| Martha Carey Thomas | |
|---|---|
Martha Carey Thomas |
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| Born | January 2, 1857 Baltimore, Maryland |
| Died | December 2, 1935 (aged 78) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | Carey Thomas |
| Known for | Educator, suffragist, and second President of Bryn Mawr College |
Martha Carey Thomas (January 2, 1857-December 2, 1935) was an American educator, suffragist, and second President of Bryn Mawr College.
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Carey Thomas, as she preferred to be called, was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She was the daughter of James Carey Thomas and Mary Whitall Thomas. Her family included many prominent Quakers, including her uncle and aunt Robert Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith, and her cousins Alys Pearsall Smith (first wife of Bertrand Russell) and Mary Smith Berenson Costelloe (who married Bernard Berenson).
Growing up, Thomas was strongly influenced by the staunch feminism of her mother and her mother's sister Hannah Whitall Smith. Her father, a physician, was not completely happy with feminist ideas, but his daughter was fiercely independent and he supported her in all of her independent endeavors. Though both her parents were orthodox members of the Society of Friends, Thomas' education and European travel led her to question those beliefs and develop a love for music and theater, both of which were forbidden to Orthodox Quakers. This religious questioning led to friction with her mother.
Thomas initially attended a Society of Friends school in Baltimore, and then transferred to the Howland Institute, a Quaker boarding school near Ithaca, New York. It was here that a teacher influenced her to study education, rather than medicine. Thomas hoped to enter Cornell University to pursue further education, but met with her father's objections. After a great deal of pleading from both Thomas and her mother, her father relented.[1]
Thomas graduated from Cornell University in 1877. She did graduate work in Greek at Johns Hopkins University but withdrew because she was not permitted to attend classes.[1] She did further graduate work at the University of Leipzig, but that university did not grant degrees to women. She then went to the University of Zurich and earned a Ph.D. in linguistics, summa cum laude, in 1882 for her dissertation which was a philological analysis of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This dissertation continued to be highly regarded by specialists eighty years later.[1] She was the first woman and the first foreigner to receive such a doctorate from the university.[1] She then spent some time in Paris, where she attended lectures by Gaston Paris at the Sorbonne, and then went back home to the United States. Thomas did not pursue her degree out of love for her academic work, but rather out of a desire to show Americans that women had the same intellectual capacity as men.[1]
In 1884, Thomas became dean of the college and chair of English at the new Bryn Mawr College for women, of which her father was a trustee. She had written to the trustees in 1882 requesting that she be made president of the University, but they were concerned about her relative youth and lack of experience.[1] Thomas was the first female dean in the United States.
In 1885 Thomas, together with Mary Elizabeth Garrett, Mamie Gwinn, Elizabeth King, and Julia Rogers, founded The Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore Maryland. The school would produce well-educated young women who met the very high entrance standards of Bryn Mawr College.
Despite not receiving her desired role at Bryn Mawr, Thomas was active in the college's administration. According to the biographical dictionary Notable American Women: 1607-1950, by 1892 she was "acting president in all but name".[1] In 1894, the first president of the college, James Rhoads, retired, and Thomas was narrowly elected to succeed him. She was president until 1922 and remained as Dean until 1908.
During her tenure as president, Thomas' primary concern was upholding the highest standards of admissions and academic rigor. The entrance examinations for the college were made as difficult as those at Harvard University, and pupils could not gain admission by certificate. For the academic curriculum, Thomas emulated the "group system" of Johns Hopkins, in which students were required to take parallel courses in a logical sequence. Students could not freely choose electives. There were also other requirements, including a foreign language requirement that culminated in a sight translation examination proctored by Thomas herself. Overall, the academic curriculum at Bryn Mawr under Thomas shunned liberal arts education, preferring more traditional topics such as Greek, Latin, and mathematics.[1] Thomas was also instrumental in bringing several new buildings to the College, which introduced collegiate Gothic architecture to the United States.
In 1908, she became the first president of the National College Women's Equal Suffrage League. She was also a leading member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. After 1920 she advocated the policies of the National Woman's Party. She was one of the early promoters of an equal rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Thomas lived for many years in a relationship with Mamie Gwinn.[2] After Gwinn left Thomas in 1904 to marry (a love triangle fictionalized in Gertrude Stein's Fernhurst), Thomas started another relationship with Mary Garrett;[2] they shared the campus home, living together until Garrett's death. Miss Garrett, who had been prominent in suffrage work and a benefactor of Bryn Mawr, left to President Thomas $15,000,000 to be disposed of as she saw fit.
The inheritance of Garrett's money changed Thomas, leading to an erosion of her discipline. She spent the last two decades of her life traveling the world in luxury, including trips to India, the Sahara, and France. Thomas died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of a coronary occlusion. She had returned to the city to address Bryn Mawr College on the fiftieth anniversary of its founding. Her ashes were scattered on the Bryn Mawr College campus in the cloisters of the Thomas Library.[1]