As my three older sisters had already attended the seminary at
Rockford, of which my father was trustee, without any question I
entered there at seventeen, with such meager preparation in Latin
and algebra as the village school had afforded. I was very
ambitious to go to Smith College, although I well knew that my
father's theory in regard to the education of his daughters
implied a school as near at home as possible, to be followed by
travel abroad in lieu of the wider advantages which the eastern
college is supposed to afford. I was much impressed by the
recent return of my sister from a year in Europe, yet I was
greatly disappointed at the moment of starting to humdrum
Rockford. After the first weeks of homesickness were over,
however, I became very much absorbed in the little world which
the boarding school in any form always offers to its students.
The school at Rockford in 1877 had not changed its name from
seminary to college, although it numbered, on its faculty and
among its alumnae, college women who were most eager that this
should be done, and who really accomplished it during the next
five years. The school was one of the earliest efforts for
women's higher education in the Mississippi Valley, and from the
beginning was called "The Mount Holyoke of the West."
It reflected much of the missionary spirit of that pioneer
institution, and the proportion of missionaries among its early
graduates was almost as large as Mount Holyoke's own. In
addition there had been thrown about the founders of the early
western school the glamour of frontier privations, and the first
students, conscious of the heroic self-sacrifice made in their
behalf, felt that each minute of the time thus dearly bought must
be conscientiously used. This inevitably fostered an atmosphere
of intensity, a fever of preparation which continued long after
the direct making of it had ceased, and which the later girls
accepted, as they did the campus and the buildings, without
knowing that it could have been otherwise.
There was, moreover, always present in the school a larger or
smaller group of girls who consciously accepted this heritage and
persistently endeavored to fulfill its obligation. We worked in
those early years as if we really believed the portentous
statement from Aristotle which we found quoted in Boswell's
Johnson and with which we illuminated the wall of the room
occupied by our Chess Club; it remained there for months, solely
out of reverence, let us hope, for the two ponderous names
associated with it; at least I have enough confidence in human
nature to assert that we never really believed that "There is the
same difference between the learned and the unlearned as there is
between the living and the dead." We were also too fond of quoting
Carlyle to the effect, "'Tis not to taste sweet things, but to do
noble and true things that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs."
As I attempt to reconstruct the spirit of my contemporary group
by looking over many documents, I find nothing more amusing than
a plaint registered against life's indistinctness, which I
imagine more or less reflected the sentiments of all of us. At
any rate here it is for the entertainment of the reader if not
for his edification: "So much of our time is spent in
preparation, so much in routine, and so much in sleep, we find it
difficult to have any experience at all." We did not, however,
tamely accept such a state of affairs, for we made various and
restless attempts to break through this dull obtuseness.
At one time five of us tried to understand De Quincey's marvelous
"Dreams" more sympathetically, by drugging ourselves with opium.
We solemnly consumed small white powders at intervals during an
entire long holiday, but no mental reorientation took place, and
the suspense and excitement did not even permit us to grow
sleepy. About four o'clock on the weird afternoon, the young
teacher whom we had been obliged to take into our confidence,
grew alarmed over the whole performance, took away our De Quincey
and all the remaining powders, administrated an emetic to each of
the five aspirants for sympathetic understanding of all human
experience, and sent us to our separate rooms with a stern
command to appear at family worship after supper "whether we were
able to or not."
Whenever we had a chance to write, we took, of course, large
themes, usually from the Greek because they were the most
stirring to the imagination. The Greek oration I gave at our
Junior Exhibition was written with infinite pains and taken to
the Greek professor in Beloit College that there might be no
mistakes, even after the Rockford College teacher and the most
scholarly clergyman in town had both passed upon it. The oration
upon Bellerophon and his successful fight with the Chimera
contended that social evils could only be overcome by him who
soared above them into idealism, as Bellerophon mounted upon the
winged horse Pegasus, had slain the earthy dragon.
