USA > Ohio > Women of Ohio; a record of their achievements in the history of the state, Volume I > Part 20
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Hezekiah Rudd gave reluctant consent, found friends with whom Mary might travel, and took her to them in New York City. They traveled up the Hudson River, across New York State by the Erie Canal, by boat to Cleveland and by stage to Oberlin.
Mary Rudd spent five years as a student in Oberlin, one year in the pre- paratory school and four years in college. During that time she visited her home only once, because the trip was expensive. In Oberlin she lived in the
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Mahan house, earning her board and room by housework and the care of the little Mahan children. Her aunt had promised in advance that she herself would relieve the girl for recitations and study periods.
Mary Rudd was one of the four young women who, in Oberlin in 1837, demanded and received the right to take the full college course with the men, and thus became the first real college women. As stated in the beginning of this outline on Oberlin, she graduated in 1841. Her diploma is in the posses- sion of the Oberlin College Library.
In the fall of 1841, in Connecticut, she was married to George Nelson Allen. Eight years older than Mary, he had received a thorough education in music in Boston and had completed three years of college work before he entered Oberlin in 1837. So he was a senior when she was a freshman. He remained in Oberlin after his graduation, as teacher of Sacred Music, and in 1841 was promoted to a professorship. Some years later he changed his post to that of professor of Geology.
Back to Oberlin as a bride went Mary Allen, to become one of its most loved and trusted women. Her "Aunt Sally" joined the family and made her home with them until her death.
Five children were born, Frederic in 1844; Alice in 1846; George in 1848; Rosa in 1851 and Carrie in 1854.
The salaries of professors were pitifully small-for many years Professor Allen was paid six hundred dollars per annum. To live comfortably, it was necessary for Mrs. Allen to add to the income. She did so by keeping boarders. She was known as an excellent housekeeper, who set a generous table, and to her home flocked the older girls and the young men instructors took their meals at her house. There is a tale of a small Allen daughter, assigned to the task of dusting the parlors, who interrupted the courtship of a man who later had a national reputation.
Miss Hosford, in her history of co-education in Oberlin, mentions the three Mary's who entered college together in 1837. Mary Kellogg did not graduate but she returned to Oberlin in 1841 as the wife of Professor Fair- child, who later was president of the college. The two young couples occupied houses side by side and later their children played together as one harmonious family.
Mrs. Allen was a scholar, maintaining her interest in the ancient lan- guages throughout her life. She was a thinker and wise in her judgments, so she stood out in a community apt to be radical and impetuous. She was revered and she was greatly loved.
She created a happy home life. The musical father and talented children, as they grew older formed an orchestra of their own. The father played the violin ; Fred the flute ; George the cello; Alice and Carrie the piano; and Rosa had a wonderful soprano voice.
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CAROLINE MARY RUDD
one of the first four women ever to be candidates for the A.B. degree. She enrolled at Oberlin College more than one hundred years ago, in September, 1837. Miss Rudd was a native of Huntington, Conn.
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Mrs. Allen was thoughtful about everybody. When her homeless negro cook planned to be married, Mrs. Allen asked her to be married in the parlors of their home. The incident might have been forgotten but for one detail. Guests and preacher arrived but no bridegroom. The minutes passed and everybody grew anxious. Mrs. Allen went out to the kitchen and found the bride placidly rocking in her chair and to the inquiry, she replied, "I told him it was fashionable to be late."
Mrs. Allen held no old-fashioned ideas about women's working. She prepared her daughters to be self-supporting. While still in their teens, the older two had their turns as governesses in rural families. Eventually all be- came teachers of music. Rosa, the most talented, was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music, through the generosity of an uncle.
"Aunt Sally" was not the only member of the family who found a refuge at the Allen house. A half-sister, Emily Rudd, lived with them two years, while attending college, and her father, Hezekiah Rudd, spent many contented months in the home.
Mrs. Allen had a warm welcome for sons and daughters of old friends, particularly for those who came to college from great distances. While they were in Oberlin she was their best friend and counselor.
