A Potential Site in Paris

Author: Joyce Goodman, December 2020

In summer 1919 and January 1920 M. Carey Thomas (1857-1935), president of Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, travelled to Paris on behalf of the Committee on International Relations of the American Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA - a forerunner of the American Association of University Women).  M.Carey Thomas was in Paris to explore the possibilities of opening a club house for American women students and graduates and to investigate the potential of establishing scholarships for women students and professors.  Thomas was well acquainted with Paris. In 1883 she had attended lectures at the Sorbonne after completing a PhD in Zurich and she had returned to Paris several times across the intervening years. The ACA had authorised Thomas to investigate relations with “foreign institutions” on their behalf during a sabbatical from her post Bryn Mawr College during the academic year 1919 - 1920. During her sabbatical year Thomas also travelled extensively in Europe to inquire on behalf of the ACA and Bryn Mawr about the potential for “foreign scholarships”,  about the ACA’s hostel for women in Athens, and about the American schools in Rome.

In her quest to find a suitable site for an American club house, Thomas met with many people in Paris from her extensive network of international connections. She set great store on her meeting with Anna Amieux (1871-1961), the newly appointed director of the École normal supérieure de jeunes filles at Sevres, whom she reported back to the ACA “knows the living conditions of Paris very well indeed.” She discussed the practicalities of a Paris club house with Mrs Shields, who had managed the very successful girls’ club that Elizabeth Mills Reid (Mrs Whitelaw Reid, 1858-1931), the widow of the former US Ambassador to  Britain, had run for several years in Paris; and she conferred with Miss Thérèse Bonney (1894-1978), who was at that time responsible with Professor Charles Petit Dutaillis (1868-1947) (the current director of the ‘Office national des universities et écoles française) for choosing French girls for study abroad scholarships in America and whom Thomas considered knew living conditions in Paris from both a French and an American point of view. Thomas also met with James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959), an American historian who had resided in Paris for over twenty years; and she talked through the club house plan with “every American college woman she met in Paris.”

At the point when Thomas visited Paris to search for a site for the American club house the Cité universitaire had not yet been established but pensions and and hostels for young women were already in existence. From 1901 Marie Bonnet (1874-1960) managed a residence for French students in the rue Saint-Sulpice. Bonnet would become one of the founders in 1920 of the Société nationale féminine de rapprochement universitaire (the forerunner of the Association des française diplômées des universités (AFDU - later AFFDU). From 1908 Marie Bonnet acted as directrice of the Maison des étudiantes at 214 boulevard Raspail, which would be amalgamated in 1920 with two other organisations - the Foyer universitaire féminin (founded and directed by Louise Cruppi (1862-1925) and the Société universitaire des amis de l’étudiante - under the umbrella name of Maison des étudiantes. When Thomas visited what she termed existing “so-called residential clubs for women” she thought that none of them would meet the ACA’s purpose. She found them “so overcrowded they would only be able to accept a few additional university women students” even if such students would be happy living in them.  Furthermore, she noted, in some residential clubs it was “unlikely that American women university students would be willing to live in a community club with stenographers, book-keepers, nurses, or musical students;” and it was her view that “this type of environment was inappropriate for college women.” In other clubs, she wrote, they would be “subjected to religious propaganda” or controlled by regulations”, which “however, necessary for young, untrained girls, would be offensive and unnecessary for older more serious university women.” Summing up her concerns about the potential of existing residential hostel provision for college women in Paris she concluded, “The good people managing the few girls’ hostels that exist seem to me to have no understanding of the needs of women students” and my “issues of concern” seemed  “to be incomprehensible to them.”

Thomas also described arguments around the benefit to women students of living with French families in order to learn French and French customs as “fallacious.” She wrote,

“The right kind of French families will not take in strangers and even if they would the students must study in the evenings and cannot waste their time in the ordinary give and take of conversation.”

She reported that it was extremely difficult for American women to find accommodation themselves because “prices for uncomfortable unheated rooms and insufficient board” were very high and there were no fixed prices. Women also needed to take care about locations: “the advice of people familiar with present Parisian conditions must be exercised to see that women students get into suitable lodgings.”

Thomas was very clear that a club house for American college women was very much needed in Paris:

“There is no question in my mind that a university women’s resident club would very much facilitate to the coming of women students to study in Paris and would not only make their stay in Paris safe and pleasant but would enable them to economise greatly in both time and money.”

Anna Amieux, Miss Bonney and Mrs Shields, she reported, were all of the same opinion:

“These three women who really know conditions are also certain that such a club would be filled constantly as soon as it became known. I also am convinced on both these points: - first, that a resident women’s university club is urgently needed, second, that such a club could be kept filled with university women all the year round.”

