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In 1886, then, Miss Thomas, exercising her authority as dean, gave informally into the hands of these girls their own conduct. At that period, when the college for women was not far removed from the young ladies' seminary in spirit, we can picture the authorities of other colleges looking on with tremulous alarm while they waited to see this foolhardy young school wreck itself. But the wreck did not occur. A venture is counted foolhardy, or not, according to its outcome. For this reason educators look back upon Bryn Mawr's pioneering in self-government as an event which has made history. From East to West today the college girl is coming to be recognized as a responsible human being who can control her own conduct and who will control it far better if it be left in her own hands, on the principle that the only fun in breaking rules lies in having rules to break. It was Miss M. Carey Thomas who first pointed this out.

But although other colleges and schools have followed, Bryn Mawr still stands unique in the completeness of its democracy: for it admits no member of the faculty even in an advisory capacity to its board of discipline. Miss Thomas does not lead liberty on leash. In 1892, when the experiment was about a halfdozen years old, the girls asked that a charter be given to them which should

establish a permanent government of their own. The president and trustees gladly gave the girls in letter what they already possessed in spirit; and in their constitution it is to be read that "to the Bryn Mawr Students' Association for Self-Government the president and dean shall entrust the exclusive management of all matters concerning the conduct of students in their college life which do not fall under the jurisdiction of the authorities of the college or of the mistresses of the halls of residence." And upon closer inspection one finds that the matters which are left to the faculty are practically all academic, and that the mistresses of the halls are concerned no more with discipline than are hostesses in a houseful of guests-only with the matters which, without question, belong to the management of the household. As for the behavior of the girls, that is attended to by proctors of their own appointing.

Now observe the workings. Take, for example, a young freshman, we will say Miss Minerva Smith. She has been reared in a conservative family, this is her first going-away, she hears that the faculty does not discipline, and a glittering vision of liberty suddenly dazzles her eyes. On the first available day she takes a train for Philadelphia, and devotes herself to shopping. Later on she meets old friends, dines, stays over night and spends Sunday

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VISITORS ON THE LAWN ON COMMENCEMENT DAY AT BRYN MAWR COLLEGE

from her mind. She mentioned it merely as any other observer might, in wishing to aid the Association in its work. If the students choose to take up the matter, well and good; if not, it will never be referred to again.

Next day a note comes to Minerva. It is not from the president, dean, or any other of the mature powers-that-be. It is from certain authorized members of the Students' Association, which elects its officers wholly from the ranks of the students. In the note Minerva Smith is reminded that, in the first place, she left the college for overnight without registering her address in the hall; and that, secondly, she has broken the rule that the sevenforty-five on weekdays, and the eight-fifteen on Sundays, are the latest trains which students are permitted to take unescorted, and the nine-fifteen is the latest in any case.

"But I thought there were no rules for conduct made by the faculty!" she protests to a junior.

"There aren't. The rules are our own. And you won't find many faculties that enforce rules as strictly as we do," warns the weathered junior.

Miss Minerva is given a chance to mend her ways, but is made to understand that repeated offences mean a penalty. The fact that her fellow students frown upon her careless conduct strikes her forcibly. It dawns upon her that liberty in its truest sense is the most austere form of government; she hears that these girl students warn, punish, if necessary expel, offenders. without asking advice from anybody.

To be sure, they are not often called upon to use such extreme measures, for in the main the self-government achieves its end of excellent conduct. But the girl who will not enter into the spirit of it ever and anon appears, and she is dealt with to the full measure of the law.

Perhaps, in the beginning, the troublesome freshman was like Minerva. Smith and did not understand. But if the But if the executive board becomes fully convinced of her law-breaking spirit, it summons her before its court, gives her a hearing, calls upon witnesses, and judges. Her sin may have taken any one of many forms. Perhaps, fairly tremulous in the excite

ment of her own devilment, she may have lighted a cigarette! Possibly she has crossed the campus in male attire, having dressed thus for her rôle in a play. She may have made a social engagement with some male member of the faculty. She may have secretly turned the strawberry lemonade into punch at a tea. She may have returned so late that the low windows offered an easy means of entering her dormitory, unknown. She may have invited a man caller to her own study without a chaperon. Once a student smuggled her own brother into the gymnasium, disguising him in feminine garments.

