The Story of Wellesley

by Florence Converse

And still another: "I have had more real pleasure from my Economics courses and Sociology courses than from any others of my college course. Had it not been for yourself and Miss Balch, that work would not have stood for so much. For your guidance and your inspiration I am most grateful. I have tried to carry out your ideals as far as possible in the Visiting Nurse work and the Social Settlement in Omaha ever since leaving Wellesley."

Professor Emily Greene Balch, who succeeded Miss Coman as head of the Department of Economics, is herself an authority on questions of immigration; her book, "Our Slavic Fellow Citizens", is an important contribution to the history of the subject, and has been cited in the German Reichstag as authoritative on Slavic immigration. She has also served on more than one State commission in Massachusetts,—among them the disinterested and competent City Planning Board,—and the sanity and judicial balance of her opinions are recognized and valued by conservatives and radicals alike. Besides the traditional courses in Economic History and Theory, Wellesley offers under Miss Balch a course in Socialism, a critical study of its main theories and political movements, open to juniors and seniors who have already completed two other courses in Economics; a course entitled "The Modern Labor Movement", in which special attention is given to labor legislation, factory inspection, and the organization of labor, with a study of methods of meeting the difficulties of the modern industrial situation; and a course in Immigration and the problems to which it gives rise in the United States.

The Wellesley fire did the college one good turn by bringing to the notice of the general public the departments of Science. When so many of the laboratories and so much of the equipment were swept away, outsiders became aware of the excellent work which was being done in those laboratories; of the modern work in Geology and Geography carried on not only in Wellesley but for the teachers of Boston by Professor Fisher who is so wisely developing the department which Professor Niles set on its firm foundation; of the work of Professor Robertson who is an authority on the bryozoa fauna of the Pacific coast of North America and Japan; of the authoritative work on the life history of Pinus, by Professor Ferguson of the Department of Botany; of the quiet, thorough, modern work for students in Physics and Chemistry and Astronomy.

An evidence of the excellent organization of departmental work at Wellesley is found in the ease and smoothness with which the Department of Hygiene, formerly the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, has become a force in the Wellesley curriculum under the direction of Miss Amy Morris Homans, who was also the head of the school in Boston. By a gradual process of adjustment, admission to the two years' course leading to a certificate in the Department of Hygiene "will be limited to applicants who are candidates for the B.A. degree at Wellesley College and to those who already hold the Bachelor's degree either from Wellesley College or from some other college." A five years' course is also offered, by which students may obtain both the B.A. degree and the certificate of the department. But all students, whether working for the certificate or not, must take a one-hour course in Hygiene in the freshman year, and two periods a week of practical gymnastic work in the freshman and sophomore years.

Like all American colleges, Wellesley makes heavy and constant demands on the mere pedagogic power of its teachers. Their days are pretty well filled with the classroom routine and the necessary and incessant social intercourse with the eager crowd of youth. It may be years before an American college for women can sustain and foster creative scholarship for its own sake, after the example of the European universities; but Wellesley is not ungenerous; the Sabbatical Grant gives certain heads of departments an opportunity for refreshment and personal work every seven years; and even those who do not profit by this privilege manage to keep their minds alive by outside work and contacts.

Every two years the secretary to the president issues a list of faculty publications, ranging from verse and short stories in the best magazines to papers in learned reviews for esoteric consumption only; from idyllic novels, such as Margaret Sherwood's "Daphne", and sympathetic travel sketches like Katharine Lee Bates's "Spanish Highways and Byways", to scholarly translations, such as Sophie Jewett's "Pearl" and Vida D. Scudder's "Letters of St. Catherine of Siena", and philosophical treatises, of which Mary Whiton Calkins's "Persistent Problems of Philosophy", translated into several languages, is a notable example.

But the Wellesley faculty is a public-spirited body; its contribution to the general life is not only abstract and literary; for many of its members are identified with modern movements toward better citizenship. Miss Balch, besides her work on municipal committees, is connected with the Woman's Trade Union League, and is interested in the great movement for peace. In the spring of 1915, she was one of those who sailed with Miss Jane Addams to attend the Woman's Peace Congress at the Hague, and she afterwards visited other European countries on a mission of peace. Miss Bates is active in promoting the interests of the International Institute in Spain. The American College for Girls in Constantinople often looks to Wellesley for teachers, and more than one Wellesley professor has given a Sabbatical year to the schoolgirls in Constantinople. During the absence of President Patrick, Professor Roxana Vivian of Wellesley was acting president, and had the honor of bringing the college safely through the perplexities and terrors of the Young Turks' Revolution in 1908 and 1909. Professor Kendall, of the Department of History, is Wellesley's most distinguished traveler. Her book, "A Wayfarer in China", tells the story of some of her travels, and she has received the rare honor, for a woman, of being made a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Miss Calkins is an officer of the Consumers' League. Miss Scudder has been identified from its outset with the College Settlements Movement, and of late years with the new service to Italian immigrants inaugurated by Denison House.

As a result of these varied interests, the intellectual fellowship among the older women in the college community is of a peculiarly stimulating quality, and the fact that it is almost exclusively a feminine fellowship does not affect its intellectuality. The Wellesley faculty, like the faculty of Harvard, is not a cloistered body, and contact with the minds of "a world of men" through books and the visitations of itinerant scholars is about as easy in the one case as in the other. Every year Wellesley has her share of distinguished visitors, American, European, and Oriental, scholars, poets, scientists, statesmen, who enrich her life and enlarge her spiritual vision.

III.

One chapter of Wellesley's history it is too soon to write: the story of the great names and great personalities, the spiritual stuff of which every college is built. This is the chapter on which the historians of men's colleges love best to dwell. But the women's lips and pens are fountains sealed, for a reticent hundred years—or possibly less, under pressure—with the seals of academic reserve, and historic perspective, and traditional modesty. Most of the women who had a hand in the making of Wellesley's first forty years are still alive. There's the rub. It would not hamper the journalist. But the historian has his conventions. One hundred years from now, what names, living to-day, will be written in Wellesley's golden book? Already they are written in many prophetic hearts. However, women can keep a secret.