These Fevered Days

by Martha Ackmann

  Even darker concerns abounded about educating young women: fears about their health, womanhood, and safety. Many detractors, including at least one Harvard professor, thought too much reading and writing drained blood from a young woman’s brain particularly during her catamenial period. Women and men were different, he said. Women have a finite amount of energy and should expend it wisely. “With every act of life . . . the uttering of a word, the coining of a thought, the thrill of an emotion, there is a destruction of a certain number of cells.”11 If women spent too much time at their desks, they ran the risk of never being able to have children. Some ministers warned their religious colleagues not to associate with Mary Lyon. The editor of The Religious Magazine took the argument one step further, declaring that Miss Lyon’s work undercut the very foundation of society, producing masculine women out to supplant men. “In the place of all which is most attractive female manners, we see characters expressly formed by acting a manly part upon the theater of life,” he wrote.12 Then there were those who believed Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary put ideas in girls’ heads: ideas about ambition and living lives far different from their mothers. Celia Wright of Blandford, Massachusetts, was one of those girls; Emily knew her through Amherst friends. Celia had graduated Mount Holyoke the year before Emily entered and dreamed of traveling west for missionary work with Choctaw Indians. Her father disapproved. He thought the work was dangerous and did not want his daughter so far away from home. But Celia was defiant and flatly announced she would go. That’s what you get, Dr. Wright may have thought, from someone like Mary Lyon who urged young women to “accomplish great things.”13 When Emily’s Amherst friend called on the Wright family, she felt tension between father and daughter. Someone had been crying. Later a seminary teacher recorded the whereabouts of recent 1846 graduates. “Celia S. Wright,” she wrote in a column of names, “to the Indians.”14

  Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson did not worry about fifty-year-old Mary Lyon planting preposterous ideas in their daughter’s head. Edward did have apprehensions about Emily being away from home, of course, but they were his usual worries about eyestrain from reading too much, and unease about his daughter being in charge of her own money for the first time. “Tell Father, I am obliged to him much, for his offers of ‘picauniary’ assistance, but do not need any,” she instructed Austin.15 Mrs. Dickinson checked to see if Emily had enough shoe blacking and boxed-up treats to be delivered when the family made an occasional visit. She knew Emily had a sweet tooth and sent gingerbread, a cake, and a pie. Fruit and chestnuts, she probably realized, would remain untouched for days. If they needed any reassurance about Mary Lyon’s aims, the Dickinsons had only to look to relatives and friends who supported her. Early on when Miss Lyon put out a call for help with seminary furnishings, Grandfather Norcross had readily supplied the crockery.‡ Amherst College president Edward Hitchcock and his wife, Orra, had invited Miss Lyon to board with them while she put finishing touches on her dream. Edward Hitchcock said being around Mary Lyon made the wise wiser and the good better.16 He would do anything for her, including serving as a Mount Holyoke trustee and giving the seminary his old anatomy mannequin that he so loved showing Amherst Academy students. His wife helped too. A skilled artist, Orra had sketched a biblical vignette that the seminary adopted for its seal. The landscape—resembling Mount Zion—suggested Mount Holyoke Female Seminary was a place where women would be raised up.17

  The seminary seal would have appealed to the Dickinsons. It reassured them that Emily’s education would be grounded in the same Christian principles as Amherst College. Emily’s mother already had pledged her life to Christ in 1831—the only member of family yet to do so.§ Her father had not professed, but regularly attended First Church, where he also served on parish committees and helped search for suitable ministers.¶ Like her parents and grandparents, Emily knew that Christianity was tightly woven into the everyday life for students at colleges such as Amherst, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, and female seminaries like Mount Holyoke. Faculty led student prayer groups, roommates encouraged one another to consider conversion, the curriculum was infused with biblical study, and religious revivals were a frequent and serious occurrence. President Hitchcock once remarked that religion was at the very core of Amherst College.18 Area newspapers shared his point of view. In reporting on commencements at Amherst and Mount Holyoke, newspapers listed students who read prizewinning essays as well as the number of seniors who had professed their faith. To be a college or seminary student in New England meant to be a student of faith as well. Edward Dickinson knew firsthand how deeply religion weighed on students’ minds. He could remember walking past doorways of student lodging in New Haven and hearing young men’s prayers. He kept letters his parents wrote—letters imploring him to take advantage of Yale’s revivals and pledge his life to Christ.# Samuel and Lucretia Dickinson counted the number of Amherst College students who had professed, rejoiced when one of their son’s friends joined the fold, and used student professions to prompt Edward’s own. Even more than studying, listen to the sound of God around you, his mother had urged. It is “the most important of all calls.”19

