Women's History Month 2004
Mar. 14th, 2004 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sff_corgi_ljElizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz
Born in Boston on December 5, 1822, Elizabeth Cary was related to many of the city's leading families. She received no formal schooling but acquired a somewhat haphazard education at home.
In April 1850 she married the distinguished and recently widowed Swiss naturalist Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz 1; he was many years her senior, and when they married he was newly widowed with a small son and two daughters to raise. Elizabeth never had children of her own, but she raised Louis’ children and later three step-grandchildren also left motherless. 2
Her work proved to be invaluable to Louis's career. Her notes on his lectures were the raw material of much of his published work, and she helped organize and manage several of his expeditions into the field, notably the Thayer Expedition to Brazil in 1865-66 and the Hassler Expedition through the Strait of Magellan in 1871-72. Together they founded the Anderson School of Natural History, a marine laboratory on Penikese Island in Buzzard's Bay, Massachusetts. Her own published work includes A First Lesson in Natural History (1859), Seaside Studies in Natural History (1865; with her stepson Alexander Agassiz), and A Journey in Brazil (1867; with her husband). 1
From 1855 to 1863 in their Cambridge home 1 on Quincy Street, which closed during the Civil War 3, Elizabeth Agassiz conducted a school for girls, which, in addition to providing a needed supplement to the family income, was a pioneering effort in women's education. 1 The Agassiz house was on the corner of Oxford Street and Broadway, where the Fogg Museum is now located. 2 For some years after the death of her husband in 1873, she devoted herself to the care of her grandchildren and to the writing of a memoir of her husband. The book was published as Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence (1885). 1
From the time of her husband's death she had been interested in the idea of a college for women to be taught by the Harvard University faculty; a coordinate college would give women access to educational resources once limited to the use of men. 1 By the nineteenth century, women’s rights and women’s access to higher education had become significant social questions, and females begin actively to seek admission as Harvard students. A woman applied to the Medical School in 1847. The Dean assured Harvard’s governing body, the Corporation, that she was old and unattractive enough not to disrupt the male students’ concentration, but she was still denied a place. Just two years later, Sarah Pellet sought admission to the College -- and was denied.
In the decades that followed Sarah Pellet’s disappointment, the expansion of higher education for women in the United States was dramatic. Oberlin had been pathbreaking in admitting women in 1837; Mount Holyoke Seminary was founded the same year; Vassar opened in 1865 as a college exclusively for women; Cornell accepted an endowment for a college for women in 1872; Smith and Wellesley opened for women students in 1875. These developments did not go unnoticed in Cambridge, where a group of women -- wives, daughters, sisters of its highly educated elite -- became increasingly vocal about their desire to partake of Harvard’s intellectual riches. Harvard would not follow the coeducational example of Oberlin. But neither would the Cambridge supporters of women’s education model their efforts on Wellesley or Smith. Their hopes for eventual integration into Harvard led them to invent a different structure.
Since early in the nineteenth century, individual women had, under a variety of informal arrangements, gained entrance to some lectures at Harvard College, and this may have fueled an appetite for greater access. 4 Under the leadership of Mrs. Agassiz, the Cambridge women proposed a compromise, officially titled "Private Collegiate Instruction for Women," but popularly known as "the Annex." Women students would be taught by Harvard professors in classes and lectures given in addition to their regular obligations to the College. Opening in 1879, the Annex came to offer twenty or thirty courses a year, fewer than a quarter of those at Harvard, to a population of young women drawn overwhelmingly from the local area. Elizabeth Agassiz regarded the arrangements as a temporary measure and continued to work for the full admission of women to Harvard, even raising funds to present as an endowment to cover costs associated with the adoption of coeducation. 4
This presidency was not a full time job. She was appointed not as an administrator but as a liaison to the Harvard Corporation and a fund raiser for the new education enterprise for women. Her diplomatic skills and close connections to Harvard faculty were invaluable. 2 By 1890, the Annex had grown to more than two hundred students, had acquired Fay House, and required a more regularized structure. In 1893, the Annex offered Harvard its real estate and $150,000 as a lure to merge, but as a Harvard faculty member later wrote, this had small influence. The Annex, he explained, "had nothing to offer Harvard but girls, whom Harvard did not want." 4
Thus, in 1894, Radcliffe College, named in honor of Ann Radcliffe, founder of the first Harvard scholarship (1643) 1, was born -- as a compromise between what women wanted and what Harvard would give them, as an alternative to the two prevailing models of coeducation and separate women’s institutions. The "Annex" was incorporated by the Massachusetts Legislature and authorized to "confer on women all honors and degrees as fully as any university or college in the Commonwealth." So the newly named Radcliffe College achieved a certain authority but not autonomy. 5 It would educate women by contracting with individual Harvard faculty to provide instruction, would offer its own diplomas, to be countersigned by Harvard’s President, and would be subjected in academic matters to the supervision of "visitors" from Harvard. 4
Elizabeth Agassiz was pleased with this outcome and became Radcliffe’s first President, firmly believing that the College over which she presided was a temporary expedient and that women would soon be admitted as full students to Harvard. 4 Agassiz described the partnership thus: "Virtually then they say to us, 'Keep your independence -- the management of your property, and of all the other general interests of your establishment. We will assume the guardianship of the instruction, and endorse the work of your students as approved and certified by the professors and teachers of Harvard.' This places us, as it seems to me, just where we wish to be." 5 She would have more than a century to wait for coeducation.
