Mary Emma Woolley (July 13, 1863 – September 5, 1947) was an American educator, peace activist and women's suffrage supporter. She was the first female student to attend
Brown University
Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...
and served as the 11th President of
Mount Holyoke College
Mount Holyoke College is a private liberal arts women's college in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It is the oldest member of the historic Seven Sisters colleges, a group of elite historically women's colleges in the Northeastern United States.
...
from 1900 to 1937.
Early life and education
Woolley was the daughter of Joseph Judah (J.J.) Woolley and his second wife, Mary Augusta Ferris. She was given the nickname May, and enjoyed a comfortable, nurturing childhood in New England. She was first raised in
Meriden, Connecticut
Meriden is a city in New Haven County, Connecticut, United States, located halfway between the regional cities of New Haven, Connecticut, New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut, Hartford. In 2020, the population of the city was 60,850.[Pawtucket, Rhode Island
Pawtucket is a city in Providence County, Rhode Island, United States. The population was 75,604 at the 2020 census, making the city the fourth-largest in the state. Pawtucket borders Providence and East Providence to the south, Central Falls ...]
. Her father was a Congregational minister and his efforts to incorporate social work into religion, heavily influenced his daughter.
Woolley attended
Providence High School and a number of smaller schools run by women before finishing her secondary schooling, in 1884, at the
Wheaton Seminary in
Norton, Massachusetts
Norton is a New England town, town in Bristol County, Massachusetts, Bristol County, Massachusetts, United States, and contains the villages of Norton Center, Massachusetts, Norton Center and Chartley, Massachusetts, Chartley. The population was ...
. Woolley returned to teach there from 1885 to 1891. After traveling through Europe for two months during the summer of 1890, she intended to attend
Oxford University
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
, but her father agreed with
Elisha Benjamin Andrews
Elisha Benjamin Andrews (January 10, 1844 – October 30, 1917) was an American economist, soldier, and educator.
Early life
Andrews was born in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, Hinsdale, New Hampshire.Marquis Who's Who, Inc. ''Who Was Who in American ...
, the president of
Brown University
Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...
, that Woolley should become one of the first female students at Brown. She began attending Brown in the fall of 1890, while still teaching at Wheaton. In 1894, she received her B.A. and in 1895, her M.A. for her thesis titled, ''The Early History of the Colonial Post Office''.
Teaching career
In 1895, Woolley began teaching biblical history and literature at
Wellesley College
Wellesley College is a private women's liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1870 by Henry and Pauline Durant as a female seminary, it is a member of the original Seven Sisters Colleges, an unofficial g ...
. She was popular among her students and peers and, in 1896, she was made an associate professor. By 1899, she had been promoted to full professor. During her time at Wellesley, she made significant changes in the curriculum while gaining administrative experiences as the chair of her department. She also met
Jeannette Augustus Marks
Jeannette Augustus Marks (August 16, 1875 – March 15, 1964) was an American professor at Mount Holyoke College. She is the namesake of the Jeannette Marks Cultural Center (formerly known as the Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Community Cen ...
, a student at Wellesley. Beginning in 1899, the two women lived in a life-partnership for 48 years.
In December 1899, Brown offered her a job as the head of the newly founded
Women's College
Women's colleges in higher education are undergraduate, bachelor's degree-granting institutions, often liberal arts colleges, whose student populations are composed exclusively or almost exclusively of women. Some women's colleges admit male stud ...
. Simultaneously,
Mount Holyoke College
Mount Holyoke College is a private liberal arts women's college in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It is the oldest member of the historic Seven Sisters colleges, a group of elite historically women's colleges in the Northeastern United States.
...
offered her its presidency. Woolley took Mount Holyoke's offer and on January 1, 1901, at the age of 38, became one of the youngest college presidents in the United States.
Also in 1900, she became the first woman to receive an honorary degree from
Amherst College
Amherst College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. Founded in 1821 as an attempt to relocate Williams College by its then-president Zephaniah Swift Moore, Amherst is the third oldest institution of higher educatio ...
.
Mount Holyoke Presidency
![Mary Emma Woolley](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Mary_Emma_Woolley.jpg)
Immediately upon arrival at Mount Holyoke, Woolley outlined her views on female education. While in the past, the college had placed an emphasis on women's education in service to society, Woolley stressed that in the future, a women's education would not need to be justified by anything but intellectual grounds. Woolley believed education, roughly, was a preparation for life, and that an educated woman was able to achieve anything. She argued that if women had not succeeded in the past, it was because their education, or lack thereof, had held them back.
As the president of a women's college, one of her many responsibilities was to publicly support female education. During her 36-year presidency, she worked to end the prejudice of the era that contended that women had a natural learning disability and that intellectual work negatively affected their health. Woolley began to have influence within the academic community, and she led cooperative efforts with other women's colleges to raise funds, academic standards and public consciousness for women's education. During Woolley's presidency, she built a strong faculty, attracting scholars from the most prestigious graduate schools by offering increased salaries, fellowships, and sabbaticals.
Woolley also attempted to improve the quality of students admitted to Mount Holyoke, after raising admission standards, introducing honors programs and general examinations for seniors. The college endowment also grew from $500,000 to nearly $5 million and the campus added sixteen new building during her 36-year presidency. One of her most significant changes came when she abolished the domestic work system, instituted by the college's founder,
Mary Lyon
Mary Mason Lyon (; February 28, 1797 – March 5, 1849) was an American pioneer in women's education. She established the Wheaton Female Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts, (now Wheaton College) in 1834. She then established Mount Holyoke Femal ...
. When Lyon founded the college in 1837, students were required to cook and clean for economic reasons, and other women's colleges followed the example. By 1901, Mount Holyoke was the only women's college with the system still in place and Woolley thought the system was old fashioned and an obstacle in her goal of making Mount Holyoke intellectually equal to male colleges.
