"Scholar," "Lady," "Best Man in the English Department"? Recalling the Career of Marjorie
Hope Nicolson
Author(s): Andrea Walton
Source: History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 2, (Summer, 2000), pp. 169-200
Published by: History of Education Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/369535
Accessed: 02/05/2008 13:53
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=hes.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We enable the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
http://www.jstor.org
"Scholar,""Lady,""Best Man in the
English Department"?-Recalling the
Career of Marjorie Hope Nicolson
Andrea Walton
"We came late enough to escape the self-consciousness and the belligerence of the pioneers, to take education and training for granted. We came
early enough to take equally for granted professional positions in which we
could make full use of our training. This was our double glory."l Speaking
before an audience at the University of Michigan, her alma mater, in 1937
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, then Dean of Smith College, reflected on the
heady years during which she, Class of 1914, and her female contemporaries came of age. These lines, later published in a well-known essay entitled "The Rights and Privileges Pertaining Thereto .. .," are often quoted
in histories of women's higher education to capture the circumstancesamong them, peaking female enrollments, rising doctorates, and wartime
employment-that buoyed the aspirations and career ambitions of college
women in the early decades of the twentieth century.2By vividly evoking
the spirit of possibility that so deeply influenced women in the Progressive
Era, Nicolson's description, in turn, offered an equally telling perspective
Andrea Walton is an Assistant Professor in the Foundations of Education and Higher Education programs at Indiana University at Bloomington. She would like to thank the following people for their helpful comments on earlierdraftsof this article:Ellen Condliffe Lagemann,
B. Edward McClellan, Hamid Mubarak, Gabrielle Oldham, Sevan Terzian, and Claire Ellen
Walton. This article was completed during a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellowship and is part of a larger study of women at Columbia University from the founding of BarnardCollege in 1889 to coeducation at Columbia College in 1983.
'Marjorie Hope Nicolson, "The Rights and Privileges Pertaining 'Thereto..." in
A UniversityBetweenTwo Centuries,ed. Wilfred B. Shaw (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1937), 414. A condensed version of this speech appeared in Journal ofAmericanAssociation of UniversityWomen31 (April 1938): 135-42.
2For prominent references to Nicolson's "Rights and Privileges Pertaining Thereto"
speech, see, for example, Patricia Albjerg Graham, "Expansion and Exclusion: A History of
Women in American Higher Education," Signs 3 (Summer 1978): 765 and Lynn D. Gordon,
Genderand Higher Educationthe ProgressiveEra (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990),
200. For a discussion of women's opportunities in the 1920s and 1930, see Graham, "Expansion and Exclusion," 764-765 and Barbara Solomon, In the Companyof Educated Women:
A Historyof HigherEdulcation
in America(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), esp. Table
2, p. 63 and Table 6, p. 133. For the experience of women who earned the doctorate before
1924, see Emile Hutchinson, Womenand the Ph.D. Institute of Women's Professional Relations Bulletin no. 2 (Greensboro: North Carolina College for Women, 1929).
Historyof EducationQuarterly
Vol. 40
No. 2
Summer 2000
170
Historyof EducationQuarterly
on the disillusionment that many female graduatesexperienced later, in the
wake of vastly changed employment realities and a widespread backlash
against women's advances. "We did not realize that such fever is inevitably
followed by reaction.... Within a decade shades of the prison house began
to close."3
Interestingly,though Nicolson's commentaryhas figuredprominently
in shaping our interpretation of this pivotal period in the history of women's education and entry into the professions, little has been written about
Marjorie Hope Nicolson herself. A pioneer literary scholar in the interdisciplinaryfield of science and imagination, Nicolson was the first woman
president of Phi Beta Kappa, serving two consecutive terms, from 1940 to
1946. She held the vice presidency of the Modern Language Association
(MLA) in 1937-38, and nearly a quarterof a century later, in 1962-63, was
honored as that organization'spresident.In addition to these national offices
and leadership roles, Nicolson received many attractive offers to assume
the deanship or presidency at a woman's college. But it was the life of scholarship that most appealed to her. In 1941 Nicolson achieved the distinction of being the first woman to hold a full professorship in Columbia
University's graduatefaculty.4Despite the myriadhonors and accolades she
garnered, Nicolson's career has been eclipsed, left relatively unconsidered
by historians, even within the literature on academic women. That said,
memories of Nicolson by former colleagues and students, over three decades
after her retirement, still evoke vivid and often mixed reactions: she is
remembered admiringly by some as the "Conscience of Columbia" and
more ambivalentlyby others as the "Bestman in the English Department."
Who then was the woman who penned these famous lines, Marjorie Hope
Nicolson? How did she conceptualize academic life and build a career that
was both subjectively satisfying and socially significant? How might her
story help us understand more fully the experience and circumstances of
second- and third-generation college women?
In this biography, I seek to answer these questions by tracing Nicolson's growth as a scholar and analyzing the ways gender expectations,
whether subtle or explicit, shaped her career. My purpose is to shed light
on the woman's individuality, and through her life to further our understanding of the gender politics affecting the aspirations and achievements
of women of her era as they embarked on an academic path. It is because
her life raises some thorny issues (vis-a-vis gender and the professoriate)
that Nicolson's career deserves closer attention. The lines from Nicolson's
3Nicolson, "Rights and Privileges," 414.
4Fora useful bibliography, see In HonorofMarjorieHopeNicolson,printed by Columbia
University, February 17,1962. The main source of information on Nicolson's life is an oral
history. See "The Reminiscences of Marjorie Hope Nicolson," (1975) in the Oral History
Collection of Columbia University; [hereafterMHN Oral History].
The CareerofMarjorieHopeNicolson
171
speech, though well-known, can be misleading. Taken by themselvesapart from a portrait of Nicolson's life and career-they fail to capture the
tangle of gender-related biases and ambivalent feelings that, I argue, were
embedded in Nicolson's view of the status of academicwomen and her own
success. Rarely did she discuss the frustrated ambitions of her generation
of university-trained women with such self-consciousness and empathy.
When she earned her Ph.D. from Yale in 1920, Nicolson sensed a
poignant moment of opportunity for herself and her female contemporaries. Like many of her generation who had grown up in the years before
the Great War, she was "so persuaded of the Idea of Progress that social,
political, national progress seemed ... as inevitable as biological evolution."5If the brutality of war had shaken their view of global politics, many
of Nicolson's contemporaries were nonetheless hopeful that the achievements of women faculty and students during World War I had sufficiently dispelled gender prejudices to foster a "general awakening" in higher
education.6 Steeped in the optimism of the era, Nicolson believed firmly
that women's battles had been won by an earlier generation and, therefore,
that sex-consciousness was anachronistic. Adamant that she was "no feminist," and indeed uncomfortable with equal rights rhetoric, or any arguments that held the danger of politicizing the academy, Nicolson, by her
own admission, savored the financial independence and personal freedoms
gained by the "womanmovement."7Smoking, drinking,driving (she dubbed
her car "Calvin"because "he did not choose to run"), and sporting a shortcropped haircutwere tangible signs of freedom to her, but these paled when
compared to the "romance"of scholarship. Nicolson weighed seriously the
"rights and privileges" of academic life and revered her doctorate as the
true symbol of her intellectual emancipation.8
Her appointment at Columbia was noteworthy because few women
had gained positions in the private research-oriented universities of the
East.9During her nearly two decades at Columbia University, Nicolson's
sMarjorieHope Nicolson, "New Philosophy Calls All in Doubt," ScrzppsCollegePapers
number 9 (1947), 6. See also idem., "Scholars and Ladies," YaleReview 19 (June 1930): 778.
CA.Caswell Ellis, "PreliminaryReport of Committee W on Status of Women in College and University Faculties," Bulletin of the AmericanAssociationof UniversityProfessors7
(October 1921): 25.
7SJ. Woolf, "Woman Leader of 'Key Men,' New YorkTimesMagazine, 17 March 1940,
19.
8MarjorieHope Nicolson, "The Romance of Scholarship,"in The Humanitiesat Scrpps
College(Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie, 1952), 47-59; idem.," The Rights and Privileges Pertaining Thereto . . .," 403-26. See also MHN Oral History, I, #1, 3.
Patricia Graham's 1978 study provides the following account of women's early representation in the Ivy League institutions: "The first woman to be appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard was Cecelia Payne-Gaposhkin, an astronomer in 1956; at Yale, Mary
Wright in Chinese History in 1959; at Princeton, Suzanne Keller, a sociologist, in 1969; and
at Columbia, Nicolson in English in 1941." See Graham, "Expansion and Exclusion," 767.
172
HistoryofEducation Quarterly
pioneering work illuminatingthe influence of science on the poetical images
and themes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and her unflinching defense of the university ideals of academic life and humanistic learning earned her a number of high-profile awards and honors-in addition
to the national offices already mentioned, among them, the British Academy's Rose Crawshay Prize in 1947 for Newton Demands the Muse, membership in the American Philosophical Society, and an endowed chair at
Columbia. Warmly regarded by her Columbia colleagues as the voice of
"clarity"and integrity in a time of burgeoning enrollments and challenges
to the humanities and by her doctoral students as the "Fourth Fate, the
Fourth Grace, and the Tenth Muse," Nicolson's contributions to Columbia's community were marked by an intellectual coherence and originality
that surpassedeven the enthusiasticexpectationsof departmentchair Ernest
Hunter Wright, who recruited her.1' And yet, Nicolson's appointment and
presence on campus did not mark a watershed for academic women, even
at Columbia. When Nicolson retired in 1962, she was still one of the few
women professors in the Ivy League." Importantly, though, for Nicolson
the pressing issue of the day was not the status of women on campus but
the changing, and from her vantage point declining, intellectual standards
of the academy in the period of post-World War II expansion.
Simply put, in Nicolson's view, the world of ideas and the academic
professionby both definition and social realitywere open to men and women
alike. The challenge for an academic woman was to be a "scholar"and a
"lady."Nicolson's pursuit of her career and her conceptualization of the
liberties and constraints of scholarly life reflected sensibilities that differed
in fundamental ways from many of her contemporaries among deans of
women or literary scholars like the University of Wisconsin's Helen Constance White or the University of Nebraska's Louise Pound, who worked
through professional organizations such as the American Association of
It is important to note that while Gaposhkin was the first woman in the arts and sciences to
receive a full professorship at Harvard through promotion, the university had recruited and
appointed its first woman professor in the arts and sciences, the British historian Helen Maud
Cam, in 1948 -seven years after Nicolson's appointment at Columbia. Cam held the newly
endowed Samuel Zemurray,Jr., and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professorship. See Current Biography,1948, s.v. "Cam, Helen M."
'0EdwardW. Tayler, "In Memoriam: Marjorie Hope Nicolson (1894-1981)," journal
of theHistoryof Ideas42 (October-December 1981): 666. For student admirationof Nicolson's
erudition, see AAUW awardannouncement, Box 952, MarjorieHope Nicolson Papers, Smith
College Archives.