There were practically no Economics taught in women's colleges--at
least in the fresh-water ones--thirty years ago, although we
painstakingly studied "Mental" and "Moral" Philosophy, which,
though far from dry in the classroom, became the subject of more
spirited discussion outside, and gave us a clew for animated
rummaging in the little college library. Of course we read a
great deal of Ruskin and Browning, and liked the most abstruse
parts the best; but like the famous gentleman who talked prose
without knowing it, we never dreamed of connecting them with our
philosophy. My genuine interest was history, partly because of a
superior teacher, and partly because my father had always insisted
upon a certain amount of historic reading ever since he had paid
me, as a little girl, five cents a "Life" for each Plutarch hero I
could intelligently report to him and twenty-five cents for every
volume of Irving's "Life of Washington."
When we started for the long vacations, a little group of five
would vow that during the summer we would read all of Motley's
"Dutch Republic" or, more ambitious still, all of Gibbon's
"Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." When we returned at the
opening of school and three of us announced we had finished the
latter, each became skeptical of the other two. We fell upon
each other in a sort of rough-and-tumble examination, in which no
quarter was given or received; but the suspicion was finally
removed that anyone had skipped. We took for a class motto the
early Saxon word for lady, translated into breadgiver, and we
took for our class color the poppy, because poppies grow among
the wheat, as if Nature knew that wherever there was hunger that
needed food there would be pain that needed relief. We must have
found the sentiment in a book somewhere, but we used it so much
it finally seemed like an idea of our own, although of course
none of us had ever seen a European field, the only page upon
which Nature has written this particular message.
That this group of ardent girls, who discussed everything under
the sun with unabated interest, did not take it all out in talk
may be demonstrated by the fact that one of the class who married
a missionary founded a very successful school in Japan for the
children of the English and Americans living there; another of
the class became a medical missionary to Korea, and because of
her successful treatment of the Queen, was made court physician
at a time when the opening was considered of importance in the
diplomatic as well as in the missionary world; still another
became an unusually skilled teacher of the blind; and one of them
a pioneer librarian in that early effort to bring "books to the
people."
Perhaps this early companionship showed me how essentially
similar are the various forms of social effort, and curiously
enough, the actual activities of a missionary school are not
unlike many that are carried on in a Settlement situated in a
foreign quarter. Certainly the most sympathetic and
comprehending visitors we have ever had at Hull-House have been
returned missionaries; among them two elderly ladies, who had
lived for years in India and who had been homesick and bewildered
since their return, declared that the fortnight at Hull-House had
been the happiest and most familiar they had had in America.
Of course in such an atmosphere a girl like myself, of serious
not to say priggish tendency, did not escape a concerted pressure
to push her into the "missionary field." During the four years it
was inevitable that every sort of evangelical appeal should have
been made to reach the comparatively few "unconverted" girls in
the school. We were the subject of prayer at the daily chapel
exercise and the weekly prayer meeting, attendance upon which was
obligatory.
I was singularly unresponsive to all these forms of emotional
appeal, although I became unspeakably embarrassed when they were
presented to me at close range by a teacher during the "silent
hour," which we were all required to observe every evening, and
which was never broken into, even by a member of the faculty,
unless the errand was one of grave import. I found these
occasional interviews on the part of one of the more serious
young teachers, of whom I was extremely fond, hard to endure, as
was a long series of conversations in my senior year conducted by
one of the most enthusiastic members of the faculty, in which the
desirability of Turkey as a field for missionary labor was
enticingly put before me. I suppose I held myself aloof from all
these influences, partly owing to the fact that my father was not
a communicant of any church, and I tremendously admired his
scrupulous morality and sense of honor in all matters of personal
and public conduct, and also because the little group to which I
have referred was much given to a sort of rationalism, doubtless
founded upon an early reading of Emerson. In this connection,
when Bronson Alcott came to lecture at the school, we all vied
with each other for a chance to do him a personal service because
he had been a friend of Emerson, and we were inexpressibly
scornful of our younger fellow-students who cared for him merely
on the basis of his grandfatherly relation to "Little Women." I
recall cleaning the clay of the unpaved streets off his heavy
cloth overshoes in a state of ecstatic energy.