She also created a position for Jeanette Marks, who taught English and Theater at Mount Holyoke until her retirement in 1941. Though the women never publicly acknowledged a lesbian relationship, there were some undercurrents of resentment at the college for Woolley's alleged "favoritism" towards Marks.
Organizational activity
Woolley also managed to devote her time to a number of organizations during her presidency, advocating for social reform of all kinds, including suffrage, pacifism and church matters. She served as the vice president of the
American Civil Liberties Union
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1920 "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". T ...
(ACLU) and also worked on U.S. entry into the
League of Nations
The League of Nations (french: link=no, Société des Nations ) was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference that ...
. She also worked with President
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) was an American politician who served as the 31st president of the United States from 1929 to 1933 and a member of the Republican Party, holding office during the onset of the Gr ...
on women's rights and with President
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (; ; January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. As the ...
on pacifism. She was an early member of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae which later became the
American Association of University Women
The American Association of University Women (AAUW), officially founded in 1881, is a non-profit organization that advances equity for women and girls through advocacy, education, and research. The organization has a nationwide network of 170,000 ...
. From 1927-1933, she served as President of AAUW. She gained international recognition after President Hoover appointed her as a delegate to the
Conference on Reduction and Limitation of Armaments, which met in
Geneva, Switzerland
Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevra ; rm, Genevra is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland (after Zürich) and the most populous city of Romandy, the French-speaki ...
, in 1932.
She was on the board of electors of the Hall of Fame, the national board of the
Y.W.C.A.
The Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) is a nonprofit organization with a focus on empowerment, leadership, and rights of women, young women, and girls in more than 100 countries.
The World office is currently based in Geneva, Swi ...
, the executive committee of the American School Peace League, the council of the National Institute for Moral Instruction, the Commission on Peace and Arbitration. She was a senator of the United Chapters of
Phi Beta Kappa
The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal a ...
and honorary vice president of the
National Consumers' League
The National Consumers League, founded in 1899, is an American consumer organization. The National Consumers League is a private, nonprofit advocacy group representing consumers on marketplace and workplace issues. The NCL provides government, bu ...
.
In 1900, Woolley was one of 60 signers of the "Call for the Lincoln Emancipation Conference to Discuss Means for Securing Political and Civil Equality for the Negro", a document that created the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E. ...
.
Later years
Beginning in 1933, an effort began to gather steam among some male members of the Board of Trustees to make sure that when Woolley retired, she would be replaced by a male president. Many of the Board members who supported this approach believed that Mount Holyoke College had become "overfeminized" with most of the departments headed by women and male faculty in a small minority. Some looked to Mount Holyoke as a place where graduates of Yale University might find jobs and felt that hiring a male president would make that more likely.
Woolley retired in 1937 at the age of 74. The appointment of Roswell Gray Ham to succeed her was a bitter blow to opportunities for women to advance through higher education. She, members of the faculty, members of the AAUW and members of the alumnae group fought back strenuously. The vote at the June 6, 1936 Board meeting just achieved the required majority despite eloquent pleas from trustee Frances Perkins (a Mount Holyoke alumna and Secretary of Labor), Woolley and members of the faculty. After Ham was appointed, some alumnae attempted to rouse sufficient opposition to convince Ham to refuse the appointment but official Mount Holyoke closed ranks and the opposition was defeated. Woolley and her allies did have the "last word" at the college's centennial celebration in May 1937 (a month before Ham took office). He was not invited to attend and many of the speeches decried the actions of the Board of Trustees. After her retirement, Woolley never visited the Mount Holyoke campus again. She moved to the Marks family home in Westport, NY and lived there with Marks until her death in 1947.
Woolley remained an active social advocate during her retirement, and she spent much of her time lecturing at meetings and conferences. On September 30, 1944, in her
Westport, New York
Westport is a town in Essex County, New York, United States overlooking Lake Champlain. The population was 1,312 at the 2010 census.
The town is on the eastern border of the county and is south of Plattsburgh and south of Montreal, Quebec, Canad ...
home, she suffered from a
cerebral hemorrhage
Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), also known as cerebral bleed, intraparenchymal bleed, and hemorrhagic stroke, or haemorrhagic stroke, is a sudden bleeding into the tissues of the brain, into its ventricles, or into both. It is one kind of bleed ...
which partially paralyzed her. She spent the final three years of her life in a wheelchair and Marks cared for her until her death in 1947.
In popular culture
Woolley was the subject of a play, ''Bull in a China Shop'', written by Mount Holyoke alumna Bryna Turner.
The show premiered at the
Lincoln Center
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (also simply known as Lincoln Center) is a complex of buildings in the Lincoln Square neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It has thirty indoor and outdoor facilities and is host to 5 millio ...
on March 1, 2017.
Works
In addition to her master's thesis, she wrote ''Development of the Love of Romantic Scenery in America'' and many educational articles.
[
]
See also
* Presidents of Mount Holyoke College
Footnotes
References
*Allgor, Catherine A.. "Woolley, Mary Emma". American National Biography Online. July 14, 2009 .
Further reading
*
*
External links
Biography from Kappa Delta Pi, International Honor Society
Encyclopedia Brunoniana
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Woolley, Mary Emma
1863 births
1947 deaths
Brown University alumni
LGBT people from Connecticut
Mount Holyoke College faculty
Pembroke College in Brown University alumni
People from Meriden, Connecticut
People from Norwalk, Connecticut
People from Pawtucket, Rhode Island
People from Westport, New York
Presidents and Principals of Mount Holyoke College
Wellesley College faculty
Women heads of universities and colleges