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The Pioneers
In 1894, these seven
scholars became the first women to earn Yale PhDs.
September/October 2012
by Liena Vayzman ’02PhD, Ruth Vaughan ’09MAR, and Laura Wexler
Liena Vayzman ’02PhD and Ruth Vaughan ’09MAR recently served as postdoctoral/postgraduate associates with the Yale Women
Faculty Forum (WFF). Laura Wexler is a Yale professor
of American studies and of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and recent cochair of WFF. Their research on
Yale’s first female PhDs was undertaken for WFF.
Mary Augusta Scott
English
1851–1918
Even before Yale made its official announcement about
coeducation, Mary
Augusta Scott had written to President Timothy Dwight ’49 to ask
about admission. Dwight passed on the inquiry to administrator Trumbull Ladd,
who assured Scott, “I see no reason why you should not attain the doctor’s
degree. … You appear already to have done a considerable amount of advanced
work.”
Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1851, Scott graduated from
Vassar with a BA and MA in 1876. In the 15 years before she entered Yale, she
studied at Cambridge University and Johns Hopkins and taught at Vassar. She was
particularly proud of being the first woman to earn a fellowship at Yale. The
publisher George Arthur Plimpton wrote to congratulate her when he saw the news
in the paper, adding: “The world has grown tremendously.… This higher
education for women has come to stay and women are going to be given just as
good facilities as men have. It is singular that men don’t realize it.”
Scott became an English professor at Smith in 1902. She
was a prolific writer, contributing to journals and publishing five books,
including Elizabethan Translations from the Italian and The
Essays of Francis Bacon. On her death, a student remembered her as
private, living “to a certain extent in seclusion,” and as a rigorous teacher
and scholar. At the same time, “No one told a joke more irresistibly or enjoyed
one more. … One can best describe her in the terms which she applied to
Chaucer, ‘so wise, so learned, and so sunny.’” Scott left a bequest to Vassar,
and a chair of English there is named for her.
Margaretta Palmer
Mathematics
1862–1924
Although she earned her degree in mathematics, Margaretta Palmer’s
work and her dissertation were on astronomy; she was likely the first woman
ever to earn a doctorate in the field. Born in 1862 in Branford, Connecticut,
Palmer went to Vassar and studied under Maria Mitchell, a pioneering
astronomer—and followed closely in her footsteps, researching the comet
Mitchell had discovered. Many of Palmer’s male relatives had attended Yale;
after graduating from college, she was hired as a research assistant in the
Yale Observatory. She worked at this post until entering graduate school and
returned to it after receiving her PhD. Her specialty was computational
astronomy; she collected data on dozens or hundreds of sightings of a single
astronomical object from different observatories, and set up complex equations
that allowed her to determine the object’s orbit. In 1918 the observatory
closed, but Yale retained Palmer because her work was deemed so valuable.
In her dissertation, Palmer had computed the orbit of
Maria Mitchell’s comet, which had also been sighted by a German woman, ten days
after Mitchell found it. “To the woman,” Palmer wrote, “who turns her attention
to astronomy this comet is conspicuous as one of the few that have been
discovered by a woman, and probably the only one that has ever been discovered
independently by two women.”
Cornelia H. B. Rogers
Romance Languages and Literatures
1862–1907
The first seven women to earn Yale PhDs included two
sisters from the Rogers family of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Cornelia
Hephzibah Bulkley Rogers graduated from
Wellesley in 1884, then studied in Italy and Spain. She earned the first PhD
awarded in her field at Yale and was an expert in Old Spanish as well as
Italian and French; her professor noted that she was “exceptionally well
prepared” for doctoral work, with “a remarkable fluency and accuracy” in
Spanish. She became an instructor in French and Italian at Vassar in 1898 and
in 1902 an associate professor.
Laura Johnson Wylie
English
1855–1932
Born in Milton, Pennsylvania, in 1855, Laura Wylie was valedictorian of her class at Vassar in 1875. She taught Latin and English
at the Packer Institute in Brooklyn for 14 years; after graduating from Yale,
Wylie was immediately hired by Vassar and became head of the English department
within two years. (The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay likely studied with her
there.) A Yale professor made her book Studies in the Evolution of English
Criticism a regular part of his course on poetry, and she edited and
published several other books. Wylie’s life partner was another Vassar English
professor, Gertrude Buck; they were professional partners as well, and together
they had a major role in shaping the development of writing programs in the
United States.
