Photograph of Lucy Donnelly, taken on the occasion of her graduation from Bryn Mawr College in 1893. Donnelly was an English instructor at Bryn Mawr College when Eva arrived on campus in 1896. Courtesy of Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College Libraries, Photo Archives collection.

When Eva had enrolled back in the fall of 1896, Bryn Mawr College was still a very young institution. It had opened its doors in 1885. Thomas was its first woman president. In contrast to the trustees, who aimed to form good Quaker wives and mothers, Thomas was on a mission to establish a world-class research institution for women, modelled on the Johns Hopkins University, which itself was modelled on German research universities.[1] To do this, she needed money. The trustees expected her to find it herself. Luckily for Thomas, she had easy access to anchor funding from an old friend from Baltimore—the railway heiress Mary Garrett. It was thanks to Garrett, in fact, that the trustees named Thomas president. Garrett’s first donation to Bryn Mawr had come with a proviso: Thomas must take the reins.

But the college’s sterling reputation could not rest on one major donor alone. Thomas would have to find a wider base for her research institution. The college was barely breaking even.   

Bryn Mawr College was unique in other ways. Since 1892, it boasted the first system of representative and legislative undergraduate student governance in the United States.[2] This system took the form of the Student Government Association. For young women interested in civic leadership, politics, and philanthropy, the SGA was an élite training ground. By the time Eva Palmer entered as a freshman, however, tensions were rising between the president and the SGA. It was in the SGA leaders’ self-interest to defend and promote representative self-government at Bryn Mawr. It was in Thomas’s self-interest to strengthen her presidency and concentrate power in her own hands.

All this was common knowledge. It has been immortalized in Gertrude Stein’s novella Fernhurst, written during this period and completed by 1904.[3]

Photograph of Mamie Gwinn, circa 1880. Gwinn was a bohemian academic who chaired Bryn Mawr's English Department during this period. She seemed to have more in common with Lucy and Eva than she did with her life-partner, Carey Thomas. Courtesy of Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College Libraries, Photo Archives collection.

To shape the institution after her ideal, Thomas took great care in choosing the faculty. At a time when men’s universities could afford to poach any professor whose career Thomas was developing, Thomas’s obsession with loyalty was an asset. Perhaps this was why Mamie Gwinn, Thomas’s life-partner, was also head of the English Department. Another person who could be counted on, come hell or high water, was Thomas’s own sister, Helen Thomas, who had become an instructor in 1896. Helen’s great friend as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr had been Lucy Donnelly, now also an instructor.

Lucy, Helen, and Mamie shared bohemian affinities. Decades later, Eva Palmer would recall them as a group.[4]

Toward the end of 1891, Thomas and Garrett began an affair. They had always been an item, even before Thomas had paired off with Gwinn. In the fall of 1896, Eva Palmer’s freshman year, Thomas’s domestic problems were heating up. Thomas, healing from surgery, could not deliver her usual lectures in freshman English that fall. She asked Gwinn to give the class in her place. Gwinn was willing to fill in for Thomas, but on one condition: that she be acknowledged as co-author of Thomas’s lectures. In fact, Gwinn was probably the sole author. Those lecture notes would have been Gwinn’s intellectual property. Thomas refused to credit Gwinn, so Gwinn rebelled. Thomas was obliged to assign the course to an instructor. This laid bare her marital strife for all to see.

Mamie was unhappy. In fact, she was finding it increasingly difficult to hide her malaise, and Helen saw this. Helen Thomas often found herself taking Mamie’s side, personally and professionally. Disputes between Thomas and Gwinn positioned the Bryn Mawr English Department against the administration. At the same time, Thomas showcased the English Department whenever she was fundraising. Open conflicts with its chair and faculty would have weakened her powers of persuasion.

Photograph of Helen Thomas, Carey’s younger sister, circa 1893. Thomas taught English rhetoric and composition at Bryn Mawr. As a straight woman, she may have been in a position to smooth any ruffled feathers when lesbian campus drama seemed to threaten Carey’s mission. Courtesy of Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College Libraries, Photo Archives collection.

Notes

[1] Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s, 2^nd ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 115–16; Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, ed., The Making of a Feminist: Early Journals and Letters of M. Carey Thomas (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1979), 19.

[2] “Welcome to the Bryn Mawr College Self-Government Association,” 2026, https://sga.blogs.brynmawr.edu.

[3] Gertrude Stein, Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings, esp. 3–8.

[4] Palmer, Upward Panic, 25–26.