  Emily had not received letters from her parents about professing her faith. As they had when she was home, Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson left the subject of Christian conversion to their daughter and did not pressure her. But the routines at Mount Holyoke made it nearly impossible for Emily to keep her thoughts about religion private. She had to take a stand on faith and she had to do it publicly. During her first month at the seminary, Miss Lyon had asked students to declare their status. Students came forward and identified themselves in one of three ways: those who already had professed, those who were considering a hope in Christ, and those who did not feel a call. Emily was in the latter group—those without hope. She was not the only one. Seventy-nine other young women—nearly a third of the seminary—had joined her. During church services, the large group of “no hopers”—as they were called—sat together every Sunday, a stark physical reminder to themselves and others of their spiritual state. But there were other times during the day when Emily could disappear into her own solitary space and turn over thoughts. As public and communal as the seminary was, Mary Lyon valued solitude and believed it was critical to young women’s development. If she’d had her way, Miss Lyon would have built the seminary with private rooms for every Mount Holyoke student. Finances precluded the option, so she settled for “lighted closets”—individual spaces in each room where a young woman could separate from her roommate and have time to pray or think. When Emily wanted to be alone, the lighted closet was a refuge. No one would know if she spoke to God or let her thoughts glide elsewhere to words, images, and poetry.20

  While Emily took the question of faith seriously, it did not diminish her attention to academics at Mount Holyoke. She was doing well. Before she entered the seminary, she had reviewed arithmetic in order to be to be on the “safe side of things,” she had said.21 During those first weeks back in September, Emily had passed all her examinations—a notable accomplishment for someone so young. Many students were not as prepared: some had been sent home for failing marks or for not completing the three days of exams on time. A few left because they were homesick. Emily’s test scores placed her into the first class level. By the middle of the term, she had advanced to the next rung. With three levels of classes at Mount Holyoke, it was possible Emily could complete her studies and graduate in two years rather than the usual three. That is, if she wanted to. The majority of students did not, although her roommate, cousin Emily Norcross, was an exception. Cousin Emily was in her final year at the seminary and looked forward to work as a music teacher somewhere out west. With both of her parents deceased, Cousin Emily knew she would need to support herself, and teaching was her future.** But most parents and many students looked upon a year or two at Mount Holyoke as the final step in a young woman’s education—a “finishing stroke,” Emily said.22 Emily’s child
hood friend Helen Fiske had wanted nothing more than to attend Mount Holyoke and had spent months reviewing her subjects, especially—like Emily—her ciphering. Helen’s father worried that his daughter was studying with such intensity that she was neglecting her duties to others. He spoke with Mount Holyoke’s assistant principal, Mary Whitman, about his concerns. Either Miss Whitman had persuaded him that Helen should not attend Mount Holyoke—at least not right away—or he had decided himself. Professor Fiske determined Ipswich Female Seminary would be better for his daughter, saying it provided “less stimulus to intellectual effort.”23 Emily knew she was fortunate to be accepted at Mount Holyoke, and realized it was too soon to be talking about successfully completing all her classes and graduating. Besides, the first year for every student, no matter what level, was probationary. For now, she enjoyed sharing a room with her cousin, singing in the seminary chorus, taking piano lessons, and making the most of her studies in botany, rhetoric, physiology, ecclesiastical history, astronomy, and algebra. She boasted to Austin after she had completed each course, and announced to him when she delved into chemistry, Mary Lyon’s principal subject. “Your welcome letter found me all engrossed in the history of Sulphuric Acid,” she wrote, adding five exclamation points.24