One of the peculiar results of the arrangements agreed upon in 1894 to establish Radcliffe was that the new college would never have a faculty. Radcliffe was structured as an administrative rather than an academic unit. This also meant that its students were not exposed to female instructors, for the Harvard faculty had no women at all before the arrival of Maud Cam in 1948. By 1919, 100 percent of Barnard’s faculty were women; 55 percent of Bryn Mawr’s, 80 percent of Vassar’s, 82 percent of Wellesley’s, 30 percent at coed Swarthmore, and 29 percent at Oberlin. But all of the 185 Harvard instructors who offered courses at Radcliffe that year were male and crossed Garden Street to deliver their lectures in Radcliffe classrooms filled exclusively with women. 4
Radcliffe, however, contributed to the presence of the arts at Harvard. For instance, in 1899, the new Radcliffe Choral Society, together with the Harvard Glee Club, became the first university chorus to sing with a major orchestra. Archibald Davison, who conducted both groups (1915-25), recalled years later, "I sometimes wonder how much, if anything, Harvard realizes that it owes to Radcliffe. . . . Without the early and enthusiastic cooperation of the 'young ladies of Radcliffe' the impressive tradition of college choral singing, which is now nationwide and which is always associated first with Cambridge, would almost certainly have been established much later here or would have originated elsewhere." 5
Elizabeth Agassiz remained president of the society until 1899, when she relinquished her formal duties. She died in Arlington Heights, Massachusetts, on June 27, 1907. 1
Fay House in Cambridge was once a private home and the first building Radcliffe purchased (in 1885). Exit the yard through the gate next to Fay House and turn left. Note that the second gate you pass is a memorial gate to Elizabeth Agassiz, erected by her children and grandchildren. (the word "step"-children does not appear). 2 Mrs. Agassiz's writings continue to be accessible for reading: 6
In addition to her personal contributions to education and science, however, Mrs. Agassiz is remarkable for her family connexions. Bear with me here, because it's a little complicated.
Robert Gould Shaw was a New England 'merchant prince', building up a considerable fortune in the early 1800s. He and his wife, Elizabeth Willard Parkman Shaw (who may have come from a Unitarian Universalist family) had at least three children -- Francis George "Frank", Quincy Adams and Sarah.
The Cary family were REAL old New England, founded by James Cary, who sailed from Bristol and arrived in 1639. His great-great-great-grandson, Robert, one of six children, was the father of not only Elizabeth, but Richard (and an unknown number of siblings). During the Revolutionary War, their grandfather (Robert's father), Col. Richard Cary, had served on the staff of Gen. George Washington. It was Robert's brother Samuel who established the Cary house in Chelsea in the grand state it achieved.
These two families became tied together by a pair of marriages -- Quincy Shaw married Elizabeth's daughter Pauline Agassiz and Alex married Anna Russell, the daughter of Sarah Shaw Russell and her husband George R. Russell. Quincy and Alex also became business partners along with their other brother-in-law, other daughter Ida Agassiz's husband, Henry Lee Higginson. Pauline went on to become a notable educator outside of her husband's business, partly in response to trying to find the best way to raise their five children.
