Suffragist, lesbian feminist and pioneer advocate of women's career and educational rights, Martha Carey Thomas (1857-1935) was president of Bryn Mawr College and one of the founders of Johns Hopkins Medical School. According to this wholly engrossing and often shocking biography, she was also a plagiarist, an elitist snob, a racist who actively discriminated against Jewish and African American applicants to Bryn Mawr and a deceitful, autocratic administrator. Horowitz ( Campus Life ), a Smith history professor, presents compelling evidence that Thomas's lover, Mamie Gwinn, ghostwrote all or part of Thomas's Ph.D. dissertation, and further, that Gwinn was the unacknowledged collaborator of Thomas's Bryn Mawr lectures. With sympathetic insight, Horowitz probes how Thomas replaced the Christian faith of her orthodox Quaker parents with a positivist belief in evolutionary science. Horowitz also unravels Thomas's partly simultaneous, passionate affairs with bohemian Gwinn and wealthy Mary Garrett, a balancing act complicated by Gwinn's love for novelist Alfred Hodder. This is a brilliant portrait of a complex, divided personality. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Thomas surpassed outrageously the normative achievements of a Victorian woman. Self-invented in a world lacking female role models, she emerges in this gorgeously written and copiously documented biography as a penultimate aesthete simultaneously shaped by her world and struggling against it. One of the first heavy- weight women academics, she made an indelible mark as president of Bryn Mawr College; in Horowitz's telling, she becomes as well a sublimely complex period study worthy of the emulation of women today. Horowitz (Campus Life, LJ 5/15/87) presents a rich portrait of a complex and sometimes contradictory woman of power. This is the first complete life of Thomas, well supported by excellent collections of letters and papers. It will be of interest to libraries at all levels focusing on women's studies, academic life, and social customs of the Victorian era in the United States.
Susan E. Parker, Harvard Law Sch. Lib.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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