Part 1 (1/2)
The Story of Wellesley
by Florence Converse
ALMA MATER
To Al
Thro' all her wealth of woods and water Let your happy voices ring; In every changing mood we love her, Love her towers and woods and lake; Oh, changeful sky, bend blue above her, Wake, ye birds, your chorus wake!
We'll sing her praises now and ever, Blessed fount of truth and love
Our heart's devotion, ive our lives and hopes to serve her, Huhest, noblest--all; A stainless name ill preserve her, Answer to her every call
Anne L Barrett, '86
PREFACE
The day after the Wellesley fire, an eager young reporter on a Boston paper caroup of Wellesley worief-stricken by the catastrophe which had befallen theht-hearted breathlessness so characteristic of young reporters in the plays of Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett He was charly in character, and he sent his voice out on the run to roup:
”Now tell me some pranks!” he cried, with pencil poised
What she did tell him need not be recorded here Neither was it set down in the courteous and sympathetic report which he afterwards wrote for his paper
And readers who come to this story of Wellesley for pranks will be disappointed likewise Not that the lighter side of the Wellesley life is oht revelry of the college year, belong to the story Wellesley would not be Wellesley if they were left out But her aluree that the college was not founded primarily for the sake of Tree Day, and that the Senior Play is not the goal of the year's endeavor
It is the story of the Wellesley her daughters and lovers know that I have tried to tell: the Wellesley of serious purpose, consecrated to the noble ideals of Christian Scholarshi+p
I am indebted for criticism, to President Pendleton who kindly read certain parts of the manuscript, to Professor Katharine Lee Bates, Professor Vida D Scudder, and Mrs Marian Pelton Guild; for historical material, to Miss Charlotte Howard Conant's ”Address Delivered in Mee Chapel”, February 18, 1906, to Mrs Louise McCoy North's Historical Address, delivered at Wellesley's quarter centennial, in June 1900, to Professor George Herbert Palmer's ”Life of Alice Freehton Mifflin Co, to Professor Margarethe Muller's ”Carla Wenckebach, Pioneer,” published by Ginn & Co; to Dean Waite, Miss Edith Souther Tufts, Professor Sarah F Whiting, Miss Louise Manning Hodgkins, Professor Emeritus Mary A Willcox, Mrs Mary Gilman Ahlers; to Miss Candace C Stimson, Miss Mary B
Jenkins, the Secretary of the Alumnae Restoration and Endow alumnae and faculty, whose letters and articles I quote Last but not least inand accurate chroniclers, the editors of the Wellesley Courant, Prelude, Magazine, News, and Legenda, whose labors went so far to lighten mine
FC
CHAPTER I
THE FOUNDER AND HIS IDEALS
I
As the nineteenth century recedes into history and the essentially roreat adventures is confireness” which illu, what the adventurers theher education of women was not the least ros, and that its relation to the greatest adventure of all, Democracy, was peculiarly vital and close
We know that the ” with perplexity and scornful ahters--or hters--to prove that the intellectual heritagetheory,of a procession of young wo eyes beheld the visions hitherto relegated by scriptural prerogative and ed conservatiseness he called queer That he should have nificance of the moveo and for several years thereafter, even as he is still nificance of other movements to-day Processions still pass hie, May Day, Labor Day, and those black days when the nationshe seenificance But after a long while the hters go to college as a ed them the opportunity
They remind hi the benevolence, the intellectual acumen, the idealism of the few men, exceptional in their day, who saw eye to eye with Mary Lyon and her kind; the an, who founded Vassar and Wellesley and Bryn Mawr, and so helped to organize the procession Their re to take forer, for achieveate of opportunity on the crack, and we pack more into a half century than we used to And women, more obviously than men, perhaps, have ”speeded up” in response to the de social, political, industrial, and above all, educational lines, since the first woe was founded, is not inconsiderable
How much, or how little, would have been accomplished, industrially, socially, and politically, without that first woisters, with their statistics concerning the occupations of graduates, are suggestive reading
How little would have been accomplished educationally for woine: Vassar, Wellesley, Sht visions, the fullness of life that they connote to A,--blotted out; coeducational institutions harassed by nuislation to keep out the women; man still the almoner of education, and wo probabilities the woes save us to-day This is what constitutes their negative value to education