  Not only had she done well in her classes, Emily also had adjusted to the seminary’s bustling environment. At times it felt like she was living in a beehive: swarms of students and teachers buzzed about the building, each with schedules, chores, and places to go. Few seminaries existed that were as large and complex an operation as Mount Holyoke. Every action had to be systematically organized and assessed for effectiveness. As was her custom, Mary Lyon kept track of it all. She compiled lists of students absent overnight, notes on sweeping, care of sink pumps, and inventoried the kitchen contents: one spinning wheel, one blue tub, one meat barrel, one cheese strayner. She marked who was ill and needed mayweed tea. Nowhere was Mount Holyoke’s organizational bearing more apparent than in domestic work. In order to keep costs of the school down, avoid hiring outside help, and teach the values of self-reliance and equality, Miss Lyon created a domestic work requirement. Each student worked at least an hour every day on chores that contributed to the “family.” Some young women prepared puddings, others ironed tablecloths, several helped out in the sick room, and a group of copyists sent off a journal letter to former students who were missionaries abroad. There were 235 jobs for 235 students. Miss Lyon was adamant that parents not associate domestic work with academics, and stated her policy in the annual seminary catalogue: “All members of the school aid to some extent in the domestic work of the family. The portion of time thus occupied, is so small that it does not retard their progress in study, but rather facilitates it by its invigorating influences. But it is no part of the design of this Seminary to teach young ladies domestic work. This branch of Education is exceedingly important, but a literary institution is not the place to gain it. Home is the proper place for the daughters of the country to be taught on this subject; and the mother is the appropriate teacher.”25 After learning she would not be attending Mount Holyoke, Helen Fiske justified her disappointment by disparaging the seminary as a place “to learn to make hasty pudding and clean gridirons.”26 But Emily did not mind the chores. “My domestic work is not difficult,” she wrote Abiah, “& consists in carrying the Knives from the 1st tier of tables at morning & noon & at night washing & wiping the same quantity of Knives.”27 Students made light work of their chores, singing as they cooked, needling their classmates for washing dishes “after the manner of the Pharises!,” and humorously naming their work circles for lofty church organizations. The dishwashers were known as the American Board.28 Those scrubbing the baking dishes were the Home Missionary Society. A joke among the domestic groups was Mary Lyon’s unending reconfiguration of the dining room. She always looked for a better arrangement to promote efficiency. Around Mount Holyoke, the sound of Miss Lyon moving tables was as constant as the boil of bubbling stew pots.

  Nearly every student at one time or another wrote home about Mary Lyon. She was everywhere, they said. Up at five a.m. in her wrapper to check on breakfast, setting buckets of disinfectant in the hallways to ward off illness, shepherding students into coaches for mountain hikes in the fresh air. With everything she had to do—or thought she had to do—she believed focus was key. “Try to be systematic,” she lectured the young women. All her life, she told them, she suffered from what she called “regular habits.” They had to do better. She warned them about interruptions to their thinking and drains on their time. “I really think it requires more discipline of mind and more grace to meet a lady’s duties than a gentleman’s,” she argued. “He has little minutia to attend to. He can rise in the morning and go to his business without hindrance, but it is not so with a lady.”29 Mary Lyon’s command did not escape Emily’s notice. Joking with Austin about South Hadley’s isolation, she cast Miss Lyon as a military general, leading a charge, and urging her troops to fight back. “Do you know any nation about to besiege South Hadley?” Emily wrote. “If so, do inform me of it, for I would be glad of a chance to escape, if we are to be stormed. I suppose Miss Lyon. would furnish us all with daggers & order us to fight for our lives, in case such perils should befall us.”30 Over and over again students commented on the intensity with which Miss Lyon approached her work. “I wish you could see Miss Lyon,” one of Emily’s classmates wrote home. “I know you would laugh. She is hard of hearing, has false teeth, wears a cap, and dresses as well as an old washwoman. Yet she is noble for doing business. She runs around here with her nose dripping and does more business than any two men.”31 She is, another student observed, such a “driver and hurrier. There is no standing still where she is.”32 What some saw as rush, Emily might have seen differently. It was not so much hurry that defined Mary Lyon, but urgency. Emily felt it in herself. A year earlier, during her self-proclaimed year of improvement, Emily told Abiah “life is short and time fleeting” and she wanted to “spend the year. . . . to better advantage.”33 She, too, was driven, and searching for ways to make her dreams take shape.34 Whether a commitment to God was part of that plan remained uncertain. But she knew that within hours she would need to make up her mind.

