Smith College

April 2, 2003
Smith College

I am slowly realizing that of all the privileges I have enjoyed, being allowed to go to a great college is the most valuable. Not just any college, the one that was perfect for me. My mother, father and big brother all went to Cornell, and I worked like a beaver ( do beavers study?) to be sure of grades that would get me into Cornell too. But then my brother became the V.P. of a big old famous fraternity and announced that he simply could not have a sister at Cornell because his fraternity did not approve of co-eds, and he would like to have a sister at Smith. ( He never explained how he got away with having a co-ed mother.)

So Mother and I went off to Northampton to consider this substitute institution. Mother teased me ever after that when I woke up and heard the standard New England rain I said, 'Well, it has nothing on Cornell, yet." Northampton and Ithaca turned out to be at the ends of the rainiest area east of the Mississippi. We went to the scholarship office. The admissions person asked Mother, " Could you possibly manage without scholarship assistance.?" It was 1937. My parents had weathered the Depression. My father was back at work 5 days a week, after being cut to 4, but never back to the 5 ½ that he had worked for many years. They were looking at two college tuitions to pay the same year. Mother drew herself up and said "Well, I guess we could if we had to." Thus ended the scholarship discussion. I learned later that almost half the people there were getting some amount of help.

The Smith campus is beautiful even in the rain, which is fortunate, since you see it that way a great deal. We toured the campus and talked with students and I went home persuaded that it would be OK since Cornell was out of the question. Talking with Smith students and meeting Smith alumnae made me realize it was far above OK, even if not above Cayuga's waters. By the time the acceptance letter came I thought the world might end if I couldn't go there. It came late in the summer, and I will never know if I was on a fill- in list or if everyone waited that long. There was no early admissions policy then.

We went to Hahnes' in Newark for college clothes. Each department store had a crew of college students allegedly helping you buy just the right thing for your particular campus. They didn't do too well in my case, but once in Northampton there were just the right clothes on every hand. I got carried away once and ordered a dress made to order, like my rich friends were doing. It was lovely, but it didn't survive cleaning very well.

Not only had I never had rich friends before, I didn't even understand the many differences between public and private schools. I am told that 19% of people in my generation went to any college, and of course a smaller percentage of women, and of that a VERY small percentage of women from public high schools went to the big name colleges. There were 3 public school freshmen in our House of 60 women. Smith has no sororities. Students live in Houses of 60 more or less, carefully assigned for a mix of east and west, north and south, US and other countries. I would have been miserable in a sorority society, either sad because not chosen, or embarrassed for those left out if chosen. As it was, even with public school background I was elected to some humble office on House Council each year - Historian, Fire Captain or something. It is true that the girls who came in packs from Abbot Andover or Emma Willard or wherever tended to vote each other into the major class offices, but they did such good jobs that I thought this was a pretty good plan. It was the beginning of understanding the power of networking in politics.

I was so ignorant I didn't know you were supposed to buy your own pencils and paper in college. After all, I had always been handed everything I needed, on the first day of school, for 12 years. On the first day in Philosophy class the professor asked me if she might borrow my pencil. When I said politely that I didn't have any, she said " You might consider bringing one, just in case anything important should happen to be said here." It didn't occur to me to ask why she didn't have one, and if it had I certainly would not have said it. Why was I taking Philosophy? Because my wonderful high school French teacher had mentioned it one day and made it sound interesting. On that first day we were asked to write our definition of Philosophy. In spite of the pencil incident trauma I wrote "Philosophy is the history of man's search for truth", which was my own invention , not a quote, and made the Professor so happy that she repeatedly pressed me to take honors in Philosophy. No way. We parted when I told her I had no use for discussion or argument unless it led to decision and action.

My first memory of college is watching the family Hudson disappear through the arch that led out of the quadrangle, without a qualm or a quiver. I, who had been homesick on every vacation, miserable at camp, never again felt another twinge. The next memory is of the house mother asking me to serve the soup from the first silver tureen I had ever met, at my first college dinner. We were served by maids we loved, Abby and Lucy, and we kept cloth napkins in a dining room cubby. The House Mother invited different people to join her at the head table. No was not a choice. The head maid, Grace, stood at attention to the left and slightly behind the House Mother's seat. Grace served each person from the platters that came from the kitchen. I had never been in a house where there were maids, and I thought it was just like the movies. The war changed all that, and now students do the waiting and cleanup and have paper napkins, and pay far more than we did. For 25 cents Lucy used to wash and iron a pure silk blouse and hang it in my closet. Tuition, room and board were $2000 a year when I started and $2200 when I finished. At that time, this was the top of Seven Sisters and Ivy League costs.