Frank and Sarah Blake Sturgis Shaw were famous abolitionists and also Unitarian Universalists -- a recurring motif in this group. "The widespread admiration for Frank and Sarah Shaw stemmed not just from their reform activities but also from their personal qualities." c
The next generation proved remarkable on their own. Most notably, the Shaw children -- Frank and Sarah's four daughters and one son -- followed at various levels their parents' footsteps. Anna Shaw Curtis and especially Josephine Shaw Lowell were well-known in Unitarian circles. Anna's daughter Elizabeth Curtis eventually grew up to found the Political Equality Club for Women, which evolved into the League of Women Voters. h However, the son overshadowed them all in history's eyes. Robert Gould Shaw, named after his grandfather, led the 54th Massachusetts 'coloured' regiment to his heroic and tragic death during the American Civil War.
Richard Cary, Quincy Adams Shaw, Henry Lee Higginson and Henry Sturgis Russell (Anna Russell Agassiz's brother and Robert Shaw's first cousin) were all officers in the 2nd Massachusetts, 'Gordon's Regulars' and served well. They, the feminine members of the extended family and their spouses went on to lead exemplary lives of philanthropy, military service, social activism, mercantile shipping and prime horseraising.
Mrs. Agassiz didn't just raise college women -- she raised two generations of heroes.
1 http://search.eb.com/women/articles/Agassiz_Elizabeth_Cabot_Cary.html
2 http://cox-marylee.tripod.com/cambridgecrowd.htm
3 http://www.cpsd.us/baldwin/history/lagassiz.html
4 http://www.radcliffe.edu/about/leadership/DeanLecture.pdf
5 http://www.news.harvard.edu/guide/underst/under4.html
6 http://etrc.lib.umn.edu/bibprim.htm
a http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/2126/
b http://search.ancestry.com/db-bcaw/P6.aspx
c http://www.ohiou.edu/oupress/seekingintro.pdf
d http://olgp.net/chs/d1/caryfamily.htm
ehttp://www.bitsofblueandgray.com/june2003.htm
f http://www.harrisonfamily.com/27409.htm
g http://www.edsanders.com/gen0019.htm
h http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/386/shaw.html
i http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~barlow/GeorgeofSandwich/francis.html
Born in Boston on December 5, 1822, Elizabeth Cary was related to many of the city's leading families. She received no formal schooling but acquired a somewhat haphazard education at home.
In April 1850 she married the distinguished and recently widowed Swiss naturalist Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz 1; he was many years her senior, and when they married he was newly widowed with a small son and two daughters to raise. Elizabeth never had children of her own, but she raised Louis’ children and later three step-grandchildren also left motherless. 2
Her work proved to be invaluable to Louis's career. Her notes on his lectures were the raw material of much of his published work, and she helped organize and manage several of his expeditions into the field, notably the Thayer Expedition to Brazil in 1865-66 and the Hassler Expedition through the Strait of Magellan in 1871-72. Together they founded the Anderson School of Natural History, a marine laboratory on Penikese Island in Buzzard's Bay, Massachusetts. Her own published work includes A First Lesson in Natural History (1859), Seaside Studies in Natural History (1865; with her stepson Alexander Agassiz), and A Journey in Brazil (1867; with her husband). 1
From 1855 to 1863 in their Cambridge home 1 on Quincy Street, which closed during the Civil War 3, Elizabeth Agassiz conducted a school for girls, which, in addition to providing a needed supplement to the family income, was a pioneering effort in women's education. 1 The Agassiz house was on the corner of Oxford Street and Broadway, where the Fogg Museum is now located. 2 For some years after the death of her husband in 1873, she devoted herself to the care of her grandchildren and to the writing of a memoir of her husband. The book was published as Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence (1885). 1
From the time of her husband's death she had been interested in the idea of a college for women to be taught by the Harvard University faculty; a coordinate college would give women access to educational resources once limited to the use of men. 1 By the nineteenth century, women’s rights and women’s access to higher education had become significant social questions, and females begin actively to seek admission as Harvard students. A woman applied to the Medical School in 1847. The Dean assured Harvard’s governing body, the Corporation, that she was old and unattractive enough not to disrupt the male students’ concentration, but she was still denied a place. Just two years later, Sarah Pellet sought admission to the College -- and was denied.
In the decades that followed Sarah Pellet’s disappointment, the expansion of higher education for women in the United States was dramatic. Oberlin had been pathbreaking in admitting women in 1837; Mount Holyoke Seminary was founded the same year; Vassar opened in 1865 as a college exclusively for women; Cornell accepted an endowment for a college for women in 1872; Smith and Wellesley opened for women students in 1875. These developments did not go unnoticed in Cambridge, where a group of women -- wives, daughters, sisters of its highly educated elite -- became increasingly vocal about their desire to partake of Harvard’s intellectual riches. Harvard would not follow the coeducational example of Oberlin. But neither would the Cambridge supporters of women’s education model their efforts on Wellesley or Smith. Their hopes for eventual integration into Harvard led them to invent a different structure.
