Outlaw Marriages (5 page)

Bryn Mawr's growth brought Thomas a new challenge because the physical size of the campus hadn't kept up with the increase in students. And so, in an era before colleges had development staffs, Thomas added fund-raising to her myriad other duties.
51

When she began identifying wealthy individuals who might make major gifts to Bryn Mawr, Thomas focused on Mary Garrett, a friend from her early years in Baltimore. The Garrett family had amassed a fortune valued at $20 million through investments in the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, which meant that Mary, whose parents were now dead, had become one of the wealthiest women in the country.
52

Mamie Gwinn didn't support Thomas's plan to ask Garrett, who wasn't married, for donations. Gwinn had known Garrett when the three women were all in their twenties, and she'd insisted that Thomas distance herself from the other woman because, Gwinn said in letters she wrote at the time, Garrett was “in love with” Thomas and the physical affection that Garrett wanted from Thomas “belongs not to Mary Garrett but to me.”
53

Thomas was determined to raise money for the college, however, so she ignored Gwinn's objections and appealed to Garrett, who began giving Bryn Mawr $10,000 a year, which was more than 10 percent of the annual budget.
54

It's not clear exactly when the relationship between Mary Garrett and Martha Carey Thomas became intimate, but they definitely had crossed that line by the turn of the century. In 1901, Thomas wrote Garrett a letter laying out her plans for a trip to her lover's house in Baltimore. “Let us have a bottle of champagne for dinner and a mince pie and broiled lobster,” Thomas wrote. “And let us sleep in your bedroom.”
55

When Thomas began her affair with Garrett, she didn't end her relationship with Gwinn. Indeed, for several years, Thomas simultaneously maintained intimate relations with both women. During the week, she and Gwinn lived together in the Deanery, while on many weekends when Gwinn visited her widowed mother in Baltimore, Garrett moved in.
56

Meanwhile, Garrett's gifts to Bryn Mawr kept coming. She endowed various scholarships and set aside $100,000 for Thomas to spend however she wanted. Garrett gave another $100,000 to the college to expand the Deanery.
57

Thomas tried to keep her affair with Garrett a secret, but Gwinn soon figured out what was going on. She wrote Thomas, while visiting her mother, that “Carey Thomas and Mary Garrett have become as familiar as Carey Thomas and I are. I have been positioned in the role of the first wife, and the first wife these days is frequently feeling forgotten.”
58

Even though Gwinn was angry that her partner was having an affair, she didn't end the relationship. Gwinn stayed with Thomas at least partly because she knew that if she ended the outlaw marriage, Thomas had the power to remove her from the faculty. And if Gwinn left Bryn Mawr, her mother would demand that her daughter return home, in keeping with the expectations for
an unmarried woman at the time. Gwinn adamantly opposed that idea.
59

And so, Mamie Gwinn began to explore the possibility of taking her personal life in a dramatically new direction.
60

Alfred Hodder had joined Bryn Mawr's literature faculty after earning his doctorate from Harvard. When Gwinn discovered that her same-sex partner was romantically involved with Mary Garrett, she set her sights on seducing the handsome and charming Hodder. “He is exactly the person that I have been looking for,” Gwinn wrote in her diary. She saw marriage to Hodder as a path that would allow her to leave Thomas but avoid having to live with her mother.
61

By 1902, Thomas and Gwinn were both having affairs with other people while continuing their long-standing relationship with each other. Thomas was happy with the arrangement, writing Garrett that, “It is such great fortune for me to love two people like you and Mamie.” Gwinn, however, had other plans. In early 1904, she announced that she and Hodder were engaged to be married.
62

Thomas arranged that she and Garrett were vacationing in Europe on Gwinn's wedding day, so she had an excuse for not attending the ceremony. When Thomas returned to Bryn Mawr, Garrett moved into the Deanery as a full-time resident.
63

After Gwinn and Alfred Hodder married, they left Bryn Mawr as well as academic life and moved to New York City. He took a job in city politics, and she read poetry.
64

The marriage ended up being short lived, as Alfred Hodder died of an intestinal ailment a mere three years after the wedding. Social mores of the time then allowed Mamie Gwinn Hodder, as a widow, to live by herself rather than with her mother.
65

Martha Carey Thomas's relationship with Mary Garrett also ended sooner than the women had expected. In 1912, Garrett was diagnosed with leukemia. She died three years later.
66

Garrett left the bulk of her estate to Thomas, who committed much of that money to constructing several buildings at Bryn Mawr. Indeed, the campus became one of the country's leading showplaces for Gothic-style architecture.
67

Thomas's transformation of the campus was one of the reasons the
New York Times
named her, in 1922, one of the country's dozen most admired women. To create the high-profile story, the
Times
asked each of twenty national leaders to make a list. Thomas was one of three women that the
Times
spotlighted—along with social reformer Jane Addams and suffragist Carrie
Chapman Catt—as “being mentioned on every one of the lists.”
68

Despite Thomas's many accomplishments, the final decades of her life were unhappy ones. Her personal maid said in an interview several decades later, “There was a constant sadness about her.”
69