But I think in my case there were other factors as well that
contributed to my unresponsiveness to the evangelical appeal. A
curious course of reading I had marked out for myself in medieval
history, seems to have left me fascinated by an ideal of mingled
learning, piety and physical labor, more nearly exemplified by
the Port Royalists than by any others.
The only moments in which I seem to have approximated in my own
experience to a faint realization of the "beauty of holiness," as
I conceived it, was each Sunday morning between the hours of nine
and ten, when I went into the exquisitely neat room of the
teacher of Greek and read with her from a Greek testament. We
did this every Sunday morning for two years. It was not exactly
a lesson, for I never prepared for it, and while I was held
within reasonable bounds of syntax, I was allowed much more
freedom in translation than was permitted the next morning when I
read Homer; neither did we discuss doctrines, for although it was
with this same teacher that in our junior year we studied Paul's
Epistle to the Hebrews, committing all of it to memory and
analyzing and reducing it to doctrines within an inch of our
lives, we never allowed an echo of this exercise to appear at
these blessed Sunday morning readings. It was as if the
disputations of Paul had not yet been, for we always read from
the Gospels. The regime of Rockford Seminary was still very
simple in the 70's. Each student made her own fire and kept her
own room in order. Sunday morning was a great clearing up day,
and the sense of having made immaculate my own immediate
surroundings, the consciousness of clean linen, said to be close
to the consciousness of a clean conscience, always mingles in my
mind with these early readings. I certainly bore away with me a
lifelong enthusiasm for reading the Gospels in bulk, a whole one
at a time, and an insurmountable distaste for having them cut up
into chapter and verse, or for hearing the incidents in that
wonderful Life thus referred to as if it were merely a record.
My copy of the Greek testament had been presented to me by the
brother of our Greek teacher, Professor Blaisdell of Beloit
College, a true scholar in "Christian Ethics," as his department
was called. I recall that one day in the summer after I left
college--one of the black days which followed the death of my
father--this kindly scholar came to see me in order to bring such
comfort as he might and to inquire how far I had found solace in
the little book he had given me so long before. When I suddenly
recall the village in which I was born, its steeples and roofs
look as they did that day from the hilltop where we talked
together, the familiar details smoothed out and merging, as it
were, into that wide conception of the universe, which for the
moment swallowed up my personal grief or at least assuaged it with
a realization that it was but a drop in that "torrent of sorrow
and aguish and terror which flows under all the footsteps of man."
This realization of sorrow as the common lot, of death as the
universal experience, was the first comfort which my bruised
spirit had received. In reply to my impatience with the Christian
doctrine of "resignation," that it implied that you thought of
your sorrow only in its effect upon you and were disloyal to the
affection itself, I remember how quietly the Christian scholar
changed his phraseology, saying that sometimes consolation came to
us better in the words of Plato, and, as nearly as I can remember,
that was the first time I had ever heard Plato's sonorous argument
for the permanence of the excellent.
When Professor Blaisdell returned to his college, he left in my
hands a small copy of "The Crito." The Greek was too hard for me,
and I was speedily driven to Jowett's translation. That
old-fashioned habit of presenting favorite books to eager young
people, although it degenerated into the absurdity of
"friendship's offerings," had much to be said for it, when it
indicated the wellsprings of literature from which the donor
himself had drawn waters of healing and inspiration.