And furthermore, wrote Thomas, she had identified the perfect site:

“The club house is made to our hand in Mrs Whitelaw Reid’s Girls’ Club which is excellently situated in the university quarter, less than ten minutes walk from the university buildings at 4 Rue de Chevreuse.”

Thomas explained to the ACA that Elizabeth Reid’s Club had been run for the past 6 years for American girls, especially musical and art students, but at the current time was lent to the American Red Cross, which was currently winding up its work in France:

“Mrs Shields believes that Mrs Reid would care so much about having her work for American women in Paris carried on that she would be glad to turn it over at any time - immediately if desired - to any financially solid women’s organisation that would undertake to run it for a women’s club. All that Mrs Reid asks is that such an organisation should assume the annual rent, without any assistance from her of 5,000 francs a year (at present rates of exchange equal only to 600 dollars). Mrs Reid’s lease of the property extends for another 5 years (I believe but of the exact date I am not sure). She has an option to purchase for 500,000 dollars [sic] at the present exchange (25,000 dollars) [sic] either at the expiration of the lease or at any previous time.”

Thomas assured the ACA that both the rent and the purchase money at present Paris prices were ridiculously small. She herself had been assured by Gertrude, Lady Heaton-Ellis (1868-1943), an English woman whom she knew well, and who was then managing a philanthropic working girls’ club in Paris, that it was possibly only to get very inferior accommodations for 5,000 francs and that Lady Ellis would gladly rent the property if permitted. Furthermore, Mrs Shields had told her that Mrs Reid would give the furniture and equipment and the large library of English books rent free and would let them go with the house if purchased:

“There are sixty single bedrooms, furnished; a very large and delightful sitting room and reception room furnished; two dining rooms, kitchen and pantry, furnished; and a series of seven ground floor reception rooms, used by Mrs.Reid for music rooms opening on the garden; a very large court garden which could be made charming. Altogether no such opportunity for a Paris club house can ever be hoped for again and it is one we must take or lose now, as the property will certainly be snapped up by some one else as soon as it is in the market.”

On the basis of a breakdown of the running costs that Mrs Shields had provided to her Thomas was confident that the clubhouse could be financially viable, particularly because changes were about to be brought in to the French university system [uniformity in male and female programmes and a single baccalaureate]. Thomas considered that the proposed changes to French university study, would result in France becoming one of the most desirable places possible for American women as well as men to pursue higher studies:

“There is, it seems to me, reason to believe that there are many women, and perhaps some men. whose interest in American French relations is now so keen that they could be successfully appealed to for financial aid for such a club house.”

Thomas concluded her report with a number of recommendations to the ACA, the first of which read:

“That Mrs Whitelaw Reid  be requested to give the A.C.A the refusal of the property at 4 Rue de Chevreuse for as long a time as she is willing to do so, if possible at least until December 31st 1920. From what I heard in Paris it seems probably that the American Red Cross would like to make use of it until the late autumn of 1920. This would give us time to find out whether it is possible to make the necessary financial arrangements to take over the property, and as a new roof must be put on would enable us to have this done and to open the Club House in the summer of autumn of 2021.”

Thomas’s additional recommendations related to raising finance, where she noted that if American women assumed the financial responsibility “they shall keep the management of it in their own hands.” In her report to the ACA Thomas suggested that American and British University Women would be the most numerous and needed to be provided for first. As a result, she believed, control of the club house should be limited to American and British women. But she also added:

“[A]lthough we may be entreated to exercise liberality and discretion in filling the vacancies by students of other nationalities we must keep in our hands the power to exclude from residence women students whose standards of behaviour might bring discredit on American and British University women studying in Paris.”

In order to assist British students and to secure a  broader academic atmosphere she recommended reserving about 15 rooms for British women, 5-10 for French women university students and 2 or 3 for Italian and Spanish women students. During the summer vacations, she thought the Club could be opened as a hotel to American and British women for a small sum but without “extras” of any kind.

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

Bryn Mawr College Special Collections. Courtesy of the Special Collections Department, Bryn Mawr College Library:

M.Carey Thomas Persona Papers, IBD2 folder Paris Club House

• Resident American University Club House in Paris, Section 4 of Report to ACA c.27 February 1920

M.Carey Thomas Personal Papers, Alys Smith Russell to M.C.T [1880-1925] folder 5-3

Secondary sources

• Gérard, Renée, and Nicole Fouché. "Marie Bonnet." In Dictionnaire biographique: Militer au XXe siècle. Femmes, féminismes, Églises et société, edited by Evelyne Diebolt, 61-62. Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2009.
• Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
• Hunyadi, Marie-Elise. "Caroline Spurgeon, Virginia Gildersleeve, et la promotion des carrières intellectuelles féminines." In Pionnières de l’éducation des adultes, Perspectives internationales, edited by Françoise Laot and Claudie Solar, 109-27. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2018.