Just Well Rounded

(See Cover)

On a brisk morning last March, two ladies of serious demeanor paid a call at Brooklyn College. It was important that their mission be kept a secret. So, stating only that they were members of the Public Education Association, they bustled into a large building, hurried down a corridor, and quietly slipped into back-row seats in a history classroom.

Actually the visitors were trustees from one of the most important colleges for women in the U.S. Wellesley College, in Wellesley, Mass., was searching high & low for 3 new president. With only six candidates left out of an original 1,200 whose names had been suggested, Wellesley's scouts had come to look over the Brooklyn possibility.

They knew little about their quarry except that she was an assistant professor of history. But she sounded promising-she was a Wellesley alumna ('30) of a suitable age (38), and she had recently won a Pulitzer Prize for a scholarly biography entitled Forgotten First Citizen-John Bigelow* What the ladies saw that day was nonetheless a surprise.

Assistant Professor Margaret Clapp had deep brown eyes and dark wavy hair. In her bright red dress, she seemed too slim and pretty to be a historian of note. As she lectured, she spoke softly, seldom moved her hands except to turn the note cards in front of her. As is the custom at Brooklyn, the students constantly interrupted her with questions. Sometimes Professor Clapp answered quickly, sometimes led a lively discussion. Often she broke into a broad, dimpled smile.

Margaret Clapp did not guess why the trustees were there, or why they stayed for lunch with her. That night she rode home on the subway, as usual, to her Greenwich Village walk-up and thought no more about it. But some time later her telephone rang. It was Edward Weeks editor of the Atlantic Monthly, also a Wellesley trustee. Would Miss Clapp have dinner with him? By this time, Miss Clapp had a good idea of what was up. Over brook trout and a bottle of wine at the Ritz-Carlton, Weeks began to ask questions. "Do you sleep well?" he wanted to know. Miss Clapp answered that she did, she was not a worrier.

One by one, like talent scouts coming backstage, the trustees called. Besides her Wellesley background, her Pulitzer Prize and her ability to cope with a college class, it appeared that Margaret Clapp had other qualities important in a college prexy serenity and aplomb. "Head and shoulders above any of the other candidates," reported Weeks. The rest of the trustees agreed. They popped the question. Yes, said Miss Clapp, she would take the job.

Tell Me." By June the matter was settled. As soon as she could rent her apartment and pack her trunk, Margaret Clapp hopped a train and went back to her old college, twelve miles west of Boston's Copley Square. Feeling a little like Cinderella, she moved into the big white mansion she had known as the President's House. She had three sitting rooms, a drawing room, two maids, a cook, a chauffeur and two secretaries. Her new domain stretched out over 400 acres of rolling hills. From the air it looked like a series of Gothic cathedrals with all their spires neatly shorn away. It was a network of pathways that ran under archways, circled a lake, wound among gardens, and threaded through lawns. It was a place of leaded windows and tiny balconies. A mid-campus tower commanded it all.

President Clapp remembered the tower.

But it was still hard to recall exactly where all the pathways led. And when she got inside the Administration Building she promptly got lost. She introduced herself to the first person who happened along, and asked: "Can you tell me where mv office is?"

As the weeks passed, however, Wellesley's summer staff found that its new president needed few directions. One room of the big office suite, she learned, was for receiving visitors. The other, with its high ceiling and ornate desk, was for working.

There Margaret Clapp spent most of her time. "She's in there reading," one of her secretaries told visitors. "Reading reports and such. She's getting educated." Last week, after two months of getting educated, Wellesley's president was ready for her first big opening.

"Ask Me." As usual, the freshmen came early. In a cold drizzle, four upper classmen with big "Ask-Me" badges on their coats waited impatiently on the station platform for the 9:03 to round the bend. Among its passengers would be the first wave of the Class of '53. The train was half an hour late.

The first girl off nearly stumbled with excitement. The rest, in tailored suits or hooded raincoats, hovered about their luggage, fingered their baggage checks, exchanged nervous pleasantries.

"What do I do now?"

"Get in line . . ."

"Oh, is this a line? It doesn't look like one."

Gradually the jitters passed. Somehow, the girls managed to sort out their bags, then moved on to the waiting taxis. Only one had to run back for her pocketbook.

