Vida Scudder

• Vida Scudder
• Born: December 15, 1861
• Died: October 9, 1954

Settlement house worker and social reformer, was born in Madura, India, and was christened Julia Davida. She was the only child of David Cort Scudder, a Congregationalist minister, and Harriet Louisa (Dutton) Scudder, both of whom came from prominent old New England families. Before her first birthday her father, a missionary, died in India. Her mother returned with her daughter to her maternal grandparent’s home in Auburndale, Massachusetts. She grew up in an environment that valued Christain duty and education. A sensitive and delicate child, Vida, as she was known to her family, spent most of her youth in Europe in the company of her devoted mother. The older woman taught her a love of tradition and beauty, and the two became close friends and were virtually inseparable until her mother’s death in 1920.

Vida Scudder was educated abroad and in Boston in Miss Sanger’s School in 1871, and was a member of the first class of Girl’s Latin School in 1878. In 1880 she enrolled in Smith College. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1884, she went to Oxford University in Great Britain for postgraduate study, and was one of the first American women to enter its graduate program. There she was influenced by John Rus-kin, who helped develop in her a social conscience. She began to read the works of leading socialists including Leo Tolstoy, Charles Kings-ley, and J.F.D. Maurice. By the time she returned to Boston in 1885 she was a dedicated socialist. For two years she drifted, until finally accepting a post in the department of English at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. In her teaching and in her writings she expressed a deep concern for social justice in American society. A Marxist, she adhered to the theories of dialectical materialism and class consciousness. She was convinced that the existence of privilege or a privileged class had detrimental effects on the rest of society. Determined to take an activist role in 1887, she began planning a college settlement whose aim was to promote fellowship among immigrants, workers, and college women. The first settlement house opened in New York City in 1899. This was the beginning of the College Settlements Association. Serving as secretary of the board of directors of the association, she lectured at numerous college campuses to promote the group’s work. In 1892, on a year’s leave of absence from Wellesley, she joined Helena Dudley in opening Denison House, a settlement in Boston’s South Side, and for over two decades she was closely associated with it.

Scudder was often in conflict with the Wellesley College administration for her socialist views, and in 1900 she openly criticized a gift from the Rockefeller family to the school. The following year she suffered a mental breakdown, and spent the next two years traveling in Europe. Renewed in strength, she returned to Boston, and formed an Italian circle for new immigrants at Denison House. When her interests expanded into a concern for labor, she became an organizer for the Woman’s Trade Union League and a delegate to the Boston Central Labor Union. Denison House became a meeting place for several labor organizations.

In the late 1870s she became a member of the Episcopal church, and by the late 1880s was a convert to Christian socialism, and actively participated in socialist and religious organizations. She was a member of the Society of Christian Socialists, the Christian Union, the Brotherhood of the Carpenter, and a charter member of the Episcopal Church Socialist League founded in 1911, whose prime objective was to apply Christian principles to social and industrial relations. In the same year she joined the Socialist party. Scudder worked to reconcile the differences between socialism and Christianity. Although called a Communist by some, she believed that the remedy for social ills of society would only come from applying Christian principles to problems. Her work, including her book Socialism and Character (1912), anticipated the debates between later generations of Christians and Marxists.

After participating in the celebrated textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, she was asked to stop teaching her course on “Social Ideals in English Literature,” and even to resign from Wellesley. Instead she left Denison House, fearing her radical views were hurting its work, and moved to Wellesley.

Vida Scudder supported President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter World War I in 1917, while upholding the rights of pacifists. In 1919 she organized the Church League for Industrial Democracy for Episcopal church members committed to the cause of social justice. She also assisted in the reorganization of the Intercollegiate Socialist League into the League for Industrial Democracy. After the war she increasingly became committed to pacifism. In the summer of 1923, after becoming a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, she presented a series of lectures at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in Podebrady near Prague.

She retired from Wellesley in 1928, and turned to scholarly research. In 1931, after an extensive examination of the early history of the Franciscans, she published The Franciscan Adventure, which established her as the leading American scholar on that subject. She became first dean of Wellesley’s Summer School of Christian Ethics in 1930, and the following year took up a position at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Continuing her concern for social justice, she published sixteen books on literary, religious, and political subjects and in 1937 wrote her autobiography, On Journey.

Vida Scudder combined an active career with a strong religious commitment. A member of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, an Episcopal women’s group dedicated to social reconciliation, she organized for it institutes on religious themes, particularly the church’s duty toward racial groups and penal reform. She remained an active worker until her sudden death from asphyxiation, caused by choking on food, at her home in Wellesley at the age of ninety-three.

The papers of Vida Scudder can be found at Wellesley College, the archives of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, Adelynrood, South Byfield, Massachusetts, and Smith College Library. Vida Scudder’s works include: The Life of the Spirit in the Modern English Poets (1895), The Witness of Denial (1895), Social Ideals in English Letters (1898), A Listener in Babel Being a Series of Imaginary Conversations (1903), Saint Catherine of Sienna as Seen in Her Letters (1905), Discipline of a Saint (1907), Socialism and Sacrifice (1910), Introduction to the Study of English Literature (1914), The Church and the Hour: Reflections of a Socialist Churchwoman (1917), The Social Teachings of the Christian Year (1927), Brother John; a Tale of the First Franciscians (1927), The Christian Attitude Toward Private Property (1934), The Church and Social Justice (1934), The Privilege of Age; Essays Secular and Spiritual (1939), and Father Huntington, Founder of the Order of the Holy Cross (1940).

There is no full-length account of her life. The best modern sketches are in T. Corcoran, Vida Dutton Scudder (1982), Notable America Women: The Modern Period (1980), and The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 5 (1977). See also A. Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age (1954); A. Davis, Spearheads for Reform (1967); W. O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave (1969); P. J. Frederick, The Professor as a Social Activist,” New England Quarterly (September 1970); and T. Corcoran, “Vida Dutton Scudder: Impact of World War I on the Radical Woman Professor,” Anglican Theological Review (Spring 1975). An obituary appeared in The New York Times on October 11, 1954.