In February 1945, President Franklin
Roosevelt appointed Dean Gildersleeve to the United States delegation to the San Francisco
Conference charged with writing the Charter of the United Nations. She was the only
scholar and the only woman named to
the delegation. Barnard students were thrilled. As the president of the Senior Class,
Sabra Follett, exclaimed at a dinner honoring Dean Gildersleeve before her departure:
All twelve hundred of us [Barnard students] are ready to pack at an instant's notice, in case our Dean should need any assistance. We're not really conceited enough to think that she might need our intellectual assistance, or our advice on international matters. But we'd be ever so helpful with the bags, and porters are scarce these days. And then too, we hope that a Dean without a college is as lost as this particular college will be without its Dean. We are bursting with pride. . . .2
So were many women. The San Francisco conference fulfilled a dream dating back to at least 1915, when the suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt organized the international Woman's Peace Party. Peace was not exclusively a woman's issue, by any means, but it was an issue to which a large number of highly educated, reform-minded women had dedicated much of their lives. One of these women was Dean Gildersleeve, who, at the same time as she was carrying out her BarnBornard College responsibilities, was a member of the Inter-American Commission of Women, the International Federation of University Women, the Institute of International Education, and the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace.3
Virginia Gildersleeve brought to San Francisco not only the hopes of her generation, but also the experience of four decades as the leader of Barnard College. That experience shaped the contribution she made, and its history deserves more attention than it has yet received. Gildersleeve's career is little known, I believe, because scholars brought up in the iconoclastic spirit of modem feminism have seen little of interest in a woman who appears at first blush remote, imperious, even snobbish. How could she possibly compete for the historian's attention against such rivals as the fiery anarchist Emma Goldman, the impassioned birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, or the militant suffragist Alice Paul? But there was more to this collegiate pioneer and internationalist than first meets the eye. Through the contributions she made to women's education and international relations, she helped define what it meant to be a feminist in the early twentieth century.
The term feminism first came into general use in America in the years before World War I. Those who embraced the feminist label were, for the most part, younger women who felt alienated from the mainstream woman's movement of their time. They objected to the rhetoric of older leaders who were always talking about how women were more moral, less selfish -in short-better than men. Feminists were tired of hearing about women's moral rectitude and wanted to talk about women's rights. They thought that women should take their place in the world not because they were superior to men but rather because they were fundamentally the same. Like men they wanted careers, and they wanted power. Virginia Gildersleeve was one of them.
Born in 1877 to well-to-do Episcopalians in New York City, Gildersleeve grew up in a town house on West 48th Street, near Fifth Avenue, and prepared for college at the Brearley School. Upon graduation she thought of attending Bryn Mawr, but her mother preferred that she stay closer to home, so she enrolled at Barnard, the little college that had just opened its doors a couple of blocks away on Madison Avenue. After college, Gildersleeve stayed on at Columbia to take a Ph.D. in English and to begin teaching at her alma mater in its elegant new quarters way uptown on Morningside Heights, opposite the newly relocated university. Continuing to live at home with her parents, she commuted each day to her job, even after Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler appointed her dean of Barnard in 1911.4
When Gildersleeve took over the stewardship of Barnard College, the woman's movement was in full flower and both parents and trustees were anxious about the movement's possible corrupting effects on young women Dean Gildersleeve had barely settled into her new office when the distraught mother of one student arrived at her door. The mother implored her to forbid Barnard students from participating in a planned suffrage parade down Fifth Avenue. To "march in a parade would be a shocking and shameful thing" for the students to do and would "injure the college greatly," the distressed mother warned.5 Nor was this mother alone in opposing student support for women's suffrage.
