The Power and Passion of M. Carey ThomasM. Carey Thomas (1857-1935) was an extraordinary woman whose career spanned the Victorian and modern worlds. Her story is superbly told in a biography that resonates with the complicated interplay between he necessarily hidden private life and her eminently visible and successful public life as president of Bryn Mawr College, as a founder of the Johns Hopkins medical school and the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, as a leader in the women's suffrage movement, and as the preeminent spokeswoman for education around the turn of the century. Behind close doors, however, Carey Thomas was by no means the "proper Quaker daughter" many of her contemporaries assumed her to be. She was a freethinker. She was an ardent admirer of Swinburne, Rossetti, an the Pre-Raphaelites. She was a passionate woman whose lovers were women. In rich detail and with insight and balance, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz recounts a life lived outside the bounds of nineteenth-century convention. She show us the child overcoming a life-threatening and disfiguring burn; the schoolgirl deciding to devote he life to scholarship -- and ultimately becoming one of the first American women to study for a doctorate in Germany. We see the Cornell woman -- in an age when marriage eliminated the possibility of a serious career -- promising her parents to avoid all encounter with men students; the young educator outwitting college trustees to develop her dreams of a rigorous education for women. Throughout, as the book reconstructs Thomas' consciousness and her understanding of herself as a woman of passion, Horowitz provides fresh insights into emotional and sexual life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carey Thomas was complexity itself. She was at once visionary and narrow, warm and hard, spontaneous and calculating. She demanded everything of the world and of herself. She brought equal intensity to her professional responsibilities and her personal relations. She lived at fever pitch. Helen Horowitz has given us a brilliant portrait of the vivid and sui generis woman who -- in a world that held no models for her -- created herself, full scale, in the grand manner. |
Contents
Could Not Catch Thee | 3 |
Aint Going to Be Sentimental | 16 |
We Want Scholars | 37 |
Copyright | |
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abroad Alfred and Mary alumnae Anna Shipley Baltimore began Bessie Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr School Carey and Mamie Carey Thomas Carey wrote Carey's Cornell daughter Deanery faculty father feel folder frame Frank friends friendship girls graduate Gwinn Hodder Collection Hannah Hannah Whitall Smith Helen Helen Taft Helen Thomas Howland Johns Hopkins lectures letter live Mamie Gwinn Mamie's Margaret Hicks Mary Berenson Mary Garrett Mary Gwinn Hodder Mary's Mawr College Archives Mawr's MCT diary MCT to Anna MCT to HWS MCT to MEG MCT to MWT Minnie Minnie's MMG to MCT mother MWT to MCT never passionate poems president professors Quaker reel 15 reel 29 reel 31 Rhoads Richard Cadbury Rockefeller Rufus Jones scholarship Simon Flexner Smith summer Swinburne talk thee Thomas wrote took University woman women women's colleges write wrote to Mary