The Consequences
After six months of quarreling among the SGA officers and the college president, Eva was eventually informed that she would not be welcome back to Radnor Hall the following year. The SGA sent her a “sentence of suspension” on May 28, 1898, requesting that she “live outside the college halls for one year.” There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Eva was guilty—the SGA very nearly voted to suspend her for three years.[1]
At some point, the SGA officers would have become aware that they also had implicated Lucy Donnelly. Lucy’s suspension was entered into the Trustee minutes on April 15, but the actual decision would have been made earlier, possibly even months earlier, by Thomas. On such a small campus, gossip spread like wildfire. While the Trustee meetings were conducted in private, the minutes were transcribed by a secretary. If Lucy’s involvement in Eva’s case had been a secret, it was no longer possible to keep that secret after the trustees meeting on April 15. The SGA was now responsible for jeopardizing the career of a young, well-liked faculty member.
The SGA had bungled the case. Its officers had naively assumed that continuing to investigate Eva would not result in negative consequences for Lucy. Thomas proved them badly wrong. After April 15, why didn’t they drop the charges against Eva?
From the documents we looked at, it seems that the officers were willing to throw the book at Eva, perhaps believing that she would be just as happy living in the village, walking to classes, and graduating with her class of 1900. We can imagine their justification: Eva was a bad influence. She was older. She was a sophisticate. She was more closely bonded to the teachers than to her fellow students. How bad could it be for Eva to be banned from residential life?
So Eva had been officially suspended. But curiously, the charges had changed. Now there was no mention of the Halloween party at all. Instead, the notice read: “You smoked in one of the college halls on the afternoon of May 26th 1898.”[2] The SGA no longer needed Eva to name names. The officers had found a way to reclaim their authority.
At first glance, smoking seems a plausible enough excuse for harsh discipline. Fire hazards were only too real. Moreover, the SGA claimed, there had been a prior incident. Supposedly Eva had been caught smoking toward the end of her first semester, back in November 1896, and had “assured a member of Ex. Bd.... that [she] would not again smoke in the halls.”[3]
Plausible enough, that is, until we ask: was Eva even still on campus on May 26? Her student record lists a full course load for Spring 1898, but no grades.[4] The final exam period for Spring 1898 began May 18, a full ten days before her suspension was handed down, so Eva would have had ample time to complete the last of her assignments.[5] If Eva never took her exams, would she have been staying on campus on May 26? If not, she could not have smoked in the college halls.
As far-fetched as the smoking charge may seem, it makes sense if we consider that the SGA’s investigation had never really established that there had been any students at Eva’s Halloween party. All Eva had told them was that she would never report against her friends.
Eva Palmer was not suspended from Bryn Mawr just the once; she was suspended twice. President Thomas clearly wanted to be the final arbiter. She sent Eva a separate notice of suspension, but it did not come until two months later. Eva was denied “right of residence in the halls of residence of Bryn Mawr College” from May 28, 1898, through May 28 of the following year. Thomas concluded: “I do this with the greatest regret, even although [sic] I know that it will not alter in any way the plans you had already made for next year.”[6] In spite of the harsh treatment, Thomas’s letter is surprisingly intimate. It tells us she knew Eva had already blown off Bryn Mawr before the spring semester ended. And in saying she knew why, Thomas implied that Eva had confided in her or in Gwinn.
Eva had cleverly found a way to save face. Not just with the SGA, but with President Thomas (and perhaps also with the gossip peddlers). “My brother [Courtlandt, the pianist] was starting for Rome,” Eva explains in Upward Panic, “and he invited me to go with him. I did not hesitate.” It was a journey that would, conveniently, spirit her far away from a mid-Atlantic lesbian scandal.
In later admitting that she had once planned to settle at Bryn Mawr, Eva closed that chapter of her life with some of the queer defiance that she had shown under interrogation: “I did not care whether I got a degree or not. It seemed a choice, logically, between living in Bryn Mawr for the rest of my life, to gain a smattering of varied and unrelated subjects, or of leaving as quickly as possible.” [7]
Meanwhile, back at Bryn Mawr, the nature of Eva’s punishment remained an ongoing matter of dispute, suggesting that Eva had actually left open the possibility of returning. The SGA officers wished only to suspend her from residing on campus. What they wanted was for Eva to suffer “only exclusion from the college halls,” but not from classes.[8] Thomas argued for something harsher:
I feel very strongly that when a student is excluded from the privileges of residence she should also be excluded from the privilege of lectures or from appearance on the college campus. Unless the college campus is explicitly included by your Board we have no right to prevent a student from visiting one of the professors.[9]
Thomas’s words here are telling. From her perspective, even knowing that Eva was bound for Rome, the danger of letting the SGA impose the penalty was most likely that Eva might return to visit one professor in particular—Lucy Donnelly. That was a risk Thomas simply could not take.