At Vassar College the administrators so feared adverse publicity should their students become involved in the unladylike world of political activism that student supporters of the suffrage movement had to hold organizational meetings in the local graveyard to avoid detection. And at Barnard itself, members of the Board of Trustees opposed Barnard students having anything to do with women's suffrage.6
Foremost among these opponents was Annie Nathan Meyer, a founder of the college and a member of the Board. Although Meyer had challenged convention by seeking admission to Columbia many years before, and then, when rebuffed, by mounting a campaign to open Barnard, she drew the line at demanding a place for women in the political world - a world that she and many others at the time regarded as too sordid for a refined woman.7
Despite Meyer's outspoken views,
Gildersleeve refused to interfere with student suffragists; indeed, she encouraged faculty
and students to engage freely, not only in the fight for suffrage, but in all the
political movements of the day. In contrast to Vassar, with its ban on all suffrage
activity, Gildersleeve's Barnard had an openly acknowledged Socialist League. And in the
area of campus once known as the jungle (where Lehman Library now stands), many a stump
speaker defended a controversial cause.8
Gildersleeve not only allowed students and faculty to become politically active, she took
positive steps to enlarge that activity. Faced with Annie Nathan Meyer's steadfast
opposition to suffrage and political activism among students, Gildersleeve felt
constrained to move cautiously, but she saw an important opportunity to act when the
Columbia School of Journalism offered to admit any Barnard student who had taken a course
in government. Barnard did not at that time offer such preparation, government being a
subject thought suitable only for the male students at Columbia. But taking advantage of
the Board of Trustees' desire to win admission for Barnard women to Columbia professional
schools whenever possible, Gildersleeve quietly hired a young Columbia instructor in 1914
to teach Barnard's first course in political science. The young man was Charles Beard, and
his wife, Mary, was one of the city's leading young reformers. Barnard was never the same
again.9
Victory in the matter of political science encouraged Gildersleeve in her ambition on behalf of her students. She was determined to open to them all the resources of the university - from the graduate to the professional schools-and, through them, all the opportunities of the wider world. At a time in which women counted for fewer than one in five faculty members, fewer than one in twenty doctors, and fewer than one in one hundred lawyers, the possibility of gaining full access to these opportunities must have seemed, at best, remote.
But Gildersleeve was determined, and she saw a chance to press her case in 1915, when the Columbia Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa asked her to address them at their annual convocation. She was, I believe, the first woman to do so. In welcoming her as that year's speaker, Professor Harold Webb of the Columbia physics department sent her a list of the subjects of prior addresses to serve as a guide. These subjects included "Competition in College," "New Humanities for Old," and, most recently, "The College Man's Opportunity in Public Life."10
Having reviewed these titles, Dean Gildersleeve selected her own: "Some Guides for Feminine Energy." Gildersleeve's address was a genteel, but nonetheless Clear, declaration of war on the male-led university. She began by pointing out that 1915 was not only the year of the Great War in Europe, but that it was also the year of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Barnard's founding. And, therefore, she declared, "Speaking as a representative of a feminine college on a feminine anniversary, I feel committed to a feminine subject, and for this I crave your indulgence."11
Politely, no doubt, her largely male audience listened as she took up her theme of female energy. As most of her listeners would have been aware, she was playing with an idea that had long plagued women scholars in America. Back in 1873, Dr. Edward Clarke of the Harvard Medical School had published a book in which he claimed that the higher education of women would kill off the middle class. Basing his dark prophecy on a view, widely held among physicians at the time, that the body is a closed energy system, he explained that energy available for one task-the development of a woman's mind-would not be available for another-the development of a woman's reproductive organs. In short, the mental strain of higher education would inevitably render women students infertile.
The prospect of infertility raised, in turn, the specter of "race suicide," which was the belief that middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants were marching toward extinction as a consequence of their declining birth rate. According to President Theodore Roosevelt, there would soon not be enough sons to go to Harvard.
Angry, but undaunted, talented young women had been flooding the colleges ever since, distinguishing themselves academically and, in due course, maternally. Concern about the limits of feminine energy lingered, however, especially in the minds of male academics. Could women really be expected to excel academically, given the reproductive and domestic demands on their energies? This was the question that Dean Gildersleeve was implicitly addressing in her speech.
And her answer was a simple yes; women had plenty of energy; indeed, their energy sought new outlets, since the technological change of the previous generation had removed the great bulk of domestic work from the home. A learned woman could read by an electric light, rather than having to devote winter afternoons to making candies. A learned woman could even, with a clear conscience, abjure motherhood, now that improved public health and declining infant mortality made it unnecessary to breed as many children as once had been the case. In the modem world, women could have the same ambitions as men.
Having laid down the gauntlet in her Phi Beta Kappa address, Gildersleeve began to move on several fronts: scheming first to broaden opportunities in the scholarly disciplines, second to open the medical schools and law schools to women, and third to create broader opportunities in the world.
