The Women’s Movement
During the Johnson tenure, there were other episodes in the growth of the American women’s movement that was to reach maturity half a century later.
One began with a letter from Professor George H. Palmer of Harvard, to Dr. Johnson on April, 1920:
In the elections to the Hall of Fame in 1915 Alice Freeman Palmer received forty-seven votes, the highest number falling to any woman who failed. A change of votes would have put her on a level with Charlotte Cushman, who was elected.
“The newspapers seem to suggest that a candidate must be nominated before she can be voted on. If that is the case, then let me nominate my wife, Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer.”
A letter with a touch of raillery from a Harvard professor would scarcely go unnoticed by a man conscious of the circles in which he moved. We do not know the extent of Dr. Johnson’s influence in elections; we do know that her being on the ballot in 1920 was assured by her having got 47 votes earlier (twenty or more meant automatic renomination), and that she was elected that very year.
Shortly thereafter, Johnson received one of the very good documents of the twentieth-century women’s movement, a forthright letter that speaks for itself. Except for a brief “testing of the waters” (tentatively suggesting withdrawal of her name if conditions were to continue), it is a fair expression of the changing mood of the nation after World War I, and a protest in that spirit against the segregation of women in the Colonnade.
Robert Underwood Johnson, DD.D.
Dear Sir:
As Director of the Hall of Fame, you are aware that the tablets commemorating women were originally set in a section of the corridor apart from those of the men. For some months now, during reconstruction of the building, they have been temporarily withdrawn. I write to inquire whether when they are replaced a more rational order might not be adopted. The recent election of Mrs. Palmer to a place in distinguished company must be my excuse for writing.
The arrangement of the men is excellent. It forms the best possible safeguard against caprice in elections. Everyone chosen must have performed some specific public service and be placed where he is brought into comparison with the other great ones of this group. Grouping, classification, are the foundation principles of the Hall of Fame. By them it has secured public respect and has put a difference between itself and other miscellaneous gatherings of notables, such as that in the Capitol at Washington. Is it wise to abandon a principle so precious and in dealing with half of humankind to put in the foreground the incongruous principle of sex? Personally, I am always offended by the sex-consciousness of “Advanced Women.” To give it a lodgement in the Hall of Fame seems to me a kind of intellectual treachery.
The founders of the Hall, however, were not without excuse. Twenty years ago comparatively few women had received a college training. Few had entered trade, the law, medicine, or the higher grades of teaching. They had not half their present opportunities . . . But all this is now changed . . . the 19th Amendment is henceforth the law of our land. The Hall of Fame looks to the future no less than to the present and the past. It fixes estimates which we expect our grandchildren to approve. Will they approve a policy already out of date? If we go in huddling women together in an indistinguishable mass, shall we not look queerer and queerer with each advancing year?
Even now visitors must find the groups perplexing. Walking down the Judicial gallery one looks about to see if Mrs. Stowe is reckoned among influential authors. She is not. Did Mary Lyon give any impetus to education? No. She does not belong in the class with Horace Mann. One seems to have heard of an astronomer, Maria Mitchell; and of a social reformer, Frances Willard. It is all a mistake. They were merely pleasing women. How confusing is all this, and how easily it leads to the lowering of electoral standards. A female painter is proposed for membership. Her pictures, it is true, have no permanent worth; but considering she is a woman, shy not let her in and concede her a certain amount of merit: Obviously a double standard is unsafe. If the Hall is to hold the respect of the future, it must reward only solid achievement and not count middling work creditable if it proceeds from a woman. The only security against abuse is to distribute all tablets side by side, in meaningful groups and to shut out whoever cannot stand the test of comparison. No doubt the number of women admitted under this scheme would for the present by small. But with the enlarged intellectual demands which the new age lays on women the number is sure to increase.
