The Dark Angel of Bryn Mawr: The Saga of M. Carey Thomas

In telling the story of M. Carey Thomas, there is no getting around the fundamental fact that she was, resoundingly, a terrible person. The depths of her selfishness were unfathomable. She sacrificed friends and family when they ceased to be of use to her. She was academically dishonest, employed deception and manipulation as her primary administrative tools, burned through other people’s money to fund her lavish lifestyle, and abused her power in service of her racist and anti-Semitic worldview to actively keep minorities out of the institutions she created. 

Autocrat, eugenicist, spendthrift, narcissist. All of these terms are applicable to her at one point or another of her career, and yet the institution that she created through the force of her own exceptional will, Bryn Mawr College, was for decades the premiere institution in women’s higher education in the United States, producing two generations of the nation’s leading lights in science, mathematics, literature, and philosophy, a result achieved by harnessing her litany of deep but effective character flaws to a cause greater than herself. She took an institution meant to be a small-scale Quaker place of higher learning, and lied, swindled, and schemed it into a premiere college of world renown, which she then led with an iron but generally capable fist for three decades.

M. Carey Thomas (1857-1935) was born in Baltimore to a deeply Quaker family. She was the first child, and by all accounts, was a willful but captivating terror. Other family members warned her parents that they were being too indulgent with her carousing ways and earthy inquisitiveness, but they could never bring themselves to rein in her spirits, which were positively encouraged by her aunt, the writer and suffragist Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911). As a young girl, she was interested in the natural sciences, and gained a measure of local infamy by a youthful experiment in which she drowned a mouse, then skinned it, and reduced the remnants to a skeleton for her own instruction. 

Her life of youthful exuberance came to a sudden halt at the age of seven when her dress caught on fire while she was helping the household cook prepare a meal. The flames wrapped themselves around her body while her mother frantically attempted to suffocate them. Thomas was saved, but the burn wounds that ran across her thigh and over her abdomen took years to fully heal, and the psychological ramifications were yet more intense. Having called out to the Christian god for help from the depths of her soul while she was aflame, she experienced disillusionment that no divine aid was forthcoming. Characters in holy texts seemed to always get divine intervention when they asked for it, but when she, a seven year old girl, reached out, no help was to be had. Why would her god let her burn, then live for years in pain? 

As she would later in life, Thomas willed herself out of her problems, pushing through the anguish to force herself to walk again and resume something like a normal young life. In 1872, her parents sent her to the Howland Institute to further her education, where she came under the influence of one Miss Slocum, who encouraged her to press on with her higher education and take up the life of a scholar. And so it was that she found herself in 1875 at Sage College, the women’s counterpart of Cornell University. Her parents were at the time struggling financially, but Thomas continually lived beyond her means at Cornell, confident that her parents would find money somehow to support her lifestyle and that, if they didn’t, other relatives could be found who would. She formed intense relationships, called “smashes” in the parlance of the era, with other women on campus, and found herself falling into every habit that Quakerism frowned upon, including a love of music, morally suspect literature, and a steady loss of faith in the beliefs of her forefathers. She read Swinburne and Shelley, and developed for herself an identity centered around the seeking of grand emotions and poetic inspiration, eventually dubbing herself and her circle of friends as “nous autres”, a title meant to separate them, the seekers of truth and beauty, from the grasping and herd-like majority of humanity.

After graduating Cornell in 1877, she sought graduate work that would place her one step closer to the title of Scholar that she sought for herself. She briefly attended Johns Hopkins as a Greek student, then stretched the family finances further by attending the University of Leipzig, where she employed various half-truths and outright deceptions to get her parents to fund vacations to Italy with her traveling companion, Ms. Mamie Gwinn. She reveled for a time in the heady atmosphere of German philology, with its minute analyses of word and phrase origins, ultimately transferring to the University of Zurich to earn the PhD that Leipzig refused to offer to a woman. Her 1882 dissertation on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was her own work, but for the follow-up piece of scholarship required by the University, she turned to her friend Mamie Gwinn, who authored long stretches of the work for her in what would come to be a pattern of Thomas passing off Gwinn’s inspired words as her own. 