In 1874 Fred, the oldest son, with a doctorate from the University of Leipsig, was called from the University of Tennessee to be one of the first three professors at the University of Cincinnati. His parents came to Cin- cinnati to make a home for him. One by one the other children drifted to the city and there Professor Allen died in 1877.
Mary Rudd Allen lived until December 2, 1892. She was active in church work, devoted to her children and grandchildren, calm, kind and capable. Greek never seemed to have undermined her domestic virtues. Her brain seems to have proven a useful as well as a cultural asset, all her days.
Miss Cochran's biography appears with those of other librarians and that of her sister, the late Helen Finney Cochran, elsewhere in this chapter on women educators. The story of their other grandmother, Helen Finney (Mrs. Jacob D. Cox), appears in the chapter on women in public office and public life.
It is well to know the beginning of things, in order to understand their initial motivation and gain a true prospective of their development. Oberlin College, through at least three of its woman students, was destined to repre- sentation in three great and successful struggles, the battle for freedom of negro slaves, the fight for woman suffrage and the grim effort to force entrance into the then outstanding profession of the ministry.
It is fair to state that the men students, faculty members and college authorities also shared in the effort for negro freedom. From the first, Oberlin admitted, helped and encouraged students of the negro race. It protected fugitives from slave states, did all possible in behalf of suffering and down
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trodden races. But it remained for three women students-only one of them -BETSY MIX COWLES, Ohio born, to carry to the world appeals so unique as coming from a woman, so vehement and so courageous that their names have won permanent place in national history. The other two young girls were LUCY STONE and ANTOINETTE BROWN, later Antoinette Brown Blackwell.
Lucy Stone, the daughter of prosperous Massachusetts parents, taught school at 16 at a salary of $1.00 a week and board around, in order to obtain money for the education on which she was determined.
Oddly enough, Lucy also wanted to learn Greek. She had a personal reason. She wanted to know whether it was really true that there was on women a "curse of Eve" which ordained a life of toil, the bearing of nine children and complete subservience to their father, such as Lucy's mother so patiently accepted as her destiny. Lucy thought that if she could go to college and read Greek and Hebrew she could find out exactly what the Bible said in the original. Maybe there had been some mistakes.
But Lucy's father, although he cheerfully sent his sons to Amherst, thought his daughter quite crazy to even think of such a thing. So Lucy taught school and very successfully. Trustees once, in desperation, gave her a position always previously held by a man. The last man had been thrown out bodily by the big boys. Lucy was not. For nine years Lucy taught and saved and studied and by the time she was 25, in 1843, she was ready to enter college. There was, of course, only one college in existence she could enter.
So Lucy entered Oberlin. But she did not find all plain sailing, even there. For as advanced and as liberal as it was in its principles, even Oberlin had rules, many of them patterned after those of the New England Colleges whose courses it had more or less adopted. Lucy soon found opportunity to help human welfare and at the same time earn a little money by teaching a school for escaped slaves that had been established in the village of Oberlin.
The people of the town planned a celebration on the tenth anniversary of emancipation of negroes in the West Indies and, at the request of Lucy's dark skinned pupils, she was listed among the speakers. She is said to have made a fine speech. But the next day she was called before the Ladies Board of Managers and told in no uncertain terms how improper her public appear- ance had been.
They thought it must have been terribly embarrassing to have been up there on a public platform with all those men. Not at all, Lucy Stone assured the lady managers. The men were professors that she knew very well indeed. Did she not see them almost every day in the classrooms? Why would a platform be so different ?
Then there was the bonnet trouble. Lucy, it seems, took off her bonnet in church. Again the ladies' board expressed scandalized disapproval. And
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again our Lucy was at no loss for a comeback. Quoting "Father Shipherd"- "If I do this, what account shall I give my Maker for my wasted Sabbath afternoon ?", queried Lucy. The ladies knew that Lucy would never claim headache unless she had one. And they, too, felt definitely accountable to their Maker and certainly took their Sabbaths seriously. So it was decided that Lucy might sit in the rear, under the gallery and thus shielded from public gaze, remove her bonnet at nature's bidding.
