The Three Sapphos of 1900: What Bryn Mawr College Can Teach Us about the Icons Who Put Lesbian Culture on the Map, by Suzanne Stroh and Samantha Pious

This exhibit traces the development of the “Sapho 1900” phenomenon in Paris to three lesbians who came of age in the United States: the performance artist Eva Palmer and the poets Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien. At Bryn Mawr College, they clashed with prominent lesbians who could have been their role models: M. Carey Thomas, the college president, and Mamie Gwinn, the noted literary scholar. But despite their differences, the two generations of women shared an unlikely experience: polyamory. The poetry Barney and Vivien wrote during this period is an early example of queer creatives asking how to live fulfilling lives when pulled in multiple directions by jealousy and desire. The exhibit also shows how they negotiated the reality of blackmail but could not escape its devastating effects. Copyright (c) 2026 by Suzanne Stroh and Samantha Pious. Published originally on OutHistory in May 2026.

Bryn Mawr College, Class of 1900

After an international upbringing, shuttled from school to school, Eva Palmer was drifting. As the daughter of a New York society family, she was already a regional celebrity. Such beautiful, clever, and charming young ladies were expected to marry eligible young gentlemen. There was no earthly reason for Eva to go to college—except that she was in the mood for a change of scene.

Photograph of Carey Thomas taken two years after she was installed as the president of Bryn Mawr College in 1894 at the behest of Mary Garrett, one of Bryn Mawr's major donors. Courtesy of Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College Libraries, Photo Archives collection.

At the time, Bryn Mawr was an attractive option. There was, however, a challenging set of entrance exams. When Eva visited Bryn Mawr as a prospective student in the spring of 1896, she met with President M. Carey Thomas, who told her point blank that she would not be able to pass.[1] For a dilettante like Eva, Thomas said, acquiring the basics would take years. Eva took this as a challenge. Over the next six months, she learned plane geometry, algebra, science, and history, filled in the gaps in her knowledge of English literature, and brought her Latin, French, and German up to speed. She pulled off a passing grade.[2]

Photograph of Mary Garrett, 1895. Garrett was the heiress of a B. & O. railway fortune who was well-known for her “coercive philanthropy” and was a driving force behind the Johns Hopkins Medical School, Bryn Mawr College, and the Bryn Mawr School for Girls in Baltimore. Courtesy of Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College Libraries, Photo Archives collection.

Photograph of Baltimore’s famous Friday Evening Group of feminists taken between rougly 1870 and 1880. The Group was centered around M. Carey Thomas (bottom left), who maintained parallel lesbian relationships with Mary Garrett (center) and Mamie Gwinn (top left). Also included in this photograph are Bessie King and Julia Rogers. Courtesy of Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College Libraries, Photo Archives collection.

Eva entered as a freshman in the fall of 1896. At twenty-two years old, she was closer in age to a graduating senior.[3] That alone would have made Eva, a world traveler, one of the most sophisticated students on campus. But now she was conspicuous for more than her beauty and her bohemian flair. By laying her academic foundation so rapidly and unexpectedly, Eva had gotten herself onto the radar of the President’s office, where one of the most influential women in the country sat behind the desk.

Bryn Mawr College President Thomas just so happened to be living with the head of the English Department, Mamie Gwinn. Thomas, the daughter of Pennsylvania Quakers, was Quaker only in her dealings with the Bryn Mawr trustees, who saw the college as a Quaker institution. The rest of the time, she answered to one thing only: ambition. Gwinn, for her part, hailed from an elegant, sophisticated family of Baltimore politicians. Her father was Maryland’s attorney general; her grandfather, a U. S. senator and ambassador. She was a freethinker and a free lover as well. Together, Gwinn and Thomas were the lesbian power couple of women’s higher education in America.

Nor was the student body of Bryn Mawr without its share of lesbian couples. In the class of 1897, Clara Landsberg (daughter of radical Reform rabbi Max Landsberg and civic leader Miriam Landsberg, née Isengarten) left Judaism to be with a devout Protestant, Margaret Hamilton (younger sister of the classicist Edith Hamilton and researcher Alice Hamilton).[4] Eleanor Brownell (also class of 1897) and Alice Howland (attended 1901–1902, but did not graduate) would later become co-principals of the Shipley School before retiring to Santa Fe. Together they would raise two adopted daughters.[5]

The really hot gossip was Thomas and Gwinn. Since they lived on campus in a stylish house called the Deanery, all their comings and goings were watched carefully by the students. Was Thomas really taking up with another woman, the heiress Mary Garrett? Would Gwinn leave Thomas for another English professor, Alfred Hodder? (Spoilers: yes and yes.) In 1903, Gertrude Stein, herself a lesbian and Seven Sisters alumna (Radcliffe class of 1898), wrote a fictionalized account of their relationship, Fernhurst, which she published the following year.[6]

But these were not the only goings-on at Bryn Mawr. A series of unfortunate events began on the night of October 31, 1897—Halloween, which was also Natalie Barney’s twenty-first birthday. These events would affect the entire college: students, faculty, administration, and trustees.

Photograph of the grounds of Bryn Mawr College, 1889. Courtesy of Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College Libraries, Photo Archives collection.

Excerpt from the Bryn Mawr College entrance examination policy, circa 1896–97. Contributed to Archive.org by Bryn Mawr College Library, Special Collections.

Notes

[1] As an adult, Thomas was called Carey. Here and elsewhere, information on the lives of Carey Thomas, Mamie Gwinn, Mary Garrett, and Helen Thomas is drawn from Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York: Knopf, 1994).

[2] She entered with “conditions” in Latin and algebra, which meant she would have to retake both exams. She passed Latin in February 1897 and algebra that June. Bryn Mawr College Program 1895 (Philadelphia: Sherman & Co., 1895), 50, http://www.archive.org/details/brynmawrprogram1899bryn; Eva Palmer, student record, Bryn Mawr College Archives.

[3] Eva Palmer (as Eva Palmer-Sikelianos), Upward Panic, ed. John P. Anton (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, 1993), 23–25; Eva Palmer, student record, Bryn Mawr College Archives.

[4] Cynthia Francis Gensheimer, “A Tale of Many Cultures: Clara Landsberg’s Experiences at Hull House with Eastern European Jewish Immigrant and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Social Workers,” Chicago Jewish History 46, no. 3 (Summer 2022): 14–21, esp. 15.

[5] Bryn Mawr College Program 1898–99 (Philadelphia: Sherman, 1898), 69, https://archive.org/details/brynmawrprogram1899bryn/page/68/mode/2up; Bryn Mawr College Program Academic Year 1902–03 (Philadelphia: Avil, 1903), 224, https://archive.org/details/brynmawrprogram1904bryn/mode; “Eleanor Brownell of Shipley School,” New York Times, 17 Aug. 1968, 27 https://www.nytimes.com/1968/08/17/archives/eleanor-brownell-of-shipley-school.html.

[6] Gertrude Stein, Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings, ed. Donald Gallup and Leon Katz (New York: Liveright, 1971), esp. Gallup, “A Note on the Texts,” vi–vii, and Katz, Introduction, xxxi–xxxvii.