Mary Emma Woolley

Background

Mary's early years were spent in Meriden, Connecticut, where her father, after serving in the Civil War as chaplain of the 8th Connecticut Volunteers, had become minister of the Center Congregational Church.

Education

In Pawtucket, Mary Woolley attended three private schools.

The last, Mrs. Davis's Private School for Young Ladies, was an important educational influence, providing small classes and close attention to each student and offering excellent Latin instruction.

She went next to the Providence (R. I. ) high school, and then, forsaking the finishing school program she had initially envisioned, enrolled with advanced standing in Wheaton Seminary, Norton, Massachussets, in 1882.

A European trip with a Smith College group in the summer of 1890 included Oxford and Cambridge in its itinerary and further encouraged Mary Woolley's growing educational ambitions.

Through her father's friendship with President E. Benjamin Andrews, she was in 1891 admitted to Brown University as one of the first seven women undergraduates.

She took her B. A. degree after three years and stayed an additional year for her master's degree, studying with the noted historian J. Franklin Jameson.

Her reputation as a teacher and humanist, together with her emerging qualities of leadership, led to an invitation to become president of Mount Holyoke College, which had been founded in 1837 by Mary Lyon as a seminary and had been chartered as a college in 1888.

Before taking office in January 1901, she spent three months in England studying women's education in British universities.

Career

After graduating from Wheaton in 1884, she taught there for four years.

She sought particularly to raise faculty salaries.

Secret societies were abolished, as well as the traditional requirement of domestic work in the college.

She especially felt that they could play a critical role in the search for peace.

In an address two years later entitled "Internationalism and Disarmament, " she called for a reeducation toward international understanding on all levels.

The trustees wished to replace her with a man, but she and a substantial group of faculty and alumnae felt strongly that Mount Holyoke's unbroken tradition of women presidents should be maintained.

The trustees decided otherwise, and Mary Woolley never recovered from this emotional blow.

She refused ever to visit Mount Holyoke again.

She continued active in her public career, living in West Port, N. Y. , with Jeannette Marks, a faculty friend of Mount Holyoke days.

[Essential sources are the Mary Woolley Papers in the Mount Holyoke College Lib. ; Arthur C. Cole, A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College (1940); and Jeannette Marks, Life and Letters of Mary Emma Woolley (1955).

A revealing autobiographical memoir is in What I Owe to My Father, ed.

Sydney Strong (1931).

Her scholarly style can be sampled in "The Early Hist.

of the Colonial Post-Office, " R. I. Hist.

Soc. , Publications, Jan. 1894, and in "The Development of the Love of Romantic Scenery in America, " Am.

Hist.

Rev. , Oct. 1897.

See also Hugh Hawkins in Notable Am.

Women, III, 660-663; N. Y. Times obituary, Sept. 6, 1947; and, for her memberships and honors, Who Was Who in America, II (1950).

The Cole history reproduces a portrait of Mary Woolley. ]

Religion

He moved in 1871 to the Congregational church in Pawtucket, R. I. , where he initiated controversial reforms.

Her own affiliations included the American Peace Society (vice-president, 1907 - 1913), the League of Nations Association, and the Institute for Pacific Relations.

Views

Mary Woolley's mixture of political astuteness and idealism is conveyed in her Internationalism and Disarmament (Kappa Delta Pi Lecture Series, 38 pp. , 1935).

Personality

Although not herself a militant, she was an enthusiastic supporter of the woman's suffrage movement and in her later years endorsed the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.

Connections

Both parents were descended from English settlers of Connecticut.

She later gratefully attributed this decisive step to the enlightened guidance of her father.

Father:

E.