Outlaw Marriages (4 page)

Gwinn embraced Thomas's plan because she wanted to see Europe and get out from under the watchful eye of her highly protective parents. She made her motivations clear to Thomas, bluntly writing to her, in early 1879, “I do not love you.”
14

Gwinn's parents initially didn't agree to let their daughter live in Germany, fearing for her safety. But Mamie was accustomed to getting her way, so she persisted, feigning illness and telling her parents that it was because they didn't trust her. The Gwinns then relented.
15

And so, in the fall of 1879, Thomas and Gwinn moved into an apartment some four thousand miles away from their parents. They continued this arrangement for the next four years, while also going on holidays together to other parts of Europe.
16

Thomas's typical day began with attending four lectures—all in German—in the morning and then reading independently in the afternoon. Her area of specialty was literature, with a focus on linguistics. “I feel head and shoulders above my former self,” she wrote her mother a few months after arriving in Leipzig. “I am so happy.”
17

She also wrote her mother that she wished she and Gwinn could marry. “If it were only possible for women to elect women as well as men for a ‘life's love,' I would do so with Mamie in a minute,” Thomas wrote in 1880. She repeated the same thought in another letter two years later, this time saying that
her fondest dream was that “Mamie and I could go through the marriage ceremony together.”
18

Although Thomas didn't tell her mother the details of her relationship with Gwinn, entries in her diary show that the women were physically intimate. “When I kiss her, it as if I am in a trance—so blissful do I feel,” Thomas wrote. More references to the sexual dimensions of the outlaw marriage came in the letters the two women wrote to each other. When Gwinn made a brief trip to Berlin by herself, for example, she wrote to her partner in Leipzig, “'Tis 11:30 but I am awake, and longing for you. I lie on the sofa and don't undress because I am miserable undressing without you.”
19

One by-product of the two women spending time together was that Gwinn taught her partner how to behave in a more ladylike manner. The more refined woman persuaded Thomas to speak more softly, dress more fashionably, and use more nuanced gesturing by moving only her fingers rather than flinging her entire arm. Gwinn also exposed Thomas, for the first time, to the ballet and the opera.
20

The university calendar consisted of eight months of study followed by four months of vacation, and the two women took full advantage, during their first year, of the opportunity to leave campus by spending the entire summer in Italy. “Rome, Naples, Capri, Pompeii—we have seen them all,” Thomas wrote a friend.
21

After the women returned to Leipzig, however, their priorities diverged. Thomas was increasingly focused on her studies, while Gwinn preferred to while away her days reading the authors she most admired—for her own enjoyment rather than to pursue a degree.
22

During the academic year, the differing priorities weren't a problem, as each woman spent her time as she chose without disrupting the other's activities. But the situation grew more difficult when it came to deciding what they'd do during their summer vacations. Thomas wanted to study, while Gwinn wanted to travel.
23

By year three, Thomas had a plan for how she could earn her doctorate, despite the University of Leipzig's policy against awarding graduate diplomas to women. To secure the degree, she'd have to work with the University of Zurich, a less prestigious institution but one that was open to granting graduate degrees to women.
24

It was at this point that Thomas and Gwinn devised a strategy that would give both of them what they wanted. The couple developed their plan in response
to the combination of Thomas facing stringent requirements to earn her degree and Gwinn wanting to see as much of Europe as she could during the four years that her parents had stipulated was the maximum she could live away from home.
25

The University of Zurich faculty told Thomas she'd have to complete four steps: write a dissertation based on original research in the field of linguistics, spend one semester in Zurich, pass a series of exams, and submit an analytical paper demonstrating her expertise in a field of literature other than linguistics. Thomas could fulfill the first three requirements on her own, but she needed Gwinn's help on the fourth.
26

As her first step, Thomas submitted her dissertation, a linguistic comparison of twelfth-century French poetry with the fourteenth-century English poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The Zurich faculty accepted the manuscript, giving its content their highest praise, although not being as impressed with how the work was written.
27

Thomas then went to Zurich to fulfill the residency requirement and take her exams, while Gwinn stayed in Leipzig and worked on a poetry paper for her partner. When Gwinn finished the paper, Thomas submitted it to the faculty, identifying herself as the sole author.
28

Gwinn's contribution to her partner's academic advancement made practical sense, as it meant that Thomas completed her degree requirements soon enough that the couple had several months to travel, as Gwinn wanted. At the same time, however, the couple's action violated standards of academic authorship—Zurich faculty members weren't aware of that breach when they accepted the paper.
29

Regardless of Thomas and Gwinn's impropriety, their plan succeeded. In late 1882, Thomas received her degree summa cum laude, becoming the first woman of any nationality to earn that distinction. Thomas and Gwinn then traveled to France during 1883.
30

When Thomas returned to the United States, she was hired as dean of the faculty at Bryn Mawr College, a new Quaker institution for women that was scheduled to open near Philadelphia in the fall of 1885. She then set out to fulfill the formidable responsibilities of her new job, which included creating admissions requirements, developing the curriculum, and hiring the faculty.
31

At the same time that she was setting these myriad processes in motion, Thomas found the time to make sure influential newspapers reported on what she was doing. In a story about Bryn Mawr's upcoming opening, for example, the
New York Times
wrote, “Martha Carey Thomas, Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English, will adopt standards of admission and instruction equal
to the highest in existing colleges.”
32

The reason Thomas took the step of publicizing her work at the college became clear when she announced to the board of trustees that she wouldn't continue in her position unless they supported one specific proposal from her: Bryn Mawr must become the first college in the country to offer graduate degrees to female students.
33

