Women at GW: From Mini to Maxi Role

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“Women at GW: from Mini to Maxi Role”

A speaker at chapel exercises in Columbian College deplored as "evil" the slight attention being paid to the education of women. The year was 1837. Thomas White Sydnor stated there was little doubt that the female mind could grasp such subjects as mathematics, philosophy, ancient languages and astronomy. To improve the minds of women would "exert a healthful" influence on society, he said, since to the woman is "committed almost exclusively the training of the infant mind." (Sydnor's remarks were reprinted in the historical supplement of the Hatchet, March 25, 1931). For one reason or another, the University was reluctant to admit women, possibly due to its early Baptist cast and to the Southern influence in the nation's capital. (Until World War II, Washington, D. C., had the reputation of being more parochial in its manners and customs than any other city outside the South).

After the Civil War women renewed their struggle to gain the vote, and naturally Washington was the focus of their demonstrations and lobbying efforts. A remarkable woman, Mrs. Belva Ann Bennett (a widow who later married the Rev. Ezekiel Lockwood in Washington) came from New York state to take charge of Union League Hall, a center for the suffragette movement. Already the possessor of two college degrees, Mrs. Lockwood apparently felt she could be more effective in Washington if she studied law.

When Columbian (later GW) Law School held its opening exercises October 13, 1869, Mrs. Lockwood was present. "The noticeable feature of the evening ... was the presence of the irrepressible Mrs. Lockwood of Union League Hall - women's rights discussion notoriety," the Washington Morning News commented the next day. There was no reason why women should not study law, run for public office, and rid the country of "political rings," according to the newspaper, because women have "a higher regard for honesty" than men. The law faculty felt differently. They saw no "public want" for women lawyers.

Mrs. Lockwood studied at National University Law School and received her law degree in 1873. No woman had practiced law in the District courts previously, but after a good deal of argument, Mrs. Lockwood was admitted to practice before the highest District court on September 23, 1873. She appeared in court every day on behalf of her clients, many of them poor and discredited, according to American Women (1897). She asked to be admitted to the Court of Claims and the Supreme Court, but her motions were rejected because the men jurists said there were no English precedents. Mrs. Lockwood argued there was precedent enough in the fact that some English monarchs had been queens. Undismayed, she drafted a bill to permit women lawyers to practice before the Supreme Court, found several Congressmen to introduce it, and within three years the Congress enacted her bill into law. She was admitted to the highest court March 3, 1879.

In the meantime Mrs. Lockwood had run up a sizeable number of legislative achievements. Among other successes she secured passage of a Congressional bill giving women employees in government pay equal to men's for the same work. She had also persuaded the Congress to appropriate $50,000 in "bounties for sailors and mariners," a group often exploited at the time. She worked hard for peace, declaring that "difficulties" both at home and abroad should be settled by arbitration rather than force or war. As a delegate to the Universal Peace Union, she attended several international conferences in Paris, where she presented arguments in favor of establishing the machinery for international arbitration. Mrs. Lockwood was nominated to run as President of the United States by the Equal Rights Party in 1884 and again in 1888.

Having rejected Mrs. Lockwood's request to be admitted to the Law School, GW can claim this redoubtable woman as its own only by the accident of merger. In 1954 National University Law School and its records were absorbed by GW, and the combined schools were renamed the National Law Center of George Washington University.

In 1871 Mrs. Maria M. Carter offered the University a gift of $5,000 if the income from it would be used to pay the tuition of women students. After some eight months the Board of Trustees deemed it not "expedient" to accept the gift until some plan could be devised for the education of women.

In 1884 four women applied for "tickets" to attend lectures at the Medical School. The medical faculty pointed out there were no proper "retiring" rooms for women. The women replied that they were quite willing to put up with this inconvenience, and so they were allowed to matriculate. One of them, Clara Bliss Hinds, was awarded the Doctor of Medicine degree in the Class of 1887, the first woman graduate of Columbian University. The next year two women were graduated from the Corcoran Scientific School, whose faculty did not object to coeducation. The following September Miss Mabel Nelson Thurston was permitted to enroll for a degree in the Columbian College, although she could not attend classes. She was to see her professors individually for assignments, as her presence in class might prove "diverting." Miss Thurston's behavior and scholarship met such high standards that the bars against coeds went down the next year. Eleven women enrolled in Columbian College in 1889 and counting Miss Thurston and a woman in the Corcoran Scientific School, they numbered 13.