Antoinette Brown may have shared this gallery seat, for Antoinette, although she entered Oberlin a little after Lucy, immediately sought and found in her a kindred spirit. Antoinette was born in New York State. She was deeply religious by nature and came to Oberlin to fit herself for the ministry.
But even at the most progressive college of its day, she could not quite do that. Antoinette planned to enter the theological department. That was regarded as going pretty far, even at Oberlin. But when it developed that this ultra sanguine if sanctified young woman actually expected to obtain a license to preach the Gospel-well, that was just too bad for her. They said she could receive instruction-and she did, completing the three year course- but they would in no way assist her to obtain the license regularly given to their theological department graduates.
Antoinette's struggle for due recognition as preacher attracted wide attention. Charles A. Dana is said to have urged her to preach in New York-to hire her own hall. She is said to have been a young woman of unusual taste as well as unusual ability and unusual courage. Nothing of Aimee McPherson in Antoinette Brown, apparently. For she obtained, instead a small church in the country. And she had her reward. At South Butler, New York, Antoinette Brown was ordained-the first woman to be ordained to the Christian ministry.
When Antoinette Brown Blackwell was 83 years old, Oberlin College conferred on her, with due deference, the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity. Lucy Stone was invited to make the leading address at the semi- centennial celebration at Oberlin in 1883. Thus the prophets were honored, at last, in their own country. But neither of them seem to have had any hard feelings about their early difficulties. They knew that even the most far sighted of human institutions can see just so far and no farther.
Lucy Stone seized the occasion of her big address to appeal strongly for woman suffrage. Even by 1883, this was still regarded as wildly visionary and unwomanly as well. It would be 37 long years before passage of the nineteenth amenment. She appealed "as one of twenty million who may be taxed and fined and imprisoned and hung-as one whom the law touches at every point, reaching its hand into my cradle and deciding all about my baby."
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We must not forget the third of these three self starting young women, BETSY COWLES. Betsy, in reality, out pioneered the other two, for she was graduated from Oberlin in 1840. She was then 30 years old, a born teacher and a born speaker. Not long after she had completed her studies at Oberlin, she was appointed to a teaching position at Portsmouth, Ohio and later she became principal of the Women's department of Grand River Institute, Austinburg, Ohio, her home town.
She helped to establish public school work at Massilon and at Canton, Ohio, helped to organize normal schools at Hopedale, Ohio and at Bloom- ington, Illinois, and finally received the appointment, most unusual even today, of superintendency of the public schools of Painesville, Ohio.
It might be thought that Betsy Cowles' urge to express, as strongly as possible, her very strong views on the slavery question would have cramped her educational career. Not so. Many people were beginning to feel the same way.
According to Frances Hosford, it was Betsy who awakened Ashatabula County from indifference on the burning question and this led to getting into Congress some of the founders of the anti-slavery party in the crucial years before the Civil War.
But while people were receptive as regards the moral wrong of slavery, the injustice of taxation without representation still left them pretty cold. And Betsy Cowles was as vocal in this cause as in the other. As early as 1860, only two years after Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton called the first woman's rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, Betsy Cowles, according to Frances Hosford, presided at a similar convention held at Salem, Ohio. About this convention we will have more to tell, a little later on.
It would not do to leave Oberlin without telling of several more notable women, among them ELIZABETH RUSSELL LORD. She was born at Kirt- land, Ohio in 1819 and reared as the daughter of pioneers, with a thorough apprenticeship at the spinning wheel and in other household duties. In March, 1838, Elizabeth Russell set out by stage coach for Oberlin.
But she did not arrive that way. She walked the last eight miles, the coach having stuck in the mud. She presently undertook a course at the Western Reserve Teachers Seminary at Kirtland and for some time divided her time between the two institutions.
Elizabeth did not fully complete her college course at Oberlin, although in 1901 she was given the honorary degree of Master of Arts by the college. Among other things accomplished by the "indefatigable Elizabeth" in the interim was matrimony. In 1842 she was married at Oberlin to Dr. Asa M. Lord and so she returned to share her husband's work as teacher at the Kirt- land seminary. When Dr. Lord became superintendent of the Ohio Institution for the Blind, at Columbus, in 1856, his wife became a teacher there. So interested did she become in this work and so proficient, that for a period she
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served as superintendent of the New York Institution for the Blind, at Batavia, N. Y.