'According to a study by the RadcliffeCommittee on GraduateEducation for Women,
the number of "women holding the rank of full professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
in leading universities in 1954-1955," was: California (Berkeley): 19; Chicago: 18; Wisconsin: 6; Columbia: 2; Harvard:2; Michigan: 2;Johns Hopkins: 1; Cornell: 1; Princeton: 0; Yale:
0. See Radcliffe College, Committee on Graduate Education, GraduateEducationfor Women:
The RadcliffePh.D., (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 121.
The Career of Marjorie Hope Nicolson
173
University Women (AAUW) and the American Association of University
Professors (AAUP) to fight against gender barriers and to broaden career
and professional development opportunities for educated women.'2 Betraying little awareness of her own social advantages, Nicolson was convinced
of the equalizingvalue of a liberal arts education. She built a scholarlycareer
that was individualistic, more attentive to academic policies and intellectual standardsthan to the social concerns of institutional life. Her choices and
perspectives provide important insights into the salient individualism of
many professional women in the post-suffrage years and reflect the matrix
of social and culturalexpectationsand institutionalcircumstancesthat shaped
women's real opportunities and those they imagined for themselves.'3 By
valuing hard work, academic conservatism,and the intrinsic rewardsof erudition, Nicolson negotiated the narrow path of acceptance in her profession, avoidingthe snaresand pitfallsthat often thwartedthe careeraspirations
of talentedwomen. Her accomplishmentswithin the male-dominatedacademy reinforced her belief that she had succeeded on her own terms (with
substantial industry and good fortune) and that her career demonstrated
that a woman scholar could rise to prominence if she proved "worthy"by
the standardsof her profession.
It was her perceived unquestioning of the politics and meaning of
"worthiness,"though, that at times distanced Nicolson from female graduate students and colleagues; yet Nicolson was not so naive as to be completely unmindful of sex discrimination or of the fact that others viewed
her in gendered terms, despite her own gender-effacing manner. "Awoman
leader of 'key' men" read the headline announcing Nicolson's election to
the presidency of Phi Beta Kappa in 1940.'4 Even her close friend, Smith
College President William Allan Neilson, interpreted the balloting results
as "a milestone in academic and democratic progress,"one that should satisfy "those who have waited impatiently for the equality of opportunity to
which we pay lip service."'5Inevitably, therefore, Nicolson's life under-
AmericanWomenModernPeriod,s.v. "Pound, Louise";NotableAmericanWomen
'2Notable
Moder Period,s.v. "White, Helen Constance."Audrey Roberts, "Helen White Remembered,"
in vol. 1, UniversityWomen,ed. Marian J. Swaboda and Audrey Roberts (Madison: Office of
Women, 1980), 43-49. For a characterization of the MLA's first two women presidents and
a somewhat different view of Pound, see Carolyn G. Heilbrun, "PresidentialAddress, 1984,"
PMLA 100 (May 1985): 281-82
'3RosalindRosenberg, BeyondSeparateSpheres:the IntellectualRootsofModernFeminism
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Nancy Cott, The Groundingof ModernFeminisn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
4Woolf, "Women Leader," 9, 19. The membership of Phi Beta Kappa at the time was
approximatelyone-third women and two-thirds men, see CurrentBiography,1940, s.v. "Nicolson, Marjorie Hope."
'5WilliamA. Neilson, "Phi Beta Kappa'sWoman President,"TheKeyReporter5 (Autumn
1940): 1,2.
174
Historyof EducationQuarterly
scores the ubiquity of gender as a salient principle shaping a woman's education and professional choices, as well as the perceptions and expectations
others hold for her.
The purpose of this article, then, is threefold. First, an examination
of Nicolson's life-the influence of family, mentors, colleagues, and formal education-sheds light on the formative interplay of gender expectations, institutional circumstances, and the ideals of mentoring and professionalism that shape women's intellectual ambition and career paths. Second, analyzing Nicolson's career trajectory, from the 1920s to the 1960s,
informs our knowledge of the opportunities women found to teach and
conduct research in coeducational and single-sex institutions, as well as the
strategies academic women used to advance themselves. Third, because
Nicolson's politics differed from the more familiar story of feminist advocacy or scholarly sisterhood, her story helps us explore the complexity of
women's choices in negotiating academic life, the tensions too often hidden by the rubric "woman scholar," and the variations in career style and
personal politics that existed among female doctorates and professors, particularly in the post-suffrage years. In all, by exploring Nicolson's contributions to the literary history of ideas and to the institutions she loyally
served, we gain insights into the range of women's past intellectual contributions to the disciplines and to the ethos of scholarly life. Beyond that,
understanding such a figure, whose perspectives and choices defy easy categorization, advances our knowledge of the history of academic women.
An Itinerant Education: The Shaping of Scholarly Aspirations
Born in Yonkers, New York, on February 18, 1894, Marjorie Hope
Nicolson was the second child and only daughter of Lissie Hope Morris
Nicolson, a British-born nurse, and Charles Butler Nicolson, a Canadian
lawyer-turned-journalist.The Nicolson children received an itinerant education as the family lived variously in Nova Scotia, Maine, and Michigan.
If perhaps overshadowed by her brother Clyde's scholastic achievements,
Marjorie, known as "little bright eyes," reveled in her mother's adventure
tales and spirited sea chanties and delighted in studying Latin and Greek
with her father.'6The circumstances of Nicolson's childhood and youth,
fostered the independence and creativity that, together with her family's
heritage of Scottish Presbyterianism and stern Nova Scotian Methodism,
shapedwhat many later described as her "Calvinisttemperament"and work
ethic.'7 By her senior year of high school, Marjorie "yearned" to attend
Wellesley."8Her choice did not reflect any particularaffinity for single-sex
"For Nicolson's recollections of her childhood, see MHN Oral History I, #1,4-5,7,11.
'G.S. Rousseau, "Eloge," Isis73 (March 1982): 98.
"MHN Oral History I, #2, 38, 56.
The Careerof MarjorieHopeNicolson
175
education as much as Nicolson's respect for excellence and, even then, her
enduring attraction to the intellectual culture of the East.
Unfortunately, the tuition and expenses of a prestigious eastern women's college were beyond the family's modest reach. The Nicolsons' limited finances led both Marjorie Hope and her brother to matriculate, a year
apart, at the nearby University of Michigan. Though Michigan had not
been Nicolson's first choice, she thrived in the university's heady atmosphere. The institution still reflected recently-retired President James B.
Angell's support for coeducation and his efforts to cultivate in this midwestern school the ideals of the German university, including the concept
of Lernfrieiheit, a student's freedom to elect courses. In fact when Nicolson
entered, Michigan had no lettered gradingsystem and requiredonly English
rhetoric. Nicolson's self-direction as a learner and her respect for cultural
tradition became evident when she elected advanced study of Greek, with
the Rev. Martin Luther D'Ooge, a senior classicist.Nicolson was not deterred
that few women at Michigan studied Greek beyond the introductory level
or that the classics were losing ground in the modern university. To her,
studying ancient literature and languages represented continuity, a connection to the intellectual legacies of the past and to her earliest, and in
many ways fondest, learning experiences in her family. By this time, the
roles ofMarjorie and her brother (and consequently, parental expectations
for the siblings) had reversed. While Clyde was increasingly distracted by
sports, Marjorie devoted herself full heartedly to her studies in languages,
history, and philosophy, and in the process became the scholar of the Nicolson family. She was never disappointed that financial circumstances had
driven her to attend Michigan.'9
Finding a mentor, choosing an academic path
In a number of important ways, Nicolson's years in Ann Arbor nurtured her intellectual aspirations and strengthened her acceptance of the
sacrifices that might be needed to pursue an academic career. Self-reliant,
Nicolson held her first significant job at the age of thirteen (she had traveled alone on the streetcarto earn five dollars a week in a downtown Detroit
telephone office) and earned her way through college at Michigan.20After
her graduation in 1914-her bachelor's degree and teacher's certificate in
hand-Nicolson taught in high schools and normal schools in Michigan.
While she did not wish to follow school teaching as a career, finding the
'9MHN Oral History I, #2, 38, 40, 43-44, 48, 50-52.
20MHN Oral History, I, #1, 25-26;I #4, 116-17. See also, Shaw, ed., The Universityof
Michigan,284. MHN Oral History, Nicolson lived in the Chi Omegasorority house, as there
were no university dormitories for women. Her brother could not afford to join one of the
exclusive fraternitiesand so boarded in town. For instances of Nicolson's adamantself-reliance
during her graduate years at Yale see MHN Oral History, I #4, 116-17.
176
Historyof EducationQuarterly
daily lessons too routine, such employment met her goal of achieving financial independence and financing her graduate studies.21
Nicolson's pragmaticbent of mind was similarlyreflected in her decision to earn her Ph.D. in English literature rather than in philosophy, her
intellectual passion. By her own account, she was strongly influenced by
the career advice offered by the philosopher Robert Mark Wenley, a distinguished graduateof the University of Glasgow who had joined the Michigan faculty upon John Dewey's departure for Chicago.
Nicolson did not at first glance view Wenley as a possible mentor. In
fact, in her own words, she "despised" him as an ostentatious lecturer.22
However, Nicolson eventually came to know Wenley better through his
university extension work in the local schools where she taught. Later, as
a student in his advanced course in metaphysics, she was captivated by his
sweeping intellect and deeply influenced by his career advice and perspectives. Wenley would sit comfortablyon his couch-cigar and Scotch whiskey
in hand-as he listened and discussed Nicolson's plans for an academic
career. Women, he believed, were categorically incapable of being metaphysicians."Until you can drinkthis and smoke this, you'll ne'er be a philosopher,"he told her.23Defining successstrictlyas makingan originalcontribution
to knowledge, Wenley steered Nicolson away from philosophy, particularly from metaphysics, and toward literature.
Nicolson and Wenley were aware that universities were more willing to train and hire women in literary studies than in other disciplines and
that several of the foremost women in higher education were universitytrained language scholars-among them, Barnard'sDean Virginia Gildersleeve and Bryn Mawr's President M. Carey Thomas. More important,
Nicolson could easily-through literaryhistory-interweave studies in philosophy and, given the relativeopenness of the literaryprofession to women,
find a position where she could shape the nascent academic discipline and
build an outstanding reputation as an English scholar. All this was made
possible by her intellectual talents and background in the history of philosophy and, from Wenley's perspective, despite her gender.24
Accepting Wenley's candid estimation of her intellectual attributes
as well as the institutional and disciplinary constraints facing her in phi-
21MHN Oral history, I, #2, 66. After his 1913 graduation, Clyde Nicolson attended
the Michigan School of Mines (B.S. E.M., 1916). Marjorie Nicolson taught English in a manual training high school in Saginaw, Michigan (her annual salary was $650), and from 1915
to 1918 at Detroit Northwestern High School and Martindale Normal School. She received
her A.M. from Michigan in 1918.
