BURIED TOGETHER
Partner Elizabeth Reynard, buried together
Queer Places:
Columbia University (Ivy League), 116th St and Broadway, New York, NY 10027
Brearley School, 610 E 83rd St, New York, NY 10028, Stati Uniti
Barnard College (Seven Sisters), 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027
St Matthew, 382 Cantitoe St, Bedford, NY 10506, Stati Uniti
Virginia
Crocheron Gildersleeve (October 3, 1877 – July 7, 1965) was an American
academic, the long-time Dean of Barnard College, and the sole female
United States delegate to the April 1945 San Francisco United Nations
Conference on International Organization, which negotiated the UN Charter
and created the United Nations. Seven women from Britain made the ocean
voyage to New York in the autumn of 1918 to visit 46 universities and
colleges over six weeks and produce proposals for productive British–US
exchanges. Unfortunately, two of them,
Caroline Spurgeon, the
first female university professor in Britain at Bedford College in London,
and
Rose Sidgwick, an English
lecturer at Birmingham University, caught flu (this was during the 1918–19
flu epidemic) on board ship. Sidgwick died, but Spurgeon survived,
convalescing in the home of New York college dean Virginia Gildersleeve,
with whom she formed an intimate personal and professional attachment for
the rest of her life.
Virginia Gildersleeve was born in New York City, she attended the
Brearley School and following her graduation in 1895 went on to attend
Barnard College, a member of the Seven Sisters affiliated with Columbia
University. She completed her studies in 1899 and received a fellowship to
undertake research for her MA in medieval history at Columbia University.
She taught English part-time at Barnard for several years. She declined a
full-time position and took a leave of absence to undertake her Ph.D. in
English and comparative literature at Columbia for three years. When she
completed her studies in 1908 she was appointed a lecturer in English in
1908 by Barnard and Columbia; by 1910 she had become an assistant
professor and in 1911 was made dean of Barnard College.
In 1918 Gildersleeve,
Caroline
Spurgeon, and Rose Sidgwick met while the two English women were on an
academic exchange to the United States. They discussed founding an
international association of university women, and in 1919 founded the
International Federation of University Women. Gildersleeve shared an
"intimate" relationship with the British Spurgeon, with whom she annually
shared a rental summer home.[1]
Following World War I she became interested in international politics.
She campaigned for Al Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt. During World War II
she chaired the Advisory Council of the navy's women's unit, the WAVES and
following the war she was appointed to the United Nations Charter
Committee. She was involved in the reconstruction of higher education in
Japan. For this work she received France's Legion of Honor.
Throughout her tenure as Dean of Barnard College, Gildersleeve worked
to advance women's rights by championing their access to Columbia'
professional school and to the best professors. This included hiring
Charles A. Beard, a young Columbia instructor in 1914 to teach Barnard's
first course in American government so that Barnard graduates would be
eligible to attend the Columbia School of Journalism. At the beginning of
World War I, she hired the head of Columbia's anthropology department,
Franz Boas, when he was threatened with being fired because of his
objections to World War I. Professor Boas was a German Jewish immigrant
and a Socialist. Among the Barnard undergraduates, Boas found several of
the century's most outstanding anthropologists, including
Margaret Mead.[2][3]
Barnard had only a few African-American students during Gildersleeve's
tenure. Zora Neale Hurston was a pioneer in 1925, who attended Barnard
with assistance from her literary mentor
Fannie Hurst and Barnard College
co-founder Annie Nathan Meyer.[4]
In the early 1940s, Dean Gildersleeve paid for the full scholarship of at
least one African-American student from Harlem out of her own pocket.
Gildersleeve opposed religious exclusivity and refused to openly
categorize her students, but took steps to reduce the number of Jewish
students. In the 1930s, roughly 20 percent of Barnard students were
Jewish, compared to 6 to 10 percent at most other women's colleges,
although Jewish enrollment at Columbia College had reached 40 percent
before World War I. According to Gildersleeve's biographer Rosalind
Rosenberg, both Columbia and Barnard began recruiting students from
outside New York City, evaluating applicants on the basis of psychological
tests, interviews, and letters of recommendation, as well as academic
criteria, thereby lowering the number of Jewish applicants accepted. In
the two decades before World War II, this process of selective admissions
reduced the percentage of Jewish students at both Columbia and Barnard to
20 percent.[3]
Gildersleeve encouraged faculty and students to engage in all the
political movements of the day even though the Barnard College Board of
Trustees believed that "marching in a parade would be a shocking and
shameful thing" for female students to do, and some school administrators
considered political activism "unladylike" and "too sordid for a refined
woman,".[3]
During World War I, Gildersleeve contributed vigorously to wartime
civil defense activities in New York City. She was an early and strong
supporter of the formation of the League of Nations. On February 22, 1918
Gildersleeve called for "some ordered system of international government,
backed by power enough to give authority to its decrees".
