Martha Carey Thomas  (1857 - 1935)

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The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (Women in American History) by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

As an adolescent, M. Carey Thomas decried the inequity that denied American women an education comparable to that offered American men. The future president of Bryn Mawr kept her sense of that injustice as she gained a Ph.D. in Europe and thereafter set the higher education of women on an irreversible upward course. Lacking both the reticence of the 1979 edition of Thomas' early journals and letters (The Making of a Feminist) and the acrimony of Gertrude Stein's fictionalized depiction of Thomas in Fernhurst, Horowitz's study of this complex, determined woman who was a freethinker, a leader in the women's suffrage movement, and an "impassioned lover whose lovers were women" is a full-scale biography. It is a life which, moreover, does not fail to convey an understanding of Thomas' unique contribution to American education, especially in her early books on women's colleges (Alma Mater) and undergraduate culture (Campus Life). Regard Horowitz's effort as a cornerstone for education and women's studies collections--and thoroughly readable to boot. Marie Kuda

Martha Carey Thomas Biography

From Gaygate.com

Excerpt:

Martha Carey Thomas was born of wealthy parents on January 2, 1857, in Baltimore, Maryland. Even as a child, she had a clear vision of herself that was at odds with the self society expected from her: "I ain't going to get married and I don't want to teach school. I can't imagine anything worse than living a regular young lady's life," she is reported to have said. After attending a Quaker boarding school for girls, she went on to college--over her father's objections. It was fine, he argued, for middle class girls to go to college but improper for wealthy ones. Thomas earned her B.A. from Cornell in 1877. Her attempt to do graduate work at Johns Hopkins, however, was rebuffed when she was barred access to the classrooms. Undeterred, she and her "devoted companion" Mamie Gwinn went to Europe, and in 1882 Thomas was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Zyrich. Returning with Gwinn to the United States, Thomas became the Dean of English at the newly founded college of Bryn Mawr. In the meantime, a wealthy philanthropist named Mary Garrett had fallen in love with Thomas. She promised to give millions to the college if Thomas became its president, and so in 1894 , at the age of 37, Thomas was appointed Bryn Mawr's second president. She remained in that post for the next 28 years. How Thomas managed to balance the competing attentions of Gwinn and Garret is evidenced by an account left us by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who visited Thomas in 1896: "[Thomas] had immense energy, a belief in culture which she carried out with a businessman's efficiency, and a profound contempt for the male sex..... At Bryn Mawr she was Zeus, and everybody trembled before her. She lived with a friend, Miss Gwinn, who was in most respects the opposite of her....

By Joelle Gail Novey

Excerpt:

"There is so much opposition," an eighteen-year-old M. Carey Thomas wrote in her journal with frustration, "to the only thing I care for it is so impossible to get the highest culture by one's self, and I have to see thousands of boys enjoying and often throwing away the chances I would give anything for."[1] It was not the first nor the last occasion on which Thomas would feel this discrepancy acutely and painfully.

From the mid-nineteenth century, when Martha Carey Thomas was born, until her death in 1935, American reality did not meet her vision of the ideal America. A woman unique in her era in determination and commitment to education, she spent her life in pursuit of this vision. The most salient conflict between Thomas' vision and the America of her era involved the role of women. In this area she was progressive, in the sense that her views presage later changes in American society. Thomas' famous work as president of Bryn Mawr College and as a founder both of the Bryn Mawr School and of the Johns Hopkins Medical School was a significant force in moving America closer to her vision. Earlier, her unprecedented doctoral degree at the University at Zurich had been in itself a contribution to the American women's movement. Though America did not become the place she envisioned during her lifetime, the institutional legacies and models Thomas helped create were partially responsible for the significant changes in America that were to take place decades later. Today, Thomas' vision has largely become a reality for American women...

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