Throughout our school years, we were always keenly conscious of
the growing development of Rockford Seminary into a college. The
opportunity for our Alma Mater to take her place in the new
movement of full college education for women filled us with
enthusiasm, and it became a driving ambition with the
undergraduates to share in this new and glorious undertaking. We
gravely decided that it was important that some of the students
should be ready to receive the bachelor's degree the very first
moment that the charter of the school should secure the right to
confer it. Two of us, therefore, took a course in mathematics,
advanced beyond anything previously given in the school, from one
of those early young women working for a Ph.D., who was
temporarily teaching in Rockford that she might study more
mathematics in Leipsic.
My companion in all these arduous labors has since accomplished
more than any of us in the effort to procure the franchise for
women, for even then we all took for granted the righteousness of
that cause into which I at least had merely followed my father's
conviction. In the old-fashioned spirit of that cause I might
cite the career of this companion as an illustration of the
efficacy of higher mathematics for women, for she possesses
singular ability to convince even the densest legislators of their
legal right to define their own electorate, even when they quote
against her the dustiest of state constitutions or city charters.
In line with this policy of placing a woman's college on an
equality with the other colleges of the state, we applied for an
opportunity to compete in the intercollegiate oratorical contest
of Illinois, and we succeeded in having Rockford admitted as the
first woman's college. When I was finally selected as the
orator, I was somewhat dismayed to find that, representing not
only one school but college women in general, I could not resent
the brutal frankness with which my oratorical possibilities were
discussed by the enthusiastic group who would allow no personal
feeling to stand in the way of progress, especially the progress
of Woman's Cause. I was told among other things that I had an
intolerable habit of dropping my voice at the end of a sentence
in the most feminine, apologetic and even deprecatory manner
which would probably lose Woman the first place.
Woman certainly did lose the first place and stood fifth, exactly
in the dreary middle, but the ignominious position may not have
been solely due to bad mannerisms, for a prior place was easily
accorded to William Jennings Bryan, who not only thrilled his
auditors with an almost prophetic anticipation of the cross of
gold, but with a moral earnestness which we had mistakenly
assumed would be the unique possession of the feminine orator.
I so heartily concurred with the decision of the judges of the
contest that it was with a care-free mind that I induced my
colleague and alternate to remain long enough in "The Athens of
Illinois," in which the successful college was situated, to visit
the state institutions, one for the Blind and one for the Deaf and
Dumb. Dr Gillette was at that time head of the latter
institution; his scholarly explanation of the method of teaching,
his concern for his charges, this sudden demonstration of the care
the state bestowed upon its most unfortunate children, filled me
with grave speculations in which the first, the fifth, or the
ninth place in the oratorical contest seemed of little moment.
However, this brief delay between our field of Waterloo and our
arrival at our aspiring college turned out to be most
unfortunate, for we found the ardent group not only exhausted by
the premature preparations for the return of a successful orator,
but naturally much irritated as they contemplated their garlands
drooping disconsolately in tubs and bowls of water. They did not
fail to make me realize that I had dealt the cause of woman's
advancement a staggering blow, and all my explanations of the
fifth place were haughtily considered insufficient before that
golden Bar of Youth, so absurdly inflexible!
To return to my last year of school, it was inevitable that the
pressure toward religious profession should increase as
graduating day approached. So curious, however, are the paths of
moral development that several times during subsequent
experiences have I felt that this passive resistance of mine,
this clinging to an individual conviction, was the best moral
training I received at Rockford College. During the first decade
of Hull-House, it was felt by propagandists of diverse social
theories that the new Settlement would be a fine coign of vantage
from which to propagate social faiths, and that a mere
preliminary step would be the conversion of the founders; hence I
have been reasoned with hours at a time, and I recall at least
three occasions when this was followed by actual prayer. In the
first instance, the honest exhorter who fell upon his knees
before my astonished eyes, was an advocate of single tax upon
land values. He begged, in that phraseology which is deemed
appropriate for prayer, that "the sister might see the beneficent
results it would bring to the poor who live in the awful
congested districts around this very house."