22MHN Oral History, I, #3, 79, 81.
23MHN Oral History, I, #3, 83; see also 82-84. Nicolson always carefully noted that
the professor and student were chaperoned by Wenley's wife, who sat nearby patiently
knitting.
24MHN Oral History, I, #3, 83-86.
The CareerofMarjorieHopeNicolson
177
losophy, Nicolson applied for graduate study in English and Comparative
Literature at Yale, where unlike circumstancesat Harvard,women received
the same degrees as men and the department's scholars generally favored
humanistic approaches over philological ones.25
Thrilled to be back East and believing, naively, that the only possible constraint would be the limit of her own energy and industry, Nicolson was stunned to learn that the coeducational university still permitted
faculty discretion in excluding female students from particularcourses. All
of her professors were male, and not all were as inspiring and encouraging
as her friend Dean Wilbur Cross. There were also hostile and bewildering
encounterswith ProfessorChauncey BrewsterTinker, who literallyslammed
the door in her face, and what Nicolson herself referred to as the "pedagogical misogyny" of the Shakespeareanscholar Tucker Brooke.26The latter after reading one of Nicolson's essays had written, "This gives the
impression of trying to be smart."27But the indefatigable "Miss Nicki," as
generations of students and colleagues fondly called her, was not deterred
by overt hostility toward a bright woman; on the contrary, such affronts
steeled her determination to excel. She was a quintessential scholar with a
superb mind and an intimate knowledge of classical languages and literature shared by few contemporaries, male or female.
Despite the gender-relatedbarriersand the additionalburden of earnher
way at Yale-including teaching at a nearby private high school,
ing
summer teaching back in Michigan, and editing at the Yale Press-Nicolson excelled in her doctoral studies. In 1920, she completed her Ph.D. in
two years and became the first woman to receive the coveted $500 John
Addison Porter Prize for the year's outstanding dissertation.28In all, Nicolson was well on her way to fulfilling Wenley's expectations and, indeed,
her own.
A Scholar's Commitment
An excellent academic record notwithstanding, the range of jobs open
to Nicolson was more restricted than those open to her male classmates.29
25MNHOral History, I, #3, 83; I, # 4, 88. See also Marjorie Hope Nicolson, "The History of Literature and the History of Thought," in EnglishInstituteAnnual, 1939 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1939), 62-63.
26Tayler,"In Memoriam: Marjorie Hope Nicolson," 665. See also MHN Oral History, I, #3, 95.
27MHN Oral History, I, #4, 101, original emphasis. For a discussion of other difficulties and disapointments that Nicolson experienced along the way as a graduatestudent at Yale,
see MHN Oral History I, #4, 89, 117; I, #5, 119-20.
28Rousseau,"Eloge," 98.
29A1921 report published by the AAUP, which surveyed 29 men's colleges and universities, found that there were no female full professors in these institutions and only two
178
HistoryofEducation
Quarterly
The University of California, her top choice, apparently "didn't want
women," so in the fall of 1920 Nicolson became an instructor of English
at the University of Minnesota, which had alreadyknown such fine women
faculty as Eliza Mosher, Ada Comstock, and Maria Sanford.30Nicolson
readily distinguished herself as a teacher who "dazzled"students, recalled
Minnesota alumna and sociologist Jessie Bernard.31
Nicolson's early careerwas particularlypromising. She published her
first article, edited selections of poetry-Shelley, Keats, and Tennysonand, encouraged by her senior colleague Carleton Brown, began to participate in professional conferences.32After three years and promotion to an
assistant professorship, she found herself in the enviable, yet difficult, situation of deciding whether to leave Minnesota. In 1923, Smith College
President William Allan Neilson, a noted Shakespeareanscholar and coeditor of the HarvardClassics,offered Nicolson an assistantprofessorship,with
a salary of twenty-five hundred dollars.33In other circumstances she would
have seized this opportunity, but she felt family pressure over her father's
ill-health to find a position near Washington, D.C., where Charles Nicolson was a correspondent for the DetroitFreePress.Nicolson thus joined the
faculty of Goucher College, a small women's college in Baltimore.
It might be expected that the daughter of a journalist would have
ample excitement in Baltimore, home to H.L. Mencken's BaltimoreSun,
but Nicolson found the city dreary.More problematic,she found Goucher's
old campus small and provincial. "I was intellectually lonely," she later
recalled.34As the product of midwestern public schools, coeducational
research universities, and later while dean at Smith, Nicholson was never
a staunch proponent of private, single-sex education. From her vantage
point, the brandof segregated schooling Goucher offered cultivateddomes-
women of other professionalranks.No womanof any professionalrankwas reportedat a
men'sundergraduate
liberalartscollege.Bycontrast,45%of the fullprofessorships
and32%
of all professionalranksin women'scollegeswerefilledby men.Womenheld4% of the full
professorships
atcoeducationcollegesanduniversities.
SeeEllis,"Preliminary
Reportof CommitteeW,"21-23.
30MHNOral History, I, #5, 139. For biographies of Sanford and Comstock, see GeralWomenin Coeducational
Universities1870-1937
dineJoncich Clifford, LoneVoyagers:Academic
(New York: Feminist Press, 1989).
"Jessie Bernard,AcademicWomen,(College Park:Pennsylvania State University Press,
1964), ix.
"See Taylor, "In Memoriam," 665. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, "The Authorship of
'Henry the Eighth,"' PMLA 37 (September 1922): 484-502. See also, idem., "A Generous
Education," PMLA 74 (March 1964): 6.
"William Allan Neilson to Marjorie Hope Nicolson, June 23, 1923, Smith Correspondence 1923-29, Box 382, Records of the Office of the President, 1917-1939; Smith College Archives, Northampton, Ma.; hereafter cited as ROP, Smith College Archives.
34MHN Oral History II, #6, 178.
The Careerof MarjorieHopeNicolson
179
ticity and docility rather than professionalism and independence. In all, it
rendered young impressionable women "ineffectual angels."35
Nicolson's Goucher years were nevertheless decisive, providing the
freedom to hone her scholarly strengths and interests. She consulted materials in the Library of Congress and began informal post-graduate study in
philosophy at Johns Hopkins University with A.O. Lovejoy, the influential historian of ideas. Though it had a poor record providing opportunities for women, the self-motivated young Nicolson was inspired. She
compared her experience atJohns Hopkins favorablyto the university ideal
described in Thorstein Veblen's Higher Learning in America. It was, she
recalled, "Mark-Hopkins-Lovejoy-and Greenlaw [sic] at one end of a log
and us at the other."36
During the Goucher-Hopkins years, from 1923 to 1926, Nicolson
received offers from severalcolleges and continued to correspondwith Neilson about possibilities at Smith. Though in later years she would be more
reticent about sexism, Nicolson told Neilson that she had left Minnesota
partly to protest what she simply, but firmly, described as "unjustdiscrimMinnesota's departmenthad been concerned that college instrucination."37
tion was becoming feminized and that male students might view English
as a woman's field of study.38Nicolson's dissatisfaction may also have centered on the gender-related disparities she perceived in rank and salary,
since she emphasized to Neilson that Minnesota's president and dean had
promised her the opportunity to return "upon the same basis as the men
in the department."39When Neilson learned that Nicolson had, in fact,
declined such an offer from Minnesota that winter (mainlyto accept a teaching fellowship at Hopkins), he asked her to reconsider coming to Smith. In
his opinion, her career prospects were better in a women's college than in
a large state university. A scholar of her demonstrated talent could enjoy a
35MHN Oral History II, #6, 178; II, #7, 184-85, 187. Nicolson was displeased that
apparentlylittle distinction was made in the South between girls' "schools" and women's colleges. "IneffectualAngels" was, in fact, the title of an article that Nicolson sold to a magazine
for seventy-five dollars. The publication was postponed while the editor searched for a suitable author to write a rebuttal. Ironically, this was to be written by none other than President
Neilson, with whom Nicolson was negotiating her future position at Smith. MHN Oral History, II, #7, 187. The articles apparentlywere not published, and I have not located any drafts
or manuscripts.
'6Nicolson, "A Generous Education," 6.
3Nicolson to William Allan Neilson, June 19, 1925, Box 382, ROP, Smith College
Archives. I have not found documentation of Minnesota's offer; personal correspondence,
January 15, 1992, from Penelope Krusch, archivist and head, University Archives, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
8SeeJ.M.Thomas, Chairman,to DeanJ.B.Johnston, memorandum October 15, 1921,
filed along with the Minutes of Department of English, October 13, 1921. University of Minnesota Archives.
9Nicolson to William Allan Neilson, June 10, 1925, Box 382, ROP, Smith College
Archives.
180
Historyof EducationQuarterly
stable career at Smith and with continued success might earn a salaryat the
top of the Smith scale, which he quoted as five thousand dollars.40
Despite the appeal of Neilson's offer, Nicolson had teaching commitments at Goucher, research and study interests at Hopkins, and aspirations to apply for a Guggenheim fellowship. In the end, she remained in
Baltimore to teach for one more year and to study seventeenth-century
intellectual history with Professor Edwin Greenlaw ofJohns Hopkins. She
confidently wrote to Neilson about her decision: "I am not primarilyinterested in either salary or rank at the present; I am interested in the work I
am doing, and the preparation I need for future work."41
Dean ofa Women's College
The following year, Nicolson's career took an auspicious turn. Henry
Moe, President of the Guggenheim Foundation, appearedat her classroom
door to congratulate her on winning one of the newly instituted fellowships. Encouraged by Neilson and assured that a job at Smith would await
her, Nicolson prepared for her year abroad. While in England, Nicolson
received an attractive offer from Scripps College in California. Years earlier, as a recent Yale Ph.D., she had searched for such an opportunity to go
west, but by now she was a self-described easterner. She felt obligated to
Neilson and perceived far greater opportunity closer to the literary and
educational organizations of the Northeast. She joined the Smith faculty
as an associate professor in the fall of 1927. Shortly thereafter, in 1929, she
was promoted, by unanimous vote, to a full professorshipand became dean,
a position she held for twelve years.42
Sharing his respect for liberal learning, Nicolson worked closely with
Neilson to raise Smith's academic standing despite the financial pressures
of the Depression years. She hoped to help him cultivate and sustain the
type of intellectual community-with opportunities for student research
and direct reading-that earlier she had found wanting at Goucher. The
mutual respect between Neilson and Nicolson as colleagues, combined with
their shared Scottish heritage and passion for literature, deeply reinforced
Nicolson's already substantial respect for educational tradition and her
buoyant sense of intellectual equality. Capturing her abiding respect for
Neilson's presidency, she wrote in tribute upon his death: "Never was there
'William Allan Neilson to Nicolson, June 12, 1925, Box 382, Neilson Papers.