Her first opportunity came as a direct result of World War 1. To the dismay of Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler, many Columbia faculty not only opposed the war but said so publicly. He fired several of them, but he hesitated about firing the head of his anthropology department, Franz Boas. Professor Boas was a German Jewish immigrant and a Socialist. On account of his native roots and his politics, he objected to the war. His views distressed Butler, but Boas was the most famous anthropologist of his time and he was nearing retirement. Perhaps, Butler hoped, there might be some way out, a solution that would protect impressionable Columbia undergraduates from Boas's antiwar views, without forcing Butler to sacrifice his world-renowned graduate department of anthropology.
Gildersleeve saw her chance and worked out the following agreement: She would hire Boas to teach Barnard undergraduates, and Boas would confine his teaching Columbia to the older and less impressionable graduate students. Far from resenting his exile Barnard, Boas once remarked that he rather appreciated having had the opportunity to make the move, because he found the Barnard students to far and away the best he had ever taught. In due course he would find several of the century's most outstanding anthropologists among them, including Margaret Mead.12
At the same time that Gildersleeve was scheming to open anthropology to her students, she was also approaching the medical school. She made the medical school dean two promises. She would raise $50,000 dollars for his new school, and she would offer him female applicants guaranteed to graduate the top of their medical school class. She made go( on both promises. Aided by the American Women's Medical Association, she raised the $50,000 by the promised date of 1917, and Columbia's first women medical students (handpicked by Gildersleeve) graduated first, third, and fifth in their medical school class four years later.13
Gildersleeve's goal of opening Columbia Law School to women proved more difficult to achieve. Columbia law professors explained privately that if they admitted women students, their best male students would all move to Harvard. Momentarily stumped, Gildersleeve wondered whether similar concerns plagued the faculty at Harvard, and she decided to find out by going there and asking them. As she later recalled thinking, "if, when I inquire why they don't admit women, they say it is because if we did our best students would go to Columbia, then I can try to persuade both schools to hold hands and take the dangerous step together. In that case neither would be injured." 14
Gildersleeve failed at Harvard, but she finally succeeded at Columbia. The effort entailed ten years of lobbying on her part and on the part of her faculty - ten years of patiently but repeatedly asking the Law School to explain, once again, why qualified women should not be admitted to their school. Finally, in 1927, the Law School relented and opened its doors to women students. Harvard did not do so until 1950.15
Having breached the barriers set up by Columbia's professional schools, Gildersleeve set her sights on more distant challenges-creating opportunities for women in the wider world. She made some notable gains in the 1920s, helping students to find jobs in retailing, journalism, publishing, social work, and academe. But there were limits to what she could do. Opportunities in much of the business world remained scarce and in science they were all but closed. The Depression just made matters worse.
And then came World War II - a terrible event, to be sure, but an opportunity to be exploited for women as far as Barnard's single-minded dean was concerned. To Gildersleeve, the war gave women a chance to assume greater responsibility in the world in three ways: first, in finally gaining access to positions in science; second, in gaining entry to the military; and, finally, by claiming the right to shape the postwar world.
Scholars have written a great deal in the past two decades on the importance of World War 11 in opening up jobs in war industries to women; this was the era of Rosie the Riveter. Much more important in the long run, though, was the chance created by the war to open science to women. Predictably, Dean Gildersleeve played an important role in that effort. In articles, radio broadcasts, and speeches she hammered away at her favorite wartime theme: To win the war the nation needed highly trained scientists; to have enough scientists, the country would have to turn to its women.16
Gildersleeve did everything that she could to keep her students in school, to dissuade them from quitting to take a job in a factory-no matter how glamorous wartime propaganda made the job seem. She also did everything she could to keep from losing her students to marriage. She seems to have accepted the fact that, given the wartime pressures, marriage to departing soldiers would occur; she simply drew the line at students following their new husbands to wherever they might be sent. In her view, young wives were far better off at Barnard completing their education than they were staying near some military camp on the other side of the country.17
The war offered Barnard an unprecedented chance to turn out physicists, chemists, and mathematicians who could have their pick of good jobs. Gildersleeve was aware of the Manhattan Project across the street at Columbia and the fact that women were being hired to work on it. She knew that there was a crying need for engineers, and she used this knowledge to win women admission, finally, to Columbia's School of Engineering." She saw to it that one of the country's foremost code-breaking programs was housed at Barnard. She found jobs for anthropologists with the Army and Navy, which were desperately seeking specialists who could advise their aviators on how to get along with the peoples of the South Pacific. She established one of the country's first programs in international relations to prepare women for the foreign service. She set up the country's first program in American Studies, so that her students would understand the cultural values for which the country was fighting. And last but not least, she won a place for women in the armed forces by helping to found the WAVES, the Navy's female reserve officers' corps.