Slowly the mills of the students grind, but woe to the sinner when the grinding is done. If it be agreed by the executive board that the victim be suspended for six weeks, possibly expelled, Miss Thomas is asked to go through the form of dismissal. This is a mere matter of form, however; the board knows that its decision will stand. The president has never yet vetoed such a decision; this she would not risk doing, for one veto would overthrow the democracy. But the significant fact is: she has never yet wanted to veto.

And so, in the guise of a detached observer, she looks on as if she had nothing to do with it all. Occasionally some infringement of rules comes to her attention -as, for instance, Minerva Smith's offence - but she merely reports the incident to the students in authority, to assist them.

And yet her spirit is the vital force animating this remarkable government, small, compact, compact, isolate, and practically perfect as a republic. So, too, her insistence upon ideals of scholarship is behind that proverbially high standard of requirements in entrance examinations and for graduation. It is a standard which keeps the college small; it does not even attempt to accommodate more than about four hundred and fifty students, and it annually weeds out two thirds of its applicants by examination. The girl who carries off a Bryn Mawr diploma must be ready to fight for it. And no matter how hard her struggle for learning, it cannot possibly be as hard as was the struggle of this woman who has

made these privileges possible to her; for she, of another generation, fought against the overwhelming odds of prejudice.

In the days of her earliest struggles, she wept over the story of Adam and Eve because she thought that the curse pronounced upon Eve might imperil girls' going to college. She searched books everywhere for light upon the possibilities of woman, and often found her hopes rebuffed by even the greatest. Milton excited her rage and indignation and she condemned him as a woman-hater; even Shakespeare, she felt, was not entirely fair to her sex intellectually. And so, through inward storm, rebuked by her period, she fought on, educating herself in America and Europe. The degree she had earned at the University of Leipzig from 1879 to 1882 was refused her on account of her sex; a like fate befell her at the University of Göttingen; but the University of Zürich finally granted her the degree of Ph.D., summa cum laude, the highest cum laude, the highest degree, at that time, ever awarded to a woman. It was a sort of martial experience for a girl; it brought the iron to the surface. No wonder it was with an austerity of standard that she started on her career as an educator. And somehow, by that occult process which we all have experienced, that austerity has contrived to permeate the air of Bryn Mawr. The students inhale it.

She will not permit Bryn Mawr College to accept the certificates of schools in lieu of its own own examinations. These are given annually in twenty or more centres. When the days of examinations are over, the little group that President Thomas looks over as it faces its freshman year is only one third of those who applied for entrance, a picked and tiny army.

And now come the four years of still keener effort. This college dared to undertake the group system of studies, adopting it from Johns Hopkins in early days, when other colleges for women were trying no venturesome experiments of such a nature. Every girl has her major subjects to which she must give one and a third years of her time. Chemistry and physics may be woven together, or political economy and history, or Greek and Latin. Another Another

third of a year must go to some science, another third to another science, or to political economy, or history, or law, or mathematics, another third to the history of philosophy, another third to whichever one of the four languages was omitted at entrance (Greek, Latin, French, and German were offered, three to be chosen), and another third for two years to English literature and the correct writing and pronunciation of our language. Here you have, then, only a highly modified form of specialization. The major subjects are chosen by the student, but so many subjects are required of her that she is bound to have a pretty general education before she gets through. She cannot escape these subjects, whether she is interested in them or not.

All this is part of that greed for learning, and more learning, both for herself and others, which fills Miss Thomas. A four years' course is none too long, according to the president's stern doctrine, to prepare to specialize. In a day when the vocational mania is abroad in the land, there is something formidable in viewing the foundation required here for a superstructure later on. In a day when we smatter through countless subjects in a quick preparation, that we may hurry on to our specialty, this groundwork for life looks like the great wall of China beside the underpinning of a portable house.

