Paris Club House Emerging

Women College Presidents. M.Carey Thomas Papers, Box 24 Personal Business Courtesy of the Special Collections Department, Bryn Mawr College Library.
Written by Joyce Goodman, December 2020

The possibility of a Centre for American college women in Paris was discussed at a meeting in 1918 of the American Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA) - a regrouping of university women in the north and the south of the USA and the forerunner of the American Association of University Women (AAUW). The ACA established a Committee on International Relations in 1917, chaired by Virginia C Gildersleeve (1877-1965), dean of Barnard College, New York. By the time of the committee’s first meeting on 11 June 1918, the American University Union in Europe had organised a large hotel as the headquarters for American college men studying in Paris but no equivalent arrangement for college women existed. At the first meeting of the ACA’s International Relations Committee M. Carey Thomas (1857-1935), president of Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, suggested that the ACA “consider the organisation of a centre for College women in Paris.” This meeting agreed that before moving forward it would be necessary to ask graduates living in Paris about the practicability and the cost of such an undertaking.

The question of a Paris headquarters for American college women was again raised at a conference at Radcliffe College (of Harvard University) on 6 December 1918. This small but high-powered conference on “After-War Problems in the Higher Education of Women in Great Britain and the United States” was convened jointly by the ACA’s Committee on International Relations and the Committee on War Service Training for Women College students. It included the presidents of the women’s colleges on the East Coast of America and those of the “Seven Sisters” colleges (Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar and Wellesley) as well the two women members of a British Educational Mission which visited educational institutions in the United States from October to December 1918 - Caroline Spurgeon (1869-1942), Professor of Literature at Bedford College (University of London) and the current president of the British Federation of University Women and Rose Sidgwick (1877-1918), lecturer in ancient history at the University of Birmingham. The  conference focussed primarily on opportunities and obstacles for study abroad in Britain and the United States but Virginia Gildersleeve, who chaired the discussion on international relations, included in the topics for discussion the question of “the headquarters of American college women in Paris.” Under an item on “The desirability of an international association of college women, or the establishment of relations between the ACA and the Federation of University Women in Great Britain” she noted:

“[i]t would seem to be more natural to have a headquarters of all nationalities. If we could develop some international association, it might be under the auspices of that body that headquarters could be established.”

In summer 1919 and again at the start of 1920 M.Carey Thomas visited Paris on behalf of the ACA to explore in person the practicability and the cost of opening an American Club house in the city.

Sources

Primary sources: Columbia University Special Collections:

Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve Papers 1898-1962 MS 0484 Box 44.

  • Minutes of the Meeting of the Committee on International Relations of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae 11 June 1918.
  • Conference on After-War Problems in the Higher Education of Women in Great Britain and the United States, 6 December 1918.
  • Letter 28 March 1919 from M.Carey Thomas to Virginia Gildersleeve.