One development that contributed to Thomas's sorrow came in 1922 when she reached the college's mandatory retirement age of sixty-five. She appealed to the trustees to make an exception in her case. When the college's senior faculty, however, complained that she'd fired at least seven faculty members not because of poor performance but merely because she didn't like them, she was forced to leave her position.
70

It wasn't long after her retirement, although the exact year is uncertain, that Thomas tried to reconcile with Gwinn. She wrote her former partner that she'd made a grave mistake in becoming intimate with Mary Garrett, attributing her error to being attracted to Garrett's fortune. “Now I have everything that money can give,” Thomas wrote Gwinn, “but I realize I loved you—and still love you—more than anything in the world.” Thomas said that because of the hurt she'd caused Gwinn, “My heart is broken.”
71

Gwinn rejected the overture, refusing to respond to her former partner. In the draft of a memoir Gwinn never published, she wrote a bitter assessment of Thomas's character. “She was created—so it seems to me in retrospect—as being as incapable of an altruistic feeling as my cat is.” Gwinn also wrote, speaking of the time she lived with Thomas at Bryn Mawr, “Those were years in which I was a prisoner in the dwelling of an ogress.”
72

And so, Thomas and Gwinn never saw each other again after 1904.

Martha Carey Thomas died in 1935 at the age of seventy-eight, and Mamie Gwinn Hodder died in 1940 at the age of seventy-nine. The nation's leading newspapers reported on Thomas's passing in prominent obituaries and tributes. The
New York Times
described her as “one of the world's foremost women educators” and the
Chicago Tribune
as “one of the most brilliant leaders of her sex,” while the
Washington Post
stated, “Higher education for women owes a debt of permanent gratitude to this great educator.” None of Thomas's numerous obituaries included any reference to Gwinn. Likewise, when Mamie Gwinn Hodder died, her single published obituary made no mention of Thomas.
73

Building the Collections of America's Art Museums

…

Most people who stroll through the classical antiquities sections of this country's finest art museums—filled with marble sculptures, terra-cotta vases, and other objects from Greek and Roman civilizations—don't think about exactly
how
these magnificent items found their way out of Europe and into the United States. And so, it's only by digging into the archival records of these institutions that a person can gain a sense of the enormous debt the nation owes to the same-sex couple John Marshall and Ned Warren.

From the 1890s through the 1920s, these two men devoted their lives to locating high-quality antiquities, buying the items, and placing them on display in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. During their forty-three-year partnership, the men blended their complementary skills and aptitudes to build the core antiquities
collections that millions of visitors now enjoy. “The great collections of Marshall and Warren,” one scholar has written, “remain one of the most significant collecting feats of all time.”
1

John Marshall was born in Liverpool, England, in 1860. His father built a successful business as a wine merchant, and his mother devoted much of her time and energy to the local Anglican parish. He was a quiet and introspective boy as well as an excellent student.
2

After completing his public education, Marshall enrolled at Liverpool College and immersed himself in the classics, with plans to become a priest. His mother was pleased with the boy's choice of study, but his father was concerned that he was spending too much time in the rarefied world of academics. And so, Marshall was required to work part-time in his father's business, dealing both with the journeymen who made wine and the wealthy clients who bought it.
3

Marshall performed so well as an undergraduate that he was awarded a classics scholarship that allowed him to continue his studies at the prestigious Oxford University. He excelled in that highly competitive environment as well, ranking as the top student in his class.
4

In addition to earning a reputation as a gifted scholar, Marshall also was known as one of the most popular students at the university. His classmates praised his congenial nature and his ability to get along with everyone who came into contact with him.
5

Edward Perry Warren was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, in 1860. His father had made a sizable fortune in the paper industry, and his mother collected Old World paintings and Chinese porcelain.
6

When Ned—as he was known throughout his life—was three years old, the Warrens moved to a mansion in the exclusive Beacon Hill section of Boston. His early years weren't happy ones, as his four siblings as well as other children ridiculed him for walking around the neighborhood dressed in a Roman toga.
7

Warren would later recall that his most pleasant childhood memories were of the times he was able to sneak pieces of his mother's china out of the parlor and into his bedroom where he could admire them more closely. Other highlights came when the family traveled to Europe when Ned was eight years old and again when he was thirteen.
8

By the time Warren entered Harvard College in 1879, he'd already developed a series of romantic crushes on several male classmates, although none of the boys felt the same way about him. “My friends were affectionate,” he
later wrote, “but their affection did not pass beyond a certain point.” Warren didn't excel in his classes, but he managed to earn a bachelor's degree so he could enroll in graduate studies at Oxford.
9

Upon arriving at the university, Warren embraced all things English. He exhibited so many mannerisms of his adopted country, in fact, that most other students didn't realize he was from the United States. First among those affectations, according to Warren's classmates, was an annoying sense of superiority similar to that displayed by many British aristocrats.
10

Ned Warren's fellow students also described him as making no secret of his eagerness to become romantically involved with other men. Unlike his earlier efforts to find a lover, however, those at Oxford were successful. He first had a relationship with a lad four years his junior, and then he set his sights on the most intellectually gifted student in his class.
11