In one great gush, like a city that has survived a plague, the campus came to life. Bare walls suddenly had pictures; windows had bright new curtains. In the roadways, cars were emptied of bridge lamps, wastebaskets and even a pair of antlers. In one house a janitor wrestled with a trunk ("I should be twins today"). The Head of House tried to make everyone feel at home. "The girls get prettier every year," she burbled. "At least we think so for the first few days."

Pick & Choose. Prettier or not, successive generations of girls had unpacked at Wellesley for 75 years. It was not the oldest of U.S. colleges for women. Mount Holyoke (1837) and Vassar (1865) got started sooner. Smith (enrollment 2,300) was bigger. But Wellesley (enrollment 1,700) had maintained its place among the top women's colleges in the country--like the others, dedicated to their founders' conviction that a woman had just as much right as a man to a first-class education, and that it was worth starting a new college to give her one.

Over the years the best of them had taken on traits of their own: from highbrow Bryn Mawr, geared to the scholar's mind, and citified Barnard and Radcliffe, which share, respectively, the faculties of Columbia and Harvard, to the middle-of-the-roaders such as Wellesley, Smith, Vassar, Mt. Holyoke, to progressive Bennington, with its free-for-all curriculum, and newcomer Sarah Lawrence (founded 1926) which tailors each student's schedule to fit the student and studies the past by starting from the present.

The women's colleges had long ago made good their demand for equal education. This year, with some 700,000 girls enrolled in U.S. colleges (nine-tenths of them in state and private coeducational schools), they were content to pick & choose, from long lists of applicants, the relatively few that they could admit. To parents who could afford it, the academic and social prestige of a school such as Wellesley was worth the cost ($1,600 a year for tuition and dormitory fees alone).

Botany into Bendix. After 100 years of women's education, one question still unsettled is: Education for what? A man can expect to use his college education in any kind of breadwinning, from banking to bauxite mining. So can a woman--if she goes for a career. But even though she may work for a while after graduation, the average college girl winds up a housewife with children. She finds that the real openings are for good cooks and mothers.

At that point, report the experts, a lot of B.A.s begin to feel frustrated. Their French goes into the frying pan, their botany into the Bendix. Says Anthropologist Margaret Mead: "Women who used to pride themselves on their ability to talk find . . . that their words clot on their tongues."

Critics like Columbia University's Jacques Barzun blame such frustrations on the fact that when the women's colleges were started they were modeled after the men's. With a few exceptions (e.g., the charm course at Stephens, home-economics courses here & there), their courses have paralleled the curricula of men's colleges ever since. The result, says President Lynn White Jr. of California's Mills College (for women), is that "women are educated to be successful men. Then they must start all over again and learn to be successful women."

Wellesley, which above all believes in being well-balanced, is inclined to approach such dilemmas calmly. Its own three-quarter-century is a record of changing U.S. ideas about what a well-brought-up young girl should know, and how to go about teaching it.

Bustles & Bonnets. Wellesley was founded by a wealthy Boston lawyer named Henry Fowle Durant, who contributed $1,000,000 for the training of future teachers and "the glory of God." Its first students numbered 314--a bewildered group in bustles & bonnets, who were carted in horse-drawn "barges" up to old College Hall.

In time their bustles gave way to hobble skirts; middy blouses came & went. Meanwhile, President "Princess Alice" Freeman, who first organized the college into 14 departments, resigned to marry a Harvard professor. After her came Mathematician Helen A. Shafer, who set up the system of majors, and portly Caroline Hazard, the great money-raiser, who surveyed her campus from a surrey with a fringe on top.

The girl of the '80s read Macaulay and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, carefully refrained from eating between meals (no "pies, lies [or] doughnuts at Wellesley," Founder Durant had warned). By 1900 she wanted to be a Gibson girl, and a few years later, to the horror of her elders, she began sewing in class, missing vesper service and using such unseemly words as "prune," "pill," and "nifty."

One night in 1914, fire broke out in College Hall. By morning, the hall ("a palace!" a visiting male had observed) was a ruin. In its place rose modern Wellesley. Stately President Ellen Fitz Pendleton and her electric brougham were succeeded by trim Mildred McAfee Horton and her Pontiac. When President Horton, wartime head of the Navy's WAVES, resigned last year to help her husband, the Rev. Douglas Horton, with his work for the Congregational Christian Churches, Wellesley went looking for a Margaret Clapp.

