CAROLA WOERISHOFFER, HER LIFE AND WORK
Bryn Mawr College, Class of 1907. 137 pp.
“The large, outgiving life” is a graphic phrase used by the biographer of Ellen H. Richards in introducing the story of her sixty-eight well-spent years. Mrs. Richards was a woman in whose nature the quality of acquisitiveness seems almost to have been omitted. She gave boundlessly of herself to individuals and to the common welfare. Her thoughtfulness for friends and associates and her notable public services were intrinsic forms of self-expression. Apparently, she was incapable of a perfunctory act. Her letters to friends, the gift for the coming baby, the “treat” for the girl student away from home for the first time, the pot of flowers sent to a new neighbor, her letters to “correspondence” students, her analysis of the water supply of the state of Massachusetts, her leadership in the home economics movement—all these things, from the least to the most important, were but the sincere expressions of her outpouring spirit.
Her impulse for service was re-enforced by a remarkable talent for administration. It was this which made possible the extraordinary generosity of her life. It was scientifically managed from the start. At the height of her career, as Miss Hunt remarks, Mrs. Richards was doing the work of ten people. Even as a little girl, Ellen Swallow had shown her capacity to carry on a triple career by helping her mother at home and her father in the “general store,” besides doing the lessons proper for a little girl. Later she combined teaching with housekeeping and storekeeping and helped to earn the money with which she went to college. During the greater part of her two years at Vassar, she supported herself by tutoring. From this time on, as student in the Boston Institute of Technology and subsequently as instructor, Mrs. Richards was steadily increasing the range of her energies and activities. The history of her life is the history of the inauguration of many social and scientific movements.
As a leader, she united to a marked degree the qualities of pioneer and conservator. To have been the first woman to enter the Institute of Technology and to have opened the way for other women was for her a life-long satisfaction. She was never weary in fighting the battle for the higher education of women. But she had also a strong instinct for sustaining the victory so hardly won. This is illustrated by a reproachful letter which she wrote to a woman friend, a college professor, who had fainted. “Take beef three times a day for a fortnight to tone yourself up,” she wrote, “and don’t do it again. It is fully as important to keep in physical condition as to have a mental grasp. Nowadays the last card they can trump up against us is that we are not physically equal to what we try to do. The more prominent we are the more closely they watch us. Just now, too, when so much is in the air against woman’s education.”
The volume is issued as a memorial and was prepared with the co-operation of Professor Richards and a committee of Mrs. Richards’ friends representing her various interests.
At the age of twenty-five, Ellen Swallow was just pulling herself free from the narrow life of a New England village and starting off to Vassar College. At the same age, Carola Woerishoffer, thanks to a more favorable environment and a more enlightened generation, had finished her college course and entered upon a well-established career of social service. When her gallant and useful life came to a tragical end in an automobile accident at this same age, she had already accomplished much that was worth recording.
A picture of her life and personality is given in a small memorial volume, which consists chiefly of a series of addresses made by personal friends at a meeting held in Greenwich House shortly after her death. In the descriptions of her friends, the girl’s devotion to athletics, her spirit of comradeship, her strong-willed nature, her democratic instincts, her German fondness for thoroughness and hatred of dilettantism, and her sense of social responsibility as the possessor of wealth are the qualities which are made to stand out as most representative of her.
The spirit in which her social work was done was thus described by one of the speakers: “She and another young woman, Elizabeth Butler, who also did immeasurably hard things and who also left us forever this summer—they undertook so simply the things that to us of my generation seemed a moral adventure, a wonderful undertaking,—these young women took them in such a matter-of-fact way. It did not seem to Carola an adventure to go into laundries any more than it did to Elizabeth Butler to go into the depths of blackest Pittsburgh. The things were there, and we had to know about them, and it was all matter-of-fact, just as it would have been for an able-bodied man to go and look at things and come back and tell the world what it bitterly needs to know about them. It was all matter-of-fact for them, and I believe they are forerunners of new generations of women who will insist in their youth on knowing life as it is, on facing the world clear-eyed and changing these things which we of my generation, in our youth, shirked and preferred not to know.”
Katharine Anthony.