"Nicolson to William Allan Neilson, June 11, 1925; Nicolson to William Allan Neilson, June 19, 1925, Box 382, ROP, Smith College Archives; See also MHN Oral History II,
#7, 187.
42MHN Oral History, II, #10, 278. See memorandum of Special Meeting, January24,
1929, Trustee Instruction Committee, "English Department 1930-1939," Box 416, ROC,
Smith College Archives.
The Careerof MarjorieHopeNicolson
181
a college which came as close to Academe, the Ideal of what a college should
be, as Smith in his best years."43
Nicolson's position as Smith's dean gave her an influential platform
for commenting on educational trends and what were widely referred to as
"women's issues."44The 1930s were a tumultuous time for the established
easternwomen's colleges. Beyond budgetarydifficulties,therewere widespread
criticisms that the liberal arts curriculum was elite, that vocational guidance for students was inadequate, and that college students lacked the intellectual spiritedness of earlier years and were departing from traditional
feminine values and roles.45Nicolson's contemplation of these circumstances
and the type of learning and environment she hoped to cultivate at Smith
brought her thinking about gender and education into a distinct, unified
pattern-one that brought her both acclaim and criticism.
Nicolson's philosophy of education was anchored in personal experience-in her love of classical languages, her admiration for her teachers,
and her voracious reading of books, poetry, and historical tracts. She was
particularlyinfluenced by Milton's OfEducation (1644). It was Milton's definition of a "complete and generous" education-the learning that enables
one "to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the offices both
public and private, of peace and of war"-that resonated in her own thinking as a teacher and administrator.46The challenges of the future could not
be anticipated, but maturity of vision and judgment could be gained by
reading widely and deeply in the works of poets, philosophers, and historians. Because she valued the trained intellect, she urged young women not
to leave their college studies duringsuch perilous economic times. By acquiring a first-classliberal arts education, women might contribute invaluablyas wives, mothers, or career women-to the nation's economic security and
democracy.47
43MarjorieHope Nicolson to Mrs. Neilson n.d., "Saturdayevening" (October 1946),
folder 16, Box 982, Nicolson Papers;and, see Margaret FarrandThorp, Neilsonof Smith (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1956).
44MargaretRossiter, in fact, describes Nicolson as a "majoracademic stateswoman of
the 1920s," see Margaret Rossiter, WomenScientistsin America:Strugglesand Strategiesto 1940
(Baltimore:John Hopkins University Press, 1982), 363nl2; see also, Nicolson, "A Generous
Education," 3-12.
4IHelen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: DesignedExperiencein the Women'sCollege
for their NineteenthCenturyBeginningsto the 1930s (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 279294, esp. 284. Solomon, In the Companyof EducatedWomen, 153-171.
4Nicolson, "A Generous Education," 4.
Hope Nicolson, "The Value of the AcademicLife," Box 954 Nicolson Papers.
47Marjorie
Similarly, during World War II, Nicolson, then Phi Beta Kappa president, disagreed with
Mrs. Roosevelt's assertion that women students should interupt their educations and immediately join the war effort. See "Women's opportunity for Service," clipping dated December 11, 1942, Box 954, Nicolson Papers.
182
Historyof EducationQuarterly
Nicolson's vision of the intimate tie between democracy and humanistic education, however, did not tolerate a deeper pluralism. She advocated extending liberal arts to the masses but wanted educators to distinguish
sharply between what she held as the enduring values of a liberal arts education and the "fads"of"drug store" progressive education, between regular and honors degree students, between gifted scholar-teachers and
"plodding" men and women, and, of course, between mediocre and firstrate educational institutions.48
Several of the administrativepolicies Nicolson supportedin her effort
to ensure educational standardswere perceived by her female contemporaries as compromising equity and undercutting women's advancesin higher education. Their concerns reflected questions raised by academicwomen
nationwide. Should women's colleges have female faculties? Should coeducational universitieshire women scholarsto fill at least half their positions?
When some of Smith's female professors suggested that President Neilson
tended to favor hiring men and to promote young male faculty members
more quickly, Nicolson defended the administration. From her vantage
point, it was unwise for women's colleges to assume the role of compensating for discrimination that academic women encountered elsewhere,
when the onus should be on universities to hire the women they trained.
But, she also expressedher candidview that a mixed teachingstaffwas "sound
and intelligent" policy-for the well-being of students (men and women
alike) and for institutional prestige.49Nicolson was openly impatient with
arguments for group advancement put forth by women. The demands of
"ardentfeminists" and those of scholarship, academic excellence, and commonsense practicalitywere, to Nicolson's mind, at variance.50
If Nicolson's views on campus policies and the status of academic
women drew attention, so too did her professional affiliations-or lack
thereof. Beyond her professional ties with other female administratorsin
the Seven Sister's Conference, Nicolson generally was not oriented toward
all-female groups or organizations. Members of the AAUW at Smith were
bewildered and displeased that Nicolson had not joined the organization
during her Goucher years. Nicolson explained that she respected the con-
48ChapelSpeech, October 5, 1938; "Addressto Alumnae Council;"Chapel speechtranscript, June 14, 1940, all in box 954, Nicolson Papers; Nicolson, "Addressof the Presidential
Nominee," Schooland Society51 (March 2, 1940): 279-80; and, Woolf, 19.
49Nicolson, "Rights and Privileges . . .," 416. Margaret Rossiter underscored Nicolson's supportfor offering men higher salariesand more rapidadvancementin order to strengthen Smith's institutional prestige. See Rossiter, Women Scientists,364nl5 and idem., Women
Scientistsin America:BeforeAffirmativeAction, 1940-1972 (Baltimore:John Hopkins University Press, 1995) 462n45. Barnard's Dean Virginia Gildersleeve encountered similar challenges in faculty selection. See Virginia Gildersleeve, A GoodCrusade(New York:MacMillan,
1954), 78.
50Nicolson,"Scholars and Ladies," 788.
TheCareerofMarjorieHopeNicolson
183
tributions of the AAUW to higher education but had felt no emotional or
intellectual affinity for the members of that particularchapter. "They were
such purposefulpeople-always fulfilling a function in the best evangelical
manner," and, she added brusquely, underscoring the meager attraction
she felt for organized campaigns and social gatherings, "I have a profound
distaste for functions."51
Criticism ofNicolson's failure to act as an advocate for women came
also from friends and alumnae of Smith who followed news of the college
in the national press. Nothing more poignantly captures the disappointment and anger expressed toward Nicolson's deanship than an anonymous
typewritten note sent, from Cleveland, Ohio, to President Neilson in the
spring of 1938. "If Dean can't serve women more sincerely . . . wouldn't
she do well to withdraw from Smith.... We expect such comments from
State University men-but hardlyfrom a Dean of Smith. Mothers will think
twice.i52
"Scholars and Ladies": Nicolson on Gender and the Scholarly Life
Nicolson could too easily be dismissed as a prominent woman whose
success in negotiating academic life inured her to gender discrimination or
who self-consciously and consistently distanced herself from other women
to preserve her own status and position. Even while acting upon Wenley's
advice to pursue a literary career, Nicolson resisted his judgment vis-a-vis
women and created through her scholarship and teaching on science and
the literary imagination an innovative and legitimate conduit into the study
of philosophy.
Nicolson's scholarly reputation and her standing in Smith's strong
faculty were solidified by the publication, in 1930, of The ConwayLetters,
which documented Henry More's friendship with the philosopher Anne
Finch (1631-1679) and soon became a "classic"in the intellectual history
of the seventeenth century.53Building upon her postdoctoral study during
"Marjorie Hope Nicolson to Miss Clark, November 1, 1928, original emphasis, Box
952, Nicolson Papers; Nicolson to Mr. Neilson, November 7, 1928, Box 382, ROP, Smith
College Archives. Neilson Papers. Similar remarksNicolson had made privately earlier drew
criticism from the League of Women Voters, Nicolson to Neilson, November 7, 1928, Box
382, ROP, Smith College Archives.
"2Thenewspaper article, entitled "We Need More Research," criticized Nicolson for
comment she had made during a Phi Beta Kappa address at the University of Rochester. Her
speech apparentlycast the blame on women for their subordinate positions in academe rather
than on men's attitudes. See note typed on newspaper clipping, n.d., Box 382, ROP, Smith
College, Archives.
"The work was based on Nicolson's prize winning dissertation study and additional
research that she completed at Cambridge, the Bodelian, and the British Museum during her
Guggenheim fellowship year in England. A collection of letters from Nicolson to her mentor, A.O. Lovejoy, housed in the A.O. Lovejoy Collection at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library,
John Hopkins University, captures Nicolson's fascination with this particular project.
184
Historyof EducationQuarterly
the Goucher-Johns Hopkins and Guggenheim years, Nicolson capitalized
upon the opportunities for original teaching and research at Smith and
moved toward scholarly maturity. She achieved a deeper understanding of
the creative influence of science on the literary imagination through her
discovery and investigation of writers and poets of earlier centuries who
had moved beyond the details of common, everydayevents to describe new
horizons and worlds of possibility-voyages to the moon and glimpse of
life seen through the microscope.
Nicolson's seminaron "Science and Imagination"establishedher reputation as one of Smith's finest scholar-teachers and laid the groundwork
for the books that she would publish during her years at Columbia. The
seminar was innovative on two counts: first, the selected readings and the
published studies that both seminar members and their instructor produced
helped broaden the lens of English scholarship to include fantasy literature; and second, the seminar's design demonstrated a remarkable attentiveness to female intellectualityand imagination (a subjectvirtuallyignored
by the emerging history of science).54Lacking any relevant historical perspective on women's contributions to knowledge, many students enrolled
in Nicolson's seminar believing that only then, in their modern times, were
women engaged in scientific study and work. They delighted in learning
about Anne Finch's friendship with Henry More and the Cambridge Platonists, Aphra Behn's 1688 translation of Fontenelle's Pluralityof Worlds,
and the assertive Duchess of Newcastle, who because she demanded "scientific rights" for her sex was publicly ridiculed as "Mad Madge" by the
diarist Samuel Pepys.55The study of the history of science through literature-which she had come to from her study with A.O. Lovejoy and her
Nicolson's The ConwayLetterswas one of the first scholarly works to suggest the still debated notion that writing of Anne Finch influenced Leibnitz. See Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The
ConwayLetters:The Correspondence
ofAnne, Viscountess
Conway,HenryMore, and TheirFriends,
1642-1684 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 455-56; and "The Real Scholar Gypsy,"
Yale Review 18 (December 1928): 347-63. As Sarah Hutton notes in her introduction to a
recent, revised edition of Nicolson's classic, "In many ways Professor Nicolson's work was
ahead of its time and pioneered areas subsequently more fully explored. Even where later
scholars disagree with her conclusions, they are indebted to her admirable spadework."See
The ConwayLetters,revised edition, with an Introduction and new material by Sarah Hutton
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), xii.