That said, Thomas excelled in the subsequent orals to such a degree that she was awarded a very rare PhD summa cum laude, the first in Zurich’s history awarded to a woman. That triumph having been achieved, Thomas then faced the profound question of where to go next. She wanted most of all to become a great poet, a member of the world of productive artistic talents she so admired, but knew that her poetry was too awkward to ever join the ranks of the immortals. She had the degree to continue in the world of philological scholarship, but her time at Leipzig had shown her that academic scholarship was a trifling grind that, at the end of the day, simply was not worth it. If not a poet or scholar, then, what was she to become? 

She was rescued from this dilemma by her family. Her father and uncle were both key players in the effort to create a new Quaker college from an endowment left for the purpose by Joseph W. Taylor. Thomas initially thought of herself as an ideal candidate to be the professor of literature there, and set about a gossip campaign to ruin the prospects of the man who had been promised that job already, Frank Gummere, who had for many years been Thomas’s friend. Using her unique personal ties to the men responsible for bringing Bryn Mawr into being, she was able to eliminate any rivals for the position that she wanted and then, not content with a likely lock on the position of literature professor, she decided that she was the only person capable of being the president of the new college, and began lobbying for that position as well.

The board responded politely with the not unreasonable point that Thomas had never been a teacher before, never been an administrator before, and in fact had never had any job of any sort before, and thus was perhaps slightly underqualified to be the chief administrator of a new college during its most delicate and difficult years. Though she was denied the presidency, however, she was given a position of sweeping authority as dean of the college, a position that allowed her to determine essentially every aspect of the school’s curriculum, faculty, and mission. The board of trustees wanted to keep to Taylor’s original mission of creating a small school for Quakers to receive an education, run by a Quaker staff and adhering to Quaker moral precepts. Thomas, fresh from her graduate studies, saw everything at first through the myopic lens of philology studies, and wanted to make the college a world-class institution focusing on the field she knew best and considered therefore to be the most important, at the expense of departments like science and history, which she deemed to be of secondary value. After touring other women’s colleges, however, she changed her mind and decided to make Bryn Mawr a leading institution in all fields, with a first rate staff, and a student body consisting of respectable upper class ladies.

Here Thomas’s classism and racism made themselves manifest. While the board wanted to create scholarships so that women of lesser means could attend the school, Thomas consistently insisted, in line with her evolving eugenicist beliefs, that only women from rich families were suitable as Bryn Mawr material, and that only white women should be considered. In her writings, she decried the “Race Suicide” that was happening throughout the world by the intermixing of higher races (like those of Western Europe) with the lower ones (like those of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East), to produce mongrel offspring who were lazy, immoral, and a drain on their societies. As a result, Black women were not allowed into the university until nine years after she stepped down as president, and Jews were strictly barred from receiving faculty appointments. 

Thomas moved into the Deanery in 1884 with Mamie Gwinn, to whom she claimed to be entirely devoted, though she would throughout the 1880s and 1890s court the ultra-wealthy railroad heiress Mary Garrett on the side, ultimately carrying out simultaneous romantic relationships with both women, making each miserable by her lack of faithfulness, and her complete unwillingness to bring to an end a situation that brought her artistic and monetary benefits. Gwinn wrote Thomas’s literature lectures, and Garrett would become increasingly crucial to Thomas as a source of emergency funding as she repeatedly brought herself and the college to the verge of financial collapse. 

