Martha Carey Thomas was an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
educator,
suffragist"Suffragette" is a term coined by the Daily Mail newspaper as a derogatory label for members of the late 19th and early 20th century movement for women's suffrage in the United Kingdom, in particular members of the Women's Social and Political Union...
, and second President of
Bryn Mawr CollegeBryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....
.
Early life
Carey Thomas, as she preferred to be called, was born in
BaltimoreBaltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...
,
MarylandMaryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east...
. She was the daughter of James Carey Thomas and Mary Whitall Thomas. Her family included many prominent Quakers, including her uncle and aunt
Robert Pearsall SmithRobert Pearsall Smith was a lay leader in the Holiness movement in the United States and the Higher Life movement in Great Britain. His book Holiness Through Faith is one of the foundational works of the Holiness movement...
and
Hannah Whitall SmithHannah Tatum Whitall Smith was a lay speaker and author in the Holiness movement in the United States and the Higher Life movement in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland...
, and her cousins
Alys Pearsall SmithAlyssa Whitall Pearsall Smith was the first wife of Bertrand Russell.Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she was the daughter of Robert Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith, prominent figures in the Holiness movement in America and the Higher Life movement in Great Britain...
(first wife of
Bertrand RussellBertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
) and Mary Smith Berenson Costelloe (who married
Bernard BerensonBernard Berenson was an American art historian specializing in the Renaissance. He was a major figure in pioneering art attribution and therefore establishing the market for paintings by the "Old Masters".-Personal life:...
).
Growing up, Thomas was strongly influenced by the staunch
feminismFeminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
of her mother and her mother's sister
Hannah Whitall SmithHannah Tatum Whitall Smith was a lay speaker and author in the Holiness movement in the United States and the Higher Life movement in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland...
. Her father, a physician, was not completely happy with feminist ideas, but his daughter was fiercely independent and he supported her in all of her independent endeavors. Though both her parents were orthodox members of the Society of Friends, Thomas' education and European travel led her to question those beliefs and develop a love for music and theater, both of which were forbidden to Orthodox Quakers. This religious questioning led to friction with her mother.
Thomas initially attended a Society of Friends school in Baltimore, and then transferred to the Howland Institute, a Quaker boarding school near
Ithaca, New YorkThe city of Ithaca, is a city in upstate New York and the county seat of Tompkins County, as well as the largest community in the Ithaca-Tompkins County metropolitan area...
. It was here that a teacher influenced her to study education, rather than medicine. Thomas hoped to enter
Cornell UniversityCornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
to pursue further education, but met with her father's objections. After a great deal of pleading from both Thomas and her mother, her father relented.
Thomas graduated from Cornell University in 1877. She did graduate work in Greek at
Johns Hopkins UniversityThe Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
but withdrew because she was not permitted to attend classes. She did further graduate work at the
University of LeipzigThe University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest universities in the world and the second-oldest university in Germany...
, but that university did not grant degrees to women. She then went to the
University of ZurichThe University of Zurich , located in the city of Zurich, is the largest university in Switzerland, with over 25,000 students. It was founded in 1833 from the existing colleges of theology, law, medicine and a new faculty of philosophy....
and earned a Ph.D. in
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, summa cum laude, in 1882 for her dissertation which was a
philologicalPhilology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
analysis of
Sir Gawain and the Green KnightSir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English alliterative romance outlining an adventure of Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table. In the poem, Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from a mysterious warrior who is completely green, from his clothes and hair to his...
. This dissertation continued to be highly regarded by specialists eighty years later. She was the first woman and the first foreigner to receive such a doctorate from the university. She then spent some time in
ParisParis is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, where she attended lectures by
Gaston ParisBruno Paulin Gaston Paris , known as Gaston Paris, was a French writer and scholar.He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901, 1902 and 1903.-Biography:Paris was born at Avenay...
at the
SorbonneThe University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
, and then went back home to the United States. Thomas did not pursue her degree out of love for her academic work, but rather out of a desire to show Americans that women had the same intellectual capacity as men.