During her long academic and civic career, Wylie was a
leader in the women’s suffrage movement, helping to establish and serving as
president of the county suffrage organization. One of several women’s groups
she helped organize during her life was the Nantucket Maria Mitchell
Association, named for the eminent astronomer who had taught her Yale classmate Margaretta Palmer. The association’s obituary
recalled, “One of her instructors said of her: ‘Don’t compare her to the rest
of us—she is a genius, we are mere mortals.’”
After Wylie’s death, her brother wrote Yale’s president
to thank him for his expression of sympathy and added, “I have often heard her
speak of her connection with the University and I know that she felt that it
was among the happiest experiences in her well rounded life.”
Sara Bulkley Rogers
History
1864–1907
We have little information, and have not yet found any
photographic trace, of Sara Rogers, sister and Yale classmate of Cornelia.
Sara received her BA from Columbia in 1889 (through the Collegiate Course for
Women, the program that later became Barnard College) and her MA in history
from Cornell. Her Yale dissertation was on civil government in early New
England. After graduating she traveled to Oxford, where she attended lectures
by a constitutional theorist, and then spent several years traveling in
Germany, France, and Italy. Once back in the United States, she continued doing
research on political history. She also wrote fiction. Publisher’s
Weekly called her 1900 book, Ezra Hardman, M.A., of Wayback College: And Other Stories, “one of the
best collections of college stories in recent years.” In Ezra Hardman, she
created a hapless academic hero—a midwestern bumpkin
unable to measure up or fit in at his snobbish eastern graduate school. “It had
seemed to him,” Rogers wrote, “if only he might secure a doctorate from some
eastern college there was nothing he might not become.”
Elizabeth Deering Hanscom
English
1865–1960
After Elizabeth Hanscom died, the archivist at Smith College, where Hanscom taught English, wrote, “Miss Hanscom delighted in
telling us that she was actually the very first woman to receive the [Yale]
diploma through the accidental arrangement by alphabet of the women candidates
in that first year.”
Hanscom, born in Maine in
1865, earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston University in
1887. She joined the English faculty at Smith after graduating from Yale and
taught there for 38 years, becoming a professor in 1905. She was elected to the
Council of the American Association of University Professors. According to the New
York Times, she “introduced the study of American Literature” at
Smith “at a time when the subject was not studied generally in American
institutions of higher learning.” She published several books, including The
Friendly Craft (1910), which collected her personal favorites from a
vast number of letters she had read by eminent Americans—“the gleanings of
several years in some of the pleasant by-paths of American
literature”—including Benjamin Franklin, Helen Keller, Henry James, Robert E.
Lee, Louisa May Alcott, and many others.
Hanscom was active in the
suffragist movement and championed the intellectual seriousness of women’s
colleges; writing in the journal Education Review in 1901,
she declared that women’s colleges should never be thought of as promoting
“womanly virtues.” She lived to see World War II begin and end, and in 1937 she
wrote passionately about it: “In this sad year of war and human wreckage, we
need the young around us to give semblance of merriment. The Christmas evangel
sounds strangely, almost on deaf ears, this year; but I am not discouraged,
being sure that eventually peace will be established on earth.”
Charlotte Fitch Roberts
Chemistry
1859–1917
Charlotte Roberts became an associate professor of
chemistry at her college, Wellesley, even before she earned her doctorate.
Roberts, who spent most of her childhood in Greenfield, Massachusetts, received
her bachelor’s degree in 1880; Wellesley made her a graduate assistant in 1881,
an instructor in 1882, and an associate professor in 1886. She spent the year
of 1885–6 in Cambridge, England, working with Sir James Dewar, a well-known
chemist and physicist. In 1896 she published The Development and Present Aspects of
Stereochemistry; her Yale professor called it “the clearest
exposition of which we have knowledge of the principles and conditions of
stereochemistry,” adding, “there is nothing in English which covers similar
ground so broadly and so lucidly.”
Roberts became a full professor at Wellesley in 1896, chair
of her department, and eventually, a fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. She devoted much of her scholarship to studying the
development of ideas in chemistry, traveling to Europe to learn from other
scholars and formulating her own theories. A chemistry professorship at
Wellesley bears her name.  |
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