Bryn Mawr, meanwhile, was growing to be every bit the premiere institution that Thomas had imagined it could be. She brought in future president Woodrow Wilson as a professor in history, and Charlotte Angas Scott to chair the mathematics department. She built a Master’s program to allow women the chance to pursue a higher education and attract both better students and better teachers to the campus. She trusted the students, at first, with their own governance, and dealt with every detail of campus life herself, from student issues to professor negotiations to building maintenance to curriculum design, and during these years the college rolled out a steady stream of first class scholars, including classicist Edith Hamilton (1894), Nobel laureate Emily Balch (1889), biologist Nettie Stevens (1903), mathematician Ada Maddison (1896), physicist Elizabeth Laird (1901), physician Martha Tracy (1898), and a cavalcade of others besides. If you have read this series for a while, you know how often Bryn Mawr has come up as a refuge for women scientists and mathematicians seeking a safe haven where they could pursue advanced studies with world-class professors, and all of that was made possible by M. Carey Thomas’s refusal to accept the limitations handed to her, and instead to create a unique place where women could receive an education every bit as challenging and fruitful as that offered by the greatest men’s universities. 

She was instrumental in pushing Mary Garrett to put up three hundred thousand dollars of her own money as an offering to Johns Hopkins to endow their new hospital, on the condition that they receive women as students, a deal which opened the doors to generations of women seeking higher medical education and, on the other end of the spectrum, together with Mamie Gwinn, she and Garrett founded the Bryn Mawr School in 1885, as a place where young women could receive a top notch high school education in preparation for eventual admittance into the college. Garrett funded the school, and ran it, often locking horns with Thomas, who objected vociferously whenever Garrett wanted to allow promising Jewish girls to enter the program.

In 1894, the college’s president passed away and Thomas employed the promise of a $10,000 annual gift to the college from Garrett as her wedge to gain the position for herself against the worries of the board about her financial and administrative approach to the college. These were valid concerns, as Thomas’s approach to the college’s financial situation was to rely on growth. She wanted to build more buildings to bring in more students to bring in more tuition to patch up the budgetary deficits. The problem, however, was that those buildings, as conceived by Thomas along broad Gothic lines, were expensive, and she refused to compromise on their grandeur because of her prejudice towards attracting primarily the daughters of the wealthy, whom she felt could only be lured by opulence. That opulence, however, meant that the money brought in by students never matched the money spent on them, and each year Thomas had to lean on Garrett to make up the difference, papering over the college’s financial deficits, and her own.

The other casualty of Thomas’s growth approach to solving the college’s problems was that it made it ever more difficult to retain professors of the caliber that Thomas felt was crucial to her vision of Bryn Mawr. Faced with years of stagnant or sometimes even declining salaries, many sought other colleges, while those who stayed bristled under Thomas’s deceptive approach to administration. At the time, the faculty did not have a seat on the board of directors, so the only way the board and the faculty could communicate to each other was through Thomas who, it turned out, blatantly misrepresented each to the other, pretending to the board that the faculty approved of her policies when they had vocally rejected them, and telling the faculty that the board had objections to their requests when in fact she had never informed the board of them. This policy of lying to the board about the faculty, and then lying to the faculty about the board, would ultimately come to a head in 1916 when the board invited the faculty to directly discuss their grievances against the college, and both parties realized the extent of Thomas’s decades of mutual deception. 

By that point, however, Thomas had carved out a space for herself as THE name in American women’s education, a world expert on the topic, and the head of the most successful women’s educational institution in the nation, and the board was unprepared to demand her resignation even in the face of such abundant evidence of misconduct. Meanwhile, the consequences of Thomas’s many years of mistreatment of Mamie Gwinn finally came to a head. Gwinn had taken over Thomas’s literature courses, and asked Thomas for permission to announce that the lectures she was going to use were actually originally written by her, and not by Thomas, so that students wouldn’t think she was simply recycling her predecessor’s lectures. Thomas refused, insisting that Gwinn continue perpetuating the lie that they were Thomas’s original work. Then, when Gwinn made a friend of the dashing and free-thinking Alfred Hodder, Thomas demanded that she give him up. It was all right for Thomas to have an outside love connection, but Gwinn, who lived an isolated life shut up in the Deanery in between her lectures, was not to have a similar luxury. Ultimately, Gwinn left, and Thomas flew into the arms of Garrett and her millions, traveling a la princesse with Garrett throughout Asia and the Middle East, where she made scathing remarks about the barbarity of the races she came into contact with along the way. 