The early socialists used every method of attack,--a favorite one
being the statement, doubtless sometimes honestly made, that I
really was a socialist, but "too much of a coward to say so." I
remember one socialist who habitually opened a very telling
address he was in the habit of giving upon the street corners, by
holding me up as an awful example to his fellow socialists, as
one of their number "who had been caught in the toils of
capitalism." He always added as a final clinching of the
statement that he knew what he was talking about because he was a
member of the Hull-House Men's Club. When I ventured to say to
him that not all of the thousands of people who belong to a class
or club at Hull-House could possibly know my personal opinions,
and to mildly inquire upon what he founded his assertions, he
triumphantly replied that I had once admitted to him that I had
read Sombart and Loria, and that anyone of sound mind must see
the inevitable conclusions of such master reasonings.
I could multiply these two instances a hundredfold, and possibly
nothing aided me to stand on my own feet and to select what
seemed reasonable from this wilderness of dogma, so much as my
early encounter with genuine zeal and affectionate solicitude,
associated with what I could not accept as the whole truth.
I do not wish to take callow writing too seriously, but I reproduce
from an oratorical contest the following bit of premature
pragmatism, doubtless due much more to temperament than to
perception, because I am still ready to subscribe to it, although
the grandiloquent style is, I hope, a thing of the past: "Those who
believe that Justice is but a poetical longing within us, the
enthusiast who thinks it will come in the form of a millennium,
those who see it established by the strong arm of a hero, are not
those who have comprehended the vast truths of life. The actual
Justice must come by trained intelligence, by broadened sympathies
toward the individual man or woman who crosses our path; one item
added to another is the only method by which to build up a
conception lofty enough to be of use in the world."
This schoolgirl recipe has been tested in many later experiences,
the most dramatic of which came when I was called upon by a
manufacturing company to act as one of three arbitrators in a
perplexing struggle between themselves, a group of
trade-unionists and a non-union employee of their establishment.
The non-union man who was the cause of the difficulty had ten
years before sided with his employers in a prolonged strike and
had bitterly fought the union. He had been so badly injured at
that time, that in spite of long months of hospital care he had
never afterward been able to do a full day's work, although his
employers had retained him for a decade at full pay in
recognition of his loyalty. At the end of ten years the once
defeated union was strong enough to enforce its demands for a
union shop and in spite of the distaste of the firm for the
arrangement, no obstacle to harmonious relations with the union
remained but for the refusal of the trade-unionists to receive as
one of their members the old crippled employee, whose spirit was
broken as last and who was now willing to join the union and to
stand with his old enemies for the sake of retaining his place.
But the union men would not receive "a traitor," the firm flatly
refused to dismiss so faithful an employee, the busy season was
upon them, and everyone concerned had finally agreed to abide
without appeal by the decision of the arbitrators. The chairman
of our little arbitration committee, a venerable judge, quickly
demonstrated that it was impossible to collect trustworthy
evidence in regards to the events already ten years old which lay
at the bottom of this bitterness, and we soon therefore ceased to
interview the conflicting witnesses; the second member of the
committee sternly bade the men remember that the most ancient
Hebraic authority gave no sanction for holding even a just
resentment for more than seven years, and at last we all settled
down to that wearisome effort to secure the inner consent of all
concerned, upon which alone the "mystery of justice" as
Maeterlinck has told us, ultimately depends. I am not quite sure
that in the end we administered justice, but certainly employers,
trade-unionists, and arbitrators were all convinced that justice
will have to be established in industrial affairs with the same
care and patience which has been necessary for centuries in order
to institute it in men's civic relationships, although as the
judge remarked the search must be conducted without much help
from precedent. The conviction remained with me, that however
long a time might be required to establish justice in the new
relationships of our raw industrialism, it would never be stable
until it had received the sanction of those upon whom the present
situation presses so harshly.