Powers & Poland. Wellesley, in the first year of Margaret Clapp's reign, has a faculty of 130 single women, 28 married women and 53 men. Some are noted in their fields--Johnsonian Scholar Katharine Balderston for her Thraliana, Pulitzer Prizewinner Ola Elizabeth Winslow for her Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758, Psychologist Edna Heidbreder for her Seven Psychologies. One professor, Mary Ellen Goodman (sociology), is a former Powers model; another, Waclaw Jedrzejewicz (Russian) was a prewar Polish minister of education.

Their charge, the average Wellesley girl, weighs about 127 Ibs. and stands about 5 ft. 5 in. In addition to her $1,600 tuition, she may spend as much as $6,000 a year, or as little as $200; her average is $1,200. Almost half (46%) of her classmates come from public high schools; one out of four is on a full-or part-time scholarship. Founder Durant had always insisted that "a calico girl is worth two velvet girls."

Instead of velvet or calico, the current Wellesleyite sometimes wears bluejeans, and often a man's shirt. In class, with a bandanna about her head, she sometimes looks a bit like a glamorized peasant woman trying to learn English.

Why she picked Wellesley she seldom knows. But she is apt to feel superior to Wellesley's rivals (as rivals feel superior to Wellesley). According to the girls, Radcliffe tends toward "the creepy, arty bookworm." Smith, some think, "makes big with the party type of girls." They don't care very much about Vassar, either: "Vassar makes girls into businesswomen." Wellesleyites prefer to think of themselves as "just well-rounded."

To her library, the Wellesley girl has added T. S. Eliot, Sartre and Freud. In her closet she keeps a suit of red winter underwear, three "dressy" dresses and at least one evening gown. For the sake of her prestige, she must never let a week go by without at least one date (freshmen get only 15 "1 o'clocks and overnights" the first semester). Those without weekend dates often prefer to leave campus, for "the awfulness of not having a date when everyone else does," says Dean Lucy Wilson, "hangs over them constantly."

Three Times & In. Usually the date is from M.I.T. or Harvard ("practically at our doorstep"). If he doesn't take her off some place for some dancing and probably a couple of drinks, she can keep him on her campus, sit with him on a bench by the lake, or even take him to class. If she takes her "special" to Tupelo Point three times and he still hasn't proposed, she can, according to tradition, throw him into Lake Waban.

After weekends, when the population is back to normal, Wellesley is as busy as an A. & P. "Don't panic," the girls tell each other as pre-exam work piles up. But some girls do panic, and a few secretly resort to "bennies" (benzedrine). Otherwise, they worry about their figures, and then at the Well, the campus soda fountain, they gorge themselves on Wellesley Specials (a brownie smothered in ice cream and hot fudge sauce). They play bebop records by the hour, but know more about Bach than any Wellesley generation before them. They are coldly practical about some things, but will gladly dress themselves up as toy dolls, rabbits or gypsies for annual Tree Day. They are fearful of seeming too girlish, but will happily make themselves look aged 13 running their annual hoop race. Wealthy girls pretend to be living on a shoestring; grinds pretend to be ladies of leisure. To be fashionable, one must be casual.

Actually, they are worriers. They worry about racial equality, and when they go home to find their parents less enlightened, they begin to worry about them. They think in global terms--about Indonesia, Liberia and Main Street. So many wanted to learn about Russia that the college set up a Russian department. The classics major is just about extinct (one major in Latin last year, none in Greek). It is the time to be a social scientist and to be haunted by the woes of the world.

A Bit of Paris. Most of all, however, they worry about marriage. Observes popular Philosophy Professor Thomas Hayes Proctor: "Almost the sole sign of success is to get your man before graduation." Though almost all want to work for a while after graduation ("at some glamorous job," says one dean, "that will take them to Paris"), few aim at a career. But even most career girls nag their married professors to find out how a career can be combined with marriage. If the marriage rate of the past is any indication, eight out of ten will become wives. Moreover, as far as their deans can see, they are marrying younger than before the war.

What is Wellesley doing about all its future housewives and the dire prospect, if the critics of women's education are to be believed, of future frustration? To the critics, President Clapp's answer might seem to be "nothing." She sees no reason why education should be particularly different for men & women: "They have the same functions as citizens, the same functions as members of a community, the same functions as voters and volunteers." When Harvard was reforming its curriculum, Wellesley did the same, tightened course requirements to give freshmen and sophomores a broader general education. After two years, the girls pick their major. If they want, they can take a dose of child psychology and attend lectures on the problems of marriage. But most girls seem to want something more. As Junior Callie Huger puts it: "I want to broaden my mind, not just my husband's stomach."