54SeeJoyce M. Homer, "The English Women Novelists and their Connection with
the Feminist Movement (1688-1897)," Smith Studiesin ModernLanguage11 (October 1929):
1-152. In the preface, Homer thanks her Smith Professors Mary Ellen Chase and Marjorie
Hope Nicolson. She also clarifies her use of the term "feminist"in discussing the lives of these
women by underscoring that these were "individualbattles they were fighting, not battle of
their wholesex."(emphasis mine)
"MarjorieHope Nicolson, "Science and Imagination,"Alumnae Weekend Manuscript
(October 19, 1935), 6. Box 952, Nicolson Papers. See also, idem., "The Early Stage of Cartesianism in England," Studiesin Philology26 (July 1929): 371; and idem., "The Microscope and
English Imagination," Smith CollegeStudiesin Moder Languages16 (July 1935): 92.
The Careerof MarjorieHopeNicolson
185
reading of Alfred North Whitehead's Scienceand theModernWorld(1925)allowed her to transcend disciplinary boundaries and like generations of
women before her, including her heroine Anne Finch, to explore philosophical ideas. In Nicolson's estimation, these women were "our ancestresses as truly is Mary Wollstonecraft."56
Nicolson is most familiar today, however, as the author of two essays
published during her Smith years: "Scholars and Ladies" (1930) and "The
Rights and PrivilegesPertainingThereto.. ." (1937).57"Scholarsand Ladies"
conveyed Nicolson's response to a wave of popular women's novels critiquing campus life, among them, Janet Hoyt's Wings of Wax, Kathleen
Millay'sAgainstthe Wall, and Wanda Neff's LoneVoyagers.Though she disagreed with these portrayalsof "femaledisillusion,"Nicholson did not want
to draw undue attention to such works by caviling with them. She hoped
instead to frame a new discussion on women's relationship to higher learning: she focused on tensions between "femininity" and "intellect" and
between the social situation of women and professional demands. In so
doing, she hoped to refute explanations she felt academic women generally held for their marginalization and exclusion.58
Nicolson readily conceded that male professors who married their
well-educated graduate students enjoyed certain advantages following the
"royal road" to productive academic careers that were generally inaccessible to women.59Faced with their dual, and overall contradictoryroles, female
professors carried mundane burdens their male counterparts did not: "She
has no wife-no alter ego to take over the social and domestic duties."60
Interestingly, however, Nicolson's tone conveyed a wistful admiration, not
disapproval, of the men who married helpmates. Nicolson seemed not to
consider fully the frustrations and sacrifices made by the stereotypically
dutiful faculty wife, even though many of these women shared educational backgrounds similar to hers and had subordinated their own ambitions
and professional aspirations to their husbands' careers.
In the end, Nicolson was less concerned with challenging social
inequities than with upholding what she regarded as academic excellence,
efficiency, and common sense. She recognized that academic institutions
treated women differently and that qualified women had fewer opportunities to attend prestigious graduate schools and build careers at coeducational institutions and men's colleges, but she also believed the reasons for
such disparities and responsibility partly rested "squarely upon women
s6Nicolson, "Rights and Privileges . . .," 405.
57Seenotes 1 and 5.
58Nicolson, "Scholar and Ladies," 779; CurrentBiography,1940, s.v. "Nicolson, Marjorie Hope."
59Nicolson,"Scholars and Ladies," 795.
60Ibid.,794
186
HistoryofEducation
Quarterly
themselves."61As she frankly expressed in a 1940 NezwYorkTimesMagazine
interview, "Even in this emancipated world women bear the children. So
long as they do, women are a greaterrisk than men, and the graduateschools
which offer expensive training feel disinclined to pay for the education of
women so that they may become better mothers."62
Nicolson realized that while being a "good" scholar, in the abstract,
required the same intellectual attributes from men and women, social and
culturalrealitiesset the sexes apart.Women would alwaysbe viewed through
the lens of gender, influenced themselves by culture, they reinforced the
double standards by which they are judged: ". .. in spite of all the feminists
have yet accomplished, the undarned hose remains a symbol of inequality!
Worn by a man, it moves to pity and aid; worn by a woman, it moves even
her peers to scorn."63The social expectations widely held for women, rooted in the related ideologies of "femininity"and "domesticity,"were generally incompatible with the customs, social demands, and peer expectations
of the prevailing "gentlemanly"academic culture.64Ambitious men might
easily merge their roles as gentlemen and scholars, bolstering their careers
through informal campus gatherings, social clubs, and after-dinnerconversation. But, she asked,was this gendered model of combining one's personal and professionallife readily accessible to female academics,particularlyat
coeducationalresearchuniversities?What image should they cultivate?Nicolson was familiarwith the intellectual "lady"as a discernible type in history.
She found little appeal in the professional styles represented by the nineteenth-century bluestocking, the "belligerent"pioneer, or the modern feminist. Academic women, she believed, need not imitate men; they should
carrytheir scholarship"lightly,"retaining their feminine virtues while interDid Nicolson's emphasispernalizing the equalizingvalues of the academy.65
haps derive from her observations as a Phi Beta Kappa initiate at Michigan
that male facultyjudged women not only by their intellect but also by physical appearances,from her study of the lady philosopher Anne Finch, whom
she revered as a "'gallant soldier,' 'Saint,' and 'Heroine,"' or from advice
from male mentors or her first-hand observations of women whose careers
advanced swiftly?66Regardless, her discussion of the tensions of striving to
be both a "scholar"and a "lady"reflected a broader current of professional
"Nicolson, "Rights and Privileges .. .," 418
62Woolf,"Women Leader," 19.
63Nicolson,"Scholars and Ladies," 794; See also Woolf, "Women Leader," 19.
64Nicolson,"Scholars and Ladies," 793-95.
"Ibid., 791.
66Nicolsonwas inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in her senior year. Nicolson felt that in
the years before the university had instituted a formal grading system, women had been elected to Michigan's Phi Beta Kappa chapter, but that "men were picking the best looking women
students." MHN Oral History I, #2, 62. For Nicolson's view of Anne Finch, see ConwayLetters,xxv.
The CareerofMarjorieHopeNicolson
187
women's aspirations,including a disaffectionwith feminism duringthe 1920s
and 1930s. It represented the path of least resistance and a strategy for mollifying potential adversariesamong the ranks of male faculty.
Nicholson concluded that few women distinguished themselves as
scholars because women generally were not socialized to act or think independently. With the rare exception of a Madame Curie, Nicolson noted,
women's patterns of thought, not external barriers, limited their accomplishments in the abstract fields. Many women, in Nicolson's view, were
"overconscientious"and "pedants and plodders"who, unlike men, became
While women could be "competent teach"bogged down in petty details."67
ers," they could not easily become scholars. The "feminine temperament"
and "socialfeeling" often precluded this. She wrote, "Itis the rarewomanan older generation would have called her 'an unnatural'woman-who can
continue her work unmindful or oblivious of want in her family."68Nicolson's argument distanced her from many contemporaries, and, ironically,
evoked a current of social thought marshaled through the decades by critics of women's education, entrance into the professions, and capacity for
scientific and artistic distinction.
How then did Nicolson project her own early choices and compromises to her parents or view her atypical status and success as a scholar?
Nicolson understood that her own life choices, to remain unmarried while
devoting her life to her career, differed from the cultural expectations widely held for women, by both traditionalistsand feminists.69Nicolson acknowledged her anomalous status and achievements with humor, portraying
herself as a cross between Eve and the woman preacher that Dr. Samuel
Johnson compared to a dog walking on its hind legs: "[She] doesn't do it
well, but attracts attention because [she] does it at all."70This description
at once captured several attributes that contributed to Nicolson's professional success and shaped her persona as a "lady"scholar: among them, her
characteristicwit, her acuity in drawing illustrative quotations and insights
from literatureand history, her reticent awarenessof the circumstancesmilitating against women's acceptance in male-dominated academic institutions, and her self-effacing humility despite extraordinaryaccomplishments.
Seven years after publishing "Scholars and Ladies," Nicolson delivered the often-quoted speech, "Rights and Privileges Thereto ...," which
67Nicolson,"Scholarsand Ladies," 791, 789; idem., "We Need More Research,"1 May
1938 clipping, Box 382, ROP, Smith College Archives. See idem., "Experiments of Light,"
review of Madame Curie:A Biography,by Eve Curie, in Essaysof Three Decades,ed. Arno L.
Bader and Carlton F. Well (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939), 469.
68Nicolson, "Scholars and Ladies," 792, 793.
69Accordingto William Chafe's research,seventy-five percent of the women who earned
the Ph.D. between 1875 and 1924 remained single, see William Chafe, TheAmerican Woman
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 100, as cited in Graham, 771.
70SmithCollegeNews, 10 March 1981.
188
Historyof EducationQuarterly
underscoredthe plight of women of the pre-World War I generation. From
Nicolson's vantage point these ambitious women had not realized that the
national emergency had only momentarily mitigated attitudes that had earlier systematically excluded women from certain fields or hindered their
professional advancement.71Indeed, she reified the sense of intellectual and
social equality and the promise of an "opening wedge" that buoyed her generation, setting them apartfrom their pathbreakingpredecessors."The millennium had come; it did not occur to us that life could be different." In
turn, she evoked the embittering reversal of women's fortunes during the
1930s, in Platonic overtones, reminiscent of Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations Of Immortality," "Within a decade shades of the prison house began
to close, not upon the growing boy but upon the emancipated girl."72
While Nicolson could poignantly describe the frustrated ambitions
of her generation of university-trained women she nonetheless in many
ways stood apart from their experience. In fact, as she penned "Rights and
Privileges Pertaining Thereto ..." her own career was ascending. Moreover, her scholarly apprenticeshipunder such male mentors and colleagues
as A.O. Lovejoy and William Allan Neilson had been fortuitous and intellectually liberating from her perspective. She even regarded Michigan's
Robert Mark Wenley with genuine affection, gratefully acknowledging his
guidance.73
If Nicolson did not believe it was the professoriate's responsibility to
offset the cultural forces that constrained women's academic advancement,
she ultimately opined that scholarly excellence was genderless. In this latter
respect,her positionwas not unlike BrynMawr'sM. CareyThomas. Grounded in hardship, solitude, and sacrifice, the cultivation of genius and talent
involved for both scholars and artists,the mature choice of one set of duties
over another; such excellence was not, she argued, easily attained by members of either sex. Nicolson concluded, "It is a way of life. The person who
chooses that way must subordinate to it all others."74
Power and Scholarship at Columbia: Gender Transcended?
As the 1930s drew to an end, Nicolson was well-situated within the
literary profession and at a crossroads in her career. While dean at Smith,
7Graham, "Expansion and Exclusion," 759-763, especially 765.
