Miss Marks and Miss Woolley: The Portrait of a Lifelong Relationship between Two Prominent and Independent Women

by Anna Mary Wells

FIRST EDITION(dated title page) 1978 Houghton Mifflin hardcover, Anna Mary Wells. A portrait of the relationship between two prominent and independent women who struggled with each other and their professional lives--one an English professor and a writer, the other President of Mt. Holyoke College--through the course of an emotional involvement that continued for fifty years, altering with time but steadily deepening until death parted them. Mary Emma Woolley retired from the presidency of Mt. Holyoke College in 1937 following a full and illustrious career as a pioneer in higher education for women. During her 36 years as Mt. Holyoke's President, Woolley had been active in feminist causes and world peace. She also had a life separate from her public self. This she shared with Jeannette Marks, an author and English professor at the college, in a love affair that lasted half a century.

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, Education, LGBT

268 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 1978

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mainly interesting because I was staying at the house that Miss Mark’s father built on Lake Champlain in the late 1800’s. Miss Marks and Miss Woolley also retired at the house.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't believe I never read this before - this being about one of the best known presidents of my college. I thought it was a very interesting book and quite well written, and it kind of amazed me that this woman who wrote this book was at the school when Mary Woolley was president (class of 1926).

I picked it up because I've been participating in a crowdsource project to transcribe the correspondence of Mary Woolley and Jeannette Marks (I haven't been able to read Marks' handwriting but I've done a lot of Woolley's letters). On the one hand, I thought she was rather hard on Miss Marks; on the other hand, it seems there was good reason to be, and she actually knew Miss Marks a little better having taken classes with her.

In a way the story was very sad - Miss Woolley is presented as more devoted to Miss Marks than the reverse, and she was always the one to give in, bend, compromise, or go the extra miles, and seemed to get little support of any kind in return. In the last years of her life when she had had a stroke and was no longer able to write or speak, a couple of letters to the editor were published under her name that Miss Marks had pretty clearly written, and which she probably would not have written herself. They were in relation to the hiring, as her successor, of the first male president of Mount Holyoke in 1937, which Miss Woolley objected to because it seemed to her that the selection of a man was an admission that all the education of women that had gone on in the past 100 years was incapable of producing a qualified woman candidate; but Miss Marks was more militant in her opposition and carried on the fight after Miss Woolley had left South Hadley and retired.

Wells is interesting on the subject of the great difference between the values and priorities of the MHC students of the 1930s vs. the students of previous decades, and how the old guard of exceptional women who had taught at the school since the 1880s (Emma Carr, Henrietta Hooker, Cornelia Clapp, for example) felt devalued by the arrivistes.

I also enjoyed her wonderfully sarcastic and elegant writing, here is an example:

"The presentation [at the 75th anniversary celebration] of the Economics Department started with primitive man and ended with the year 2000. A flock of real sheep in the pastoral scene behaved with remarkable docility. At dress rehearsal it had required fifty minutes to drive them across the stage. On the day of the performance a trail of salt was laid in the grass, and when the crucial moment came they behaved as if they all had Equity cards. This strategy suggests a firm grasp of economic motivation on the part of the planners."

Miss Woolley sounds like she was an exceptionally capable and intelligent woman and I'm glad her legacy is being honored again at Mount Holyoke. And I have to admit I'm pleased to learn she was the one responsible for the construction of the music building where I spent so much of my time while there.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

So fascinating. I found a copy of this book at a used book store, complete with newspaper clippings of reviews from the 70s stuck in the back by it's previous owner (another Mount Holyoke alumna who left a bookplate with her name on the inside cover).

As a Mount Holyoke alumna I was fascinated by the description of life at the College from 1901 to 1937, and as a gay woman I was intrigued by how Mary Woolley and Jeannette Marks' relationship was described. The author considered Jeannette Marks a mentor and friend, but the book doesn't depict either woman particularly sympathetically, or with much weight given to their seemingly obvious lesbian relationship. Reading it was like peeling back the layers of an onion - I found myself trying to decipher where exactly the truth might lie between interpreting letters left behind by the subjects, the opinions and biases the author might have brought to her writing (she graduated from MHC in 1926), and how historical interpretation of events (from the turn of the century, the 70s when the book was published, and my own biases reading it in 2010) might inform the reader's understanding of their relationship. It's not a stellar piece of historical writing, but a fascinating journey for anyone interested in the history of MHC or these two women in particular.

[Margaret Snow · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good read. More special for me as I have sat in their library on Lake Champlain.