Girl Sleuth (9 page)

When Harriet arrived in the fall of 1910 and settled into her closely supervised off-campus house—Wellesley, like all institutions of higher education, had been growing quickly since its opening thirty-five years earlier, so a great number of students, generally the younger ones, had to live in such arrangements—the program had long since fallen by the wayside. In any case, she would not have needed it. “I am glad to report that my daughter Harriet passed her examinations at Wellesley with ease and so goes in without conditions,” Edward Stratemeyer wrote to his editor at Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, who had driven the Stratemeyers to the Wellesley campus on one of their visits the year before. “She is nicely located at Mrs. Lawrence's . . . directly in front of the main gate of the grounds, and likes it very much.”

H
ARRIET'S YEARS
at Wellesley marked the beginning of a pivotal shift for American women, who were just beginning to muster the collective strength and numbers that would ultimately propel them to success in the long battle for woman suffrage. The fight had begun as far back as 1776, when Abigail Adams, writing to her future-president husband, challenged him: “In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors . . . Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” His answer was the answer women would receive on the subject, in one form or another, for the next 144 years: “As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh.”

Adams's attitude prevailed among the creators of the Constitution, and when it was ratified in 1791, it established free white males as the only Americans eligible to vote. Defeated, activist women turned instead to the abolitionist movement, working to eradicate slavery and assuming that by helping black men get the vote, they would be helping themselves as well. One of the first indications that this idea might be pure folly came at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. The United States had sent Lucretia Mott, a leader of the women's abolitionist movement, as its delegate. Upon arriving, she learned that women would not be allowed to speak.

Nevertheless, the gathering was the beginning of one of the most important relationships in the history of women and the vote. There, Mott made the acquaintance of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who would soon emerge as one of the guiding lights of the women's suffrage movement. By 1848 the two had crafted a plan to hold the first women's rights conference, “to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman.” It attracted some 260 women and about 40 men—not a great number, but still enough to get noticed. But Stanton and Mott's plans were thrown off course by the Civil War, when many women abandoned the cause. When the fighting was over, though, the suffrage movement—strengthened by the organizational skills its women had learned doing war work—scored its first victory. In 1869 Wyoming became the first state in the union to grant the vote to women. Technically it was still a territory, but when Congress tried to object to granting it statehood because of the recent change in voting laws, the intrepid legislature simply said, “We will remain out of the union a hundred years rather than come in without our women.”

Then suffragists took the battle national. Susan B. Anthony, another former abolitionist who devoted her life to suffrage, appeared in front of every session of the U.S. Congress from 1869 to 1906 to ask for the passage of a national suffrage amendment, but it was to no avail. Instead, the group took the only approach it could, a state-by-state one. It organized rallies and attempted to cast votes (Anthony herself was arrested for one such attempt in 1872). Finally, in 1870, Utah granted women the right to vote, followed by Colorado in 1893 and Idaho in 1896.

But this initial burst of enthusiasm for bringing women to the polls faltered quickly in a country where the majority of women had no public voice and in most cases were incapable of even imagining themselves in any roles other than the domestic ones they were used to. By the turn of the century, more than fifty years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott had made their Declaration, matters had not progressed. The powerful Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), formed in 1874 in Ohio by women who wanted to close the state's saloons to prevent the “immoral” effect of alcohol on family and community life, had expanded to advocate for a variety of social programs. Its president, Frances Willard, quickly realized that the WCTU could not hope to bring about any of the changes it was lobbying for without the power to vote, so she made the enfranchisement of women the group's main goal. The result was that many women who had opposed the vote on the grounds that it would distract them from their roles as homemakers now began to support it. A new generation of suffragettes had also cropped up to run the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), formed under Cady Stanton's leadership in 1890 when the National Woman Suffrage Association merged with the more conservative American Woman Suffrage Association.

But neither they nor the WCTU seemed able to reanimate the movement. Despite their best efforts, no more states granted women voting rights between 1896 and 1910. At a 1902 Senate hearing regarding a sixteenth amendment on women suffrage, the frustrated organizer of the New York State suffrage movement, Harriet May Mills, pointed out how much everything else for women had changed.

 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century no married woman could own a cent of property. At the beginning of the twentieth century women, married or single, may own and often do own millions.

Then another reason for this large increase in the property of women is that they are now allowed to earn their own living in almost any business, and there are to-day at least 4,000,000 of us earning independent incomes. We feel that it is a great injustice, gentlemen, when we are such large shareholders in the Government, when we are such large participants in business affairs, to be denied any voice in the Government.

It was quite different in the old days, when married women were always under tutelage, and had no rights of their own, when they did not even own the clothes they wore. There might have been a little more justice in giving the votes to the man and denying it to the woman, but certainly it can not be fair to-day.

Some people say that this property is all represented by the men, and that they cast the votes for us. Gentlemen, in my State of New York there are 40,000 more women than men; and is it not a great burden to put upon the men to ask them to represent not only themselves, but 40,000 more women than the double of themselves?