Garrett died in 1915, leaving Thomas a fortune amounting to upwards of fifteen million dollars, with the expectation that Thomas would carry on her work endowing educational projects. Thomas did some of that, but overwhelmingly spent the money on herself, on elaborate vacations and rich living, until by the time of her death in 1935 her worth was estimated to have declined to something on the order of eighty thousand dollars. To some degree, her propensity to pamper herself was simply the flipside of her titanic work ethic. During the school year, she threw herself, twelve hours a day, into the minute running of the institution that her willpower had given birth to, and she not unreasonably believed that, having worked so hard, she deserved to play on an equally intense scale. At times in later life, she admitted to feeling guilty about not having spent Garrett’s money in the causes that Garrett would have wanted, but these were always passing thoughts, left behind when it came time to plan the next big excursion into a nation filled with people she held to be inferior to herself and her race.

There are so many more terrible things to say about M. Carey Thomas. Her behavior towards her servants. Her years of pretending to be a devoted Quaker to advance her career while in private demeaning the religion of her parents as something ridiculous and shameful. Her virulent German-baiting rhetoric during the First World War. Her insistence that her understanding of late 1870s German philology continue to be the basis of Bryn Mawr’s liberal arts program into the 1910s, including her tendency to tweak course curricula to match her own prejudices without the consent of the teachers teaching those courses. Her fixation on making sure that Garrett’s money ended up in her hands for private use, instead of in those of an educational foundation. To read her biography is to delve deeply into the mind of an individual so obsessed with power and perfection as she perceived it that she divided the world up into people she could use, and enemies who stood in her way, with no middle ground in between. 

By the time she stepped down from the presidency in 1922, Bryn Mawr was everything she had wanted it to be, and nothing that its founders had desired. Dotted with large and impressive buildings paid for by her influence with the Rockefellers and her personal relationship with Mary Garrett, boasting robust programs for undergraduates and graduates, largely free of its narrowly Quaker sectarian basis, employing entrance examinations to keep student quality high, and boasting forward-thinking new departments focused on social economy and engagement with the needs of working women (an innovation pushed through by Hilda Worthington Smith and which Thomas, to her credit, allowed), Bryn Mawr was quite simply the gold standard in women’s education in the early years of the 20th century, so long as you were white and not Jewish, and the foundations that Thomas laid, in infrastructure and focus on advanced scholarship, once cleared from the debris of her own personal prejudices and deceptive administrative philosophy, became the solid skeleton upon which the modern Bryn Mawr was constructed. 

What are we, then, to make of M. Carey Thomas, in the end? This is a problem Bryn Mawr itself faced in 2017 when members of the campus, recalling Thomas’s public speeches against the mixing of the races and her active policies of segregation, wondered whether it might not be time to rethink her legacy. Ultimately, both Thomas Library and Thomas Hall were renamed, and now exist as Old Library and Great Hall. While those names are clearly awful, they do speak to the problem of how we, as historians and consumers of history, treat those people who, limited by the beliefs of their time, yet created institutions of lasting impact and ultimate good. The easiest, most marketable, course is simply to tear down every vestige of them, and pretend that they didn’t exist, but for my part I’d like to see Old Library become Thomas Library again, with a great plaque in front declaring: 

Here is Thomas Library, named after M. Carey Thomas, Bryn Mawr’s second president. 

She was terrible. Really, just The Worst. But you wouldn’t be here without her.

Something to think about.

Further Reading:

The book to have is Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (1994). She gamely attempts the seemingly impossible task of reconciling all of Thomas’s manifest character flaws with the size of her accomplishments, laying out how her Quaker past, her unrealizable yearning to live a life that was outside of her talents, and her position as a woman of power in an age that denigrated women’s achievement, made her the administrator she was, for both good and ill. It is not an easy read - it’s never entirely pleasant to read about fundamentally dishonest people who keep getting everything they want without repercussions or consequences - but it is a fascinating one.