Since early in the nineteenth century, individual women had, under a variety of informal arrangements, gained entrance to some lectures at Harvard College, and this may have fueled an appetite for greater access. 4 Under the leadership of Mrs. Agassiz, the Cambridge women proposed a compromise, officially titled "Private Collegiate Instruction for Women," but popularly known as "the Annex." Women students would be taught by Harvard professors in classes and lectures given in addition to their regular obligations to the College. Opening in 1879, the Annex came to offer twenty or thirty courses a year, fewer than a quarter of those at Harvard, to a population of young women drawn overwhelmingly from the local area. Elizabeth Agassiz regarded the arrangements as a temporary measure and continued to work for the full admission of women to Harvard, even raising funds to present as an endowment to cover costs associated with the adoption of coeducation. 4
This presidency was not a full time job. She was appointed not as an administrator but as a liaison to the Harvard Corporation and a fund raiser for the new education enterprise for women. Her diplomatic skills and close connections to Harvard faculty were invaluable. 2 By 1890, the Annex had grown to more than two hundred students, had acquired Fay House, and required a more regularized structure. In 1893, the Annex offered Harvard its real estate and $150,000 as a lure to merge, but as a Harvard faculty member later wrote, this had small influence. The Annex, he explained, "had nothing to offer Harvard but girls, whom Harvard did not want." 4
Thus, in 1894, Radcliffe College, named in honor of Ann Radcliffe, founder of the first Harvard scholarship (1643) 1, was born -- as a compromise between what women wanted and what Harvard would give them, as an alternative to the two prevailing models of coeducation and separate women’s institutions. The "Annex" was incorporated by the Massachusetts Legislature and authorized to "confer on women all honors and degrees as fully as any university or college in the Commonwealth." So the newly named Radcliffe College achieved a certain authority but not autonomy. 5 It would educate women by contracting with individual Harvard faculty to provide instruction, would offer its own diplomas, to be countersigned by Harvard’s President, and would be subjected in academic matters to the supervision of "visitors" from Harvard. 4
Elizabeth Agassiz was pleased with this outcome and became Radcliffe’s first President, firmly believing that the College over which she presided was a temporary expedient and that women would soon be admitted as full students to Harvard. 4 Agassiz described the partnership thus: "Virtually then they say to us, 'Keep your independence -- the management of your property, and of all the other general interests of your establishment. We will assume the guardianship of the instruction, and endorse the work of your students as approved and certified by the professors and teachers of Harvard.' This places us, as it seems to me, just where we wish to be." 5 She would have more than a century to wait for coeducation.
One of the peculiar results of the arrangements agreed upon in 1894 to establish Radcliffe was that the new college would never have a faculty. Radcliffe was structured as an administrative rather than an academic unit. This also meant that its students were not exposed to female instructors, for the Harvard faculty had no women at all before the arrival of Maud Cam in 1948. By 1919, 100 percent of Barnard’s faculty were women; 55 percent of Bryn Mawr’s, 80 percent of Vassar’s, 82 percent of Wellesley’s, 30 percent at coed Swarthmore, and 29 percent at Oberlin. But all of the 185 Harvard instructors who offered courses at Radcliffe that year were male and crossed Garden Street to deliver their lectures in Radcliffe classrooms filled exclusively with women. 4
Radcliffe, however, contributed to the presence of the arts at Harvard. For instance, in 1899, the new Radcliffe Choral Society, together with the Harvard Glee Club, became the first university chorus to sing with a major orchestra. Archibald Davison, who conducted both groups (1915-25), recalled years later, "I sometimes wonder how much, if anything, Harvard realizes that it owes to Radcliffe. . . . Without the early and enthusiastic cooperation of the 'young ladies of Radcliffe' the impressive tradition of college choral singing, which is now nationwide and which is always associated first with Cambridge, would almost certainly have been established much later here or would have originated elsewhere." 5
Elizabeth Agassiz remained president of the society until 1899, when she relinquished her formal duties. She died in Arlington Heights, Massachusetts, on June 27, 1907. 1
Fay House in Cambridge was once a private home and the first building Radcliffe purchased (in 1885). Exit the yard through the gate next to Fay House and turn left. Note that the second gate you pass is a memorial gate to Elizabeth Agassiz, erected by her children and grandchildren. (the word "step"-children does not appear). 2 Mrs. Agassiz's writings continue to be accessible for reading: 6
Seaside Studies in Natural History (with Alexander Agassiz). Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865.