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Gildersleeve, was a strong
interventionist.[6]
In 1942, early in World War II, Gildersleeve was instrumental in
founding the WAVES ("Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service"). Its
second in command was Gildersleeve's companion, English Professor
Elizabeth
Reynard; and all of its members - 90,000 in all-were college
graduates.[7]
In 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt named Gildersleeve – the only woman
named – to the U.S. delegation to write the United Nations Charter. They
were instructed to address two issues: 1) the need to prevent future wars
through the creation of a Security Council; and 2) the need to enhance
human welfare, which they accomplished through the establishment of the
United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Gildersleeve sought
and received drafting responsibility for the work of this second
Council—the one, as she put it, in charge of "doing things rather than
preventing things from being done." She was able to insert into the
Charter the following goals for people around the world: "higher standards
of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress
and development." She also persuaded the delegates to adopt the following
aim for the United Nations: "universal respect for human rights and
fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex,
language, or religion." She insisted that the Charter require the
appointment of the Commission on Human Rights, which under the direction
of Eleanor
Roosevelt, wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights three years
later.[3]
In March 1946, having been invited by General Douglas MacArthur,
Gildersleeve served as a member of the U.S. Educational Mission to Japan.
She was respected in Japan for having been the only American woman
delegate at the San Francisco founding conference.[8]
Some historians consider Gildersleeve to have been "the most
influential leader" of the Christian "anti-Zionist lobby" of her era.[9]
Gildersleeve wrote that "after (her) retirement from the Deanship at
Barnard, (she) devoted (her)self mainly to the Middle East,"
describing herself as "struggling ardently against" the creation and,
later, the continued existence of the Jewish State.
She blamed her failure to prevent the creation of the State of Israel on
"the Zionist control of the media of communication."
Gildersleeve repeatedly testified before congressional committees and
lobbied members of Congress and President Harry Truman to deny American
political, military, and financial support to Israel.[9]
Gildersleeve was a trustee of the American University of Beirut and a
leading figure in the Christian opposition to Israel's statehood in 1948.
She helped found and chaired the Committee for Justice and Peace in the
Holy Land, which merged into the American Friends of the Middle East.[13]
According to historian Robert Moats Miller, of the University of North
Carolina, the group was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency and
ARAMCO.[14]
Miller states that Gildersleeve's "sympathies were indeed overwhelmingly
with the Arabs."
[14]
Gildersleeve was an early advocate of paid leaves of absence for female
faculty members. In 1931 she raised the matter with Columbia President
Butler, who "looked a little startled." But, Butler agreed, saying "We
should have women teachers with fuller lives and richer experience, not so
many dried-up old maids" Gildersleeve recorded this remark in her memoir
without comment. She persuaded the Barnard Board of Trustees to enact a
maternity policy that provided one term off at full pay or a year off at
half pay for all new faculty mothers. In the first year three women took
advantage of this new policy.
[3]
In 1915, in a speech to the Columbia Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa she
challenged the commonly held belief that the education of women was a
detriment to society, arguing that improved public health and the
declining infant mortality made it unnecessary to breed as many children
as once had been the case. In the modern world women could have the same
ambitions as men.[3]
Rosalind Rosenberg, Gildersleeve's biographer, has argued that "Through
her work Gildersleeve and other pioneers like her provided the essential
conditions necessary to winning for women full equality with men in
American society and throughout the world. … In broadening women's
scholarly horizons, Gildersleeve laid the groundwork for some of the most
innovative scholarship of the twentieth century. And in helping to draft
the charter of the UN, Gildersleeve assured that the issues to which she
had devoted her career on Morningside Heights would be addressed
throughout the world in the decades that followed. By insisting that women
have the right to every educational opportunity open to men, and by
fighting her whole life to secure that opportunity, she helped establish
the bedrock on which feminists have been building ever since."
[3]
In her 1954 memoir, Gildersleeve protested the "particularly cruel and
unwholesome discrimination against unmarried women," like herself, who
chose to spend their lives living with other women. She attributed this
trend to "the less responsible psychologists and psychiatrists of the
day," who voiced "disrespect for spinsters in the teaching profession as
'inhibited' and 'frustrated.'" Gildersleeve never identified herself as a
lesbian, preferring instead the adjective "celibate." For several decades
she lived with companion Professor Caroline Spurgeon. Later she lived with
Barnard English Professor Elizabeth Reynard and they are buried together
at Saint Matthew's Episcopal Churchyard, Bedford (town), New York.[3]Gildersleeve
and Spurgeon met just after the First World War ended when a delegation of
British educators came to the United States. Caroline Spurgeon, a highly
respected Shakespeare scholar who published many books and papers about
both Chaucer and Shakespeare, taught at Bedford College for Women, part of
the University of London. Together they worked to establish an
organization that would foster international cooperation among like-minded
academic women. Gildersleeve imagined an organization built on the model
of the American Association of Collegiate Alumnae and the British
Federation of University Women. In 1919 they created the International
Federation of University Women (IFUW), housing it in London with a second
home in Paris at Reid Hall. For two decades, between World War I and World
War II, Gildersleeve worked through the IFUW (www.ifuw.org) to keep alive
the spirit of international understanding, even as isolationism gripped
her country.[3]
They believed that the women of the world could make change by talking to
and learning from each other.[1]
My published books:
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