-year career at Mount Holyoke did not end happily, during the greater part of her presidency she was loved and venerated by students and faculty alike.

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