Date with a Career by Jan Nickerson

Like many of the books I enjoyed growing up, Date with a Career is about a girl starting school in a new place; however, it is also about her determination to become a fashion designer. Saphronia Adams has spent most of her life in Manhattan with her mother, a successful actress, but now her mother is performing in Australia, so Saphronia has is spending her senior year in New England with the grandmother for whom she was named. 

Bookshelf Traveling - September 26

Time for another round of Bookshelf Traveling in Insane Times which was created by Judith at Reader in the Wilderness and is currently hosted by Katrina at Pining for the West.   The idea is to share one of your neglected bookshelves or perhaps a new pile of books.

This is an American History shelf that features some admired authors.  On the left are several books by David McCullough.   My parents heard him speak at Roxbury Latin and asked him to autograph John Adams (2001) for me.  I remember my friend Duncan read Truman (1992) aloud to his newborn when it first came out and that baby just got engaged!  I listened to the audio of Mornings on Horseback (1981)(about Theodore Roosevelt) as I drove to Quebec a year ago.   I also really liked The Wright Brothers (2015) but do not own that one.   Next is Down with the Old Canoe, A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster (1996) by Steven Biel.  I have a separate section for books about the Titanic so this book is in the wrong place!  I think I got it mixed up with Tippecanoe and Tyler too, the 1840 campaign song my father told me about long ago. 

Betsy Was a Junior, Group Read, Part 4

I will get back to sororities shortly but last week when I was looking for pictures of University of Minnesota buildings that Julia and Betsy Ray would have known in the early 20th century, I came across the name of Ada Comstock, who was the first Dean of Women at the U from 1901 to 1912.  Ada’s name was already very familiar to me because she was the president of my alma mater, Radcliffe College, from 1923-43. 

I was ridiculously pleased to think there was a connection between Betsy and me, although obviously attenuated as I never met Ada (she retired before my mother arrived at Radcliffe in the 50s, then married a Yale History professor and moved to New Haven, where she was living at her death in 1973 at the age of 97).  I was excited when someone suggested that Ada Comstock might be the sister of Betsy’s much loved history teacher, Miss Clarke. The Betsy-Tacy Companion explains that Miss Clarke’s real name was Grace Comstock; she was from an old Mankato family and had attended the U herself.  However, after some investigation it turns out that while they might conceivably be related, Ada and Grace were not sisters.  Originally from Maine, Ada’s father, Solomon G. Comstock (1842-1933), became a prominent lawyer in Morehead, Minnesota.  He was a Republican politician and served a term in Congress.  He was committed to education and supported the school that became Concordia College and sponsored legislation that led to the establishment of the eventual Morehead State (its student union is named for him).   Solomon’s wife, Sarah (1845-1941) was also civic minded and was involved in establishing the first public library in Morehead. 

Ada sounds like Winona Root.  She told people she was the first white child in the Red River Valley in Moorhead, and she grew up loving the wide prairies and wheat fields of the West.  She graduated from high school at 15 and began college at the U but was encouraged by her father to go East to college so transferred to Smith College in Massachusetts for her last two years (for those who know Smith, she lived in Hubbard House).  There is a story that she received a case of champagne while at Smith, which her housemother thought she should give away but she carefully stored it with the building’s water supplies so she could share it with her friends.

After graduating from Smith in 1897, Ada returned home and obtained her teaching certificate at what was then known as Moorhead State Normal School.  She then earned a Master’s Degree in English at Columbia in 1899, and then returned to Minnesota as an English Instructor and in 1907 was named Dean of Women at the U ( she would have been about 12 years older than Julia Ray when Julia arrived in September 1908 – that is, if Julia were real).  Although Ada looks severe, she was considered witty and was known for her unusually rich and persuasive voice (and she must have had a sense of humor to cope with the way Harvard treated Radcliffe as a second-class citizen).  The U still has an “Ada Comstock Distinguished Women Scholars Award & Lecture.”  She left the U to return to Smith as its first dean in 1912, and is remembered there with prestigiousscholarships in her name (at one point, she was the acting president of Smith but when the job was filled it went to a man – perhaps that is when she updated her resume and applied for the job in Cambridge).  In 1923 she left Smith for Radcliffe to be its first full-time president. 

Ada’s sister was, alas, not Grace but Jessie May, born in 1879.  She attended Radcliffe and their brother George attended Harvard.   Both Jessie and George (born 1886) returned to Minnesota after college, and George eventually donated the family home to the Minnesota Historical Society in 1965.  It has been restored to its 1883 appearance and is open for tours.  Moorhead appear to be closer to Fargo, North Dakota than to Minneapolis or Mankato so I doubt I will visit any time soon but the Comstock home sounds lovely: it is described as a “stunning example of late Victorian architecture. The 11-room, two-story home features elements of both Queen Anne and Eastlake designs. On the first floor is the front hall which leads to the parlor, library and sitting room. At the back of the house is the dining room, pantry, kitchen and a bedroom and bath. The second floor contains four bedrooms and a maid's chamber. An oak balustrated staircase leads from the first to the second floor. Many rooms contain original furnishings and personal effects of the Comstock family” and “[t]he home is characterized by a profusion of spindle work porches, high patterned chimneys and poly-chromed siding and trim. Situated on one of the highest points in the city, the property included an ice house, tool room, food storage room, and a barn for the family’s three horses and three carriages.”