Towards the end of our four years' course we debated much as to
what we were to be, and long before the end of my school days it
was quite settled in my mind that I should study medicine and
"live with the poor." This conclusion of course was the result of
many things, perhaps epitomized in my graduating essay on
"Cassandra" and her tragic fate "always to be in the right, and
always to be disbelieved and rejected."
This state of affairs, it may readily be guessed, the essay held
to be an example of the feminine trait of mind called intuition,
"an accurate perception of Truth and Justice, which rests
contented in itself and will make no effort to confirm itself or
to organize through existing knowledge." The essay then
proceeds--I am forced to admit, with overmuch conviction--with
the statement that women can only "grow accurate and intelligible
by the thorough study of at least one branch of physical science,
for only with eyes thus accustomed to the search for truth can
she detect all self-deceit and fancy in herself and learn to
express herself without dogmatism." So much for the first part of
the thesis. Having thus "gained accuracy, would woman bring this
force to bear throughout morals and justice, then she must find
in active labor the promptings and inspirations that come from
growing insight." I was quite certain that by following these
directions carefully, in the end the contemporary woman would
find "her faculties clear and acute from the study of science,
and her hand upon the magnetic chain of humanity."
This veneration for science portrayed in my final essay was
doubtless the result of the statements the textbooks were then
making of what was called the theory of evolution, the acceptance
of which even thirty years after the publication of Darwin's
"Origin of Species" had about it a touch of intellectual
adventure. We knew, for instance, that our science teacher had
accepted this theory, but we had a strong suspicion that the
teacher of Butler's "Analogy" had not. We chafed at the
meagerness of the college library in this direction, and I used
to bring back in my handbag books belonging to an advanced
brother-in-law who had studied medicine in Germany and who
therefore was quite emancipated. The first gift I made when I
came into possession of my small estate the year after I left
school, was a thousand dollars to the library of Rockford
College, with the stipulation that it be spent for scientific
books. In the long vacations I pressed plants, stuffed birds and
pounded rocks in some vague belief that I was approximating the
new method, and yet when my stepbrother who was becoming a real
scientist, tried to carry me along with him to the merest outskirts
of the methods of research, it at once became evident that I had
no aptitude and was unable to follow intelligently Darwin's
careful observations on the earthworm. I made a heroic effort,
although candor compels me to state that I never would have
finished if I had not been pulled and pushed by my really ardent
companion, who in addition to a multitude of earthworms and a fine
microscope, possessed untiring tact with one of flagging zeal.
As our boarding-school days neared the end, in the consciousness
of approaching separation we vowed eternal allegiance to our
"early ideals," and promised each other we would "never abandon
them without conscious justification," and we often warned each
other of "the perils of self-tradition."
We believed, in our sublime self-conceit, that the difficulty of
life would lie solely in the direction of losing these precious
ideals of ours, of failing to follow the way of martyrdom and
high purpose we had marked out for ourselves, and we had no
notion of the obscure paths of tolerance, just allowance, and
self-blame wherein, if we held our minds open, we might learn
something of the mystery and complexity of life's purposes.
The year after I had left college I came back, with a classmate,
to receive the degree we had so eagerly anticipated. Two of the
graduating class were also ready and four of us were dubbed B.A.
on the very day that Rockford Seminary was declared a college in
the midst of tumultuous anticipations. Having had a year outside
of college walls in that trying land between vague hope and
definite attainment, I had become very much sobered in my desire
for a degree, and was already beginning to emerge from that
rose-colored mist with which the dream of youth so readily
envelops the future.
Whatever may have been the perils of self-tradition, I certainly
did not escape them, for it required eight years--from the time I
left Rockford in the summer of 1881 until Hull-House was opened
in the the autumn of 1889--to formulate my convictions even in
the least satisfactory manner, much less to reduce them to a plan
for action. During most of that time I was absolutely at sea so
far as any moral purpose was concerned, clinging only to the
desire to live in a really living world and refusing to be content
with a shadowy intellectual or aesthetic reflection of it.