As one of them, Edna Clark, described their experience years later for the historical supplement of the Hatchet (1931), "We knew that we were looked on as a problem, that we were on trial; at any rate we were pioneers and felt sure if we did not ‘hang together' we might ‘hang separately.’”

Some of the young women consulted Dean Charles E. Munroe (inventor of smokeless gunpowder) who suggested they form a club. Except for the Enosinian Debating Society for young men, there were no other organizations to which they might be invited to join. The women got together and wondered what to call their group. Someone said, "Why not The Original Thirteen?" "Perhaps," Edna Clark recalled, "some idea that we were pioneers made us look back in history to the original thirteen states."

Additional women entered the University the following year and joined the group, so it changed its name to "The Original Thirteen Plus." The young women put on entertainment for the faculty at the close of their first and second years of college. About the same,, time the Enosinian Society elected to membership some of the Original Thirteen who had literary or debating talents. At times years after, women occasionally outnumbered men in the oldest society at the University.

In 1893, after the Original Thirteen had graduated, several members heard of a girl who planned to go to college but who was unable to do so because her father had been killed in the Ford Theater disaster. Some among the Original Thirteen met again and decided to raise funds for a scholarship for this ambitious young woman. They renamed themselves the Columbian Women.

As the years went by and their numbers increased (they invited wives of faculty members and wives of presidents of the University to join them), Columbian Women became an important fund-raising arm of the University. They raised funds to help the University buy real estate, to equip a room at the hospital, to buy books for the library, to acquire Woodhull House and a building for a faculty club. Their interest in scholarships for deserving young women continued, and today the fund contains about $70,000, the income from which is used to assist GW women students.

In 1892 the medical faculty voted to discontinue its experiment in coeducation on grounds that it was "a strain on modesty" to teach both sexes in the same classes. The law faculty also held out for all-male enrollment.

One of the student newspapers preceding the Hatchet was The Weekly Columbian and in its second issue (Oct. 17, 1903), the editor tangled with an unnamed editorial writer of the city paper, the Washington Times, on the subject of admitting women to certain classes at the University. Under the heading, “Editorially,” are the following paragraphs as excerpted from The Weekly Columbian:

“Sandwiched between an editorial on ‘Gospel Hymns’ and a batch of free advice to the libraries, the Washington Times of Saturday last flaunted an editorial intended to show the editor's qualifications for running a university, but really displayed his profound stupidity and ignorance of the facts.

"It was an editorial headed ‘Columbian University: Are the Professors or the Students the Ruling Power?’ and it endeavored to show that the faculty of Columbian had been bluffed by the students in regard to the admission of women to the diplomatic course. The editorial stated that women are excluded from the privilege of taking the course, that this decision is a change of policy, that it is in response to pressure on the part of the students, and that it is a surrender on the part of the faculty. In the first place, there is nothing prima facie criminal in the general exclusion of women from the colleges intended primarily for the education of males. Nearly all the Eastern colleges are adherents to the doctrine of segregation, and a number of the Western colleges, after experimenting with coeducation, are now taking the same stand. It is a question each college has a right to decide for itself.

“Moreover, there is nothing prima facie criminal in the yielding of a faculty to students’ demands. It doesn't mean that students thereby assume administration of the university, but in this case, the facts are not true ... The Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees, not the faculty, has the power to confer a degree on a woman ... Women are permitted to attend all lectures in diplomacy as auditors ...

“Many would be pleased to have a lecture course made a permanent part of Columbian University... since Washington is ‘the rendezvous of famous and learned men.’ The lecture course for the whole school would be a means by which the entire student body (coeds and all) might be brought together and thus ‘break the seclusion and separation of the different departments in the long and weary winter months.’”

So much for the meddling of a Washington newspaper into University affairs!