  Emily was not the only young woman who was imagining her future. Her classmate Sarah Worcester from Park Hill in the Cherokee Nation was already in conversation with tribal officials about opening a school for girls. Margaret Robertson from Sherbrook, Canada, wanted to write a novel. Louisa Plimpton from Sturbridge, Massachusetts, dreamed of going to China.†† Fidelia Fiske, Helen’s distant cousin, earlier had embarked on her own adventure. During afternoon assembly in Seminary Hall, teachers read aloud from Fidelia’s letters, praising her bravery and determination. They told the young women about how Fidelia had started Mount Holyoke in 1839, but contracted typhoid and was forced to leave. How she’d returned several years later and had finished her studies. When a foreign missions board had announced an opportunity to go to Persia, Fidelia jumped at the chance, and set sail from Boston Harbor. Four months later, she arrived in Orumiyeh, where she learned Persian and laid plans for a girls’ school modeled on Mount Holyoke. “My dream breathes not yet,” Fidelia had written her friends at the seminary. “But I hope that bone is coming to bone.”35 Everywhere around Emily women were taking risks. She knew Miss Lyon insisted that students learn chemistry not from reading books but by conducting laboratory experiments. After a teacher burned her hands when a test went awry, the solution was simply to search for a bandage, not abandon the scientific attempt. You learn by trial and error, analysis and contemplation. When something didn’t work, Miss Lyon believed, you tried again. Trust your own mind, she always said. Once students had taken to the fields to collect flowers for analysis. They had been so zealous in gathering samples, teachers asked them to temporarily suspend their collecting. Faculty worried there would be no blossoms left. In spring when the snow cleared, Emily would be out in the field again, searching for
fossil tracks and evidence of long-ago dinosaurs. Hearing about Fidelia’s ambition and being called upon to use her own powers of observation made Emily think about what was ahead for her. Time and again during the year, she introduced herself to new classmates, young women who had never heard of the Dickinsons of Amherst. She thought of these introductions as giving her “dimensions.”36 The introductions forced her to reconsider who she was, what her narrative had been, and what it would become. There was something emancipating about being herself and not solely the daughter of Edward Dickinson. Before long she was signing her letters “Emilie” and wondering if—like Fidelia—she had the independence and courage to set sail.37

  Of course, for Emily and the other students no woman was a more imposing model of determination than Mary Lyon. In founding the seminary and keeping it afloat, Miss Lyon knew better than anyone the forces against her. She spent hours every day drafting letters to would-be donors and spooling out worries to her friends. This seminary is up against so much, she had written, it has nine chances out of ten of failing. Her words filled pages with lines crossed out, phrases added, words stacked one atop another, and scrawls written up along the sides. In a draft of one difficult sentence about women’s education, she had stated, “We must cheerfully endure opposition,” then deleted with a heavy dark line the words that followed—words about enemies to the cause. It incensed her that she had to follow expectations for what women should do: she should not travel alone, she should not directly ask for money, she should not lead meetings where men were present. “My heart is sick my soul is pained with this empty gentility, this gentile nothingness,” she once fumed to a friend. “I am doing a great work. I cannot come down.” She complained of headaches and had spells of erysipelas that turned her skin as taut and as hard as an orange rind.‡‡ That November day back in 1837, when Mount Holyoke Female Seminary opened its doors for the first time, Mary Lyon wanted everything to be perfect, but it wasn’t. The front steps were not in place, windows were still without blinds, stoves sat unconnected to their stovepipes, furniture had been delayed by storms, and no one could find the new bedding. The first sight that greeted many students was Trustee Daniel Safford on hands and knees setting up bedsteads. “We are in glorious confusion,” he enthusiastically declared. By nightfall, South Hadley townswomen could be seen walking through the huckleberry patch with supplies, their arms filled with donated sheets and blankets.38