A Journey in Brazil (with Alexander Agassiz). Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1869.
"An Amazonia Picnic," Atlantic Monthly, 17 (March 1866): 313-323.
"A Dredging Expedition in the Gulf Stream," Atlantic Monthly, 24 (October 1869): 507-517; (November 1869): 571-578.
"The Hassler Glacier in the Straits of Magellan," Atlantic Monthly, 30 (October 1872): 472-478.
"In the Straits of Magellan," Atlantic Monthly, 31 (January 1873): 89-95.
"A Cruise Through the Galapagos," Atlantic Monthly, 31 (May 1873): 579-584.
In addition to her personal contributions to education and science, however, Mrs. Agassiz is remarkable for her family connexions. Bear with me here, because it's a little complicated.
Robert Gould Shaw was a New England 'merchant prince', building up a considerable fortune in the early 1800s. He and his wife, Elizabeth Willard Parkman Shaw (who may have come from a Unitarian Universalist family) had at least three children -- Francis George "Frank", Quincy Adams and Sarah.
The Cary family were REAL old New England, founded by James Cary, who sailed from Bristol and arrived in 1639. His great-great-great-grandson, Robert, one of six children, was the father of not only Elizabeth, but Richard (and an unknown number of siblings). During the Revolutionary War, their grandfather (Robert's father), Col. Richard Cary, had served on the staff of Gen. George Washington. It was Robert's brother Samuel who established the Cary house in Chelsea in the grand state it achieved.
These two families became tied together by a pair of marriages -- Quincy Shaw married Elizabeth's daughter Pauline Agassiz and Alex married Anna Russell, the daughter of Sarah Shaw Russell and her husband George R. Russell. Quincy and Alex also became business partners along with their other brother-in-law, other daughter Ida Agassiz's husband, Henry Lee Higginson. Pauline went on to become a notable educator outside of her husband's business, partly in response to trying to find the best way to raise their five children.
Frank and Sarah Blake Sturgis Shaw were famous abolitionists and also Unitarian Universalists -- a recurring motif in this group. "The widespread admiration for Frank and Sarah Shaw stemmed not just from their reform activities but also from their personal qualities." c
The next generation proved remarkable on their own. Most notably, the Shaw children -- Frank and Sarah's four daughters and one son -- followed at various levels their parents' footsteps. Anna Shaw Curtis and especially Josephine Shaw Lowell were well-known in Unitarian circles. Anna's daughter Elizabeth Curtis eventually grew up to found the Political Equality Club for Women, which evolved into the League of Women Voters. h However, the son overshadowed them all in history's eyes. Robert Gould Shaw, named after his grandfather, led the 54th Massachusetts 'coloured' regiment to his heroic and tragic death during the American Civil War.
Richard Cary, Quincy Adams Shaw, Henry Lee Higginson and Henry Sturgis Russell (Anna Russell Agassiz's brother and Robert Shaw's first cousin) were all officers in the 2nd Massachusetts, 'Gordon's Regulars' and served well. They, the feminine members of the extended family and their spouses went on to lead exemplary lives of philanthropy, military service, social activism, mercantile shipping and prime horseraising.
Mrs. Agassiz didn't just raise college women -- she raised two generations of heroes.
1 http://search.eb.com/women/articles/Agassiz_Elizabeth_Cabot_Cary.html
2 http://cox-marylee.tripod.com/cambridgecrowd.htm
3 http://www.cpsd.us/baldwin/history/lagassiz.html
4 http://www.radcliffe.edu/about/leadership/DeanLecture.pdf
5 http://www.news.harvard.edu/guide/underst/under4.html
6 http://etrc.lib.umn.edu/bibprim.htm
a http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/2126/
b http://search.ancestry.com/db-bcaw/P6.aspx
c http://www.ohiou.edu/oupress/seekingintro.pdf
d http://olgp.net/chs/d1/caryfamily.htm
ehttp://www.bitsofblueandgray.com/june2003.htm
f http://www.harrisonfamily.com/27409.htm
g http://www.edsanders.com/gen0019.htm
h http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/386/shaw.html
i http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~barlow/GeorgeofSandwich/francis.html
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Date: 2004-03-14 06:29 pm (UTC)I really enjoy reading about them!!