In urging this more rational arrangement I own I am influenced by certain personal considerations, especially by the judgment expressed by Mrs. Palmer herself on a similar occasion in 1892. At the Chicago Fair of that year a group of vindicators of “Woman’s Rights” erected a building, filled it with a creditable display of feminine products, and begged Mrs Palmer to join their staff. She flatly refused. In her view the honorable position for women was in fellowship with men and not in a place by herself. Accordingly as one of the directors of education at the Fair, she brought it about that the exhibits of the women’s colleges were grouped with those of the men. Knowing, then, from this crucial case, how offensive to her was always the thrusting into prominence of facts of sex, I cannot but regret her election to the Hall of Fame if present conditions are to continue. Probably her name cannot now be withdrawn [italics author’s]. But obviously I should do her an injustice if I set up a bust of her in a place apart. Such a memorial would be fitting only if, as she always desired, she could find her place in the general company of those who have sought to serve America as a whole
January 21, 1921
The letter was strongly endorsed by Dean Marshall Brown: “I am greatly impressed by the argument . . . I cannot but believe that the present method of election to Hall of Fame for Famous Women [an early plan for segregation] will tend to detract from the Hall of Fame as a lasting criterion of greatness.”
Others obviously shared the Dean’s idea. Ultimately, the whole notion of conferring distinction upon women by voting them into the Hall and according them “equal treatment” with separate quarters was dropped. Dr. Palmer’s letter had been effective.
It is doubtful that he really intended to withdraw his wife’s name from such distinguished company. Quite the contrary, it seems, for on the very day of his letter of protest to Johnson, Dr. Palmer wrote by hand to Chancellor Brown and included three of Mrs. Palmer’s statements that he had chosen as possible inscriptions for the bronze tablet of her wall panel. And on May 21, 1921, in the ceremony described by Katherine Lee Bates, he was introduced to the Colonnade by the president of the Wellesley Alumnae Association to unveil the tablet.
The inscription reads: “The smallest village, the plainest home fives ample space for the resources of the college trained woman.” Bathos in bronze, from one of the nation’s leading professors of philosophy, man of the world, associate at Harvard of Josiah Royce, Will James, George Santayana — and, on this occasion, ingenuous. And then Chancellor, according to Bates, pledged the University to hold the tablet in “sacred trust and perpetual guardianship.”
It is said of Dr. Palmer that, “the principal value of his work lies in its criticism of human conduct.” George Santayana said that he was the only member of the Harvard Philosophy Department who had learned the art of “eloquent simplicity.” But only those who have lost a young love may forgive him for severely circumscribing the life of a remarkable woman on a public occasion in her honor.
The best that can be said of Dr. Palmer’s first choice of an inscription is that it is less mawkish than the second, a line of her verse about their marriage: “Love came and bidding me abandon power/ Called me to take the quiet name of wife.”
The third must have been too impersonal: “It takes some time to discover that work is the best sort of play, and some people never discover it.”
In the light of his good letter to Dr. Johnson it would be unfair to dismiss George Palmer as one whose judgment of propriety in public affairs could easily be swept away by his private feelings, as indeed in this case it was. It would be equally unfair to dismiss Alice Freeman Palmer as “Alice Who?” just because her fame is now limited to a few places still influential in educational circles: Wellesley, Chicago, American Association of University Women, among them. In her time she was ahead of the times. The effects of good deeds often outlast the memory of them.
If her spirit was present on the Wellesley campus in the spring of 1990 during the rumpus over the commencement speaker, who knows what her position might have been on the question of eligibility to give the commencement address. The question raised by some students was, in effect: Should not the invitation be based on what the speaker has accomplished on her own rather than what the catch of fortune has accomplished for her: In the event the address was given by Barbara Bush, who comported herself well as both Barbara Pierce and Mrs. President George Bush. We think Alice Elvira Freeman and Mrs. George Palmer would have beamed approval. And, remembering her view that “the honorable position for women was in fellowship with men,” we wish we knew what she would think today of a Women’s Hall of Fame.