Bryn Mawr is the only woman's college to maintain a graduate school. Barnard and Radcliffe have such schools, but only as they share the privilege with the men's universities to which they are allied. There is a theory in this Pennsylvania institution that not only should the opportunity for further study be offered to women, but that it is a good thing for the undergraduates - this contact with graduate workers — and that it is stimulating to a faculty. This school is one of Miss Thomas's pet hobbies.

Just one curious requirement for graduation is a sidelight upon her passion for perfection. She has instituted the rule that every candidate for graduation must pass in sight-reading of French and German. The little room with its long table in which every senior must go through

her ordeal has been described as "quiet, awfully quiet," with the president sitting face to face with the victim and two other members of the faculty ready to hear her stumble through those alarming phrases. That Gibraltar-like austerity, combined with an infallible sense of humor which characterizes Miss Thomas, makes the hour at once terrifying and funny. Other colleges call for no such intimate knowledge of the languages; but Bryn Mawr is merciless, and the girl who cannot get through the test must give up her degree. "It means only an hour's reading a day through three summer vacations, blandly observes Bryn Mawr!

The fact that Bryn Mawr has happened to educate a great many daughters of wealthy families has given rise to no value of fashion for fashion's sake. Snobbery Snobbery among girls, even if it should appear, would wither in short order before the probing mind of this woman whose own standards tolerate no favoritism. Certain girls have brought maids with them; they were girls who had always been in the habit of having their glove-buttons sewed on and their hairpins arranged for them, but it turned out that in a few months' time they found it convenient to send the maids home and look after themselves. Secret sororities have never been admitted within these walls; it is well known that the president does not approve of them, that they would be directly opposed to her ideas of democracy. The societies she encourages are founded upon achievement, or are meant to promote interest in study.

She weeds to get her professors just as she weeds for a picked group of students; and that nothing matters but excellence is shown in this: there are more men than women in her faculty. Now she is a feminist, has always been absorbed in the woman question, is one of the foremost suffragists in our country to-day, and if she were the partisan that many a suffragist is she would choose women because they are women. Instead of that she wishes only to have the best professors. She would be glad if they happened to be of her own sex; but as they often

happen to be of the other, she does not try to deceive herself. This is one of the most distinctive traits of the woman: no one, not even Miss M. Carey Thomas, can deceive her. She looks others and herself straight in the eye and demands an honest explanation — and she has the kind of an eye that gets it.

It is as jovial an eye as it is formidable, however, at appropriate moments. It can dance over a girl's mischief even while the law is being upheld. Altogether she is a quaint figure, this Quaker-born lady with the Welsh ancestry. You may find her in the afternoon in a plain shirtwaist and a still plainer skirt, with her white. hair drawn back as if there were too few precious years of life to spend a moment more than necessary in adorning a coiffure. There is a severe plainness about the whole figure; and here it sits, monarch in a sort of intellectual palace of intellectual palace a home which is a treasure-house of rare books and exquisite ornaments from foreign lands. Room after room rambles on in this luxury, a luxury that represents wealth of mind rather than wealth of purse. And through the palace bustles this plain little woman in a shirtwaist, now hurrying to the long reception room to receive a nationally famous caller, next to the office to dictate a mass of urgent letters, seeing every task in clearcut outlines which clip it down to the minimum time. Or, chafing under the handicap of a badly sprained ankle, she still goes hobbling about, resenting the impertinence of such an ankle, refusing to submit, for her prodigious activities leave her no time to waste upon illness. These activities extend far beyond the walls of Bryn Mawr College. What Miss Thomas has done for woman everywhere is inestimable. Just one thing, for example, tells the story of her all-pervasive enterprise in a nutshell - you may have forgotten it she was one of the most powerful influences in obtaining for Johns Hopkins Medical School, in 1893, its endowment of $500,000 upon the agreement that women be admitted to its scholarship on equal terms with men. That is a type of the sort of thing Miss Thomas is always doing.

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