At Bryn Mawr
In 1884, Thomas became dean of the college and chair of English at the new
Bryn Mawr CollegeBryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....
for women, of which her father was a trustee. She had written to the trustees in 1882 requesting that she be made president of the University, but they were concerned about her relative youth and lack of experience. Thomas was the first female dean in the United States.
In 1885 Thomas, together with Mary Elizabeth Garrett, Mamie Gwinn, Elizabeth King, and Julia Rogers, founded The
Bryn Mawr SchoolThe Bryn Mawr School is an independent, nonsectarian, college-preparatory school for girls from preschool through grade twelve. Founded in 1885, BMS is located in the Roland Park community of Baltimore, Maryland, USA at 109 W. Melrose Avenue, Baltimore MD 21210.-The Bryn Mawr School Community:In...
in
BaltimoreBaltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...
MarylandMaryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east...
. The school would produce well-educated young women who met the very high entrance standards of
Bryn Mawr CollegeBryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....
.
Despite not receiving her desired role at Bryn Mawr, Thomas was active in the college's administration. According to the biographical dictionary
Notable American Women: 1607-1950, by 1892 she was "acting president in all but name". In 1894, the first president of the college,
James RhoadsJames Evans Rhoads was an American educator and administrator, first president of Bryn Mawr College.Rhoads became president in 1884 before it was officially inaugurated on September 23, 1885....
, retired, and Thomas was narrowly elected to succeed him. She was president until 1922 and remained as Dean until 1908.
During her tenure as president, Thomas' primary concern was upholding the highest standards of admissions and academic rigor. The entrance examinations for the college were made as difficult as those at
Harvard UniversityHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, and pupils could not gain admission by certificate. For the academic curriculum, Thomas emulated the "group system" of Johns Hopkins, in which students were required to take parallel courses in a logical sequence. Students could not freely choose electives. There were also other requirements, including a foreign language requirement that culminated in a sight translation examination proctored by Thomas herself. Overall, the academic curriculum at Bryn Mawr under Thomas shunned liberal arts education, preferring more traditional topics such as Greek, Latin, and mathematics. Thomas was also instrumental in bringing several new buildings to the College, which introduced collegiate Gothic architecture to the United States.
In 1908, she became the first president of the National College Women's Equal Suffrage League. She was also a leading member of the
National American Woman Suffrage AssociationThe National American Woman Suffrage Association was an American women's rights organization formed in May 1890 as a unification of the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association...
. After 1920 she advocated the policies of the
National Woman's PartyThe National Woman's Party , was a women's organization founded by Alice Paul in 1915 that fought for women's rights during the early 20th century in the United States, particularly for the right to vote on the same terms as men...
. She was one of the early promoters of an equal rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Thomas lived for many years in a relationship with Mamie Gwinn. After Gwinn left Thomas in 1904 to marry (a love triangle fictionalized in
Gertrude SteinGertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
's
Fernhurst), Thomas started another relationship with
Mary GarrettMary Garrett was an American suffragist and philanthropist.- Biography :Mary Garrett was the daughter of John W. Garrett, a philanthropist and president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad . She became the wealthiest "spinster woman" in the country with demise of her father.Garrett helped found...
; they shared the campus home, living together until Garrett's death. Miss Garrett, who had been prominent in suffrage work and a benefactor of Bryn Mawr, left to President Thomas $15,000,000 to be disposed of as she saw fit.
Later life and death
The inheritance of Garrett's money changed Thomas, leading to an erosion of her discipline. She spent the last two decades of her life traveling the world in luxury, including trips to
IndiaIndia , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, the
SaharaThe Sahara is the world's second largest desert, after Antarctica. At over , it covers most of Northern Africa, making it almost as large as Europe or the United States. The Sahara stretches from the Red Sea, including parts of the Mediterranean coasts, to the outskirts of the Atlantic Ocean...
, and
FranceThe French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
. Thomas died in Philadelphia,
PennsylvaniaThe Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
, of a coronary occlusion. She had returned to the city to address Bryn Mawr College on the fiftieth anniversary of its founding. Her ashes were scattered on the Bryn Mawr College campus in the cloisters of the Thomas Library.
External links