For Bryn Mawr students and their families, the Eva Palmer scandal was setting a worrisome precedent. Suspension from classes as well as residence would have destroyed the prospects of a student without Eva’s family background. If her parents had paid her tuition, room, and board for all four years in advance, they would have forfeited a year’s worth of it. For a student living in Radnor Hall, the total ranged from $400 to $575.[10] Ultimately, Eva’s parents seem to have lost another $1,150, as she never completed her degree.[11] These were vast sums at the turn of the century. Getting on the wrong side of President Thomas could now put a Bryn Mawr degree out of reach for students of lesser means. Could this news have been enough to put prospective families off enrollment?
After Eva’s departure in the spring of 1898, Thomas was left struggling for survival on multiple fronts. The college was strapped for cash, which she was responsible for procuring. This meant intensifying her pursuit—sexually and financially—of Mary Garrett. Meanwhile, Mamie Gwinn had turned her affections toward another English professor, Alfred Hodder. Their friendship bloomed into a full-blown love affair that could no longer be contained or concealed. Gwinn was so indiscreet that word reached Thomas’s aunt, who eventually spilled the beans to her niece in the summer of 1899, when she had been traveling in France. Thomas demanded that Gwinn keep up appearances:
I am very much distressed by the horrible fact that Aunt Hannah & all of them have heard the most abominable things about your behavior with Hodder. Of course they are tales but it is deadful [sic] for you and me and the College to have such things said [crossed out] & apparently believed by people who ought to know you better. ... & you ‘meeting Hodder both before & after her departure in all sorts of clandestine ways & places, even going to New York repeatedly to see him & stay with him.’ Aunt Hannah says this has been spoken of openly & freely for months, that she supposed of course it was true. I told [sic] it was an infamous lie & she promised me not to refer to it before Mary [Garrett] & of course I have not mentioned it to her.[12]
In the years leading up to the Eva Palmer scandal, the Garrett–Thomas–Gwinn–Hodder quadrangle had existed in a state of dynamic equilibrium. As the facts of Thomas’s domestic life became more widely known, however, Thomas’s position at Bryn Mawr grew more and more precarious. By the fall of 1897, she still held the reins, albeit shakily. The Eva Palmer scandal offered Thomas an opportunity to consolidate her power over the students, if not over the trustees or the major donors.
Notes
[1] Executive Board Minutes 1898–1902 (box 7, folder 2, vol. 5), 23–24.
[2] Executive Board Minutes 1898–1902, 23.
[3] Executive Board Minutes 1898–1902, 24.
[4] Student record for Eva Palmer, Bryn Mawr College Archives.
[5] Bryn Mawr College Program 1898 (Philadelphia: Sherman, 1898), 4, https://archive.org/details/brynmawrprogram1899bryn/page/n741/mode/2up?q=1898.
[6] [M. Carey Thomas] to Miss [Eva] Palmer, 28 July 1898, outgoing correspondence 1897–1899, M. Carey Thomas Papers, Bryn Mawr College Archives.
[7] Eva Palmer, Upward Panic, 27.
[8] [M. Carey Thomas] to Miss [Evelyn] Walker, 13 Dec. 1898, outgoing correspondence 1897–1899, M. Carey Thomas Papers, Bryn Mawr College Archives.
[9] [M. Carey Thomas] to Miss [Evelyn] Walker, 13 Dec. 1898. See also Bryn Mawr College Program 1897 (Philadelphia: Sherman, 1897), 84, https://archive.org/details/brynmawrprogram1899bryn/page/n483/mode/2up?q=1897: “Residence in the college buildings is optional. Of the students in daily attendance at the lectures and class work of the college, some have always lived in Philadelphia, or in the neighborhood of Bryn Mawr.”
[10] Bryn Mawr College Program 1898 (Philadelphia: Sherman, 1898), 93–94, unpaginated insert: “Radnor Hall,” https://archive.org/details/brynmawrprogram1899bryn/page/n741/mode/2up?q=1898.
[11] We were curious to know if the Abbes had been issued a refund, but found no correspondence between the Abbes and the bursary in the Bryn Mawr College archives.
[12] M. Carey Thomas to Mamie Gwinn, 18 July 1899, box 51, folder 14, Alfred Hodder Papers, Firestone Library, Princeton University.