Finally in June, 1911, all the professional schools opened their doors to women. One woman was enrolled in the Medical School in 1912, and five women entered the Law School in the fall of 1913. Mrs. Belva Lockwood died in 1917; two years later the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote was adopted, and in the 1920s women flocked to GW. Their numbers, compared with men, were proportionately higher in law and medicine and the graduate schools then than at any time since. Women did not shirk campus office. The senior class officers of 1925 were all women, including the Sergeant at Arms. The 1926 student yearbook, the Cherry Tree, was dedicated to Mrs. Jessie Fant Evans (Mrs. Joshua Evans, Jr.), the first woman to serve on the Board of Trustees of the University. Mrs. Evans (A.B. ‘13) helped the University and the community in numerous ways: as President of Columbian Women, as a writer for the educational page of the Sunday Star, as a former teacher, and as an active participant in many woman’s organizations. She was the first woman to receive an honorary degree (Ed.D. ‘32).

Other members of Columbian Women who were feminine “firsts” included Anita Newcomb McGee (M.D. ‘92), the first woman appointed surgeon in the U.S. Army; Mrs. Henry Grattan Doyle, the first woman president of the D. C. Board of Education; Mrs. Howard L. Hodgkins, the first woman vice-president of the D. C. Board of Education; Miss Janet McWilliams, the first woman appointed a mathematician at the U.S. Naval Observatory; Miss Mabel Nelson Thurston, the first woman to serve as associate editor of the nationally popular magazine, Youth's Companion; Miss Lucy Burlingame, the first woman appointed to the U.S. Foreign Service; Miss Elizabeth Peet, Dean of Gallaudet College and nationally honored for her education of the deaf and mute. Miss Peet also received an honorary degree from GW.

Among the distinguished Washington women who served as president of Columbian Women at one time or another is Mrs. Cloyd Heck Marvin, wife of the longtime University President. During Mrs. Marvin's administration the women added substantially to their scholarship fund.

Other Columbian Women were Mrs. Francis Parkinson Keyes, the novelist; Mary Roberts Rinehart, popular mystery story writer; Helen Nicolay, biographer of Lincoln; Julia Marlowe, the actress; and Mrs. Harry S. Truman, who was Honorary President.

Other outstanding women in Washington have given generously to the University from time to time. Hattie M. Strong Hall, the first woman's dormitory, was built with funds provided by the late Mrs. Henry Alvah Strong; The Eugene Meyer Pavilion at the University Hospital was financed by a million dollar gift of Mrs. Agnes Meyer; and Lisner Library and Lisner Auditorium were largely, financed by Abram Lisner as a memorial to his wife, a member of Columbian Women. Dimock Gallery in Lisner Lounge is in memory of Susan Dimock, daughter of the late Mrs. Susan Whitney Dimock, who turned over the assets of the George Washington Memorial Association to the University to perpetuate the name of the first President.

The unfinished work of Mrs. Belva Lockwood, alumna by merger, is now being carried on by a gaggle of woman's organizations represented on the Ad Hoc Committee for the Equal Rights Amendment. Among those on the Ad Hoc Committee is Carol Vance, a GW student representing GW students in Women's Liberation.

At a press conference held in the University Center November 13, spokeswomen for the Ad Hoc Committee asked that the original wording of the amendment be retained. Proponents of the legislation said the substitute amendment exempting women from the Selective Service Act was designed to kill equal rights. Miss Vance, as a college student of draft age, spoke to this point in the whirring glare of TV cameras: “Sex exemption from the draft is a negation of our ability to face the most onerous self-determination question of our time. We are not asking to be spared from making critical decisions. If the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment means that both men and women will be subject to involuntary induction, we claim the right to answer for ourselves.” A woman TV reporter asked Miss Vance if she was willing to be drafted. Miss Vance replied she felt that was a personal decision to be left to each individual.

If those 19th century professors with the over-delicate sensibilities could know what has happened since they refused to admit women to Columbian College, they might spin in their graves (metaphorically, to be sure). Turning away Mrs. Lockwood and others was a winning skirmish in a losing war. The barricades are up again in the battle of the sexes. Many women are dissatisfied (but who isn’t?). Yet no one could seriously question the important contributions of women at GW: as students, as faculty members, as trustees, as donors, as friends. The only question is: how badly off would the University be now had the old policies prevailed?

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Author or Source: Source: GW Magazine, Special issue, 1970
Document Location: University Archives
Date Added to Encyclopedia: January 12, 2007
Prepared by: Lyle Slovick, Assistant University Archivist

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