The Comstock family's contribution to the early history of higher education in America lives on in the buildings at four different institutions:  Morehead State, the University of Minnesota, Smith, and Radcliffe (it now appears to have been absorbed by Pforzheimer House).  Imagine if Ada had spent more than a year at Columbia!

I am grateful to the Minnesota Historical Society’s website for Comstock House, from which I have quoted.

Alma Mater (Review)

Title: Alma Mater: Design and Experience in Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s Author: Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz Publication Information: University of Massachusetts Press, 2e (originally published in 1984) Genre: History/Women’s Studies Book/Event: I was pleased to see that Helen Horowitz, Emerita professor of history at Smith College, was going to be speaking at the Radcliffe Institute because I am an admirer of her work. The topic of the speech was:

It’s Complicated: 375 Years of Women at Harvard Historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz will explore Harvard University’s relationship with women, which she describes as complicated. Her review begins with the University’s founding 375 years ago, when Harvard excluded women as students and teachers. For 200 years, the University conveyed education and prestige to a ministry and a rising merchant class. Beginning in the 19th century, women found innovative ways to attain higher education, but the terms of access required accommodation—even invisibility. Horowitz contends that the fight for equity began more than a century ago and remains a work in progress today. Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust will offer brief welcoming remarks. The book itself is fascinating. Fans of Carney’s House Party and Daddy Long Legs will, of course, love the sections on Vassar, but anyone interested in the college experience will enjoy the differing goals of the founders of these colleges and to what extent they were influenced by each other. The descriptions of the architecture are so intriguing they make me want to visit each campus with book in hand. I was delighted to meet Professor Horowitz after her speech and tell her my mother (who was with me) and I are part of a three generation Seven Sisters family. She autographed my book. What I liked: It was nice to see the Radcliffe Institute hosting an event that was standing room only. The speech was entertaining and the audience was extremely engaged, and Professor Horowitz was very interesting. I agreed with much of what she said. Coming from Harvard where we are programmed to believe in our own superiority, it was very interesting to hear her theory that Radcliffe having been created in the shadow of Harvard (because that was all that Harvard would tolerate - not news to me) never had a proper model for empowering women students (the implication was that Radcliffe College was doomed to fail). In contrast, she praised Barnard as having thrived due to strong leadership that came to advantageous agreements with Columbia. I think Barnard has issues of its own, ever since Columbia started admitting women but the alumnae I know seem pleased with their experience. Perhaps I should have asked the president of Barnard when I contacted her last week, requesting that she write to Granny for her 97th birthday next Monday… 

What I disliked: There were some interesting questions after Professor Horowitz’s speech (including one from Susan Faludi) and a few people wanted her to condemn the demise of Radcliffe College. She diplomatically said she would leave that topic to those most involved. My mother felt that the theme of the presentation ignored her belief that she had the best of both worlds – the academics of Harvard but the closeness of a women’s residential college. That was clearly true for her but several of her best friends resented the second-class citizenship and lack of mentoring. 

Source: I bought this book many years ago due to my interest in women’s education.

A proud day for Radcliffe and perhaps the world...

It is a happy day as former Prime Minister (and fellow Radcliffe alumna) Benazir "Pinky" Bhutto makes a triumphant return to Pakistan! While accusations of corruption brought down her government in 1996, she has always seemed sincere in her desire to bring democracy to her country (and some blamed the corruption on her husband, who I always suspected was part of a marriage of state, to disarm enemies who would not have taken her seriously if she were single). She has a very dangerous road ahead.

photo courtesy of Getty Images

Of course, tragedy struck, in the form of a suicide bomber, just hours after I wrote this, which must have been devastating for all involved but Bhutto sounds resolute.

Maida's Little Island

On Thursday, Carolynne Lathrop (visiting Betsy-Tacy listren from Iowa, who is also a Maida fan), my mother and I set out to visit Spectacle Island, one of the Boston Harbor Islands, the setting for Maida's Little Island (1939). The island has been expensively restored after 6 million tons of dirt and gravel from Boston's Big Dig were dumped on it, creating an 80 foot mound of trash. A friendly and helpful park ranger drove us to the island's north drumlin, the highest point in Boston's Harbor, where we were 157 feet above sea level (I had not worn appropriate shoes and was delighted to have scored us a ride in the airport-like people mover since the day was hot and the road to the top was long and dusty).

North Drumlin, Spectacle Island

This vista towered over neighboring islands and boasted a view spanning Boston's skyline and the 40 miles between Salem to the north and the Blue Hills Reservation to the south. The island itself was named by early colonists because of its resemblance to a pair of eyeglass spectacles shaped by two hills, with what is called a bridge in the middle. See map.