She came back to Ohio, to serve as assistant principal of the woman's department of Oberlin College. She resigned from this position in 1900 but never lost keen interest in the college. This interest took substantial form. Her gift of $11,000.00 made "Lord Cottage" possible and she contributed liberally to other improvements and expansions. But the finest contribution made by Elizabeth Russell Lord to Oberlin was the service she gave and the example she set to hundreds on hundreds of girl students, many of whom still recall her memory and invoke her name every time they get together. .
ADELIA ANTOINETTE FIELD JOHNSTON
Harriet Keeler, Oberlin graduate, who for a time was acting superin- tendent of the public schools of Cleveland and whose biography will be found in the chapter on Women in Education, wrote the life story of the late ADELIA ANTOINETTE FIELD JOHNSTON, who for 37 years served Ober- lin, beginning as principal of the women's department and ending as trustee and member of the Prudential Committee.
Adelia Field was born in 1837 at Lafayette, O., the daughter of Leonard and Margaret Gridley Field, who both came to Ohio from Jefferson Co., N. Y., the one to take up land, the other to teach in the new state. They were mar- ried at the home, at Lafayette, of Silas Gates, uncle of the bride, after which, hand in hand, they quietly walked across the fields to the new log cabin built by the bridegroom.
There Adelia was born and there her father supplemented as best he could her early district school education. When she was 10 years old her parents sold their farm and moved to Chester, Geauga Co., in order that Adelia might attend Geauga Seminary.
But at the end of two fine years, catastrophe came. The sudden death of the father left his widow and two children without support or adequate means of obtaining it. So they moved about from one small community to another until, quite by accident-because their wagon loaded with household goods and their tired horses necessitated an overnight stop-they discovered Oberlin and stayed there.
Mrs. Field boarded and lodged students. Returns were meagre but largely through Adelia's excellent management she was able to herself enter Oberlin College and to study there six years. Adelia was graduated in 1856 and it so happened that a man from Tennessee attended the commencement.
He was interested in obtaining a teacher for Black Oak Seminary, at Mossy Creek, Tenn. They wanted northern energy and training. But they certainly did not want any northern nonsense, no anti-slavery agitation or the like of that. The Tennesseean noticed Adelia, thought she would do, pro- vided she was tactful. Adelia certainly was. So she taught at the southern
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seminary for three years, when James M. Johnston, to whom she had for some time been engaged, went down to claim his bride.
They were married in 1859 and after a short honeymoon they went to Orwell, O., where James was principal of the Orwell Academy and where very soon Adelia began to assist him as teacher. Life went happily-too happily.
It was 1862-the Civil War-the Union desperate and needing every man. James gave up his school to enlist-instead he was stricken with pneumonia and died. His young wife was almost desperate with grief. But Adelia John- ston was master of even her own heartbreak. Seven years of teaching fol- lowed-at Kinsman, O., at Andover, Mass., at North Scituate, R. I. Then came opportunity of realizing what had long been the fondest but vainest of hopes- a trip to Europe. And on her return Adelia Field Johnston was appointed principal of the women's department of Oberlin College.
Her predecessor in this position, MRS. MARIANNE P. DASCOMB, had established standards of service which were none to easy to live up to. Mrs. Dascomb had not only headed the women's department successfully at two separate and important periods, she was also a member of the Ladies Board of Managers. She had, in fact, given 20 years of her life to Oberlin, given it, moreover, in such fashion that one of Oberlin's greatest presidents, James H. Fairchild said of her "Mrs. Dascomb was wonderfully fitted for the work she had to do, strong in the simplicity and integrity of her character and in the unconscious influence which constantly attended her".
But Mrs. Johnston proved equal to her high endeavor. The years that followed became milestones marking ever more efficient and effective service. In 1890 Mrs. Johnston was made professor of medieval history, in 1894 her title of principal was changed to "dean". We find that in 1900 she resigned from the pressing duties of the deanship in order to concentrate her energies on her teaching and in 1901 she was elected a trustee of Oberlin College. Adelia was, in fact, still immersed in educational interests when death came suddenly, in 1910.