The last memory of college is a professor in the graduation receiving line saying " You write extremely well, Now it remains to be seen if you have anything to say."

In between those first and last memories were four years of growing up. After always being at the top of my class, or very close, I didn't get another A until senior year, except in one semester of Spanish which I dropped as soon as I passed the required 2nd language reading test in French. After being in band and orchestra for years, I couldn't blow my horn in the college symphony because all the music was in tenor clef which I hadn't learned. The conductor was very kind. After taking piano lessons for 6 years I failed the audition to be accepted as a piano student for credit, because I had not learned the vocabulary of formal piano work, and could play more things than I knew names for. No regret there - I had enjoyed every minute of my unorthodox music education, and I took lessons all 4 years from the department's tutor. Since there was no credit involved, there was no stress, and if it was exam week and I hadn't practiced, we played 4 hands Beethoven sonatas.

What surprises me now is that I took for granted the main thing Smith does for its students. Girls flew the planes, rowed the boats, rang the tower bells, ran the radio station, published the college paper and the literary magazines, ran the student government ( including Grass Cops!), and I didn't know this was special. In True North former president Jill Ker Conway talks about faculty paternalism but we developed a lot of independence in spite of it, especially when compared to generations before us. Betty Friedan was there, one year behind me, Gloria Steinem came to Smith 15 years later. They made Smith famous as a hotbed of feminism, but the college laid the foundation for any of us to be, shall we say, unsubmissive. Growing up in a town full of engineers, who thought it was normal for daughters to take shop for 3 years along with sons, I had assumed that girls could do just about anything, but Smith certainly cemented this idea. I was to learn out in the cruel real world that this was not the prevailing notion. Smith made it very clear that women could learn to do anything they wanted to. Friedan and Steinem just shook them up to start doing it. Smith now has the first women's degree-granting engineering program.

Mary Ellen Chase defined Smith as a community of teachers and students working and learning together. She and the other great and famous professors taught Freshman classes ( now called First Years), came to tea in the Houses and talked with us casually, and kept their office doors open. One professor invited me to her house and showed me the reference cards laid out where she was working on her next book. There were no graduate students marking papers. In a lecture hall of 300 students there was no need of a microphone, partly because there was not a sound from the student audience, partly because these people were great speakers. Teachers and the President and students mingled at lectures and concerts, learning and enjoying together. One of many turning points in my life came the evening I sat in a lecture on the Dead Sea Scrolls which had just been discovered, thinking it was pretty boring. Then President Neilson, who was sitting in the front row, began asking questions. It dawned on me that if he was still learning, I had pretty far to go and had better pay attention, whatever the subject might be. Mr. Neilson had been an editor of the Merriam Webster Unabridged Dictionary, and the Harvard Classics library, etc. etc. Chapel attendance was required on Wednesdays, and was always interesting, but on Mondays he presented his views of world news. Those of us who were listening knew that World War II was coming and why.

The war came. The college made room for the WAVES. A lot of physical changes took place. But the college remained and remains what it has always been to me, an island of excellence in a crazy world. Careless academic work was not accepted. In a time before computers, each professor stated, not suggested, " All papers will be typed." If a meeting needed 13 chairs, the King's Men would have 13 chairs in place on time. There were no crumbling concrete steps. If a class was scheduled to start at 8:00, it started at 8:00, in snow or rain or heat. If Miss Chase hadn't quite finished her sandwich she mounted the podium chewing, but on time. Papers were due not like maybe pretty soon, but DUE. It seemed to me that the professors routinely studied about 9 books to prepare each one hour lecture. Miss Chase's basic reading list had 19 titles and we were expected to read far more than that.

Excellence doesn't preclude fun and kindness. I wrote on one senior year blue book, "Sorry I haven't read this book. I was home getting married." The world renowned Shakespeare professor wrote her grade: "That's the way to do it! A." This ploy only worked, I'm sure, because the war was getting closer and closer. It was spring of 1941. As a dean said to one graduation class, "Frightening as it may be, you are now among the best educated people in the world." And as Mrs, Morrow said to our class the first week, ''Let's have no more talk of adjustment. Let's just get at it." So we left. All 560 of us, Baccalaurealem in Artibus, MDCCCCXXXXI, Reiquepublicae Americanae CLXV, and have been at it ever since, trying to live up to the standard Smith set for us.