72MarjorieHope Nicolson, "Rights and Privileges .. .," 414. The poetical reference is
to William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality,"stanza v.
73Nicolson,in fact, had planned to dedicate the ConwayLettersto Wenley and was saddened that he passed away shortly before the volume appeared in 1930. Nicolson, The Conway Letters,xv; MHN Oral History, I, #3, 86-87.
74Nicolson,"Scholarsand Ladies," 792. Nicolson believed, for instance, thatJane Carlyle's preference for "one set of duties" lost to the world "a writer of first rank." See Nicolson, "Women as Letter Writers," YaleReview21 (June 1932): 854. Albany Evening News, 20
May 1929, Box 954, Nicolson Papers.
The CareerofMarjorieHopeNicolson
189
she had an enviable record of research-three books and thirty-three articles. Carefully guarding her continued productivity,she declined to be considered for a number of administrative posts and willingly passed over the
honor of succeeding Neilson upon his retirement in 1939 and, hence, the
distinction of becoming Smith's first woman president, to accept what was
tantamount to a research chair at Columbia University.75
Nicolson's 1941 appointment represented an auspicious "fit"between
her long standing career aspirations and Columbia's pressing departmental needs. Widely considered among the nation's top-ranking centers for
graduate literary training, Columbia's competitive edge was threatened by
budgetary constraints, the retirement of several senior literaryscholars, and
the attractive salaries male scholars were being offered at state universities.
Chair Ernest Wright hoped to secure his department's future by aggressively pursuing promotions for deserving professors (especially promising
men who had or might receive enticing job offers) and by recruiting ranking scholars from across the nation. What was atypical, of course, was for
Columbia to consider a woman. Wright regarded Nicolson as an exemplary scholar-teacher and a pillar of the literary profession whose addition
(and anticipatedlong tenure at Columbia) would augment the department's
stability and prestige.76Moreover, he knew that the timing bode well-only
now, with Neilson's imminent departure, might Nicolson be lured away
from Smith.
Encouraged in his preliminary recruitment plans by Columbia University's Committee on Instruction, an enthusiastic Wright, as early as
December of 1939, set about coaxing Nicolson to Morningside Heights
with an attractive offer of a full professorship, limited seminar teaching,
ample time for research, and a generous beginning salary.77He was soon
distressedto learn that the trustees refused to allow him to proceed.78Unfortunately, there is no record of the Board's discussion regarding Nicolson's
appointment. One can infer, however, that the trustees's concerns encompassed budgetary matters and the candidate's gender. Nicolson apparently would only come to Columbia if she retained her professorial rank.
Columbia University's reluctance was not surprising. Its support for
women's higher education had been tenuous, even after the founding of
75Nicolsonto William Allan Neilson, n. d. (Spring 1935), Box 382, ROP, Smith College Archives. MHN Oral History, II #10: 320-21.
76ErnestHunter Wright to Advisory Committee on Educational Policy, November
15, 1939, Central Files Collection, University Archives, Columbia University, New York City,
New York [hereafter Wright Central Files.]
7Ernest Wright to Dean Pegram, December 16, 1939, Wright Central Files. See also
Dean Gildersleeve to Marjorie Hope Nicolson, December 18, 1939, Dean's Office Records,
BarnardCollege Archives, New York.
'8Acopy of the memorandum that E. H. Wright sent to President Butler on January
12, 1940 is attached to another letter that Wright sent to Butler a few days later, on January
15, 1940, in Wright Central Files.
190
Historyof EducationQuarterly
Barnard College, a women's coordinate, in 1889 and the introduction of
graduate coeducation in the 1890s. Like other universities, Columbia was
more willing to train than to hire women. Excluded from the faculty of the
men's undergraduateliberal arts college, few women had found professional
opportunities, even in low-ranking or peripheral positions, within Columbia's graduatedepartmentsof arts and sciences. Those who did gain appointments tended to be Columbia-trainedinsiders and yet did not advance.The
literary scholar Susanne Howe Nobbe (Columbia Ph.D. 1930), Nicolson's
predecessor in the English department and a faculty wife, had remained an
assistant professor since her 1935 appointment. Lucy Hayner (Columbia
Ph.D. 1925) had taught in the physics department since her 1929 appointment as an "assistant"but had only attained the rank of associate. More
familiar is the case of the noted cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict
(Columbia Ph.D. 1923) who, having served for nearly twenty years and
having been a de facto departmental administrator,was long denied institutional recognition commensurate with her professional standing. Moreover, she had been passed over by the Columbia committee to name Franz
Boas's successor in favor of Ralph Linton, a man and an outsider.79In the
decade preceding Nicolson's appointment, however, the possibility of a
senior appointment for a female scholar at Columbia began to seem less
remote. By the mid-1930s at least one Columbia administrator admitted
candidly (though privately) that "the universities will have to come to it"
and, moreover, that it was "[not] bad policy to take the bull by the horns
and accept the necessity."80
Whether this self-interested shift in institutional thinking was reflected in Wright's proposal to recruit Nicolson is unclear. Regardless, Wright
realized that it would be difficult to win administrativesupport for his nominee. President Butler had been a suffrage supporter and advocate of graduate-level coeducation, but his lofty vision of a university, blending the
English collegiate and German research traditions, did not readily include
the advancementof women faculty at Columbia. Wright therefore appealed
to Butler's scholarly ideals and philosopher's mind, hoping to impress him
with Nicolson's superb publication record and her decline of the presidencies of Wellesley and Mt. Holyoke Colleges. Also, recognizing the
administration'sfinancialconservativism,Wright assuredButlerthat although
the English department had lost the services of four professors, this single
"illustrious"appointment of a productive scholar would be satisfactory.But
Wright warned Butler that Columbia must seize the opportunity without
9Fora discussion of Benedict's circumstances, see Margaret Caffrey, Ruth Benedict:
Strangerin the Land (Austin: University of Texas, 1989), 276-278.
80DeanHoward McBain allegedly expressed this view in consideration of the anthropologist Ruth Benedict's advancement; see Caffrey, Ruth Benedict,276.
The Careerof MarjorieHopeNicolson
191
delay: Nicolson might soon be offered and accept the presidency of Bryn
Mawr. He urged decisive action: "We still believe we can secure her if we
approach her first, because we think she will prefer a life of scholarship to
one of administration;but we fear that she will not keep on declining presidencies unless we can make her the offer she abundantly merits."81
Columbia's Secretary, Frank Fackenthal, responded immediately to
Wright's concerns by conveying President Butler's "interest"and "sympathy" in Wright's plan but advising him that "it might be a mistake to use
pressure"in the matter.82By the spring of 1940, Wright had finally gained
the approval of the Columbia trustees and administration, and President
Butler, duly impressed by Nicolson's credentials and philosophical orientation, wrote extending her a warm welcome.83Nicolson's letter of acceptance, dated April 7, 1940, in turn, musingly alluded to the matter of gender
and emphasized the intellectual openness she perceived her appointment
symbolized: "I am particularly touched by the fact that both of them (the
department and the administration)have been willing to disregardmy inferior sex! Personally I have always found my masculine colleagues ready to
forgive what was no fault of mine." Invoking a familiar Miltonic allusion
that likely helped solidify her intellectual rapprochement with Butler, she
wrote, "But I think it extraordinarilyliberal of Columbia to be willing to
face the world in their refusal to quote again: 'He for God only; she for
God in him'!"84
If Columbia had acted boldly in taking the lead among the elite Ivy
institutions by appointing a woman as a full professor, it was also acting
prudently by selecting a traditional woman like Nicolson, whose appointment posed little "risk"or uncertainty and whom Columbia's male students
and faculty could admire for her scholarship and respect for established
institutional values and professorial manner.
Nicolson viewed her Columbia University appointment as the crowning glory of an already rewarding career. As she once wrote to Frank Fackenthal, the Secretary of the University, "I'm inclined to feel that I ought to
pay Columbia for the privilege of teaching here."85Indeed, Nicolson found
the Columbia graduate English Department a congenial intellectual niche.
The humanistic approach to literature that Nicolson valued had been cul-
8Ernest Hunter Wright to President Butler, January 12, 1940, Wright Central Files.
82FrankFackenthal to Ernest Hunter Wright, Janaury 15, 1940, Wright Central Files.
83ErnestHunter Wright to Nicholas Murray Butler, March 11, 1940 and April 3, 1940;
President Butler to Ernest Hunter Wright, April 3, 1940; and President Butler to Marjorie
Hope Nicolson, April 3, 1940; all in Wright Central Files
84MarjorieHope Nicolson to President Nicholas Murray Butler, April 7,1940, Nicolson Central Files.
85Nicolson'sletter acknowledged the University's generosity when it informed her that
it planned to double her salary raise. Nicolson to Frank Fackenthal, April 7, 1947, Nicolson
Central Files.
192
HistoryofEducation
Quarterly
tivated earlier by Columbia's "gentleman" scholars, including such notables as the poet George Woodbury, the drama critic Brander Matthews,
the literary historian Ashley Thorndike, and the "Great Books" advocate
John Erskine. In the early 1940s, the tradition still existed in a modernized
sense. Several of Nicolson's new colleagues-among them, Joseph Krutch,
Mark Van Doren, and Lionel Trilling-had immersed themselves in the
heady, journalistic world of New York City literati, such as the Nation,
before embarking upon academic careers at Columbia, their alma mater.
Nicolson, by contrast, had followed an academically- and institutionally-oriented path. Her ambition, intellectual roots, and sensibilities
were strictly in the academy and professional organizations, such as the
Modern Language Association and Phi Beta Kappa. Nicolson characteristically favored the canon over contemporary writing, British and continental history and literature over American, the clarity and precision of the
Baconian method over then popular currents of modernism and subjectivism, and detective stories and crossword puzzles over psychological and
"women's"novels.86If several of her Columbia colleagues were intellectually drawn to cultural and political criticism, debates about American literature or the New Criticism, Modernism, myth, or Freudianinterpretations
and the like, the department as a whole reflected a consensus about what
constitutes "good" literature and a liberal education.87Self-described as a
"conservative and traditionalist,"in the Ruskian sense, Nicolson's contributions to the department reflected and added to that consensus.88Her orientationas a teacher-scholarreflecteda brandof intellectualismand humanism
that had been salient throughout the history of the Columbia department.
She had absorbed these educational ideals through her study of Milton and
the classics. Her commitment to them had been nurtured by her association with men like Wenley, Lovejoy, Greenlaw, and Neilson.
Nicolson's years at Columbia were busy and productive. She published seven books between 1946 and 1962, served on the editorial boards
of the Journal of the Historyof Ideasand TheAmericanScholar,and lectured
extensively. Her work was reviewed in the leading modern language and
'6Remarksdelivered by Professor Alice Fredman,Memorial Service for MarjorieHope
Nicolson, April 29, 1981 (in author's possession); Marjorie Hope Nicolson, "The Professor
and the Detective," AtlanticMonthly 1511 (April 1929): 483-93.