The WAVES, under Gildersleeve's leadership, became a military branch of the Seven Sisters. Gildersleeve served as President of its advisory board. Its highest-ranking officer was the much younger President of Wellesley, Mildred McAfee; its second in command was Gildersleeve's companion, English Professor Elizabeth Reynard; and all of its members - 90,000 in all-were college graduates.19
Gildersleeve had no illusions about what would happen to these opportunities after the war: They would shrink, perhaps even disappear. But, she insisted, where opportunity remained, her students were going to have as big a competitive advantage as she and the educational resources at her command could assure. More than a decade before the National Manpower Council was to publish its pathbreaking study, Wornanpower, on the need to train women in America for science, Gildersleeve was leading the way.
The opportunity to build on the accomplishments of the war came in February 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt named Gildersleeve to the U.S. delegation to write the United Nations Charter. Shortly before Gildersleeve was to leave for San Francisco, a celebration was held in her honor at the Commodore Hotel. There she was feted by, among others, William Allan Neilson, past president of Smith College, who noted that Gildersleeve's appointment gave recognition to two important facts: first, the increasing importance of acadedmically trained experts in politics, and, second, the increasing influence of women in world affairs. Neilson regretted that Gildersleeve would be the only woman on the U.S. delegation, "but that will not matter," he concluded, "if only the men will listen."20
When the delegates from around the world assembled in San Francisco a couple of months later, they accepted the instructions worked out for them the previous year at Dumbarton Oaks, outside Washington, D.C., and reaffirmed at Yalta in February. They were instructed to write a Charter that addressed two issues. The first was the need to prevent future wars. This they were to accomplish through the creation of a Security Council. The second issue was the need to enhance human welfare, which they were to accomplish through the establishment of an Economic and Social Council. Gildersleeve sought and received drafting responsibility for the work of this second Council-the one, as she put it, in charge of doing things rather than preventing things from being done.
What did Gildersleeve accomplish? By her own account she was able to insert into the Charter's statement of purpose the following goals for people around the world: "higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development." She also persuaded the delegates to adopt the following aim for the United Nations: "universal respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion."21
These were goals she endorsed not only for their importance to the enhancement of human welfare, but also because she saw them as providing job opportunities for all the women who had been training to be health professionals, research scientists, lawyers, teachers, and social workers. She was advocating nothing less than an international Works Progress Administration for educated women.
To carry out its work, the Council was given the power to appoint whatever commissions it deemed necessary, but Gildersleeve insisted that the Charter require the appointment of one in particular: the Commission on Human Rights. This was the commission that, under the direction of Eleanor Roosevelt, would write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights three years later. This declaration, in turn, has served as the basis for all of the United Nations' work on behalf of women throughout the world over the past two generations.22
When Gildersleeve began her academic career at the turn of the twentieth century, American women had barely established a toehold in higher education, and that toehold was by no means secure. By insisting that women could succeed at the very pinnacle of academic and professional life, she swam against powerful currents of public prejudice. Many parents sent their daughters to women's colleges like Barnard with the expectation that they would be sheltered from such corrupting influences as feminist ideas. But Gildersleeve did not see herself as a surrogate mother. She aspired to be a leader of a new generation of American womenwomen who deserved to be prepared for every opportunity that they might be able to claim.
Through her work, Gildersleeve and other pioneers like her provided the essential conditions necessary to winning for women full equality with men in American society and throughout the world. In gaining for women access to medical school, she began to change the face of American, and later world, health care. In gaining for women access to law school, she opened the way for full participation in politics, a calling for which a law degree, if not essential, has nonetheless become the single most important qualification. In broadening women's scholarly horizons, Gildersleeve laid the groundwork for some of the most innovative scholarship of the twentieth century. And in helping to draft the Charter of the United Nations, Gildersleeve assured that the issues to which she had devoted her career on Momingside Heights would be addressed throughout the world in the decades that followed.