I do not see how it is possible for any man to represent a woman.

 

It would take until the next decade, when activists finally brought into their ranks the lower-class workers who had been laboring for so long without protection or representation, for the suffrage movement to revive. But this time there was no going back. When Harriet entered Wellesley in the fall of 1910, the signs of impending change were everywhere. The Wellesley Equal Suffrage League was founded that same autumn, and when new president and Wellesley alumna Ellen Fitz Pendleton was inaugurated during the fall of Harriet's sophomore year, she made it clear that the mission of the college—any college, whether for men or women—had been conspicuously updated in anticipation of the changes to come. “I ask you to consider this morning the two-fold function of the college, the training for citizenship and the preparation of the scholar. The exigencies of our mother tongue compel me to use the masculine pronoun, but it will be understood that references are made to college students of both sexes.” Preparation for participation in national civic duty was now a part of the curriculum.

As in the nation, however, support for suffrage was not guaranteed on the Wellesley campus. In 1911 California approved giving women the vote even as the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage was founded. Opinion was equally divided on campus. Early that year a vote was taken to see how many students approved of giving women the vote, and the majority did not. The
Wellesley College News
thought it was because of “lack of knowledge and indifference” on the part of anti-suffragists on campus, though in truth they opposed the movement on the well-thought-out (if strangely self-defeatist) grounds that men and women were bound to vote differently and thus granting women the right would sow discord in families and, indeed, in the nation itself. But by 1912, following the trend in the rest of the country, the majority of Wellesley students supported women's right to vote.

These idealistic young women arrived on campus ready to change the world—in the latest fashions, of course. In their trunks were long, tight “hobble skirts,” which, while they were the height of style, had a tendency to impede their wearers' strides thanks to the narrow hem. The girls wore them with low heels that made for easy—or at least easier—walking on the hilly campus paths, and tied up their hair in ribbon bows. One issue of the campus paper described the usual garb for a day of classes: “White buckskin golf shoes, a long narrow white linen skirt, shirt-waist with long sleeves and a negligee ruffled collar; the whole ‘toned' by a dash of color in the form of a violent green sash two feet wide. This costume is usually set off by what might be called the ‘society slouch,' which aims to give a bored listlessness to one's posture.” In the privacy of their cluttered rooms, the girls wore boudoir caps and played the latest dance tunes on their mandolins, guitars, or banjos. “Can you dance the Boston, / Can you dip and gently rise?” they sang, scandalizing themselves ever so slightly in the process. As an editorial in the paper saw it, “modern dancing” was a big problem for the Wellesley girl. “People who wish to be broadly tolerant are countenancing dances which their instincts tell them are disgusting, and which doctors have pronounced full of danger from a physiological point of view . . . We would not be prudish, and yet we would be decent.”

Wellesley girls were a vibrant group of young women, curious about the world if somewhat more socially conservative compared to their counterparts at other women's colleges. In an editorial to the freshman in the fall of 1910, the
Wellesley News
encouraged the new class to “be alive, be awake and active in every phase of college life into which you enter.” But, like all women away at school in those years, they operated under strict rules of conduct. They were not allowed to go off campus without registering a time of departure, a destination, and time of return, which could be 7:15
P.M.
at the latest, and leaving campus in the evening without a chaperone was not allowed under any circumstances. They were not to even consider entering “the precincts of any men's college or building used as a dormitory for the student of such college . . . [which] shall be understood to include the Harvard Yard.” They could not be seen eating anything on the street in town or “stand[ing] about the railroad station without a hat,” but they were venturing into the town of Welles-ley more and more (an activity referred to by a local priest as “the 4 o'clock invasion”) and even to Boston, where the ideal afternoon included a play and some shopping topped off by a marsh-mallow fudge sundae. Their numbers on these outings could be literally overwhelming—as a spoof poem in the
News
joked: “One day to Boston I did go / To watch the crowd, the passing show, / I thought to walk on Tremont Street / And gaze on Boston's true elite. / But every swell at whom I'd stare / Had such an old, familiar air: / The truth at last came over me,—/ The whole crowd was from Wel-les-ley!”

With its enormous parcel of land, Wellesley had ample grounds for recreation of other sorts within its own walls. There were plenty of playing fields as well as excellent aquatic facilities. Harriet herself played tennis, field hockey, and softball, and swam and rode horses when she could. In addition, a new class called “Physical Training” was required of all students in their first two years at the college, combined with a course in “Hygiene.” “The department of Hygiene and Physical Education . . . seems to me a very important development of the College,” asserted the college president. “Without health a woman's life is sadly handicapped. She is the natural guardian of the health of children. To maintain and improve her own health, whatever her walk in life, is one of the prime essentials of living; to instill right principles in those under her care is one of her highest duties.” The era in which girls were expected to sit inside embroidering was at an end, and Wellesley was at the forefront of creating young women who were confident in both mind and body.