8OscarJames Campbell, "The Department of English and Comparative Literature,"
inJohn Herman Randell, Jr., A Historyof the Facultyof Philosophy(New York: Columbia University Press, 1957) 72, 90, 99. See also Gerald Graff and Michael Warner eds., The Origins
of LiteraryStudiesin America:A DocumentaryAnthology(New York: Routledge, 1989), introduction; Laurence Veysey, "PluralOrganized Worlds of the Humanities," in The Organizain Moder America,1860-1920, ed. AlexandraOleson andJohn Voss (Baltimore:
tionofKnowledge
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 54.
88SeeNicolson's reviewof Motimer Adler'sHowtoReadaBookin YakReview30 (September 1940): 180.
TheCareerofMarjorieHopeNicolson
193
philological journals and was recognized for its eloquence, bold interpretations, and intellectual grasp of developments in science and literature
throughout the centuries. Her well-known, award-winningNewtonDemands
the Muse, her first book after joining Columbia, analyzed the ways Isaac
Newton's popular eighteenth-century Optics"gave color back to poetry
from which it had almost fled during the period of Cartesianism."89Four
years later, The Breakingof the Circlegained attention for its highly provocative and debated interpretation of the variant spelling of "she" and "shee"
in John Donne's seventeenth-century poems, known as The Anniversaries.
And, in 1959, Nicolson's Mountain Gloomand Mountain Glory offered a
nuanced interpretation of the images of mountains as a lens for understanding the shifting sensibilities as the eighteenth century gave rise to the
Romantic Period.90
Such works, together with the accomplishments of the students she
trainedand placed, helped Nicolson achieve a national reputationas a "lady"
and a "scholar." Still, the approach to literary study that her work exemplified was not without its critics, who characterized the exercise as a type
of stark "intellectualism" that failed to situate literature within the economic, cultural, and social context. Writing in 1953, Rene Wellek noted
that "among American literary scholars there [were] actually few historians of ideas in Lovejoy's sense," but placed Marjorie Hope Nicolson alongside Perry Miller and Louis Brevold as leading contributors.9l
It was not only as a leading humanities scholar but also as a pragmatic,
skilled, and humane administratorthat Nicolson became well-known in the
Columbia community. Possessing what one former colleague described
admiringly as "the strength and ability of any two ordinary men," Nicolson played an active administrativerole in the affairsof Columbia's English
department, the MLA, and Phi Beta Kappa.92On the social side, moving
to New York City allowed Nicolson to renew her friendship with her Yale
roommate, Dorothy Staran,(now Mrs. Arnold and Dean of Women at New
York University) to find new colleagues at Morningside Heights, including literary-mindedfaculty wives Irita Van Doren and Dorothy Van Doren
and the English department's secretary Adele Borgo Mendelson. In all,
Hope Nicolson, NewtonDemandstheMuse:Newton'sOpticksandtheEightreenth89Marjorie
CenturyPoets(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 22.
90SeeRichard Bevis, "Eternal Snows: Pope's Temple of Fame and the 'Aesthetics of
the Infinite," Eighteenth-CenturyLife 9 October 1986): 44-58. Literary interest in Nicolson
seems to be increasing, see note 51 and MarjorieHope Nicholson, MountainGloomandMountain Glory:The Developmentof the Aestheticsof the Infinite, with a foreward by William Cronon
(Seattle: University of Washington, 1997).
9'See Rene Wellek, "LiteraryScholarship,"in Merle Curti ed., AmericanScholarshipin
the TwentiethCentury(New York: Russell and Russell, 1953), 120.
92SmithPresident Herbert Davis to Nicholas Murray Butler, September 16, 1940,
Nicolson Central Files.
194
Historyof EducationQuarterly
however, Nicolson generally did not seek out the company of other university women or participate in the Women's Faculty Club. She felt challenged by and identified both intellectuallyand sociallywith her department
members and her male colleagues in professional organizations such as Phi
Beta Kappa and The American Scholar,particularly Christian Gauss and
Hiram Hayden.
Despite any initial reservations, the Columbia University administration relied confidently on Nicolson's extensive contacts in literary circles and the field of women's education and was proud of the honors others
bestowed upon Nicolson-particularly when the accolade constituted a
"first" for a woman. Nicolson, in turn, relied upon the prestige of her
Columbia position and her widening network of former students and colleagues to secure good positions for her first-degree students, thereby
launching promising careers and furthering her own academic reputation
and influence. Only infrequently did a mismatch between a graduate student's sex or religious affiliation make her task difficult.93
Believing that equality, as she intellectually defined it, was accessible to diligent and gifted academicwomen Nicolson was carefulnot to present herself as a female role model, nor was she inclined, by nature or
principle, to expresspreference or take affirmativesteps on behalfofwomen
students or female junior colleagues.94She might, in fact, be "farharder on
women," as one former student described, but added, "So much sternness
because so much hope."95Though she refused to be a public advocate for
women as a group, she took seriously the aspirations of individual women
who faced financial constraints in furthering their education and whose talents and commitment matched the rigors of scholarly life. She was gratified by teaching, developed several close, longtime friendshipswith former
students, particularlyher doctoral students, and was proud of the women
scholars she trained-among them the Romanticist Aileen Ward, Smith's
Dean Helen Randall, and the Renaissance scholars Rosamond Tuve and
Gretchen Finney.
Ironically,Nicolson had declined several college presidenciesin order
to focus on research, and yet she found herself accepting various leadership
roles at Columbia. She represented the Faculty of Philosophy, serving on
the University Council from 1946 to 1950, and succeeded Oscar James
93MorrisFreedman,"MarjorieHope Nicolson," TheAmericanScholar50 (Winter 1981):
87.
94TheColumbia-educated literary scholar Carolyn G. Heilbrun offers her perspective
on her student years in the department where both Nicolson and Susanne Nobbe taught in
Carolyn G. Heilbrun, "The Profession and Society, 1958-83," PMLA 99 (May 1989): 411
'5RosalieColie, "0 quam te Memorem, MarjorieHope Nicolson!," TheAmericanScholar 34 (Summer 1965): 469.
The Careerof MarjorieHopeNicolson
195
Campbell as the department's executive officer in 1954.96Nicolson's successful involvement in what were generally regarded as men's activitiesserving as the "chairman"of academic committees or persuading central
administrators of departmental needs-rested squarely upon her manner
of effacing any gender-consciousnessand on her abilityto excel by the established male standardsof scholarship, productivity, and leadership.
Nicolson's Columbiacolleagueswere impressedby her firmn
yet humane
decision making, by her institutional loyalty, and by her willingness to criticize policies and decisions which she felt jeopardized the university's educational standards and integrity.97Nicolson's abiding respect for scholarly
excellence led her, as a member of an ad hoc committee reviewing the Fine
Arts departmentin 1954, to askwhy the world-renowned scholarMargarete
Bieber, a German refugee, had only attained an associate professorship at
Columbia. Nicolson's devotion to scholarly ideals and institutional excellence was also reflected in her recommendations concerning salaries and
promotions. As the department's highest paid member in the early 1950s,
she volunteered, though she herself supported four dependents, to take a
salary cut so that junior scholars and secretaries could earn a living wage.
Beyond that, she advised President Butler to offer any salary increase or
perks necessary to retain a world-class scholar.98
Nicolson's exemplary record and commanding presence at Morningside Heights earned her two widely known and still remembered epithets: the "Conscience of Columbia" and the "best man in the English
department." Through the years, whether the latter description reflected
admiration or disdain has depended on the vantage point (and often the
gender) of the speaker.The willingness Nicolson displayed earlier at Smith
to elevate the establishedvalues of the academyover other concerns, including those of sisterhood, was also apparentduring her Columbia tenure, and
in fact, was intrinsic to her many accomplishments.
By all accounts, the institutional recognition that eluded other women
scholars at Columbia-whether judged by salary, professorial rank and
advancement, awards, collegial praise, or even social invitations to President Butler's residence-was offered warmly to Nicolson. A note written
by the Columbia philosopher Ernest Nagel congratulatingNicolson on her
9By the late 1940s, Columbia'sEnglish Department had establisheditself as the nation's
premier group of university literary scholars and teachers (AAU rating number 1), Campbell,
"The Department of English and Comparative Litertature," 95.
'97Nicolson'searlier association with Lovejoy and Neilson, both prominent figures in
the early years of the AAUP, nurtured and strengthened her commitment to the integrity of
the academic profession. Nicolson, for example, joined John Dewey, William Allan Neilson,
Morris Raphael Cohen, and Robert Sproul in sponsoring the Academic Freedom Bertrand
Russell Committee, clipping, folder 30, Box 982.1, Nicolson Papers.
98Nicolson to Vice President John A. Krout, November 24, 1954; report December
15, 1954; reportJanuary 12, 1955, Nicolson Central Files.
196
Historyof EducationQuarterly
fine speech at Harvard perhaps best expressed such sentiments: "I experienced vicarious glory in being a member of the same institution with you.""
That said, even a woman as powerful and prominent as Nicolson faced the
constraints of gender-related barriers at Columbia. Like her female contemporaries at Morningside Heights, for instance, she could not belong to
the Columbia's Men's Faculty Club, where perspectives on university life
were freely exchanged and opinions shaped, or beyond the campus gates
benefit from the collegiality and cosmopolitanism of Manhattan's prestigious and exclusively male Century Association-an experience that bolstered and enriched the careers of many Columbia men.
A University Woman Views the Post-War Transformation of the Academy
On September 23, 1942, only one year after joining the Columbia
faculty,Nicolson enjoyed the honor-rarely extended to a new facultymember, much less to a woman-of delivering the main address at the 189th
Opening Exercises of Columbia University.1'? Like many prominent members in Columbia's Morningside Heights community, including Jacques
Barzun, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Virginia Gildersleeve, Nicolson sensed a
moment of intellectual and political peril in this new "modern"world, a
fundamental challenge to the foundations of the university ideal and to the
preservation of culture and free intellectual inquiry. Drawing upon Benjamin Disraeli'swords, which themselves evoked the Baconianideals Nicolson so admired, she emphatically reminded her Columbia audience that "a
university should be a place of learning, light and liberty."101
If war posed one set of challenges to United States universities, the
post-World War II years and the shift to mass education were equally
demanding. Though the Columbia campus demonstrated a renewed interest in classical learning, there were also new challenges to the academic life
Nicolson revered. Increasingly, she found demographic changes in society
and the ascendancyof the naturaland social sciences threateningthe humanities and the traditionalintellectual unity and purpose of universitylife. The
atomic era seemed to change the intellectual landscape as dramaticallyas
had the "new philosophy" of Bacon's day. Unlike her contemporary C.P.