In the introduction to her life, Miss Keeler says, "Mrs. Johnston was a great administrator and a great teacher-great teachers, like great actors and great artists, and great singers, work in the realm of immaterial things-their work lives only in the spirit and in the conduct of those they have influenced, it can neither be counted nor measured, its extent is unknown and unknow- able."
DELPHINE HANNA
On DR. DELPHINE HANNA, first teacher of the entire United States to receive the title of professor of physical education, was conferred, in 1935, the Distinguished Service Medal of Oberlin College, in connection with the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of physical edu- cation in Oberlin. At the time that Dr. Hanna came to Oberlin, in 1885,
ADELIA A. FIELD JOHNSTON (1837-1909)
first woman professor and first "dean of women" to be known officially by that title at Oberlin College. She was in charge of women's activities for thirty years, and active in the interests of the college for a much longer period
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physical education was called "physical culture." Its leaders did not recog- nize a scientific basis. It was not commonly given to either boys or girls in colleges. At Oberlin the men students had built a gymnasium and, following the popular demand of the day, had developed some sports. At that time there was a sharp division between "sports" and "physical culture." Sports were considered outside the pale and perhaps a trifle worldly as compared with the self-disciplining content of the "physical culture" courses. Dr. Hanna, far ahead of her time, recognized the value of sports IF PUT IN THE HANDS OF UNDERSTANDING SUPERVISORS. She utilized the natural interests of the students to give them an insight into the developmental possibilities of these activities. She gathered together some of the men students who were leaders in their activities and imbued them with the sense of dignity and far-reaching value to be derived along the line of spiritual and mental values, as well as physical, from various activities which they were directing.
Delphine Hanna was born December 2, 1854, was graduated from Brock- port State Normal School in 1874 and from the Sargent School of Physical Education in 1885. The degree of M.D. was conferred on her by the Uni- versity of Michigan in 1890.
From 1885 to 1920 the period of her service at Oberlin, Dr. Hanna built up a department of physical education which was recognized throughout the world. She was a pioneer in bringing to the physical education field sports conducted in such a way as to make them educational. Ahead of her time, she early sought a place where girls could look forward to having camp experience.
In the words of Dr. Gertrude Moulton, now physical education director for women at Oberlin, "Dr. Hanna's interest was in the WHOLE college. She developed volley ball for mixed groups. The Rockefeller Skating Rink, obtained during her regime, was used by boys, girls, and faculty. The tennis courts which she developed were open for mixed tennis playing on occasion before the men had any courts. So interested was she in having the boys' interests furthered that we read in her report for 1901-02: 'During all the years that efforts were being made to secure a new gymnasium for the men the needs of the women in that line were purposely held in abeyance.' Then she adds, 'But now that the men are properly housed and equipped, it seems fitting that the needs of the women should be presented.'
"She completed her work without realizing her desires along this line and even now we are using the same buildings she felt were inadequate.
"Dr. Hanna struggled against discouraging odds. When Ladies' Hall was burned down, she carried on, used old and second-hand and home-made equipment and furnishings, worked in an office where the showers leaked down upon her desk, filled her own coal-oil lamps for the sake of increasing the hours when the inadequate gymnasium could be used, had a small base-
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ment excavated in which a furnace could be installed, then saw that basement fill up year after year with water which came high enough to put the fire out. Yet with all of these discouraging conditions, she kept her indomitable will and her steadfastness of purpose and made the department of physical education for women the first one to demand a broad background for pro- fessional service and to recognize service to all students as its province. Through her efforts, her wisdom and her tenacity of purpose, Oberlin's department of physical education earned and received the respect of all the physical education interests throughout the whole nation. The teacher's course which she established here was the first one in the United States to require four years of training with a broad cultural background. It was the first one to grant a Bachelor of Arts Degree. Dr. Hanna was the first teacher in the United States to receive the title of PROFESSOR of Physical Edu- cation."
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