In the old days, the Christian Association was the stronghold of the dying Evangelicalism, and was looked on with distaste by many of the radical students; but of late years, its tone and its method have changed to meet the needs of the modern girl, and it has become a power throughout the college. The annual report for 1913-1914 shows a total membership of 1297. The association carries on Mission Study Classes; Bible Classes which the students teach, under the direction of volunteers from the faculty, in such subjects as "The Social Teachings of Jesus", "The Ideals of Israel's Leaders as Forces in Our Lives", "Christ in Everyday Life"; "General Aid" work, for girls who need to earn money in college. Its Social Committee is active among freshmen and new students. Of its special committees, the one on Conferences and Conventions plays an important part in quickening the interest in Silver Bay, and the one on "the College in Spain" presents the needs and claims of the International Institute for Girls at Madrid. Besides its regular meetings, the Christian Association now has charge of the Lenten services, and this effort to deepen the devotional life of the college has met with a swift response from the students. During 1913-1914, in Lent, the chapel was open every afternoon for meditation and prayer, and cards with selected prayers for each day were furnished to all who cared to use them. Unquestionably, Wellesley possesses no student organization more living and more life-giving than its Christian Association.
Four years after the foundation of the Christian Association, Wellesley had opened her heart and her mind to the College Settlement idea. The movement, as is well known, originated in the late '80's in America. At the same time that Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr were starting Hull House in Chicago, a group of Smith College alumnae, chief among whom were Vida D. Scudder, Clara French, Helen Rand (Thayer), and Jean Fine (Spahr), was pressing for the establishment of a house in the East. And the idea was understood and fostered by Wellesley about as soon as by Smith, for it was interpreted at Wellesley by Professor Scudder, who became a member of the college faculty, as instructor in English Literature, in the autumn of 1887. In 1889, the Courant printed an article on College Settlements, and students of the later '80's and early '90's will never forget the ardor and excitement of those days when Wellesley was bearing her part in starting what was to be one of the important movements for social service in the nineteenth century. All her early traditions and activities made the college swift to understand and welcome this new idea.
From the beginning, the social impulse has been inherent in Wellesley, and settlement work was native to her. Professor Whiting tells us that there used to be a shoe factory in Wellesley Village, about where the Eliot now stands; that the students became interested in the girl operatives, most of whom lived in South Natick, and that they started a factory girls' club which met every Saturday evening for years, and was led by college girls. In Charles River Village, also at that time a factory town, Mr. Durant held evangelistic services during one winter, and "teacher specials" used to help him, and to teach in the Sunday School.
In 1890-1891, probably because of the settlement impulse, work among the maids in the college was set going by the Christian Association. A maids' parlor was furnished under the old gymnasium, and classes for the maids were started.
In 1891, the Wellesley Chapter of the College Settlements Association was organized. It was Professor Katharine Lee Bates (Wellesley '80) who first suggested the plan for an intercollegiate organization, with chapters in the different colleges for women; and her friend Adaline Emerson (Thompson), a Wellesley graduate of the class of '80, was the first president of the association. Wellesley women have ever since taken a prominent part in the direction of the association's policy and in the active life of the settlement houses in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Wellesley has given presidents, secretaries, and many electors to the association itself, and head-workers and a continuous stream of efficient and devoted residents, not only to the four College Settlements, but to Social Settlement houses all over the country. The College Chapter keeps a special interest in the work of the Boston Settlement, Denison House; students give entertainments occasionally for the settlement neighbors, and help in many ways at Christmas time; but practical social service from undergraduates is not the ideal nor the desire of the College Settlements Association. It aims rather at the quickening of sympathy and intelligence on social questions, and the moral and financial support which the College Chapter can give its representatives out in the world. Such by-products of the settlement interest as the Social Study Circle, an informal group of undergraduates and teachers which met for several years to study social questions, are worth much more to the movement than the immature efforts of undergraduates in directing settlement clubs and classes.
Already the historic perspective is sufficiently clear for us to realize that the College Settlement Movement is the unique, and perhaps the most important organized contribution of the women's colleges to civilization during their first half century of existence. Through this movement, in which they have played so large a part, they have exerted an influence upon social thought and conscience exceeded, in this period, by few other agencies, religious, philanthropic or industrial, if we except the Trade-union Movement and Socialism, which emanate from the workers themselves. The prominent part which Wellesley has played in it will doubtless be increasingly understood and valued by her graduates.
IV.
Let it be frankly acknowledged: the ordinary adult is usually bored by the undergraduate periodical—even though he may, once upon a time, have edited it himself. The shades of the prison-house make a poor light for the Gothic print of adolescence. But the historian, if we may trust allegory, bears a torch. For him no chronicle, whether compiled by twelfth-century monk or twentieth-century collegian, can be too remote, too dull, to reflect the gleam. And some chronicles, like the Wellesley one, are more rewarding than others.
No one can turn over the pages of these fledgling journals, Courant, Prelude, Magazine, News, without being impressed by the unconscious clarity with which they reflect not merely the events in the college community—although they are unusually faithful and accurate recorders of events—but the college temper of mind, the range of ideas, the reaction to interests beyond the campus, the general trend of the intellectual and spiritual life.
The interest in social questions is to the fore astonishingly early. In Wellesley's first newspaper, the Courant, published in the college year 1888-1889, we find articles on the Working Girls of Boston, on the Single Tax, and notes of a prize essay on Child Labor. And throughout the decade of the '90's, the dominant note in the Prelude, 1889-1892, and its successor, the Wellesley Magazine, 1892-1911, is the social note. Reports of college events give prominent place to lectures on Woman Suffrage, Social Settlements, Christian Socialism. In 1893, William Clarke of the London Chronicle, a member of the Fabian Society, visiting America as a delegate to the Labor Congress in Chicago, gave lectures at Wellesley on "The Development of Socialism in England", "The Government of London", "The London Working Classes." Matthew Arnold's visit came too early to be recorded in the college paper, but he was perhaps the first of a notable list of distinguished Englishmen who have helped to quicken the interest of Wellesley students along social lines. Graham Wallas, Lowes-Dickinson, H. G. Wells, are a few of the names found in the pages of the Magazine and the News. The young editors evidently welcomed papers on social themes, such as "The Transition in the Industrial Status of Women, by Professor Coman"; and the great strikes of the decade, The Homestead Strike, the Pennsylvania Coal Strike, the New Bedford Strike, are written up as a matter of course. It is interesting to note that the paper on the Homestead Strike, with a plea for the unions, was written by an undergraduate, Mary K. Conyngton, who has since won for herself a reputation for research work in the Labor Bureau at Washington.