Gildersleeve's achievements were
significant, but she was not without serious flaws. Though she was dean of a college
founded by, among others, prominent New York Jews, she welcomed Jewish students and
faculty only so long as they were thoroughly assimilated, and she included African
Americans only so long as they were well spoken and did not ask to live in the
dormitories.
But having conceded that this was a flawed pioneer, I believe that her scholarly vision
and her dedication to basic feminist and humanitarian principles deserves our respect. By
insisting that women have the right to every educational opportunity open to men, and by
fighting her whole life to secure that opportunity, she helped establish the bedrock on
which the United Nations' Fourth World Congress on Women will build when leaders from
around the world gather in Beijing to discuss the problems that continue to face women
today.
It gives me special pleasure to share with
those who were here at the end of Dean Gildersleeve's career these reflections on her
intellectual and institutional legacy to us all.
Rosalind Rosenberg is the chair of Barnard's history department.
TALK WITH ROSALIND ROSENBERG
BARNARD MAGAZINE: Why has Gildersleeve failed to attract historians?
PROFESSOR ROSENBERG: I think that for my generation of historians-the ones that have
written women's history for the last twenty years-the concerns have really lain elsewhere:
in the history of suffrage, of sexuality, of birth control, etc. The trouble is with the
history of women's higher education in general. It seems so middle class, so elite. It
doesn't appeal to generations out of the sixties so historians have been slow to turn to
it.
Also, I think Gildersleeve has seemed a particularly remote figure among those in higher
education, in part because she was so involved outside of the college in international
affairs. It doesn't reflect well on my generation of women's historians, but we reacted
strongly to the "old" ways of doing history and so did very little history on
war, international relations, or any of the other fields traditionally dominated by men.
BARNARD MAGAZINE: What surprised you the most about Dean Gildersleeve once you began your
research?
PROFESSOR ROSENBERG: I was most surprised by how important she was in gaining access for
women students to the larger university. I was also surprised by how important she really
was in the creation of the United Nations.
Caroline Niemczyk. a Columbia graduate student working with Professor Rosenberg toward
the completion of a dissertation on Gildersleeve, is seeking remembrances of Gildersleeve.
Write to her at 305 McLaine St. Bedford Hills, NY 10507, or call (914) 666-0373.
1 I wish to thank Barnard Archivist Jane Lowenthal for her invaluable assistance in preparing the talk. Thanks also to the wonderful alumnae who attended this talk and spoke afterwards about their own memories of Virginia Gildersleeve.
2 Remarks of Sabra Follett at dinner honoring Dean Virginia Gildersleeve, March 11, 1945, Barnard Archives.
3 Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992) 71.
4 "'Virginia Cocheron Gildersleeve," Woman's Who's Who of America, edited by John William Leonard, 1914-1915, p. 326.
5 Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade: Memoirs of Virginia Cocheron Gildersleeve (New York: Macmillian, 1954) 71.
6 Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) 112-113.
7 Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade, 99.
8 Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Knopf, 1984) 255.
9 Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade, 99.
10 Harold Webb to Virginia Gildersleeve, April 19,1915, Gildersleeve Papers, Barnard College Archives.
11 Virginia Gildersleeve, "Some Guides for Feminine Energy," Columbia University Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 4 (September 1915): 363.
12 Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982) 213-214.
13 Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade, I00 - 101.
14 Gildersleeve, 102.
15 Gildersleeve, 103.
16 Virginia Gildersleeve, "The Shortage of Trained Brains," February 1942; "Training Women for War Work Professional Level: Statement for the Manpower Commission," December 11, 1942; "Educating Girls for the War and the Post- War World: Postscript," speech delivered October 20, 1943; "Professional Fields in Which New Jobs Are Developing," speech delivered on July 17, 1944, Gildersleeve papers, Barnard Archives.
17 Gildersleeve, "Address at Alumnae Luncheon" 1943, Barnard Archives.
18 Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade 257.
19 Ibid., 267-87.
20 Remarks of William Allan Neilson, March 11, 1945, Barnard Archives.
21 Gildersleeve, "The World is a Community," Address given under the auspices of the American Association for the United Nations, July 14, 1995, printed as a pamphlet of the AAUN, Barnard Archives.
22 Ibid