The board members then faced the threat that their chief academic officer would resign—a development they knew would be widely reported in the press—unless they agreed to her demand. Although several of the men grumbled about Thomas's calculated tactics, they approved the history-making policy.
34

On a less positive note, Thomas and Gwinn's relationship had been disrupted as Gwinn's parents had insisted that when their daughter returned to the United States, she had to live with her family in Baltimore. Gwinn quickly tired of this arrangement, writing Thomas that she found the circumstances “monotonous” and “life-sucking.”
35

By the time Bryn Mawr opened its doors, the two women had come up with a plan that improved Gwinn's quality of life—as well as Thomas's. As dean, Thomas decided which graduate students would be admitted as well as which would receive financial support through fellowships. For the first graduate fellow in English, she took the highly unusual step of selecting an applicant who would enter graduate school without a bachelor's degree: Mamie Gwinn.
36

In addition, the dean invited that student to live with her. That is, Thomas and Gwinn both moved into the eight-room cottage located on campus, called the Deanery, that the college provided for its chief academic officer. And so the two women again began sharing a home, as they had in Germany. This time, though, the arrangement continued for more than two decades.
37

Thomas quickly found, when the school opened, that her duties as dean of the faculty were onerous because the trustees required her, in addition to fulfilling her administrative responsibilities, to teach the introductory Western literature course that every undergraduate was required to take. Thomas didn't see how she could do it all, so she persuaded Gwinn to help with her teaching.
38

Specifically, Gwinn took care of all the behind-the-scenes preparation. She chose which works Thomas's students were required to read, put together the exams, assigned the research papers, and wrote out—word for word—every
lecture that Thomas then delivered as her own. And when students submitted their exams and research papers, Gwinn read and graded them.
39

Meanwhile, the couple's outlaw marriage appeared to be progressing smoothly. In return for helping with the course, Gwinn asked her partner to spend most evenings at home. A letter that Gwinn wrote to Thomas while they were apart for a few days provides a glimpse into how the women spent those quiet times. “I am starved for our nightly ritual,” Gwinn wrote, “of you in your red dressing gown and me in my black Antwerp silk with the lace and cherry ribbons, you reading and me with my head nestled serenely on your lap.”
40

During the three years that Gwinn was a student, she stayed in the couple's bedroom when Thomas entertained dinner guests at the Deanery. After Gwinn finished her doctoral degree and Thomas hired her as a professor in 1888, however, the two women hosted social events as if they were husband and wife. Likewise, when members of the board of trustees invited Thomas to dinner, she took Gwinn with her.
41

The early 1890s marked a period of continued triumph for Thomas, as other colleges followed her lead and opened their graduate programs to women. Many of those institutions paid tribute to Thomas for her role in advancing the cause of female students. When the University of Pennsylvania, for example, made its graduate programs coed in 1892, Thomas was asked to give the keynote address at the ceremony celebrating the new policy.
42

And then, in 1894, Bryn Mawr president James Rhoads retired. Thomas was the logical choice to replace him, but several trustees were reluctant to name a woman to such a powerful position. If they made the appointment, the thirty-six-year-old Thomas would become only the second woman in the country's history to serve as a college president—Alice Freeman of Wellesley had been the first in 1882.
43

The board eventually agreed to promote Thomas, but only after abolishing the position of dean of the faculty. This meant that she now had to fulfill all the duties that Rhoads had been responsible for, while giving up none of the duties she already had.
44

Thomas's primary mission upon becoming president was to increase Bryn Mawr's enrollment from the current 325 students to a target figure of 875. This growth was essential, the board believed, to transform the college from a tiny liberal arts school into a major force in American higher education.
45

Thomas's strategy to increase enrollment was to establish herself as a nationally recognized educational leader, thereby raising Bryn Mawr's profile—as well as her own. So she began traveling around the country speaking to civic and educational groups, often asking Gwinn to help her write the speeches.
46

The most frequent theme in the addresses was that educators were doing a disservice by teaching female students nothing but manners and domestic skills, which was the practice in the majority of American colleges and universities. Thomas told New York University alumni in 1896, for example, that limiting the education of female students caused long-term damage because those young women grew up to become the classroom teachers in charge of educating the next generation of boys as well as girls. “Our women are uneducated, and yet the education of this nation's children are in the hands of those very women,” Thomas protested.
47

Newspapers around the country reported on Thomas's speeches, partly because it was a novelty for a woman to address crowds containing both men and women. Eye-catching headlines that ran above the stories included “Women Merely Man's Drudge, Says the President of Bryn Mawr College” and “Mental Reach of Girls Fully Equal to Mental Reach of Men, Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr Opines.”
48

Thomas had, by the late 1890s, achieved her enrollment goal and also had become one of the nation's best-known female educators. When the
New York Times
published a story about higher education for women, Thomas was highlighted. “Reference would naturally be made to M. Carey Thomas first in any discussion of the present-day leaders in the education of women,” the
Times
reported.
49

Despite these professional successes, a letter that Thomas wrote in 1896 suggests that her personal life wasn't going so smoothly. Gwinn was preparing to take over the Western literature course that Thomas had been teaching, so she asked her partner to publicly acknowledge that the lectures she'd been giving weren't entirely her own but, in fact, were a collaborative effort between the two women. Thomas responded to the request by letter, telling Gwinn, “I am not willing to say that we worked over them together, as I have been giving them as mine for eleven years, and it will surely be misunderstood.” Thomas also said, later in the letter, “The fact that you helped me out is a secret that must be kept.”
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