To Margaret Clapp, college students' minds, male or female, are broadened by the same studies. With a good general college course, a girl can go on and do as she pleases--study medicine, swim the English Channel, or take up the housewife's career and serve it well. Woman's place, thinks Margaret Clapp, is anywhere.

Singing & Talking. To her own present position, Margaret Clapp brings more talent than training: she was never a dean like Vassar's President Sarah Blanding or Bryn Mawr's Katharine McBride. But ever since her childhood, when she tried to tag after her two older brothers and sister as they marched off to school, she seemed to know what she wanted to do next. "She was always pretty," says her brother Alfred. "She always had brains, and she could always take care of herself."

Her father, Alfred Chapin Clapp, was an insurance broker of East Orange, N.J., He was a kindly man with a small goatee and a frock coat who quoted Latin and Greek and had once played championship chess. At night, his busy wife would read aloud to him (he was nearly blind); but his greatest delights were the family singing about the piano, or talking at the table. His big dictionary was always open; no conversation could go on for long without some Clapp having to look up something.

At the East Orange High School during the '208, Margaret fought the Scopes trial with her friends (she was on Clarence Darrow's side, in favor of teaching evolution) and secretly read The Sheik. By the time she got to Wellesley, she was writing poetry, soon turned to majoring in economics and talking "in great lofty generalizations and big huge principles ..." She went through Wellesley on scholarship, played basketball on the varsity, and in her senior year was elected head of College Government. "I was serious ... very serious . . . hardly the lighthearted young thing."

For a month after graduation, she worked in Stern's Department Store. Then she got a job teaching at Manhattan's Todhunter school for girls. She taught Cavalier and Puritan poetry and early English literature, "with Beowulf tucked in." In seven years she became one of the best teachers the school had, and when she went on to Columbia for her degree (John Bigelow was written for her Ph.D. dissertation), she did so well that other teaching appointments began to come easy. She was the first woman in the history department of New York's City College, went next to the New Jersey College for Women and finally to Brooklyn ("I was sold to the Dodgers").

Now, as the eighth president of Wellesley, she is a member of a rare species. In the whole of the U.S., there are only five other women who head major colleges: stylish Sarah Blanding of Vassar, Sweet Briar's pert Martha Lucas, Barnard's Millicent Mclntosh, petite Rosemary Park of Connecticut, and Bryn Mawr's stately Katharine McBride. "I do hope," said Dean Mclntosh, "that Miss Clapp knows what she's in for."

One thing she was in for: raising money (Wellesley was after $7 1/2 million, Barnard $5,000,000, Smith $7,000,000). She would find little comfort in the fact that all her fund-raisers are women. What U.S. women need, former President Horton had found, is a "psychological catching-up" about money. "They are too used to writing out household checks--for $10 or $20. The trouble is that you can't run a college on household checks."

Other presidents have found that the nation's alumnae could better use a whole re-education in the matter. To Lynn White of Mills, the big obstacle was that women outlive their husbands. Then they give away their money to their husbands' alma maters. "I go around the country advising women to predecease their husbands," says Mills's president. "We'd do better."

Actually, President Clapp was quite ready to wrestle with the money problem ("Of course, I didn't like correcting papers either"). But last week, there were too many other things to think about. For one, there was the big tea for parents--the first time she had been hostess to so many people. She had already found out one thing about the job of an unmarried (and so far unattached) woman executive: "I am not only the president, but the president's wife as well."

Then there were meetings and a stream of visitors scheduled over the week at short intervals. After a summer's light mail, her correspondence was beginning to swell. But modern Margaret Clapp, whom only the staunchest Wellesleyites had heard of two years ago, seemed already to be an old hand. As she conducted her first chapel, almost lost behind the great lectern, it was as if she had been a president for years. Wellesleyites decided that Margaret Clapp, in their chosen phrase, already looked like a well-rounded "First Lady."

*John Bigelow (1817-1911), editor with William Cullen Bryant of the N.Y. Evening Post, Civil War consul to France and one of the founders of the Republican Party, was a lifelong man-behind-the-scenes. Historians had left him there.

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