Snow who, in 1959, would conclude that science and art were "two cultures," insurmountably divided from one another, Nicolson's sense of literaryhistory and the purposesof higher educationled her to argue forcefully
and eloquently that these "two voices" must be in constant dialogue.102
99ErnestNagel to Nicolson, July 31, 1951, Box 952, ROP, Smith College Archives.
'??FrankFackenthal to Nicolson, June 24, 1942, Nicolson Central Files.
'0MarjorieHope Nicolson, "Learning,Light and Liberty,"AssociationofAmericanCollegesBulletin28 (December, 1942): 511-21.
'02Projecting
herself as an intellectual "daughterof Martha"Nicolson deliveredthe concluding remarks,entitled "Two Voices," at the three-day Rockefeller-fundedsymposium, "The
TheCareerofMarjorieHopeNicolson
197
Her own innovative studies in "literatureand science" were eclectic
and underscored the underlying connections between all types of knowledge, as did the concept ofscientia centuries earlier. Rigorous in her scholarly and professional standards, Nicolson approached literature less as a
systematic discipline and more as an imaginative art. She wanted the literary field to preserve its integrity and distinct humanistic role, complementing and being enriched by science. From her perspective, attempts by
professionalizersto establish a "scientific"literarymethod, by drawingupon
the new social sciences (particularly economics, psychoanalysis, and psychology), were misdirected. She found it naive to think there was "justone
'scientific method,"' in the pursuit of truth "common to all sciences and to
all workers."103
Having defended the academy from external criticism during the
1930s, now in the 1940s Nicolson became a Cassandra-like critic of her
colleagues. Intense professionalization, she argued, had separated disciplines and delineated sharply, and artificially, between research and teaching responsibilities. Sharing views kindred to those championed by Robert
Hutchins and Mortimer Adler at Chicago and expressed by Isaac Kandel
and Jacques Barzun at Columbia, she ardently defended the place of the
humanities in a curriculum and national mind-set that she believed was
increasingly dominated by world politics, scientific methods, utility, and
the modern ethos of positivism. "Social scientists must believe that poetry,
essays, and drama are as legitimate expressions of the spirit of man as the
works of John StuartMill, Adam Smith-or even Karl Marx. Novelists and
poets, as well as sociologists, have done much to correct abuses in slums
and prisons.... We have one common end: the search for Truth."'04
Rarely hesitant to champion academic ideals, Nicolson urged the
American professoriate to consider what she viewed as "an artificial and
serious distinction between researchand scholarshipon the one hand, and
teachingand educationon the other." She called for professors to oversee
Humanistic Tradition in the Century Ahead,"Princeton University, October 18, 1946. Attendees included, among others, Robert MacIver, Reinhold Neibuhr, Robert Hutchins, and
ArchibaldMacLeish. Of the fifty-one attendees, there were only three women. In 1954, Nicolson served on Columbia's Bicentennial Program Committee on "The Unity of Knowledge,"
along with Albert Hofstadter, Lewis Leary, Ernest Nagel, Paul Lang, Lionel Trilling, I.I.Rabi,
and Dr. Van Dusen. See clipping file, Columbiana Collection, Columbia University.
'03MarjorieHope Nicolson, "The History of Literature and the History of Thought,"
59; idem., "Merchants of Light: Scholarship in Arts and Letters," Proceedingsof the American
PhilosophicalSociety87 a(January1944): 352-60.
04Nicolson, "Merchantsof Lights," 356. In the early 1940s Nicolson served along with
Teachers College's critic of progressiveeducation IsaacKandel and Columbia's OscarJ. Campbell and Horatio Smith as a member of the MLA's "Commission on Trends in Education."
See Nicolson, "Literaturein American Education,"AmericanScholar13 (Winter 1943-1944):
122-25.
198
HistoryofEducation
Quarterly
more vigilantly the university's relationship to other parts of the educational system. When, for example, the Harvard Report GeneralEducation
in a Free Societyappeared in 1945, Nicolson criticized PresidentJ.B. Conant's committee for not making stronger recommendations. She recognized
a "deep-rooted academic feeling for 'specialization'and 'departmentalism"'
that had become a veritable"curse."Universities needed a "thoroughhousecleaning" to "sweep away the cobwebs of learning and clear our attics of
academic lumber."105
As Nicolson realized, wartime drastically affected American higher
education and, in particular, influenced ambiguous outcomes for women.
Like many other United States universities, Columbia witnessed demographic and curricular changes immediately after World War II. In particular, the G.I. Bill brought into higher education institutions many new
students, mostly men, with diverse backgroundsand goals. Perhapsno other
Columbia department experienced the influx as dramaticallyas the Department of English, which in the next several years registered over one thousand students.106Nicolson was proud of the department's efficiency and
academic standing and credited her department secretary and longtime
friend Adele Borgo Mendelson, who began her Columbia affiliation as an
extension student and then joined the departmentas an administrativeassistant under Ashley Thorndike in 1928. While Nicolson remained a private
woman throughout her career-working hard, providing for her parents,
and not especially seeking the company of other academic women-she
had an enduring friendship with Mendelson, who stayed on at the university even after her husband moved to Arizona for health reasons. Mendelson shared Nicolson's perfectionism and single-minded devotion to high
academic standards;together they became legendary among professors and
students in their service to Columbia and epitomized what many nostalgically have referred to as the "golden age" of Columbia's English department.107
Mendelson's sudden, unexpected death in 1961 saddened Nicolson
profoundly.
That same year Nicolson was named the William Peter Trent Professor of English and the next year she retired as a professor emerita. In
1954 she had alreadyreceived Columbia's bicentennial silver medallion and
the AAUW Achievement Award, but her friends and colleagues further
honored her with afestschrift,entitled Reasonand Imagination(to which her
'05Nicolson'sreview of the Harvard report both reflected her standing as an academic
statewoman and her willingness to urge professors to see themselves also as teachers and,
therefore, to be concerned with the quality of education at all levels. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, "Education in America," YaleReview35 (March 1946): 537, 538.
'0Campbell, "The Department of English and Comparative Literature," 97.
'07SeeTributes to Adele Mendelson, Department of English and Comparative Literature Folder, Columbiana Collection, Columbia University, New York.
The Careerof Marorie HopeNicolson
199
Johns Hopkins mentor, A.O. Lovejoy contributed)and a dinner at the Men's
Faculty Club.'08This was an ironic choice of venue since women, despite
several petitions, were still excluded from membership. From Columbia,
Nicolson went on to lecture at the Claremont Graduate School and then
to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Years earlier, as a young Goucher assistant professor, Nicolson had
received a Michigan Alumnae survey asking her to share some college anecdotes, even if inconsequential. Nicolson replied, "My memory, being vivid,
Her response typified the value and meanrefuses to class any as trivial!"'09
and all educational experiences. She grew
intellect
to
ascribed
Nicolson
ing
wistful as she retraced her career, from her years at Michigan to her final
Xappointment at the Institute for Advanced Study, because she believed that
the social world view so central to her career had disappeared. She had
revered the university as an ideal transcending American culture and gender, an egalitarian intellectual meeting place. But changes in the broader
culture of post-World War II America had transformed the university. For
her, the harmony between science and art and the bridge between tradition and modernity that she studied through literature, found reassuring,
and had made the intellectual fulcrum of her research had vanished. She
mourned the decline of Latin studies and argued that universities were
becoming misguided bureaucracies, "debased by a 'swarm' of students."
Professors of her "ilk"had vanished from campuses and the cultural world,
in her view, had "degenerated."'10
Nicolson now found herself "wandering between two worlds." One
was the academe she knew at Michigan and Yale, Minnesota and Johns
Hopkins, and again at Smith in those "halcyon years" alongside Neilson
and during the "early period" at Columbia. The other she described as
"phantasmagoria,"to her mind evocative of Charlie Chaplin's picture, Modem Times. "We mechanically feed them in (students), patterning our educational institutions upon technological factories .. .," she observed."'1
Nicolson's growth as a scholar and the prominent career she fashioned at Columbia ran counter to cultural stereotypes of the single woman
and prevailing expectations of feminists and professional women alike. Her
frame of reference was not the political cause of women's social advancement but rather an intellectual commitment to sustaining free inquiry and
"'JosephMazzeo ed., Reasonand Imagination:Studiesin the Historyof Ideas,1600-1800
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1962).
"'See Alumnae Survey of 1924, University of Michigan Alumni Association Records,
Box 110, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. I would like to thank archivist
Nancy Bartlett for bringing this survey to my attention.
"'Quoted in New YorkTimes,29 December 1963; Nicolson, "A Generous Education,"
6.
'"Nicolson, "A Generous Education," 12.
200
Historyof EducationQuarterly
the university ideal. She delighted in the imagination and the liberating
world of ideas. This proclivity shaped her style and self-image as an academician and was reflected by her chosen topics and historical approach to
literature.
Yet how has Nicolson's illustrious career been remembered?The circumstances that lead historians to choose and elevate certain topics or figWhile
ures over others have left Nicolson's career relatively unexplored.'112
Nicolson's commentary over the decades encapsulatedmany persistent tensions and themes of American higher education, her contributions have
been forgotten in discussions of this country's search for a common learning in the few existing histories of the literary profession or Columbia's
English department. Feminist historians, literaryscholars, and biographers
have drawnupon Nicolson's essays but otherwise have not found her a congenial figure, most probably because of Nicolson's own ambivalence about
feminism and women in the academic profession.
It is important,however, to be mindful of the varietyof women's experiences and of the multifaceted lessons of history. If the path Nicolson
chose-one that was gender-neutral, afeminist, and apolitical-diverged
from that adopted by several of her female contemporaries at Columbia, in
particularculturalanthropologistsRuth Benedict and MargaretMead whose
writings challenged established gender roles, it is important to note that
more than a few women in various fields, at various institutions, at various
historical moments, and for diverse reasons have chosen similarly. Nicolson's biography reveals an uncanny ability to minimize any obstacles she
faced, a traitwhich helped her negotiate the demandsof the academicworld.
Her efforts did not necessarily ease the path for women who followed; yet,
unlike women of more feminist sympathies, such as Benedict or Mead,
Nicolson never perceived this form of leadership as her task. Efforts to
understand the variety of choices academic women have made can help us
clarify the politics of gender and offer lessons that can inform educational
policy and women's education at all levels. Perhaps Nicolson realized that
if she had chosen a more activist path, the doors that did open to her might
have remained closed.While her initial goal was not to forge new patterns
of social thought or attitudes, Nicolson achieved eminence in her field and
contributed to the growth and legitimacy of modern language studies.
Though overshadowed in history by her male contemporaries, Nicolson
eloquently defended the relevance of the humanities in a modern world.
Moreover, while satisfying her sense of curiosity and intellectual integrity,
Nicolson illustratedthroughout her life, despite her own ambivalenceabout
women's group identity, that women possess intellectual ambition and are
capable of excellence.
have found no master's essay or dissertation on Nicolson's life and career.
112I