In April of 2002, Marc Schogol wrote in the Inquirer – You’d think that if a president once taught at your college, you’d glorify his name. But at Bryn Mawr College, there’s now no sign that Woodrow Wilson was ever there.
According to Schogol, the Wilson marker was removed by the state “for repairs,” in September of 2001. Apparently, those repairs were completed and the sign was re-installed – sometime between 2002 and 2006.
The Inquirer noted in their 2002 article, that a month after the Wilson marker was removed for repairs, “a new marker was erected not far away that commemorates the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry.”
Photo source Greenfieldblogs.brynmawr.edu
In October of 2020, The President of Bryn Mawr College Requested the Removal of the Wilson Marker
AP wrote on Monday (December 27) – At the request of Bryn Mawr College’s president, Kimberly Wright Cassidy, the Pennsylvania history agency removed a marker from the edge of campus that noted President Woodrow Wilson had briefly taught there. Cassidy’s letter to the commission cited Wilson’s dismissive comments about the intellectual capabilities of women and his racist policy of federal workforce segregation.
Cassidy’s letter to Andrea Lowery, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Historical Marker Commmission
Dear Ms. Lowery,
I write to request that the Pennsylvania Historical Markers Commission remove the marker from the Bryn Mawr College campus that recognizes Woodrow Wilson’s short tenure of teaching at Bryn Mawr College. This marker is placed on New Gulph Road in Bryn Mawr. We request that the marker be retired and not moved to another location proximate to the campus.
Bryn Mawr College was founded in 1885 to offer the kind of rigorous education at that time offered only to men at the leading institutions in the U.S. and Europe. This founding purpose continues to drive our work 135 years later. As articulated in our current mission statement, approved by the Board of Trustees in 2019, “As a residential women’s college at the undergraduate level, and through coeducational graduate programs in arts and sciences, in social work, and in post-baccalaureate premedical training, Bryn Mawr is committed to women’s education and empowerment, to gender equity, and to supporting all students who choose to pursue their studies here.” The statement goes on to assert that today this mission extends to a commitment to equity, inclusion, and diversity as “engines for excellence and innovation.”
Woodrow Wilson was recruited to join the founding faculty at Bryn Mawr, but he left the College after only three years and in large part because he did not believe women were capable of this kind of intellectual challenge. For example, in 1887 he wrote in his diary that “Lecturing to young women of the present generation on the history and principles of politics is about as appropriate and profitable as would be lecturing to stone-masons on the evolution of fashion in dress. There is a painful absenteeism of mind on the part of the audience. Passing through a vacuum, your speech generates no heat. Perhaps it is some of it due to under-graduatcism, not all to femininity.” Wilson’s private comment is echoed in other correspondence. Many alumnae and students who are aware of his views on women’s intellectual capacity object to honoring his affiliation with Bryn Mawr.
Members of the Bryn Mawr community also disavow Woodrow Wilson’s racist views and his actions to expand and codify segregation in the Federal workforce while President of the United States. As Princeton University President Christopher Eisengruber wrote on June 27, 2020, “Wilson’s racism was significant and consequential even by the standards of his own time. He segregated the federal civil service after it had been racially integrated for decades, thereby taking America backward in its pursuit of justice. He not only acquiesced in but added to the persistent practice of racism in this country, a practice that continues to do harm today.” As you may know, Princeton has chosen to remove Wilson’s name from its school of public policy and one of its residential colleges, even though Wilson was an alumnus and served as president of the university from 1902-1910.
Wilson’s affiliation with and contributions to Bryn Mawr were slight, and he did not value his experience as a member of our faculty. More important, his beliefs about women and his actions to institutionalize racial segregation are not compatible with Bryn Mawr College’s mission or values.
For these reasons, we request that the Historical Markers Commission remove the sign recognizing his affiliation with the College.
Sincerely yours,
Kimberly Wright Cassidy
President
A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission said that the Wilson Marker was erected on the property of Bryn Mawr College, and that it’s the commission policy to always remove any marker if a property owner makes that request.
The Summer School for Women Workers in Industry began at Bryn Mawr College during the Summer of 1921. According to The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education’s website – The schools were designed to give women working in industry the chance to experience higher education during the summer months when the campuses were not in use by the regular students. In the case of Bryn Mawr College, the women lived on campus and became fully immersed in campus life, including performing plays, a much loved Bryn Mawr tradition.
M. Carey Thomas, the first female President of Bryn Mawr College conceived of the women workers’ summer school on a trip she took to Africa. However, having traveled to Africa did little to change Thomas’s racist views.
In a 1986 paper that can be found in the catalog of the Bryn Mawr College Special Collections Library, Rita Rubinstein Heller wrote of Thomas – Liberal did not mean acceptance of non-white, non-western peoples into the elite, intellectual tradition. Thomas’ anti-black biases amounted to an idee fixe. On this subject she expressed herself freely making her opposition to blacks well known… Bryn Mawr admitted its first black student in 1927, five years after Thomas’ retirement, making it among the last of the Seven Sister colleges to do so. Thomas wished the Summer School to be another all-white enterprise, which it was for five years.
Photo Source – Greenfield.Brynmawr.edu
Rubinstein cited an unsent letter from Thomas to Hilda Worthington Smith (the first director of the summer college) that contained this excerpt – Personally, I hope that you will not complicate its [the School’s] full success by asking the girls to live, sleep and eat with even a very few Negro girls. I am far too convinced a eugenicist [emphasis added] and far too enthusiastic a believer in heredity to think that it is wise to break down social barriers before we know far more about the intellectual effect of intermarriage with unprogressive races than we do now…I believe in not mixing reforms. The absolutely imperative work before us is to educate women leaders among the labor classes, Personally I hope that you will not complicate its [the School’s] full success by asking the girls to live, sleep and eat with even a very few Negro girls. I am far too convinced a eugenicist and far too enthusiastic a believer in heredity to think that it is wise to break down social barriers before we know far more about the intellectual effect of intermarriage with unprogressive races than we do now…I believe in not mixing reforms. The absolutely imperative work before us is to educate women leaders among the labor classes, Personally I hope that you will not complicate its [the School’s] full success by asking the girls to live, sleep and eat with even a very few Negro girls. I am far too convinced a eugenicist and far too enthusiastic a believer in heredity to think that it is wise to break down social barriers before we know far more about the intellectual effect of intermarriage with unprogressive races than we do now…I believe in not mixing reforms. The absolutely imperative work before us is to educate women leaders among the labor classes, fit to guide and control the whirlwind when it strikes, to save what is good in learning, science and literature.