Martha Carey Thomas

• Martha Carey Thomas
• Born: January 2, 1857
• Died: December 2, 1935

Feminist, educator, suffragist, and second president of Bryn Mawr College, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the eldest child in a family of five sons and five daughters of James Carey Thomas, a physician, and Mary (Whitall) Thomas, the first president of the Baltimore chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the sister of the reformer Hannah Whitall Smith. The family belonged to the Gurneyite Quaker sect, the moderate branch of Orthodoxy. In the 1680s Thomas’s maternal ancestors had emigrated from England, settling in Red Bank, New Jersey, while her paternal ancestors, who were descended from Welsh nobility, established themselves in Maryland. The Thomases lived comfortably, but were not wealthy.

Minnie, as she was known to her family, was a bright and rebellious child who adored her mother and resented her strict father. At the age of seven she was severely burned in a cooking accident and was an invalid for two years, during which she developed a passion for reading.

The contrast between the Quaker principle of equality of the sexes in religious life and the conventionally male-supremacist behavior of Baltimore Quakers helped shape Thomas’s feminism as she was growing up. She attended a Quaker school in Baltimore and at the age of fifteen was sent to Howland Institute, a Quaker boarding school for young women near Ithaca, New York. Here she came to the attention of a teacher who encouraged her intellectual development, influenced her to devote her life to scholarship, and pushed her in the direction of coeducational schooling at Cornell. Her father disapproved of her choice, but with her mother’s assistance she won out. She spent a year at home preparing for her entrance examinations, entered Cornell in 1875, and received her bachelor’s degree two years later. During this period she started using the name Carey Thomas and became estranged from her religion, although she did not formally leave the Society of Friends until 1927, after her retirement from Bryn Mawr.

In 1877 Thomas entered Johns Hopkins University, planning to obtain a second degree. But she was unsuccessful in her attempts to break down the barriers against women there, and she was not allowed to attend classes. In 1879 she persuaded her father to let her travel to Leipzig, Germany, to study English philology. Three years later she transferred to the University of Zurich in Switzerland, where she became, in November 1882, the first woman and the first foreigner to obtain the university’s doctorate summa cum laude.

In 1883, while still abroad, Thomas wrote to the board of directors of Bryn Mawr, a women’s college then being planned by members of the Society of Friends, requesting the position of college president. The board instead offered her the post of dean and a professorship in English, which she took when she returned to the United States in November 1883; she was the first dean of an American women’s college to hold a doctorate. The college, located near Philadelphia, opened in 1885. By 1892 Thomas had become acting president in all but name, and in 1894 she was chosen by a margin of one vote to be the college’s second president.

Thomas was a strong-willed and supremely competent administrator who brooked no interference or opposition. Her goal at Bryn Mawr was to prove that, given an equal chance, women are as capable as men of undertaking rigorous study and achieving intellectual excellence, without risk to their health or morals. Under her leadership Bryn Mawr provided an education to women that was equivalent to or better than that offered at men’s colleges. Entrance requirements were more rigid than at Ivy League schools, and the curriculum stressed disciplined scholarship. Unlike most women’s colleges, which required their students to take courses in “domestic science,” Bryn Mawr relieved its students of all housekeeping chores, in accordance with Thomas’s insistence that domesticity is not compatible with the life of the mind.

Thomas adopted a number of new ideas that set standards for women’s higher education, establishing a graduate school, an exchange program of scholars from other countries, and research chairs for outstanding professors. She opened an experimental school based on John Dewey’s educational methods and, in 1921, a Summer School for Women Workers in Industry, which gave working women the chance to study on campus for eight weeks. The graduate department of social research that she created was the first in the country to offer the doctoral degree, in 1915. Bryn Mawr also broke precedent by employing unmarried men to teach women and encouraging women faculty members who married to continue their work, rather than to resign.

In 1885 Thomas and a group of friends founded the Bryn Mawr School for Girls, a preparatory institution in Baltimore. When Johns Hopkins University opened its medical school in 1893, she and her friend and fellow feminist Mary Garrett donated a large endowment on condition that women be admitted on an equal basis with men.

Thomas was the first college president to work for woman suffrage, and she became an important figure in the movement from 1906, when she joined the College Equal Suffrage League. In 1908 she became first president of the National College Women’s Equal Suffrage League. She also worked for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), but left that organization in 1920 to join Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party, which was working for an equal-rights amendment. A captivating speaker, she lectured on women’s-rights issues, including birth control, long before that cause was considered a respectable topic for public debate. Although she never married, primarily because it would have interfered with her career, she firmly believed that marriage should be a partnership of equals. She supported the League of Nations and in 1923 submitted a plan for world peace to the contest for Edward Bok’s American Peace Prize.

After her resignation from the presidency of Bryn Mawr in 1922, Thomas spent thirteen years traveling abroad. She returned to Philadelphia in 1935 to speak at Bryn Mawr’s fiftieth anniversary celebration and died a month later of a coronary thrombosis at the age of seventy-eight. Her ashes were buried in the cloister of Bryn Mawr’s library.

M. Carey Thomas’s papers are in the archives of Bryn Mawr College. Her numerous writings include the pamphlets Education of Women (1899; also published as a chapter in N. M. Butler, ed., Monographs on Education in the United States, no. 7 [1900]); Dr. Thomas on Woman’s Ballot (1907); and How to Get into the League of Nations (1924). For the early part of her career see M. H. Dobkin, ed., The Making of a Feminist: Early Journals and Letters of M. Carey Thomas (1979), and for her administrative work see C. L. Meigs, What Makes a College? (1956). The standard biography is E. Finch, Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr (1947). See also B. M. Cross, The Educated Woman in America (1965), for a sketch of her life, and H. T. Flexner, A Quaker Childhood (1940), by Thomas’s sister. For her attitudes toward domestic duties at women’s colleges, see R. Wein, “Women’s Colleges and Domesticity, 1875-1918,” History of Education Quarterly, September 1974. See also Notable American Women (1971) and The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 1 (1944). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, December 3, 1935.